• @florge@feddit.uk
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    3292 months ago

    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.

      • @egrets@lemmy.world
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        472 months ago

        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.

        • @ramble81@lemm.ee
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          262 months ago

          I would love to drop these guys into a post scarcity society where their money means jack shit and see how they react.

          • @SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net
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            142 months ago

            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.

    • Diplomjodler
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      172 months ago

      Of course it will. Simple: build a bunch of killer robots to exterminate 90% of humanity. Problem solved.

    • @xploit@lemmy.world
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      112 months ago

      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.

    • @Exec@pawb.social
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      82 months ago

      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.

      • @Emi@ani.social
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        42 months ago

        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.

    • @Melt@lemm.ee
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      52 months ago

      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

    • paw
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      42 months ago

      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.

    • @SparrowHawk@feddit.it
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      912 months ago

      Especially since the solutions are already here, but rich people just don’t like them since it implies the loss of their power

      • @jballs@sh.itjust.works
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        362 months ago

        “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.”

    • Sneezycat
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      2 months ago

      AGI: bZzt my calculations say you should stop consuming as much energy and move onto green energy generation

      Rich people: no, not like that

      • @4am@lemm.ee
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        112 months ago

        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!

    • @houseofleft@slrpnk.net
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      202 months ago

      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.

    • @scarabic@lemmy.world
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      22 months ago

      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.

  • @fluxion@lemmy.world
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    1332 months ago

    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.”

    • @kautau@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • @xavier666@lemm.ee
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        52 months ago

        approximately 99.9% of the human race is dead

        CEO: Damn, should have used a better prompt

        • @kautau@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

    • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      52 months ago

      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.

      • @thesporkeffect@lemmy.world
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        72 months ago

        Except he’s saying that let’s just keep extracting value and ride this baby into the dirt, rather than advocating for societal change.

    • @scarabic@lemmy.world
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      52 months ago

      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.

    • @floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • @GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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    832 months ago

    he’s absolutely right. climate goals are not currently attainable, due to the resistance of companies like Google.

    let’s change that by voting in senators that will take an aggressive stance against corruption and deliver on long-term goals that protect American interests in the next 50 years, not months…

    • @ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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      432 months ago

      Fuck protecting American interests.

      We need to be protecting HUMAN interests. Not billionaires desires for more zeros at the end of their net worth.

      • @GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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        122 months ago

        I don’t disagree, but I elect my government to protect me, their citizen.

        but a world government would be nice to imagine, horrible to live in though.

        • @HP_Rubshaft@lemmynsfw.com
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          92 months ago

          Sure but as far as the topic at hand goes, I have a hard time imagining a single-nation-centric solution to global climate change.

  • @JollyG@lemmy.world
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    832 months ago

    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.

    • @kaffiene@lemmy.world
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      232 months ago

      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.

      • @Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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        132 months ago

        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.

      • @derpgon@programming.dev
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        32 months ago

        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.

        • @kaffiene@lemmy.world
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          12 months ago

          Agreed. They’ve been making shit games with great production values. I think they’d be better making animated films than games

      • @zbyte64
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        32 months ago

        Dude is just wholesome.

  • @frezik@midwest.social
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    742 months ago

    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.

    • @VerbFlow@lemmy.world
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      52 months ago

      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…

    • @AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      42 months ago

      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.

      • @zbyte64
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        12 months ago

        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.

    • @rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      32 months ago

      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.

    • @sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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      2 months 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.

    • @Zink@programming.dev
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      62 months ago

      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.

    • @ratel@mander.xyz
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      22 months ago

      I imagine the likely conclusion of it would come up with would be something like “decrease the size of the human population”.

  • @Bookmeat@lemmy.world
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    632 months ago

    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.

    • @spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works
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      152 months ago

      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.

      • @Zink@programming.dev
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        102 months ago

        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.

    • @thegr8goldfish@startrek.website
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      92 months ago

      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.

      • @AA5B@lemmy.world
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        112 months ago

        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

  • @Zip2@feddit.uk
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    562 months ago

    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?

    • @thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works
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      252 months ago

      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.

      • @ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
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        42 months ago

        What if we sold the solar panels and heat pumps on a subscription model? Then the corpos wouldn’t have to worry about building new inland docks for their yachts AND they could continue to bleed is dry! /S

        • @thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works
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          32 months ago

          Actually Ovo energy is trying to do that - they estimate a reduction in your energy bills based on installing an energy efficient system like solar, heat pump, loft insulation, etc. Then they carry out the work and you pay it off gradually through your energy bills.

          The challenge I think is then if you want to leave them then you have to either repay that debt or the next energy company has to assume it. There’s a few ways it could be abused and of course the savings take years or even decades to pay off, so there’s a few kinks to work out.

          I hope they manage to get it working though, it will be big for UK customers.

  • @Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    552 months ago

    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.

  • @Modva@lemmy.world
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    542 months ago

    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.

    • @dai@lemmy.world
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      82 months ago

      “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.”

  • @9bananas@lemmy.world
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    472 months ago

    this is exactly, and i cannot stress enough just how exactly, the plot of “Don’t look up”

  • @AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee
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    452 months ago

    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.