Behind the Curtain: The Cruel Reality of AI Progress

Illustrated by Radu Sega

 

AI- tech. What comes to your mind when we say these words?

Convenience? Well, absolutely! AI allows us to process, personalise and automate tasks in a way so efficient that it still leaves many (including us!) perplexed.

Productivity? A no-brainer: AI has fundamentally transformed the way in which we approach tasks, providing that streamlined optimization that is oh so helpful when trying to find that one bit of data tucked away across the nauseating expanse of your 58-page assignment doc.

Though, hidden beneath this alluring veneer lies something far more grim, something that many have never even considered.

Depriving? Dangerous? Destructive? These are the words that so often get lost amidst the hype of these new technologies. 

Dangerous?

Though remarkable, one must wonder how these pieces of genius got into our hands in the first place; sadly that story is quite a bit less remarkable.

The pollution associated with the making of these devices is not fresh press to anyone; it’s borderline impossible to go five minutes whilst watching the news without some activist rearing their head.

Simply put: we’ve become desensitized to it. We’ve become blind to the fact that around 50,000 litres of water is consumed in the life cycle of a SINGLE smartphone (Ercan, 2016)(1), ‘yet every year, nearly one million lives are lost due to lack of access to this resource’. (2). 

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A rather harrowing comment taken from Joanna Murzyn’s ‘Echoes of Electronic Waste’ (3) details:

‘Toxic particles enter the soil, groundwater, surface water, settle on the bottoms of water bodies, and then seep into the biosphere and human organisms, leading to permanent damage to the nervous system, blood system, kidneys, brain development, respiratory and skin disorders, the spinal cord, and disrupting the immune and hormonal regulatory systems’.

When we hear about the effects of our tech construction we are aware it’s affecting the planet but, in a weird way, we become detached from the startling proximity of it all: WE LIVE HERE! Our actions affect real people in real time and not just the image of an unfeeling planet.

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As put by professor and researcher Max Liboiron in their esteemed ‘Pollution is Colonialism’ (4):

‘Relationships between technology and its materiality, environments, and different forms of exploitation are imbricated’. 

More simply said, our advancements in tech as a whole, not only AI, have reverberating effects that are tightly interwoven into systems of exploitation—of natural resources, of marginalized communities, and even of future generations who will bear the brunt of these choices. 

Depriving?

It’s easy to think: how is something which advances so often, building upon itself, actually depriving humanity?

Well, the answer is that advancements in technology have almost superseded human need which, many fear, will ultimately render humanity redundant.

Tech and AI has advanced further than humans in certain industries such to the point that now you don’t need some whining flesh bag insisting on a lunch break, but instead a machine, or robot.

For instance, Amazon is famous for having robots conduct themselves autonomously in their warehouses, navigating themselves without human input. 20 years ago that would have been humans doing that very same job, but now these jobs are being lost to the AI dominated era we find ourselves in.

In the UK, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPC) reported to the Guardian that ‘around 8,000,000 people are at risk of losing their jobs in the next 3 to 5 years’ (5). Quotes like this show how easily replaceable humanity is by our own creations.

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This idea of deprivation is deepened by the  loss of jobs which only humans should be able to do: creative arts.

It may be predictable that we will lose labour intensive jobs to a better suited robot which could say, lift more wooden pallets than a tired middle aged man whose been working since 5AM.

However, now it has become evident that we are losing our art, something so innate to humanity that nothing else should be able to replicate it.

The art we’re talking about are things like, films, drawings, music and paintings. AI now has the abilities to “create” its own “art” deemed as good enough to be passed on as human.

This can be seen within music with the already controversial Kanye West using it to generate lyrics (and even sing for him!)  in his song ‘Sky City’.

If we are now being deprived of our art then, what is next on the chopping block ready to be replaced by AI?

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Destructive?

Lastly, as a part of our three D’s, is destructive. Yes, it may be odd to think of a computer being able to even destroy anything, (it’s not like it has the ability to walk around and beat you up!) but it has developed the capability to destroy our planet and, in this department, it has succeeded. 

“Operated over six years, the annual GHG impact (aka carbon footprint, CFP) will be around 778kg CO2e. Of this, around 85 percent results from manufacture and shipping, and just 15 percent from electricity consumption while in use” .(6)

This shows that, while the laptops themselves and powering them is not exactly a huge issue, when evaluating them in terms of the environment, buying and consuming them is feeding into the cycle of pollution and carbon emissions.

With that, by buying the latest MacBook or smartphone you’re encouraging huge corporations like Apple to keep perpetuating this repeat abuse and extortion of our planet, as they keep selling the same products every year to the same consumers.

“Manufacture of desktop components is recognised to consume large amounts of water, and extraction of raw materials, as well as end of life disposal, have further impacts. These largely arise from manufacture and disposal, so scale directly the number of devices purchased, rather than as a result of use.” (7)

Now this is the big one: the quote epitomising it all.

Tech’s creation is destroying our resources, taking away nature’s building blocks of water and raw materials for the sake of a new generation of iPads: is that really worth it?

When you put it that bluntly: no, of course not, especially not at the rate in which humanity is ploughing through them, chopping and destroying our resources at a much faster rate than to which we can combat the problem. 

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So, as we’ve seen, our radical advancement in tech really isn’t all it’s hyped up to be.

Despite the many benefits it provides, it’s shown, time and time again, to be a traitorous double-edged sword and one that, unfortunately, we continue to wield against, not just our planet, but ourselves too.

 

If you’d like to delve a little more in to this kind of stuff, with some heavier, more in-depth material, we’ve attached our recommended list of reads below: sink your teeth right in!