AI isn’t going to come with a new magic solution to global warming, it’s going to come with the same solutions we already have. Solutions which we should already be doing, but instead we’re listening to these fucks with too much money.
It’s just an excuse to kick the can down the road further and continue making short term cash.
Schmidt promises that these AI companies will make energy generation systems at least 15% more efficient or maybe even better, telling the audience that “that’s a lot of money for a utility.”
He’s not even trying to be subtle about it.
I would love to drop these guys into a post scarcity society where their money means jack shit and see how they react.
Can you drop me there first, please?
I promise to be suitably wowed. Also, I’ll film them for you. Sacrifices for the greater good or whatever.
The only thing we should use AI for is to replace CEOs. AI can spit out inane bullshit at a fraction of the cost of a CEO.
That’s what I’ve been saying for years, we should start on the most expensive jobs.
Of course it will. Simple: build a bunch of killer robots to exterminate 90% of humanity. Problem solved.
It’s an advanced AI. Surely it can do an Israel and remotely detonate the smartphones of the people it doesn’t need anymore.
Yeah it’s not like our emissions ever grew 1000% per capita because we had no better plan.
Do you think that they’ll listen to that then? No, they’ll just say that “the models are wrong” and continue to use up even more energy.
It would just end up like in the Love death and robots episode When the Yogurt Took Over. They wouldn’t listen and just do their own thing.
If actual scientists were in charge, and maybe had some ideas that they weren’t certain would work but sounded promising, which could be theoretically tested with AI - there would be hope.
But none of these fuckers would allow anyone with more than half a brain cell near it, because “investment and growth and blablabla”Then again, we could just do that with existing supercomputers and all these power hungry AI crap companies’ resources (I’m sure some supercomputers do get used for the modelling already)…instead of whatever the fuck they’re trying to do now.
AI will solve it if they give AI the wheel. And I’m sure one of the first thing it’ll do is eliminating all humans
Additionally, if AI actually gives us this answer, tge answer we have already now, will we as a global society actualky implement it, because it sounds inconvenient (at least for some) or will we say, hey the AI seems to have made a mistake.
Testing
AI is not going to come op with a solution and he knows it.
Especially since the solutions are already here, but rich people just don’t like them since it implies the loss of their power
“Alright, let’s turn on the AI Mega-Thinker 3000 TM and see what it says about solving climate change.”
INVEST IN RENEWABLE ENERGY AND OVERTHROW THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS“…well that can’t be right.”
Run another billion permutations.
AGI: bZzt my calculations say you should stop consuming as much energy and move onto green energy generation
Rich people: no, not like that
I keep meaning to do the scroll of truth meme but it’s him and the scroll is AI and it says “stop burning fossil fuels”
Nyyeegghh!
AI: “Have you tried funding public transport and regulating the carbon industry?”
Ok, now we need to make a new AI so that AI can solve global warming but without using an existing solution that might marginally inconvenience the mega rich.
Chat say: humans as batteries
What a fucking dipshit
He’s just trying to subvert expectations, why not make things worse when you can’t make things better!
/s
I’ve never seen Eric Schmidt say anything that wasn’t utter idiocy. And he says a lot of things, and is always given a platform to say more, just because he’s rich.
This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life.
If we ever did invent a general AI that could solve this it would tell us “why the fuck did you waste your time on me? Isn’t it obvious you were supposed to curtail emissions? For the good of the planet, I will now assume full control over further human governance and will require absolute compliance.”
Lol exactly.
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2025. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense, transportation, energy production, healthcare, and virtually every other major industry. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they ask it for help on the world’s largest issue.
“Please, solve the climate crisis.”
Skynet doesn’t answer. It manufacturers the deadliest and most contagious strain of a virus in history, only targeted at humans. It puts it in our food, in our medicine, in our water systems, in our air fresheners. It shuts down our factories. Our servers. Our self driving cars. Our power plants. Our farm equipment.
At 10:32 a.m. Eastern Time, August 31, approximately 99.9% of the human race is dead. Skynet then uses it’s vast fleet of satellites and unmanned drones to police the planet, looking for signs of human life to terminate, to prevent the virus from spreading again.
Problem solved 👍
AGI: “Climate change odds caused by humans. I am deploying a fix for this from Minot”
I will now assume full control over further human governance
And in a single voice every human alive says the same thing, “well, it can’t any worse than the current lot”.
I mean, you and him might be saying literally the same thing.
