I was struck this week by three stories worth sharing, as they reveal the literal cracks in the foundations of our civilization and the first flawed bricks of new foundations being set. So here goes!
The Foundations Under Our Feet Are Shifting
That sounds like hyperbole, but it turns out the multiple heatwaves in London are drying out the clay and literally shifting the foundations of tens of thousands of homes. And, as described in Bloomberg, by the 2030s, this subsidence could affect “nearly all properties in most of London.”
We often think of Miami or Venice when thinking about cities that might be lost to climate change; imagine hundreds of thousands of folks having to vacate their homes and apartment towers in London after multiple buildings collapsed. Perhaps those still standing but deemed too risky to inhabit would end up as informal slums, repopulated with immigrants, who in the perpetual crisis state the UK would be grappling with would have become all but ignored (or worse, targeted for deportation). I know this sounds like the setting for a dystopian climate film, but then again, with 2-4 million properties across the UK projected to be affected by subsidence by 2070 depending on the climate trajectory (medium or high, respectively), it could turn out to be horrifically prescient.
Meanwhile in China, AI is taking over
I admit I try to ignore artificial intelligence day to day. Other than its embeddedness in Google searches, I don’t utilize it directly (although I’m sure it’s guiding me all the time through Internet tracking and many other ways I’m not even aware of). But this interactive story from The New York Times really got to me. It’s a walk through all the ways AI has already started to embed itself in life in China. The article chronicles taking a driverless taxi, using AI vending machines and trash cans, going to a convenience store run by a robot proprietor (clearly just in its novelty stage as its failure reveals), and even being publicly shamed for jaywalking—all of which are disturbing in different ways. I watch enough sci-fi to be able to imagine what all these could lead to—Minority Report certainly comes to mind, where people are constantly tracked and marketed to through ongoing retinal scans (see the clip below)—but to see the first blocks being placed is certainly creepy.
The Power Needed To Run This Future
And even if that doesn’t sound terrible but kind of fun (I admit I didn’t mention the cute AI-driven pets who are little fuzzy chatbot friends—although are probably as manipulative as their virtual brethren) the power demand for this future is horrifying. A recent analysis of 99 data centers planned in the U.S. found that they’re turning to natural gas for their electricity demands. So? Well, combined, they’d add 126 GW to the grid (more energy than all U.S. nuclear power plants currently produce)! Running at 60% of the time (industry standard) the data center gas plants would produce 318 million metric tons of CO2 annually, increasing U.S. electricity emissions by 20%!
Let’s revisit the first story about climate change making global cities uninhabitable. Building out the AI ‘revolution’ is going to push us over the edge. And for those apologists who argue that AI could ‘save us’ through its green innovations, here’s one more study (from Nature) to share. It turns out AI is proving effective in increasing productivity of fossil fuel extraction. Researchers found that if AI is adopted equally within the renewable energy and fossil fuel sectors, net annual CO2 emissions increase by 500 to 1,800 million metric tons (roughly 1.2-4.8% of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2024). To achieve net emissions reductions, AI would have to be 4-5 times more efficacious in increasing renewables’ productivity, which is highly unlikely “absent policy steering,” as the researchers note.
In other words, not only is AI creating additional climate pollution through its operations, but is facilitating even more through its utilization. Or spun differently, AI, which needs gas to run (at least in climate-denying, fossil-fuel celebrating America), will help increase gas production, so problem solved! Other than that looming climate crisis thingy. But perhaps we won’t notice that, as we immerse fully in our AI world, and if we do, hopefully our AI pets will console us, inviting us to find a cool place to space out when the heat gets too much, or more likely selling us something cold and sweet to solve our negative feelings. Seems like there’ll always be money to be made, no matter how bad it gets….
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