By racking our brains over a digital dystopia, we are distracted from a real existential threat we are utterly ill-equipped to deal with: the increasingly rapid collapse of the environment that sustains us.
As we know, a day seems to go by without another thought leader warning of the apparent danger that artificial intelligence poses to civilization.
These aren’t necessarily wrong, but I would argue the risks are: AI It is something that humanity can manage.
But brooding over a digital dystopia has me moving away from a very real existential threat that we’ve been utterly ill-equipped to deal with: the ever-rapid collapse of the environment that sustains us. Our attention is diverted.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t worry too much about AI.
Last month, hundreds of experts, including some of the biggest names in AI research, supported a statement from the San Francisco Center for AI Safety, stating that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI is a global threat alongside other societal-scale risks.” should be a high priority,” he said. Pandemic, nuclear war, etc. ”
When bad guys give needed direction to massive AI models, or when good guys lose control of their creations, AIs or groups of AIs can work together to wreak havoc.
Not because they have “human-like” intelligence, but as they once did, Google AI’s “Godfather” Jeffrey Hinton I warn you because you don’t.
But while an AI “extinction” might be theoretically possible, and it’s only right to start thinking about it seriously, at a time when a far more probable extinction event is accelerating before our eyes. Throwing is an exaggerated word.
AI is getting ‘crazier’
‘Worrying’ temperatures
The same week that the latest AI doomsday declaration was announced, a completely different group of scientists started talking about what was happening in the North Atlantic.
Sea surface temperatures there are rising at levels and speeds that surprise even the most sober climate scientists.
Dr Marilena Ortmans, an oceanographic physicist at Southampton’s National Marine Centre, says the reasons for the rapid rise in sea temperatures are complex but still “worrisome”.
“Heat is energy, at the end of the day,” she says. “As the climate warms, more energy will become available to power the climate system.”
That energy makes the atmosphere more humid, which increases the intensity of the storm.
who are going home Thunderstorms in southern England this week I didn’t need an AI simulation to tell you what it felt like.
International cooperation is essential
AI needs regulation, it needs international agreement.
The potential is so huge and powerful that it will not be easy to persuade the countries leading its development, such as the United States and China, to come to the table to agree on some basic principles. But history shows that it is not impossible.
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on ways to reduce the risk of nuclear annihilation, an existential crisis at the time.
That threat is now greater than at any time since the Cold War, but there is still some confidence in the rules that prevent it from occurring.
In the late 1990s, most countries adopted a biotechnology moratorium on cloning technology to deter anyone from creating human life. And even in countries that do not have laws in place to prevent this, it is unacceptable.
Chinese authorities have reacted harshly to a local doctor who claims he manipulated a human fetus.
Humans are great at creating new and terrifyingly powerful tools, such as nuclear bombs and biotechnology.
AI is one of those tools. But we have demonstrated the ability to regulate them.
read more:
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sacrificial environment
Perhaps this is an overly optimistic view, but there is more than can be said about our ability to reign supreme in another aspect of human nature, to profit at the expense of the environment. That’s for sure.
Despite more than two decades of international negotiations to address climate change, carbon emissions continue to rise.
The environments upon which all our economic production is based (forests, oceans, etc.) continue to deplete faster than nature can replace them.
And this is where AI could come to our rescue.
Sunak welcomes the potential of AI
We can’t solve all of humanity’s problems, but giving chemists powerful AI could create new catalysts that pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
Physicists are already using this to accelerate the development of nuclear fusion, which provides unlimited power without warming the planet.
Researchers at tech giant Nvidia are using vast computing power to build a “digital twin” of the planet. This could allow artificial intelligence to guide some of humanity’s limited options to avoid an ecological catastrophe.
Human intelligence has evolved over millions of years, and at current trends, by mid-century, the Earth will be warmer than ever in its long evolutionary process.
Let’s stop worrying about how artificial intelligence will replace us and instead work on how to use it to save us from ourselves.
