Among early challenges of AI, how NOT to use it

Energy to power AI concerns many, but avoiding it is increasingly difficult

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(Mark Hulbert, an author and longtime investment columnist, is the founder of the Hulbert Financial Digest; his Hulbert Ratings audits investment newsletter returns.)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — There are compelling reasons to limit your use of artificial intelligence, even if you believe it’s the wave of the future.

That’s because it could take as long as a decade for new nuclear plants to be built that could even begin to satisfy the massive energy demand of AI’s data centers. In the meantime, much of that growing demand will come from increasingly dirty fossil fuel sources which, unlike nuclear power, produce huge greenhouse gas emissions. During this transition period it will be especially important to avoid frivolous uses of AI—which, as I discussed two weeks ago, require a surprising amount of energy.

As Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, recently put it: “Even as tech companies tout plans for nuclear power, they’ll actually be relying largely on fossil fuels, keeping coal plants open, and even building new natural gas plants that could stay open for decades. AI and nuclear could genuinely help each other grow, but the reality is that the growth could be much slower than headlines suggest.”

It’s getting harder to avoid frivolous AI

Even as the need to avoid frivolous uses of AI is becoming more compelling, however, it also is becoming harder to do so. That’s because AI tools are increasingly becoming the default on your phone and your computer. So you may not even know it when you’re using AI. Regardless, unless you turn those defaults off, you are contributing to AI’s increasingly heavy reliance on dirty fossil fuels.