‘Terrible’ AI has given tech an existential headache: Activist

Expertise corporations are ceaselessly selling new AI merchandise, however local weather activist Sage Lenier says AI is ineffective, unsustainable and has given the business an existential drawback.

“AI has no benefit to society,” she instructed AFP on the sidelines of the Internet Summit tech convention in Lisbon.

The CEOs who’ve develop into enraptured by a “useless” product class have smashed the concept of tech as a vital utility.

“And now they have an existential problem,” she mentioned.

Lenier first garnered consideration as a 19-year-old scholar in 2018 when she based and led a course on the University of California, Berkeley, titled “Solutions for a Sustainable & Just Future”.

She has mentioned college students like her have been sick of the form of local weather training that supplied no hope—she needed to give attention to the options not simply the issues.

Lots of joined the course at Berkeley through the years and finally a whole bunch extra on-line, and Lenier has since constructed a nonprofit round it and now hopes to launch a documentary sequence.

The California native, who now lives in New York, mentioned she was largely optimistic about tech.

However her local weather focus makes her an outsider on the Internet Summit—”I’ll keep coming if they want me to shout at them,” she mentioned.

Final yr, she instructed the gang: “Some of you could be considered directly responsible for architecting the ecological crisis.”

She implored tech bosses to embrace the circular economy, which depends on reusing and recycling quite than creating merchandise that find yourself being junked.

However one yr on, Microsoft, Google and others have unleashed an infinite stream of energy-gobbling AI merchandise.

They’ve rushed to reopen nuclear plants, pledged to construct many extra information facilities—and crashed by way of their local weather targets.

‘Waste of emissions’

But AI, Lenier mentioned, “has a million negatives”.

“It is terrible for the planet. It’s terrible for every community that you’re running data centers in. And it’s useless. I think it’s just a waste of emissions,” she mentioned.

She factors out that it was not at all times this manner within the tech sector.

“It was the only industry, at least in America, where for years and years they tried to portray themselves as clean, green and pro-future,” she mentioned.

“Invoice Gates has written a number of books on climate change.”

The CEOs actually need the picture, and succeeded in dodging the form of scrutiny placed on the style and automotive industries.

“Then the moment they got an opportunity, with AI, to increase shareholder returns… every single one of them slammed the red button,” she mentioned.

‘So dangerous so quick’

Though Lenier got here to prominence by focusing consideration on the options to the local weather disaster, she sees a bleak future coming inside a technology.

“Shit is going to get so bad so fast. The food chain is going to break. We will see mass malnourishment if not mass starvation,” she mentioned.

The power grid, too, will break down.

In opposition to this background, merchandise like vehicles and new garments are superfluous.

“You can’t have cars in the long term. It doesn’t matter if they’re electric or not. They’re unsustainable,” she mentioned.

“We can’t be producing 80 billion garments of clothing a year in a low carbon future.”

A yr in the past, she mentioned she may need argued that tech was one thing completely different.

“It’s a piece of our infrastructure, we built our societies around it,” she mentioned.

However with AI, “they’ve given themselves their own little fast fashion”.

© 2024 AFP