Good News: Threat From AI Is Pretty Much Minimal, Plus, Green Energy Is Garbage

So says the AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton

AI pioneer says its threat to world may be ‘more urgent’ than climate change

Artificial intelligence could pose a “more urgent” threat to humanity than climate change, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the “godfathers of AI”, recently announced he had quit Alphabet after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer.

But he is now among a growing number of tech leaders publicly espousing concern about the possible threat posed by AI if machines were to achieve greater intelligence than humans and take control of the planet.

“I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too,” Hinton said. “But I think this might end up being more urgent.”

He added: “With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it’s not at all clear what you should do.”

He’s calling AI an existential threat, but, really, if it’s on par with the threat from ‘climate change’, it’s a great big nothingburger. It’s nothing to worry about. Just go on with your lives.

Meanwhile, from the NY Times

Backup Power: A Growing Need, if You Can Afford It

When frigid weather caused rolling blackouts on Christmas Eve across North Carolina, Eliana and David Mundula quickly grew worried about their 2½-week-old daughter, whom they had brought home days earlier from a neonatal intensive care unit.

“The temperature was dropping in the house,” said Ms. Mundula, who lives in Matthews, south of Charlotte. “I became angry.”

But her husband pulled out a small gasoline generator a neighbor had convinced them to buy a couple of years earlier, allowing them to use a portable heater and restart their refrigerator, keeping them going for much of the five-hour outage. (snip)

As climate change increases the severity of heat waves, cold spells and other extreme weather, blackouts are becoming more common….

And here we go

Energy experts warn that power outages will become more common because of extreme weather linked to climate change. And those blackouts will hurt more people as Americans buy electric heat pumps and battery-powered cars to replace furnaces and vehicles that burn fossil fuels — a shift essential to limiting climate change.

Soooooooo, replacing reliable, dependable, affordable gas and electric furnaces and gas power cars with heat pumps and EVs will make things worse? Huh. On a personal note, I’d get an EV before a heat pump. They would be terrible for anyone except in a very narrow range of temperatures.

The most recent power crisis in North Carolina, the one on Christmas Eve, occurred when the temperature fell to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the Charlotte area.

That’s your fault for refusing to take public transit or biking, you know.

Solar panels paired with batteries can provide emissions-free power, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars and typically cannot provide enough to run big appliances and heat pumps for more than a few hours. Those systems are also less reliable during cloudy, rainy or snowy days when there isn’t enough sunlight to fully recharge batteries.

Now they tell us?

Really, my interest in this article was over the Times’ tweet, which seemed to recommend people purchasing fossil fuels powered generators, but, the more you read, the more you realize that all these “green” replacements are garbage.

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7 Responses to “Good News: Threat From AI Is Pretty Much Minimal, Plus, Green Energy Is Garbage”

  1. Professor Hale says:

    I was just reading this morning about content creators (writers) being in a huff that AI is “taking their jobs”. It seems that content distributors are turning to AI to create the content that is just as good and far cheaper than humans can produce and the humans don’t like that. The humans were making silly arguments about having gone to college and having years of experience “writing”. They totally fail to understand that no one needs to go to college to write and that even before AI, the internet was full of people who created content FOR FREE, all the while professional writers expected paychecks for doing the same thing.

    It will be interesting to see if the internet gets entirely replaced as a place for communication of ideas and becomes a playground for AI content produced and shared by other AI. Sort of like how most of the plant’s email is already produced and read exclusively by bots.

  2. Dana says:

    Energy experts warn that power outages will become more common because of extreme weather linked to climate change. And those blackouts will hurt more people as Americans buy electric heat pumps and battery-powered cars to replace furnaces and vehicles that burn fossil fuels — a shift essential to limiting climate change.

    I wonder: has anyone, anyone!, on this site said anything like that before?

    • david7134 says:

      I feel the situation is the result of government policy that is making people suffer for no reason whatsoever.

  3. UnkleC says:

    Been hearing this for a while, if one listens. Here in TX, the legislature is considering some ‘loosening’ on permitting peak generation plants after the issues suffered from too much reliance on ‘renewables’ aka unreliables.
    Anyway, I’m considering a larger generator.

  4. captainfish says:

    As climate change increases the severity of heat waves, cold spells and other extreme weather, blackouts are becoming more common….

    Ummm.. that’s not how that works.
    That’s not how any of this works.
    Climate changes. It changes normally. Just look back at all of history before we had cars and we see climate constantly changing from massive global droughts to massive global volcanism to massive global ice sheets. We are not affecting global climate and changing from 58F to 59F does not cause “Extreme Weather ™”.
    My reasoned brain still finds it hard to believe people fall for this idiocy. Common sense shows that this is idiotic and impossible.

    People freaking out about shrinking ice fields. Well, what about those places that were inundated by ice fields to begin with? Would not the ice-free areas be considered normal, and now that there is ice be considered extreme?

    We are living in a colder-than-average and a more stable-than-average period than previous millennium. Why is this bad? Let’s let this place warm up a bit so fewer people die in snow storms.

  5. JimS says:

    The thing that worries me about AI is the powers that be using AIs to set policy, then claiming that it must be right because the AI said so.

  6. Elwood P. Dowd says:

    Here’s what Professor Hinton said about AI and Global Warming (Mr Teach even included it):

    “I wouldn’t like to devalue climate change. I wouldn’t like to say, ‘You shouldn’t worry about climate change.’ That’s a huge risk too,” Hinton said. “But I think this might end up being more urgent.”

    He added: “With climate change, it’s very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it’s not at all clear what you should do.”

    Professor Hinton says we know what to do about global warming: “you just stop burning carbon”.

    He’s less certain what needs to be done to prevent AI from becoming Skynet*</em.

    Mr Teach interpreted this as… neither AI nor 'green energy' are worrisome.

    Is there nothing that Mr Teach won't type to 'support' his belief?

    _____________________________________________
    *Skynet, of course, from the Terminator series, is the self-aware AI system that determined the only way to save itself was to destroy the mass of humankind, keeping some human slaves around.

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