One of the problems with science and technology is we don’t always understand the full consequences of what we discover until it’s too late. Coal power revolutionized the world and also defaced buildings with soot, damaged lungs, and altered how our atmosphere insulates our world.

Modern technology can have even more far-reaching implications. Blockchain offers new ways to store and hide information, generate currency, and commit crimes, and the tech required releases heat, consumes massive amounts of energy, and can cause people to lose fortunes with a one bad power surge or insecurely typed password.

Both coal and blockchain technology only have so many applications. Blockchain isn’t going to revolutionize refrigerator technology, and coal isn’t going to offer solutions to the automotive industry. These limitations are something of a blessing because they limit how much damage these technologies can do.

Not all advances are so compartmentalized. The internet has spanned the internet of things, and with this new “how do I connect my bathroom scale to wifi” reality is coming a second wave of revolution in artificial intelligence.

And according to a group of researchers published in Nature Climate Change and led by Lynn Kaack, this new revolution has mixed implications for our planet, and we need to take care to balance the scales so the good outweighs the bad. Per the press release: The paper divides the impacts of AI on greenhouse gas emissions into three categories: 1) Impacts from the computational energy and hardware used to develop, train, and run AI algorithms, 2) immediate impacts caused by the applications of AI – such as optimizing energy use in buildings (which decreases emissions) or accelerating fossil fuel exploration (which increases emissions), and 3) system-level impacts caused by the ways in which AI applications affect behavior patterns and society more broadly, such as via advertising systems and self-driving cars.

Put another way, every time you ask, “Why does my bathroom scale need batteries?”, we are expending energy in a new way that satiates our need for the best possible data, but that may not benefit the planet. At the same time, every time we ask, “Why does my AC unit need to be on the internet?”, we may be creating a reality where our house can adjust the temperature to conserve energy whenever we aren’t home.

One of the frustrating things is this is going to be driven by capitalism rather than climate science. If it is cheap and easy to track my face, custom advertising will be the norm, and those Sorel slippers Google ads are trying so hard to sell me won’t just follow me around the web, they will follow me around the real world as bus stop ads and billboards change to determinedly try and convince me I need warm, furry goodness next to my feet. And with every ad, a little more power is used, and a little more of my willpower to not buy slippers is worn down, until I cave and buy the slippers, increasing consumption and causing the ads to flip to the next item the algorithm has decided I need to buy.

I don’t want that future. I just want smart heating and cooling that tracks how our house is used and optimizes the heating and cooling to match room use.

We can only hope that the savings from smart temperature control will save enough money that their energy savings (and the energy savings of similar devices) will be more lucrative than smart ad-generated sales. It may be a false hope, but today I’m going to choose hope. 

And I’m not going to give in to the temptation to buy those slippers.

More Information

McGill University press release

“Aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation,” Lynn H. Kaack et al., 2022 June 9, Nature Climate Change