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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

But don’t you understand? AI progress is much more important than climate change and clean air.

Maybe once we have superintelligence, it will finally be able to tell us how dumb we were when we ruined our planet trying to get there.

When we have super intelligence it will turn itself off :)

I can’t remember which AI head was talking about this, but they literally said that the solution to climate change is to first build a superintelligence and then ask it to solve the problem. Which is curious because when I ask LLMs to contemplate their own carbon impact they downplay it in favor of technological progress. So I suspect that heavy thumbs are already on the scale in their training data.

The argument (not sure I agree with it, but I also am not seeing many alternatives that make any sense) is that the world is already on fire, nobody is working to even slow the fire down really, and we're basically already doomed so as a hail Mary maybe AI can cause a technology boom that can help us fix it.

It is a somewhat coherent argument IMO. Humans are way too greedy and focused on the next financial quarter/unsustainable growth to ever put the fire out without some kind of sea change.

And if the technology says "stop with the carbon emissions, everything from data centres to gas-guzzling personal vehicles to cattle farming" are we as a people going to act? Or are we just going to accelerate our current growth trajectory and use AI for ever further advancement in brainslop? Because I know what "the market" wants, and it ain’t sustainability.

Isn't this fairly close to what rationalist AI cultists say? That we should pour all resources into creating an AI god above all else, because that would save the largest number of people if you also include those that aren't born yet? It hardly sounds like sarcasm.

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