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AI is causing a heavy toll on climate goals and the big tech firms are fantasizing a "clean future based on nuclear fission and fusion". I'm not joking, this is what they are literally saying.
Datacenter in the US are predicted to account for almost 10 percent of the total electricity usage in the US by 2030 and the largest portion of this goes towards training AI. After the massive resource waste that we have/had with the blockchain experiment, this is just the next big thing that will burn down the planet.
Some AI tools are pretty cool at first. But the important question that raises here is: Is it really worth it?
Tech companies try to frame the narrative that AI is going to save us all. The power grid is going to be smarter. Climate models will be more accurate. $randomnextthing. We will learn how to create unicorns.
Just ...
That we won't. AI, or more specifically those language models are not showing any signs of intelligence or sentience. They are yet to show some meaningful scientific progress, let alone to crack one of the big nuts of the current scientific problems. Given how volatile and precise e.g. plasma models and magnetohydrodynamic needs to be I see exactly zero chances for this to have any impact on the development of fusion technology. It would be great if it did, but it doesn't.
Call me AI skeptic, because I am. Perhaps you think it will save us all and we just need to believe. I don't. For me this is just another big hype around some fancy toys that have an impact on mediocre mental work activities ("formulating an email") at best, and even that they cannot do unsupervised. Putting the hope in AI that it will crack one of the big nuts like it is suggested by the Tech Bros that believe AI is going to save us all is just laughable.
So ... Is it really worth it? I say no, at least not in it's current form. It's nothing more but a fancy toy, that mimics eloquence which is often confused as intelligence. So far we're still to see any meaningful output, or any ability to solve any of the actual problems that we have.