Neutralizing the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Climate Change

[Applause]

i made sustainability my default choice

in the year 2018

and my vision for the year 2030 is to

neutralize the impact of artificial

intelligence on climate change

seven years one or three days 15 hours

12 minutes

and 6 seconds the clock here is from

manhattan

which shows you the amount of time left

to reverse climate change

seven years one not three days 15 hours

12 minutes and 6 seconds let that sink

in

on 25th of september 2019 approximately

6 million people

across the world protested against the

lack of action

and ownership by global leaders on

climate change

yet there are still a lot of people in

the world who do not believe climate

change is happening

the survey here is done by the yale

school of environment on united states

of america

which shows you that 12 percent of the

people do not believe in global warming

while 47 believe that it’s not going to

affect them

but climate change is real whether you

believe in the science of it or not

and it will affect you even though you

do not live in the cities that are

currently facing wildfires hurricanes

or are going to get submerged by the

year 2050 in water due to climate change

the world health organization estimates

that if climate change remains unchecked

then from the year 2030 to the year 2050

you will have about 2 lakh 50 000 deaths

per year

in fact there’s also research which

shows that climate change affects your

mental health

so how do we stop this a lot of people

believe a way to decarbonize

is to decomputerize technology does have

a massive impact on climate change

technology such as artificial

intelligence intel internet of things

has its own carbon footprint a team at

stanford came up with a tool called

green ai

which shows you the amount of carbon

emissions generated by an artificial

intelligent algorithm

according to the tool a natural language

processing algorithm which is widely

used

in alexa city and other customer service

chatbots

generates about 1 400 pounds of carbon

emissions

which is equivalent to a person taking a

round trip from new york to san

francisco

so does this mean we stop making

innovations and technology

technology has been the one thing that

has kept us together in this kobe 19

pandemic

technology is the way i’m communicating

my thoughts with you

technology is the method that we are

using to online conference our office

colleagues and even video chatting our

friends and family

or even to get your most basic amenities

from online grocery shopping

in fact technology is the very same tool

that we use to even spread awareness on

climate change

each tweet you post generates about 0.2

grams of carbon emissions

and there are about 500 million tweets

which go out in a day

short well let me tell you how each

tweet gets stored and processed in data

centers

these data centers are used for almost

everything on internet

from google searches to instagram posts

to even netflix and amazon

to process the tweet and to share it

with the rest of the world

these data centers run 24 7. now this

energy to run these data centers comes

from burning of fossil fuels

to give you an idea of the intensity of

this in the year 2016 it was reported

that the data centers across the world

consumed about 416.2 terawatts of energy

which was more than the energy

consumption of britain that year

hence making data centers responsible

for 2 percent of global emissions

research shows that if data centers

continue the way they do

then by the year 2040 they will be

responsible for 14

of global emissions which is equivalent

to the emissions of united states of

america right now

so how do we fix this is there a way for

us to neutralize the

negative impact of technology by using

technology for good

the answer is absolutely yes one of the

most common solutions for this problem

is to go green

that is to use renewable energy sources

to power your data centers

instead of fossil fuels but renewable

energy sources comes with its own

challenges

challenge number one they’re

intermittent in nature that is

they’re not constant 24 7. which leads

us to our challenge number two

can these intermittent sources be able

to supply

energy for 24 7 running data centers

also just shifting towards renewable

energy is not enough

the energy pyramid here shows you

exactly that

there is no point of just shifting

towards renewable energy we need to

ensure that the systems

are also energy efficient and have

energy conservation in picture

let me share with you three solutions

where artificial intelligence algorithms

can be used

solution number one artificial

intelligence algorithms such as load

monitoring can be used with your sensors

to manage and track your demand of the

data centers

this ensures that the systems in the

data centers work more efficiently

hence ensuring less amount of energy

consumption

in fact google has already implemented

this and seen a 40 percentage drop in

their energy consumption

solution number two since we knew

renewable energy is not constant in

nature

we need to ensure that the demand of the

data centers is always met by the supply

this can be done by predicting your

supply and demand by using time series

forecasting

solution number three artificial

intelligence algorithms can be used to

schedule data processing across

data centers in the world for example

consider these two data centers

data center one is in usa while data

center 2 is in asia

during the morning in asia where solar

energy is at its peak

the data centers here can run on solar

energy and process the data

while during the night this processing

can be shifted to usa

where it’s still day and solar and

energy there can be used

each of these solutions are already

implemented but

in small scale each of these solutions

can reduce the carbon impact by minimum

20

to 60 percent not only are these

solutions

environment friendly but also budget

friendly since renewable energy is much

cheaper than fossil fuels

so now that we know these solutions

exist what do we need to make this

happen

we need two things one for the present

and one for the future

let’s start with the present first like

bill gates said

we need climate denominators we need

researchers

entrepreneurs scientists engineers

who understand the correlation between

climate change and technology

and create solutions like this now for

the future

we need reducing carbon impact as one of

the core values

while developing anything new in

technology this not only applies for

hardware but software as well

every algorithm that we generate we need

to ensure that the processing takes the

least amount of energy

hence ensuring low carbon emissions with

this i leave you with my vision not just

for 2030 but also beyond it

progress in technology and mitigating

climate change needs to go hand in hand

neither one of them should happen at the

cost of the other

you