I work at Cisco and had to sit through a four hour mandatory town hall meeting last week in which our exec spewed nonsense about our AI future, and when asked the climate change question simply said "don't worry, we'll be building data centers in space soon enough". He also demanded we stop writing code using our own brains, and in fact demanded that we re-write all of our code using AI over the next two years for no reason. I'm sick of the tech oligarchy fast tracking climate change because of their own delusions. Thank you for your reporting, it's helping me stay sane.
This is such an important expansion of the conversation, Emily.
One thing I keep coming back to with AI is that we often focus on the direct footprint of the technology: energy consumed, infrastructure required, data centers built...but the harder question is what the technology enables.
That feels like the climate version of a broader leadership challenge I’ve been thinking about: AI is an amplifier. It can accelerate solutions, but it can also accelerate existing incentives, systems, and decisions that may need to be questioned.
The question isn’t simply “How much energy does AI use?”
It’s also “What are we choosing to use that intelligence for?”
The same technology that can help optimize renewable systems can also make extraction more efficient. The difference comes down to the human choices, incentives, and governance around it.
Really appreciate you pushing the conversation beyond the obvious first-order metrics.
Not sure if you saw Erald Kolasi's and Jesse Damiani's super thorough analysis of how they calculate AI's carbon footprint, but I think this dovetails nicely with your piece. They suggest we're significantly underestimating the related output for data centers owing to a previous lack of a framework for considering the expenditure of resources outside of mere operation of these facilities.
I've been afraid for a while that we've been coasting on the amazing technological progress of wind and solar, and gotten fooled into believing that putting additional costs on gas and oil usage wouldn't be necessary, because clean energy would just become the obvious choice for self-interested actors. If it turns out there's scope for gas to get a lot cheaper to produce, that would obviously be a problem for a political system that seems increasingly incapable of making rational choices that might cause some harm to insanely rich people.
I work at Cisco and had to sit through a four hour mandatory town hall meeting last week in which our exec spewed nonsense about our AI future, and when asked the climate change question simply said "don't worry, we'll be building data centers in space soon enough". He also demanded we stop writing code using our own brains, and in fact demanded that we re-write all of our code using AI over the next two years for no reason. I'm sick of the tech oligarchy fast tracking climate change because of their own delusions. Thank you for your reporting, it's helping me stay sane.
This is such an important expansion of the conversation, Emily.
One thing I keep coming back to with AI is that we often focus on the direct footprint of the technology: energy consumed, infrastructure required, data centers built...but the harder question is what the technology enables.
That feels like the climate version of a broader leadership challenge I’ve been thinking about: AI is an amplifier. It can accelerate solutions, but it can also accelerate existing incentives, systems, and decisions that may need to be questioned.
The question isn’t simply “How much energy does AI use?”
It’s also “What are we choosing to use that intelligence for?”
The same technology that can help optimize renewable systems can also make extraction more efficient. The difference comes down to the human choices, incentives, and governance around it.
Really appreciate you pushing the conversation beyond the obvious first-order metrics.
Not sure if you saw Erald Kolasi's and Jesse Damiani's super thorough analysis of how they calculate AI's carbon footprint, but I think this dovetails nicely with your piece. They suggest we're significantly underestimating the related output for data centers owing to a previous lack of a framework for considering the expenditure of resources outside of mere operation of these facilities.
Thanks for highlighting the Fossil Fuel- AI link. Wait a minute: FF-AI Link....maybe an acronym is emerging: FFAIL, or FAIL for short?
Ohh, solid idea. I like FFAiL
I've been afraid for a while that we've been coasting on the amazing technological progress of wind and solar, and gotten fooled into believing that putting additional costs on gas and oil usage wouldn't be necessary, because clean energy would just become the obvious choice for self-interested actors. If it turns out there's scope for gas to get a lot cheaper to produce, that would obviously be a problem for a political system that seems increasingly incapable of making rational choices that might cause some harm to insanely rich people.