Rapid development in the field of AI means the technology can help scientists understand the links between cause and effect by sifting through vast quantities of information, said Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., the holding company that owns Google.
“AI will play this role to navigate through this and help us.”
It can also aid companies in designing new, personalized systems. In the future, Schmidt would like to see “Eric and Not-Eric,” he said at a conference in New York, where “Eric” is the flesh-and-blood Schmidt and“not-Eric is this digital thing that helps me.”
Nextbigfuture’s position on population growth, climate change, human development, and education is AI is not needed
Larger families in Africa is the remaining aspect of higher population growth. Population going to 11-12 billion by 2100 is because Africa will go from 1 billion to 5 billion. Asia population has flattened other than India and some South Asian countries. The developed world and China have flat to declining population.
A lot of the larger family in Africa issues will be greatly reduced when they have healthcare and public health infrastructure like clean water and sanitation and vaccination. If people have over 99% confidence that their children will die then they will not have 5-6 children to assure that they end up with 2 that grow into adults.
Climate change and CO2 emissions are a unintended byproduct of industrialization. We use coal and fossil fuels for energy and industry and the carbon gets combined with oxygen when it is burned to make CO2. We use about 8 billion tons of coal and about another 4 billion tons of oil. Carbon plus two oxygens means the weight of CO2 is about 40 billion tons. Burning literal mountains of carbons each year also means billions of tons of soot and particulates. Incomplete burning results in this air pollution which also blackens white icecaps and other surfaces. Darkening increases the heat that is absorbed and not reflected. The soot problem results in almost as much heating effect as the CO2 and it also kills more people because of the damage to hearts and lungs. The soot and particulate problem kills over 4 million people each year and makes billions of people less healthy which increases medical costs. The soot and particulate problem is ten to twenty times cheaper to address and can provide faster results of a few years rather than decades.
Again no AI is required to diagnose and prescribe solutions. Clearly when people want to spend many trillions addressing CO2 to get some effect in several decades to a supposedly urgent issue when a lot less money could be spent targeting soot and particulates shows that people are not really trying to solve the big problems.
A 2013 study indicated that the role in climate change for soot is twice as large as previous estimates. Soot has 66% of the impact of carbon dioxide. Mitigating soot would cost about $6 per ton of CO2 equivalent. CO2 mitigation costs about $100 per ton. Nextbigfuture has frequently written that soot is the most cost effective emission target for managing climate. It is also the one with the fastest results. Carbon dioxide mitigation does not impact temperatures for 50-80 years. Fully mitigating soot can also save 1-2 million lives by avoiding the disease from soot pollution
Is AI supposed to make up for human corruption and unwillingness to take obviously better approaches and basic analysis ?
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