4 ms·

How about we fix global warming and switch 100% to clean energy, and then invest in AI?

ben_w 1y ago
To the extent that further improvements to AI remain economically useful, "let's do these other things first" means your economy trails behind those of whoever did work on the AI. To the extent that further improvements to AI are either snake oil or just hard to monopolise on, doing everything else first is of course the best idea. Even though I'm more on the side of finding these things impressive, it's not at all clear to me that the people funding their development will be able to monopolise the return on the investment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus etc. Also: the way the biggest enthusiasts are talking about the sectoral growth and corresponding electrical power requirements… well, I agree with the maths for the power if I assume the growth, but they're economically unrealistic on the timescales they talk about, and that's despite that renewables are the fastest %-per-year-growth power sector and could plausibly double global electrical production by the early 2030s.
- grey-area 1y ago
  Is generative AI economically useful? More economically useful than switching to renewable energy?
  - rudolph9 1y ago
    There are notable similarities between a wartime economy and one continually adapting to global warming. While perhaps not sustainable long-term, we may observe short-term economic growth driven by government spending, followed by extended inflationary periods. We might currently be experiencing the first cycle of this kind, with more likely to follow.
- ngangaga 1y ago
  Well yes, nationalism will be the dagger in the heart of humanity. But AI won't do anything to address this; in fact, leaning into the concept of competing rather than cooperating economies will accelerate pushing the dagger in.
- haswell 1y ago
  > To the extent that further improvements to AI remain economically useful, "let's do these other things first" means your economy trails behind those of whoever did work on the AI. The major question is: at what point will unaddressed climate change nullify these economic gains and make the fact that anyone worried about them feel silly in retrospect? Or put another way, will we even have the chance collectively enjoy the benefits of that work?
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    Still, another two big questions are: - To what extent AI will actually be helpful in solving the climate crisis? - To what extent the power generation growth fueled by AI will be critical to solving the climate crisis, and conversely, how badly we'll be screwed without it? "Degrowth" is not an option. It hasn't been for a long time now. We can't just "social solution" our way out this problem anymore.
    - Retric 1y ago
      We can very quickly and reasonably cheaply ‘solve’ global warming without AI. Wind, solar, batteries + existing hydro and nuclear can hit a 95% clean electricity grid with capacity to scale in EV’s and heat pumps. Electricity + home heating + cars is not 100%, but cutting emissions in half means you double the time before reaching any given threshold. For many problems the last 10% is the most challenging but we get 10x as long to solve it and 10x as long to implement mitigation strategies. That’s what makes climate change critical, the next year is more important than what happens 10 or 20 years from now.
      - daedrdev 1y ago
        Electricity is only part of energy use and emissions production. In no way is there a simple and cheap solution, all proposals have tradeoffs and costs
        drdrey 1y ago
        electricity generation is only ~20% of emissions
- CooCooCaCha 1y ago
  That’s why I wonder if a planetary government is inevitable sometime in the future. We can’t address species-wide issues if we’re constantly worried about competition, and if market forces aren’t going to work then the only other solution I can think of is a bigger, more powerful entity laying down the law.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
85392_school 1y ago
You'd probably meet the talking point that if we don't accelerate AI development China will win.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
bcoates 1y ago
1. Build atomic power plants sufficient to supply electricity needs for projected future AI megaprojects 2. Inevitable AI winter 3. Keep running the plants, clean energy achieved, stop burning coal, global warming solved
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- GolfPopper 1y ago
  The problem is that's far from a guaranteed path. What if, instead we get: 1. Plan to build atomic power plants sufficient to supply electricity needs for projected future AI megaprojects. 2. Build the AI megaprojects first, because of fallacies related to sunk costs, urgency, and unwillingness to let the pyramid scheme collapse. 3. Never complete the nuclear plants, never get the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow, and pump a couple hundred million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the mean time.
godelski 1y ago
