Geoffrey Hinton

I suspect that AI is going to be very good at making more efficient solar panels.

making you better at figuring out how to absorb carbon dioxide at the moment it's emitted by cement factories or power plants.

No, but we already knew that.

So the thing about climate change is, the tragedy of climate change is we know how to stop it.

You just stop burning carbon.

It's just we don't have the political will.

We have people like Murdoch whose newspapers say, no, there's no problem with climate change.

This is called the singularity, when you get AIs to develop better AIs.

In this case, you're asking it to create more energy-efficient AIs.

But many people think that will be a runaway process.

that they will get much smarter very fast.

Nobody knows that that will happen, but that's one worry about it.

To a certain extent, yes.

It's beginning to happen.

So I had a researcher I used to work with who told me last year that they have a system that, when it's solving a problem, is looking at what it itself is doing and figuring out how to change its own code so that next time it gets a similar problem, it'll be more efficient at solving it.

That's already the beginning of the singularity.

Told you there was another panic attack.

They have to get access to the computers to replicate themselves, and people are still in charge of that.

But in principle, once they've got control of the data centers, they can replicate themselves as much as they like.

Absolutely.