Green AI

I don't believe in “Green AI.”

It's not that it's impossible to do the things people are calling Green AI. Rather, it's that I'm not willing to call those things “green.”

Some of the most technologically capable people in the world see the environmental challenge that Large Language Models (LLMs) pose and think “I should make a green data center for this new project.” Then they buy offsets—a horror I'm not going to address here—or they actually invest money to make a new and allegedly green data center.

The thing is, humans didn't—and don't—really need AI. Human society worked fine without it. And those technologists could be solving preexisting problems that are still there but now perceived as someone else's problem.

New ‘green data centers’ for AI represent both the creation and the solution of a problem that didn't exist, leaving the world with as many probiems as before but also leaving the world with fewer technologists focused on the problems human society faces because those technologists are resting on their laurels—as if solving these problems—problems that needn't have existed—helped something other than their consciences.

AI and its associated effort has a big opportunity cost, stealing from the body of people who could solve others' problems. Myriad companies around the world are diverting effort from what they normally do to explore how not to have AI leave them behind. That effort and cost isn't solving the Climate Crisis either. It is plundering our best and brightest for noncritical problems.

Meanwhile Climate Change is killing us. We have real and immediate problems that LLM-style AI can't solve.

I say it can't because, as Chomsky so aptly puts it, it's a “plagiarism” engine. If, like me, you think Chomsky is right, then it's easy to conclude that if a solution was there to plagiarize, that solution could have already saved us. LLMs are not performing new and immediately trustable computation of the kind we need for Climate, they're just blurring and regurgitating already-existing, often even already-tried, thought.

Makework and waste and distraction are the key elements here, and none of that is helping. And, yes, enormous resource use makes it worse. But my point is that the resource spent isn't just on a problem we needn't have sought to solve, which would be bad enough, but addressing that steals human resources from problems we do need to solve.

There's a denialist belief that down the road things will pay off. But human civilization may not have that long to wait. The climate crisis is now. It will not wait. We need all hands on deck solving that, not distracted by a problem that, while intriguing, isn't yet mature enough to help.

Big Tech needs to solve existing problems, not make new ones, solve those new ones, and then collapse exhausted, leaving everyone else out here in the land of Little Or No Tech to solve the existing problems that were here in the first place, but without any help.

 

---

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post began as a post on Mastodon. I did light editing to re-host the essay here. Think of that one as a rough draft.

I created the graphic in Gimp, starting from a circle with a line through it that began as an SVG image that one of the chatbots at Abacus.ai made for me one day when I was exploring how to use it. The code for that is just:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100">
  <circle cx="50" cy="50" r="45" stroke="red" stroke-width="10" fill="none" />
  <line x1="15" y1="85" x2="85" y2="15" stroke="red" stroke-width="10" />
</svg>