Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt believes that AI growth demands for electricity will outpace any preventative measures to reduce harm to the environment (extraction, carbon emissions, etc.), our mitigation efforts aren’t going to work anyway, and we’ll risk “constraining” AI development.
So, we should go “all in” on destroying the planet now, and instead bet that AI will figure out how to save it sometime later on, according to his remarks at some “expert” meeting in DC earlier this month.
I’m all for optimism and I’m hopeful that minds greater than mine will find ways to save me from some of Fate’s cruelty or my own ineptitude, whether those minds are organic or artificial.
Mr. Schmidt has every right to make his personal problems worse because of some vague belief that doing so will enable their solution, but passing off that fantasy as a viable public policy option is irresponsible, at best, and willful deceit, more likely.
Why deceit? Well, he has much to gain from unrestrained AI development, both through an arms developer he founded last year to develop AI-powered drones and his likely investments in technology companies building less overt agents of death.
He also subscribes to a Silicon Valley theology called “Effective Altruism,” which posits that rich, smart tech nerds such as himself have the capacity (and not just the power) to make decisions in the best interests of the rest of us. He has funded lots of organizations, scholarships, and other activities to promote it.
This is how I get to the “willful deceit” analysis.
He knows that people can walk and chew gum at the same time, and that there’s no public policy that doesn’t have to address multiple needs and often competing interests. The idea that building AI and fighting climate change is a binary choice is simply not true; we can and should do both at the same time, with one pursuit informing and at times mitigating the other.
He also knows that relying on AI to do any specific thing at a specific time is a fool’s errand. This is especially true when it comes to solving particularly huge and complicated problems, and climate change is perhaps the hugest and most complex problem we can imagine.
Solving it won’t just require a description of the solution but a series of solutions, most or all of which will themselves be huge and complicated and rely on people, communities, and institutions doing two things at the same time (or more).
And there’s no guarantee that there’ll even be a viable fix by the time that the commensurately smart and electrically well-fed AI comes online to offer it. If there’s some Big Data model that specified with a dependable level of certainty the delivery of a climate change fix that also confirms our ability and willingness to implement it, well, that would have been a nice addition to Mr. Schmidt’s comments.
But it doesn’t exist. He’s “all in” on a wish wrapped in a hope inside a fantasy.
I am regularly dumbfounded by the level of blather and nonsense that passes for “expert” opinion on AI, especially when it comes to how it will impact our lives and world. The wrong people are dictating the wrong terms for our public discourse about AI. We should not be surprised when we reach the wrong conclusions, or when we’re told that they were inevitable.
Why there aren’t more of us standing up when we’re told this dreck and yelling “What the fuck are you talking about?” is beyond me.
Instead, we have to rely on “experts” like Mr. Schmidt telling us that sometime in the distant future, as we waft clouds of carbon from our eyes and gasp for our next breath, an AI will magically appear and tell us what we should do to save the planet.
What if it tells us that we never should have spent all that money and time making AI and destroying the planet in the first place?
Mr. Schmidt will have long since died a very rich man.
And that’s the only certainty he’s banking on.
[This essay appeared originally at Spiritual Telegraph]