During recent years, I’ve seen many of my friends experience burnout from the push for more efficiency.

Last night, a friend mentioned they use a range of AI tools to help them work faster. That sounds good, but their workload keeps growing while their pay stays the same.

When productivity goes up, companies aren’t hiring more people; they just expect more from the staff they already have.

South Africa already struggles with a high rate of unemployment. Won’t this make things worse? When companies use AI to get more out of current employees instead of hiring new people, it seems to me it just makes the problem bigger. People burn out faster, and there are fewer jobs, so we end up trading real jobs for more efficiency from AI.

But there’s something even bigger that keeps me up at night.

The environmental impact of AI is huge:

Training just one large language model generates hundreds of tons of CO2 emissions. It’s a problem in many ways. (“training GPT-3 emitted roughly 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂)—the equivalent of driving a car from New York to San Francisco about 438 times.”) Climate Impact Partners

I keep hearing about the real cost of AI:

👉 Huge amounts of water are used to cool data centres—millions of litres every day. (“Large data centres can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.” Environmental and Energy Study Institute)

👉 Electricity use is rising fast, putting more strain on power grids. (“Global electricity demand from data centres is set to more than double over the next five years, consuming as much electricity by 2030 as the whole of Japan does today.” IEA)

👉 Manufacturing semiconductors creates toxic pollution. (“serious environmental concerns, particularly through the discharge of hazardous, toxic, and persistent wastewater.”) Science Direct

👉 Mining for the rare minerals needed for AI is destroying natural habitats. (“The unregulated mining of ion-adsorption clays has resulted in widespread soil contamination, deforestation, and water pollution, critically impacting both terrestrial and aquatic habitats.”) Society Byte

👉 Even the oceans are at risk. Underwater data centres can harm marine life by releasing heat and disrupting electromagnetic fields. (“the heat generated by these submerged facilities can raise local water temperatures, further intensifying existing warming due to climate change. Elevated water temperatures reduce oxygen availability, threatening marine species’ healthy functioning.”) LSE

I feel stuck in a personal dilemma:

I sometimes use AI tools because it helps my work process and the benefits can’t be ignored. But I worry a lot about the environmental impact of this, even though it feels almost impossible to not use them. Even a simple Google search now uses AI.

“We clearly can’t fight against it,” as a friend reminded me. “If you don’t use it, you will get left behind.”

It’s frustrating that most AI regulations focus on ethics and privacy but don’t address environmental impact. In many places, there isn’t enough oversight at all.

So, what should we do?

I don’t have that answer yet.

But I’m starting to think the real question isn’t whether we should be using tools or not; it’s about how we can push AI companies to act responsibly and demand stricter environmental rules.

Progress that harms our planet and our well-being isn’t really progress.

It’s just destruction with better marketing.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading.