Kevin takes a deep dive into the environmental implications of AI technologies like ChatGPT, connecting the dots between fitness, philosophy, and the future of technology.
Kevin takes a deep dive into the environmental implications of AI technologies like ChatGPT, connecting the dots between fitness, philosophy, and the future of technology.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Welcome back to Get Fit Guy, Kevin Don here. This week I’m basically going to take carte blanche to talk about whatever I want. Been a while since I went off on a total tangent, but here we go. So, regular listeners will know I am studying for an MA in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. But more specifically, most of the courses I have elected to take are at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the Centre for Technomoral Futures. What does that mean? Well its the study of the morality and value of future technology. AI, Data, Algorithms, Robots, Post Humans, biodiversity and so on. The connection here to ‘fitness’ is the environment. If we have some pet fish in a home aquarium and we dont do what is required to look after the water in the tank, the fish become unwell, or worse. The water is their environment. So the same goes for us. How many bicep curls do you think you need to be able to do to stop the polar ice caps melting or how many ab crunches save future generations from forest fires and flash floods from changes to global climates? So, our own fitness in terms of our ability to interact with our environment very much depends on there being an environment to interact with.
This past week, I saw someone I know who doesn’t have an insignificant following on social media posting to his followers about how they can free up more time and make life easier by having an LLM, for those not in the know this stands for Large Language Model, the most well known of which is chat gpt, write your email content, your instagram captions and so on. Now, this would be hard to argue against, its pretty obvious that if you get another entity, be in a personal assistant, a friend or an LLM to do your work for you, that you will have more free time. But I would also wager that most people know something doesn’t come from nothing. Before anyone religious emails in to say God created the universe from nothing, lets say that non metaphysical beings cannot create something from nothing. So, what is the cost of your ‘something’, in this case emails and instagram captions? Because there has to be one. I’ll get onto the interaction I had over WhatsApp with this person about his claims in a while but first of all, lets have a look at the costs of using LLM’s. Before I do, I want to say that first off, I’m literally studying this at one of the worlds most advanced research centres on the topic, so you are allowed to email me in with a counter claim, but remember that a Tik Tok video or a clip from Joe Rogan is so far down a hierarchy of evidence that it’s in the bin. Also that this is only a 12 minute podcast and not my dissertation, so I’m not able to cover every single nuance.
So, since I started this episode off talking about the environment as a component of fitness, I think you can probably guess there is an environmental cost. There is. First off, the huge use of water. Researchers at the University of Texas found in a study which I can’t cite because it is still awaiting peer review, that in merely the process of training chat gpt 3, Open AI used 185,000 gallons of water. Which is the same as is required to cool a nuclear reactor. Why? Well when these LLM’s ‘think’ they get hot. Real hot. The servers need cooled and thats why water is needed. Apart from the huge volumes of water used just to train these models up, it is estimated that the servers need a liter of water per 50-100 questions. As of last month, chat gpt is being asked around 10,000,000 questions a day, so is consuming 100,000 litres of water every 24 hours just to stay cool.
In addition to the water cost, chat gpt, as of Sept 2024 is using around 227gigawatt hours of electricity a year. This is enough to fully charge over 3 million electric vehicles or 48 million iPhone 15’s everyday to full charge, for a year. A single chat gpt enquiry uses 25 time more energy than a google search and training chat gpt 3, aside from the earlier mentioned 185,000 gallons of water, produced over 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide, about the same as a jumbo jet flying from New York to London 850 times. This is especially problematic when one looks at the locations of the chat gpt servers and the local energy production. We can see the roughly 16% of energy for the servers is coming from fossil fuels. However, without going too much into the morals of cryptocurrency, this is significantly less than something like bitcoin, which gets about 63% of its energy from fossil fuels.
So, it’s fair to say that there is a lot of empirical evidence out there on the negative effects of LLM’s on the environment. So, what happened with the chat I had about why I wouldn’t recommend that people who have any kind of influential following tell people to use LLM’s to do their work? Well, of course, I wasn’t believed but then also was met with the statement that they think that AI itself will come up with a solution to all this in the future and so we don’t need to worry. Genuinely one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard. I don’t think we should ever say its ok to poison or actively contribute to negatively impacting the environment and kick the can down the road for someone or something else to deal with. But it also got me to thinking about the morality of distance and how philosophy can help us to interpret why, in spite of sending data over, that I was met with this kind of response. The reality is that we can make a compelling case for the statement ‘charity begins at home’ have validity. Levine, et.al, (2002) and Levine and Thompson, (2004) showed that people are more likely to feel moral imperative towards members of their own groups than members of other groups. The outcome of these and other studies were that distance diminishes the strength and emotional impact. It was also shown that distance diminished moral responsibility and how large people anticipated their impact could be on a particular set of consequences.
This would align with work done in psychology called Social Impact Theory which suggests that the impact of an event diminishes with space and time. It is easy, It think to imagine 3 scenarios of application of violence. In the first, we have an infantryman engaged in hand to hand combat with the ‘enemy’, who has to take the life of another human with their own hands and witness it first hand. The second is a sniper, who takes the life of an enemy from a mile away, seen through a scope and the third is a drone operator in a command bunker in the U.S. firing weapons systems of enemy combatants thousands of miles away, seen only through a computer monitor, in Afghanistan. All of the above will experience moral injury. But it could be likely that distance of space and time results in each person experience a different sense of connection to the consequences of their actions via distance. This space and time proximity is one way that in law, payouts can be determined in litigation. The source of this is the UK was a live televised soccer match where many people were crushed to death. People who witnessed this live on television tried to take legal action against the BBC for the trauma they experienced, but proximity is key and they failed to make a compelling argument due to lack of proximity to the events.
Something to think about. And that is what philosophy is, really. If you have thought about energy use in your interest activities today, then philosophising was done. But remember, that just because moral sense was diminished by distance from the consequences of ones actions, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no connection between actions and consequences. There are farmers in Botswana having crops wiped out by flash floods caused by climate change that haven’t ever heard of chat gpt.
If you have any questions or would like to just say ‘hi’, please email me on getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, the director of podcasts Brannan Goetschius and Davina Tomlin. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app