Season 3 Trailer: Feeding the Matrix: a special series on AI and climate, coming soon

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

It’s a new year and there’s one conversation I want to tackle head-on and that conversation is AI and climate.

You kids remember your history as told in the great American prophecy The Matrix? When Morpheus reveals to Neo that in their past AI became so power-hungry, humans were reduced to batteries, their bioelectric energy harvested to keep the machines running.

Matrix CLIP: 'The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields where human beings are no longer born … we are grown.

Obviously the climate crisis wasn’t relevant to the machines either they nuked the earth during the war with the machines and everybody lives underground or as a battery in a saline pod anyway.

So in hopes of avoiding EITHER of those futures we’re starting off this season with a special series on AI and climate that I’m calling Feeding the Matrix.

See “Artificial intelligence” is a euphemism in much the same way that “the cloud” is a euphemism both of those things actually mean gigantic buildings full of computers that are working 24-7 to store, analyze, receive, deliver, and process information.

These buildings as you’re probably becoming more aware are called data centers and they are starting to account for a bigger and bigger percentage of global electricity use.

In 2023 according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data centers consumed 4.4% of US electricity. And that was mostly just to deliver YouTube and Netflix and store images and information and be Facebook or Google or Instagram or Microsoft 365 or whatever.

But now there’s this new tech in the mix. Generative A-I AI that doesn’t just analyze information it takes in huge amounts of information, breaks it down, processes it, and then uses that information to generate NEW things like answers to your recipe questions or fun trivia games or images or write emails for you or interpret your tarot cards. Am I the only one who does that?

Anyway, that process of LEARNING and also GENERATING requires a LOT more power. In fact that same Lawrence Berkeley National Lab report said that demand may cause JUST U-S data centers to consume as much as 12% of U-S electricity by 2028 more than the electricity used by California, Florida, and New Jersey combined.

So what does that mean for global carbon emissions for the sustainability goals of these companies for global electricity demand and possibly in terms of demand for actual clean energy and energy innovation?  and what role could AI itself play in reducing the need for so much electricity, even as it grows, that is what we aim to investigate over the next four weeks on everybody in the pool.

That’s what we aim to investigate over the next four weeks on Everybody in the Pool.

You'll hear from Nvidia, the company whose chips power much of today's AI revolution, about their push to make artificial intelligence more energy efficient. We'll take you inside Amazon's AWS data centers to see how the cloud computing giant is reimagining sustainable infrastructure. You’ll hear from a fusion energy startup that believes it can power tomorrow’s A-I with the same process that powers the sun and we'll talk to a former Microsoft executive who was in charge of transforming data centers from energy hogs into regenerative hubs that actually give back more resources than they consume.

The future of AI depends on solving its energy crisis. Join us next week as we explore how to build that future without you know turning to human batteries and cooking the whole planet.