Global capitalism is not as monolithic as many of its critics believe it to be. The threat posed by climate change to the prospects of continued growth is now widely recognised. But different sectors respond to that threat in different ways.
Big Oil, for example, remains wedded to the fossil fuels which so successfully raised output, profits, and, for some, living standards, over the past century. It may now tinker at the edges with renewable energy, and dream that it can store its carbon emissions, but it is too heavily invested in the infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction, distribution, and consumption to willingly give up on its core business.
Big Tech, on the other hand, can recognise that continued burning of fossil fuels is destroying the climate stability on which human civilisation has relied for the last 11,000 years. It is aware that its huge appetite for energy is problematic, and calculates that transition to cheap low-carbon energy would slow climate disruption yet allow growth to continue. It is less concerned, though, about the damage caused by the mining of the new minerals that are needed for energy transition. It seizes on solutions that respect one planetary boundary (climate change), but transgress others (biosphere integrity, land system change, and freshwater use)..
Techno-Optimism
Big Tech depends on continued economic growth. It recognises that climate change is a threat to its operations and its customer base and also an opportunity to profit from its ability to offer solutions. Its instrumental thinking seeks new technological disruptions of nature to resolve problems created by existing technological disruptions of nature. It’s a mindset that is exemplified by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Andreessen champions the innovation that he believes only tech startups (Little Tech) can provide. He commits to screen what many in Big Tech actually think “There is no material problem - whether created by nature or by technology - that cannot be solved with more technology,” he claims. He doesn’t recognise any limits to growth - “a technologically advanced society has unlimited clean energy for everyone. … We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.”
The latest kid on the techno-optimist block is Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology that is based on detecting patterns in data. With generative AI (ChatGPT etc) it is often assumed that the bigger the data set (much of it scraped from the internet) from which it draws the better the outcome. In practice, it invades privacy to assemble something so big that it’s impossible to assess the quality of the data on which it has been trained. This is what computational linguist Emily Bender means by calling it a stochastic parrot - it generates language which is plausible, but it just haphazardly repeats words whose meaning it does not understand, from sources whose veracity cannot be checked. And both the energy and water it consumes are vast. Predictive AI is little better. It may be less prone to bias than generative AI, but it is just as data (and energy and water) greedy.
We have already seen, with crypto ‘currencies’ like Bitcoin, how quickly an energy devouring tech dream can disrupt energy grids. China discouraged bitcoin ‘mining’ in 2021 because this was having such a disruptive effect on its power grid. Bitcoin mining migrated to the USA, particularly Texas, where the increased energy demand caused prices for households to surge. All for a ‘currency’ those fluctuating value renders it useless as a medium of exchange, and which functions mainly to facilitate money laundering or to encourage speculative greed.
“AI is going to be a cornerstone technology for economic growth, if it’s allowed to play out the way that it should … This may be the biggest technological boom of all time … This is going to determine the shape of the world for hundreds of years.”
(Marc Andreessen, The Little Tech Agenda: Why We Support Trump, YouTube July 2024)
AI will hopefully be put to more productive uses than crypto, though there is no guarantee of that (AI technology is already changing military operations in a big way), There’s no doubt that its uses will multiply, and that its demands for energy will be huge. Already, the International Energy Agency has estimated that data centres consume 1-1.3% of global electricity, and that crypto mining adds another 0.4%. Efficiency will improve as data storage migrates from small enterprises to large cloud facilities, but this will pose massive grid problems anywhere hyperscale facilities are concentrated - data centres already account for a fifth of total electricity consumption in Ireland, for example, thanks largely to the demands of Google (Dublin) and Meta (Meath).
Often, large data centres can only be sited where there is existing spare grid capacity. Digital Reef’s planned new 600MW data centre in the UK had to be located on green belt land in Havering as this was the only site within 40 miles of Central London where its 600MW electricity demand could be met without having to wait for a grid upgrade.
“At least 3000 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power projects, of which 1500 GW are In advanced stages, are waiting in grid connection queues …. While investment in renewables has been increasing rapidly - nearly doubling since 2010 - global investment in grids has barely changed.”
(International Energy Agency, Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions, 2023)
Big Tech is keen to decarbonise its energy use, and it proudly displays its solar panels. But even accelerated grid upgrades and rapid expansion of renewable energy coupled with battery storage will fail to meet all its needs. Instead, it is pinning its hopes on developing its own small modular reactors, supplying its own sources of power, independent of the grid. Not just old-fashioned nuclear fission, but nuclear fusion. The fact that no nuclear fusion reactor has yet been able to produce more electricity than it uses has not deterred the techno-optimists. Open AI’s Sam Altman has invested $375 million in Helion, a fusion startup which it claims will become operational by 2028. Helion is already signed up to supply energy for data centres run both by Microsoft and Open AI.
