Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world as we know it. High school kids are getting it to write their assignments for them, our cars are using it to drive themselves, we now have AI chatbots and digital assistants on almost every device, and it helps run search engines like Google. Elon Musk is even making an AI-powered humanoid robot for factory work and to do his hoovering! There is almost a sense that, soon, everything will be automated by this seemingly magical technology. But, AI has a dark side, one that could threaten our precious Earth if left unchecked. But, conversely, it can also be used to save the Earth from our climate sins. So, is AI good? Or bad?
Let’s start with a super quick and simple explanation of how AI works. AI is based on simulated neural networks that function similarly to the synapses in your brain. These neural networks can be excellent at recognising patterns in data, or even creating data that follows a pattern. However, like a biological brain, they must be taught how to do this first.
To achieve this, they ingest vast amounts of data in a process known as training. For example, an AI that can identify cats and dogs in images will be trained on a dataset of images of cats and dogs. Simple AIs like this cat and dog detector only need a relatively small dataset to work correctly. But their data demands skyrocket for more complex AIs like self-driving cars, language models like ChatGPT and digital assistants!
However, for these complex AIs, data demands don’t stop after training. Once these complex AIs are trained and operational, they need to access yet more large datasets to function correctly. Take ChatGPT; it doesn’t store all of its knowledge in the AI; instead, it is stored in a massive remote data centre that it can access through cloud computing.
It’s these data demands of training and running AIs that are so problematic. Let me explain.
These data centres have racks and racks of high-speed storage and servers. All of this computing power takes a lot of energy to run, which in turn creates a lot of heat. This heat would easily damage the delicate circuits if left unchecked, so most data centres are cooled with energy-intensive air conditioning…
