Artificial Intelligence (AI) has truly taken the world by storm, and yet, collectively, it is difficult to pinpoint the impact AI will have on the world. With Earth Day right around the corner, it’s fitting to dive deep into the environmental effects of AI. AI is a very powerful tool that is in the midst of being integrated at all levels of society, and there is no stopping this as AI possesses many benefits. However, when it comes to the environment, is AI helpful or harmful? The answer is both. AI is a multipurpose technology that can essentially be trained or modified to fit a plethora of uses. Because of this reason, it has the potential to be useful when it comes to monitoring, optimization, and prediction making, all functions that could help humans better the environment. On the flip side, creating and implementing AI is already starting to prove very taxing for the Earth’s resources.
There are several ongoing initiatives that aid and protect the environment that wouldn’t be possible or as successful without the help of AI and a few of them are listed below.
Detecting planet-heating methane:
After carbon dioxide emissions, methane emissions are the second highest contributor to global warming. Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas and is the main ingredient found in natural gas, which is a widely used form of energy. Methane enters the atmosphere through a variety of sectors, such as the energy and agriculture industries. However, scientists and researchers have found a way to track methane emissions on a daily basis through AI-powered tools. “Before we could mine satellite information with AI, we had no idea where methane was coming from,” says Antoine Halff, co-founder and chief analyst at Kayrros, a climate analytics firm.
Preventing and detecting wildfires:
With the changing global climate, wildfires are becoming commonplace. CEO of Dryad, Carsten Brinkschulte, explains how his startup is working to use AI-based sensors to detect smaller burns before they escalate into large-scale wildfires. Similarly, AI is also being incorporated into preventative measures like having controlled burns that function as a way to remove the excess bush and vegetation that serves as a catalyst for wildfires. Yolanda Gil, director for strategic AI and data science initiatives at the University of Southern California, and her team built “Burn Managers,” a smart Siri-or Alexa-like assistant that analyzes high volumes of data and creates models to ultimately decide where and when controlled burns should be made.
While these are some extremely positive takes on the environmentally-friendly capabilities of AI, there are several downsides to the overall inception and operation of AI technologies and some of these are explored down below.
AI’s extensive carbon footprint:
One of AI’s biggest strengths is processing a lot of information very quickly, and this does come at a cost. Training AI with complex datasets and models requires a lot of energy, and this directly impacts greenhouse gas levels. A study conducted by University of Massachusetts researchers found that training AI models can produce about 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to 300 roundtrips from New York City to San Francisco. The issue is this already isn’t a sustainable practice, but with the growth of AI and its reliance on society, the environmental offsets created by AI are only going to increase.
Electronic waste disposal:
AI requires specialized chips in order to process high amounts of data at fast rates. This, unfortunately, also leads to high rates of e-waste, which can have severe consequences on the environment. E-waste contains harmful materials that can easily contaminate soil and water supplies, which is endangering both humans and the environment overall.
While it is clear that AI eases many processes and certain things would not be possible without the use of AI technology, AI does still pose a serious environmental concern. As the use of AI is only going to grow within the world, a lot of work will have to be done by people to regulate the use of AI, especially to control the environmental offsets its increased use will bring about.
