The Environmental Tradeoffs of the Rise of AI

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Artificial intelligence is under scrutiny for the amount of water required to cool data centers. John Kempf, founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, says this conversation shouldn’t be about whether AI is “good” or “bad,” but rather a larger evaluation of what this technology is being used for.

Kempf… “ When we have all these significant energy costs, how much value are we creating that is offsetting that. So there's always this cost benefit analysis that needs to be done. If we are using AI just to simply create better social media posts, then maybe we need to question our priorities and the impact that we're having. But if we are using water for cooling AI data centers and we're using that to facilitate ecosystem regeneration on scale where we have much more uniform and consistent rainfall in a given region, for example, and there's a significant cost benefit ratio in favor of doing it. I would propose that we should think about it, not in terms of using it or not using it, but in terms of what are we using it for? And for that matter, we would be wise, I think, to ask that question for all the technology that we're utilizing.”

Kempf founded Advancing Eco Agriculture in 2006 and is focused on supporting farmers in developing regenerative agricultural systems.