This isn't an "either or" situation. You can do both. The absolute dollar value might seem high, because we're working with the budget of not just a country but the wealthiest country, but as a percentage it is quite low. You can certainly pull funds from other areas too, like the military, which also greatly benefit from such research endeavors. Even if these were exclusively non-weapons and non-military based technologies being developed it'd be naive to not recognize that the best military defense is to stop a war before it happens. That comes through many avenues, but notably the development of new technologies, especially those that benefit people as a whole (e.g. medicine or see the Taiwan strategy). But even then, it would also be naive to think that the same technology couldn't be adapted to military uses. Anything can be a weapon if you use it wrong enough. But note that we're also seeing a reduction in federal research funding. We're also seeing less fundamental research and these types of problems need a strong pipeline through the classic TRL scale[0]. I think you'll find some of that discussion over in yesterday's thread about Bell Labs. The pipeline doesn't work if you don't take risks and are rushing. You need a fire under your ass but too hot and you get burned. It's easy to be myopic in today's settings, and that's not a great idea for an organization who needs to have an outlook in terms of decades and centuries (i.e. government) as opposed to the next election cycle or next quarterly earnings report. Mind you, we've done these things before. Both the Space Race and Manhattan Project. At the height of the Space Race NASA's budget was over 4.41% of the federal budget[2]. I'm not sure what percent the Manhattan Project's budget was, but it is very clear that this is A LOT cheaper than what actual war costs[3]. We're talking about less than a month of war costs. Remember, we spent over a $750bn over in Iraq[4]. The question is not if we have the money, but what we want to spend it on. Personally I'd rather stuff like this than bombing people. Frankly, you can eat the cake too, as it makes it cheaper to bomb people as well... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
- neves 1y ago
babyent 1y ago
I think climate change is legit. But I also think that a lot of it is just a mechanism to knee cap other countries from progressing. I don’t mind, because it keeps us at the top.
- gosub100 1y ago
  [flagged]
dale_glass 1y ago
Who "we"? The people qualified to fix global warming aren't the same people qualified to work on ML.
- XorNot 1y ago
  Don't you know? Humanity can only solve one problem at a time in order of importance. And it's corollary: something being in the news or social media means everyone else has stopped working on other problems and is now solely working on whatever that headline's words say.
- threeseed 1y ago
  Yes they are. I've worked with hundreds of Data Scientists and every one had the ability to work on different problem areas. And so they were working on models to optimise truck rollouts or when to increase compute for complex jobs. If as a society we placed an increased emphasis on efficiency and power consumption we would see a lot more models being used in those areas.
  - michaelt 1y ago
    Seems to me, we know pretty well what we need to do about climate change. It has already been data scienced many, many times. The problem is we don't want to do it.
whatever1 1y ago
This is the plan. Build all the clean infrastructure with the fake promise of AI and once the bubble bursts, boom. We have spare clean capacity for everyone.
kgwxd 1y ago
AI might be faster path to solving those issues.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  AI doesn't yet exist as far ad we know, and LLMs will only be helpful at generating a massive amount of guesses at how a human may describe the solution. At best its a needle in a haystack approach, and one that seems to toss out methodical, reasoned science in favor of a blunderbuss.
engineer_22 1y ago
Let's also cure cancer and stop all wars while we're at it.
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  Don’t forget world hunger. I don’t understand this line of reasoning - it’s like saying “you’re not allowed steam engines until you drain all of your mines”. It’s moralistic, rather than pragmatic.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    It's just a passive aggressive means of disagreeing with the value of something without providing any argument for such. The exact same rhetorical fallacies are widespread when it comes to debates around the values of e.g. pursuing efforts to become a multiplanetary species. I think it's safe to call it a rhetorical fallacy because its underlying premise implies humanity can somehow only focus on a very finite number of things at once and that funds directed to 'your thing' would somehow otherwise be directed to 'their thing' which is even more absurd.
- threeseed 1y ago
  There is no one cancer but we are working to cure as many variations as we can.
- GolfPopper 1y ago
  You friendly megachurch pastor, I mean TV psychic, I mean AI that will be coming real soon will do that for you! Just send money now.
gosub100 1y ago
what's wrong with global warming? If you're asking me to put animals' lives before my own, I say "no thanks".
- knowaveragejoe 1y ago
  You're dependent on the planet and its ecosystems, so I'd say this is completely missing the point.
dr-detroit 1y ago
[dead]
_heimdall 1y ago
We can't just switch to clean energy, we would need to drastically reduce our energy use per capita.
- threeseed 1y ago
  Which is actually a problem AI is perfect for.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    How so? LLMs will just guess at what sounds like a likely human response to the problem.
    - threeseed 1y ago
      Far more to AI than just LLMs. I am talking about more traditional models.
      - _heimdall 1y ago
        Which ones? Machine learning is a larger field, but artificial intelligence is different entirely.
- dlivingston 1y ago
  Absolutely not. We would be moving backwards as a society. Increased energy usage is a bellwether of societal advancement. See the Kardashev scale and Dyson sphere for example. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
  - BrawnyBadger53 1y ago
    I don't think we should be setting artificial limiters on energy usage or anything but you're using circular reasoning as justification. These scales use energy usage as the measure of progress which you are saying is proof that reducing energy use is reducing progress.
bobxmax 1y ago
It's going to be fun when China rules the world because western democracies have gone so batshit anti-tech

