Climate activists have spent the past month vandalizing ancient stones at Stonehenge, spraying private planes with orange paint, disrupting sporting events and continuing to demand that you stop using gas and wood stoves.
Meanwhile, activist groups are ignoring recent studies that warn of a real threat to the climate: artificial intelligence.
In practice, AI’s insatiable demand for energy is destroying our power grid.
Major technology companies are engaged in a futuristic arms race to create the most omnipotent software ever developed. The electricity needs of data centers, some random warehouses with server racks This artificial intelligence technology is already outstripping the available energy supply in many parts of the globe.
Some experts predict that the electricity consumption of AI systems could soon require adding to our planet the equivalent of a small country’s electricity production.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that data centers will use 1,000 terawatt hours per year by 2026, roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan, a country of 125 million people.
By 2034, global data center energy consumption is expected to exceed 1,580 terawatts, at which point only 16 countries, including the United States and China, would need a higher percentage of energy demand.
“The dramatic increase in energy demand driven by Silicon Valley’s growth-at-all-costs approach to AI also threatens to upend the energy transition plans of entire nations and the clean energy goals of multi-billion dollar tech companies,” a report said. Bloomberg article earlier this month.
Quantitatively, a single Meta-owned data center complex in Iowa consumes the annual energy equivalent of seven million people. laptop AI runs for eight hours a day. According to the IEA, a ChatGPT search consumes nearly ten times more electricity than a Google search. In the UK, AI is expected to consume 500% more energy than it would without it over the next decade.
“By the end of the decade, AI data centers could consume as much as 20 to 25 percent of U.S. energy needs,” Rene Haas, CEO of chip design firm Arm Holdings, recently warned. “Today, that number is probably 4 percent or less. To be honest, that’s not very sustainable.”
While tech giants claim they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power to offset emissions, their zero-carbon energy purchases require highly polluting fossil fuel power plants. stabilize the electricity grid, a Washington Post article detailed earlier this month.
OutKick asked several climate extremist groups, including Just Stop Oli, why they were ignoring the devastating impact of AI on the climate they are so concerned about. Unfortunately, we never got an answer.
The answer is obvious. Climate activists are not serious or intelligent people. They are pawns. Like most activist groups, they act on behalf of the powerful who radicalize and finance them.
And the growth of AI is the product of two of the most powerful groups in America: tech companies and the politicians they influence.
In 2023, the lobbying for AI has set itself yet another record with 460 organizations spending money on federal lobbying, up 302 from 2022. That’s a 7,567% increase from 2016, when just six organizations were lobbying on AI-related issues.
The four leaders – Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta – each spent more than $10 million on lobbying. However, as policy expert Hamza Chaudhry has said, explained to Time – because the definition of lobbying only includes speaking with staff about specific laws – these figures likely underestimate the amount of money tech companies spend to influence lawmakers.
Despite what they say and do with their money, the elites don’t really care about energy or the planet.
AI accelerationists Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are the three biggest funders of climate change activism (no wonder climate extremists never protest outside Microsoft’s energy-guzzling data centers), but they have each downplayed AI’s strangulation of the energy supply.
“Let’s not get too carried away in our concerns about the energy consumption of AI,” Gates said last week, while dismissing the data and defending Microsoft. declared investments over $100 billion in AI.
“They don’t really care about Mother Earth. They are pushing the tree hugging religion to emotionally manipulate people into giving up their rights and freedoms in the name of bettering the planet,” OutKick host Tomi Lahren said in a statement for this article. “The elites will NEVER give up or sacrifice their way of life to better the Earth, and that would include their private jets, huge mansions, and AI.”
Especially AI.
Simply put, elites in Silicon Valley and Washington are willing to risk fracturing the power grid in favor of the benefits that smarter-than-human intelligence can bring them.
AI gives technology and political leaders a level of power beyond the fears of their greatest opponents, thanks to technology that is far more sophisticated and submissive than humans.
AI’s ambitions are endless. AI software is already being designed to replace federal workers, reduce human interaction, increase control over information, and simplify the collection of personal data (spying). But these are just the beginnings of a third-level advance, in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AGI was created to reduce the need for humans by having robots that outperform human abilities in a wide range of cognitive tasks. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI explained in 2022 that “in the future it will be clear that the sole purpose of science was to build an AGI” and that “the long-term goal is to build an AGI that loves people as parents love their children.”
Sex robots, automated teachers, and robotic alternatives to the nuclear family are on the way.
The Future of Life Institute is a nonprofit organization that aims to steer transformative technologies toward the well-being of life and away from large-scale risks. The organization published an open letter warning that progress on AGI is outpacing research into its consequences.
“AI systems with human-like competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as extensive research shows (1) and as recognized by top AI labs. (2) As noted in the widely endorsed report Asilomar AI Principles“Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life and Earth, and should be planned and managed with commensurate care and resources,” the memo reads.
“Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not being achieved, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an uncontrollable race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can reliably understand, predict or control.”
Therefore, rapidly developed superhumanly intelligent AI technology will be disseminated throughout society, regardless of the amount of energy absorbed in the process.
“The elites are promoting artificial intelligence knowing it could cause power outages for the same reason they are promoting electric vehicles that overload the power grid. They don’t really care about the consequences for us, the little people,” Lahren added. “They are collateral damage in their quest for money and power.”
America’s greediest oligarchs have tied their future prosperity to the dystopian seeds of a large-scale artificially intelligent society that will severely weaken the human species. In exchange, they are willing to fracture the power grid.
Imagine the New York blackout of 1977, but on a global scale and with robots everywhere. Meanwhile, climate pawns are telling you to turn down your air conditioning this summer.