“AI can be a double-edged sword,” said Felippa Amanta, a Ph.D. candidate at University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, in The Conversation. “It can be a powerful tool for climate action, improving the efficiency of the energy grid, modelling climate change predictions or monitoring climate treaties. But the infrastructure needed to run AI is energy- and resource-intensive.”
And while AI is useful for making systems such as home cooling and heating more energy efficient, that efficiency can sometimes encourage the use of more power as people become accustomed to fine-tuning their environments.
“In fact, the true scale of AI’s impact on the environment is probably underestimated, especially if we focus only on the direct carbon footprint of its infrastructure. Today, AI permeates almost all aspects of our digitalised daily lives. Businesses use AI to develop, market and deliver products, content and services more efficiently, and AI influences how we search, shop, socialise and organise our everyday lives,” Amanta said. “These changes have massive implications for our total energy consumption at a time when we need to actively reduce it. And it’s not yet clear that AI will support us in making more climate-positive choices.”