Can Digital Tech Save Us From Itself?
Climate change, the energy crisis, and the role of AI and other digital tech
As Europe struggles with a serious energy crisis and climate change threats keep looming overhead, governments and companies embrace digital technologies as tools that should put us on a path towards a less energy hungry and more climate friendly future. But digital tech is not the silver bullet it is taken to be since it is itself highly problematic in terms of its environmental and climate impact. If it does not want to be part of the problem, significant change is needed towards green tech and we need to embark on a not so easy reflection on the sustainability of our way of life.
Things do not look good in Europe today. On top of a global climate crisis, a pandemic, and a war, we are confronted with a lack of affordable energy. An almost forgotten cold war has been heated up again; in the meantime, our homes have become a little colder. Prices soar. Bills hit hard. Governments, companies, and citizens suddenly wake up and feverishly look for alternatives. And as usual technology is called to the rescue. Technology will save us. Will it? Can it? Should it?
There is little doubt that advanced digital technologies can help us dealing with the climate and energy crisis. To name just a few examples: AI applications can make energy use more efficient and predict natural disasters and extreme weather events. Smart electricity grids and appliances can save a significant amount of energy. Deforestation and carbon emissions can be tracked. Blockchain technologies can also help with avoiding fraud in the carbon offsets industry. And cloud computing can streamline digital work and reduce road traffic.
But these technologies also use energy. For example, training a large model can use a lot of energy and emit massive amounts of carbon dioxide. According to a by now famous study, training large AI models for natural language processing (NLP) uses the equivalent of five times the lifetime emissions of an American car, including its manufacture. Yet NLP is not something exotic but is increasingly used in many areas of human activity. Think of OpenAI’s GTP models that can produce surprising results. AI is not the future; it is already long here and is used widely. While usually such models are used many times and for many tasks, and while not every model is as large or trained from scratch, it’s clear that there is a problem. AI has a climate and energy problem.
Data centres, so important for AI and cloud computing, are also known for their energy consumption. The storage and processing of data uses electricity, as does cooling the machines. Big tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba try to balance that by investing in green initiatives and decreasing their energy demand. But global power consumption by data centres is likely to increase. Due to a lot of efforts, so far it tends to remain the same, estimated at about 1% of global electricity. But how long still?
Mining cryptocurrencies also requires energy due to the required computer power and cooling systems. According to The New York Times, Bitcoin mining uses more energy than Finland. The numbers are controversial and as with AI, much depends on where the energy is coming from. Some is renewable energy. And some currencies such as Ethereum use less electricity than Bitcoin. Yet currently the damage is being done. Research suggests that Bicoin’s climate impact is greater than gold mining and comparable to the climate damage done by gasoline and beef production. In addition, studies show that Bitcoin also produces a lot of potentially toxic e-waste with its short-lived hardware.
This is also true for AI. As Kate Crawford has shown in her book The Atlas of AI. Digital tech is anything but immaterial. Our tech devices are material and have been produced using energy and natural resources such as lithium, which needs to be mined. This causes environmental damage, next to ethical and social problems due to the human labour involved: surveillance, illness, discrimination. Digital tech is not just about software but also about hardware, infrastructure, energy, supply chains, waste, social relations, ecosystems, and ultimately the planet. It may look clean, safe, and comfortable; in fact, it is deeply political and has its dirty and dark sides.
Of course we can and must use digital tech to solve our climate and energy problems. We need smarter and more economical ways of dealing with energy. Digital technologies can be part of creating that greener future. But unless we significantly reduce their carbon and energy footprint, the balance is unlikely to turn out sufficiently positive. We need energy friendly tech, green tech, tech for climate. This requires substantial changes in the way we develop, use, and regulate tech. If digital tech remains as it is, it cannot save the planet from itself.
Effectively and strategically combining technology policy, energy policy, and environmental policy is no longer optional. Time is up. We urgently need vision and leadership in this area. Creating pathways towards a green technological future should be Chefsache. The European Green Deal proposed by the European Commission is a good start, but is not ambitious enough. This is not just about protecting the environment. It is also about the future of Europe and its citizens. And ultimately the future of the planet. The current situation, however challenging it is, is a chance for Europe to lead.
Beyond that, we need to question the technological fix logic itself. The paradox that tech is supposed to save us from tech is not coincidental. It is part of the modern condition. We keep using tech in the hope that it will save us. That it will solve our problems, that it will make life easier, that it will deal with our vulnerabilities. But tech itself creates its own problems and new dependencies and risks. We end up with vicious circle. More tech creates more problems, which then — or so we believe — requires more tech. This is how we ended up with what some call the Anthropocene.
There is only one way to break the circle and avoid the paradox: to consider the idea that tech is not always the solution and certainly not the only solution. For this we urgently need to engage in an inconvenient exercise: reflect on whether our way of life in Europe and in the West is still sustainable — if it ever was. The uneasy question is: Are we prepared to do with less and make more significant changes to our lifestyle? Can we even afford not to go into this direction? And is this already a rhetorical question?
Finally, if the footprint of digital technologies is currently not visible enough, we need to change the technologies in such a way that this too is remedied. Companies and their products will need to be more transparent about energy use and carbon footprint. Education will need to include the environmental, material, and political dimension of technology. Otherwise, we will keep believing in digital tech as the magical, clean, and easy solution, the ring that will fix it all. Today we are still bound by this ring. But it’s time to break the spell and face the new, less comfortable future that suddenly visits us as an unwelcome winter guest.
— — —
A German translation of this text was published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) on 3 January 2023 (link)
