AI will never solve this

On hurricanes, tech's magnificent bribes, and climate change. Plus: The Nobel laureates of AI, OpenAI's fuzzy financial projections, and Uber's latest assault on workers.

Greetings all — hell of a week here. As always, thanks to everyone who reads, supports, and shares this stuff. Paid subscribers, you are the very best. Gonna try a thing where I put the week’s tech and labor headlines additional commentary below a paywall, who knows. So sign up or chip in here if you get value out of this work, and cheers to all.

It was one of those weeks laden with so many compounding crises that you don’t really know where to start, so I guess I’ll start with the hurricane that looked so ominous in the modeling forecasts that it made a career weatherman weep on the air. Hurricane Milton started gathering strength just as the extent of the wreckage of Hurricane Helene—which left over two hundred dead and is now the second deadliest hurricane to hit the United States in the last 50 years, after Katrina—was beginning to be understood.

Both storms stunned meteorologists with their ferocity—Helene with the *40 trillion gallons* of water it dumped, Milton with its rapid growth and intensity. As the Orlando-based meteorologist Noah Bergren wrote in a viral X post, “This is nothing short of astronomical… This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.”

Of course, we have climate change to thank for the warmer, storm-friendlier conditions that fueled both monster storms, these deadly juggernauts affirming that we are living in an age of crisis. So it was jarring, if not particularly surprising, to hear former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argue that we should spare no expense in ramping up and running energy-intensive AI systems, since “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway” while thousands of hurricane survivors were mourning the loss of loved ones, millions were still without power, and millions more braced for a potentially even more brutal storm.

Hurricane Milton, NOAA.

Schmidt was speaking at a summit in Washington DC when he was asked about the energy demands of AI, and whether that was a concern. All of the incremental progress we’ve made as a nation to reduce carbon emissions, he said, “will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology… 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 continued: "We're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we're not organized to do it… Yes, the needs in this area will be a problem, but I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

The clip of the talk, which you might have seen floating around, went viral, as the sentiment was expressed rather bluntly and callously, but it’s a pretty commonly held view among the tech set, and an increasingly popular one outside it, too; Bill Gates shares it, so do droves of AI influencers on social media, so, to some extent, does the World Economic Forum and even the UN.

But we should be extremely clear about this, because it is an inane and even maybe dangerous notion: AI will never “solve” climate change. Even if OpenAI successfully builds an AGI tomorrow, it will never, under any circumstances, produce any kind of magic bullet that will “fix” the climate crisis.

Look, this is not that hard. Even without AGI, we already know what we have to do. We do not need a complex and all-knowing artificial intelligence to understand that we generate too many carbon emissions with our cars, power plants, buildings, and factories, and we need to use less fossil fuels and more renewable energy.

The tricky part—the only part that matters in this rather crucial decade for climate action—is implementation. As impressive as GPT technology or the most state of the art diffusion models may be, they will never, god willing, “solve” the problem of generating what is actually necessary to address climate change: Political will. Political will to break the corporate power that has a stranglehold on energy production, to reorganize our infrastructure and economies accordingly, to push out oil and gas.

Even if an AGI came up with a flawless blueprint for building cheap nuclear fusion plants—pure science fiction—who among us thinks that oil and gas companies would readily relinquish their wealth and power and control over the current energy infrastructure? Even that would be a struggle, and AGI’s not going to doing anything like that anytime soon, if at all. Which is why the “AI will solve climate change” thinking is not merely foolish but dangerous—it’s another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isn’t necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isn’t necessary right now. It’s techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.

Now this is pointedly not to say that AI systems cannot be useful in research and in improving clean energy at all—AI has been used for things like identifying the optimal way to place solar panels to maximize the sunlight they receive, to locate and analyze which glaciers are shrinking fastest, and so on. And not to discount that—those would all be great things, if they were happening in a vacuum, and are genuinely useful. And yet they are also being used to justify both the ideology outlined above and further investment in the technology itself—which is, ironically, itself an increasingly potent contributor to climate change. The rush to adopt AI, as readers of this newsletter know, has done nothing less than helped revitalize the gas industry in the United States.

The big tech companies, once proudly committed to sustainability—and some really were, this is not to be snide about it; Google and Facebook were huge purchasers of solar power, and for a long time made sure to run their servers with clean energy—are faced either to adopt something resembling Schmidt’s attitude, that AI’s steep carbon costs will be worth it, because those costs will eventually come down and AI will unleash unimaginable advances in clean tech, or to ignore the contradiction altogether. This is apparent especially in those tech companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon especially, that are selling AI tools—the same ones touted for their ability to fight climate change—to oil companies to help them locate and extract fossil fuels faster and more efficiently.

The idea that AI can “solve climate change” is what the critic Lewis Mumford would have called a magnificent bribe—a lofty promise or function that encourages us to adopt a tech product despite its otherwise obvious harmful costs. It is of AI’s greatest predicted benefits, to help us overlook its proven harms, to paraphrase Dan McQuillan. Because right now, on net, it’s clear that AI is only adding to our already significant carbon burden.

That AI will “solve climate change” is nonsense—a quasi-religious mantra that is repeated by tech executives and AI advocates to help them make the case for their products, which happen to consume tremendous amounts of energy. And I get it. Like so many similarly-shaped pitches for AI, it’s easy to see the appeal. We’re all exhausted and anxious here, sure it’d be nice if some all-powerful sentient mass of data could just fix everything for us. But you might as well be praying for divine intervention.

There’s just something uniquely dark about surveying the state of play, as folks like Schmidt and Bill Gates have surely done, and saying, ah well, let’s just build more data centers and hook them up to more gas plants and hope for the best. It’s another instance of Silicon Valley’s halo era wearing off—where once it was at least easy to believe the tech companies’s stories about building a better future, now they’re not even bothering to tell them. Instead of ‘we’re part of the solution’ now it’s ‘well it’s complicated’—at best. Schmidt’s vision is even more dire: We’re never going to address climate change anyway, so we might as well set the controls for the heart of the sun, full steam ahead.

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Anyway! It was yet another major week in AI news on a number of different fronts, starting with…