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2025-01-23 03:00:00
Final week, Keir Starmer introduced his plans to make use of synthetic intelligence to drive “unimaginable change in our nation”. A part of the technique is to create “AI development zones”, together with one in Culham, Oxfordshire.
The choice caught the eye of the Guardian’s atmosphere reporter Helena Horton.
“They’ve positioned this development zone in one of the crucial water-stressed areas of the UK,” Helena tells Michael Safi. “The Setting Company has categorised that space as severely water pressured, and that’s why they’re constructing a brand new reservoir there.
“These information centres don’t simply use an enormous quantity of power, additionally they use an enormous quantity of water a whole lot of the time,” Helena says. “As a result of they’re processing a lot information, the servers get actually, actually sizzling … so to cease the servers from overheating, they’ve to chill them down with water.”
However what concerning the argument that synthetic intelligence will assist clear up points across the local weather, as some AI bosses have prompt?
“It’s good to have the world’s biggest thinkers occupied with local weather change. However the concern is that it may be used as an excuse to not use the know-how that we’ve got now, and a whole lot of the know-how we’ve got to construct renewables is fairly cutting-edge, the batteries which can be being developed. They’re simply not as sort of attractive as AI, you already know?
“And it’s not an argument in opposition to AI itself. It’s simply saying that if we’re going to construct these information centres which can be required for AI, we must be accountable with how we construct them.”
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