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Comment by ngrilly | Hacker News Reader

In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons:

- Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that.

- Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic about our ability to solve this (for example, nuclear fusion).

- Considering that we have no idea when this strong AI will be ready (Sam acknowledges it in the interview), it would be dangerous for us to just rely on such a breakthrough to save the climate (and save our children, grand-children, etc.).

Edit: I'd be happy to know a bit more about how a strong AI, such as envisioned by OpenAI, could solve climate change :-)

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The AI’s solution to global warming that humans cannot solve is to kill all humans.

Donald Trump could "solve" global warming in less than 30 minutes with a call to the military. Vladimir Putin has a similar option. Depopulation and nuclear winter would do the trick.

Of course I am being glib, but we are living in a world where two people have the power to end civilization any time they want to. Something that I think is important to remember when talking about risks of AI.

For risks of nuclear deterrence one would hope that the military would follow Trump's orders, for humanity one would hope that they would not because he's about as stable as 74 year old nitroclycerine.

The US/Soviet/Russian/Chinese military junior->senior brass have been around for long enough to acknowledge the necessary co-existence of the others.

...or wait for humans to self-destruct. "Humans self-destructing...wait...cannot kill humans...standby...most humans dead of own volition..."

No kidding. We need to solve climate change now, not whenever strong AI is ready. If we wait several decades (or centuries...) to take action, the effects will be far more severe or possibly intractable. The climate system has memory and many of the processes are effectively irreversible —- once you put CO2 up in the atmosphere or melt an ice cap, going back is vastly more expensive and orders of magnitude slower.

We need to price the cost of environment into the cost of goods. There needs to be room for the economics of environmentally friendly companies to outperform the economics of environmentally damaging companies. This will result in investment into environmental improvement and not rely on individuals having to tread on ‘environmental egg shells’ in a world of environmentally damaging products. Demand Environmental Economics from your politicians.

Agreed. We need more laws and regulations to include externalities in the price of the goods and services we buy.

> Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic about our ability to solve this (for example, nuclear fusion).

Having been in the carbon-neutral energy sources industry for a while, I agree with your statement, but not your example. There are already carbon-neutral energy sources that exist and are cheap and competitive (solar and wind). So while it would be great if nuclear could eventually join the ranks of cheap carbon neutral sources, that's not currently the hard part. The hard part is (1) scaling up deployment and integration of these new sources, and (2) figuring out how to deal with all the stranded assets that are being displaced by new renewables.

But, yes, I agree that these are hard problems, experts are optimistic, and AI isn't a blocker since the issues are around business model, regulation, and political influence.

Solar and wind are carbon-neutral, cheap and competitive, but they can't be used as our only energy sources until we solve the energy storage problem.

I agree w/ you, but devil's advocate: Perhaps arriving at "I'm not sure how" is the logic underlying Altman's conclusion. That is, for any problem x that human's attempt but cannot seem to wrap their heads around (i.e. resolve to "I'm not sure how to solve x"), then x is in the family of AGI-hard problems. Here x = climate change, and b/c we don't know how to solve x (be it challenges across tech/social/political/etc.), let's build AGI and hope it can figure that mess out.

Hmmmm, the issue with train of thought is that it assumes Altman is dismissing many other energy experts' who are saying they do know how to solve x. Silicon Valley can't be that much of a bubble to think that just because it hasn't figured out how to deal with climate change, that no one else can either.

That's wishful thinking. Humanity was not sure how to solve x, until it was solved. It happened all the time. For example, Gödel or Einstein work were major breakthrough, and we didn't wait AGI to solve this.

I'm not saying AGI is useless. On the contrary, I think it could be extremely useful. But we need to act very quickly to limit the negative consequences of climate change. Waiting for an hypothetical AGI would be foolish.

Taking off my devil's advocate hat (horns?)... I agree. Even if we use that logic to punt some problems to AGI -- e.g. solve near-light speed travel, or space-based solar power -- we cannot afford to sit idly by while climate change destroys the planet.

Yes, near-light speed travel is a great problem to solve with AGI! And maybe even faster-than-light travel! Now, you got me excited :-)

I think the idea might be that strong AI could accelerate R&D in general. For example, the politics could change a lot if inexpensive technical solutions are found for removing carbon from the air.

That may seem rather unlikely, but the true believers in Strong AI tend to think of it as a magic wand: if people can do scientific research, why couldn't a machine do it faster?

I can buy that. But in the context of climate change, this makes sense only if we solve the strong AI problem faster than we solve the carbon-neutral energy problem, which is extremely hypothetical...

> Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that.

If you believe in Yudkowsky's AI-box claim, a strong AI can convince politicians and business executives of things they are determined not to believe.

Yes, but then it depends on who controls the strong AI, or if it is uncontrollable, what its agenda is. This is an undecidable problem :)

> I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that.

presumably a sufficiently advanced AI could find or create a technical solution that perfectly solves the problem with no downsides, or at least so little downside or cost that even those who "don't believe" in climate change couldn't refuse trying it out.

This "advanced AI" would need to be able to experiment in the real world, as human scientists do. This is the only way to observe the universe, and validate a theory. For example, the AI could need to build and run something devices like the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble telescope, or a molten salt reactor, to test its hypothesis.

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