Saturday, March 25, 2023

The Age of AI has begun

Bill Gates writes:
Philanthropy is my full-time job these days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how — in addition to helping people be more productive — AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year. That’s down from 10 million two decades ago, but it’s still a shockingly high number. Nearly all of these children were born in poor countries and die of preventable causes like diarrhea or malaria. It’s hard to imagine a better use of AIs than saving the lives of children.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities.

In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly making sure that students succeed at math. The evidence shows that having basic math skills sets students up for success, no matter what career they choose. But achievement in math is going down across the country, especially for Black, Latino, and low-income students. AI can help turn that trend around.

Climate change is another issue where I’m convinced AI can make the world more equitable. The injustice of climate change is that the people who are suffering the most — the world’s poorest — are also the ones who did the least to contribute to the problem. I’m still thinking and learning about how AI can help, but later in this post I’ll suggest a few areas with a lot of potential.

No, this is all foolishness.

Climate change is not an injustice. Increasing CO2 was a consequence of industrialization. Nearly everyone agrees that industrialization was a good thing, and not a problem. Those poor countries did not contribute to industrialization but benefited from it anyway.

The math achievement is not cause by school, and improving education will close the gap. We did a big experiment called No Child Left Behind, and it did not work.

I don't know why he cares so much about Third World babies dying. Everybody dies eventually. Those countries with high child mortality just make more babies and are not concerned about the deaths.

AI has lots of important applications, but not what Gates says.

1 comment:

CFT said...

Climate change as being proposed by the left is called CAGW or Carbon Anthropogenic Warming. This is the belief that the climate is driven primarily by carbon-dioxide produced by humanity. It is also just another badly wrapped excuse to promote discredited Marxist ideology.

CAGW is also pretty dismal science. Dr. Richard Lindzen has done a pretty thorough job of explaining why on several grounds. Using a climate model that can't even account for water vapor, clouds, the sun, or the fact that earth is not a flat disk going in a circle, but is a spherical object in an orbit, is just the tip of the computer modeling iceberg of idiocy that parades as 'settled science'.

Basing any kind of economic policies or activities on bad models results in disaster...as it predictably should.