This is an awesome progress in human achievement to get these machines intelligent. And this is also a fast regress and decline on the human wisdom!
We are simply greasing the grooves and letting things slide faster and faster and calling it progress. How does this help to make the human and nature integration better?
Does this improve climate or make humans adapt better to changing climate? Are the intelligent machines a burning need for the humanity today? Or is it all about business and political dominance? At what cost? What's the fall out of all this?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions. Relying on AGI solving problems like climate change seems like a risky strategy but on the other hand it’s very plausible that these tools can help in some capacity. So we have to build, study and find out but also consider any opportunity cost of building these tools versus others.
Solving climate change isn't a technical problem, but a human one. We know the steps we have to take, and have for many years. The hard part is getting people to actually do them.
No human has any idea how to accomplish that. If a machine could, we would all have much to learn from it.
I disagree with this assessment. We don’t know the steps we have to take. We know a set of steps we could take but they’re societally unpalatable. Technology can potentially offer alternative steps or introduce societal changes that make the first set of steps more palatable.
I feel I should clarify as clearly this is an unpopular opinion: I’m not saying climate change can be solved by technology alone, but I do believe that enabling the societal changes needed to deal with climate change requires using every tool we have at our disposal and that includes technology. I don’t really see why this is controversial and would love to hear that perspective.
My perspective is that no technology can do much while the social problem is so intractable.
If somehow we could get past the social problem, technology will happen. Probably quickly, once we had some agreement that it was a thing worth doing. But until then the technology is largely moot.
We are simply greasing the grooves and letting things slide faster and faster and calling it progress. How does this help to make the human and nature integration better?
Does this improve climate or make humans adapt better to changing climate? Are the intelligent machines a burning need for the humanity today? Or is it all about business and political dominance? At what cost? What's the fall out of all this?