{"id":742,"date":"2024-10-17T13:09:17","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T05:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/?p=742"},"modified":"2024-10-17T13:09:17","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T05:09:17","slug":"sorry-ai-won%e2%80%99t-%e2%80%9cfix%e2%80%9d-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/archives\/742","title":{"rendered":"Sorry, AI won\u2019t \u201cfix\u201d climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u3010\u80fd\u6e90\u4e0e\u73af\u5883\u3011 | Energy & Environment<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

By\u00a0James Temple<\/a>\uff08MIT Technology Review<\/a>\uff09\uff0cSeptember\u00a028. 2024<\/p>\n

Chinese<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman claims AI will deliver an \u201cIntelligence Age,\u201d but tech breakthroughs alone can\u2019t solve global warming.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n
\n

In\u00a0an essay<\/a> last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic \u201cIntelligence Age,\u201d unleashing \u201cunimaginable\u201d prosperity and \u201castounding triumphs\u201d like \u201cfixing the climate.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a promise that no one is in a position to make\u2014and one that, when it comes to the topic of climate change, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

More maddening, the argument suggests that the technology\u2019s massive consumption of electricity today doesn\u2019t much matter, since it will allow us to generate abundant clean power in the future. That casually waves away growing concerns about a technology that\u2019s already\u00a0accelerating proposals<\/a> for natural-gas plants and diverting\u00a0major tech companies<\/a> from their\u00a0corporate climate targets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By all accounts, AI\u2019s energy demands will only continue to increase, even as the world scrambles to build larger, cleaner power systems to meet the increasing needs of EV charging, green hydrogen production, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Altman himself\u00a0reportedly<\/a> just met with White House officials to make the case for building absolutely massive AI data centers, which could require the equivalent of five dedicated nuclear reactors to run.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bedrock perspective of\u00a0MIT Technology Review<\/em> that technological advances can deliver real benefits and accelerate societal progress in meaningful ways. But for decades researchers and companies have oversold the potential of AI to deliver blockbuster medicines, achieve super intelligence, and free humanity from the need to work. To be fair, there have been significant advances, but nothing on the order of what\u2019s been hyped.<\/p>\n

Given that track record, I\u2019d argue you need to develop a tool that does more than\u00a0plagiarize journalism<\/a> and help\u00a0students cheat on homework<\/a> before you can credibly assert that it will solve humanity\u2019s thorniest problems, whether the target is rampant poverty or global warming.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

To be sure, AI\u00a0may help the world<\/a> address the rising dangers of climate change. We have begun to see research groups and startups harness the technology to try to\u00a0manage power grids<\/a> more effectively,\u00a0put out wildfires faster<\/a>, and discover materials that could create\u00a0cheaper, better batteries<\/a> or solar panels.<\/p>\n

All those advances are still relatively incremental. But let\u2019s say AI does bring about an energy miracle. Perhaps its pattern-recognition prowess will deliver the key insight that finally cracks fusion\u2014a technology that Altman\u00a0is betting on heavily<\/a> as an investor.<\/p>\n

That would be fantastic. But technological advances are just the start\u2014necessary but far from sufficient to eliminate the world\u2019s climate emissions.<\/p>\n

How do I know?<\/p>\n

Because between nuclear fission plants, solar farms, wind turbines, and batteries, we already have every technology we need to clean up the power sector. This should be the low-hanging fruit of the energy transition. Yet in the largest economy on Earth, fossil fuels\u00a0still generate 60%<\/a> of the electricity. The fact that so much of our power still comes from coal, petroleum, and natural gas\u00a0is a regulatory failure as much as a technological one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

\u201cAs long as we effectively subsidize fossil fuels by allowing them to use the atmosphere as a waste dump, we are not allowing clean energy to compete on a level playing field,\u201d Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the independent research organization Berkeley Earth, wrote\u00a0on X<\/a> in a response to Altman\u2019s post. \u201cWe need policy changes, not just tech breakthroughs, to meet our climate goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say there aren\u2019t big technical problems we still need to solve. Just look at the continuing struggles to develop clean, cost-competitive ways of fertilizing crops or flying planes. But the fundamental challenges of climate change are sunk costs, development obstacles, and inertia.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve built and paid for a global economy that spews out planet-warming gases, investing trillions of dollars in power plants, steel mills, factories, jets, boilers, water heaters, stoves, and SUVs that run on fossil fuels. And few people or companies will happily write off those investments so long as those products and plants still work. AI can\u2019t remedy all that just by generating better ideas.<\/p>\n

To raze and replace the machinery of every industry around the world at the speed now required, we will need increasingly aggressive climate policies that incentivize or force everyone to switch to cleaner plants, products, and practices.<\/p>\n

But with every proposal for a stricter law or some big new wind or solar farm, forces will push back, because the plan will hit someone\u2019s wallet, block someone\u2019s views, or threaten the areas or traditions someone cherishes. Climate change\u00a0is an infrastructure problem<\/a>, and building infrastructure is a messy human endeavor.<\/p>\n

Tech advances can ease some of these issues. Cheaper, better alternatives to legacy industries make hard choices more politically palatable. But there are no improvements to AI algorithms or underlying data sets that solve the challenge of NIMBYism, the conflict between human interests, or the desire to breathe the fresh air in an unsullied wilderness.<\/p>\n

To assert that a single technology\u2014that just happens to be the one your company develops\u2014can miraculously untangle these intractable conflicts of human society is at best self-serving, if not a little na\u00efve. And it\u2019s a troubling idea to proclaim at a point when the growth of that very technology is threatening to undermine the meager progress the world has begun to make on climate change.<\/p>\n

As it is, the one thing we can state confidently about generative AI is that it\u2019s making the hardest problem we\u2019ve ever had to solve that much harder to solve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Reprinted from\u00a0MIT Technology Review<\/a><\/p>\n

Ralated:<\/p>\n

Davos 2024:\u00a0Sam Altman on the future of AI
\n<\/a>President Sally Kornbluth and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discuss the future of AI<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

More>><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u3010\u80fd\u6e90\u4e0e\u73af\u5883\u3011 | Energy & Environment By\u00a0James Temple\uff08MIT Technology Review\uff09\uff0cSeptember\u00a028. 2024 Chinese OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman claims AI will deliver an \u201cIntelligence Age,\u201d but tech breakthroughs alone can\u2019t solve global warming. In\u00a0an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic \u201cIntelligence Age,\u201d unleashing \u201cunimaginable\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-city","category-ee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":744,"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions\/744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jointings.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}