The focus in this article is not on how close AI is to human-level capabilities, nor on questions of safety. It’s on something surprisingly mundane: the energy these systems consume. To give a specific detail, three litres of cooling water for each 100 words of text. (The scientist in me would prefer more precise details: what temperature is this water? Is it not recycled through the system? Would it not be better to give a figure in kilowatt-hours aka standard units?)
21% of the electricity in Ireland is now consumed by these vast server farms- some of them powering AI most perhaps not. Who pays for all that electricity? Use of ChatGPT is free, Facebook is free, Google is free, Gmail is free. What do these companies get in return for providing these free services?
“the extraction from human beings of knowledge and labour; the automation of that knowledge and labour by technology: this is the logic of artificial intelligence,” writes O’Connell. This answer is a bit sketchy, it needs fleshing out.
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A