Massive benefits of AI come with environmental and human costs. Can AI itself be part of the solution?
Generative AI has a large carbon footprint and other drawbacks. But AI can help mitigate its own harms—by plowing through mountains of data on extreme weather and human displacement.
The recent explosion of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E enabled anyone with internet access to harness AI’s power for enhanced productivity, creativity, and problem-solving. With their ever-improving capabilities and expanding user base, these tools proved useful across disciplines, from the creative to the scientific.
But beneath the technological wonders of human-like conversation and creative expression lies a dirty secret—an alarming environmental and human cost. AI has an immense carbon footprint. Systems like ChatGPT take months to train in high-powered data centers, which demand huge amounts of electricity, much of which is still generated with fossil fuels, as well as water for cooling. “One of the reasons why Open AI needs investments [to the tune of] $10 billion from Microsoft is because they need to pay for all of that computation,” says Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. There’s also an ecological toll from mining rare minerals required for hardware and infrastructure. This environmental exploitation pollutes land, triggers natural disasters and causes large-scale human displacement. Finally, for data labeling needed to train and correct AI algorithms, the Big Data industry employs cheap and exploitative labor, often from the Global South.
Generative AI tools are based on large language models (LLMs), with most well-known being various versions of GPT. LLMs can perform natural language processing, including translating, summarizing and answering questions. They use artificial neural networks, called deep learning or machine learning. Inspired by the human brain, neural networks are made of millions of artificial neurons. “The basic principles of neural networks were known even in the 1950s and 1960s,” Toyama says, “but it’s only now, with the tremendous amount of compute power that we have, as well as huge amounts of data, that it’s become possible to train generative AI models.”
Though there aren’t any official figures about the power consumption or emissions from data centers, experts estimate that they use one percent of global electricity—more than entire countries.
In recent months, much attention has gone to the transformative benefits of these technologies. But it’s important to consider that these remarkable advances may come at a price.
AI’s carbon footprint
In their latest annual report, 2023 Landscape: Confronting Tech Power, the AI Now Institute, an independent policy research entity focusing on the concentration of power in the tech industry, says: “The constant push for scale in artificial intelligence has led Big Tech firms to develop hugely energy-intensive computational models that optimize for ‘accuracy’—through increasingly large datasets and computationally intensive model training—over more efficient and sustainable alternatives.”
Though there aren’t any official figures about the power consumption or emissions from data centers, experts estimate that they use one percent of global electricity—more than entire countries. In 2019, Emma Strubell, then a graduate researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, estimated that training a single LLM resulted in over 280,000 kg in CO2 emissions—an equivalent of driving almost 1.2 million km in a gas-powered car. A couple of years later, David Patterson, a computer scientist from the University of California Berkeley, and colleagues, estimated GPT-3’s carbon footprint at over 550,000 kg of CO2 In 2022, the tech company Hugging Face, estimated the carbon footprint of its own language model, BLOOM, as 25,000 kg in CO2 emissions. (BLOOM’s footprint is lower because Hugging Face uses renewable energy, but it doubled when other life-cycle processes like hardware manufacturing and use were added.)
Luckily, despite the growing size and numbers of data centers, their increasing energy demands and emissions have not kept pace proportionately—thanks to renewable energy sources and energy-efficient hardware.
But emissions don’t tell the full story.
AI’s hidden human cost
“If historical colonialism annexed territories, their resources, and the bodies that worked on them, data colonialism’s power grab is both simpler and deeper: the capture and control of human life itself through appropriating the data that can be extracted from it for profit.” So write Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, authors of the bookThe Costs of Connection.
The energy requirements, hardware manufacture and the cheap human labor behind AI systems disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
Technologies we use daily inexorably gather our data. “Human experience, potentially every layer and aspect of it, is becoming the target of profitable extraction,” Couldry and Meijas say. This feeds data capitalism, the economic model built on the extraction and commodification of data. While we are being dispossessed of our data, Big Tech commodifies it for their own benefit. This results in consolidation of power structures that reinforce existing race, gender, class and other inequalities.
“The political economy around tech and tech companies, and the development in advances in AI contribute to massive displacement and pollution, and significantly changes the built environment,” says technologist and activist Yeshi Milner, who founded Data For Black Lives (D4BL) to create measurable change in Black people’s lives using data. The energy requirements, hardware manufacture and the cheap human labor behind AI systems disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
AI’s recent explosive growth spiked the demand for manual, behind-the-scenes tasks, creating an industry described by Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri as “ghost work” in their book. This invisible human workforce that lies behind the “magic” of AI, is overworked and underpaid, and very often based in the Global South. For example, workers in Kenya who made less than $2 an hour, were the behind the mechanism that trained ChatGPT to properly talk about violence, hate speech and sexual abuse. And, according to an article in Analytics India Magazine, in some cases these workers may not have been paid at all, a case for wage theft. An exposé by the Washington Post describes “digital sweatshops” in the Philippines, where thousands of workers experience low wages, delays in payment, and wage theft by Remotasks, a platform owned by Scale AI, a $7 billion dollar American startup. Rights groups and labor researchers have flagged Scale AI as one company that flouts basic labor standards for workers abroad.
