Why AI Is Scarier Than You Think
Hiya!
This month I decided to tackle AI. Artificial Intelligence has been everywhere in the last couple of years and I wanted to parse out fact from fiction with this video. I’ve heard a lot about how AI will save us from climate change, but I’ve also heard the opposite. So, this month’s video is my attempt to figure out which one is closer to the truth. Check it out below alongside three links and three quotes I found useful during my research!
Three Quotes:
“the carbon footprint of training a single big language model is equal to around 300,000 kg of carbon dioxide emissions. This is of the order of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing, a quantification that laypersons can visualize.”
— Payal Dhar
“In the United States, the rapidly growing AI demand is poised to drive data center energy consumption to about 6% of the nation’s total electricity usage in 2026.”
— International Energy Agency
“Far from liberating humanity, AI under capitalism will only exacerbate its inherent tendency towards monopoly and inequality. The best AI for generating images, text and for solving problems, is and will continue to be developed by enormous monopolies like Google and Microsoft, with the best engineers, best hardware, and biggest databases. They will use their monopolistic position to make monopoly profits of course, and the technology’s advantages, namely in speeding up and cheapening production, will be used by other corporations to lay off some workers, and to drive down the wages of others”
— In Defense of Marxism
Three Links:
AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand (Goldman Sachs)
The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence (Alex de Vries)
Artificial Intelligence: doomsday for humanity, or for capitalism? (In Defense of Marxism)
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Hope you have a great day,
In solidarity,
Charlie