Great hard hitting article! Whether we want it or not AI is inevitable. It's important to know the extraordinary hidden costs and the backroom shenanigans that occur to extract those costs. Nice work Arielle!
The idea that we can either AI or decarbonization is a bad starting point. AI can run just as well on non-carbon-based energy, but there has to be political pressure on the tech leaders to make that happen. Zuckerberg, Pichai, Bezos, Cook, Nadella—let's hold them accountable. They all talk a good game about climate, so let's make them walk the talk.
In article sections touching on “gas industry claims methane is a cleaner alternative to coal for electricity generation”, you may be interested in including reference to work by Robert Howarth and team at Cornell about how methane is generally worse than coal once the climate impact of methane leakage in the supply chain is accounted for. Some threads & links: Bill McKibben referenced Howarth in his newsletter Monday, Howarth’s research lab webpage: https://www.research.howarthlab.org/index.php
My reading of AI critics (ie. Cory Doctorow, Ed Zitron) has convinced me that we don't need this f**king technology -- that, in fact, the Tech Bros plutocrats are foisting a gargantuan boondoggle upon the public that will ultimately do nothing but further ruin our already deteriorating internet infrastructure and magnify our society's "epistemic crisis." This is one of the major problems of being ruled by a plutocracy: any old smarty-pants billionaire wing-nut can decide on whim to invest in projects that will radically upend life for millions and millions of people, and we have no way to stop them. Even non-cooperation or boycotts will be ineffective to halt the rush, when all aspects of life can be brought into the AI fold for monitoring and control. These Tech Bros are also the exact same people who think that when it gets too hot on Earth, all we need to do is blast some aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect away a few percentage points of sunlight. What could go wrong?
A lot of the “need” for AI is really just the tech industry looking for another technology to fuel growth and failing that, a growth story they can sell for the next couple of years. A lot of these companies have basically reached every single consumer out there with blockbuster products, so there just isn’t that much growth to be found there. Enter a new technology, and they can tell Wall Street they’ve hit jackpot again and to just sit back and count their money.
The problem with the story is that it fails to impress anyone with a memory. There was the whole blockchain/web3/crypto craze during corona (and several times before), there was the metaverse, etc. The entire tech economy depends on there being some new “enabler” to allow new products and services to be launched, regardless if it’s smartphones, browsers, cloud or something else. Now they’ve moved to AI, it can do a few cool things, but it’s also pretty clear that a lot of the AI that’s really helpful to people doesn’t need the big data centers at all!
Has anyone done a side by side comparison between an AI Google search and one by Duck Duck Go or other search that doesn't use AI to see the quality of the results, the amount of time it takes, and the energy expended? I mean, we can reduce energy use by commuter bicycle as compared to an automobile for many local transportation needs, for instance, and it's healthier for your body. A side by side comparison between the two shows that the auto is WAY faster but there are many other variables to consider, and if energy consumption is the criterion, then bicycles win hands down.
Has anyone tried to carve out a low energy alternative to AI when it comes to search engines and so many other uses of computers in our lives? Why are we just accepting the AI wave as inevitable? I mean, I don't need it if I don't all of those new data centers that are used to launder money through cryptocurrency and AI use that is looking for jobs it can take away from our already digitized lives....
But given the example of crypto currency, where everyone should know by now that Ethereum uses 1/1000th the kWh/transaction, it's still only 1/5th the market cap of Bitcoin, so I'm not sure if folks using AI will care. What would make the "sellers" of AI care is rationing of electricity allowed to them.
I have been worried about the energy impacts of AI for quite some time. Your reporting suggests the impacts will be far worse than I imagined! Humanity's future prospects look more bleak with each passing day.
As discussed in the Jeff Bezos AI turkey post, there are potential positive uses of artificial intelligence, ones that help humans compile information far faster than they could ever hope to unassisted and that use comparatively little resources. The scope of the projects outlined here are, ahem, not that.
The question of how AI models get the data they accumulate, i.e. from wholesale theft in many cases, already makes their proliferation an ethical concern. The environmental implications only add a moral dilemma to the mix. It's a bad situation (understatement of the century).
Really interesting and slightly concerning stuff! What stood out to me was this line "But by cutting out utilities as the middleman power supplier, the gas industry says it can circumvent many of the federal regulations that slow down pipeline construction now. " Wonder how true that is because it seems like a problem.
I think though regardless of what one thinks about AI, the linked report on power demand growth shows large annual increases and the need to have a strategy in place to address any rising power demand with clean energy.
