Watch Your Step
On
a recent weekend in the Santa Monica Mountains
of Southern California, I found myself in the
not unwelcome predicament of having lost the
trail. I had lucked into an underused corner of
state wilderness, on the slope of a small
mountain covered in sumac and yucca, and,
instead of backtracking, decided I should push
uphill. In short order, the slope became steep
enough (and my breathing hard enough) that I
decided I should probably turn back. As I made
my way down, though, I realized I was on a
steep, brambly, rocky slope, with no cell
reception. A turned ankle here, while not fatal,
would be a major inconvenience. I decided a
mantra would get me through. “Care, not speed,”
I told myself, as I walked mindfully downhill.
“Care, not speed.”
The
other thing that had been on my mind that day
was artificial intelligence. Since the November
2022 release of ChatGPT by OpenAI, AI has become
something of a sensation. Media organizations
have used it, to varying degrees; it’s come up
at work meetings at Earth Island; and I’ve
played around with it here and there myself. But
now we are on the cusp of an AI explosion, with
more and more uses of the technology becoming
apparent, and with more and more companies ready
to build the chips, data centers, and other
infrastructure needed to scale up. (Sam Altman,
the CEO of OpenAI, announced early this month
that he is looking to raise billions of dollars
for an AI chip venture that would include a “global
network of fabrication plants.”)
The
energy requirements of a fully realized, robust
artificial intelligence industry is hard to
quantify. In part, that’s because we don’t
really know the power demands right now, though
we know it is already straining
power grids in some places. Experts figure
it will be much
more than bitcoin mining and crypto
currency. That’s to say nothing of the water
demands of cooling, or the e-waste these centers
will produce. And yet we ought not discount AI
entirely from an environmental perspective.
After all, machine learning is helping
researchers better understand
freshwater ecosystems, the
culture of killer whales, and more.
What’s needed then, is the same approach that
got me down that mountain: moving with care in
mind, not speed. Alas, this is not the way of
Silicon Valley, at least not for now. We can
only hope the titans of AI can exercise caution,
and, where possible, encourage them to do
so.
Stay
safe out there, and watch your step.
|