Hi Everyone 👋🏽

If you're new here, welcome to Growth Imperatives, an ongoing curation of found ideas that de-construct the current world, and ask how we can build a new one.

This week, I want to talk about AI (yes, again). I'd love to stop, but it continues to be a hot-button topic in design—although Wall Street does seem to be cooling on it.

🙅🏽‍♂️ AI is incompatible with environmentalism

As much as designers love to be on the cutting edge of tech, this article made me come to a strong conclusion: any designer who cares about the climate should abandon AI. Or at least relegate it to a 'break in case of emergency' tool. It goes without saying that using it as a personal Google or calculator is a waste.

AI follows the same doublespeak pattern of other tech advancements of the past 15 years—from social media to the cloud—which we thought were innocuous but ended up being socially or environmentally detrimental. (The cloud, a euphemism for 'data center,' has a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry.)

The difference between AI and those technologies is that AI is still nascent. There's still time to scuttle the ship.

The real question we need to ask ourselves is this: Is the upside (?) of summarizing emails, getting feedback without talking to another living person, having personalized stock imagery—or, god forbid, an imaginary Friend—worth the downside of running the planet further into the ground?

I don't think it is, and it's more apparent to me than ever that we have more to gain by developing a worldview centered around nature than one centered around technology.

Anyway, here's a bit from the article:

[I]nsatiable hunger for power is slowing the transition to green energy. When the owner of two coal-fired power plants in Maryland filed plans to close last year, PJM asked them to keep running till at least 2028 to ensure grid reliability. Meanwhile, AI is also being used to actively increase fossil fuel production. Shell, for example, has aggressively deployed AI to find and produce deep-sea oil. [...]

Even before Google’s AI integration this spring, the average internet user’s digital activity generated 229 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. That means the world’s current internet use already accounts for about 40 percent of the per capita carbon budget needed to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. [...]

“It’s difficult to reckon with the physical harms of AI, says Brian Chen, policy director at the nonprofit Data & Society, because “tech companies invisibilize the consequences of these systems, most people don’t have to think about it.”

Latin America, for example, is now seeing a surge in data center development, including near drought-stricken Mexico City, which is hurtling toward a day in the near future when its taps run dry. [...]

People don’t realize that when the groundwater is exhausted, there’s no alternative.

“They don’t live in the natural world,” Ward says. “They live in a world where there’s a pipe in the wall, and you get water, and they have no idea where it comes from.”

He adds, “But when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Read → The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI by Lois Parshley

🏗️ Reconstructions

Three bite-sized ideas to help challenge your thinking:

It can sometimes feel as though we have given up on any bold ideas about how we might want to live in the future. All we hear is artificial intelligence, ‘AI’. At the same time, ‘sustainable’ design feels trapped in a narrow framework defined by concepts such as ‘net zero’. It is in shaving mode: shaving off some carbon here, some plastic there and some waste over there. This is all crucial work, but if we struggle to achieve net zero, it is partly because carbon counting feels like accountancy, not a compelling vision of the future.

→ Justin McGuirk in The Impact of Design: Symptoms, Systems and Stories

It can be easy to get lost in numbers, but what they point to is an obvious truth: generative AI is an environmental disaster that’s accelerating natural destruction and the climate crisis at the very moment alarms are sounding about the precious little time that remains to turn things around. Tech companies once pitched themselves as the purveyors of a more ethical form of capitalism. They wanted us to believe they would balance corporate profit with environmental sustainability, such that the digital future was marketed as inherently more sustainable than the analog past. It’s clearer than ever that was a lie.

→ Paris Marx in Generative AI is a climate disaster

I will reflexively convert a personal story into a lesson or metaphor—sometimes even as it's happening. I've learned to experience life as a series of content opportunities. And I know I'm not alone.

Kate Tyson once texted me a screenshot of a LinkedIn update that started with an eye-catching line about checking into the emergency room. After teasing that the experience got them thinking, the update pivoted to ask, "What can an emergency room visit teach you about running a better business?" For all I know, the rest of the post was thoughtful and well-considered. It’s not the content itself that’s at issue. The issue (or one of them) is what happens when our creative reflex becomes turning a personal story into valuable content.

Our stories cease to be our stories—and become instruments for attracting attention.

→ Tara McMullin in Unpacking the Attention Fetish

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

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