To the extent that further improvements to AI remain economically useful, "let's do these other things first" means your economy trails behind those of whoever did work on the AI. To the extent that further improvements to AI are either snake oil or just hard to monopolise on, doing everything else first is of course the best idea. Even though I'm more on the side of finding these things impressive, it's not at all clear to me that the people funding their development will be able to monopolise the return on the investment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus etc. Also: the way the biggest enthusiasts are talking about the sectoral growth and corresponding electrical power requirements… well, I agree with the maths for the power if I assume the growth, but they're economically unrealistic on the timescales they talk about, and that's despite that renewables are the fastest %-per-year-growth power sector and could plausibly double global electrical production by the early 2030s.

grey-area 1y ago
Is generative AI economically useful? More economically useful than switching to renewable energy?
- rudolph9 1y ago
  There are notable similarities between a wartime economy and one continually adapting to global warming. While perhaps not sustainable long-term, we may observe short-term economic growth driven by government spending, followed by extended inflationary periods. We might currently be experiencing the first cycle of this kind, with more likely to follow.
ngangaga 1y ago
Well yes, nationalism will be the dagger in the heart of humanity. But AI won't do anything to address this; in fact, leaning into the concept of competing rather than cooperating economies will accelerate pushing the dagger in.
haswell 1y ago
> To the extent that further improvements to AI remain economically useful, "let's do these other things first" means your economy trails behind those of whoever did work on the AI. The major question is: at what point will unaddressed climate change nullify these economic gains and make the fact that anyone worried about them feel silly in retrospect? Or put another way, will we even have the chance collectively enjoy the benefits of that work?
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Still, another two big questions are: - To what extent AI will actually be helpful in solving the climate crisis? - To what extent the power generation growth fueled by AI will be critical to solving the climate crisis, and conversely, how badly we'll be screwed without it? "Degrowth" is not an option. It hasn't been for a long time now. We can't just "social solution" our way out this problem anymore.
  - Retric 1y ago
    We can very quickly and reasonably cheaply ‘solve’ global warming without AI. Wind, solar, batteries + existing hydro and nuclear can hit a 95% clean electricity grid with capacity to scale in EV’s and heat pumps. Electricity + home heating + cars is not 100%, but cutting emissions in half means you double the time before reaching any given threshold. For many problems the last 10% is the most challenging but we get 10x as long to solve it and 10x as long to implement mitigation strategies. That’s what makes climate change critical, the next year is more important than what happens 10 or 20 years from now.
    - daedrdev 1y ago
      Electricity is only part of energy use and emissions production. In no way is there a simple and cheap solution, all proposals have tradeoffs and costs
      - drdrey 1y ago
        electricity generation is only ~20% of emissions
CooCooCaCha 1y ago
That’s why I wonder if a planetary government is inevitable sometime in the future. We can’t address species-wide issues if we’re constantly worried about competition, and if market forces aren’t going to work then the only other solution I can think of is a bigger, more powerful entity laying down the law.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

85392_school 1y ago

You'd probably meet the talking point that if we don't accelerate AI development China will win.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

bcoates 1y ago

1. Build atomic power plants sufficient to supply electricity needs for projected future AI megaprojects 2. Inevitable AI winter 3. Keep running the plants, clean energy achieved, stop burning coal, global warming solved

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
GolfPopper 1y ago
The problem is that's far from a guaranteed path. What if, instead we get: 1. Plan to build atomic power plants sufficient to supply electricity needs for projected future AI megaprojects. 2. Build the AI megaprojects first, because of fallacies related to sunk costs, urgency, and unwillingness to let the pyramid scheme collapse. 3. Never complete the nuclear plants, never get the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow, and pump a couple hundred million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the mean time.

