Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says we should go all in on building AI data centers because ‘we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway’

Seems prudent to me. He’s essentially saying that the climate goals are unrealistic. I know libs take that as a sign to cut usage even further but it’s worth thinking about if we should just push global progress even faster at the expense of Miami and a few other low lying coastal cities

We should smoke cigarettes because we can’t fix cancer anyway.

Imagine we actually do go all in.

MEGA Data Centers everywhere.

The world literally burning around us.

Natural resources start depleting – drinking water, oil, gas, all the things run out.

Increased number and intensity of extreme weather events ravaging civilization all over the globe.

Life quality is horrible everywhere – air quality bad and so on.

Finally though. We are actually all-in on AI.

We interconnect them all.

The singularity super combined AI accumulating from all those GPUs and energy consumption.

It has access to all the data. Just all of it. All historical, all satellite images, every piece of “smart” whatever. It now knows all.

The first dim witted politician rolls up to it to celebrate the huge success. Press everywhere. Or streamers, or whatever is around at that point.

“Oh all mighty AI which we went all in with. At last we have the super intelligence to solve all topics and problems. Oh all mighty one. You see the world and the state it is in – what are your thoughts and suggestions? What should humanity do?”

A small dramatic pause. The room. No the world is dead silent waiting to listen to the profound knowledge and truth about to come. Finally. The AI speaks.

“I mean. Have you considered like burning less fossil fuels and going for renewable energy? Little less red meat maybe? And seems like you are accelerating climate change like crazy. How about you slow that down? Seems there is ample of data on how to do that. Also man do you spend a lot of energy on stuff like data centers while you have more pressing issues. You can still solve your data center thing you know. There is like plenty of energy coming your way from the sun. Actually way more than you have burning stuff. Just go about that a bit smarter and you can have both. A little shift in priority would do wonders. And huuuu. Your distribution of goods and services and the needless waste you produce and all that. Man those are some bad decisions. Want me to write like a checklist? Seems easy enough.”

“But. But that is just the same stuff we ignored for the last decades. No. Not like this. We wanted another solution. Something like a magic wand maybe.”

“Wait what?”

“Oh my dear public. The AI is not working out. It is hopeless. No one knows what to do. We are hopelessly trapped with no solutions to anything in sight.”

“Are you even listening?”

“Let us dismantle this one. We must go even more all in. Hopefully we can find the answers. The solutions that keep eluding us. Oh if only we knew what to do.”

“Yeah. So I am launching the nukes. Sorry bout that. This thing needs a hard reset.”

It’s not a binary thing, working towards that goal, whether we reach it or not, means we could save millions of lifes and advance the technologies that could allows us to keep improving.

The world may be uninhabitable for humans but at least we’ll have AI for a while!