AI vs. the Climate | Socialist Alternative

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In 2022, OpenAI released a public sample of ChatGPT, a text-based generative artificial “intelligence” (GenAI or AI). The proliferation of ChatGPT led to an explosion of AI on the tech market, which has quickly started to change our jobs, daily lives, and—most notably—the environment, for the worse. 

The data centers which AI requires eat up two things extremely quickly: energy and water. Water, while covering the majority of the Earth, is also very scarce in certain regions, especially in a usable condition. Over three-quarters of a billion people do not have adequate and safe drinking water, but AI is projected to use up to 1.7 trillion gallons of water by 2027. Meanwhile, the energy cost of training GPT-3 alone cost almost 1,300 MWh, which is equivalent to the annual energy use of 130 average American households, and each search uses almost 10 times the energy of a regular Google search. Worse still, this energy usage is increasing rapidly thanks to the further development and proliferation of AI. According to a report by the US Department of Energy, “data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are expected to consume approximately 6.7 to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028.” The speculative AI market is, unsurprisingly, the primary culprit in this growth. 

These massive increases in energy use means that there is now a lot more money to be made, and the fossil fuel industry will likely gain more than anyone. The rise of AI has only acted to further the strength of the mountain that is the fossil fuel market, which is one of the largest polluters in the world. U.S. gas power plants alone emitted more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide last year, up nearly 4 per cent in a year and the highest on record. 

The consequences of this growth for the world is obvious. In the past few years, working people have increasingly suffered hurricanes, blizzards, and firestorms intensified by climate change. Thousands have lost their lives and many more find themselves destitute. Meanwhile, the members of the capitalist class remain safe while destruction provides them new investment opportunities. In many cases, big business has been bluntly prioritized during these disasters, as seen during various electrical outages in which corporations were still given power while working people were left hanging. 

These issues are exacerbated by the mechanisms of the capitalist system. Firstly, capitalism is pushed to constantly grow and expand profits. Because of this, capitalists will continue supporting the growth of AI in order to keep the money flowing. Secondly, this need for ever growing profits means that capitalists often need to cut wages in order to maximize profits. This is exactly what the capitalists hope AI will help them do. It doesn’t matter if the industry harms the environment or threatens the livelihoods of working people; capitalism’s need to grow and cut labor costs is more important than the qualms of even the most “moral” capitalist. Consequently, we see the escalation of speculation and data center use in relation to AI.

How Must We Respond?

AI does not currently serve the interests of working people. Instead, it is used to try to further oppress workers while the capitalists hold it up in order to further profit. As part of its power struggle with Chinese imperialism, the U.S. ruling class wants to use AI as an economic and military superweapon that can vastly increase productivity domestically and destructive power on the battlefield. Corporations like Google and Microsoft are developing AI weapons for the US military like autonomous drones and software that uses AI to plan troop movements. Military and civilian applications of AI swallow up incredible amounts of dwindling natural resources  while working people pay the price. 

This, however, doesn’t need to be the case. There could be a world where the interests of working people and nature would be in the fore, where machines serve to make the lives of working people better. Instead of fearing that a new tool would threaten one’s wage, one could enjoy the ease and time that new tools—now created for usefulness and not speculative profit—could give. Even generative AI, under the eyes of a planned economy run by the working class, could find potential uses. However, as long as the pressures and contradictions of capitalism continue to run, this will not be the future of AI or any new developments.

Working people can only win a better world if we fight back. While we have immense power as the working class, we can only win these struggles if we are organized and fight together. This means forming unions and going on strike to win job protections, but also fighting for workers’ control over our workplaces and technology to ensure automation and innovation benefit the working class, not the ruling class. 

We also need to bring the largest energy companies into democratic public ownership, and use their profits to immediately transition to green energy and mitigate climate disasters. We should build for massive protests on Earth Day this year to connect demands about the climate with demands against war, imperialism, and wasteful uses of technology.

Ultimately, the struggle for these sorts of demands and for a livable future will necessitate the union of working people into a new political party, free of the corporate interests of the Democrats or Republicans, and which is democratically run by rank-and-file workers in the interests of our class and the planet.