Helion’s operations are shrouded in even more secrecy than Open AI’s ChatGPT, and it is difficult to assess the realism of its claims. There’s no public information about its waste treatment plans, for example, or how it will address security issues. Its nuclear reactions fuse deuterium, an abundant element, with Helium-3, an element which is scarce on Earth, but abundant on the moon. Is the long term plan to plunder the moon’s resources to create the abundant ‘clean’ energy they crave? I wouldn’t put it past them.
Whether or not Big Tech’s faith in nuclear fusion is justified, continued growth will require a huge expansion in renewable energy plus battery storage. This requires more mining, and because the needs of growth cannot be questioned, the consequences of mining for the living planet are ignored. BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager, has highlighted how “The energy transition is dependent on a range of mined commodities.” - copper, lithium, rare earths, etc. Always on hand to provide a ‘progressive’ cloak for boundary violation, it does not acknowledge that these new mining operations will inevitably destroy wildlife habitats and contribute to species extinction and pollution of scarce water supples. Instead, it suggests that these operations can be greenwashed by decarbonising them, and that AI will help with this - “Technology and AI can help with precision targeting of mining project, plus energy optimisation technologies, including waste heat recovery, smart process control and monitoring.”
The return of Tony Blair
In the UK, a key driver of techno-optimism is the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), which has huge ambitions to determine the policies of the new Labour government. Blair himself is as convinced by the PR claims of AI advocates as he had been in 2002 by the dodgy dossier’s claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. One of his ambitions is for the UK to be “the first nation to show the full opportunity of governing in the age of Artificial Intelligence.”
Larry Ellison, executive chair and chief technology officer of Oracle, is one of the TBI’s main funders. Oracle is a major provider of cloud services, and of data systems that facilitate the application of AI to healthcare. It’s no surprise that the TBI should be obsessed with persuading the new Labour government to transform the public sector, and particularly the National Health Service, with AI. It’s an obsession that both ignores the downsides of replacing humans with AI, and reinforces the compliance-based management systems that limit public sector effectiveness in the real world.
One of the TBI’s many reports published in the immediate aftermath of the election identified possible efficiency gains that “could help save a fifth of public-sector workers’ time” (which likely means laying off a fifth of the public sector workforce, rather than using productivity gains to improve service). The report’s analysis, inappropriately enough, was based on content generated by ChatGPT. As Consultancy UK have noted, “asking ChatGPT, an active player in the market openly looking for investments, whether it could be a useful tool would not stand up in any other context.”
A separate Greening AI report from TBI recognises that AI is energy-intensive, and that its growth depends on growth in energy supply. It insists that “slowing down the development of compute infrastructure while clean energy supply catches up is not a sensible option”, and stresses the importance of accelerating investment in clean energy and in grid infrastructure, and innovating more energy efficient AI hardware and software. In the long term, it offers nothing specific, just a word salad - “a positive loop in which AI speeds up the energy transition while subsequent clean-energy production fuels further technological innovation unleashing investments into compute infrastructure and clean technologies”, to be implemented by “triple-helix partnerships that interconnect and enhance collaboration between government, academia and the private sector.”
Beyond the limits
Big Tech claims it has solved the problem of how to overcome the limits to growth on our finite planet. It believes it has found a source of unlimited cheap energy, that will enable the storage and analysis of unlimited quantities of data. “If we make both energy and intelligence and energy ‘too cheap to meter’,” Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto suggests, “the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils … We believe technological progress therefore leads to material abundance for everyone.”
There is considerable overlap between the dreams of the techno-optimists and those of the transhumanists. Both treat technology as if it were a religion. Both celebrate the violation of boundaries. And both welcome the prospect of humans fusing with machines and dissociating from nature.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto unashamedly asserts the rights of humans to destroy wilderness and deny other species the right to exist. “We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated,” it proclaims. “We believe the global population could expand quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.”
The techno-optimist quest for endless economic growth, like the transhumanist quest for artificial reproduction and everlasting life, pretends to deny material reality, but this won’t stop tech billionaires pouring resources into trying to achieve the impossible. Pursuit of that quest is destroying wild nature, just as pursuit of the transhumanist quest is destroying human biology.
It’s important not to be taken in by the promise of AI. Its uses are not confined to those which are socially beneficial. The tech corporations that supply it need continued growth, wherever that leads them. We cannot sit back, give them our data, and let them take over our lives. If we allow them to carry on their reckless path, nature will, one way or another, put a stop to it, and react against us.
If we resist, reorient our economic system around basic needs rather than profit, and restore nature rather than destroy it, then perhaps we can wean ourselves off dependence on growth, in a way that respects both our humanity and the living planet as a whole. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
Google Search was the only AI used in the writing of this substack (autocorrect’s contribution was negative). I can’t vouch for the quotes or hyperlinks.