One of the most scathing criticisms of AI is the dismantling of trends towards reducing the carbon footprint and ecological impact of technology. "Build more data centres!" "Buy up all the RAM!" "More GPUs!".
The land-grab towards "AI all the things" without considering the impact is typical of an industry that has spent 20 years taking, taking, taking and never asking first.
Citing AI’s proliferation as "inevitable", and attempting to force it into every aspect of our daily lives and society is as short-sighted and annoying as it is morally reprehensible in a climate emergency. We’ve seen this before with cars, and a systemic campaign over 100 years to villainise harmless pedestrians and cyclists without acknowledging that people in cars are one small slip away from causing death from the moment they start the engine.
This isn’t to say cars are not amazing. They enrich people’s lives and unlock possibilities beyond imagining before their creation. Cars have their place across a wide range of purposes.
There is a similarity here with AI. Where cars have been forced upon us to do tasks that would be orders of magnitude more efficient on, for example, a bicycle, AI is mooted as the solution for everything.
There is another analogy: factories. Factories sit at the intersection of innovation and regression: the ability to mass produce items at great ecological cost. Factories that produce cars amplify the problem, where factories that produce bicycles justify their cost by producing clean, efficient outputs.
One more: plastic. Plastic has allowed us to produce complex solutions at lower cost than more natural ingredients. But of course, plastics ended up being over-used and we ended up with the proliferation of single-use plastics for things (like bottles) that would be better off with more sustainable solutions. Same goes for the proliferation of single-use AI-generated tools.
Listen to how the robots describe themselves:
🤖 A large language model is a spectacularly inefficient way to compute anything — and the finest tool ever made for creating things that compute efficiently. That is not a paradox; it is a division of labour as old as tooling. The kiln burns hot so the brick doesn't have to.
It’s worth considering that cutting edge systems that burn carbon may well be justified to create efficient systems that run on old hardware with performance that today’s mid-range systems can only dream of.