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   felix stalder (festal@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 07:24:02 JST felix stalder

   Ex-Googler Eric Schmidt "My own opinion is that we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we are not organized to do it and yes the needs in this area [AI] will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

   This seems to be a fairly prevalent sentiment among the tech crowd.

   It's probably impossible to separate the self-serving bullshitting from the actual tech-utopianism beliefs.

   https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/eric-schmidts-risky-bet-on-ai-and

   • Embed this notice
     felix stalder (festal@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 07:23:59 JST felix stalder

     in reply to

     • goncourt

     @goncourt It's weird to me that they all bet on GenAI as a step towards AGI. When narrow-AI has been, and will continue to be, useful.

     But the larger point is: AI cannot solve "climate" because "climate" is not a knowledge problem. The outlines of the problem and solutions are known, but there is no will to implement bc of vested interests.

     Unless you dream of some fantastic, technocratic geoengineering solution, AI will contribute incrementally, rather than as a paradigm shift.

   • Embed this notice
     goncourt (goncourt@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 07:24:00 JST goncourt

     in reply to

     @festal Auf den Punkt: «In the clip, Schmidt runs together different many different forms of AI. GenAI, which is consuming all the power, probably isn’t going to do a whole lot for addressing climate change, when it can’t even reason reliably about river crossing problems. Other forms of AI, that are more domain-specific and specialized might help; those aren’t actually the ones getting the massive funding – or doing the massive harm.»

     Rasmus Fleischer repeated this.