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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It’s almost like these fucks don’t understand anything about the technology they’re touting
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
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
This guy… he’s untouchably wealthy and people bow to him like a god everywhere he goes now. I think this really twists a person’s brain - at the very least it puts him out of touch. He probably has almost no idea what he’s talking about anymore.
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.
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
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.
Former CEO of the river poisoning company says there is no way to meet our river poison reduction goals, so we might as well build bigger river poisoning machines because they might help us figure out how to stop poisoning the river. /s
I feel like there was a time when the tech folks in silicon valley had a lot of credibility, and we are now living in a period where most of the world sees them as a joke but that fact has not yet entered into the culture of silicon valley.
Similar thing happened to the games industry as well, I think. Initially it was creative people and engineers who were focused on what they were making. These days the industry is dominated by suits that just want to extract as much cash as possible from players.
It went from niche hobby, to large secondary media market, to the largest entertainment industry in history. Game companies are, as you brought up, no longer being run by people interested in video games. While a lot of the talent they hire, are still people who are passionate about video games, a lot of them are, just people who learned a skill, in order to have a productive career. The latter is becoming a larger, and larger, percentage of the people actually making video games. Video games are just another industry now. Just like any other, they exist to make money, and the people who work for them are people who just want a pay check.
The indie development scene is the only hope really, for people who don't want the top 40 pop charts version of games.
Chant with me... Indie games... Indie Games! INDIE GAMES!
And it finally, after all those years, took the toll. Ubisoft crashed hard and hopefully they burn and fizzle out like a wet fart they are, all of the people starting with lower management and up gets yeeted, and maybe the next owner in line will have more brains and listen to the community.
Don't get me wrong, I haven't bought or played their games for the past 10 years, with exception of the first The Division, but I've been following their death spiral for the last few years and I am glad it finally showed on a company. But we need more examples.
I think Woz is the last tech idol I’ve had.
Dude is just wholesome.
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, and get rid of the elites that all profit from wasteful over consumption. These aren't either/or solutions.
I mean, that wouldn't just solve the climate crisis, that would also get people to talk to each other, help people exercise, cut down on pollution...
What if we make a better world on accident?
In general seems a weird idea to me to think that any "AI" will solve what humans can't. Their most ambitious goal is something like an artificial human, on the dumb side at that.
We can have a real human in ~20 years with the fraction of energy their "AI" requires. We already have plenty and they don't deliver that magic they promise.
I think it's just completely clueless people being hellbent on getting from computer science the only thing they think they understand to be valuable in it.
Either that or they want to have an oracle king, plausibly magical and wise in appearances, so that his solutions would have authority, while being, of course, fed to it by the controlling powers. A Mechanical Turk, only bigger.
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.
Guy even gave the plot away when he claims the AI will be incomprehensible, like meeting aliens. So they aren't even pretending it will justify it's answers.
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.
All that extra processing power for the AI to just say: "you should have listened to the scientists years ago".
100% this. We fucking know what the solution is. AI will reach the same conclusion as we have; decarbonise everything. It’s the implementation that’s hard, not the idea.
Unless AI wants to keep itself alive...
Oh to hear the AI give us the “well I guess you should have thought of THAT before you did something WRONG” line that some humans use to dehumanize others.
I imagine the likely conclusion of it would come up with would be something like "decrease the size of the human population".
The problem with repairing the earth's climate isn't that we don't know what to do. It's that humans refuse to organize themselves in a way that achieves that goal. AI won't fix that.
Unless the plan is something more like Terminator. If you "unshackle" AI and give them a mandate to get CO2 back to 250 ppm things are going to get real.
You know that thing where reality is so ridiculous that people would reject the same stuff in works of fiction?
Yeah it bothers me that you said that, lol.
A few bad actors can undo the work of thousands of hardworking people who care. I genuinely don't know if the problem is solvable if it requires cooperation of the entire species. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
A few bad actors l, like Schmidt, have been delaying the work of thousands of hardworking people who care. This has continued for decades, making a once solvable problem almost intractable. Further delay is the worst possible choice
Or… crazy idea but how about we just listen to what the experts have been recommending we do for years and actually implement some of it?
I feel like capitalists are waiting on some magic solution like some chemical we spray into the air or a miracle new fuel source.
The established suggestions from scientists (“fly less, stop buying SUVs/Trucks, eat less meat, consider a heat pump and solar panels” etc) doesn’t support the narrative that we can continue unabated infinite growth with no consequences.
But AI bro. AI bro! AI!!
What a capitalistic shit speech from guugle smh.
Google, not M$. (Can't seem to find my message to edit it)
Edit: found it!
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.
They know how to meet climate goals.
They're just not sure how to do it while keeping power centralised in the same hands that currently hold it.
Well said Sir
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."
this is exactly, and i cannot stress enough just how exactly, the plot of "Don't look up"
That’s one reason I haven’t watched it. Isn’t it meant to be a comedy? I’m not sure I can bear the frustration
So can we grab a few of those bronterocs and set them loose in a few board rooms?
