ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: BIG COMPUTING: Artificial intelligence may offer solutions to the climate

crisis, but the vast amount of energy needed to power AI systems makes the story more complicated.
Article Margin Notes
1. To some, artificial intelligence (AI) is a silver bullet--a solution to all
of our societal and environmental woes. We're approaching the
era of self-driving cars, AI-assisted medical diagnoses, AI-managed
food systems and mass cloud computing; all of this amid what the
United Nations calls the 'defining issue of our time'--the global
climate crisis. Here, too, AI offers some solutions.

2. AI is set to improve the efficiency of technologies that power the

grid, hastening the transition to low-carbon energy sources such as
wind and solar. Machine-learning solutions can improve
forecasting of supply and demand, enabling electricity plants to
produce the right amount of power for a given area. Automated
control of generators and infrastructure using AI systems can help
to control energy outputs, or produce algorithms that calculate
how much energy can be stored. Moreover, AI and machine
learning are being used to improve climate modelling.

3. However, there are increasing signs that AI systems and the cloud
computing that facilitates them need to clean up their own energy
bills. In 2019, researchers at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst explored the carbon emissions released when building
and training natural processing language (NLP) models--AI systems
that process human language. By converting the energy
consumption in kilowatts to equivalent C[O.sub.2] emissions, they
showed that training a single NLP model emitted 300,000kg of
C[O.sub.2], equivalent to 125 round-trip flights between New York
and Beijing.

4. Roel Dobbe, AI researcher at Delft University of Technology and

formerly at the AI Now Institute, explains that the carbon-
intensiveness of many AI systems is driven by a belief in the power
of what's known as 'big compute'. 'In the AI field, there is a
dominant but false belief that "bigger is better", and that
assumption drives the use of increased computation and bigger
data sets in the development of AI models,' he says. As AI relies on
more computational power, its carbon footprint increases.

5. AI and big computing are on an exponential trajectory,' he adds. In

2018, OpenAI reported that 'since 2012, the amount of compute
used to train the largest AI systems has doubled every 3.4
months'. That equates to a 300,000-fold increase in the amount of
computing power used in AI training runs. 'It's not just that you
train these AI systems once: companies obtain data to keep
 training their AI systems, making some very carbon intensive,' says
Dobbe. What's more, the speed of new 5G networks will drive the
continued development of AI systems. 5G networks have latency
figures (the amount of time it takes for a packet of data to get
from one designated point to another) of three milliseconds--three
times faster than the time taken for visual stimuli to travel from
the human eye to the brain.

6. Last year, a report identified that the broader tech sector will
contribute 3-3.6 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by
the end of 2020. A critical barrier to bringing down these
emissions is transparency. Currently, cloud-computing players--
such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and
Microsoft Azure--aren't required to disclose the energy use of data
storage centres. This makes it difficult for the millions of
companies and countless industries who use cloud computing to
fully assess their own digital-carbon footprints. 'Consumers need
more insight into how their use of cloud computing affects their
sustainability. The big players should provide this information in
numerical form to their customers,' says Dobbe. He's perplexed as
to why disclosure isn't already mandated: "The hardware is
already running; we know how many operations various
algorithms need to run. It's mostly a matter of political will and
consumer awareness to enforce transparency.'

7. AI researchers at Cornell University in New York have taken

matters into their own hands, developing an algorithm that shows
how much equivalent C[O.sub.2] is emitted as a result of
computing and machine-learning models. The researchers would
like to see their 'Energy Usage Reports' become widely used as
part of a standard accountability process to improve the
environmental awareness of big computing.

8. There is also the fact that AI and big compute are still being used
to prop up fossil fuels. Last year, Amazon launched a programme
called Predicting the Next Oil Field in Seconds with Machine
Learning, while Microsoft held an event called Empowering Oil &
Gas with AI. 'On the one hand, tech companies are investing in
renewable energy and trying to make their data centres more
efficient. Their investment in oil and gas runs contradictory to this,'
says Dobbe. 'When they're selling their AI capabilities to oil and
gas players, they're actively trying to make non-renewables a more
attractive investment prospect. AI should be used more
responsibly, and for the global good.'
Reference

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: BIG COMPUTING: Artificial intelligence may offer solutions to the climate
crisis, but the vast amount of energy needed to power AI systems makes the story more complicated.
(2020, November). Geographical, 92(11), 6+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A645315652/CIC?
u=conestoga&sid=CIC&xid=a7c2dc1c