### Reader’s Letter to The Observer, 17th August 2024 ###
Dear Editor,
I strongly agree with John Naughton’s skepticism regarding AI and delivery drones (The Observer, 11th August 2024, page 25) and, indeed yes, we should strongly resist blind acceptance of “technology for technology’s sake”.
The moral questioning of this attitude of inevitability and acquiescence is certainly valid but maybe we should also focus in on AI’s central Achilles’ heal which is the issue of “electricity”: AI uses massively more processing-power than previous incarnations of the internet (e.g. web-pages) with, at the moment, most of that energy (both for processing and for cooling) being generated from fossil sources. On top of this there is the sourcing of rare metals for circuitry (e.g. coltan in conflict-areas of Africa) and lithium for the batteries (a core-feature of data-centres as well as of our beloved gadgetry).
So, yes, the energy and pollution footprint of AI is ASTRONOMICAL which is, in a way, an advantage because we can and should simply say that we are “not going there” because this technology will end up frying the climate.
A case in point is the situation here in Germany where Microsoft is about to build two massive data-centres right next to a large-scale, open-cast, highly-polluting coal-mine just to the west of Cologne: They say that the power for the data-centres will come from “renewable sources” but their location, next to power-stations fed by the mines, makes a clear mockery of this assertion.
Yours,
Alan Mitcham
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