Vijaya Ramachandran, Juzel Lloyd, and Seaver Wang at the Breakthrough Journal: Amongst the many energy-hungry technologies supporting modern society, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a major driver of energy demand. Data centers—the physical infrastructure enabling AI—are becoming larger, multiplying, and consuming more energy. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace are concerned that this will jeopardize decarbonization efforts and halt progress in the fight against climate change. AI can track melting icebergs or map deforestation, all the while consuming excessive amounts of carbon-intensive energy. But a closer look at the data shows that fears of AI’s insatiable appetite for energy may be unwarranted.
If we take reports at face value, we might conclude that AI-induced climate stress is all but inevitable. Niklas Sundberg, a board member of the nonprofit SustainableIT.org claims that a single query on ChatGPT generates 100 times the amount of carbon as a Google search. The International Energy Agency predicts that global energy demand from data centers, cryptocurrency, and AI will double by 2026. Even the U.S. government believes that AI will exert a major influence on society: the Department of Homeland Security announced the first 10 hires for a newly formed AI Corps, to provide advice on how best to use AI within the federal government. The Department of Energy has created a working group on the energy needs of data center infrastructure and is talking to utilities on how to meet energy demand. AI’s energy demands, according to the Bloomberg Energy Daily, are “a source of trepidation.”
Climate activists have raised the alarm. Greenpeace is calling for an official emissions tracking system to quantify AI’s environmental impacts. Climate researcher Sasha Luccioni proposes that governments restrict AI’s energy use, including by the use of AI “sobriety” measures or a carbon tax to deter electricity consumption. Vox warns that the benefits of the modern world—while substantial—come with tradeoffs and that none of these trade-offs is as important as energy: “As the world heats up toward increasingly dangerous temperatures, we need to conserve as much energy to lower the amount of climate-heating gasses we put into the air.” AI’s energy consumption has become yet another way to push back at a high-energy planet.
But a closer look reveals a more complex relationship between AI use and energy demand, energy efficiency, and decarbonization that isn’t all bad news. First, there is the question of whether businesses are using AI. With data from the US Census Bureau, Guy Berger at the Burning Glass Institute shows that the two most common applications of AI are marketing automation (2.5% of US businesses) and virtual agents/chat bots (1.9% of businesses). Only 1% of businesses have used large language models. Berger’s analysis also shows that labor-saving uses of AI are still quite small, with 1 out of every 4 businesses using AI to perform a few tasks that were previously carried out by humans. And the largest businesses are most likely to say that they are using AI but also the most likely to say that they don’t know if they are using AI. Of course, the use of AI will increase in the future, but for now, it seems mostly confined to a few sectors and activities.
More here.
