Conversation

#AI #GenerativeAI #ClimateChange #CarbonEmissions #FossilFuels: "So the AI companies are exacerbating the climate crisis in at least three ways:

- Selling tools to help oil companies AI tools to accelerate fossil fuel extraction.

- Running data centers that require ~10x the amount of electricity as Google

- Giving fossil fuel companies a reason—or an excuse—to build more power plants.

This makes it all the more pressing to deflate each of those bubbles. It’s a lot harder, after all, to decommission infrastructure than it is to not build it in the first place. And it should go without saying that, amid an accelerating climate crisis, we do not need to increase our energy use tenfold so that every tech giant can compete to shoddily automate call center and illustration jobs, inundate search results with tips for how to eat rocks safely, and load up our social feeds with dubious deepfakes.

The question is, how? The recent past offers one possible route. This isn’t the first time that the tech giants have been made to face scrutiny over their hypocritical climate policies—back in 2018, I wrote about the many ways that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon were selling AI and automation tools to fossil fuel companies. (The generative AI boom is like deja vu on steroids in this regard.) As the revelations of climate hypocrisy mounted, workers at those companies began public-facing pressure campaigns to get their employers to make good on their own climate promises. They made a climate-focused shareholder resolution, staged a public protest, and formed groups like the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The workers won concessions—Google said it would stop selling certain AI tools to oil companies, and Amazon made an elaborate if unenforceable Climate Pledge—even if they were far from what’s needed."

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-revitalizing-the-fossil-fuels