Tech companies are constantly promoting new AI products, but climate activist Sage Lenier says AI is useless, unsustainable and has given the industry an existential problem.
“AI does not benefit society,” he told AFP on the sidelines of the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon.
CEOs who have become overwhelmed by a class of “useless” products have shattered the idea of technology as an essential utility.
“And now they have an existential problem,” he said.
Lenier first gained attention in 2018 as a 19-year-old student when he created and led a course called “Solutions for a Sustainable & Just Future” at the University of California, Berkeley.
She said students like her were fed up with the kind of climate education that offered no hope: it wanted to focus on solutions, not problems.
Hundreds enrolled in the Berkeley course over the years and eventually hundreds more online, and Lenier has built a nonprofit around it and now hopes to launch a documentary series.
The Californian, who now lives in New York, said he was very positive about the technology.
But his climate focus makes him an outsider at Web Summit: “I’ll keep coming if they want me to yell at them,” he said.
Last year, he told people: “Some of you may be directly responsible for the architecture of the ecological crisis.”
He pleaded with tech majors to embrace the circular economy, which is based on reuse and recycling, rather than creating products that end up as waste.
But a year later, Microsoft, Google and others have released an endless stream of power-guzzling AI products.
They have rushed to reopen nuclear power plants, pledged to build many more data centers, and failed to meet climate goals.
Effluent waste
However, AI, Lenier said, “has a million negatives.”
“It’s terrible for the planet. It’s great for all communities where you use data centers. And it’s pointless. I think it’s just a waste of emissions,” he said.
He pointed out that this was not always the case 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, green and pro-future,” he said.
“Bill Gates has written several books on climate change.”
The CEOs really want the image, and they managed to avoid the kind of scrutiny that was done to the fashion and automotive industries.
“Then, with AI, the moment they had an opportunity to increase shareholder returns … every single one of them hit the red button,” he said.
So bad so fast
While Lenier distinguished himself by focusing on solutions to the climate crisis, he sees a bleak future within a generation.
“Shit is going to get so bad so fast. The food chain will be broken. We will see mass malnutrition if not mass starvation,” he said.
The power grid will also be disrupted.
Against this background, products such as cars and new clothes are superfluous.
“You can’t own a car in the long run. It doesn’t matter if they are electric or not. They are unbearable,” he said.
“We can’t produce 80 billion clothes a year in a low-carbon future.”
A year ago, he said, he could have argued that the technology was something different.
“It’s part of our infrastructure, we’ve built our societies around it,” he said.
But with AI, “they have given themselves a little fast fashion”.
