(CNN) – Artificial intelligence did not become the utopia that technology evangelists anticipate. So far, artificial intelligence has proven to be more capable of generating stock exchange enthusiasm than, for example, great tangible things for mankind. Unless you count a Shrimp Jesus.
But that will change, AI advocates tell us. Because the only thing standing in the way of an AI-powered idyll is heaps and heaps of computing power to train and operate these nascent AI models. And don’t worry, friends of the audience who never asked for any of this: this power will not come from the fossil fuels Imagine the PR headaches.
No, the technology that will save humanity will be driven by the technology that almost destroyed it.
Here’s the deal: to do AI on the scale that the Microsofts and Googles of the world imagine, it takes a lot of computing power. When you ask a question in Chat-GPT, that question and its answer are consuming electricity in a supercomputer full of Nvidia chips in some remote air-conditioned data center.
Data center electricity consumption, AI and cryptocurrency mining (its own environmental headache) could double by 2026according to the International Energy Agency.
In the U.S. alone, energy demand is expected to grow 13% to 15% annually through 2030, which could make electricity a much scarcer resource, according to analysts at JPMorgan.
The technology industry’s solution, as of now, is nuclear energy, which is more stable than wind or solar and practically free of carbon emissions.
- Microsoft closed a deal this month to reopen a reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of a partial meltdown in 1979 near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in order to provide the company with enough energy to sustain its growth in AI. (Not the reactor, of course, but another that did not fail and continued to operate on the island for years after the incident).
- Amazon is working on building a data center campus right on the site of a Talen Energy nuclear power plant in northeastern Pennsylvania.
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also invested heavily in nuclear power and is chairman of Oklo, a nuclear start-up that last week received approval to begin investigations of a microreactor site in Idaho.
- This Monday, the Financial Times reported that the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, is backing a new nuclear company trying to create a new method of producing a more powerful nuclear fuel used in advanced reactors.
The irony of all this, of course, is that even AI advocates invoked the history of nuclear proliferation to try to convey the need to put barriers on artificial intelligence (as long as regulations don’t slow them down or reduce your benefits in any way).
And while predictions about the future of artificial intelligence are often labeled alarmists, those concerned about nuclear power cannot be so easily dismissed. History is, tragically, on his side.
Anna Erickson, professor of Nuclear Sciences at Georgia Tech, told me that nuclear power is better understood today than it was in 1979, when reactor 2 at Three Mile Island suffered a partial core meltdown.
“Nothing in life is infallible,” he says, “but we now have a much better understanding of how nuclear reactors work,” thanks in part to the wave of safety regulations triggered by the Three Mile Island incident.
Conclusion: there is no future for AI without a major increase in energy supply, making the expansion of nuclear power virtually inevitable. But many of the recently announced projects will take years to get up and running, meaning the data centers of big tech companies will have to keep using fossil fuels as long as demand continues to rise.
Are we okay with destroying the planet if all we get are apps that can digest our emails? Or slightly more human but less reliable search engines? Is the future really just variations of crustacean-based deities in an AI basophile shake?
Much is at stake, including our jobs, the environment, and our entire sense of the world, according to the AI developers themselves. And yet it remains unclear what people will get out of all this.
