[Music] have you ever used artificial intelligence like Tik Tok filters to turn yourself into an astronaut or ride a dragon it's fun and harmless right not quite AI generates millions of images a day and according to a recent study just one image can consume as much energy as charging your phone that's right just like most things AI has a carbon footprint we definitely shouldn't um kind of view AI as a Costless thing I think it's very easy to view it this as abstract thing on your computer that doesn't have any impact but it but it
does so where do those emissions come from well around the world most AI is posted in data centers like this one that sound you're hearing those are fans being used to keep the hardware cool as these computers are sucking up a lot of electricity and generating a lot of heat running AI is running any other computer program you have an input you want an output it's going to lots and lots of operations and doing lots of operations for one answer means that there's a lot of energy and electricity from Netflix recommendations to smart cars and
image filters AI is a big part of our everyday lives according to the International Energy agency data centers and transmission networks account for 1% of global energy related emissions that's almost as much as the aviation industry and AI is a quickly growing piece of that but it's not all bad it's also an important tool in the climate fight AI is being used in all sorts of ways to address climate action from helping us better forecast solar and wind on the power grid to help us better integrate those into Power grids to helping better optimize heating
and cooling systems in buildings to help kind of improve improve the efficiency of those systems in the global South climate change is increasing Locust outbreaks and threatening food security an AI tool uses data on soil moisture wind humidity satellite images and more to predict Locust swarms in some African countries Farmers receive text alerts up to 3 months in advance of an outbreak AI powered models are also providing earlier warning system systems for natural disasters like floods and can help map flood patterns to guide Disaster Response here at home you can see AI in action in
some potato fields in PEI meet the aggr Scout robot there were a few people who stopped on the road to see what was going on what this robot is actually doing in the field it may look like a Rover that belongs on Mars but it's actually helping potato Farms Farmers using cameras to look for potential disease in their crop it will generate a map with the location information they can load that map on their cell phone it will direct you where those infected plants are and get those out we are planning to attach a robotic
arm to it that whereever it picks on the symptom it get those plants out and Rising temperatures and trout conditions are making Wildfire Seasons more extreme bring in AI german-based company dry at is building AI trained sensors for Ultra early Wildfire detection the company has deployed 20,000 worldwide these are solar powered gas sensors so behind this membrane here is a gas sensor that is um um sensitive to hydrogen carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds so it actually is like an electronic nose um that can actually smell fire and we can um detect fires as small
as a campfire uh even before there is an open flame uh sometimes as long as the gas molecules are hitting the sensor so we can protect about the size of a football field AI is becoming more widely adopted across society and the types of models that we're using are also changing some of the models are getting larger and larger this picture is changing and we really have to be on the lookout for the growth in ai's emissions footprint and fundamentally one thing that is challenging in getting a hold of that is that there isn't enough
transparency AI will continue to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions until we move away from fossil fuels having an energy G that is less carbon intensive means that for the same amount of computation for the same model you're going to have less of a carbon impact AI is here to stay we will only use it more and more in our daily lives but experts say we have to think about how we use it and its consequences we can't really afford to be distracted for 5 years thinking about whether the a is going to be the Terminator
instead of addressing how it's going to impact uh climate emissions
