Highlight of the week: “The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI”
“We’re actually seeing less and less disclosure,” De Vries says, as companies claim information about models harms their competitive advantage. “In terms of transparency, we’re actually going backward.”
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This insatiable hunger for power is slowing the transition to green energy. When the owner of two coal-fired power plants in Maryland filed plans to close last year, PJM asked them to keep running till at least 2028 to ensure grid reliability. Meanwhile, AI is also being used to actively increase fossil fuel production. Shell, for example, has aggressively deployed AI to find and produce deep-sea oil.
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Even before Google’s AI integration this spring, the average internet user’s digital activity generated 229 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. That means the world’s current internet use already accounts for about 40 percent of the per capita carbon budget needed to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
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In Michigan, for instance, which passed groundbreaking climate legislation last year, experts warn that data centers will prevent the state from achieving its goal of carbon-free energy by 2040.
Also good: “‘No specific purpose’: Experts on how Big Tech attempts to create demand for AI”
Abeba Birhane: There is no better example than current generative AI that showcases that these big corporations will produce AI and will put it out there, and they will force it onto the population until it becomes the norm. There is no specific purpose, there is no specific use case for generative AI. It’s just been a technology over the past couple of years that’s just floating around looking for purpose, looking for some kind of uptake.
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But one of the major differences is that there is this public support or public framing that presents AI as societal advancement — as progress that makes it seem like it’s in everybody’s interest to advance AI. So we have a much harder problem pushing back against Big Tech as opposed to the other big corporations that have played influential roles in the past.
Links
- “All About That Button, ’Bout That Button - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”
- “A Beloved Tech Blog Is Now Publishing AI Articles Under the Names of Its Old Human Staff”. “The site’s new owners have stolen her identity, replaced her photo with an AI-generated one, and have been publishing what appear to be AI-generated articles under her byline.”
- “Fix your union, fight for journalism, repair the world”. “Few workers remain unmoved once they see how their bosses’ lawyer talks about them while rejecting a modest improvement to working conditions.”
- “AI is effectively ‘useless’—and it’s created a ‘fake it till you make it’ bubble that could end in disaster, veteran market watcher warns”. ‘“AI still remains, I would argue, completely unproven. And fake it till you make it may work in Silicon Valley, but for the rest of us, I think once bitten twice shy may be more appropriate for AI,” he said. “If AI cannot be trusted…then AI is effectively, in my mind, useless.”’
- “The U.S. could need the equivalent of 40 new nuclear plants over the next 5 years, by one estimate—and power hogs crypto and cannabis are to blame”. “But there are a few lesser-known factors that could push America’s grid over the edge. The AI boom, the ongoing popularity of crypto mining, and legalized marijuana are all adding potential strain to the grid at a time when extreme weather is making it more vulnerable.”
- “A new way to prevent HIV delivers dramatic results in trial : Goats and Soda : NPR”. “The trial began on August 2021 and, so far, not a single woman who received the injections has contracted HIV.”
- “AI is not “democratizing creativity.” It’s doing the opposite”. “The AI companies, of course, do not much care if they take a wrecking ball to the already fragile creative economy.”
- “Intel is selling defective CPUs - Alderon Games”. “Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing. The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100%, indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail.”
- “The coming storm, part 2 - Charlie’s Diary”. Hoo, boy.
- ““GitHub” Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software - The Future Is Now”. “This isn’t the only GitHub feature that’s felt subtly worse in the past few years—the once-industry-leading status page no longer reports minor availability issues in an even vaguely timely manner; Actions runs randomly drop network connections to GitHub’s own APIs; hitting the merge button sometimes scrolls the page to the wrong position—but this is the first moment where it really hit me that GitHub’s probably not going to get better again from here.”
- “LLM vendors are incredibly bad at responding to security issues – Pivot to AI”