Valuing AI over the poor
While we preach energy conservation, we pour terawatts into AI, bitcoin
If you want to know why the world increasingly tunes out America’s — and the West’s — nonstop moral haranguing about the climate, consider this:
While we pressure international agencies to deny funding for African nations to build affordable power plants —the kind that operate off oil or coal — in the name of “saving the planet,” we now dedicate over 1 percent of global energy use to powering the computers running the programs that create so-called “Artificial Intelligence.”
AI relies on massive server clusters to run its calculations, and those servers use up a lot of energy.
A new report shows that by 2025, AI servers could be using as much as 85.4 terawatt-hours of energy per year. This is about the same amount of energy as used by entire nations, like The Netherlands or Sweden.
And while bitcoin has taken a bit of a reputational hit of late, the West — along with China — still dedicates 127 terawatt-hours to generating the long security keys that underpin the digital currency platforms (that turn out to be not so secure after all).
In the meantime, many families in places like Chad, Zaire and Rwanda still cook their meals over wood fires because the West blocks their governments from securing necessary loans to construct the kind of power plants that could bring electricity to outlying villages.
The level of hypocrisy in such a neo-colonial enterprise is difficult to comprehend.
Maybe we can borrow some phraseology from the woke and term it Institutionalized Hypocrisy?
Clearly, Western elites don’t truly view climate change as an apocalyptic crisis.
If they did, they wouldn’t be fast-tracking deployment of AI data centers and processors that promise to use more energy than half of Africa uses combined.
And they wouldn’t be championing bitcoin — which not only uses 30 percent more electricity now than AI is projected to use in three years — but is increasingly leveraged by criminal operations to mask their financial tracks and avoid taxation, particularly of human trafficking.
Besides, can anyone seriously argue that AI and bitcoin are anything other than bright, shiny baubles for rich elites to play around with? (Anyone not invested, financially or emotionally, in said enterprises, that is?)
While Berlin recently paid South Africa $800 million to stop using coal, Germany also increased its own importation of South African coal by eightfold to make up for shortfalls of natural gas from Russia resulting from the Ukrainian invasion.
And what, exactly, does AI promise to give us in exchange for pouring an ever-greater share of the global energy supply into its endless maw?
Why, it can predict what we want to buy next on Amazon! It can write homework assignments for our children, saving them hours of actually learning! Or, wait, it gets better ... AI can replace HUMAN BEINGS in many jobs!
For this “progress,” huge swaths of the world’s brown and black people are to be kept in darkness?
You know, saving the planet.
Except we’re clearly not focused on actually reducing energy usage to lower carbon emissions.
What we are focused on is maintaining Western hegemony over the rest of the world — but our modern, progressive colonialists are too embarrassed to admit as much, and so we have to create a whole new religion to give cover to our political power grab.
A recent report that the United States lacks the electrical grid capacity necessary if federal goals for electric vehicle adoption are to be met or even partially met was greeted with angry denunciations from the so-called green sector — but the study likely undersold the shortfall because it didn’t account for the now-predicted growth in AI and bitcoin computer clusters.
To be fair, of course, the long-predicted electric vehicle “boom” is already petering out, with Germany backpedaling on its mandates, and Ford and GM both scaling back their planned production of EVs since tens of thousands sit unsold — and unwanted — on dealer lots.
Still, the unavoidable conclusion is that Western elites are talking out both sides of their mouths — claiming we need electric vehicles to save the planet, but then promoting AI and (to a lesser extent) bitcoin, which siphon away vast amounts of electricity that will not be available to charge EVs.
And, of course, out of sight and out of mind, at least in the gilded halls of government in North American and Western Europe, the poor of Africa and Southeast Asia continue to cook dinner over wood, sod and even dung so that Western elites can smugly reassure themselves that they’re “saving the planet.”
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