It is possible to draw a parallel with chattel slavery—the most significant economic event that continues to shape the modern world—to see the business structures that allow for the massive exploitation of people, Milner says. Back then, people got chocolate, sugar, cotton; today, they get generative AI tools. “What’s invisible through distance—because [tech companies] also control what we see—is the massive exploitation,” Milner says.
“At Data for Black Lives, we are less concerned with whether AI will become human…[W]e’re more concerned with the growing power of AI to decide who’s human and who’s not,” Milner says. As a decision-making force, AI becomes a “justifying factor for policies, practices, rules that not just reinforce, but are currently turning the clock back generations years on people’s civil and human rights.”
Ironically, AI plays an important role in mitigating its own harms—by plowing through mountains of data about weather changes, extreme weather events and human displacement.
Nuria Oliver, a computer scientist, and co-founder and vice-president of the European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), says that instead of focusing on the hypothetical existential risks of today’s AI, we should talk about its real, tangible risks.
“Because AI is a transverse discipline that you can apply to any field [from education, journalism, medicine, to transportation and energy], it has a transformative power…and an exponential impact,” she says.
AI's accountability
“At the core of what we were arguing about data capitalism [is] a call to action to abolish Big Data,” says Milner. “Not to abolish data itself, but the power structures that concentrate [its] power in the hands of very few actors.”
A comprehensive AI Act currently negotiated in the European Parliament aims to rein Big Tech in. It plans to introduce a rating of AI tools based on the harms caused to humans, while being as technology-neutral as possible. That sets standards for safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly AI systems, overseen by people, not automation. The regulations also ask for transparency in the content used to train generative AIs, particularly with copyrighted data, and also disclosing that the content is AI-generated. “This European regulation is setting the example for other regions and countries in the world,” Oliver says. But, she adds, such transparencies are hard to achieve.
Google, for example, recently updated its privacy policy to say that anything on the public internet will be used as training data. “Obviously, technology companies have to respond to their economic interests, so their decisions are not necessarily going to be the best for society and for the environment,” Oliver says. “And that’s why we need strong research institutions and civil society institutions to push for actions.” ELLIS also advocates for data centers to be built in locations where the energy can be produced sustainably.
Ironically, AI plays an important role in mitigating its own harms—by plowing through mountains of data about weather changes, extreme weather events and human displacement. “The only way to make sense of this data is using machine learning methods,” Oliver says.
Milner believes that the best way to expose AI-caused systemic inequalities is through people's stories. “In these last five years, so much of our work [at D4BL] has been creating new datasets, new data tools, bringing the data to life. To show the harms but also to continue to reclaim it as a tool for social change and for political change.” This change, she adds, will depend on whose hands it is in.
Astronaut and Expedition 64 Flight Engineer Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency displays Extra Dwarf Pak Choi plants growing aboard the International Space Station. The plants were grown for the Veggie study which is exploring space agriculture as a way to sustain astronauts on future missions to the Moon or Mars.
Astronauts at the International Space Station today depend on pre-packaged, freeze-dried food, plus some fresh produce thanks to regular resupply missions. This supply chain, however, will not be available on trips further out, such as the moon or Mars. So what are astronauts on long missions going to eat?
Going by the options available now, says Christel Paille, an engineer at the European Space Agency, a lunar expedition is likely to have only dehydrated foods. “So no more fresh product, and a limited amount of already hydrated product in cans.”
For the Mars mission, the situation is a bit more complex, she says. Prepackaged food could still constitute most of their food, “but combined with [on site] production of certain food products…to get them fresh.” A Mars mission isn’t right around the corner, but scientists are currently working on solutions for how to feed those astronauts. A number of boundary-pushing efforts are now underway.
The logistics of growing plants in space, of course, are very different from Earth. There is no gravity, sunlight, or atmosphere. High levels of ionizing radiation stunt plant growth. Plus, plants take up a lot of space, something that is, ironically, at a premium up there. These and special nutritional requirements of spacefarers have given scientists some specific and challenging problems.
