Artificial intelligence is a danger to humanity. I have almost no fear of it taking over the world as some do because we have already imagined that reality and taken so many steps to prevent that, that it is not only physically impossible but also people have always been ready to pull the plug. The real issue I have with AI is its very large energy consumption to do tasks that a regular human could do for essentially nothing.
AI not only consumes 10 times as much energy to produce an answer then a regular google search but it also is already increased the amount of power consumed by data centers owned by google in the past calendar year jumped nearly 50% mostly because of AI coming more into the mainstream but also because of the fact that data centers processing versus electricity consumed has stopped making meaningful efficiency gains that mean that more power is needed to keep up with our insatiable demand on these server farms. Electricity isn’t even the only thing that this enterprise is consuming though. In areas of the country that are overcome by drought AI is using water to cool itself. The data centers where AI exists in the physical world need a lot of water to keep cool. According to National Geographic around 50 messages back and forth with a chatbot cause around a liter of water to be completely evaporated. Many of the places where these server farms that need a lot of water are housed are also drought prone areas in the west of the US. Using water that could be used for consumption and growth of real food instead of just entertaining us would be the way it should be.
AI also doesn’t give credit for any of the answers that it spits out to people’s queries. The inability to check where it got its information from or how it came to a particular conclusion is practically impossible and the fact that people tend to accept results from a machine as fact more than a person is a dangerous thing to exist. The way that the machine learning algorithms that write essays and emails for people were created was essentially by stealing books and essays from the internet including e-books. These authors will never get credit for their contribution to these chatbots in monetary or simply spoken ways.
The issues with AI can also be extended to the crypto industry that has done nothing productive for the world. The people that are using it will continue to be drug dealers that want to pay for shipments that go across continents and want an untraceable way to pay. It also uses a vast amount of energy. The crypto tycoons have shown themselves to be incapable of not committing fraud, as the fall of FTX shows. These people who are committing fraud also get lighter prison sentences as it is a white collar crime. Instead of going to jail for life as many Black and Brown people did during the war on drugs, they will be able to get out on good behavior after only a few years.
The whole industry is based on people who are already rich and want to get richer. The working class doesn’t benefit from this “innovation” and should boycott it. We don’t need yet another thing that destroys our spaceship earth. We don’t need to add to the riches wallets. We don’t need to create new forms of currency. We don’t need AI to write our emails and essays for us. We don’t need AI or crypto, and getting rid of them will be a net positive on society.
