Suddenly, the world is abuzz with chatter about chatbots. Artificially intelligent agents, like ChatGPT, have shown themselves to be remarkably adept at conversing in a very human-like fashion. ChatGPT, for instance, recently passed written exams at top business and law schools, among other feats both awe-inspiring and alarming. Researchers at Stanford University's Polarization and Social Change Lab and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) wanted to probe the boundaries of AI's political persuasiveness by testing its ability to sway real humans on some of the hottest social issues of the day--an assault weapon ban, the carbon tax, and paid parental leave, among others. Indeed, AI-generated persuasive appeals were as effective as ones written by humans in persuading human audiences on several political issues," said Hui "Max" Bai, a postdoctoral researcher in the Polarization and Social Change Lab and first author on a new paper about the experiment in pre-print.

Climate change is one of those critical issues that don't receive enough attention from the AI community. The main reason why machine learning developers and data scientists are building so few climate models is that climate change is painfully hard to forecast in the long run. While weather forecasts are increasing their accuracy every year, climate predictions and their socioeconomic impact are much harder to estimate, this is due to the huge amount of human variables that play a role in climate change. However, climatic models have experienced a boost in recent years thanks to Integrated Assessment Models. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) help us understand how human development and societal choices affect each other and the natural world, they are "integrated" because they combine different disciplines to model human society alongside parts of the Earth system.

Averting the effects of anthropogenic climate change requires a transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon technology. A way to achieve this is to decarbonize the electricity grid. However, further efforts must be made in other fields such as transport and heating for full decarbonization. This would reduce carbon emissions due to electricity generation, and also help to decarbonize other sources such as automotive and heating by enabling a low-carbon alternative. Carbon taxes have been shown to be an efficient way to aid in this transition. In this paper, we demonstrate how to to find optimal carbon tax policies through a genetic algorithm approach, using the electricity market agent-based model ElecSim. To achieve this, we use the NSGA-II genetic algorithm to minimize average electricity price and relative carbon intensity of the electricity mix. We demonstrate that it is possible to find a range of carbon taxes to suit differing objectives. Our results show that we are able to minimize electricity cost to below \textsterling10/MWh as well as carbon intensity to zero in every case. In terms of the optimal carbon tax strategy, we found that an increasing strategy between 2020 and 2035 was preferable. Each of the Pareto-front optimal tax strategies are at least above \textsterling81/tCO2 for every year. The mean carbon tax strategy was \textsterling240/tCO2.

Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, and author of Bill Gates' two favorite books. However, his latest – Enlightenment Now – has some serious shortcomings centering on Pinker's misperceptions about climate change polarization. Pinker falls into the trap of'Both Siderism,' acknowledging the Republican Party's science denial, but also wrongly blaming liberals for the policy stalemate, telling Ezra Klein: There are organizations like Greenpeace and NRDC who are just dead set opposed to nuclear. There are also people on the left like Naomi Klein who are dead set against carbon pricing because it doesn't punish the polluters enough ... the people that you identify who believe in a) carbon pricing and b) expansion of nuclear power, I suspect they're a tiny minority of the people concerned with climate … What we need are polling data on how many people really would support carbon pricing and an expansion of nuclear and other low carbon energy sources. Here Pinker has created a strange straw man that bears no resemblance to the real population of American liberals and environmentalists.