Final week, Keir Starmer introduced his plans to make use of synthetic intelligence to drive “unbelievable change in our nation”. A part of the technique is to create “AI development zones”, together with one in Culham, Oxfordshire.
The choice caught the eye of the Guardian’s setting reporter Helena Horton.
“They’ve positioned this development zone in probably the most water-stressed areas of the UK,” Helena tells Michael Safi. “The Atmosphere Company has categorised that space as severely water pressured, and that’s why they’re constructing a brand new reservoir there.
“These information centres don’t simply use an enormous quantity of vitality, additionally they use an enormous quantity of water a variety of the time,” Helena says. “As a result of they’re processing a lot information, the servers get actually, actually sizzling … so to cease the servers from overheating, they’ve to chill them down with water.”
However what concerning the argument that synthetic intelligence will assist remedy points across the local weather, as some AI bosses have advised?
“It’s good to have the world’s best thinkers fascinated by local weather change. However the difficulty is that it may be used as an excuse to not use the expertise that we’ve got now, and a variety of the expertise we’ve got to construct renewables is fairly cutting-edge, the batteries which are being developed. They’re simply not as sort of horny as AI, ?
“And it’s not an argument in opposition to AI itself. It’s simply saying that if we’re going to construct these information centres which are required for AI, we should be accountable with how we construct them.”
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