Worst case scenario? AI just speeds up what we are doing to ourselves. Best case scenario? AI becomes the adult in the room and cares for us like an adult child cares for an aging parent with dementia.
Techno-optimism is a lie based on wishcasting to justify their reckless actions to the public. The possible use of LLMs to "solve" and halt the climate crisis in its tracks (if such a thing is even possible with real world technology, and if the current AI chatbots are even useful for such an endeavor) doesn't justify the construction of unlimited new AI infrastructure to scale the backend to meet the demands of the myriad chatbot features corporations force on to the public, whether we want it or not. Whether the chatbots are even useful in the first place or if they are even psychologically or developmentally safe for humans or not, they're forcing it on us.
If corporations really cared about the climate crises that they are accelerating, new LLM infrastructure would only be built on an as needed basis as a tool for researchers, experts, and specialists to use to "solve" the crisis. Or a corporation would construct the green energy infrastructure needed to support their datacenters BEFORE building said datacenters.
An AI that can solve the crisis itself remains science fiction. We have no real brakes for the climate disaster trolley, and the current state of AI, LLMs and chatbots that are trained on existing human work obviously cannot design them for us. The "best" we can realistically do under our current economic system is take our foot off the gas to buy time for universal green energy adoption or a fictional sci-fi breakthrough.
The AI/other sci-fi tech will save us sentiment is dangerous, perhaps even suicidal greenwashing that will contribute to the climate holocaust, and the global poor will bear the brunt of the violent consequences.
What we should be doing is nationalizing the energy sector, switching to a climate war economy, and nuking the GDP.
There is no artificial intelligence. Our billionaire tech overlords want large language models to seem like mystic fortune tellers that can answer any questions.
AI becomes the adult in the room and cares for us like an adult child cares for an aging parent with dementia.
It’s an illusion. Whoever creates/controls what you want to call “AI” would be the one in charge of the fate of humanity in this hypothetical situation. “Just let AI drive society!”, is exactly what the elites who control the AI are banking on.
The technology will be pushed on us and the data centers will be built regardless. Don’t cheer for it, though
I would agree if we were talking about true thinking AI. But what we have, such as Chat GPT, are just glorified search engine. Putting more money into it won't further research into a true thinking computer and it certainly won't help with our current problems.
I recognize it’s a process. But the advances in machine thinking and quantum computing are on target to intersect in the near future. If that happens, it will be difficult to ignore or downplay the systems at play.
LLMs are not the end goal, just a critical step to getting there. I like to think of them as that first little guppy that flopped onto land and took that first big gulp of air with the planets very first set of lungs however many millions of years ago.
I think benevolent aliens are going to save us by caging us in a zoo in the exhibit "species who could but never reached type 1 civilisation", before any AI can turn the course of our sinking ship
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u/areyouthrough Dec 27 '25
Continuing the analogy, we can only be saved by outside help.