News Former Google CEO says climate goals are not meetable, so we might as well drop climate conservation — unshackle AI companies so AI can solve globa...

[Admin]

Former Google chief Eric Schmidt says that we should prioritize AI development over energy conservation to use the former to solve our climate problem.

Former Google CEO says climate goals are not meetable, so we might as well drop climate conservation — unshackle AI companies so AI can solve globa... : Read more

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

Spoken like a true psycho.

 

[logainofhades]

This kinda stuff is how Skynet is born. AI will determine we are the problem and wipe us out.

 

[eichwana]

Something tells me he has stock in energy companies so it's his bottom line he's thinking about. Who cares if we don't have a planet to live on, so long as he's richer, right?

 

[DS426]

This idea of "throw everything we have at AI now and it will solve the problem before it's too late" notion is ridiculous. We don't need AI to tell us that we need to start changing things now to result in even lower impact down the road, i.e. many of our impactful systems have a lot of inertia. Moreover, AI isn't going to fix politics, so little wins need to be taken wherever they can be.

Kind of tangential but this over-reliance on AI will just be speeding up idiocracy.

 

[Phaaze88]

We're totally screwed if we go that route...

 

[sauve.richard]

Something tells me he has stock in energy companies so it's his bottom line he's thinking about. Who cares if we don't have a planet to live on, so long as he's richer, right?

This is EXACTLY what I was thinking.

 

[kkthebeast]

He is right, we cannot do it ourselves (if you even agree it needs to be done..., nor is even controllable by humans) either way the solution will be via advancements in science/engineering/methodology/material sciences and not via social means. There is nothing you can do to fix the problem without destroying QOL or freedoms. The solution WILL ONLY ever happen via innovation, optimization, atmosphere tech scrubbing on a tera forming level. Anything less is a smooth brain emotional response and an Utopian ideology at the absolute BEST. "IMHO" lol.

 

[hotaru251]

"it cant be met so might as wel lnot exist" - ex google guy

So can't pay bills? might as well get rid of money right?

Just becasue soemthign "cant be met" doesnt mean you drop it. it means you change so it CAN be met.

 

[watzupken]

And how does he think AI will help here? AI is a collection of human knowledge scrapped and gathered from whatever sources they can to train the it. So I am not sure what about AI that can meaningfully solve climate issues. Even if the AI comes out with a plan, it also requires commitment to get there, At the end of the day, you make a plan, you try and press on to see where you will land. You may not get there, but at least you may make some improvement. Instead, his idea is that you can't make it, so that's go the other way and make it worst. This is a seriously dumb comment.

 

[Notton]

That dude is so out of touch with reality.

Climate change is not a binary solution, there are varying degrees of intensity.
If we can't hit 2.5C, then our next goal should be 2.6C.

Although, seeing as how this guy thinks, it's no wonder Google dumps the baby with the bathwater from their product stacks.
Okay, I thought the obituary was shorter, that's a lot of things Google has killed.
https://killedbygoogle.com/

 

[georgebaker437]

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

 

[KyaraM]

Of course he would say that... not him who will have to live in a freaking wasteland after all. All that counts is that he gets richer in the end, as always.

 

[jp7189]

And how does he think AI will help here? AI is a collection of human knowledge scrapped and gathered from whatever sources they can to train the it. So I am not sure what about AI that can meaningfully solve climate issues. Even if the AI comes out with a plan, it also requires commitment to get there, At the end of the day, you make a plan, you try and press on to see where you will land. You may not get there, but at least you may make some improvement. Instead, his idea is that you can't make it, so that's go the other way and make it worst. This is a seriously dumb comment.

He not talking about LLMs. AI (machine learning) is one of the hottest topics for climate modeling. Bigger datacenters = bigger models = more accurate and faster simulations. That means you can test solutions faster and with more accuracy to help choose the best path forward in the real world. ..and he's right that that's ultimately more important than if you put the wrong type of plastic in the wrong bin.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Solutions are already out there but some people and politicians don't want to believe in climate change. Since these people don't believe the scientists, why does he think that they will believe AI?

 

[SonoraTechnical]

These super rich totally disconnected from reality types.... him and guys like him (Musk included) often go the way of Howard Hughes....

 

[Moonstick2]

What's happened is that the tech industry has stumbled onto this major cash-cow that has the unfortunate side effect of consuming staggering amounts of energy at a time when energy consumption and carbon footprints are getting more and more attention. And these companies don't just have to consider justifying how much energy they're using now: they're thinking about the amounts they're going to have to justify using in just a few years' time, while other companies and private consumers are getting leant on to use less. (That's also why he tries to claim it's self-regulating because "No large company wants to have a huge power bill.", when he knows full well that if a company is guaranteed to make $2 profit for every $1 spent on power, it'll be happy with the biggest power bill possible.) The game here is to try and avoid governmental restrictions or financial punishments on their energy consumption.

One way is to try and lump all the AI in together, good, bad and frivolous. Make it sound like all this energy is being used to do good stuff, but who knows how it divides up? ChatGPT alone reportedly consumes in a year enough energy to power an entire European country for a day or two. Is that sort of energy also being expended on protein folding models? Seems unlikely. And people aren't asking ChatGPT how to solve the climate crisis, they're asking it to help with their homework or recommend a TV show to watch or restaurant to go to. When Schmidt talks about "unshackling AI", I'm very sure he's not advocating leaving LLMs and deepfakes out of that.

So he makes out the huge catch-all of "AI" is part of the solution to climate change, not part of the problem, so leave us alone to keep doing whatever we want please. Of course the only answers people are going to be interested in are going to be ones that don't cost them more money or require them using less energy. I'm not sure AI can work out that miracle of arresting climate change pain free. But as long as the money's rolling in, its not Big Tech's immediate problem if nobody likes the answers.

I wonder what Schmidt's reaction would be if part of AI's solution to solving climate change was turn off all the non-scientific AI? Try and bury it, probably.