By Mary O’KEEFE

By now everyone has heard something about artificial intelligence – AI. After a talk on AI by Charly Shelton (full disclosure – he’s my son) from CVW and AIM Systems I started changing my attitude toward AI.

Charly did a talk as part of the Crescenta Valley Chamber of Commerce speaker series on how AI works for businesses. 

First of all I have to say that, being a science fiction fan, AI scares the heck out of me. We have been warned over and over again about what will happen when machines take over society. But AI is here and no matter what we do this ship is sailing and we are on it – whether or not we like it. 

Charly explained how AI can work for businesses, not by replacing workers but by adding to the productivity of the staff already in place. All of this made sense and by the end of the talk I, and others, were surprised at how much AI could help – if used properly. However, he did warn of issues and that AI is something that should be looked at from all angles, including the one sci-fi writers warned us about. 

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has gone to Congress numerous times and warned it about AI. Two years ago, Altman urged Congress to regulate AI but in a recent visit he urged it to leave AI alone. His change may have been because he is in a race with China to be the best AI. 

“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” he told Congress. 

Again – “Star Trek” has shown us over and over again exactly how “wrong” it could go. 

What I didn’t know until recently though is how AI affects the environment and, thanks to a two-part series in MIT News, I now have a better understanding of the ecological connection and am terrified on a whole new level. 

AI is often compared to the Industrial Revolution, which we all know played havoc on our environment with the burning of coal, the dumping of waste into our streams and deforestation – just to name a few issues – so it is not surprising that this new revolution will first damage the Earth before any regulations are put in place. 

“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,” according to MIT News. 

And that doesn’t include the millions of those using generative AI in their daily lives. (Generative AI is described as “a type of artificial intelligence that creates new, original content … by learning patterns … from large amounts of existing data.”)

“…and then fine tuning the models to improve their performance draws large amounts of energy long after a model has been developed,” the article stated. 

So there will be the demand for electricity and a demand for water – a lot of water – to cool the hardware used for training, deploying and fine-tuning generative AI models, which can strain local water agencies. 

The increasing number of generative AI applications has also spurred demand for high-performance computing hardware, adding indirect environmental impacts from its manufacture and transport, according to MIT.

“When we think about the environmental impact of generative AI, it is not just the electricity you consume when you plug the computer in. There are much broader consequences that go out to a system level and persist based on actions that we take,” said Elsa A. Olivetti, professor in the Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering and the lead of the Decarbonization Mission of MIT’s new Climate Project.

And it is the data centers that are used to train and run the “deep learning models” behind tools like ChatGPT. 

“A data center is a temperature-controlled building that houses computing infrastructure, such as servers, data storage drives and network equipment. For instance, Amazon has more than 100 data centers worldwide, each of which has about 50,000 servers that the company uses to support cloud computing services,” according to MIT. 

The article pointed out there have been data centers around since pre-WWII that supported the first computers; however, with the popularity of AI the pace, and construction, of data centers has increased. 

“What is different about generative AI is the power density it requires. Fundamentally, it is just computing but a generative AI training cluster might consume seven or eight times more energy than a typical computing workload,” said Noman Bashir, lead author of the impact paper, who is a Computing and Climate Impact Fellow at MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) and a postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), according to MIT News. 

According OpenAI researchers, since 2012 the amount of computing power required to train cutting-edge AI models has doubled every three to four months. According to Earth.org, by 2014 it was expected that the emissions from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry, as a whole, will reach 14% of the global emissions with the majority of those emissions coming from the ICT infrastructure, particularly data centers and communications networks. 

ICT already accounts for approximately 4% of worldwide carbon emissions, according to The Shift Project research, and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is 60% higher than the aviation industry.

As more enterprises and organizations turn to AI and machine learning applications in an effort to drive innovation, there is a corresponding increase in demand for Cloud optimized data center facilities. If Anders Andrae, senior researcher at Huawei in Sweden, is right in his prediction that by 2025 data centers will account for 33% of global ICT electricity consumption, the sustainability of AI is a conversation that green-minded organizations desperately need to start having, according to Scientific Computing World in “The True Cost of AI Innovation.”

My optimism has waned nowadays about anyone learning anything from history. I really think we have far surpassed, and suppressed, the idea “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” The mistakes of the Industrial Revolution are being made again today. We continue to wear blinders when it comes to innovation, especially when AI CEOs have dollar signs twinkling in their eyes. The Earth is the last thought on the mind of AI creators where profits are concerned and that is what we are seeing now as AI moves forward so fast with no regulation. 

AI is here. AI is going to make a difference and in many cases it will be for the good – but at what costs? How long will our Earth be able to carry the weight of technology?