godelski 1y ago

This isn't an "either or" situation. You can do both. The absolute dollar value might seem high, because we're working with the budget of not just a country but the wealthiest country, but as a percentage it is quite low. You can certainly pull funds from other areas too, like the military, which also greatly benefit from such research endeavors. Even if these were exclusively non-weapons and non-military based technologies being developed it'd be naive to not recognize that the best military defense is to stop a war before it happens. That comes through many avenues, but notably the development of new technologies, especially those that benefit people as a whole (e.g. medicine or see the Taiwan strategy). But even then, it would also be naive to think that the same technology couldn't be adapted to military uses. Anything can be a weapon if you use it wrong enough. But note that we're also seeing a reduction in federal research funding. We're also seeing less fundamental research and these types of problems need a strong pipeline through the classic TRL scale[0]. I think you'll find some of that discussion over in yesterday's thread about Bell Labs. The pipeline doesn't work if you don't take risks and are rushing. You need a fire under your ass but too hot and you get burned. It's easy to be myopic in today's settings, and that's not a great idea for an organization who needs to have an outlook in terms of decades and centuries (i.e. government) as opposed to the next election cycle or next quarterly earnings report. Mind you, we've done these things before. Both the Space Race and Manhattan Project. At the height of the Space Race NASA's budget was over 4.41% of the federal budget[2]. I'm not sure what percent the Manhattan Project's budget was, but it is very clear that this is A LOT cheaper than what actual war costs[3]. We're talking about less than a month of war costs. Remember, we spent over a $750bn over in Iraq[4]. The question is not if we have the money, but what we want to spend it on. Personally I'd rather stuff like this than bombing people. Frankly, you can eat the cake too, as it makes it cheaper to bomb people as well... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

neves 1y ago

babyent 1y ago

I think climate change is legit. But I also think that a lot of it is just a mechanism to knee cap other countries from progressing. I don’t mind, because it keeps us at the top.

gosub100 1y ago
[flagged]

dale_glass 1y ago

Who "we"? The people qualified to fix global warming aren't the same people qualified to work on ML.

XorNot 1y ago
Don't you know? Humanity can only solve one problem at a time in order of importance. And it's corollary: something being in the news or social media means everyone else has stopped working on other problems and is now solely working on whatever that headline's words say.
threeseed 1y ago
Yes they are. I've worked with hundreds of Data Scientists and every one had the ability to work on different problem areas. And so they were working on models to optimise truck rollouts or when to increase compute for complex jobs. If as a society we placed an increased emphasis on efficiency and power consumption we would see a lot more models being used in those areas.
- michaelt 1y ago
  Seems to me, we know pretty well what we need to do about climate change. It has already been data scienced many, many times. The problem is we don't want to do it.

whatever1 1y ago

This is the plan. Build all the clean infrastructure with the fake promise of AI and once the bubble bursts, boom. We have spare clean capacity for everyone.

kgwxd 1y ago

AI might be faster path to solving those issues.

_heimdall 1y ago
AI doesn't yet exist as far ad we know, and LLMs will only be helpful at generating a massive amount of guesses at how a human may describe the solution. At best its a needle in a haystack approach, and one that seems to toss out methodical, reasoned science in favor of a blunderbuss.

engineer_22 1y ago

Let's also cure cancer and stop all wars while we're at it.

madaxe_again 1y ago
Don’t forget world hunger. I don’t understand this line of reasoning - it’s like saying “you’re not allowed steam engines until you drain all of your mines”. It’s moralistic, rather than pragmatic.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  It's just a passive aggressive means of disagreeing with the value of something without providing any argument for such. The exact same rhetorical fallacies are widespread when it comes to debates around the values of e.g. pursuing efforts to become a multiplanetary species. I think it's safe to call it a rhetorical fallacy because its underlying premise implies humanity can somehow only focus on a very finite number of things at once and that funds directed to 'your thing' would somehow otherwise be directed to 'their thing' which is even more absurd.
threeseed 1y ago
There is no one cancer but we are working to cure as many variations as we can.
GolfPopper 1y ago
You friendly megachurch pastor, I mean TV psychic, I mean AI that will be coming real soon will do that for you! Just send money now.

gosub100 1y ago

what's wrong with global warming? If you're asking me to put animals' lives before my own, I say "no thanks".

knowaveragejoe 1y ago
You're dependent on the planet and its ecosystems, so I'd say this is completely missing the point.

dr-detroit 1y ago

[dead]

_heimdall 1y ago

We can't just switch to clean energy, we would need to drastically reduce our energy use per capita.

threeseed 1y ago
Which is actually a problem AI is perfect for.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  How so? LLMs will just guess at what sounds like a likely human response to the problem.
  - threeseed 1y ago
    Far more to AI than just LLMs. I am talking about more traditional models.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      Which ones? Machine learning is a larger field, but artificial intelligence is different entirely.
dlivingston 1y ago
Absolutely not. We would be moving backwards as a society. Increased energy usage is a bellwether of societal advancement. See the Kardashev scale and Dyson sphere for example. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
- BrawnyBadger53 1y ago
  I don't think we should be setting artificial limiters on energy usage or anything but you're using circular reasoning as justification. These scales use energy usage as the measure of progress which you are saying is proof that reducing energy use is reducing progress.

bobxmax 1y ago

It's going to be fun when China rules the world because western democracies have gone so batshit anti-tech