With the new technology being used daily as a resource for convenience, many people don’t fully understand its effects and are overusing and taking advantage of its applications.
Artificial intelligence is becoming an integral part of daily life, even if we don’t realize it. It powers everything from digital assistants to online shopping. But with these crutches we have put into our technology comes a shockingly growing environmental footprint. AI’s rapid growth also drives higher water usage, emissions, and e-waste, raising urgent sustainability concerns. This is due to the amount of energy it takes to use AI.
Adam Zewe explains, “The computational power required to train generative AI models that often have billions of parameters, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, can demand a staggering amount of electricity, which leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressures on the electricity grid.”
Not only is it negatively affecting the environment, but it also affects our brain movement, including critical thinking. There was a study done at MIT, raising the alarm about how AI impacts learning and how convenience could come at a cost for your brain. In the study, they looked at three groups: people using AI, a search engine, or only their pre-existing knowledge to write an essay. In the end, it showed that using AI created weaker neural connectivity compared to using just your brain.
And although all of these factors are very important, AI has also had positive effects in other subareas, such as medical usage. It is important to put the future into perspective and to fully understand the technology that you have such easy access to. AI should not be used to take jobs away, such as artists. It is a very powerful tool that almost everyone has access to, and it has many negative effects on us as the people using it and the world we live in.
Overall, AI should be used lightly, and it should have more safety guards so that we wouldn’t be in this situation with so many disregarded problems. If we don’t take these steps, things will only get worse from here on out.
