Technology companies are ceaselessly promoting new AI products, but climate activist Sage Lennier says AI is useless, unsustainable and poses an existential problem for the industry.
“Artificial intelligence is of no benefit to society,” she told AFP on the sidelines of the Web Technology Summit in Lisbon.
CEOs fascinated by the “useless” product category have trashed the idea of technology as an essential tool.
“And now they have an existential problem,” she said.
Linnear first gained attention as a 19-year-old student in 2018 when she founded and led a course at the University of California, Berkeley, called “Solutions for a Sustainable and Just Future.”
She said students like her were tired of this kind of climate education that offered no hope — she wanted to focus on solutions, not just problems.
Hundreds joined the course at Berkeley over the years, and eventually hundreds more online, and Lenier has since created a nonprofit around it and now hopes to launch a documentary series.
The California native, who now lives in New York, said she was largely positive about the technology.
But her focus on climate makes her an outsider at the Web Summit: “I’ll still come if they want me to scream in their faces,” she said.
Last year, she told an audience: “Some of you could be held directly responsible for engineering the environmental crisis.”
She called on tech heads to embrace the circular economy, which relies on reusing and recycling rather than creating products that end up being thrown away.
But a year later, Microsoft, Google and others have unleashed an endless stream of power-hungry AI products.
They rushed to reopen their nuclear plants and pledged to build more data centers — but fell short of their climate goals.
Wasted emissions
However, Lehner said AI “has a million downsides.”
“It’s terrible for the planet. It’s terrible for every community you run data centers in. And it’s useless. I think it’s just a waste of emissions,” she said.
She points out that it wasn’t always this way in the technology sector.
“It was the only industry, at least in America, where they tried for years and years to portray themselves as clean and green and pro-future,” she said.
“Bill Gates has written many books about climate change.”
CEOs really want image, and they have successfully avoided the kind of scrutiny that is levied on the fashion and auto industries.
“Then the moment they had an opportunity, using AI, to increase shareholder returns… every single one of them pressed the red button,” she said.
Too bad so quickly
Although Lenair rose to prominence by focusing attention on solutions to the climate crisis, she sees a bleak future coming within a generation.
“Shit is going to get really bad this fast. The food chain is going to break. We’re going to see mass malnutrition if not mass starvation,” she said.
The electricity grid will also be disrupted.
Against this background, products such as cars and new clothes have become unnecessary.
“You can’t have cars long term. It doesn’t matter if they’re electric or not. It’s not sustainable,” she said.
“We cannot produce 80 billion pieces of clothing a year in a low-carbon future.”
A year ago, she might have argued that technology was something different.
“It’s part of our infrastructure, and we’ve built our communities around it,” she said.
But with AI, “they’ve given themselves their own little quickie.”
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