Artificial Intelligence versus sustainability

The oft-used word "sustainability" states an ideal. It would seem to be a simple one, even a low bar. Can the human species sustain itself on this planet? Do our practices sustain our planet's ability to host us?

Three years ago the University of Alberta put the point this way: "Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

At the same time, "artificial intelligence" is on everyone's lips. Nothing about the near future seems more certain than that there will be ever higher levels of AI there, doing ever more and ever-more complicated tasks.

So, let us promote the battle of the finance world buzzwords, by asking: is AI sustainable? What is the ever-increasing dependence of the human race on self-teaching complexes of algorithm going to do to the environment in which we live?

The reason for asking? AI uses up a lot of power. A story that appears recently in MIT News tells us, "The computational power required to train generative AI models that often have billions of parameters, such as OpenAI's GPT-4, can demand a staggering amount of electricity, which leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressures on the electric grid."

Even beyond that, there is water use. Water is used to cool hardware throughout the world of computing. AI in particular is a very water-intensive field, straining both municipal water systems and the local ecosystem. According to a Forbes study a little more than a year ago, AI's projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion cubic meters of the stuff by 2027.

If AI is not sustainable, it'll have to be shut down. That is definitionally clear, presuming only that we do want to sustain ourselves. Re-adapting it to make it sustainable sounds like only a slightly less ambitious goal than shutting it down altogether.

Comments

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog