Data Vampires Redux: Sacrificing for AI (Episode 3)

Tech Won't Save Us

This episode of Data Vampires explores the massive environmental and social costs driven by the generative AI boom. Host Paris Marx critique

Key takeaways

• Sam Altman of OpenAI admits that realizing his vision for AI will require an unimaginable amount of energy, potentially necessitating geoengineering.
• Sasha Luccioni explains that generative AI can use up to 30 times more energy than extractive AI for simple tasks like question answering.

Main topics

• Energy demands of generative AI
• Corporate climate pledge failures

Notable quotes

The moon has moved. It's more than five times as far away as it was in 2020.

Conclusion

The episode warns that the AI hype cycle serves to cement the power of

Transcript preview

Speaker 8 (0:00) Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And this month, we are continuing our re-airing of the Data Vampires series that I made about this build-out of hyperscale data centers, the demands that they have on communities, and why the tech industry is actually doing this in the first place. What is really driving them? And of course, we're doing that to mark the release of my new book, Hyperscale, which looks into those very same issues and comes out on October 20th in the US, Canada, the UK, and more broadly in Europe. If you like this series, I think you are really going to like the book as well. And of course, you can find out more information and pre-order a copy for yourself at hyperscalebook.com. Now, I think it's actually really interesting that this is the episode of Data Vampires that happens to coincide with this week, because as I'm talking to you in 2026. For the past week or so, we've been hearing a lot about the threat of AI to humanity, basically. You know, a former worker at Anthropic came out and warned against the risks that generative AI and, you know, the AI models that Anthropic is creating, the risks that they pose for... humanity itself. And continuing this myth that we've been hearing for the past few years, that AI is getting closer and closer to being super intelligent and being able to take over the world and, you know, effectively control us humans, if not wipe us all out. Now, if you've been listening to the podcast for long enough, you will know that I think that is completely science fiction. But actually, this episode of the series digs into the wider costs of these generative AI technologies and, of course, the data centers that power them and how the real threats are not, you know, this notion of AGI, artificial intelligence, or even AI superintelligence, but the actual demands of the technology, what it means for the climate, what it means for communities, as, you know, I was talking about last week. on the show and how these are the real problems, not these kind of fantastical, science fictional, future-focused solutions. All that they do is distract us from the real harms that are being caused in the present. that these companies really don't want us to be focused on and that they certainly don't want regulators to be focused on. And of course, that's not to mention how I would argue there are just a lot of people in this industry who are kind of deluded and who have collectively deluded themselves into believing that they're building the science fictional threats that they've seen in movies and novels that they encountered as younger people. And that doesn't mean that we should believe everything that they tell us about the technologies that they're building. So that's all to say, I think that this episode of the series is very relevant to what we're seeing right now. And I think you're going to really enjoy it, whether you've never heard it before, or even if you heard it a couple years ago, but maybe don't remember all the details that we included in this series. You know, the thing that it opens on is Wild Enough on its own, and you'll hear that in just a minute. But then to think about the other... statements that these companies and CEOs and, you know, just workers are making about this technology. It's wild. And that doesn't mean that we should believe exactly what they're saying. And of course, just a final note that if you do enjoy this series, I think you're really going to enjoy my book, Hyperscale, The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires, which, as I said, comes out on October 20th. And you can find more information at hyperscalebook.com. So with that said, please enjoy this week's episode of Data Vampires. Speaker 7 (3:20) We do need way more energy in the world than I think we thought we needed before. And I think we still don't appreciate the energy needs of this technology. That's Sam Albin, the CEO Speaker 8 (3:32) of OpenAI, speaking to Bloomberg in January 2024 at the World Economic Forum. In that interview, he was lightly pressed on the climate cost of his generative AI vision, and he was remarkably honest. The future he wants to realize is one that will require an amount of energy that's hard to even fathom. And all that energy needs to come on stream in record time at the same moment. We're supposed to be phasing out fossil energy in favor of less emitting alternatives like solar, wind, hydro, or in some people's minds, a ton of nuclear energy. Speaker 7 (4:03) The good news to the degree there's good news is there's no way to get there without a breakthrough. We need fusion or we need like radically cheaper solar plus storage or something. at massive scale, like a scale that no one is really planning for. So it's totally fair to say that AI is going to need a lot of energy, but it will force us, I think, to invest more in the technologies that can deliver this, none of which are the ones that are... burning the carbon. The way Altman talks about the massive energy demands Speaker 8 (4:32) his AI ambitions are creating is typical of tech billionaires. The climate crisis is not a political problem, but simply a technological one. And we need not worry because our technocratic overlords will deliver a breakthrough in energy technology so they can continue doing whatever they want, regardless of whether it makes any real sense to do so. Even though Altman refers to this as good news, it's hard to see it that way. He's basically acknowledging that warming far beyond the 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius limit we're supposed to be trying to keep to is essentially locked in because of industries like his own, unless they come up with a technological breakthrough in time. There's no guarantee that will happen. And in fact, it's highly likely it won't. That's why so many of their scenarios assume we're going to overshoot on emissions, but hope we'll be able to use some future technology to pull all those greenhouse gases back out of the atmosphere. And again, another massive gamble with the planet and everything that lives on it. But in the interview, Altman wasn't just candid on how much energy the widespread rollout of generative AI will require, but also about that more grim scenario. Speaker 7 (5:38) I still expect, unfortunately, the world is on a path where we're going to have to do something dramatic with climate, like geoengineering as a band-aid, as a stopgap. But I think we do now see a path to the long-term solution. Speaker 8 (5:52) Altman and his fellow AI boosters want us to gamble with the climate to such a degree we have to try to play God with weather systems. Also, they can have AI companions and imagine that one day they might be able to upload their brains onto computers. It's not only foolish, it verges on social suicide. And I don't think that's a trade-off that many people will openly accept. Speaker 8 (6:28) This is Data Vampires, a special four-part series from Tech Won't Save Us, assembled by me, Paris Marks. Over the course of this series, we'll learn more about data centers and the extreme vision of the future these powerful people in the tech industry are trying to foist on us, regardless of whether we want it or whether it will even make the lives of most people any better. In this week's episode, we'll be digging into how generative AI hype is accelerating the data center build-out and presenting a series of threats, from worsening climate catastrophe to further social harms, that will only become more acute the longer this is allowed. Speaker 8 (7:18) Become a supporter at patreon.com slash tech won't save us today. So with that said, let's learn more about these data vampires, and by the end, maybe we'll be closer to driving a stake through their hearts. Speaker 8 (7:32) Since the release of ChatGPT in November of 2022, talk of artificial intelligence or AI has been everywhere. Let's be clear, AI is not a new thing. The term has been in use for decades and has referred to different things since then. When you type a message on your phone and the keyboard suggests the next word, or when you're putting together a document in Microsoft Word and a squiggly line appears beneath the word to tell you it's spelled wrong, that's AI too. It's just not the same kind of AI as what powers the chatbots and image generators that are all the rage today. That's generative AI. And it's what's fueling a lot of these problems. Sasha Luchoni is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Sustainable AI Group. And I asked her why this new generative AI is so much more computationally intensive. This is what she told me. Speaker 3 (8:14) If you compare a system that uses... I guess, extractive AI or good old-fashioned AI. Search the internet and I'll do an answer to your question. It's essentially converting all these documents, all these webpages from words to numbers. And when you're searching for a query, like, I don't know, what's the capital of Canada? It will also convert that query into numbers. using the same system and then matching numbers is like super efficient. This stuff goes really, really fast.