I asked them, and they essentially have the same discourse saying, doesn't matter, we're working on AGI.

And for me, as like a scientist, I find that really shocking because it's like, well, yeah,

you have scientific responsibility. You should be transparent about the cost of your work.

That's part of being a scientist. That's part of being a researcher. And the fact that it's

percolated to that level, yeah, it really worries me.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Sasha Lucioni.

Sasha is an artificial intelligence researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face.

Now, you've probably seen plenty of stories in the past year or so about the rising emissions at companies like Microsoft and Google, the large water use of their data center networks,

and of course the growing concerns about the energy use and computational demands of generative

AI tools released by OpenAI, Google, meta, and these other major tech companies. At the same time

as temperatures seem to be rising, as the natural disasters that we experience globally seem to be

getting worse because of climate change, the tech industry has decided to massively increase

its energy use and its computational demand to

build out many new hyperscale data centers in order to power these AI ambitions with little

thought for the climate impacts and the sustainability goals that they're breaching by chasing

their business interests, by trying to grow their cloud computing businesses,

and by rolling out generative AI tools that don't actually provide the benefits that they claim

they do. The climate is being further ravaged in our ability to actually stay within the targets

that we need to meet are being made more and more difficult because the tech industry,

not just these major companies, are arguing increasingly that we need to be massively increasing

our energy use or else we as a society are going to stagnate and life will become a lot worse.

...