[incangold]

I also share the author’s concerns.

I keep coming back to the fact that if you asked even GPT 3 how to solve climate change, it would give you a perfectly good answer. We have this idea that AI will “solve climate change” at some point in the future. What we really mean is “give us a different answer to climate change that has zero cost”.

Climate change is not currently being solved because of politics and existing systems, not because of a lack of intelligence.

There are so many similar situations in medicine. Intelligence is not enough- you also need a system capable of acting with that intelligence.

AI could be transformational, but not without systemic change to support it.

[samatman]

Climate change is easy to solve: build fusion reactors which are 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar. Deuterium is cheap, after all.

> Climate change is not currently being solved because of politics and existing systems, not because of a lack of intelligence.

It's a technical problem that's sociopolitical because we don't have a Pareto-improving technology to solve it with. Like 50x fusion reactors. Not a complete solution, but with it, the political will to shut down remaining emissions is easy to muster.

Some people think we'll have AIs soon for whom "design me a fusion reactor which is 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar" is the sort of input which gets the requested output. I am skeptical of this. But it isn't an incoherent thing to believe.

Where cancer is concerned the situation is much less clear.

[dale_glass]

> Some people think we'll have AIs soon for whom "design me a fusion reactor which is 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar" is the sort of input which gets the requested output. I am skeptical of this. But it isn't an incoherent thing to believe.

IMO, pretty much magic wishful thinking.

I'm enthusiastic about AI. But it's not magic. The main problem here is as Feynmann said, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled".

In this case the problem is that a fusion reactor is a real, physical machine intensely dependent on the real world in a million ways. From the actual physics of fusion, to manufacturing capabilities, to the capabilities of the various sensors, actuators, processors, etc needed to control the reaction.

You can't magic that up with AI. There's no way for it to figure out that we're subtly wrong about some fact about fusion and that we can get 100X better by just doing things differently. A hypothetical GPT20 would still need to actually perform real physical experiments to gain such knowledge, because it'd be nowhere in our books or the internet for it to ingest it.

[wizzwizz4]

> Climate change is easy to solve: build fusion reactors which are 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar.

That just kicks the can down the road. If our general strategy (aim for exponential growth in all things) remains the same, cheaper power will mean we use more of it. Even if we completely phase out CO₂-releasing energy sources, the waste heat of our industrial processes would eventually dominate the power received from the sun. Even if we solve that… deuterium, like oil, is non-renewable. Doesn't matter how cheap it is: there are only two dozen trillion tonnes of it in the ocean, and once we've run out, we've run out.

[tbrownaw]

At some point the sun is supposed to go red giant and eat the earth. Anything that can last at least that long is effectively unlimited.

[wizzwizz4]

Projected oil demand is currently measured in trillions of tonnes per century. Deuterium is only seven or eight orders of magnitude more energy-dense than oil. If our power use continues to grow exponentially, we won't get close to the five billion year mark before running out: ten thousand years would be pushing it.