Terms such as ‘The Cloud’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ suggest these new technologies are abstract ― that they are not connected to the physical world of financial and resource constraints. Yet such is not the case.
A recent article in the Financial Times (paywall) entitled ‘Booming AI demand threatens global electricity supply’ describes the massive energy requirements for AI. The article’s subtitle is ‘Tech chiefs warn that power-hungry data centres are a bottleneck in developing artificial intelligence’.
Although the article correctly shows that AI is not just an abstraction, it fails to draw two follow-on conclusions:
Physical constraints may limit the growth of AI.
Most of the energy that AI needs comes from fossil fuels. As the demand for energy increases so do greenhouse gas emissions.
A theme of the posts at the Process Safety Report is that process safety management is a systems discipline. Rather than assuming continuous growth of AI in the process and energy industries, we should also evaluate the physical requirements and impacts of this new technology.
