'Shut these dangerous and parasitical robots down before it's too late'

A water cooling system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego. MIT researchers are using the 'Comet' supercomputer to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to detect electron correlation

(Image credit: Bing Guan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

By Harold Maass, The Week US

published 5 March 2024

'The staggering environmental toll of artificial intelligence'

Liza Featherstone in The New Republic

The threat that artificial intelligence could worsen "misinformation, democratic dysfunction, and systemic racism" could be "obscuring the more direct" problems the technology creates, says Liza Featherstone. AI data centers use an "unconscionable" amount of water to cool their computers, "in desert regions that can ill afford to squander it." Generative AI also voraciously consumes energy and critical minerals, and generates mountains of toxic "e-waste." All this puts our planet "under existential threat, for no good reason."

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.