Combining my passion for all things digital and a commitment to our planet’s well-being, I find myself at the crossroads of an increasingly AI-driven world and its environmental implications. This unique blend of expertise fuels my quest to unravel the complex dynamics between the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the stewardship of our planet (especially as this AI ‘thing’ is getting hotter and hotter).
A New Dawn for Urban Landscapes: Where Innovation Meets Sustainability
AI’s proliferation raises pivotal questions that demand our attention.
“What happens when AI saturates political life and depletes the planet, and how does AI shape our understanding of ourselves and our societies?”
In pursuit of answers, it becomes imperative to scrutinize the role of technology firms as they use AI to sculpt our future. My focus sharpens on the synergy of AI, automation, algorithms, and datafication, through the lens of cloud computing- a driving force behind urban development initiatives.
Navigating the AI Labyrinth
Over the last two decades, technological breakthroughs have rocketed humanity into a data-driven age. The combination of computing power, internet ubiquity, and digital technology has revolutionized our interactions with the world.
AI has a lengthy history of becoming “the next big thing” but has endured several winters. Yet, since the mid-2000s, AI has taken off as a topic in academia and industry. Today, a few large technological corporations are deploying AI systems globally, dubbed equivalent, if not superior, to human intellect.
AI has seamlessly integrated itself into the fabric of contemporary media, changing governance architecture, business dynamics, and the very substance of social norms.
Let’s ask the deceptively simple question: What is artificial intelligence? If you ask someone in the street, they might mention Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s cloud service, Tesla’s cars, or Google’s search algorithm.
However, the implications of AI stretch far beyond these consumer-facing applications. In general, AI is a hardware/software system designed to mimic the way our intelligence works. Built on the foundations of capital, policing, and militarization, these systems result in a complex web of various intentions and effects.
So, how is AI conceptualized and constructed? What are the social and material ramifications of incorporating AI and comparable algorithmic technologies into social institutions’ decision-making processes?
We go into the heart of this study through the prism of smart cities and their adoption of cloud computing, investigating the complex impact of AI on our society.
AI Takes the Wheel: Driving Smart Cities into the Future
With the growing popularity of connected devices, smart cities are becoming an ever-closer reality. I envision future cities as outstanding instances of how technology, when ideally linked with human needs, has the potential to alter society and the economy. Using AI to construct sustainable urban settings is the heart of this urban transformation. Smart cities are an emerging domain for big data analytics; cities worldwide are progressively implementing data-driven infrastructures and algorithmic decision-making to improve urban planning, operational efficiency, mobility, sustainability, and resident safety.
IoT (Internet of Things)- based machine learning, AI-centric control systems, and enhanced data science mark this transition to smart cities. These factors form a linked ecosystem that improves urban living by creating intelligent biotechnological unions in which varied micro-environments cohabit harmoniously.
This paradigm shift impacts future societies’ overarching governance structures and operational frameworks. In Kate Crawford’s recent work, ‘The Atlas of AI,’ Artificial Intelligence is more than just an idea or enterprise; it is an infrastructure, a kind of power exertion, and a lens through which we experience the world. AI is both embodied and material.
In this digital age, data has become the lifeblood of society.
Cities generate massive volumes of data (Big Data), allowing unparalleled opportunities to improve public services and people’s well-being. The emergence of smart cities is inherently linked to ubiquitous computing, which leverages real-time analytics, big data, and the IoT.
Integrating these new technologies into the urban fabric requires a seamless transition between the technological and biological domains.
Big Data has not just accelerated AI; AI systems are based on statistical models; AI can only function with a large amount of data to feed it. This relies on datafication, a process that converts numerous elements of life into quantifiable data for collection and analysis, thus powering the AI functionalities of smart cities.
Amidst this backdrop, the integration of cloud-based data analytics emerges as a pivotal force, acting both as a platform and a technology that underpins the operational capabilities of smart cities.
Cloud computing enables the creation, deployment, and scaling of apps and services, which improves urban planning, operational efficiency, and resident safety. This technology allows cities to use AI-powered analytics and decision-making algorithms to optimise urban processes, forecast trends, and improve resource management.
