Artificial Superintelligence and the Climate Crisis
Hello, I wanted to get some people's opinions on this issue. As most/all of you know, artificial intelligence as a field has been developing rapidly. Alongside that, climate change is likely to cause extremely dire problems for human civilization if we don't make major changes in energy, behaviors, and resource usage.
Climate change used to worry me more than anything in the world aside from nuclear apocalypse. Now, it's barely on my mind.
Why? Because of AI. AI has advanced at a rapid pace, and 90% of AI experts believe that we will achieve human level AI by 2075: https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intelligence-singularity-timing/
This is a relatively conservative estimate, and the timelines seem to be moving closer and closer.
In fact, OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT and one of the world's leading organizations in AI, believes that Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), which is AI which **exceeds** human level intelligence, might arrive **this decade**: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment#fn-A
There's no telling how high the ceiling is on intelligence, though we know for at least some domains it's possible to be superior to human minds in both speed and abilities (think how the best chess player in the world is a computer, or the fastest calculator in the world is a computer). It may be the case that one day, the smartest being on Earth will be millions of times smarter than the human race combined - a God in a box so to speak.
If we are able to build minds that exceed our own before the century is over, then surely they will have the ability to solve the climate crisis.
As we know, it's physically possible to solve climate change, after all, we caused it in the first place with our physical and chemical actions.
This has pretty much completely replaced my fear of climate change with a new fear of AI.
If we build superhuman AI before the climate change crisis hits its peak, which seems likely at this point, then one of two things will happen:
1. If the AI is aligned with human interests, it will solve this issue, along with many/all others, for us with new technologies 2. If the AI is not aligned with human interests, we have a way bigger problem on our hands and it can just kill us all anyway
What do you all think of this? I think it's very reasonable and placed in pretty grounded trends and science, however, it's completely possible that, for some reason, it takes us way longer than expected to build ASI, and thus the climate apocalypse gets to us first. That seems very unlikely, but it seems like the only option in which we get screwed by climate change. The probability of superhuman intelligence NOT being able to solve climate change seems so low that it's almost not even worth considering.
Does anyone have any arguments against this? I haven't heard/thought of any that I haven't accounted for here (mainly being what if we're too late in building ASI)