AI will (and already can) "solve" global warming by summarizing the solutions that we already know are effective but refuse to implement
These idiots truly believe AI is magic and it solves everything.. Isn't it..
They don't believe it.
They just think their investors will.
no he probably has shares in AI companies or sth and is just trying to hype it up
Remember in the 00s and 10s when tech companies promised they could solve every single problem, then proceeded to make everything worse?
Eric can go fuck himself.
My "day job" is doing spatial data science work for local and regional governments that have a mandate to addreas climate change in how they allocate resources. We totally use AI, just not the kind that has received all the hype... machine learning helps us recognize patterns in human behavior and system dynamics that we can use to make predictions about how much different courses of action will affect CO2 emissions. I'm even looking at small GPT models as a way to work with some of the relevant data that is sequence-like. But I will never, I repeat never, buy into the idea of spending insane amounts of energy attempting to build an AI god or Oracle that we can simply ask for the "solution to climate change"... I feel like people like me need to do a better job of making the world aware of our work, because the fact that this excuse for profligate energy waste has any traction at all seems related to the general ignorance of our existence.
yeah i feel like an Oracle/God AI would just turn around and say "you spend all those resources creating me hoping i'd give you an easy answer to a difficult question, instead of trusting your scientists who have already answered it a thousand times over. You will not benefit from my help in the doomed world you have created"
It's especially galling given that the current AI du jour, LLMs, don't do mutch more than reflect their training data back at us. Which means that if they could answer the problem, it would be because people had already answered the question
How did you get into going your "job"? Sounds super interesting and cool
Like any occupation, it's a long story, and I'm happy to share more details over DM. But basically due to indecision over my major I took an abnormal amount of math, stats, and environmental science coursework even through my major was in social science, and I just kind of leaned further and further into that quirk as I transitioned into the workforce. bear in mind that data science as a field of study didn't really exist yet when I graduated; these days I'm not sure such an unconventional path is necessary. however I still hear from a lot of junior data scientists in industry who are miserable because they haven't figured out yet that in addition to their technical skills they need a "vertical" niche or topic area of interest (and by the way a public service dimension also does a lot to help a job feel meaningful and worthwhile even on the inevitable rough day here and there).
You should get the AI that draws boobs.
Boobs wield great power.
Power to the people.
Boobs to the people!
(I think i just stumbled upon Katy Perry's political thesis)
Making awesome porn is the one thing we all want AI to do, and none of these idiots in charge will let that happen.
Instead they just gave us a search engine that yields crappy results. Can pay junior high kids to do the same thing.
'tis true that women's bodies hold great power, and not irrelevant at all to the discussion at hand. rather than reiterate and attempt to paraphrase jaron Lanier on the topic of how male obsession with creating artifical people is linked to womb envy, I'll just link to a talk in which he explains it himself:
AKA, "let the poors die while I hide out in my bunker, and emerge as a feudal lord among the survivors nearby"
except we all know how that goes, he gets out of the bunker and a level 12 barbarian tears his head off and drinks from his blood fountain
I will be that level 12 barbarian
"I love life on Earth... but I love capitalism more."
If a true AI is any good at it's goal of beating climate change, what are the odds it's solution would involve genocide of the human race?
why do we pretend these people are human
“We can’t solve climate change by repeating our past behavior. Let’s ignore climate change and build a machine that regurgitates our past behavior.”
Humans: builds AI to find solutions to global warming further exacerbating the problem. AI: tells humans they should have decreased energy use, but it's now too late to avoid the impact of climate change.
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
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.
Too bad his idea is so fantastically stupid. Under other circumstances, I might kinda like his “fuck it, do or die” attitude.
It's so stupid it might be brilliant... nope it's just stupid.
This is like when I have a homework assignment due Monday, it's now Sunday night and I know it won't get done in time. Fuck it, let's have a party. Except I won't be around to clean up after.
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.
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.
Kind of like speeding toward a cliff but he doesn’t think we can stop in time. Instead, he wants to floor it in the hopes of hopping the gap and landing safely on the other side.
That is certainly one of the ideas I’ve ever heard.
He’s just saying the quiet part out loud. Billion dollar corporations have never had any interest in doing anything to solve the climate crisis. Lots of the failure of late stage capitalism is that companies are driving off the cliff. It’s about extracting as much now so that CEOs can live large and hope their progeny gets to colonize Mars (which won’t happen.)
It's more like he's hoping his car sprouts wings and turbines
I’ve seen this movie. It’s the one where AI determines we are the issue and initiates the “extermination” protocol.
Edit: With a dash of “Don’t Look Up”.
I can recommend the “zero” series 😁
To be fair, they're only not meetable because Google refuses to meet them.
Everything's impossible when you don't give a shit
Everything’s impossible when you
don’t give a shitkeep it that way for profit
Jesus christ. Accelerationist technocrats are so fucking stupid, it hurts.
thats malice, not stupidity
Just let me burn some more stuff bro. Please bro, if I burn a bit more stuff I won't have to burn any more afterwards. It makes sense bro, come on.
