AI & bees
Graham Pyke
Here’s a strange article re AI & bees, which has just appeared in Sustainability Matters. No author given. No link provided to ‘report’ or ‘study’ . Strange argument which seems to be that AI will require lots of energy, leading to further global warming, which would be bad news for bees. The Centre for AI, Trust & Governance at USyd is located in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences with no apparent focus on bees or biology. Similarly, the background of Dr Rob Nicholls, also at USyd, is interesting, but has no apparent connection with bees.
I don’t understand!
Can anyone help?
Graham
Prof Graham Pyke PhD FRSN
School of Natural Sciences
E8C-281, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
E:
graha...@mq.edu.au
T: +61 408 474 021
W: http://www.professorgrahamhpyke.com/
Partner with Prof Paul Ehrlich’s Stanford-based Millennium Alliance for Humanity & the Biosphere
Website: http://mahb.stanford.edu/
Douglas Yanega
Here’s a strange article re AI & bees, which has just appeared in Sustainability Matters. No author given. No link provided to ‘report’ or ‘study’ . Strange argument which seems to be that AI will require lots of energy, leading to further global warming, which would be bad news for bees. The Centre for AI, Trust & Governance at USyd is located in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences with no apparent focus on bees or biology. Similarly, the background of Dr Rob Nicholls, also at USyd, is interesting, but has no apparent connection with bees.
I don’t understand!
Briefly, it's one of the main arguments that opponents of AI use as a basis for opposition. Only supercomputers can run these massively interactive AI services; supercomputers take massive amounts of energy and also give off massive amounts of heat.
That much is clear.
What isn't clear is how MUCH extra heat this amounts to. It's a real phenomenon, but people are likely to be arguing about how much impact it has until we're all dead. Estimates run from 2% of global electricity consumption to "the ice caps will melt by next Tuesday". Reality is likely to be somewhere in between. As far as I can see, the negative impact models all assume that we will power all of our supercomputers with fossil fuels exclusively. If that isn't true, the worst-case scenarios shouldn't come into play. But, the way things look, fossil fuels and the people who profit from them are not giving up without a fight, and it could get even uglier than it is now.
TLDR: it's fossil fuels that are the bad guy in global warming, not AI in and of itself.
Peace,
-- Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 voicemail:951-827-8704 FaceBook: Doug Yanega (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's) https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
Flatbush Gardener
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