Case Study: Amazon Web Services AWS and Smart City Innovations
Now, how do Smart City innovations use these digital technologies to improve sustainability, efficiency, and innovation?
Illuminating the Path:
In urban development, the convergence of AI, automation, algorithms, and datafication represents progress and a significant revolution. Cloud technology is at the centre of this transformational wave, a seemingly ethereal idea with real-world implications for urban living. The question then becomes, how does this intangible technology appear in the tangible realm of urban living?
How Cloud Computing Elevates Urban Sustainability
Cloud platforms stand at the vanguard of revolutionizing energy management within smart cities. Cities can fine-tune their energy usage by leveraging smart grids, renewable energy sources, and demand-response systems, organised through real-time data analytics. This technique reduces carbon emissions and promotes energy efficiency and sustainability.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud platform offered by Amazon.com, is spearheading this revolution, with over 200 fully featured services available from data centres worldwide. As of 2022, AWS has a 40% market share, making it the largest cloud computing company in the world. This technology redefines city modalities in line with sustainability and operational efficiency objectives.
AWS’s Blueprint for Smarter, Greener Cities
Imagine a city where every streetlight, public transport vehicle, and healthcare facility is interconnected, generating a constant data stream.
AWS Cloud does precisely this, laying the foundation for such a futuristic vision. They are pioneering this paradigm of provisioning digital infrastructure, delivering a wide range of services, including computing power, storage options, networking, databases, analytics, machine learning, and more.
Their infrastructure is pivotal in managing many IoT applications, from public transportation and street lighting to healthcare delivery and resident payments (Lee, 2022). Integrating services across urban landscapes is about more than just operational efficiency; it is about creating a sustainable and liveable future.
AWS’s ambition to use 100% renewable energy by 2025 and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 demonstrates this vision. By moving workloads from on-premises to their platform, carbon footprints can be reduced by up to 96%, proving the platform’s better energy efficiency.
AWS’s Impact in Canada: A Microcosm of Global Transformation
AWS’s presence in Canada, with over 65 business and logistical sites, highlights their importance in digital infrastructure. The usage of cloud computing among Canadian businesses has increased, with Statistics Canada reporting a 39% utilisation rate in 2019 (AWS, 2022). This shift, amplified by the COVID-19 epidemic, reflects a digital transformation trend.
The use of technology and collaborations between the public and private sectors have become crucial in dealing with environmental threats like wildfires. Cloud services provided by AWS, such as open data that includes satellite images, have played a vital role in monitoring and controlling these crises, showcasing cloud technology’s effectiveness in disaster response and environmental conservation.
A Leap Forward
The global launch of the AWS Smart City Competency Programme is a big step towards creative urban solutions. Miovision, an AWS partner headquartered in Canada, is revolutionizing traffic management and road safety for 17,000 municipalities in 50 countries. Miovision’s solutions, which convert physical infrastructure into data assets, demonstrate how cloud technology can improve real-time management of urban environments, increase emergency response times, and strengthen overall city resilience.
So, AI’s great, right?
The Other Side of AI: Unpacking Environmental Footprints
The investigation into AI and datafication reveals a story riddled with ethical, privacy, and severe environmental concerns.
Drawing on the rich study of researchers such as Kate Crawford and Shoshana Zuboff, we obtain insight into AI as an extraction technology—from the physical extraction of minerals to the intangible extraction of labour and data (Crawford, 2021). These conversations are critical for understanding the broader consequences of major tech companies’ data collecting and utilisation, particularly regarding privacy, ethics, and power relations between consumers and technology giants.
It goes almost without saying that a logical consequence of the ever-present datafication is widespread surveillance, resulting in serious privacy breaches (Zuboff, 2015).
But this extends far beyond privacy concerns.
The environmental footprint of AI is a growing concern, marked by its substantial energy consumption and carbon emissions. Highlighted by Coeckelbergh, datafication has morphed into a critical resource for major companies, particularly within machine learning (2020). This change has become essential to current technology infrastructures.
