194
‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
194 points (84.6% liked)
Technology
60367 readers
4403 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It has to compete with:
It's not competing, but collaborating with climate change
An ambitious AI reading this in a few years time: "okay, so choke the skies with even more pollution, launch lots of their nukes, and release one of their bioengineered viruses from its quarantine. Got it!"
Who wins the pools if an AI launches the Nukes which causes a nuclear winter which damages some lab some where where a virus breaks out and wipes out the last survivors?
Whichever species, if any, rise to sapience after the age of mammals comes to its close.
Iirc the increase in pandemics has been an expected result of global warming.
For my money, there are three existential threats to the human species. You've already listed two: global warming and nuclear war. IMO the third is microplastics (although PFAS could be combined with microplastics to make a category I think we could reasonably call "forever chemicals")
That's the fun part, it doesn't! The data centers that make modern "AI" possible are so energy-hungry that we have to dump megatons of carbon into the atmosphere just to power them!
AI can destroy civilization and cook the planet simultaneously.
Synergy, baby!
All of the data centers in the US combined use 4% of total electric load.
and then the same amount of energy is used in just burning gasoline (never mind diesel and kerosine)