The Gist
- Rampant resource use. AI’s high energy and material consumption threaten environmental sustainability.
- Ethical oversight needed. The race for AI advancement often overlooks crucial ethical considerations.
- Profit over planet. AI development prioritizes financial gains at the expense of ecological health.
The sheer heat of AI. Billions of parameters whirling through billions of words to process with white-hot speed. Big Tech maximizes revenue and power through maximizing heat, maximizing material use, maximizing waste production. The environmental impact of AI is profound as software and hardware are eating the world and crapping mining waste, energy waste, data waste and e-waste. AI ravenous, intense chips, each one consuming thousands of kilowatts a year, with millions of them being produced. The sheer heat and energy of AI. Ravenous. Exajoules.
The Environmental Impact of AI: The Race Beyond Nature’s Limits
AI comes striding from a technological culture of fast and furious performance, efficiency fetishism and the innovation cult. Fed by a complicit media to a still tech-starstruck public, everyone wants some of the performance, the efficiency, innovation and progress. Enraptured by the Growth Death Cult, accelerating forever past all Nature’s boundaries and guardrails.
The environmental impact of AI is stark as more and more and faster chips, developed at frenzied speed, chasing performance and causing Mount Everests of mining waste and Great Walls of China of e-waste. Super-efficiency when it comes to larger and larger bulging and overflowing datasets. Water, energy and materials are infinitely and instantly available with prices approaching zero, and all true costs charged to generous Mother Nature. Churning through materials is seen as positive, part of the innovative, creative process, part of inevitable progress.
Related Article: Energy Hungry AI: Is It Sustainable?
AI Hype Ignores Ethics, Embraces Profit
The world of modern technology is made up of hype cycles, and AI is simply the latest chapter, another spin of the wheel. It’s a frenzied race to make the quick kill, increase profitability and shareholder value, and nothing can be allowed to get in the way, until, of course, the next great rock ’n’ roll technology swindle comes along.
Those who dare raise issues of safety or ethics are first undermined, then fired, defunded or otherwise canceled. States salivate, offering tax breaks, dirt cheap energy and water. They’ll do anything not to be left out. Is this wise? Are you serious? There is too much money to be made right now — right this very moment — to allow such trivialities and silly questions to be asked, let alone answered. Acceleration forever.
And as AI explodes, there is even less time to ask about what good it is, actually. What’s its actual use? (Other than for scams, spam, destroying democracy and advertising, of course.) Ethics teams are either decimated or gotten rid of entirely. Teams that are there to control lies and misinformation are weakened or replaced by AI policing AI.
Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of the growth super-gravy cybertruck. Highlighting the environmental impact of AI, acceleration continues forever. The environment and society are externalities. Innovate or die. Progress to the bitter end.
Related Article: Generative AI Technologies: Now and in the Future
AI’s Thirst Drains Resources, Sparks Outrage
Things move so fast, adding a Germany or Japan worth of electricity demand to the electricity grid every couple of years — or is it now every couple of months? Acceleration forever. Software and hardware eating Nature. Such thirsty work.
Considering the environmental impact of AI, every time you interact with AI, it drinks a glass of water. The poor must go thirsty so that AI can drink the freshest, cleanest water. Drinking 20 times more than those old-fashioned Google searches used to drink. That’s nothing.
Isn’t China’s AI drinking as much water as the entire population of South Korea? Or was that last week? Is it now drinking twice or 10 times as much? “It’s a recipe for disaster,” Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement organizer Jake Grobe told Futurism about Microsoft’s water usage in west Des Moines. “ChatGPT is not a necessity for human life, and yet we are literally taking water to feed a computer.”
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