Artificial intelligence is often associated with ludicrous amounts of electricity, and therefore planet-heating emissions, expended to create nonsensical or misleading slop that is of meagre value to humanity.
Some AI advocates at a major UN climate summit are posing an alternative view, though – what if AI could help us solve, rather than worsen, the climate crisis?
The “AI for good” argument has been made repeatedly at the Cop30 talks in Belém, Brazil, with supporters arguing AI can be used to lower, rather than raise, emissions through a series of efficiencies that can spread through areas of our lives such as food, transport and energy that cause much of the pollution dangerously heating our planet.
Last week, a coalition of groups, UN bodies and the Brazilian government unveiled the AI Climate Institute, a new global initiative aimed at fostering AI “as a tool of empowerment” in developing countries to help them tackle environmental problems.
Proponents say the program, in time, will help educate countries on how to use AI in an array of ways to bring down emissions, such as better optimizing public transit, organizing agricultural systems and recalibrating the energy grid so that renewables are deployed at the right times.
Even weather forecasting, including the mapping of impending climate-driven disasters such as flooding and wildfires, can be improved in this way, according to Maria João Sousa, executive director, Climate Change AI, one of the groups behind the new initiative.
“Very few places in the world actually run numerical weather prediction models because numerical weather prediction models are very compute-intensive,” she said. “I definitely believe (AI) is a positive force to accelerate a lot of these things.”
AI can help monitor emissions, biodiversity and generally see what is going on, said Lorenzo Saa, chief sustainability officer at Clarity AI, who is also attending Cop30.
“You can really start looking at where the problem is,” he said. “Then you can predict, and the prediction is actually short-term and long-term. You can now predict floods in the next week, but you can actually figure out sea level rise and things like that.”
Saa admitted there are legitimate concerns about the governance of AI and its impact upon society but, on balance, the effect on the environment could be positive. In June, a report by the London School of Economics had an unexpectedly sunny estimate – AI could reduce global greenhouse gases by 3.2bn to 5.4bn tonnes in the next decade, even factoring in its vast energy consumption.
“People already make dumb decisions about energy, such as running air conditioning for too long,” Saa said. “How much of our phone has bad stuff for us? I think a lot. How many hours do we spend on Instagram?
“My view of this is that society is going to go in this direction. We need to think about how we are not destroying the planet with heating and we’re actually trying to make sure that…
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