Say, Could AI Solve Climate Doom?

Well, only if something changes. Can you guess what?

Could AI Fix Climate Change? Probably Not Under Capitalism.

“There’s no question that in four or five years’ time, we’re going to use a lot more fossil fuel,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “But also, in the next decade in front of us, at no time in history are we better prepared to move to sustainable energy,” he added. “If you want to turn a corner on climate change, if you want a future that’s sustainable, lean into AI.”

It is perhaps surprising, given the tone of much mainstream discussion of artificial intelligence, that the man at the helm of the world’s most valuable company, which produces chips essential to the new technology, was agnostic about whether AI would stop climate change. “It could be solar, it could be nuclear, it could be fission, fusion, hydro, you name it,” Huang said in his hour-long interview with Klein. The future would be great, but he was uncertain about how. His rhetoric is a prime example of how the language of climate politics, and of climate obstruction, has changed since the emergence of powerful AI models.

In a way, Huang’s rather vague promises are a return to the rhetoric of the early days of climate politics, when economists like Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus won renown for models that heavily discounted the future compared to today. By this thinking, spending lots of money now to avoid climate damages later was not worth it because future humans would be so rich that they could afford the climate costs. The model was called “DICE”; humans should roll one.

Well, it’s weird that governments and rich folks are spend tons of money on solving climate doom and yet nothing changes. They always want more money. It couldn’t be due to it being a scam, right? Anyhow, let’s just skip to the end of this Jacobin piece, and, remember, Jacobin as is hardcore Modern Socialist, hating on capitalism, wanting government control of the means of production, and controlling Everyone Else

Artificial intelligence is clearly a powerful technology: no one should dismiss this because they prefer to mock the tech elites building it. The primary concern at present should be that this technology is emerging into a global economic system dominated by profit seekers, largely unconcerned with the climate crisis, whom governments are for the most part allowing to regulate themselves. While some have compared the current AI build-out to the Manhattan Project, nuclear technology was never allowed to remain in private hands.

If AI is to help solve the climate crisis without causing great damage of its own, governments will have to take more control of the firms building it and rewrite economic rules to channel this new power in the right direction.

Huh.