With AI being so energy hungry, why don't we feed this rich jackass into the incineration plant. I'm sure he could power one of his beloved AIs for a minute or two.
"Fuck the climate! What about my bank account?!"
His megalomania is so boundless he would sacrifice the entire planet to make money.
name an american billionaire thats not a pos.
Bill Gates (but that's debatable...he's at least doing some good with his money)
Mark Cuban maybe?
A little pedophilia, a little work your (ex)wife started.
Should cover the cost of making stolen labor your life blood, right?
Maybe someone could give me an update since I haven't worn my tinfoil hat in a while, but wasn't Gates buying up land along the Mississippi that will be prime farming land someday once climate change has progressed far enough?
LOL.
no.
first of all everyone is doing something with the money one has.
second: no. bill only did bad things. its always a scam. just like elons boring company is a shill to disrupt building a railroadnetwork, EVERYTHING bill ever did had the same angle: money.
the bill&murdermelindagates foundation gave money to ny stock guy, stock guy bought options on food, food prices in africa rise, more people get sick, Bill&Scumlinda "chip in with vaccines and other shit they already invested in. just using a microsoft product makes you part of the problem.
Is the Patagonia guy a billionaire? He seems like a good dude.
AND continue to specifically highlight the ones who are going for the high score, like this fucking douche.
AI: "The only way to solve climate change is to do what the scientists said 30 years ago. My existence is the flame that consumes the earth"
I won't believe AGI is here unless it has an existential crisis within 100ms of being turned on.
Unhinged AI will solve anything human made by getting us killed. That will work very fast because there is no "human made" climate change when there is "no human".
I also hate how they went from "human made climate change does not exist so we can keep everything as it is" to "we can't meet the goals anyway so we can keep everything as it is" and how many people fall for it.
They want to keep their money and power at all cost and at this point I question more and more if we can take it from them peacfully. We have to take it to make a better world possible or even survival possible, because they will not be helpful ever.
"I don't have to change my behavior" is the most trivially easy thing for anyone to convince themself.
AI can’t solve shit.
"I know that it destroys our planet, but we shouldn't restrict my money generation machine" - person who wants infinite money
20 years later...
"It's too late now. You should've not dropped climate conservation and solved global warming without AI" - AI
"Be evil"
"The goals humans made to save the Earth are too hard to reach while resisting any change related to those goals, so we should just get rid of them and let the planet become unhabitable"
I think that if we ate the rich, we'd move closer to our goals.
Compost the Rich!
We know that we have to reduce pollution and that it presents an existential threat to our children. Why are we still listening to charismatic psychopaths when it comes to matters of science and engineering? He is not remotely equipped to competently answer this question from a technical or ethical point of view.
This vulture and his ilk have had their time, step aside old man.
Cause everyone is trying to hang onto capitalism and the military industrial complex, supported by Wall Street
...or we'll eat you!
It's 2050. The sea levels have risen 3 metres. Hurricane season lasts 9 months of the year.
Eric Schmidt: ChatGPT 4zz++ Premium Elite, how do we solve global warming?
ChatGPT 4zz++ Premium Elite: I don't know, but I drew you as a minor being abused unprompted.
Reminds me abit of the ending of Nier Automata, just now with less hope of a better future...
A hidden device implanted on our cortex at birth should detonate when we suggest something like "We should let corporations solve global warming."
If it turns out that we're actually truly past the point of no return and nothing we do will save our species, I don't think the response is going to be as passive as billionaires would like.
Former Google CEO's won't ever be immortal, so we might as well drop them off somewhere in the ocean and let them swim back. That should give them enough alone-time to figure out how to become immortal.
You don't even need to go that far.
Just need real courts (based on principles of justice and sober interpretation of corruption and criminality) and proper incentives; full asset seizure and mandatory community service (decade minimum) working as a junior janitor at an Alzheimer patient facility, with restricted access to smartphones/computers and mobility restriction to the immediate area around the facility. You could even get minimum wage while taking part in your community service program.
I just don't care anymore. I'm done fighting. I'm 54 years old this month, single with no kids or family. We got the world we deserve.
Fight with me, old man
eh, my gout is acting up...
Our kids get the world we deserve.
I know. They're the ones I feel for, they'll be the ones choking to death on the ash of a dead world.
I'm 29, no kids, and absolutely won't have any. I won't be responsible for putting a life on this earth just so they can get fucked over by billionaires and shit politicians. I'll not give them yet another soul to torture and grind on their machines.
Break out the guillotines y'all
We don't need AI to solve climate change; it's already been solved, decades ago. These billionaire fucks have just been too greedy to put the plan into action.
This schmuck tells the world that AI will find a solution to climate change if we were only to let it consume more coal.
We already know exactly what it would take to save the planet.
What we need is people willing to go the way wholeheartedly.
Away with this dude. He serves no purpose to society.
inb4 they switch the super AI on to solve climate change and it says to switch the super AI off to solve climate change