The AI future is green

Imagine a world where technology helps us save the planet by making our economy more innovative and less wasteful. That’s not a Solarpunk Yogurt Commercial in Studio Ghibli style — it’s happening now, thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

A recent report from the Lisbon Council explains that despite the fears of increased demand for computer processing, AI also offers enormous benefits and energy savings that everyone — including the environmentally conscious — should consider.

Some environmentalists like to paint the future as a choice between a high-tech dystopia with pollution and a return to the pre-industrial past. This is a false choice. The degrowth theory is wrong for humans; its implementation would create mass human suffering. But we don’t have to resign ourselves to a high-tech-high-pollution future either. We can create a better environment with minimized trade-offs — and we can do it without passing any environmental legislation. By implementing AI rather than suppressing it with reactionary fervor, we can leverage the profitability of cost savings to achieve environmental gains. What’s more, we can do so with ever-shrinking input costs per unit of processing power.

How? Through intensification.

Get this: A car driving 60 miles an hour on the freeway nowadays emits fewer emissions than one idling in the driveway in the 1960s. Today, we produce hundreds of times more agricultural products on far less land than we did centuries prior, leaving more land to return to nature. American manufacturers create more products now than ever, with fewer industrial accidents. These are examples of a process called intensification: doing more with less to make more profits and reduce the unintended byproducts.

AI’s effect on the economy will likely bring the intensification phenomenon to many areas of the economy on a massive scale. It will produce tremendous savings, allowing us to do more with less and minimize wasteful expenditures to maximize profits.

One of AI’s core advantages is that it helps us understand how complex systems can change in dynamic environments. This applies in many interesting ways.

For the climate concerned, we could get better predictive power in climate and weather, thus better deployment of solar and wind in smart grids, and avoid natural disasters that could impact nuclear or natural gas power plants.

For everyday folks, AI also means the ability to understand how complex biological processes could interact with molecule combinations in pharmaceuticals. AI is reducing the cost of testing and development for many drugs, in the long run, resulting in products cheaper than they otherwise would be or creating more capital to pursue more diseases. It can also enable individualized medicine.

In materials science, AI can develop new metals, plastics, crystals, fibers, ceramics, and other products for applications by simulating material structures and predicting their behavior in the real world. This includes everything from better batteries to 2.2 million new kinds of crystals, the applications of which are not yet clear, though testing is ongoing.

These advances are great, but what about the cost in terms of power to fuel them? Won’t introducing AI create more demand for energy to run the processors? Yes, but intensification applies to the processors as well.

Most people know about Moore’s law: smaller chips mean faster and cheaper processing every year. Moore’s law maxed out a few years ago, but with the advent of parallel computing, we’ve continued to see massive growth in processing efficiency and power. For example, the energy efficiency of the fastest supercomputer went from 15 gigaflops per watt to 52, more than doubling in efficiency in two years, from 2021 to today.

And that isn’t even counting the next frontier in quantum computing and what that means. But suffice it to say, the data centers required now to fuel AI might someday look like the office building-sized computers dedicated to managing the Apollo missions. The same computing power now fits in our pockets. Someday, AI will as well.

Why settle for less when AI can help us achieve more efficiency, sustainability, and innovation? We don’t have to; we just have to choose AI as our ally, not our adversary, as we script the next chapter of our civilization. We must harness AI, not fear it, as we power towards a smarter, more efficient future of wealth, health, and prosperity.

David Rand is a Young Voices Contributor Featured in the American Thinker and the Mises Institute, a Podcast Philosopher at Human [Re]Action, Media, and Political Consultant. Find him at David-Rand.net and HumanReactionPod.com

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