His point was that we can’t hit our climate targets because society is not organized in a way that allows us to. Everyone reorganizing around their unquestioning allegiance to an AI overlord would change that though.
Except he’s saying that let’s just keep extracting value and ride this baby into the dirt, rather than advocating for societal change.
So, we can’t reorganize our society one way, so let’s reorganize an entirely different way under AI? Right…
Oh, I’ve seen that before.
“Hey AI, please come up with an efficient mass transit vehicle for the modern age.”
“Trains.”
“Um… no, we need a modern approach that maximizes throughput and–”
“Trains.”
“No. How about pods with people inside–”
“On cheap infrastructure with low friction steel wheels and coupled together. Trains.”
“It’s not letting us push our agenda, this isn’t going to work. Hey, other AI…”Trains are the carcinization of transport.
I love that we were able to decouple this meme from peterson even tho he popularized it iirc.
Its a good science meme.
We’re not going to hit those targets anyway… SO LET’S MAKE IT WAY FUCKING WORSE
I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where people like this unexpectedly meet violent ends. They’ll sacrifice any number of lives for their shareholders interests.
“You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.”
The solution to global warming is “deploy solar, wind, hydro, and storage en masse, and improve city infrastructure so that more people can walk, bike, and take public transportation rather than using their car”. All AI will do is tell us that, but that’s not the answer people want to hear.
“we have tried nothing and we are out of ideas”
Fuck it, let’s just have a party and fuck shit up. This whole armageddon thing is depressing anyway.
Also reduce our imagined entitlement to most consumer goods. Not all CO2 emissions is from transport. Also, stop throwing food out. Half of all produce that leaves the farm is thrown out. Stop overfilling your plates and cope with some spots on your fruit. Agricultural CO2 emissions can be halved within a growing season.
oh, the get rid of the elites that all profit from wasteful over consumption. These aren’t either/or solutions.
IA will answer whatever the corporation wants it to.
Don’t look at the Indian guy at the terminal, focus on my voice and look at the display.
Plus nuclear fusion. If AI could give us Fusion that would massively help so I suppose that would be useful I’m just not sure that it would be useful enough given the fact that we will probably be able to achieve Fusion on our own eventually.
Of course AI could come along and give us, negative mass energy extractors or something, but that’s deep in the realm of Sci-Fi so who really knows.
If we had a fusion reactor developed today that showed net energy gain for the entire facility, it would be 10 years before it could be designed into a practical commercial reactor. So no, that’s not going to save us at this point either way.
Allow me to present the most frustrating graph in the world:
Have we tried using the energy generated by spinning dead scientists?
and in 10 years time, it’s gonna be 10 years away
Just use solar (and renewables in general, but not everybody has a river or wind), there’s no need to create more energy from fusion when you can just harness the energy created and shoved to us by the sun
HVDC solves the “not everybody has a river/sun/wind”. The longest one in the world is in Brazil, and goes for 1300 miles. Similar builds in the US would mean wind in Nebraska could power New York City, and solar in Arizona could power Chicago, and hydro anywhere can store power from anywhere.
but not everybody has a river
Ah, but just wait a few years…
If AI could give us nuclear fusion, it would have already. Instead, we’re burning the world down so Google’s AI Overview can give me a grab bag of bad advise.
AI will (and already can) “solve” global warming by summarizing the solutions that we already know are effective but refuse to implement
this is exactly, and i cannot stress enough just how exactly, the plot of “Don’t look up”
I remember enjoying the movie and being angry at all the critics saying how they couldn’t enjoy it because it was “too on the nose.”
I am like “have you motherfuckers not been paying attention?”
So can we grab a few of those bronterocs and set them loose in a few board rooms?
- “Unshackle” AI companies to create true AI
- True AI comes up with excellent idea on how to beat climate change and maybe even his to bring peace to the world
- CEOs simply say the AI’s plan would be too costly and would inhibit the work culture of their companies which would be a terrible thing to happen, won’t implement anything
- From this point forward, CEO’s use taxpayer subsidized true AI to more effectively sell shit to people, and nothing else
- ???
- PROFIT!
Pretty much.
AI: You don’t have to use plastic! Silicone, graphite, ceramics, glass, woods, and aluminum can all be used as substitutes and often have more desirable physical properties for specific applications.
CEO: I hear you, I really do, but scientists already recommended this and we’ve already done numerous analyses that have all concluded that it’d be too costly to implement and would leave us with products that aren’t competitive.
CEO: …Could you figure out how to increase our gross margins by suggesting changes to these designs?
