The machine's rage against the planet

Marc Andreessen famously said that software is'eating' the world, and now we have AI eating up software. However, in this original formulation, the'world' represented the economic slice of the world: How businesses operated and the profits they made were the core concern. With the push towards the triple bottom line, where all three Ps--profit, people and the planet--are taken into consideration, we must re-examine how AI is eating our planet! AI systems are very compute-intensive, i.e., their design, development, and deployment consumes a lot of cycles on a computer, typically utilising one or more Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). With the prevalence of cloud computing, we now have most training and inference jobs for these systems running in large data centres, that in turn have a rising carbon footprint.