AI will help a sustainable future - despite massive energy and water consumption. AI Keynote speaker

Patrick Dixon is a global keynote speaker on energy, sustainability and AI, author 18 books, including "How AI will change your Life". He was speaking at the ohor Legacy Sustainability Summit 2024 in Malauysia. For more see: https://greenlegacyjohor.com

MANUFACTURERS ARE ALREADY using AI to help reduce the impact of production on the environment, and we are already seeing huge benefits. More efficient factories and supply chains, less waste, smarter cities with less traffic jams and wasted fuel.

AI is driving next-generation energy - smarter grids linked to 1 billion smart meters (already installed globally), balancing power demand (enabling efficient use of solar and wind power), predicting demand (better weather forecasting linked to demand forecasting). AI will help design more efficient solar panels and better ways to make them.

AI is helping us to protect rain forests (tracking destruction - almost live so illegal activity can be stopped) and monitor agriculture (advising farmers when and where to irrigate etc) with huge increases in farm yields while reducing water use.

We are also seeing a massive AI impact on future of health care - AI diagnostics, AI linked to MedTech innovations, AI assisted surgery, AI health predictions based on the human genome project, AI advice to doctors and nurses on treatment, AI advice to people at home, AI monitoring of patients in virtual wards (at home rather than in hospital), AI in pharma to help in drug discovery, drug development, clinical trials and licensing.

AI will also help deliver universal access to education with faster generation of online material for schools and colleges, AI support for student enquiries, AI customising home education, AI to help teachers create homework or mark what students have delivered.

but AI itself is creating a new hazard by using vast amounts of additional energy and water (for cooling).

The digital world is already responsible for around 4% of global carbon emissions, more than the entire aviation industry, with 4.6 billion people connected in some way to 30 billion devices. Even before AI, energy consumption by data centres was growing by 25% every year, despite the fact that servers are now 20% more efficient than five years ago.

AI is going to consume vastly more power. Gartner predicts that AI alone could burn up a further 3.5% of the world’s energy by 2030, almost doubling the environmental footprint of today’s digital world.

By 2026, AI servers will need as much power as the whole of Argentina, the Netherlands or Sweden – 130 terawatts per year or 0.5% of entire global energy consumption. Just cooling down these servers will be a major headache. It could be argued that much of that AI power is being used to make other processes more efficient, so we should include this in our overall calculations of AI energy use. However, this will be very hard to prove, particularly is a significant part of AI energy will be powering activities like ChatGPT – which may not produce any energy saving elsewhere.

ChatGPT alone burns up as much energy as 33,000 US households, a gigawatt hour per day. Every query is the equivalent of 100 emails.

Generating a single image on Stable Diffusion XL takes almost as much power as recharging your smartphone. Creating 1,000 such AI images will release more CO2 than driving 3.5 miles in a diesel car.

Daily Telegraph review (14 September 2024 UK):

"If you need to acquire instant AI mastery in time for your next board meeting, Dixon’s your man.

Dixon gives us plenty to think about: AI’s role in surveillance; AI’s role in intellectual freedom and copyright; AI’s role in warfare; AI’s role in human obsolescence – his exhaustive list runs to over two dozen chapters.

Business types will enjoy Dixon's meticulous lists and his willingness to argue both sides against the middle."

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Dr Patrick Dixon is one of the world's best known keynote speakers on global trends, often described as Europe’s leading Futurist. Author of 18 books, he has advised over 400 of the world’s largest corporations, often sharing platforms with their CEOs at their most important global events. His clients include Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn and many of the world’s largest manufacturers as well as governments. Patrick is a cancer physician by first training and his first start-up company some decades years ago was an AI-simulator, using computers to talk to and diagnose patients. His website globalchange.com has had 15 million unique visitors with 9 million video views.