Essay by Eric Worrall
… any moves to curtail the expanding amounts of energy consumed in developing … ever more advanced AI models are futile…
Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren’t going to ‘hit climate goals anyway’
Perhaps the power-draining tech is the solution after all, posits former Google CEO
Dan Robinson
Tue 8 Oct 2024 // 13:00 UTCGoogle’s former chief Eric Schmidt thinks we shouldn’t let AI’s ballooning power consumption worry us, because putting AI to work on climate change issues will be our best shot at solving them.
Schmidt was speaking at a recent AI summit in Washington DC, and his comments echo those of Microsoft founder Bill Gates who expressed very similar sentiments at an event in London earlier this year.
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“All of that will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology,” he said, adding that “we may make mistakes with respect to how it’s used, but I can assure you that we’re not going to get there through conservation.”
Schmidt further stated that he believes that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it,” and that he would rather bet on AI solving the problems than constraining the development of the tech and still having the problems anyway.
This rather optimistic view of the Earth-saving potential of AI can perhaps be explained by the fact that Schmidt has his own investments in the technology. According to Business Insider, he is the founder of White Stork, a defense company that develops AI-powered drones.
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Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/eric_schmidt_speech/?td=rt-3a
I guess in the future radical greens won’t enjoy the same social media and search engine privileges they once did.
A green political movement can disappear really quickly when it outlives it usefulness, just look at the rapid fall into obscurity of Greta Thunberg and her “Fridays for Future” movement.
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