Our Climate Problem is Insurmountable, AI can Change That
It has been hard to be hopeful for the future. There are many technical, political, and economical challenges that makes you think there are no clear paths for avoiding catastrophic loss and pain to our civilization and the planet as a whole.
We, at Satel, however, think Artificial Intelligence could be a game changer. The fact that AI is going to disrupt this world in ways we can’t imagine, is undisputed. We believe the timing for this disruption could work perfectly with the necessity for drastic climate adaptation and reimagining our civilization.
We stand for using AI for good.
Challenges we face
Technical
Infrastructure change takes time, even if there was consensus as to where we need to go. Recent moratorium in Alberta, on renewable energy development is a great example of how far we are from consensus on approach.
On the other hand, we are currently baking in global heating for our future. Doesn’t matter how much progress we can make in the future, from now till then we keep contributing to the problem, sometimes in a compounding manner as we saw this year in carbon emissions from wildfires in Canada.
Political
Growing problem of misinformation and disinformation fueled by social media, contributing to every form of Climate Change denial. Our political leaders have shown to give in to their base even if the facts are wrong and based on social media misinformation. The pandemic discourse was a great example of that.
Economic
Our economy is built around quarterly profits and constant growth without accounting for environmental impacts. Global markets reward and penalize based on shortsightedness where we need long-term thinking to value environmental effects of our actions.
Possible solution
AI will disrupt our world beyond what we can imagine. As computer science professionals, we were skeptical if Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could even be possible, but we are now convinced we will get there in the next 10 to 15 years if not sooner. This disruption could be the unraveling of our societies as it exists now. However, it does not necessarily need to be bad. We have the opportunity to steer our world to a place, where it adapts to the extreme changes in our climate. A world where it is more sustainable, and more fair to everyone, not just the wealthiest countries and people.
This bot was created to ignite your imagination for such world.