I’m absolutely sick to the back teeth about yet another company “upgrading” their product to be “enhanced” by AI!
The Luddites
In the UK there’s a description often incorrectly used to portray someone as anti-progress, or anti-machine. That’s done by calling them a Luddite, but the Luddites weren’t any of those things. Instead, the Luddites, quite correctly, realised that machines would be replacing people, and cost people their jobs and incomes.
They weren’t against progress. Instead, they were against progress that harmed people. Today, AI brings benefits, but the costs of those benefits dwarf the benefits themselves. Perhaps we need a new movement of Luddites to combat that?
Theft. Pure and simple
AI doesn’t imagine anything new. Instead, it steals from things written, or perhaps painted by people. It then simply reassembles bits of various such items in a different way. If you don’t believe me, go ask any AI to create a picture of a clock, but one where the hands run counter clockwise. It will fail, as it never encountered that before.
And yet, like the Dot Com bubble of the 90s, AI is steaming ahead, and is literally almost everywhere these days. AI steals the work done by human beings, and regurgitates it. It can often do so at lightning speed, but that in itself is stealing from people. You see, the vast data centres needed to make the AI capabilities available are using enormous amounts of electricity.
So much so that in the USA, older, coal-fired power stations are kept online, just to feed the AI machine’s limitless hunger. In fact, the International Energy Agency expects that by 2026, AI globally will consume as much electricity as all of Japan – a developed nation of 125 million people!
One planet
AI’s carbon footprint is huge, and rising. Scientists at MIT say that generating just a single image takes as much power as is needed to fully charge your phone from flat. That might not seem much, until you factor in the millions (billions?) of images generated daily.
Worse yet, Cornell University found that just training GPT-3, an AI model, caused 500 metric tons of CO2. Training a Large Language Model (LLM) like GPT-3 doesn’t only happen once, but is an on-going process, happening over and over.
By contrast, and economy flight from London to New York emits an estimated 0.67 tons of CO2 per passenger. At even 500 passengers (Boeing 787) the total CO2 emissions is still several hundred tons less than training a single LLM just once.
So many people are starting to realise that jetting off to exotic locations is no longer acceptable, and have either vastly reduced their flying, or have gone flight-free. However, most of them would happily use an AI, without a thought for the severe impact that has on the planet.
But carbon capture and storage!
The best way to combat a warming planet is not to produce CO2, then have to waste yet more CO2 trying to capture some of the CO2. The best, simplest, most effective way is to not produce the CO2 at all. MIT has a scathing view on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The headline reads Every Dollar Spent On This Climate Technology Is A Waste.
In Texas, they built (at the time) the world’s largest CCS plant. It was designed to store 500 000 tons of CO2 underground each year. In context, that’s equivalent to just 1 000 LLM training cycles.
Are you sure AI can’t ride a bicycle?
A Huawei engineer built a “self-driving” bicycle, so in a way, technically speaking, AI can move a bicycle. However, what that self-driving bike does is absolutely worlds apart from what you or I do when we ride our bikes.
See for yourself:
What’s this have to do with WillCycle?
Apart from the fact that we all live on the planet, and require a liveable habitat, you mean?
In practical terms, it means that – to the best of my knowledge – WillCycle will remain an extremely human site. AI will write none of my content. Every grammar mistake, and every typo will be proudly human. My content will be #AIfree. I’ve written about this before, and have even stronger views now.
In fact, I’d like YOU to start using the #AIfree hashtag for any content you create that is entirely AI-free. Alongside that, I’d like you to start supporting individuals and businesses who make the choice to remain proudly human, and #AIfree.
After all, AI cannot mount a bicycle, feel the breeze in it’s face, feel its muscles strain at the hills, have its heart enriched by the views, and wear a smile on its face as it coasts down a hill. AI can’t ride a bicycle.