4mo ago

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

www.tomshardware.com Former Google CEO says climate goals are not meetable, so we might as well drop climate conservation — unshackle AI companies so AI can solve global warming

“We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway…” says former Google chief Eric Schmidt.

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

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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 👍
  
  approximately 99.9% of the human race is dead
  CEO: Damn, should have used a better prompt
  
  Lol the answer to life, the universe, and everything, when asked to most powerful computer ever made, is 42. So as Douglas Adams has said
  The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binaryrepresentations, base thirteen, Tibetan monksare all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.
- 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".
- AGI: “Climate change odds caused by humans. I am deploying a fix for this from Minot”
- It’s incredible what we’ve been able to do for energy efficiency when the driving force was making phone batteries last longer. Imagine if we cared enough about having a planet to make phone calls on.
- 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...
- M U L T I V A C

294 comments