Notes From an Environmentalist
Is AI Serving Humanity, or is Humanity Serving AI??
Is AI Serving Humanity?
or
Is Humanity Serving AI?
While the world was preoccupied with the U.S. Presidential elections, GE-Vernova quietly removed several Vinyard Wind blades originally built at their plant in Quebec to their plant in Cherbourg, France.
It was a tacit admission that their problem with blades was more widespread than the single malfunctions off Nantucket and the Dogger Banks.
It was also an admission that the company had moved too fast to build the giant blades to reap the benefits of the generous subsidies and tax benefits offered by President Biden’s Inflation Fighting legislation.
But GE Vernova appeared to be insulated from problems with their blades and the dreary financial market for offshore wind.
Like most large multinational firms, they had a team of MBA’s feverishly ferreting out how to garner subsidies for other new energy projects.
Only a month before the idea of restarting shuttered nuclear power plants would have seemed absurd, but then AI raised its power-hungry head.
Bill Gates was the first to announce that Microsoft planned to restart the infamous Three-Mile Island nuclear reactor to power its AI technologies.
Not to be outdone, Amazon and Google announced they planned to build 8 new nuclear plants.
Analysts figured that AI’s energy appetite that would more than double by 2030, exceeding the power requirements of the entire nation of Argentina.
So instead of having their stocks fall because of their problems with the relatively risk- free wind industry, GE-Vernova’s stocks had risen because of their involvement with the high risk nuclear industry.
Back in May, prominent figures like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Eric Schmidt signed an open letter stating that the AI industry should develop safeguards to mitigate the risk of AI causing the extinction of the human race through global pandemics, biological weapons or nuclear war.
In the words of Warren Buffet, “We let the genie out of the bottle with nuclear weapons. Now, AI is part way out of the bottle.” He had been rattled that AI had replicated his image and voice, “so well it could have even fooled my own family.”
After a recent TED talk in Boston a senior Google executive announced that the company’s goal was “To eliminate human emotions. They are getting in the way of progress and are no longer needed in our civilization.”
The Grandfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton who had famously resigned from Google over their AI policies devoted his entire Nobel prize address to warning about the dangers of AI, “a cutting-edge technology that had emerged with astonishing rapidity like nuclear technology and could also lead to the extinction of humankind.”
Of course, nobody is going to stop AI there was too much good to be done and too much money to be made.
But the dangers are known throughout the financial world. The Yale poll of CEO’s, showed that 42% of CEO’s of major corporations believed AI could cause the extinction of humanity in 5 to 10 years.
As the U.S. elections nears there was concern that our own species, “equipped with the affective and hormonal system not that much different than that of a jungle rat has the ability to destroy the world by pushing a few buttons.” The fate of entire societies might be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by a leader acting by his or her gut instincts.
But now, instead of doing our humanly best to reverse global warming, we are doing our humanly best to provide AI the energy it needs to use the internet’s vast data base of how humans make decisions for its own survival. The question remains, is AI serving humanity or is humanity serving AI?
