this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Many people claim AI can help us solve climate change, so I decided to ask Google Gemini. (social-cdn.vivaldi.net)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Many people claim AI can help us solve climate change, so I decided to ask Google Gemini.

It regurgitated the same points climate advocates have made for for over 40 years:

  1. Transition to Renewable Energy
  2. Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
  3. Sustainable Agriculture and Land Use
  4. Climate-Resilient Cities and Infrastructure: Design cities to be more walkable, bikeable, and transit-oriented
  5. International Cooperation and Policy

So there we have it folks.

If you've been waiting for an LLM to give you the list of things we need to do to solve climate change, then you now have the answer as regurgitated by an AI.

Now let's get on with it.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #ClkmateChange #ClimateCrisis #ChatGPT @fuck_cars

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago

ChatGPT isn't going to give us a sentence that simply solves the climate crisis (other than "Hey fucks, use less energy") but AI can absolutely be used to minimize energy use in some real ways by using prediction to control when generators go on and off and disable devices when they aren't useful.

ChatGPT is pretty fucking dumb and ill-suited to this purpose but ML algorithms have and will continue to be rolled out to try and reduce wasted energy... still, we need more dramatic action to address climate change at this point.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The problem is that ChatGPT is not capable of original ideas. When you see AI, you (and the bulk of the population) think Artificial Intelligence, but what you should be thinking is Assumed Intelligence.

If you open up a mobile phone keyboard and tap the next suggested word repeatedly, you're doing exactly the same as a large language model like ChatGPT, just much slower and with a tiny dataset.

And just like an autopredict keyboard can spout nonsense, so can ChatGPT. It's euphemistically called hallucinations, but really it's just grammatically correct gibberish.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@vk6flab @ajsadauskas Back in my days, "artificial intelligence" meant things like equipping a computer with some "quality function" helping to win some sort of game by rating possible future situations. Or it meant applying all sorts of filtering to raw data (e.g. images) to help with pattern recognition (so, that's a cow on that picture!). So now we're modelling natural languages by collecting huge amounts of (text) data, which then helps a computer to spit out plausible stuff in natural language form. The term "artificial intelligence" is not wrong, but non-technical people assume a very wrong meaning. 🤷

The major misunderstanding is to mentally draw a trajectory towards what we consider "human intelligence". That's entirely not where all of this is heading though, artificial intelligence is a completely different game.

But that said, thanks for this awesome comparison to explain what an LLM *actually* does, I guess that's a perfect way to explain it to anyone without the theoretical background! 👍

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I should add "Debian, Vic 20" :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@vk6flab In this case, the answers it's serving up are the statistically most probable sequence of words based on what climate scientists, energy experts, architects, urban planners, meteorologists, geologists, physicists, engineers, chemists, and other researchers have been saying for decades.

I'm personally pessimistic about whether the same words regurgitated by Gemini or ChatGPT will make a difference.

Hopefully it does.

Off topic: 73's, love the callsign 😁

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

QSL 🙂

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

We've known the solutions for decades.

AI isn't going to do shit about the fact that the real problem is human institutions dragging their feet on the matter because they'd rather not deal with the immediate expenses and downsides of doing something about climate change.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Well, every time we ask questions we waste many liters of water (and energy, which is more heat) when you could just use a search engine to find what scientists said 30 years ago. 😆

[–] fuzzy_feeling 7 points 1 month ago

they know how to stop it, they don't want...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The question you should ask is "how do we get people to give a shit enough to be slightly inconvenienced in order to stop destroying humanity's future?".

It's hard enough to convince people to eat plant based for a single day, or to offset a single car ride with their bike.

Yet we need the majority of people (and any corporations they run) to make a real effort, when they are too lazy, ignorant, uninterested, unmotivated, unwilling, too entitled, or narcissistic to take action.

Edit: fixed autocorrect chaos.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@Showroom7561 I respectfully disagree.

If the infrastructure is in place, then the sustainable option becomes the default easiest option, no personal choice or sacrifice needed.

For example: If your local grid is powered by renewables + storage, then no personal choice or sacrifice is needed. It's the default that comes out of the socket.

It's only if the grid is powered by gas and coal that personal choice and sacrifices (saving up for solar panels, using less electricity) are needed.

Another example: If you live within walking distance of a modern metro or a frequent bus with dedicated lanes, where services run more than once every 10 mins, then no personal choice or sacrifice is needed. It's the default option because it's often faster than getting stuck in traffic and finding parking.

It's only where services run once every 15 minutes or less that sacrifice is needed.

Same goes for cycling when there's a good city-wide network of protected bike lanes vs mixed traffic.

Or travelling domestically by train when there's high speed rail vs no or slow, infrequent rail.

Or walking to the shops when they're within walking distance of your house vs 30 mins walk away with no good footpaths.

Have the right Infrastructure in place, anf no sacrifice is needed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes, of course i agree that having the right infrastructure in place can make the best choice the default.

However, we run into a problem.

Take your example, "If your local grid is powered by renewables + storage, then no personal choice or sacrifice is needed."

In order for that to happen, a massive investment needs to be made, the right government (who supports the idea) needs to be in place, people need to be willing to pay more (for the implementation and cost of this greener tech), and the public needs enough reason to demand it.

