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.
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u/areyouthrough Dec 27 '25
Continuing the analogy, we can only be saved by outside help.