I think its critical for our society to put more into R&D of materials and others for more and faster optimization of solar and batteries.
Nvidia for example does a lot now in omniverse, simulating the real world. Its also potentially co2 saving if you simulate your full car, warehouse etc. digital and iterate over it super fast and opitmize it before it ever creates any co2 in real life.
You make a fair point. To the extent these AI tools enable better, more efficient production systems in the real world there is a case to be made it could be a net gain for society. Arguably it could also increase the carbon intensity of the economy in the short term. While renewable sources are gaining ground, most of the bulk and marginal energy demand is met by carbon heavy sources now and in the foreseeable future, and deployment of renewables also requires a lot of energy and by extension, for now, carbon emissions.
The EV consumes more energy at the beginning, solar panels and wind turbines too. Unfortunate its hard for people to get 'economy of scale' and its super frustrating that we have the investment<>expensive<>benefit hen<>egg issue.
Heat-pumps, EVs, solar and batteries could become even cheaper even faster if we would invest faster and more. In 10 years those have eclipsed every current alternative.
What i think is a good example is Alpha Fold: The graph on this page https://www.moltenventures.com/insights/a-breakthrough-in-pr... shows the jump alphafold provided.
Now tx to alphafold2 a huge library exists for all researchers. And i have seen many other breakthroughs.
Segment anything from facebook is a LOT better in image segmentation than what we had before. This makes it much faster for everyone having segmentation tasks to segment faster.
Wispher is really good in speech to text. It basically beats a lot of old school software on the market.
> we have the investment<>expensive<>benefit hen<>egg issue.
Maybe it's easy for people to get economies of scale AND path dependence. Unfortunately society has been put in a trajectory that maximized the profits of minerals rights holders in the industrializing US.
And yes, we are in a sub optimal local minimum in terms of efficiency and need to go over a hump to get to better minimums and going over that hump may mean increasing carbon intensity of the economy for a while.
Do we have time to do that though? Should we carbon de-intensify the economy and aim for a trajectory that minimizes climate related shocks or should we go all out on an accelerationist hope that we can bootstrap a better system by running the current one red hot? These seem to be the two sides of the debate we're in.
The main reason why i get paid well is, that everything i do, i normally not do for one person or a single company.