https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon
'If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate
tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable
Earth, and the pace is accelerating.
Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what
passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense,
climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff
Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how
to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are
enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification
Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho
NFT frauds:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/>
Or planet-destroying AI frauds:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain>
If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking
doomed.
But – as Ryan Cooper writes for
The American Prospect – there's a far more
dynamic, consequential, useful and
exciting innovation revolution underway,
thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:
https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/
The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the
Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing
amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense
and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel
The Lost
Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving
the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I
guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much
worse? What role do
you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
