Contrary to popular belief, new research finds that the use of artificial intelligence has a minimal effect on global greenhouse gas emissions and may actually benefit the environment and the economy.
For their study, researchers from the University of Waterloo and the Georgia Institute of Technology combined data on the U.S. economy with estimates of AI use across industries to determine the environmental fallout if AI use continues its current trajectory.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 83 per cent of the U.S. economy is powered by petroleum, coal and natural gas, all of which contribute to climate change when burned. The study authors found that while power usage from AI in the U.S. equalled the energy consumption for all of Iceland, the amounts were not noticeable on a global or national scale.
"It is important to note that the increase in energy use is not going to be uniform. It's going to be felt more in the places where electricity is produced to power the data centres," said Dr. Juan Moreno-Cruz, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at Waterloo and Canada Research Chair in Energy Transitions. "If you look at that energy from the local perspective, that's a big deal because some places could see double the amount of electricity output and emissions. But at a larger scale, AI's use of energy won't be noticeable."
While this paper did not examine the effects on local economies where the data centres are located, the researchers found some encouraging results.
"For people who believe that the use of AI will be a major problem for the climate and think we should avoid it, we're offering a different perspective," Moreno-Cruz said. "The effects on climate are not that significant, and we can use AI to develop green technologies or to improve existing ones." To reach their conclusions, environmental economists Moreno-Cruz and Dr. Anthony Harding examined different sectors of an economy, the jobs within those sectors, and what portion of them could be done by AI.
Moreno-Cruz and Harding plan to repeat the study for other countries to measure the impacts of AI adoption in other parts of the world.
The paper, Watts and Botts: The Energy Implications of AI Adoption, appears in Environmental Research Letters.
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