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.

 

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Author's Notes:

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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>

Losing Ground in the Environment

“a ‘ground’ is usually idealized as an infinite source or sink for charge, which can absorb an unlimited amount of current without changing its potential”
 — Wikipedia
   Ground (electricity)

There is a notion in electronic circuits of something called a “ground.” It takes its names from the ground we walk on, and the idea is basically that the ground, really the Earth itself, is so incredibly big that it contains an infinite number of electrons, the “stuff” of electricity. So if we ever need a source to draw electrons from, we can get them from the ground. If we ever need to get rid of some electrons, we can just pump them back into the ground.

It's for this reason that we have a “ground” pin in our electrical outlets, in hopes that rogue flows of electricity will make a beeline for the ground rather than flowing through our bodies. Plenty of room for more electrons in the ground.

What We Hold to Account

Another way of thinking about “ground” is to say it's something we don't have to account for.

Consider, for example, a tool for keeping track of your finances. Such programs keep track of several kinds of entities, but among them are typically things usually called something like an “income source” and an “expense category.”

An income source is as a place from which income arrives. When you say your employer is the source of your income, that's really all you need to know. It's not really consequential where the employer got the money. If you had to track such things, there would be no end to it. They might have gotten it from someone else. But where did they get it? It goes on and on.

Expenses are the same way. You pick an expense category like food and you tell the program you spent $20 on food. It doesn't really care what the food place did with the money. As far as it's concerned, you can spend as much as you want and that's the end of it. All gone into who-knows-where.

The point of an income source in an accounting program is to be an infinite source of money, a ground. The point of an expense category is to be an infinite sink of money, something to pour money down, again a ground.

We think of these as ways of accounting for stuff, but really they are ways of not accounting for things. Out of sight, out of mind. That's what grounds are for. They are a way of notating the idea that beyond this point, we just don't care.

“Europe was hitting up against nature's limits. They'd overfished their rivers, felled their great forests, and hunted their big game. When European conquerors stumbled upon the so-called New World, they thought they'd hit the jackpot. They saw in the Americas a kind of supersized Europe that would never run out of fish, trees, gold, fur, or any of that bounty. … The official story of our countries is a story of endless nature, wilderness to be devoured without limits.”

—Naomi Klein  

Infinite Self-Deception

Naomi Klein's excellent and insightful video “What's In a (Trump) Straw?” makes the important observation that people have been used to thinking about the world as infinite, when really it is not. In this case, it's not electrons we're talking about, however.

In her conceptualization, there is a kind of rough analog of income sources—the bounties we draw from the earth: fish and game, trees, and so on. And there is also an analog of expense categories—the various kinds of pollution we give Mother Earth in return: sewage, plastics, and air pollution of various kinds.

Stuff we never previously had to account for, because we had a belief that the world was so infinitely large that it would supply us with as much as we needed of whatever we wanted. And we deceived ourselves into believing it would gracefully accept in return as much crap, both literally and figuratively, as we wanted to throw back at it in return.

Shocking, But True

The Earth is still big enough that we haven't used up its capacity to act as an electrical ground.

But it is not big enough that we can pretend there are infinite trees to cut down, infinite fish to catch, or that there is infinite capacity to spill oil into the oceans or pump smoke from fossil fuels into the air.

As population has grown, we've reached our limits. We should have been paying better attention.

But at this point, the pleasant fiction offered by the “ground” metaphor, that there's some point in the world beyond which we don't have to account for these things, that things can be thought to go into or come from the ground as if by magic, is long past. Nature is holding us to account.

We must start caring about population growth and resource use. We should have been doing that all along. It's going to be a big change. It's not something we're used to doing. But there is no alternative.

We keep making more people, but we aren't making more planet and we're using up the one we have. That's a bad recipe. If we're going to survive, we need to get these things into balance.

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If you're looking for further reading, I highly recommend Naomi Klein's new book, On Fire.

No Halfway Measures on Climate

I have been frustrated over the failure of some Democrats to understand the urgency of the 12-year window. Some Democrats get it, others do not. But whether they get it or not, this is the issue that mankind faces, an issue that will determine all future history in dramatic ways.

This is not a time for compromise. The physics will not allow it. Better to fail trying than to give up the entire game by thinking it unwinnable, as Nancy Pelosi seems bent on doing. Shame on her. That is not leadership. Lately I look to Elizabeth Warren for leadership among the Democrats. She understands that sometimes you can't pick the timing or worry about appearances but must do what needs doing.

And addressing Climate needs doing. Climate Change is a cancer. It must be treated early and properly. If we wait too long, no treatment will be possible. There is nothing radical about an aggressive response to an existential threat to humanity. There is nothing moderate about a take-your-time or middle ground approach to the Climate Crisis.

