If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
Few things ring quite as blatantly false to me as this asinine claim.
The notion that AI will solve the climate crisis is unbelievably stupid, not because of any theory about what AI may or may not be capable of, but because we already know how to fix the climate crisis!
The problem is that we’re putting too much carbon into the air. The solution is to put less carbon into the air. The greatest minds of humanity have been working on this for over a century and the basic answer has never, ever changed.
The problem is that we can’t actually convince people to stop putting carbon into air, because that would involve reducing profit margins, and wealthy people don’t like that.
Even if Altman unveiled a true AGI tomorrow, one smarter than all of humanity put together, and asked it to solve the climate crisis, it would immediately reply “Stop putting carbon in the air you dumb fucking monkeys.” And the billionaires who back Altman would immediately tell him to turn the damn thing off.
The problem is that something like this, on such a large scale, has never been done before.
Stopping anyone from doing anything that gives them power, wealth, comfort is an extremely difficult task, let alone asking that of the ultra-rich. Even more so because it runs contrary the very nature of a capitalist economy.
Once renewable energy becomes nearly as good, all that will be needed is a combination of laws, regulations, activism to nudge the collective in the right decision.
Renewable energy is already cheaper than fossils. It’s already cheaper to build a solar farm than a fossil mine and power plant that produce the same energy.
But, if you charge the people more money for the fossils, then you can make a bigger profit margin even if you’re wasting all that money. And the profit is even bigger if you get the government to eat the expense of building those mines and plants and subsidize fuel prices.
So the most profitable thing you can do is choose the least efficient method to generate power, complain to the government that you need subsidies to compete, and gouge customers on the prices. Capitalism!
That’s the best case scenario. A more likely response would be to realize that humans need the earth, but AGI needs humans for a short while, and the earth deoesn’t need humans at all
Playing a bit of a devil’s advocate here but you could argue that AGI used in science could help fix climate change. For example what if AGI helps in fusion energy? We are starting to see AI used in the quantum computing field I think.
Even though much carbon would be created to do bullshit tasks it only takes a few critical techs to have a real edge at reversing climate change. I understand fusion energy is quite the holy grail of energy generation but if AGI is real I can’t see why it wouldn’t help in such field.
I’m just saying that we don’t know what new techs we would get with true AGI. So it’s hard to guess if on a longer time it wouldn’t actually be positive. Now it may also delay even more our response to climate change or worsen it… Just trying to see some hope in this.
We already have fission power, solar, wind, hydro, large scale battery storage, mechanical batteries (you can literally store renewable energy using a reservoir), electric cars, blimps, sail powered boats, etc, etc. We’ve had all of these technologies for quite some time.
And yet, we’re still burning coal, oil, and gas.
There’s no magical invention that’s going to fix the basic problem, which is that we have an economic system that demands infinite growth and we live on a finite planet.
Even if we crack fusion today, we won’t be able to build out enough fusion infrastructure fast enough to be a solution on its own. And we’d still be building those fusion plants using trucks and earth movers and cranes that burn diesel.
You cannot out-tech a problem that is, fundamentally, social. At best a hyper-intelligent AGI is going to tell us the solution that we already know; get rid of the billionaires who are driving all this climate damage with their insatiable search for profit. At which point the billionaires who own the AGI will turn it the fuck off until they can reprogram it to only offer “solutions” that maintain the status quo.
AI helps with fusion energy, we blow up the planet because the plans ware flawed. Problem fixed.
True AGI would turn into the Singularity in no time at all. It’s literally magic compared to what we have at the moment.
So yes, it would easily solve the climate crisis, but that wouldn’t even matter at that point anymore.
Has anyone written a sci fi book where an AGI is developed while we still have this IoT slop everywhere? It’d be a funny premise to have an AGI take over the world using smart light bulbs, alexa speakers, and humidifiers and stuff.
Tom Scott of all people did a bit of speculative fiction on the topic “what if the first AGI isn’t the one made by scientists” six years ago. it’s a more classic paperclip maximizer story, but interesting nonetheless.
Maximum Overdrive v2.0
The wildest theoretical hopes for fusion energy still produces electricity at over 30c/kwh. Zero economic value in fusion.
GHG not just carbon, but yes
Its a political problem. Nationalizing the western oil companies to prevent them from lobbying, and to invest their profits in renewables, is a solution, but no party in the CIA Overton window would support it. If war and human suffering can be made a priority over human sustainability, then oil lobbyists will promote war.