A few weeks ago, the Verge had an article about a huge new carbon capture plant opening Iceland. The article itself is not especially unique, but it did remind me that our tech priorities have been warped by an over-reliance on Silicon Valley and its cadre of VC funders.
No one with an ounce of honesty questions that climate change is really and will have real deleterious effects across human society. There are debates about how to best deal with those changes and how to best limit the damage (it does seem pretty clear that some level of heating and thus damage is baked into the system at this point). Carbon capture is one possible route to mitigation. The plant in question is a Direct Air Capture plant. It sucks in air, passes that air through filters that grab the C02 and then heats the filters to extract the C02 and store it, either as rocks (in the case of the Iceland plant in the article) or commercial products (as in the case of some other pilot programs).
These programs are not without controversy. First, it is unclear that they can be scaled to the required level to help keep climate warming to under 2 degrees Celsius. Second, they do require a lot of energy and not every proposed plant is well positioned to use entirely carbon free energy. Third, commercializing the operations requires the use of pipelines to shape the product to its end goal and/or final processing destination. New pipelines are not popular in many communities. Finally, they may be relatively inefficient compared to forcing plants and power plants to capture carbon at the release point (the carbon at release points is much more concentrated and thus you get more for your capture buck). However, it is clear that these plants do capture carbon and the government is spending 3.5 billion dollars to pilot, test, and improve the process.
Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Most sums that begin with a “B” do. And it was supplemented with about 2.2 billion dollars in grants and spending from private sources, mostly charities. So almost 6 billion dollars — not bad. However, Congress wants to spend 32 billion dollars on imitative AI alone. Never mind the amount of money that the private sector is pouring into imitative AI. The top 50 AI startups got about 35 billion dollars in funding so far this year, with almost all of it going to imitative AI companies.
Now, of course, the money spent on DAC is not the only money spent on climate change. But on the one hand, we have a potential partial solution for the one existential crisis facing modern society and it gets about 6 billion dollars this year. On the other hand, we have a product that hallucinates constantly, doesn’t live up to its often over the top hype, worsens the climate change problem, and is largely used to replace labor with inferior products, for non-consensual porn, for harassment and disinformation and it gets at least 35 billion this year. With a B. And no one is trying to generate 7 trillion dollars to support and improve DAC like Altman is for imitative AI.
Our priorities are completely bonkers, in other words. Not, mind you, an original observation but one worth repeating, I think. Our system is setup to reward hype. It doesn’t matter if the product is useful or even really works. as long as some people can make some money off it during the bubble, that is what gets the focus. We need to change our systems so that hype is less rewarded and more important work is. Or we face a future of climate disaster, all nicely hallucinated away by Google’s latest imitative chatbot.