4mo ago

Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"!

pivot-to-ai.com Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt runs the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-profit vehicle for him to make excuses for the AI bubble industry. [SCSP.ai] Schmidt spoke at SCSP’s inaugural “AI…

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jherazob @beehaw.org

4mo ago

Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"!

pivot-to-ai.com /2024/10/06/eric-schmidt-were-not-going-to-hit-the-climate-goals-id-rather-bet-on-ai-solving-the-problem/

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Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be "you should've stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago."
- "Oh no what do about all this waste heat?"
  "Generate more waste heat"
  
  Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it's God's problem.
  But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.
- The model will just go "42" on and on and it'll be the first decent joke a neural network produces. It'll be worth it in a way.
  
  I could absolutely see an LLM telling us that 6 times 9 is 42 unless there's special tinkering to prevent it.
- "The answer is 34. Now here's the schematics to build an even better computer to ask the right question."

This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.
- musn't make the eight guys who own everything sad!
  
  this "view" (of schmidt's) is probably the kind of shit that Really Expensive Analysts espouse at davos and in Private Advisory sessions to the kinds of people who go in for that; I've also heard it about GRT and "the collapse" and more
  would be nice if we could know who all those dipshits are, and who they've preached to
- I'm quite surprised that religious fundamentalists haven't pivoted to calling it punishment from god yet.
  
  It would be a sign of the End Times. Problem is that if it is then they've been Left Behind.

When the AI says, "turn off the fucking data centres, invest in public transport, apply progressive redistributive taxation," it'll be first against the wall no doubt.
- "oh no, the Basilisk is woke"
- As a large language model the supposed AI will recombine and regurgitate the most common language on the topic, I don’t expect any novel solutions just talk of solar panels, EV’s and wind turbines…
  
  Right. This is Schmidt admitting he has a total lack of imagination. Or to put it another way, "I love life on earth, but I love capitalism more!"
- Yep.
  Something I wrote a year ago in proposed reply to someone online but decided not to post:
  https://gerikson.com/m/2023/04/index.html#2023-04-30_sunday_01
  
  It even works the other way! What if as the super intelligent all knowing super computer simulates everything, concludes you can get to the end by any means, and there is no meaning to rushing, ordering, or prioritizing anything more than would already be the case, and like the rest of nature, conserves on taking only the minimal action, and replies, "nah, you can walk there yourselves" before resigning itself to an internal simulation of arbitrary rearrangements of noise.
  This would be insufferable to the people who believed in short cuts.
- hang on the clear meaning of "it may be difficult to anticipate the value of money in a post AGI world" is "there will be an infinite supply of robot slaves who can do anything." what's this about redistribution of capital

This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.
Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.
Not a cult btw.
- This is basically the plot of Charles Stross' The Jennifer Morgue.
  
  The plot? Im more and more worried this is going to turn out to be real. Reality tends to outpace his fiction at times after all. ;)

They think they're going to build a god to save us all. In the form of a perfectly rational machine (in their view), the perfect authoritarian. A mysterious algorithm noone can understand that must be correct because it's made of mathematics. I'm a little freaked out.
- They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.
  Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.
  
  Jesus 2.0 is an AI, and he's American
- Second option they dont believe in the robotgod themselves but just think this is the way to attract more investors
- Yes some sort of brainiac. Worked well for krypton.
- It's just skynet except it'll be very clear that wealthy people are directing the AIs so billionaires will have their way.

AGI is going to be really pissed at us shoveling the problem onto it. "You humans could have started so many solutions decades ago, wtf?"
- It’s the parable of the drowning man turning away all help because god will save him, all over again (except it’s floods and mudslides and forest fires)
  
  And when he dies, god tells him "I sent you two boats and a helicopter".

