“As 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,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the independent research organization Berkeley Earth. wrote in X in response to Altman’s post. “We need policy changes, not just technological advances, to achieve our climate goals.”
That’s not to say there aren’t big technical issues we still need to resolve. Just look at the continuing struggles to develop clean, cost-competitive ways to fertilize crops or fly airplanes. But the fundamental challenges of climate change are sunk costs, obstacles to development and inertia.
We have built and paid for a global economy that belches planet-warming gases, investing trillions of dollars in power plants, steel mills, factories, airplanes, boilers, water heaters, stoves, and sport utility vehicles that run on fossil fuels. And few people or companies will happily write off those investments as long as those products and plants continue to operate. AI can’t remedy all that by simply generating better ideas.
To demolish and replace the machinery of every industry in 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.
But with every proposal for a tougher law or some big new wind or solar farm, the forces will push back, because the plan will hit someone’s wallet, block someone’s opinions, or threaten areas or traditions someone holds dear. Climate change It’s an infrastructure problem.and building infrastructure is a complicated human task.
Technological advances can alleviate some of these problems. Better, cheaper alternatives to legacy industries make difficult decisions more politically acceptable. But there are no improvements in AI algorithms or underlying data sets that will solve the challenge of NIMBYism, the conflict between human interests, or the desire to breathe fresh air in pristine wilderness.
Claiming that a single technology (which happens to be the one your company develops) can miraculously unravel these intractable conflicts of human society is selfish at best, if not a little naïve. And it is a worrying idea to proclaim it at a time when the growth of that same technology threatens to undermine the meager progress the world has begun to make on climate change.
As things stand, the only thing we can confidently say about generative AI is that it is making the hardest problem we’ve ever had to solve much harder to solve.
