In this guest blog, Tanya Goodin, Founder of EthicAI shares 5 things you need to know about AI and climate change
At the end of the week of the UK government’s AI Safety Summit, the People’s Panel on AI (a ‘citizens’ jury’ of 12 members of the public who observed the events of the Summit) said they had wanted to see more meaningful focus on AI and climate.
This wasn’t a surprise to me, or Global Action Plan, after over 170 people signed up to our panel at the glorious St John’s Waterloo in London to discuss just that.
We learned that the relationship between AI and climate change is complicated but that AI is not the magical solution that will ‘solve’ our planetary crisis in the way so many tech companies would have us believe. Here’s what our panel wanted the audience to know about the relationship between the two.
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The energy demands of AI are significant: Dr Gabby Samuel from King’s College London pointed out that that AI has a voracious appetite for energy, with the tech industry as a whole responsible for between 2% and 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – equivalent to the aviation industry. Gabby pointed out that AI will create demand for more hardware and drive high levels of tech obsolescence, compounding our already significant e-waste problems.
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Generative AI will turbocharge misinformation about climate change and climate policy online: Oliver Hayes from Global Action Plan drew our attention to climate sceptic text explaining how the global temperature is not increasing – generated by ChatGPT-4 during an investigation by NewsGuard. Generative AI is a threat-multiplier for existing high levels of disinformation and misinformation online, and will make discourse on climate even more challenging.
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AI is merely the latest technology in a long history of techno solutionism: AI is currently being positioned as a silver bullet for all our existing societal problems (including climate change), as Dr Jonnie Penn from the University of Cambridge explained, building further tech dependency. He proposed a counterculture that isn’t defined by what we don’t want from AI, but is based on the need to slow down.
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AI and climate change both disproportionately impact the young: Tony Mandungu from Encode Justice called for young people’s voices to be heard in the debate about how the technology develops and for young people to be at the table for all discussions.
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For AI and climate to go well we need strong democracies and public discourse: the panel debated the relationship between individual and governmental responsibilities in navigating AI and climate, and agreed that public education is key in explaining what the issues are.
It was a lively evening and the different perspectives of the panel highlighted just how complex and multifaceted the relationship between AI and climate change is. Thank you to everyone who joined us for the evening.
As part of Global Action Plan's online climate action work calling for change and holding leaders to account, we've sent an open letter to the Prime Minister alongside Tanya Goodin and other members of the panel from our 'AI vs the climate event', calling on him to put climate and ecological risks at the heart of AI governance efforts.
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