Tech billionaires are even gambling the planet on the imminent arrival of AGI. Eric Schmidt, the billionaire venture capitalist and former CEO of Google, claims that pursuing AGI is the best path forward to solve the climate crisis, despite the enormous carbon footprint of AI data centers, because of his certainty that AGI will fix the problem for us after its imminent arrival. Sam Altman agrees, and he’s even explained how he thinks that would work. “I think once we have a really powerful super-intelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult for a system like that,” he says. “If you think about a system where you can say, ‘Tell me how to make a lot of clean energy cheaply,’ ‘Tell me how to efficiently capture carbon,’ and then ‘Tell me how to build a factory to do this at planetary scale’ – if you can do that, you can do a lot of other things too.”