In your other example, "Same goes for cycling when there's a good city-wide network of protected bike lanes vs mixed traffic.", we run into a similar set of issues, plus a twist:

Certain infrastructure, especially cycling infrastructure, doesn't get built because there's no demand. But there's no (current) demand because such infrastructure doesn't exist.

I've been to enough city planning meetings to know that this is a very real roadblock, and it's hard to convince municipal planners to spend taxpayer dollars building cycling infrastructure without this demand already in place.

In that case, you do have to make an effort (and often a sacrifice) in order to be the demand that planners are looking for. But I'll say that it's often very difficult to convince someone to ride on (current) dangerous infrastructure to make a point.

The same could be said for public transit. And if you manage to convince your local government that there's enough demand, it could be years or decades before the infrastructure is built.

I've looked at our region's active transportation plans from years ago, and much of the planned bike lanes never happened, despite there still being a need. It's incredibly frustrating.

But what about personal choices that can be made right now? Committing to a plant-based diet, making an effort to go plastic free, buying second hand when possible and not replacing things until they are broken, etc.

How do we convince individuals to make these personal choices, rather than have them wait for someone else to do something about climate change?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

@Showroom7561 Again, with all due respect, climate change is fundamentally a systemic and structural problem.

It's a collective problem.

The air pollution, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and heatwaves don't just affect the people who burn fossil fuels. Or the people who profit off fossil fuels. Or the people who wastefully consume products with embodied carbon.

The rising floodwaters will not neatly flow around the home of Vicky the vegan while completely submerging SUV Steve's house.

In economic terms, the hurricanes, bushfires, floods, droughts, and heatwaves are a massive externalised cost.

Collective problems need collective solutions. Systemic problems need systemic solutions.

I have nothing against sustainable individual choices.

But.

Individual consumer choices in the free market ain't gonna fix this one. There needs to be policy change and infrastructure investment and public policy at the level of government.

Bad public policy — State investments in motorways and coal power plants, subsidies on fuel, helped create this mess.

The answer to bad public policy isn't individual action. It's good public policy.

There's a reason the likes of BP have spent billions promoting individual consumer responses in the free market and carbon footprints.

(1/3)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@Showroom7561 They know even if 70% of the population benevolently made compromises for the greater good, there's still a market for their toxic products.

And they know that if 51% of the public vote for candidates that implement good public policy — that invest in grid scale renewables and storage, that allow higher density mixed use zoning near public transport, that invest in rail and public transport, that implement taxes that capture fossil fuel pollution externalities rather than subsidise them — they're screwed.

At the grassroots level, building movements and organisations, raising funds, getting good candidates preselected and then elected is going to have far greater impact than individual consumer choices.

If the local council doesn't understand induced demand and chooses to induce more traffic with more lanes rather than build protected bike lanes, then they are not competent for public office.

They need to go.

If the state government wastes taxpayer money building more roads that induce more traffic rather than on improving bus and train services, they need to go.

And here's the kicker. Once the Infrastructure is in place, there is no sacrifice.

People choose to catch the modern automated underground Metro that runs every 4 minutes because it's quicker than being stuck in traffic.

2/3

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

@Showroom7561 There is no functional difference between powering your lights and your TV with grid renewables and storage electricity vs grid fossil fuel electricity.

Literally the exact same activities (turning on lights, using appliances) go from having a massive carbon impact to a negligible one, depending on if there's renewables or fossil fuels powering the grid.

I don't begrudge anyone who makes individual choices to lighten their environmental impact.

But understand that the core of the issue is systemic. It's bad Infrastructure and bad public policy.

The solution to bad public policy is good public policy.

The solution to bad Infrastructure is good Infrastructure.

And if our political leaders aren't doing the job, then they need to be held to account, and replaced.

3/3

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think we fundamentally agree to the same thing, and the things that need to happen for us to get there.

I'm probably more pessimistic because our elected leaders (with no foreseeable change happening any time soon) have been waging war on all things green and sustainable. As an example, our provincial leader recently suggested that we stop building cycling infrastructure to help ease traffic congestion. The public voted for him, then re-elected him, despite the massive damage he's caused our protected areas and the downgrade to transportation he pushes.

So, even when we know what needs to be done. How do we convince voters to make the right choice in their elected officials? And then convince every branch of government to follow suit with making the right decisions. :(

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

@Showroom7561 I take it you're talking about Doug Ford?

I don't follow Canadian politics closely, but from what I've read, he sounds like a nasty piece of work (and that whole family too, for that matter).

So I can certainly understand your pessimism!

Just remember there's always a long game in politics.

Keep advocating, keep organising, keep building connections, alternative institutions, and counterweights. Ford's reign will end.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

All these LLMs should be required to show you the power costs and the CO2 emissions for every response they generate. If "AI" is the latest reason why we're going to blow right past the 2.5c point, the real costs of using them should be right in every user's face.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You know what? You're right: Put this on the news. AI said it, so finally we know what to do. Let's get to it. Hell, make it a Blockchain AI or whatever buzzword you need to make people listen to what we know since the 80ies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

This post can be pickled cause it's salty as hell!! And I'm here for it!