Jay Inslee is right that we need a climate-change-only debate. There are some good policy proposals out there for discussion, including these:

• H.R. 9. Climate Action Now Act
  This bill requires the President to develop and update annually a plan for the United States to meet its nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
• H.R. 763. Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act of 2019
  This bill imposes a fee on the carbon content of fuels, including crude oil, natural gas, coal, or any other product derived from those fuels that will be used so as to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
• H.R. 3761. Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (OFF)
  This bill transitions away from fossil fuel sources of energy to clean energy sources (e.g., energy efficiency, energy conservation, and renewable energy).
• S.Res. 59. A resolution recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.
  This resolution calls for the creation of a Green New Deal.
• Beto For America. Taking On Our Greatest Threat: Climate Change
  A four-part framework to mobilize a historic $5 trillion over ten years, require net-zero emissions by 2050, and address the greatest threat we face.
• Inslee for America. America's Climate Mission
  Building a Just, Innovative and Inclusive Clean Energy Economy.
  Subsequent to publishing this article, Inslee announced a lot more specifics. To read his position paper on the “Evergreen Economy,” which he refers to as a refinement in detail to the abstract concept of a “Green New Deal,” click here.
• Warren for President
  Subsequent to publishing this article, Elizabeth Warren published Our Military Can Help Lead the Fight Against Climate Change and My Green Manufacturing Plan for America.
• Bernie Sanders Subsequent to publishing this article, Bernie Sanders came out with his Green New Deal which has been lauded as very ambitious. He also made a great presentation at the MSNBC/Georgetown climate event, September 19.

I have my own preferences and concerns, but we can't let the perfect be enemy of the good. We need to discuss all of them, respectfully. We need to collaborate among them, understand that each has good points that might be combined or borrowed from. We need to move ahead on as many of these as we can or we will not make the 2030 deadline set for us by physics.

I said it already, but it bears repeating: The physics part is not something we can compromise on. It's what we're given. Physics doesn't grade on the curve. It doesn't care about the complexities of politics. It doesn't award trophies for trying or meaning well. We will either take necessary action in the time allotted, or condemn our descendants to live forever with the unhappy consequences, assuming the happy case that human extinction is not one of those consequences. I recommend David Wallace-Wells' book The Uninhabitable Earth if you need a visualization of what such a future world might look like.

I'll close here with one more appeal to metaphor, from a recent tweet of mine:

Climate is a train out of control, accelerating. Delay lets it accelerate more. Biden wants to schedule serious braking for another day. Physics says no, that if we delay, the brakes won't later be strong enough to use at all.

Denial = Delay
Centrism = Delay
Delay = Catastrophe https://t.co/8vngZKNFqM

— Kent Pitman (@KentPitman) May 10, 2019

Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Article and comic image ("Gray Matters: Halfway Measures") copyright © 2019 by Kent M. Pitman. All Rights Reserved.

Included public domain Elephant image obtained from Wikimedia.

Included Donkey images, before modification for this use, was created by Steven Braeger, placed in public domain, and obtained by me from Wikimedia.

By the way, it was the utter maddening nature of this news story that drove me to write this piece: Exclusive: Presidential hopeful Biden looking for ‘middle ground’ climate policy.

Angry Ocean

She had forgotten the sound of the ocean, living now as she did inland from the unreliable cities, which daily faced a pounding that anyway was not the sound she yearned for.

There had been talk not so many years back of sea level rise, always expressed in millimeters, like the drip drip drip of a tub that wouldn't quite shut off. It had sounded gentle, even aggravatingly slow, like the sequel of a movie announced five years out that you're not sure you'll even live to see.

No one had said the water wouldn't just rise but come from every other angle, too—as deluges from the sky above, as floods rolling down from the mountains or as walls of water crashing in from an angry sea. The gentle, relaxing lapping of waves, and with it any sense that the ocean was ever even benevolent, had fallen away.

Why hadn't they said? OK, they said. But they didn't cry out, like you would if a tidal wave was coming fast. And this was really that—a tidal wave—just slowly, to be assembled in parts, like a jigsaw puzzle.

But unlike a jigsaw puzzle, there was no order to the pieces. Just a box full of leftovers, a chaos that was refuse of many once-orderly puzzles belonging to lots of people, and a prayer just to happen upon a couple of pieces that sort of fit.

The rain was pounding, but the weatherman didn't think it would flood too badly in the next few hours. So maybe this was a time to sleep and prepare for the onslaught anew. At least she was high up, away from the ocean.

But she missed the ocean, and she worried her memories of its once gentle nature might one day drown in a flood of too much reality.

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Author’s Notes:

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In early June 2014, my wife and I attended a writing retreat hosted by Cary Tennis at Le Santucce in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy with a dozen or so other writers and soon-to-be friends. Last Saturday, almost 5 years later, some of us tuned in for a virtual reunion, and of course we did some writing as part of it.

The prompt to which this was a response, was “She had forgotten the sound of the ocean.” As today is Earth Day, it seemed a good day for me to share the piece with others.

Passing of the Salmon

“I have some bad news,” the bartender tells me, just recently, in fact. I prepare myself for the worst. She’s getting to know me quite well and probably actually knows the things that matter to me, I realize.

I don’t drink, mind you, but I’m there several times a week. I drink diet coke and ask them to take their ahi tuna salad and substitute salmon. I’m pretty regular about that. It’s not typical bar food, I suppose, but it suits me.

