Despite debate around skyrocketing growth of artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it, AI optimism abounds.
For Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT and the renowned author and co-author of More from Less and The Second Machine Age, artificial intelligence isn’t just something to lean into. It’s “the most powerful tool that we’ve ever come up with” to fight the civilizational challenges we face, including the energy transition. The efficiencies and transformations that AI can enable, he argues, vastly outweigh the electricity and water that data centers consume.
“[AI] is going to help us tread more lightly on the planet,” McAfee said in the first episode of the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives. “I’m very confident that we’re going to accomplish the energy transition faster the more AI we have around.”
For McAfee, the conversation about AI’s extraordinary potential starts with the Industrial Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to the first Industrial Revolution, technological progress stagnated for thousands of years. But with the advent of the steam engine and machine production, people overcame the limitations of physical strength, supercharging a new era of change in the way people worked, lived, moved, and generally thought about the world.
The rise of AI, McAfee says, has much in common with that consequential time. Like the steam engine before it, AI is quickly becoming a general purpose technology. For McAfee, this means it ticks three critical boxes beyond niche applications — it improves quickly, fuels fresh and complimentary innovations (such as autonomous vehicles), and spreads through every sector of the economy.
Yet this technological shift is occurring at a much faster pace than it during the Industrial Revolution.
“ AI is improving at head spinning rates,” McAfee said. “I struggle to think of a part of the global economy that is not going to be meaningfully transformed by AI; not in half a century, but in a decade.”
In the energy sector, McAfee sees AI’s promise across the board, but particularly in the quest to harness the power of nuclear fusion. He once shared a car ride with the head of a commercial nuclear fusion company who told him advanced computation has improved the company’s ability to simulate fusion reactors “not by 31% or 310%…but by 31 orders of magnitude,” McAfee said. This exponential increase in computing allows the company to simulate reactors in a computer rather than building expensive physical prototypes, drastically expediting the timeline to commercial fusion.
McAfee acknowledges the narrative that AI energy consumption is an unmanageable crisis. But he pushes back on it. AI workloads are energy-intensive, but he argues that AI allows for reduced energy consumption across the economy — from transportation and resource extraction to the global supply chain.
McAfee stresses that hyperscalers are incentivized to make their data centers more efficient, a shift that is already underway. “The companies producing AI don’t say, well then I guess our energy bill also has to go up at an exponential rate. They don’t treat that as a given,” McAfee said. “Hyperscale data centers are so much more energy efficient than leading data centers were ten years ago, probably even five years ago.”
To borrow his own phrase, McAfee believes we are on a path in which AI enables us to create more from less, to decouple our growth from its impact on the planet.
“ This is a triggering piece of news for some people,” he quipped. “There’s a lot of good news about our relationship with our planet and the environment, and a big part of the reason why there’s so much good news is good old-fashioned tech progress. And AI, even though it’s energy hungry, is going to accelerate that progress. I deeply believe that.”
For the full conversation with Andrew McAfee, listen to his interview on season 5 of Where the Internet Lives:
This is partner content, brought to you by Google. It borrows from an interview that appeared on Where the Internet Lives, a podcast produced in partnership by Latitude Studios and Google.
Where the Internet Lives is an award-winning podcast about the unseen world of data centers. Follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
