AI is Really Bad for the Environment

Have you ever thought, “I wish I didn’t have to write this email?" Everyone has had this thought at some point or another. You could get AI to write it, or you could be a real person, suck it up, and write it yourself. If you, dear reader, cannot tell, I have a problem with artificial intelligence. Why? Because every question or prompt you give to artificial intelligence costs 500 ml of drinking water. Just pour it down the drain. For what? A two-sentence e-mail? Are we being so for real right now? 

How does this work? Well, AI uses supercomputers to operate, and believe it or not, they’re based in Iowa. The supercomputers use about as much electricity as 180,000 households in the United States daily. That amount of electricity generates a crazy amount of heat, which needs water to be cooled down. Currently, over 1 billion people in the world’s population do not have adequate access to water, and over 2 billion lack access about one month out of the year. Also, over 2 billion people lack access to clean water. There is simply not enough water to support our population. With the current rate of artificial intelligence development by Google, Microsoft, and Meta, Forbes predicts the total water usage to develop these technologies will reach 6.6 billion meters cubed or about 1.5 trillion gallons.

There are a few instances where I can justify the use of artificial intelligence. One of those instances (and it honestly might be the only instance) is for medical research, genome tracking, and early cancer detection. 

I understand this might be a controversial take, but it’s what I believe. I think about university students today, and how cheating is simply out of control. I graduated from university almost a year ago and escaped the AI epidemic by the skin of my teeth. I had a professor, Bobby Lepak, who gave my integrated business core program a lecture on the current state of higher education. Lepak told a group of 19, 20, and 21-year-old students in 2022 that our group was the worst he’d ever seen. He had never seen a group of kids so reliant on cheating and substance abuse to move through higher education. A ton of students in the business college with GPAs of 3.5 or higher had been dishonest in earning their spots on the Dean’s and President’s List. Institutions of higher education felt more and more like sleepaway camps for rich kids. Something has got to give with this because those kids will graduate without actually learning anything, leaving the world with the most unequipped generation of young professionals.

Lepak’s words have stuck with me and I see it everywhere on social media nowadays. Using AI to write your papers, using AI to write your emails, summarazie your texts, summarize academic publications. Are we joking? This is what we’re wasting water on?

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