Artificial intelligence learns to think green News

Artificial intelligence is present in almost all areas of daily life, from the algorithms that predict the content we want to see based on our past choices to those that help detect diseases from medical images. This branch of computer science that ensures that machines have the same capabilities as people, such as learning or reasoning, has endless applications that improve decision making, although its benefits go hand in hand with a huge impact on the environment. To get an idea, the use of ICT solutions today represents between 5 and 9% of electricity consumption worldwide, a figure that could reach 20% in 2030, according to a report by the European Parliament published in May of the year past. In the case of artificial intelligence, both the training of the algorithms and the processing of the data generate an ecological bill that is difficult to digest. A group of researchers from the University of Amherst (Massachusetts, United States), for example, revealed in a 2019 study that feeding information to a computer for human language processing involves the emission of about 284,000 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent, five times more than what a car produces during its useful life, including manufacturing.