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Climate change meets cyber mind: an interview with ChatGPT
Note to readers: The article is a re-posting by illuminem.com from my website Civil Notion.
Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic. You just woke up and realized the nation is running late in putting needed climate protections in place. Discuss.
You’d have to have been hiding in a cave over the last 12 months not to have heard about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and what engineers can now program our computers to do. Love it or hate it, the AI genies are out of the bottle and unlikely ever to go back in — making it imperative for the climate community to consider carefully what role these programs might play in efforts to decarbonize national and world economies.
The question is this: will the advent of the AI age help or hinder efforts at combatting Earth’s warming? Would you be surprised to learn possibly both? Permit me to discuss.
I started to take AI seriously when Blake Lemoine, a Google software engineer, suggested that the company’s AI LaMDA[i] program could become sentient. The statement led to his dismissal.
Call me jaded. In my experience, there’s an inverse relationship between a large corporation denying something and the truth of its existence. Think Exxon and its public denial that fossil fuels have…
