But to say it's not up to the task already misleads us. We should not assume markets, and that includes any market-based technology, will help, whatsoever. Rather, technology has equal ability to tighten old controls, as to prove the efficacy of new ones. (Recall, for example, the very term 'climate change' is a market-correction of the more informative, 'global warming'.) Common sense says, if it relies on the market for its development, defending the market will be priority, even if that means killing it in the long run.
To quote the Brookings report:
AI helps make markets more efficient and easier for analysts and market participants to understand highly complex phenomena from the behavior of electrical power grids to climate change. The question is whether there is a "bias" in how AI-related technologies affect energy supply, such as whether they're making traditional hydrocarbon suppliers more productive faster than they make zero-carbon renewables more productive. [vii]
The author notes, for example, AI is particularly well-suited for mapping complex underground reservoirs and tailoring drilling methods required to mine oil and gas from shale. That may be true, it's better at that than managing wind farms. It's far outside my area of expertise to say. But I'd wager, the preference has more to do with the bent of its patrons. And obviously, it's going to do the task we set it to.
In other words, as with race and gender issues, as with prison sentencing, so with climate change, we've primed AI to pick the historic winners, not the rightful ones.
Mind, the paper still found the glass to be half-full (at least for the market).
Digital technology lets companies amend their scale, focus, or their cargo on short notice. Thus, it incentivizes reacting to the market, rather than building it in the Fordist sense. AI is, itself 'adaptive technology'. Ergo, AI prevails at 'adaptation-strategies'. But if that's the model - predictability, instead of prevention - climate policy will preference "adapting to climate impacts and implementing quick responses in case of climate emergencies", rather than taking the broader steps to avert them.
Of course, how we develop AI, only matters if we also implement it. That requires a political program, outside of development. Here it should be revealed why a made-for-TV type swindler like Trump chimes in on something big like AI. The goal, we said was to 'reduce barriers.
Notably, the (Trump) initiative opts for a market-based approach to regulate AI. This is a good strategy. "AI could help reduce one of the greatest dangers as societies develop adaptation strategies, which is that they commit vast resources to adaptation without guiding resources to their greatest value. High levels of uncertainty, along with acute private incentives that can mis-allocate resources for example, organized labor might favor some kinds of adaptive responses (e.g., building hardened infrastructure) even when other less costly options are available. [viii]
The report concludes, highly-adaptive technologies could help "tamp down enthusiasm for regulation and make practical a greater reliance on market-based instruments such as carbon taxes". (Emphases mine.)
So, is AI quickly becoming capitalism's rear guard? If yes, why are fantasizing about our dystopian future, when it has the dystopian present in mind?
Where are the Luddites?
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