Yesterday I read that Ireland’s data centres used 21% of the country’s electricity last year – more than the amount consumed by all of its urban homes combined. This comes on top of more and more articles about the energy demands of AI, as tech companies abandon their emissions targets in favour of potential profits and staying ahead in the race.

There’s no question that the world is already suffering from adverse climate change – in many areas for a long time, but it comes inexorably closer to those of us who feel a degree of protection thanks to our luck to be born in certain places and situations. Munich is having the wettest summer I’ve experienced here, with daily thunderstorms and downpours. More and more flights are disturbed by extreme turbulence, glaciers are melting and so on. The science is clear – we need to reduce emissions globally, now, or the suffering will escalate. So what do we do? I know – let’s throw all our hopes into technologies that don’t yet exist but already require massively more energy that we can safely generate! And we’d better build some nuclear power stations without any realistic solutions to attendant waste problem, and new fossil-fuel power stations as well, to be sure we keep those data centres fed.

Then last week we had the Crowdstrike outage, throwing large sectors into chaos, and surely just the beginning of this level of disruption, now that so much of our daily lives are forcibly digitised. Having your travel plans messed up is one thing, but cancelled medical treatments are more serious. And that’s just a technical issue affecting a relatively small percentage – imagine the consequences of a significant power outage in, for example, Ireland or another site for huge data centres.

So why are we doing this? Why AI? Sure, it’s fun, and in a few situations it’s even useful. But first of all let’s stop calling it AI, because it isn’t (yet) really intelligent. It’s robotic, it’s machine learning. It processes a vastly greater amount of information, much much faster, than the human brain is capable of – but without that information (created by humans), it’s nothing. It’s code, written by humans, dependent on electricity and vulnerable to the same kind of errors as led to the Crowdstrike outage. Already it’s making disproportionate demands on global resources – not only energy, it’s sucking up finance, time and talent that could be channelled towards more urgent needs – with only the vague promise of future benefits; but for who, and at what cost? These are urgent questions.

Indeed, there are many situations where advanced machine learning may prove to be very useful, even energy- and life-saving. But do we need so-called AI to interpret our dreams for us? Is there no other way to make cartoons from photos of our faces? Do we need to change our voice to that of a celebrity? Is this the only way we can bring the joy of colouring to our fingertips? Do we need so-called AI to be able to prank our friends? Sure, it’s good to laugh and do fun things – but does that justify throwing out our climate targets, piling more onto the mountains of e-waste, and putting our desire for an easy, fun life ahead of others’ right to clean water and basic living conditions?

Recently I taught a seminar at the Akademie der Bildene Künst, and amongst other things we talked about so-called AI. Most of the students didn’t know a lot about it, or were cautiously interested; but there a few who were enthusiastic and one in particular who was verging on evangelical. AI, he believes, will solve all our problems – including the energy and e-waste issues; it will be so amazing that it will be able to find solutions that we can’t even imagine (even when it struggles to get hands right). Any question can be answered, including that the AI will be programmed to always act in the best interests of humans and humanity. Somehow, humans will be clever enough to be able to programme it thus, even when we are less clever than it will be …

And what’s more – AI can do the tiresome work of making our art for us. Put in a text prompt and it will generate a video, or whatever other digital form you want. But, again, WHY? If you are an artist, the joy is in the creative process – the dreaming, the writing, the doodling, the crafting, the challenges and discoveries along the way; and, if there is an end-point, then there’s the satisfaction of reaching it, perhaps the fulfilment of realising one’s idea or the delight of having arrived at a different, unexpected outcome. Making art is much more about the process than the outcome, whereas so-called AI is focused on the outcome which, ultimately, boils down to financial profit for a few wealthy individuals.