I like salmon. I eat it a lot. I have a couple ounces for breakfast. And it’s a common thing for me to eat when I eat out.

“I have some bad news,” she says again, making sure she has my attention, and that I’m prepared. “They’re changing the menu. There’s not going to be any more salmon.”

I am stunned. I stare at her in anguish. It’s what she expected, and she seems sad. She knew this wouldn’t sit well. But I elaborate.

“The salmon were going away anyway,” I explain. “I always expected that. They’ll be extinct. And often when I eat salmon, I think, I’m really going to miss this. I just didn’t expect it so soon, and for this reason.”

There are still salmon in the world. That’s good at least. But she’s right that I’ll be sad when I come to the restaurant. Still, maybe it’s a wake-up call. Practice. The salmon aren’t quite gone, like the rest of the ecology. Climate change mostly, though we’re fishing out the oceans anyway, and not taking very good care of anything else.

I expect mankind itself to go extinct inside of 20 years. It’s not going to be pretty. Maybe if we started saying it out loud now, it would hit us in time to do something.

I’m going to miss the salmon, when it happens for real.

And soon after that, humanity itself.

Though whatever’s left probably won’t miss us.

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Author's Note: I attended a Cary Tennis writing workshop this last weekend. This is one of the stories I wrote. The writing prompt was:
Visualize something you really love. Use the phrase “I'm going to miss you.”

Postscript: In August 2022, this article appeared: What’s Behind Chinook and Chum Salmon Declines in Alaska?. In March 2023, another appeared: California cancels salmon fishing season as population dwindles due to drought: “It's devastating”. I feel like my 20-year timeline is on track, and not just because of these stories. It's very upsetting.

Recycling Theater

I'm very worried about the environment and Climate Change, and am always trying to think of useful things we could do to effect useful change. This problem is getting worse as we speak, and we really need some serious public dialog on the matter.

Some suggestions about fixing the environment are technical in nature, some are social. It's in my nature to go meta once in a while, so here's a somewhat radical proposal to help break you out of your weekend stupor.

Perhaps we should make it illegal to have places at which people can individually drive to drop off their recycling. That is, perhaps we should disallow personal recycling.

I'll skip right past whining about the whole notion of driving somewhere to be earth-friendly at the end-location. That's an issue, too, but it's “in the noise” for my purposes here. Let's cut straight to the chase:

It's really nice that there are scattered people who care about recycling, but their individual actions are not enough to save everyone. “Well, every little bit helps,” I hear you complain. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

You see, I'm guessing that most of us are busy people who have only finite time. And in some cases that extra effort consumes the available free time one has. So if we told these very ambitious, very ecology-conscious people they were not allowed to solve problems only for themselves, it might leave them frustrated but I'm guessing they would vent that frustration trying to get the problem solved for everyone, like they should have originally. A town with 10% of its residents recycling is not really helping things. But the same town with 10% of its residents on the phone regularly to the city saying “why can't I recycle in this town?” might end up with 100% of its residents recycling.

Part of the reason we're in the ecological mess we're in is the failure of people to see the interrelationships between elements of the system. We reason about independent questions as if they do not relate to one another. In that light, personal recycling seems an unambiguous good because its cost on the rest of the system is not analyzed. But if the activity is taken in the context of a larger system, it isn't cost-free.

Yes, what I'm suggesting amounts to robbing the energetic, self-satisfied folks among us (which might sometimes include me, so don't get all huffy) of the smug satisfaction of doing it themselves and feeling superior to the ones who didn't. Tell them they're not allowed to do it that way in order to spur them to find better answers, a system that works for everyone, not just for themselves. We need answers that work for everyone, even busy or lazy or oblivious people. All of society has to be involved.

It's true that on this I don't really think anyone will take the part about making it a law seriously. But that doesn't mean I'm not serious when I suggest that it's a bad idea to rely on people to be super-ethical or super-energetic as the solution to a big problem like this. This is mostly just a thought exercise, to urge people to reconsider how they spend their time and to think differently about which actions are productive. The part about making it a law was just to wake you up and think maybe I was talking to you. Which I am. One oughtn't need a public law in order to ask oneself the question: “Does my spending my time doing cute little self-congratulatory things keep me from doing something that would have more impact?”

Some actions may feel productive and give us a sense of self-satisfaction while really doing little or nothing. In his book Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theater” to refer to “countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.” When dealing with the ecology, let's not find ourselves needing a term like “Recycling Theater,” describing countermeasures to mounting environmental degradation intended to provide the feeling of having improved environmental quality while doing little or nothing to actually improve the environment.

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Originally published Nov 9, 2008 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, environment, recycling, recycle, public policy, environmental policy, suggestion, thought, law

If you don't want this post to go to waste,
please “share” it so it will be re-read by others.
It's the “green” thing to do.

Also, the logo above was intended to be a little attention-grabbing. But my wife said I would attract more attention at Open Salon with pictures of “doggies and kitties” so here's my alternative graphic: