The Environmental Costs of AI...

While AI may appear to us as something of a virtual and even weightless phenomenon, at its core lies some truly HEAVY and energy intensive hardware.

Existing AI systems require huge amounts of resources to run the machines that process data - principally electricity to power them and water to cool them, and the figures required are staggering.

One 2021 study carried out by Imperial College estimated that one medium sized data centre consumes as much energy as three hospitals.

One estimate for Ireland has it that data processing centres in that country use more energy than all the rural domestic properties. Not all of this will be used for AI, but the trend is for AI to take over a larger and larger proportion of our data processing hardware.

According to a lawsuit filed in Iowa, where Open AI's chat GPT4 was based, their data processing centre used 6% of the district's water supply in the month before GPT4 was released, all of that on cooling the processors.

And it's estimated that there are between 9000 to 11 000 to these globally.

Future Machine Learning protocols are going to require even huger amounts of computer processing power.

Open AI boss, Sam Altman has suggested that unless there is some kind of major new energy break through, such as nuclear fusion, there won't be sufficient energy to power the next wave of AI systems.

Water usage is also set to increase, An OECD study estimates that by 2027 the water usage of global AI systems could soon reach around 5BN cubic metres, the same as half the annual usage of the U.K.

For the benefit of humanity...?

I have no doubt some people will benefit from advances in AI, not least the people developing the tech which is and will be sold to various industries.

And those industries that buy AI will benefit as they use it to sell us more shit we don't need, feed us more bullshit we really don't need and cut our jobs that we do need.

However will we, the people, benefit...? Probably as usual it will be a matter of the richer you are the more likely you are to benefit, the poorer you are the less likely and the more likely you'll be living somewhere near an AI data centre that's sucking all the water out of the ground so you can no longer feed yourself, without relying on AI informed global farming systems.

Or something like that...!

Posted Using InLeo Alpha