Are you thinking about sustainability in AI? - Information Age

Professor Mark K. Smith, CEO of ContactEngine, discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) can lend itself towards sustainability Not a day goes by without a company, charity, government or some other gas-guzzling, forest-burning, ocean-destroying organisation making a grand claim about net-zero, carbon neutral or otherwise pledging to single-handedly save the planet by twenty-whenever. We'll get the brag out of the way quickly – ContactEngine is already carbon negative – but, following the noise around COP26, the threat of irreversible climate change provides a good reason to discuss sustainability in AI more generally. Cloud-based computing has rightly come under increased scrutiny in recent years for its energy use. Greenpeace estimates that by 2025, the tech sector could consume 20% of the world's electricity, a huge rise from its current 7%, and one that will be largely driven by cloud computing. As it stands, a lot of this energy use doesn't come from renewable sources, with nearly 4% of all CO2 emissions coming from data transfer and infrastructure – a figure 60% higher than aviation.