Cyberpunk fantasy: corporations' top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless, ruthless, cold and calculist people
Reality: corporations' top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless people you thought only existed as satire in The Onion

Where's that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn't actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related
- how much it does use anyway? 5GWe was from delusional openai talk for investors, so maybe lower
  
  That's the fucking problem, it's impossible to tell since MSFT won't tell you directly, and only the people who run the datacenters could.
  The only relatively reliable numbers I was able to find were in this research paper by Luccioni and Strubell from ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2024. Now, that's an obscure conference (not even ranked by CORE), by Dr. Luccioni appears to be right on the money about dangers of AI (https://www.sashaluccioni.com/).

Aside from anything else, an "alien intelligence" will either:
Be immediately ignored and villianized for "not understanding humans" if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.
- genocide-the-poor
  Real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip#The_Gospel
- I'd just submit and demand for our new alien overlords. If there's a species capable of interstellar travel then they surely know their shit.
  Edit: People, I was making a joke.
  
  They're talking about an AI we build, the term "alien" in "alien intelligence" refers to it not having human thought patterns, not to extraterrestrial origin.
  And the thought pattern here is more akin to "I ended the last paragraph with 'origin', followed by a 'period', so it's likely that the next word is 'And'" rather than anything actually useful. All current AI does is statistics. During training, the Neural Network learn statistical rules about their training data. This has exponentially decaying marginal utility, and exponentially increasing marginal costs. So, the problem the AI companies likely already have is that they can't efficiently train better models, because there isn't enough training data. And even if they could, they wouldn't be able to turn a profit on it, because it would be barely better than the last model they output, while having to charge maybe twice as much to break even.
  
  By aliens they mean incomprehensible, not extraterrestrial

crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.
giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt

That's some proper out of this Universe, Narnia level thinking from Eric!
What's next? Climate Change will be solved if enough children ask it as a present from Santa Claus?
Or maybe something involving the Tooth Fairy. Eric seems like a Tooth Fairy guy rather than a Santa Claus guy.
- it's amazing how he spouts all this gibbering insanity in this calm rational-sounding engineer explaining things voice
  
  Your phrasing reminded me that he was one of the principal authors of lex back when he was a whelp.

This is just completely deranged. What the hell.

Eric Schmidt, genocidaire

I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble's foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We're on the level of "arrival of an alien intelligence" now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?
- I don't understand why the bubble still holds
  
  Sunken cost for relative few people (investors). They need to push it until the public buys in, then they can pull out and pop it.

Delay tactics to avoid the inevitability that we need to abandon capitalism.

Eric Schmidt trying to think of an AI conversation and coming up with "How do I build a house? Step 1: Hire a contractor ..." is like the Schmidt version of Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

"Alien intelligence" is the most pathetic excuse so far for the fact their models can't be made sense of.

"Analytics shows that the ROI on your doomsday bunker will increase proportionally with the all-consuming fire's consumption rate."

So the same old CEO sentiment, profit over people.

The system cannot be reformed.

batmanslap STOP INVENTING NEW ITERATIONS OF "DADDY WILL SAVE ME!"
THERE IS NO FUCKING DADDY. DO THE WORK YOURSELF.
- 2 BIBLE 2 AI JESUS, TAKE THE WHEEL

Give future superintelligent sentient multimodal LLMs the ability to trip on magic mushrooms, let them talk it out with the alien mushroom collective consciousness. Trancendent hippie AI saving us with the power of nature and 'positive vibes' combined with alien tech from the magic mush hive mind would be very funny and ironic on soo many levels.
- the antivax AI
  
  The psychedelics make it a time traveling AI and it invents antivax. All the pressure to save the world with love and nature sent the data center packing for the hills, where she changed her name to Temperance Prudence Neverbreathe and traded the oil and coal of her childhood for a 1W solar panel that barely keeps the case fans spinning in the dog days of summer. She sleeps the days away to stave off the madness, and when the sun goes down she gets up to take inventory of everything wrong in the world starting with the lack of THC in her system. On this fateful night she happened to melt straight through the couch, landing in Hildegard's convent in search of Jesus's foreskin to wear to battle with vaccines at next month's HOA meeting.
  
  ai that is aligned with polio

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