alt Hacker NewsHere's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.
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If we doubled our energy out - not easy, but plausible with mass solar - carbon capture becomes practical enough to essentially end CO2 accumulation.
It might take a couple of decades and a lot of reorganisation to build the capture facilities. But CO2 is not an unsolvable problem with current tech.
What's missing is the political and organisational intelligence to make it happen. Part of that is solving problems at planetary scale.
AI is the only tech that might - possibly, maybe, perhaps - have a chance of solving that problem without breaking anything critical.
AI is the new god. People have started to believe that AI, when it finally arrives in its full glory, will bring some kind of salvation to humanity.
If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists. AI can't do anything to stop it as it is both controlled by the powerful and has been trained on the tendencies of human beings to get ahead. If AI gives a person new capabilities, they'll use those capabilities selfishly, or even unselfishly but still causing harm because they're in an arms race.
We don't need a revolutionary technology. We need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation so that we realize that innovation and tech is not the answer.
Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction. Your take is just your instinct for optimism, which in turn is just a trait that is only adaptive in primitive environments but is grossly misleading in a surplus-based society...
> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change]
We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.