Where is the net benefit to society through all this, one asks? I'm not a luddite but news like this makes me feel ill. Turning the planet into one big AI data center just doesn't give me the warm and fuzzies.
An AI-assisted invention that solves climate change would pay some pretty good dividends, i think.
The solution exists. It's just a matter of priorities.
Moreover, its nature is societal, we don't need to wait for a technical one - if people were willing to adjust the way they live. I'm not sure we will be able to pull off the timing for an energy transition, depending on how far we overshoot. At a point not far past 1.5c, you enter hothouse earth and amplification.
Sort of. In many cases the solutions are cheaper and easier than the actions that cause climate change, but certain people oppose progress for political reasons -- and those political reasons are no deeper than "my opponents like it so I'm against it."
A decade from now the AI-assisted invention for solving climate change will be:
"Plant more forests."
After several trillion spent on AI, we're still waiting on AI to assist with anything more complicated building stock websites.
Yes, an AI-assisted invention which paradoxically involves uprooting God only knows how many trees across 300 hectares (which by definition, means destroying entire ecosystems). Yes this AI will save us from ourselves.
Far more forest gets destroyed for far less benefit all the time. Why does everyone suddenly care now?
So we're at the stage where forest destruction is fine, more or less, if the promise of some utopia might come to fruition.
It's apparently fine to do for far stupider reasons, so why not? The implied priorities seem wild to me. Everyone has been sleeping while massive ecological catastrophies are happening, and then suddenly when AI sneezes it's the end of the world.
To put this in perspective, Finland apparently cuts down 600-700k hectares of forest each year. 87% of Finland is forest, about 23 million hectares.