Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says we should go all in on building AI data centers because ‘we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway’

https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-google-ai-data-centers-energy-climate-goals-2024-10?utm_source=reddit.com

33 Comments

  1. So his reasoning is to not reign in AI so that it can fund a solution to attain climate goals faster than reining it in and not using AI to figure out how to achieve climate goals ?

  2. Isn’t this the guy that gave $100 million into his 30 year old (now ex) girlfriend’s failing startup

  3. This sort of statements should be accompanied by a compressive breakdown of the authors stock portfolio.

  4. That is the worldview of the people who say, screw it, we’re done here, we might as well burn the house down…

    It’s sad to see they wield so much power in the world…

  5. “I never make enough money to retire comfortably… so let’s dump what we have on ponies…”

    The guy needs to google “gamblers anonymous”

  6. This is the thinking I’ve been talking about for years now.

    Some rich people are so done with life that they feel like it doesn’t matter if the world becomes uninhabitable. They’ll be dead anyway. They wanna be able to say they reached the very top before they die. There is no “after”. It’s a race.

  7. not_creative1 on

    This AI thing is turning into the classic “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think whether or not they should” meme from Jurassic park

  8. As soon as they see $$$, it’s: fuck the climate, fuck our non-profit status, fuck our safety committee, fuck your privacy

  9. The only reasons why we wouldn’t meet our climate goals are the ghouls like him that are making all the decisions.

  10. MarathonRabbit69 on

    Proof that artificial intelligence is the only way to get any intelligence into business leadership.

  11. ApprehensiveShame363 on

    We seem to have gone from climate change denial to climate change nihilism in the past few years.

    The only thing connecting both viewpoints is the idea that we should not tackle climate change in a meaningful way.

  12. We are doomed anyway, so why not do something the benefits me greatly while we head into our apocalyptic future at full speed?

  13. I would have to say I agree. Ultimately. Climate change is a problem 100% but we can approach it from many angles. It’s so short sighted to think there’s only ONE solution.

    To help us with this we can approach it from a few angles. But first we have to think about what climate change really means. Are we worried about life on the planet (ex climate change leads to problems w earth which leads to problems for humans +/- the other animals) VS are we worried about the planet itself.

    Those are distinct problems. Some fringe solutions apply solely to each of those, if we are worried about life – then one solution is to become space faring. We treat planets like resources and when we are done we move on. On the other polar end, we could depopulate earth (perhaps in a similar fashion to the one child policy). I’m more in favor of a mix + life being important with a small amount of planet being important.

    Yes the traditional solution we’ve come up with is limiting fossil fuels and emissions. But for all the rhetoric in the world. This is actually a highly unfair and “privileged” view. Most of the people on Reddit likely live in high developed or developed countries which means we enjoy a relatively high quality of life. To get there we had a period of industrialization where we didn’t worry about emissions and now we have the PRIVILEGE of trying to limit things.

    There are… however…. Many other countries still up and coming. Is it fair for us (the people who got there already) to now turn around and be like “yo now that we reaped the benefits of it, we now want everybody to slow down”. It’d be different if everybody in the USA/Western Europe/Canada were to say “ok well we are lucky and we care about the world overall. So instead of restricting the developing world, each citizen will volunteer to pay 50% of our incomes in tax to donate to those countries so they can develop while matching emission targets. Infact we might be so hypocritical that we’ve secured more emissions for ourselves than for some of those countries.

    How is that a “good” solution? Infact even if we go along with it, it’s a bandaid. Not a solution. We are delaying the inevitable (and to do that holding everybody down in the process).

    What AI represents is a way to generate new solutions. What if we were able to get technology that divorced us from emissions in general? What if we could climate engineer things backwards. Or in a worse case scenario, what if we found a way to reliably space travel so we can have backup plans to Earth?

    There’s more than one solution to a problem. AI may help us get there. And for what it’s worth our existing solution isn’t that great anyways

  14. MoonOut_StarsInvite on

    Isn’t this just what capitalism is doing right now? “Fuck it, I want to get rich before the clock runs out” Its kind of just saying out loud what I assume they say to their friends every day.

  15. Firefighter breaks out gasoline canister

    “What are you doing?

    “We weren’t going to be able to put this fire out anyway.”

  16. Ever notice how the only people excited about AI are the ones who think they’ll profit from it?

  17. Let’s tax billionaires out of existence since we are never going to achieve true meritocracy anyway.

  18. We’re already letting millions of people live in poverty so that a few Americans can live in luxury, what’s a little extra climate change?