u/nepalinewsjunkie

Let’s first talk about what the “expert plan” is to defeat climate change. It is to decarbonize and that has been happening primarily in the West. This is generally a good thing and a worthy movement but it DOES NOT solve the problems. A group of relatively rich countries doing better with emissions does not solve the worldwide problem, it hardly makes a dent.

Go look up how much coal China uses, go look at how much India and Africa are predicted to emit in the next 30 years. A worldwide kumbaya moment of everyone agreeing to decarbonize to 0 is fantasy. Why should less developed countries restrict their growth when the rich countries burned carbon at will since the Industrial revolution. Do you think a polluting factory in a war torn African country is going to care about worldwide carbon emissions when they desperately need production to sustain their country?

How to actually beat climate change

Before I even start talking about solution let’s remember that scientists that make predictions about incredibly complex systems are incredibly wrong all the time. There is no such thing as a Nostradamus of science, it’s impossible to accurately predict the future there are far too many variables. Just look at the damage Stanford professor Paul Erich did with his book predicting mass starvation due to overpopulation that lead to stuff like the one child policy in China. Now we don’t have enough young people in many countries and old people will suffer with less taxes from the young to support them.

But ok let’s say they are somewhat right and we will be in serious trouble in 50-80 years. The only way to beat it is by innovating to find a way to reduce the impact of the carbon emissions or find ways to repair some of the damage done.

Now let’s get into AI and be realistic about it. Is it going to get so good to instantly and solve the problem, we have no clue. Is it going to keep getting better at the rate it has been getting better, we have no clue. However by now we can say it undoubtedly helps scientists do research and save time in the drudgery of academia, it’s being widely adopted in many fields. In fact in some narrow areas of Math AI is doing top research work and finding solutions to problems that have been open for decades like the Jacobian Conjecture.

Again let’s get grounded about this just cause AI can do this in narrow areas of math does not mean it will solve climate science. However seeing the progress in math isn’t it a human imperative to see if we can scale AI to get to the point where it can come up with world changing innovation in climate science/medicine/biology/chemistry etc. Sure it could fail flat and maybe AI has plateaued but it’s a disservice to the world if we don’t even try, because the potential rewards of an AI as good as the AI in some fields in math today would be world changing. Stoping development is extremely stupid at least try to see if we can get there.

There are real problems with AI and some myths.

Myths:

1. Water problems is the most hillarious one, an average golf course wastes more water than AI and lot of it is recyclable. It’s not a non issue but it’s more than an acceptable cost. We are not running out of water and stuff like desalinization exists and it saves countries like Saudi Arabia.

2. Electricity prices: Yes for some people prices will go up but it has been shows in some places electricity prices have actually gone down because data centers have incentivized more electricity generation and in some cases data centers during down times will redirect electricity to the larger grid lowering prices. In addition for the places with legitimate increases that is a solvable problem we just need to increase electricity production which is happening at a massive scale with renewable clean energy. Long term this will even out and in fact we might in the future be paying less prices.

Negatives of AI

1. Noise pollution is a real undeniable problem. However few points. Most AI data centers are in extremely remote areas where it affects a very small amount of people. That sucks for some people but that cost is more than acceptable to push to see if AI can help innovate many fields that will end up saving many more lives. Again not guaranteed but a goal worth pursuing as long as models get smarter.

2. Right now because of the lack of energy increasing amount of data centers are using gas turbines that increase carbon emissions. That is bad no question about it for the environment. However, this is another example of short term pain for long term reward. Huge amounts of solar and wind is being scaled up in the US that will come online in the next decades intended to to cut reliance on gas. And even more promising finally America is getting serious about nuclear which is clean energy, there are many companies racing for reactors right now. Eventually when we get enough of these online gas will not be required. The first wave will come online late 2020s, early 2030s. The gas turbines are a bridge as solar, wind , batteries, and nuclear are getting better and better. We will soon hit a point where clean energy is more economical.

Again let’s not lose sight of what is there to be gained if AI can be superhuman like it almost is in some narrow fields of mathematics, there is legit potential for this to happen. If it happens we can solve a lot more than climate change it’s a worthy goal to pursue. If it all plateaus and fails, the data centers built will still be useful and companies will naturally stop building them when there is no potential huge reward.

Please stop the data center hate it’s counter productive to human civilization. And if AI never gets to the lofty goals we can simply shut them down. One thing that gives me hope is that even if the US stupidly stops data centers and pauses AI, I am confident China will not. And although I would prefer my country that is a democracy to get there first, I will be perfectly fine with China leading and potentially improving the world.