We humans as well as all other creatures can not eat money. When the billionaires bottomline ethic boils down to insatiable greed then the natural world followed by our species are doomed. If short term thinking makes a few very rich but everything dies. The Iroquois Confederation required considering the effect of actions & laws upon the seventh generation far in the future, folk we can never know.
Dangers of AI to climate not generally recognized--an important column:
The growth of AI has been called the “savior” of the gas industry. In Virginia alone, the data center capital of the world, a new state report found that AI demand could add a new 1.5 gigawatt gas plant every two years for 15 consecutive years.
What a waste! In many cases, though certainly not all, "AI" algorithms are replacing much more efficient algorithms for very similar results, or just allowing us to get mentally lazier and lazier. The purveyors of this are acting like they are creating some awesome capability. I don't think so. The electricity provided to them should be rationed, and they can bid against each other for it.
Makes me think about how You Tube and Facebook have provided the best platforms for anti-renewables and nuclear fantasy propaganda. Also on there, I'm sure our soon-to-be DOE Secretary is being amplified, promoting the holiness of God-given fossil fuels.
The world is going through another industrialized makeover as we move from industrial manufacturing to technological industrialized manufacturing and service industries. AI is the next big tech thing but it is still in its infancy. And like all infants, it requires a lot more resources to get it up and going before things settle into a routine. Meanwhile, data centers are also the next biggest thing in the tech industry. Which require a lot of energy to keep the computers cool and climate controlled. Energy is the one things that drives all else in the world. Until and perpetual, infinite energy source is invented someday (they're working on it), it's always going to be about the money. Make the most money for the least cost. basic capitalism 101. Pollution is just an after thought because all these companies care about the insane amounts of profits that this new technology will bring them in some fashion. Whether it is building the structures or supplying the infrastructure, such as the electricity needs. Everything is profit driven now and preserving the ecosystem isn't even in the conversations, unless the government steps in. As we are seeing, the new administration's motto is "Drill baby drill." Don't expect anyone to step in to regulate the fossil fuel industry now, or for at least the next two to four years anyway.
Great hard hitting article! Whether we want it or not AI is inevitable. It's important to know the extraordinary hidden costs and the backroom shenanigans that occur to extract those costs. Nice work Arielle!
The idea that we can either AI or decarbonization is a bad starting point. AI can run just as well on non-carbon-based energy, but there has to be political pressure on the tech leaders to make that happen. Zuckerberg, Pichai, Bezos, Cook, Nadella—let's hold them accountable. They all talk a good game about climate, so let's make them walk the talk.
In article sections touching on “gas industry claims methane is a cleaner alternative to coal for electricity generation”, you may be interested in including reference to work by Robert Howarth and team at Cornell about how methane is generally worse than coal once the climate impact of methane leakage in the supply chain is accounted for. Some threads & links: Bill McKibben referenced Howarth in his newsletter Monday, Howarth’s research lab webpage: https://www.research.howarthlab.org/index.php
My reading of AI critics (ie. Cory Doctorow, Ed Zitron) has convinced me that we don't need this f**king technology -- that, in fact, the Tech Bros plutocrats are foisting a gargantuan boondoggle upon the public that will ultimately do nothing but further ruin our already deteriorating internet infrastructure and magnify our society's "epistemic crisis." This is one of the major problems of being ruled by a plutocracy: any old smarty-pants billionaire wing-nut can decide on whim to invest in projects that will radically upend life for millions and millions of people, and we have no way to stop them. Even non-cooperation or boycotts will be ineffective to halt the rush, when all aspects of life can be brought into the AI fold for monitoring and control. These Tech Bros are also the exact same people who think that when it gets too hot on Earth, all we need to do is blast some aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect away a few percentage points of sunlight. What could go wrong?
A lot of the “need” for AI is really just the tech industry looking for another technology to fuel growth and failing that, a growth story they can sell for the next couple of years. A lot of these companies have basically reached every single consumer out there with blockbuster products, so there just isn’t that much growth to be found there. Enter a new technology, and they can tell Wall Street they’ve hit jackpot again and to just sit back and count their money.
The problem with the story is that it fails to impress anyone with a memory. There was the whole blockchain/web3/crypto craze during corona (and several times before), there was the metaverse, etc. The entire tech economy depends on there being some new “enabler” to allow new products and services to be launched, regardless if it’s smartphones, browsers, cloud or something else. Now they’ve moved to AI, it can do a few cool things, but it’s also pretty clear that a lot of the AI that’s really helpful to people doesn’t need the big data centers at all!
