Why AI Is Scarier Than You Think

In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I examine how Artificial Intelligence (AI for short) could worsen climate change. Specifically, I look at AI's water and energy demands and how those resource demands rise exponentially as AI becomes more advanced.

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Some visuals courtesy of Getty Images
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
1:14 - What is AI?
4:07 - What Does AI Mean for the Planet?
11:04 - AI Under Capitalism
16:48 - Can AI Be Used for the Better?
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Check out other Climate YouTubers:

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#ai #socialism #climatechange

[OurChangingClimate]

- What are your thoughts on AI? Do you think its useful? Should we be banning it?

[docopoper]

As an AI post-doctoral researcher in a university, one of the big problems we have building open source models owned by the public is that the closed source models are all built on stolen data and incredibly unethical services like Mechanical Turk. The only reason they're getting away with having stolen stuff is because they're closed source and hiding it. If their models were open source they'd get sued out of existence. It currently feels like a losing race developing AI for everybody, but I do not want to live in a world of megacorps that control all the AI, so I refuse to work for these private companies.

[rereremasutaa]

Comment for the algorithm, keep the channel going! You were one of the channels that introduced me to socialism

[josefagomezschmeisser]

In a news video of my country about the “gibli trend” I commented about the emissions and water usage and some people responded with the typical “ u r watching this video on a phone” and “this video wasted more water” and I don’t know how to get through people, I guess I’ll just have to memorize the numbers for now, but most of people in my country doesn’t even understand what data centers are. We need more videos like yours explaining how bad is this to environment and people.

[JessicaD.Morford]

The book Hidden Codex of Wealth by Dorian Caine feels forbidden for a reason—it reveals financial strategies the average person isn't meant to learn. I get why it's controversial now.

[TechGoblin]

I'm part of a solarpunk group of programmers called Solarcoders and we're looking to use software to empower workers and communities to take climate action and have more ethical production. Hopefully in the future things will be at a point where AI could be used to make the world a better place rather than contributing to climate catastrophe.

[airisakura]

We should stop blaming the tech and start questioning the power structures behind it. AI can be a force for good, but not when it’s monopolized by those working against the public good.

[SvalbardSleeperDistrict]

Yanis Varoufakis has suggested that today's tech tools (including AI) would result in completely different outcomes for planning economy than what the Soviets had, killing the myth of inefficiency of central planning. I tend to gravitate towards that opinion as well. It would be very interesting to see local/community experiments involving AI for decentralised economies. If they work well, that could be a great tool for promoting that "new socialism" in opposition to the unstable and inefficient "market-driven" operations.

[GlobeHackers]

As long as human supremicism is the driver, even your best case won't bring us to a culture fit for posterity.

[jammin]

I originally went to study AI at university 10 years ago back before most people knew what it was. I knew it would change the world and I wanted to try make sure it was for the better.
I remember a class mate told me sarcastically, "Oh yeah, I'm totally in this degree to help people and not for the money". I fear that is the attitude of most people in the field.

(Un)fortunately, I dropped out and pursued being a circus artist and now I'm wanting to be a Buddhist Monastic - living in a simple life in community, learning to be happy and fulfilled with what I have, and learning to transform suffering - because that is for sure going to be the most useful skill in decades to come.

[wiredz]

I remember a time when openai claimed AI would allow people to focus on being creative rather than skilled. Kind of ironic that the first area threatened by AI is the artistic fields, the original creative industry.

[severdislike]

Man am I glad that folks like you are around OCC. Yeah it feels like screaming into the void vs the century of petro-dollar cultural and educational poisoning but, much like leaded gas, they were lying and knew the harm being done then and absolutely know it now. Never been any action that worked but direct action, and people shouting to get folks moving is necessary.

[BB-tetc]

I've seen comments from people who are seemingly addicted to AI image generation because of the thrill of typing in a prompt and building anticipation while the timer clicks down and then the result displays. They described it like its a slot machine, with lots of disposable bad output but the occasional "win". This doesn't bode well for any of us.

[supasphoje]

FYI, it's great you are honest that you used Generatie AI images and did it without understanding the consequences, but I only hope you can find/have found an actual artist to produce your thumbnails (if you haven't already), even have them go back and create new thumbnails for past videos that still use Gen AI images. The overall video does a great job summarising the consequences of Gen AI's saturation in the corporate environment

[TheXiconhoca]

As ever, a very poignant and well-done video. As a traditional comics and visual artist, one thing that was just mentioned in passing, deserves a little more attention, in my opinion:

Just WHAT "generative" Ai is trained on. Billions and billions of actual images, text, movies, music and so on. Unique pieces. Art.

And all of that is used to "train" (STEAL) the AI modules into "generating" something "new", without crediting, or compensating, the actual creators and owners of the original art. Not only is it detrimental to our planet, not only is it killing our jobs, it is trivializing the very expression of Humanity, that is Art, into regurgitated Ghibli images or whatever. It is awful.

[deawinter]

😬 SAP’s AI applications are actually a fairly good example of the pitfalls of using AI for planning distributions as it’s very easy for the AI to inherit all the same blind spots and priorities as its designers, thus making plans that are either impossible because of factors the AI wasn’t taught or optimizes by pushing a limiting factor - usually human labor - towards a limit. Eventually decisions and negotiations will need to happen between people to decide how human wellbeing should be weighted in these systems. Those conversations are already happening and they are DEEPLY dystopian.

[chummer]

AI will tell us what scientists have been saying for decades. We will then ignore AI, too.

[shaneelliott]

Well, we destroyed our biosphere, but hey, the number went up and isn't that all that matters

[glowing_kitty]

Agree with the point about AI in capitalism (or let’s say in our current “profit at all costs” capitalism) being the main issue, not the tech itself. Some important points that you didn’t bring up however:
- AI doesn’t need server farms with inefficient GPUs. There are plenty of AI models which are free / open source and which can run on modern laptops that are designed to be power efficient (because they have to be efficient, unlike a gpu in a server center that is 24/7 connected to power and massive cooling). And distributed training of ai models is also possible (and needs more attention)
- people shouldn’t believe that AI is generally bad, but instead take the frustration about the negative aspects and put that frustration into creative action and build better projects that use AI for good purpose, in products designed to be as useful and awesome to use for the average person, instead of being designed to extract as much profit as possible or only help companies.
Ai is a tool that can be used for terrible things and for amazing and beautiful things. It’s up to us how we implement it. And nowadays, with ai assisted coding and ai support for all kinds of fields, we are getting to a point where everyone can build everything. Now we only need more projects that instead of helping people to build trash even faster, to instead build great projects and more impactful activism and communities even better and easier.

[metalcascade]

The older I get the more respect I have for James Connolly, the man was far ahead of his time; he also understood that economic freedom was just as important as political freedom was for Ireland. It's a pity it went the way it did for him, still he did make a difference, it has to give you some hope. We really need hope going forward.