(…) There’s something familiar about the suggestion that it’s okay to build data centers that run on fossil fuels today because AI tools will help the world drive down emissions eventually. It recalls the purported promise of carbon credits: that it’s fine for a company to carry on polluting at its headquarters or plants, so long as it’s also funding, say, the planting of trees that will suck up a commensurate level of carbon dioxide.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen again and again that such programs often overstate any climate benefits, doing little to alter the balance of what’s going into or coming out of the atmosphere.
But in the case of what we might call “AI offsets,” the potential to overstate the gains may be greater, because the promised benefits wouldn’t meaningfully accrue for years or decades. Plus, there’s no market or regulatory mechanism to hold the industry accountable if it ends up building huge data centers that drive up emissions but never delivers on these climate claims.
The IEA report outlines instances where industries are already using AI in ways that could help drive down emissions, including detecting methane leaks in oil and gas infrastructure, making power plants and manufacturing facilities more efficient, and reducing energy consumption in buildings.
Well AGI would solve climate change in a hearbeat but nobody knows wether it’ll take 5 or 500 years to get there or what other consequences comes with it. Personally I tend to think that we don’t solve it by cutting emissions but rather with technology wether that be carbon capture or not. This is something AI at least has the potential to help us with.
It’s nice to imagine we can keep living exactly as we are and not have to pay up for any of the consequences of our actions. Maybe there will be a tech miracle to save us and the non-consenting species we are taking with us, but that hope, belief, and gamble is not a solution to the problem we have.
We have the solution, we know what it is, and we know how to execute it, we just lack the will. Until that miracle appears we should try to actually fix the problem.
Waiting for a tech solution to appear is like standing on the beach after an earthquake as the tide goes out praying that it won’t come back in.
Edit: Or maybe eating a nice dinner out and continuing to order hoping they forget your bill or someone else pays it. Either way it’s not doing a thing to make the problem better.
I’m not sure AGI would. Maybe ASI. But in the end it’s still humans that would likely have to enact whatever proposals it came up with.
Its solution is nuclear winter.
Well, you can’t argue that it wouldn’t work ;-)
