Artificial Intelligence pollutes and depletes. Using it won’t help sustainability.
I read an article, The Costs of the Cloud, by Ashley Dawson in the New York Review of Books and wanted to note for future reference how much artificial intelligence pollutes and depletes. When asked how they think AI will affect the environment, most people seem to respond to a different question: “Can you think of ways AI can help with the environment?” They’re doing what I wrote about in my post Nearly everyone misses the danger of artificial intelligence we’re sleepwalking into.
They don’t ask if people extracting fossil fuels are using AI to further their goals, or their advertisers, lobbyists, scientists, engineers, and politicians. Or people who sell things that lead to more pollution and depletion, like fast fashion, travel, doof, and online sales. Or people, companies, and industries who profit from addiction.
The article linked to many others that consider how much AI is contributing to lowering earth’s ability to sustain life. Here are a few articles it links to and some quotes from it. Before you read them, note that the article covered a lot more. The articles and quotes below caught my attention, but the bigger factors are how much energy running AI takes. Even that consideration misses things like that data centers heat tons of water. They keep talking about global warming, neglecting to call attention to literally heating the planet, beyond trapping heat. Tom Murphy’s piece in Nature describes and quantifies this effect in his paper I link to in Limits to economic growth: A peer-reviewed paper by podcast guest Tom Murphy.
Articles it links to
- Fueling the future with Amazon’s AI in oil and gas: Amazon’s AI innovations fuel the oil and gas industry’s transformation, from exploration to safety
- Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI: Can artificial intelligence really enrich fossil-fuel companies and fight climate change at the same time? The tech giant says yes.
- Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever
From the second article “As Microsoft attempts to buoy its reputation as an AI leader in climate innovation, the company is also selling its AI to fossil-fuel companies… the tech giant has sought to market the technology to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron as a powerful tool for finding and developing new oil and gas reserves and maximizing their production—all while publicly committing to dramatically reduce emissions.”
Continuing “Microsoft has continued to seek business from the fossil-fuel industry; documents related to its overall pitch strategy show that it has sought energy-industry business in part by marketing the abilities to optimize and automate drilling and to maximize oil and gas production. Over the past year, it has leaned into the generative-AI rush in an effort to clinch more deals—each of which can be worth more than hundreds of millions of dollars. Microsoft employees have noted that the oil and gas industries could represent a market opportunity of $35 billion to $75 billion annually, according to documents I viewed.”
Everyone gets that they need water for cooling, “They will be cooled by millions upon millions of gallons of water.” Everyone misses that they will heat all that water. As Tom Murphy showed in his Nature piece that I linked to in Limits to economic growth: A peer-reviewed paper by podcast guest Tom Murphy, heat generated by industry will match heat retained by the greenhouse effect with a couple human lifetimes.
More: “Microsoft has failed to reduce its annual emissions each year since then. Its latest environmental report, released this May, shows a 29 percent increase in emissions since 2020—a change that has been driven in no small part by recent AI development.”
And “Microsoft is reportedly planning a $100 billion supercomputer to support the next generations of OpenAI’s technologies; it could require as much energy annually as 4 million American homes.”
From the third article, “Google released a report showing that its emissions have grown substantially as a result of the AI boom, a major leap backwards from the net-zero goal it set just a few years ago.”
And “a professor at the University of East London, estimated that every time Cristiano Ronaldo posts a photo on Instagram, the energy that would be needed to show the image to each of his followers—190 million at the time—could power a household for five to six years.”
Read my weekly newsletter
On initiative, leadership, the environment, and burpees