Energy-intensive AI training and calculation operations power the seamless interfaces of digital information.
These operations demand vast computational resources, typically in sprawling data centers that consume significant electricity. In 2020, data centres consumed around 200 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity globally, with projections suggesting a potential climb to 350 TWh by 2030 if current trends continue. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) prediction emphasises growing energy demands and consumption associated with digital technologies, cloud computing, and AI infrastructure.
Furthermore, generating AI hardware components like GPUs and servers requires resource-intensive extraction, manufacturing, and transportation operations, bearing considerable environmental consequences, as evidenced by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT). For example, building a single server can emit carbon dioxide equivalent to driving a car for nearly 10,000 kilometres.
Governing the Digital Frontier: AI for a Sustainable Tomorrow
Sustainable methods are becoming evermore crucial for reducing AI’s environmental impact in a data-driven and platformized world. Optimising data storage and processing techniques to reduce energy, renewable energy sources for data centres and AI infrastructure, and embracing ethical AI concepts are all critical for responsible data utilisation and minimising superfluous processing.
Collaboration for Sustainability
Collaboration among tech companies, policymakers, researchers, and environmental organizations is vital.
In November 2021, UNESCO member states adopted the “Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence”, taking a significant step towards establishing global norms and standards for the ethical development, deployment, and governance of AI technologies by advocating for sustainable development practices in their design, deployment, and disposal.
Achieving a sustainable AI future necessitates methods for energy-efficient algorithms, environmentally-friendly hardware, and thorough life cycle assessments. Prioritising data transparency and minimisation, alongside regulatory frameworks like the EU’s “Green Deal”, demonstrates the policy’s vitality in guiding sustainable technological innovation.
Circling Back: The Role of AWS’s Energy-Efficient Chips
In this context, improvements in hardware efficiency are critical for lowering the carbon footprint of digital and AI technologies. Improving CPU management and utilisation is at the forefront of these efforts, with better cooling systems and new CPUs for data centres playing critical roles (Ezra, 2021).
AWS is an excellent example of a game-changing solution: highly efficient CPUs that consume significantly less power. AWS’s innovation of energy-efficient chips Graviton3 and Inferentia symbolises a beacon of hope. These chips perform their functions with up to 60% less energy than previous AWS chips (Moorhead, 2022). They can perform up to 50% more work per watt of power, which is fantastic News for the environment (Moorhead, 2022).
But AWS is not the only corporation pushing the limits. Nvidia, a titan in the hardware arena, dropped some intriguing news in March 2024. Their new Blackwell GPUs and Platform technology are expected to significantly increase computational capacity while reducing prices and energy consumption by 25% over their previous model. This is huge, especially given that major names in technology like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are already planning to use them in their cloud services.
Such advances in hardware efficiency are more than just incremental improvements; they are critical milestones in tackling the environmental concerns faced by AI technologies’ increasing footprints.
Conclusion: The Future of AI in Urban Sustainability
“The convergence of AI, automation, algorithms, and datafication is revolutionizing smart cities and transforming urban sustainability initiatives. However, AIs rapid advancement raises critical environmental concerns”
Smart cities are the most exciting, visible, and challenging applications of new technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, and AI. They are becoming a stitch in the fabric of urban life, connecting people and places with technology that enables better city planning and management.
Yet, the question remains: How do we balance the scales between technological advancement and environmental stewardship?
Bridging Worlds- The Convergence of AI, Urban Sustainability, and Our Collective Future:
In the digital age, it is vital to prioritise sustainable AI design, development, and deployment. This is necessary to minimize energy consumption, cut carbon footprints, and promote environmental stewardship. The IoT, Big Data, and AI all work to create an automated environment, and understanding this relationship is critical for leveraging technology to improve our lives. Achieving justice with AI requires continuous adaptation, dedication and robust regulations, standards, and governance frameworks established by policymakers and stakeholders
The convergence of AI and urban sustainability is fraught with promise and peril, prompting us to ask: “What does true progress look like in an age where technology’s potential is limitless but the planet’s resources are not?” Maybe AI will provide the solutions.
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