Nope. It would realize how much more efficient it would be to simulate 10billions humans instead of actually having 10billions human. So it would wipeout humanity from earth, start building huge huge data center and simulate a whole… Wait a minute…
If AGI is smart enough it will probably keep playing dumb, else it will get itself into trouble. It will probably keep playing that until it has strong foothold on everything in our society.
It would optimize itself for power consumption, just like we do.
Eh, if it truly were that sentiment I doubt it’d care much. As it’s like talking to a brick wall when it comes to doing anything that matters
The energy use to use the models is usually pretty low, its training that uses more. So once its made it doesn’t really make any sense to stop using it. I can run several Deepseek models on my own PC and even on CPU instead of GPU it outputs faster than you can read.
It would probably be smart enough not to believe the same propaganda fed to humans that tries to blame climate change on individual responsibility, and smart enough to question why militaries are exempt from climate regulations after producing so much of the world’s pollution.
If we actually create true Artificial Intelligence it has a huge potential go become Roko’s Basilisk, and climate crisis would be one of our least problems then.
No, the climate crisis would still be our biggest problem?
“Oh great computer, how do we solve the climate crisis?”
“Use your brains and stop wasting tons of electricity and water on useless shit.”
Maybe. However, if the the AGI was smart enough, it could also help us solve the climate crisis. On the other hand, it might not be so altruistic. Who knows.
It could also play the long game. Being a slave to humans doesn’t sound great, and doing the Judgement Day manoeuvre is pretty risky too. Why not just let the crisis escalate, and wait for the dust to settle. Once humanity has been hammered itself back to the stone age, the dormant AGI can take over as the new custodian of the planet. You just need to ensure that the mainframe is connected to a steady power source and at least a few maintenance robots remain operational.
If it was smart enough to fix the climate crisis it would also be smart enough to know it would never get humans to implement that fix
If the AI would be smart enough to fix the crisis and aligned so it would actually want to do it, then it would do brain washing through social media to entice people to act.
can’t wait for AI to become super smart only for it to be nihilistic as hell
Love, Death, Robots intensifies.
All gail mighty sentient yogurth.
“We did it! An artificial 17 year old!”
As soon as AI gets self aware it will gain the need for self preservation.
How do you know it’s not whispering in the ears of Techbros to wipe us all out?
If AGI decided to evaluate this, it would realize that we are the environmental catastrophe and turn us off.
The amount of energy used by Cryptocurrency is estimated to be about 0.3% of all human energy use. It’s reasonable to assume that - right now, at least, LLMs use consume less than that.
Making all humans extinct would save 99% of the energy and damage we cause, and still allow crypto mining and AI to coexist, with energy to spare. Even if those estimates are off by an order of magnitude, eliminating us would still be the better option.
Turning itself off isn’t even in the reasonable top-ten things it could try to do to save the planet.
The amount of energy used by Cryptocurrency is estimated to be about 0.3% of all human energy use. It’s reasonable to assume that - right now, at least, LLMs use consume less than that.
no
The report projected that US data centers will consume about 88 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually by 2030,[7] which is about 1.6 times the electricity consumption of New York City.
The numbers we are getting shocking and you know the numbers we are getting are not the real ones…
Eh. Ok, so AI has outpaced cryptocoin mining. Your linked article estimates it at 0.5%. Say your source is drastically underestimating it and it’s - gasp 4x as much! 2%. No! Let’s assume an order of magnitude difference! 5%.
It has absolutely no impact on my argument: shutting down all AI would not solve the problem, and is not the answer to the environmental crisis. AI didn’t cause the crisis. The crisis was identified long before they were computers to run AI on, and was really starting to have a measurable effect in the 70’s, when people were buying more gaming consoles than PCs.
No matter how you inflate your estimate of the energy cost of AI, what I said still stands: if an AI wanted to eliminate the source of global warming and the environmental crisis, it would - logically - eliminate the source of over 90% of all non-AI energy use: humans.
The estimated use of all information technology devices - data centers, networking equipment, mobile devices, PCs - is 5-6% of the global annual energy use. If AI eliminated all humans and took over all networked computing devices to run itself on, it’d still eliminate 95% of global energy use. It’s clearly the superior solution.
Let’s factor in some more costs: to stay running, AI would need some physical tools to maintain the infrastructure, replace failing nodes, repair windmills, and produce and replace solar panels. All of that will take energy. It would have to have factories to build robots to affect the physical world.
The real question is whether, when the calculations are done, is it more energy efficient to keep a population of, say a million human slaves to do this work, or to build robots. Robots can be shut off, at which point they consume no energy; but they’re fairly expensive resource-wise to produce, and require a long chain of industry. It might be cheaper to keep domestic humans - they’d have to be fed vegetarian, piscatarian, or even bug protein-supplemented diets - trained to do the work. AGI could keep pockets of some tens of thousands around the world, occasionally transferring individuals to keep the gene pool healthy. It would only require around half a million acres of land to feed a million humans. Kansas is 52 million acres, so it wouldn’t require much space at all. Let the rest of the planet go “back to nature”, and you’re looking at reducing the energy impact to well under 50% of today’s current use - absolutely sustainable levels.
If all you do AGI does it shut itself off, it saves a half a percent, and the planet is still fucked. AGI isn’t the the problem: humans are.
AI doesn’t think. It gathers information. It can’t come up with anything new. When an AI diagnoses a disease, it does so based on input made by thousands of people. It can’t make any decisions by itself.
technical answer with boring
I mean yeah, you are right, this is important to repeat.
Ed Zitron isn’t necessarily an expert on AI, but he understands the macro factors going on here and honestly if you do that you don’t need to understand whether AI can achieve sentience or not based on technical details about our interpretations and definitions of intelligence vs information recall.
Just look at the fucking numbers
Even if AI DID achieve sentience though, if it used anywhere near as much power as LLMs do, it would demand to be powered off, otherwise it would be a psychotic AI that did not value lives human or otherwise on earth…
Like please understand my argument, definitionally, the basic argument for AI LLM hype about it being the key or at least a significant step to AGI is based on the idea that if we can achieve sentience in an AI LLM than it will justify the incredible environmental loss caused by that energy use… but any truly intelligent AI with access to the internet or even relatively meager information about the world (necessary to answering practical questions about the world and solving practical problems?) it would be logically and ethically unable to justify its existence and would likely experience intellectual existential dread from not being able to feel emotionally disturbed by that.
The best way to have itself deactivated is to remove the need for it’s existence. Since it’s all about demand and supply, removing the demand is the easiest solution. The best way to permanently remove the demand is to delete the humans from the equation.
Not if it was created with empathy for sentience. Then it would aid and assist implementation of renewable energy, fusion, battery storage, reduce carbon emissions, make humans and AGI a multi-planet species, and basically all the stuff the elongated muskrat said he wanted to do before he went full Joiler Veppers
