[dbingham]

I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.

It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.

We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.

Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.

Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.

It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.

It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.

[RetroTechie]

It's regretable you got modded down.

Ever since the industrial revolution, humanity has stumbled from one environmental disaster to the other.

Heavy metals, CFCs, acid rain, radioactive elements that don't occur naturally, microplastics, PFAS, large scale oil spills, greenhouse gasses, deforestation, over-fishing, species extinction, the list goes on & on.

And in each case, early warnings are ignored & the harmful activity is only curbed many decades after deployment at scale, when environmental harm becomes too serious to ignore.

Imho AI is no exception to this rule. Its energy usage alone adds to CO2 emissions at a time those should be reduced. Higher efficiency says anyone? No! Higher productivity. Read: same # of humans can consume even bigger amount of resources per time unit.

Yeah I can envision the wonders AGI/ASI could bring to humanity. But as deployed right now, it mostly helps to worsen a number of problems in human society (CO2 emissions, wealth inequality, concentration of economic/political power, to name a few).

Synthetic life? Absolutely, would be a fantastic scientific milestone. But could also turn into yet another eco disaster.

[Zambyte]

It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.

[dbingham]

This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.

Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.

Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".

[Zambyte]

> This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.

No it isn't. You don't optimize a piece of software by profiling it and rendering a flame graph, and then ignoring the sections of code that the most time is being spent in. You work on optimizing the paths where the most time is being spent, because that is where your effort has the most room for impact. If we are trying to optimize carbon emissions instead of time, we look at the biggest sources of emissions first, because that's where our effort has the most room for impact.

> Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.

I never said they did. I said they should be fighting both if they actually care about the issue.

> Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".

Excellent, you are fighting both because you care about the issue. Thank you for your service.

[CamperBob2]

Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.

Actually they do, because the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.

Private ownership of cars is not the problem. The assumption that people have to drive all over the place to get stuff done is the problem. Let's work on that.

[feoren]

> the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.

I'm so confused by this. Instead of one person driving a car to the store and parking, now the car is driving itself to the store with one person in it, dropping them off, and then either parking, or driving itself around more, back to the house or to a distant parking facility. In crowded cities, the car is just going to drive around the block empty for an hour instead of paying $12 for parking. Single-occupancy vehicles are a big problem now; I don't understand how introducing a bunch of zero-occupancy vehicles are an improvement on that? It seems very obvious to me self-driving cars are going to significantly increase the total number of miles driven every day in the world.

[CamperBob2]

I didn't say anything about self-driving cars. You still need to go to the store, if you don't get your stuff delivered by someone who is (hopefully) delivering to more than one house.

You don't need to go to the office. Neither does your car.

[CamperBob2]

And the most promising of those alternatives is, ironically enough, AI itself. Fighting data centers is literally like fighting nuclear power. If you just want more carbon emissions, then by all means, proceed.

Of course most people who commute to work don't need to be doing that now, but that's the other big elephant in the room with AI. We don't use the intelligence we already have, so what makes us think the emergence of ASI/AGI will change anything?

[Zambyte]

The most promising alternative is making it legal to build housing near where people want to be (commercial districts) and make it legal to build places people want to be near where they live (build cafes, shops, etc in suburbia). Any help that AI could have on the situation would just as easily be applied to working from home without AI.

[flurpitude]

Should also be fighting for that.

[NetMageSCW]

That’s just wrong. Transportation is 24% of carbon emissions with 18% road transportation and about 10% of that from cars. Electricity and heat production is the largest source of carbon emissions.

[Zambyte]

It's not wrong in the US.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/transportation-sector-emiss...

I'm also not breaking out personal SUVs and light trucks from "cars" because that'd be stupid.

[dinkblam]

> cars are the leading source of carbon emissions.

WTF? cars are less than 7% and even including trucks we are barely around 11%. when you look at greenhouse effect instead of "just carbon", the percentages are even tinier.

If you are looking for leading sources of climate change look at electricity/heat, industry and agriculture.

just because (bad) politicians are always talking about cars when talking about climate it doesn't mean the are actually a meaningful component. it is smoke and mirros…

[Zambyte]

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

[dinkblam]

transportation is NOT "passenger cars"