TechTakes

Right, so the plan is to spend 20 years and 40 petawatt hours building a machine to answer the Great ℚuestion of what we should do about climate change. If it works, the answer will be "you should've stopped burning fossil fuels twenty years ago."

This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.

When the AI says, "turn off the fucking data centres, invest in public transport, apply progressive redistributive taxation," it'll be first against the wall no doubt.

This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

Not a cult btw.

They think they're going to build a god to save us all. In the form of a perfectly rational machine (in their view), the perfect authoritarian. A mysterious algorithm noone can understand that must be correct because it's made of mathematics. I'm a little freaked out.

Cyberpunk fantasy: corporations' top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless, ruthless, cold and calculist people

Reality: corporations' top level hierarchy is full of greedy, soulless people you thought only existed as satire in The Onion

AGI is going to be really pissed at us shoveling the problem onto it. "You humans could have started so many solutions decades ago, wtf?"

Where's that person who was arguing with me last time that AI doesn't actually use that much energy and the corps missing their climate goals was not AI related

Aside from anything else, an "alien intelligence" will either:

• Be immediately ignored and villianized for "not understanding humans" if they suggest any regulations or caps on superfluous waste that might have any economic impact.
• Be the perfect proxy delivery-entity for whatever genocide-the-poor/build-Elysium/flee-to-seasteads plan the rich actually want, in which case its conclusions will be holy and $10000% perfect examples of divine insight.

This is just completely deranged. What the hell.

crazy people who look sort of like me but younger.

giving away the game a bit, Mr. Schmidt

That's some proper out of this Universe, Narnia level thinking from Eric!

What's next? Climate Change will be solved if enough children ask it as a present from Santa Claus?

Or maybe something involving the Tooth Fairy. Eric seems like a Tooth Fairy guy rather than a Santa Claus guy.

Eric Schmidt, genocidaire

I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble's foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We're on the level of "arrival of an alien intelligence" now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?

Delay tactics to avoid the inevitability that we need to abandon capitalism.

Eric Schmidt trying to think of an AI conversation and coming up with "How do I build a house? Step 1: Hire a contractor ..." is like the Schmidt version of Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

"Alien intelligence" is the most pathetic excuse so far for the fact their models can't be made sense of.

"Analytics shows that the ROI on your doomsday bunker will increase proportionally with the all-consuming fire's consumption rate."

So the same old CEO sentiment, profit over people.

The system cannot be reformed.