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AI and the Environment: Weighing the Benefits with the Challenges
While Artificial Intelligence may hold the key to solving many environmental problems, the flip side is that AI consumes huge amount of computer processing power and leaves a large carbon footprint. Today’s AI models require training on large volumes of data. The training takes time and consumes massive amounts of electricity and can generate thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions.
John Cohn, IBM Fellow and research scientist, said that “we’re only starting to appreciate how energy-intensive current AI techniques are. If you consider how rapidly AI is growing, you can see that we’re heading in an unsustainable direction.”
Andrew Feldman, CEO and cofounder of Cerebras Systems, said that “CPUs, GPUs, and cloud servers were not designed for AI work. They have been repurposed for it, as a result, are less efficient than processors that were designed specifically for AI work.”
Despite AI’s energy efficiency problems, the results of AI can be extremely beneficial and have been applied toward improving the environment.
Climate modeling is one area where AI models can help us understand and better interact with the environment. For example, a UN project called Carbon Tracker is using AI to monitor satellite imagery to try to identify emissions from energy plants and to determine where air pollution is coming from. It can quantify the impact of both gas and coal powered plants.
AI is also being used to more accurately predict weather patterns than methods that have been available previously.
Maria Uriarte, professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, said that “AI is going to revolutionize this field. It’s becoming more and more important for everything that we do. It allows us to ask questions at a scale that we could not ask from below. There’s only so much that one can do [on the ground] … and then there are areas that are simply not accessible. The flyovers and the AI tools are going to allow us to study hurricanes and weather patterns in a whole different way. It’s super exciting.”