To study fresh food production systems, NASA runs the Vegetable Production System (Veggie) on the ISS. Deployed in 2014, Veggie has been growing salad-type plants on “plant pillows” filled with growth media, including a special clay and controlled-release fertilizer, and a passive wicking watering system. They have had some success growing leafy greens and even flowers.
"Ideally, we would like a system which has zero waste and, therefore, needs zero input, zero additional resources."
A larger farming facility run by NASA on the ISS is the Advanced Plant Habitat to study how plants grow in space. This fully-automated, closed-loop system has an environmentally controlled growth chamber and is equipped with sensors that relay real-time information about temperature, oxygen content, and moisture levels back to the ground team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In December 2020, the ISS crew feasted on radishes grown in the APH.
“But salad doesn’t give you any calories,” says Erik Seedhouse, a researcher at the Applied Aviation Sciences Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. “It gives you some minerals, but it doesn’t give you a lot of carbohydrates.” Seedhouse also noted in his 2020 book Life Support Systems for Humans in Space: “Integrating the growing of plants into a life support system is a fiendishly difficult enterprise.” As a case point, he referred to the ESA’s Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (MELiSSA) program that has been running since 1989 to integrate growing of plants in a closed life support system such as a spacecraft.
Paille, one of the scientists running MELiSSA, says that the system aims to recycle the metabolic waste produced by crew members back into the metabolic resources required by them: “The aim is…to come [up with] a closed, sustainable system which does not [need] any logistics resupply.” MELiSSA uses microorganisms to process human excretions in order to harvest carbon dioxide and nitrate to grow plants. “Ideally, we would like a system which has zero waste and, therefore, needs zero input, zero additional resources,” Paille adds.
Microorganisms play a big role as “fuel” in food production in extreme places, including in space. Last year, researchers discoveredMethylobacterium strains on the ISS, including some never-seen-before species. Kasthuri Venkateswaran of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the researchers involved in the study, says, “[The] isolation of novel microbes that help to promote the plant growth under stressful conditions is very essential… Certain bacteria can decompose complex matter into a simple nutrient [that] the plants can absorb.” These microbes, which have already adapted to space conditions—such as the absence of gravity and increased radiation—boost various plant growth processes and help withstand the harsh physical environment.
MELiSSA, says Paille, has demonstrated that it is possible to grow plants in space. “This is important information because…we didn’t know whether the space environment was affecting the biological cycle of the plant…[and of] cyanobacteria.” With the scientific and engineering aspects of a closed, self-sustaining life support system becoming clearer, she says, the next stage is to find out if it works in space. They plan to run tests recycling human urine into useful components, including those that promote plant growth.
The MELiSSA pilot plant uses rats currently, and needs to be translated for human subjects for further studies. “Demonstrating the process and well-being of a rat in terms of providing water, sufficient oxygen, and recycling sufficient carbon dioxide, in a non-stressful manner, is one thing,” Paille says, “but then, having a human in the loop [means] you also need to integrate user interfaces from the operational point of view.”
Growing food in space comes with an additional caveat that underscores its high stakes. Barbara Demmig-Adams from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder explains, “There are conditions that actually will hurt your health more than just living here on earth. And so the need for nutritious food and micronutrients is even greater for an astronaut than for [you and] me.”
Demmig-Adams, who has worked on increasing the nutritional quality of plants for long-duration spaceflight missions, also adds that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Her work has focused on duckweed, a rather unappealingly named aquatic plant. “It is 100 percent edible, grows very fast, it’s very small, and like some other floating aquatic plants, also produces a lot of protein,” she says. “And here on Earth, studies have shown that the amount of protein you get from the same area of these floating aquatic plants is 20 times higher compared to soybeans.”
Aquatic plants also tend to grow well in microgravity: “Plants that float on water, they don’t respond to gravity, they just hug the water film… They don’t need to know what’s up and what’s down.” On top of that, she adds, “They also produce higher concentrations of really important micronutrients, antioxidants that humans need, especially under space radiation.” In fact, duckweed, when subjected to high amounts of radiation, makes nutrients called carotenoids that are crucial for fighting radiation damage. “We’ve looked at dozens and dozens of plants, and the duckweed makes more of this radiation fighter…than anything I’ve seen before.”
Despite all the scientific advances and promising leads, no one really knows what the conditions so far out in space will be and what new challenges they will bring. As Paille says, “There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns.”
One definite “known” for astronauts is that growing their food is the ideal scenario for space travel in the long term since “[taking] all your food along with you, for best part of two years, that’s a lot of space and a lot of weight,” as Seedhouse says. That said, once they land on Mars, they’d have to think about what to eat all over again. “Then you probably want to start building a greenhouse and growing food there [as well],” he adds.
And that is a whole different challenge altogether.