Has anyone done a side by side comparison between an AI Google search and one by Duck Duck Go or other search that doesn't use AI to see the quality of the results, the amount of time it takes, and the energy expended? I mean, we can reduce energy use by commuter bicycle as compared to an automobile for many local transportation needs, for instance, and it's healthier for your body. A side by side comparison between the two shows that the auto is WAY faster but there are many other variables to consider, and if energy consumption is the criterion, then bicycles win hands down.
Has anyone tried to carve out a low energy alternative to AI when it comes to search engines and so many other uses of computers in our lives? Why are we just accepting the AI wave as inevitable? I mean, I don't need it if I don't all of those new data centers that are used to launder money through cryptocurrency and AI use that is looking for jobs it can take away from our already digitized lives....
Arielle has previously reported that an AI-assisted search requires 10 times more power than a traditional search: https://heated.world/p/are-your-internet-habits-killing
I came across this, https://huggingface.co/blog/sasha/energy-star-ai-proposal, linked from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-googles-ai-answers-cost-the-environment/.
But given the example of crypto currency, where everyone should know by now that Ethereum uses 1/1000th the kWh/transaction, it's still only 1/5th the market cap of Bitcoin, so I'm not sure if folks using AI will care. What would make the "sellers" of AI care is rationing of electricity allowed to them.
I have been worried about the energy impacts of AI for quite some time. Your reporting suggests the impacts will be far worse than I imagined! Humanity's future prospects look more bleak with each passing day.
As discussed in the Jeff Bezos AI turkey post, there are potential positive uses of artificial intelligence, ones that help humans compile information far faster than they could ever hope to unassisted and that use comparatively little resources. The scope of the projects outlined here are, ahem, not that.
The question of how AI models get the data they accumulate, i.e. from wholesale theft in many cases, already makes their proliferation an ethical concern. The environmental implications only add a moral dilemma to the mix. It's a bad situation (understatement of the century).
You can't talk about fossil gas or methane without talking about the GHG emissions related to leaks in extraction or transportation
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/climate/natural-gas-leaks-coal-climate-change.html
Please make sure this is always mentioned when talking about gas. While it burns cleaner it is NOT cleaner unless we stop all the leaks
Really interesting and slightly concerning stuff! What stood out to me was this line "But by cutting out utilities as the middleman power supplier, the gas industry says it can circumvent many of the federal regulations that slow down pipeline construction now. " Wonder how true that is because it seems like a problem.
I think though regardless of what one thinks about AI, the linked report on power demand growth shows large annual increases and the need to have a strategy in place to address any rising power demand with clean energy.
How that happens under Trump idk.
Thank you Arielle!
We humans as well as all other creatures can not eat money. When the billionaires bottomline ethic boils down to insatiable greed then the natural world followed by our species are doomed. If short term thinking makes a few very rich but everything dies. The Iroquois Confederation required considering the effect of actions & laws upon the seventh generation far in the future, folk we can never know.
Dangers of AI to climate not generally recognized--an important column:
The growth of AI has been called the “savior” of the gas industry. In Virginia alone, the data center capital of the world, a new state report found that AI demand could add a new 1.5 gigawatt gas plant every two years for 15 consecutive years.
What a waste! In many cases, though certainly not all, "AI" algorithms are replacing much more efficient algorithms for very similar results, or just allowing us to get mentally lazier and lazier. The purveyors of this are acting like they are creating some awesome capability. I don't think so. The electricity provided to them should be rationed, and they can bid against each other for it.
Makes me think about how You Tube and Facebook have provided the best platforms for anti-renewables and nuclear fantasy propaganda. Also on there, I'm sure our soon-to-be DOE Secretary is being amplified, promoting the holiness of God-given fossil fuels.
The world is going through another industrialized makeover as we move from industrial manufacturing to technological industrialized manufacturing and service industries. AI is the next big tech thing but it is still in its infancy. And like all infants, it requires a lot more resources to get it up and going before things settle into a routine. Meanwhile, data centers are also the next biggest thing in the tech industry. Which require a lot of energy to keep the computers cool and climate controlled. Energy is the one things that drives all else in the world. Until and perpetual, infinite energy source is invented someday (they're working on it), it's always going to be about the money. Make the most money for the least cost. basic capitalism 101. Pollution is just an after thought because all these companies care about the insane amounts of profits that this new technology will bring them in some fashion. Whether it is building the structures or supplying the infrastructure, such as the electricity needs. Everything is profit driven now and preserving the ecosystem isn't even in the conversations, unless the government steps in. As we are seeing, the new administration's motto is "Drill baby drill." Don't expect anyone to step in to regulate the fossil fuel industry now, or for at least the next two to four years anyway.