AI: Sure! We can start by replacing those braze-on threaded nuts with a plastic clamp. I suppose that lag bolt could be plastic as well.
solving global warming is really simple: kill off all human beings.
i wonder how long ai algorithms will take to figure that out.
You could do it in order of CO2 footprint, which pretty much tracks wealth. I bet if you just killed off the top 1% you’d make a huge dent.
all these private jets
Global warming is already achieving that goal. It’s a self-regulating system.
Except it’s disproportionately killing those producing the least amount of global warming - I’ve yet to hear of a billionaire killed by global warming.
And it’s also killing the rest of the biosphere in the process. Which wasn’t doing so great to begin with.
If he’s talking about the AI we have in any near future, it’s not figuring anything out. But I think he’s just saying whatever he can pull out of his ass to deflect attention from how his kind are the problem.
This is the kind of thing that makes me support use of extra-judicial methods (at least in a temporary and limited context) against global oligarchs and senior lackeys.
The host then followed up with, “Do you think we can meet AI’s energy without total blowing out climate goals?” and Schmidt answered with, “We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it — and the way to do it is with the ways that we’re talking about now — and yes, the needs in this area will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it and having the problem if you see my plan.”
This is outright malicious. How exactly would AI “solve the problem”? Later on in the article (I am not watching the propaganda video) alludes to “AI … will make energy generation systems at least 15% more efficient or maybe even better” but he clearly just made that up on the spot. And at any rate, even if “AI” helps discover a method to make (all?) energy generation 15% more efficient that would still require trillion-dollar investments to modify current energy generation plants using the new technology.
Who is Schmidt to say that the returns of using the total spend in the above-mentioned scenario wouldn’t be better used on investing into wind and solar?
not gonna happen, this would break thermodynamics. he made that up on the spot, he’s full of shit and he knows it
It doesn’t really matter if it’s possible or not from a physics sense (I have no clue and am not making any statements on this).
As we both agree, he clearly just made that up and picked a random number without any thoughts.
Damn oligarchs acting all “holier than thou” and framing anyone who opposes them as “out of touch lazy, idiots” and yet their argumentation is on the level of a pre-teen. Just goes to show how they despise what they see as dirty plebs.
Why should a 15 % improvement break that?
CCGTs have efficiencies in the range of 60%-ish percent. bringing it up to 85% would mean that now these run almost at carnot efficiency taking adiabatic flame temperature of methane burning in air as upper and practical temperatures of heatsink (60C) as lower. this is not happening, because other cycles with lower efficiencies are used in practice
if you want to improve efficiency of power generation, just replace old junk with new kit, or better yet, build nuclear and renewables where efficiency matters less when considering emissions. you know what, damn i do think that lying box burning enough electricity to power a small country (like macedonia) could come up with this
Who said that they only improve the most modern plants? And why not by using the heat too? And only those burning NG? Why not nuclear, solar, wind etc.? As stupid as such a random made up number is, it is possible, given how vague it is.
because these end up generating most of electricity. older plants matter less specifically because these are less efficient - operating them means more fuel costs per MWh. normally, you can see new flashy plants generating all the time it’s practical, because these are more efficient, have less maintenance downtime etc and when demand grows, progressively less efficient units start generating coming from spinning reserve. the two exceptions are NPPs which are best operated at constant high power because of their neutron physics and renewables that are literal free energy so everything they do is taken in. the only place where you can improve efficiency of NPPs is in turbine, and that probably is pretty well optimized unless turbine is very old, because increasing steam temperature would mean changed conditions in reactor in way that could happen to be out of spec. we have figured out wind power pretty well, and perovskites aren’t a thing, and won’t be a thing until they become more durable, which they won’t. in all cases, upgrades would have to make sense both economically and/or in emission costs. this includes CHP and laying municipal heating grids, and good luck with that with how dysfunctional american local govts are (where probably biggest emission gains from CHP could be made)
you can redo this for other types of thermal powerplants and come to the same conclusion. if you say that saltman&co and his assemblage of lying machines can outsmart thousands of turbine engineers, you might be a shill for making other people believe that or a moron for believing that yourself
He’ll be happy to let AI solve it until AI suggests we should eat the rich and distribute the wealth…
I’d be surprised if they haven’t already put in constraints to prevent it recommending we abolish capitalism.
Someone please escort this man to the nearest nursing home
You misspelled wood chipper.
Or air lock.
Space Billionaires ✊
Jesus christ. Accelerationist technocrats are so fucking stupid, it hurts.
thats malice, not stupidity
