To what extent can artificial intelligence help tackle climate change today?

While artificial intelligence (AI) is often associated with the spawning of robots that will take our jobs, Terminator's Skynet, or the unblinking red eyes of Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, its true and immediate effects are best seen by simply observing the innovations -- ones that prove that software can do a variety of tasks better than humans can. If one thing is clear, it's that artificial intelligence has the potential to disrupt every industry, which leads to a big question that should matter to all of us: To what extent can a powerful technology like artificial intelligence be used to help us tackle climate change? To learn more about how we can leverage artificial intelligence to tackle climate change, I had to chat with Priya Donti, who's completing a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, focused on the role machine learning can play in climate change mitigation solutions. Donti is also a co-chair of Climate Change AI, an organization that unites "volunteers from academia and industry who believe in using machine learning, where it is relevant, to help tackle the climate crisis." Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, discusses the risks, the rewards, and the limitations of using artificial intelligence to combat climate change.