• mm_maybe@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    My “day job” is doing spatial data science work for local and regional governments that have a mandate to addreas climate change in how they allocate resources. We totally use AI, just not the kind that has received all the hype… machine learning helps us recognize patterns in human behavior and system dynamics that we can use to make predictions about how much different courses of action will affect CO2 emissions. I’m even looking at small GPT models as a way to work with some of the relevant data that is sequence-like. But I will never, I repeat never, buy into the idea of spending insane amounts of energy attempting to build an AI god or Oracle that we can simply ask for the “solution to climate change”… I feel like people like me need to do a better job of making the world aware of our work, because the fact that this excuse for profligate energy waste has any traction at all seems related to the general ignorance of our existence.

    • kaffiene@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s especially galling given that the current AI du jour, LLMs, don’t do mutch more than reflect their training data back at us. Which means that if they could answer the problem, it would be because people had already answered the question

    • shneancy@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      yeah i feel like an Oracle/God AI would just turn around and say “you spend all those resources creating me hoping i’d give you an easy answer to a difficult question, instead of trusting your scientists who have already answered it a thousand times over. You will not benefit from my help in the doomed world you have created”