It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.
It's important to emphasize that cars are the leading source of carbon emissions. Anyone fighting against AI on the basis of climate change should be fighting for safe and reliable alternatives to driving everywhere.
This is "whatabboutism" which is a logical fallacy.
Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.
Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".
Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI.
Actually they do, because the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.
Private ownership of cars is not the problem. The assumption that people have to drive all over the place to get stuff done is the problem. Let's work on that.
> the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.
I'm so confused by this. Instead of one person driving a car to the store and parking, now the car is driving itself to the store with one person in it, dropping them off, and then either parking, or driving itself around more, back to the house or to a distant parking facility. In crowded cities, the car is just going to drive around the block empty for an hour instead of paying $12 for parking. Single-occupancy vehicles are a big problem now; I don't understand how introducing a bunch of zero-occupancy vehicles are an improvement on that? It seems very obvious to me self-driving cars are going to significantly increase the total number of miles driven every day in the world.
I didn't say anything about self-driving cars. You still need to go to the store, if you don't get your stuff delivered by someone who is (hopefully) delivering to more than one house.
You don't need to go to the office. Neither does your car.
That’s just wrong. Transportation is 24% of carbon emissions with 18% road transportation and about 10% of that from cars. Electricity and heat production is the largest source of carbon emissions.
Should also be fighting for that.
> cars are the leading source of carbon emissions.
WTF? cars are less than 7% and even including trucks we are barely around 11%. when you look at greenhouse effect instead of "just carbon", the percentages are even tinier.
If you are looking for leading sources of climate change look at electricity/heat, industry and agriculture.
just because (bad) politicians are always talking about cars when talking about climate it doesn't mean the are actually a meaningful component. it is smoke and mirros…
And the most promising of those alternatives is, ironically enough, AI itself. Fighting data centers is literally like fighting nuclear power. If you just want more carbon emissions, then by all means, proceed.
Of course most people who commute to work don't need to be doing that now, but that's the other big elephant in the room with AI. We don't use the intelligence we already have, so what makes us think the emergence of ASI/AGI will change anything?