Βy Leonard Τraistariu
The following text is the introduction of Leonard Τraistariu from GAS, the Romanian section of ISp, to the discussion titled “The invisible cost of AI”, held during the 33rd camp of Antinazi Zone / YRE (Youth Against Racism in Europe), the antifascist and antiracist campaign built around Xekinima (Greek section of ISp). The discussion was also introduced by Zisis Sourlas and Yannis Kapsalis from Greece. We will publish their introductions too in the coming days.
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I will talk a little bit about some aspects of artificial intelligence that I think are important.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have, since the release of the first version of chat gpt, modified the way we research, learn and interact with each other.
What infrastructure does this technology run on? Of course, it can’t run on any machine that is accessible to me and you, they don’t have nearly enough power. They run on highly advanced enterprise infrastructure in huge data centers. Servers with multiple graphic cards, specially designed for the kind of operations that AI needs and storage systems capable of storing locally petabytes of training data. Using some specific mathematical calculations, applied on this data, we get a set of values that determine the probability of a word following another word.
LLMs opperate on a basic level. It’s not smart. This sounds simple and innocent enough. However, like many things under capitalism, the problems are hidden beneath the surface.
I spoke about datacenters and the infrastructure inside them. What I did not say is how much power they require. A datacenter, especially one designed for AI, needs hundreds of megawatts. To put this into perspective, there is a 500MW datacenter in Romania near a city called Craiova. This datacenter uses more energy than the whole city. In fact it uses many times the continuous power for a city of 250,000 people. This also generates enormous amounts of heat, so much heat that it’s impossible to cool the facility using traditional methods. Datacenters are cooled using liquid, more precisely, water.
Where is that energy coming from? Well, it comes from the grid. This introduces problems. And I can give a concrete example in Romania. Romania generates a lot of energy using hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy, using the water in the Danube. Some of you might be aware that the level of the danube has been at a record low, recently. This has forced Romanian authorities to shut down some of the nuclear power capabilities. It also decreases the amount of energy hydroelectric plants on the Danube can generate.
Now, datacenters require continuous operation, otherwise the company using them will experience disruptions and lose money. They will not decrease their power consumption. This means that the Romanian state will need to import energy from neighboring countries, often at a very high price. If neighboring countries experience similar shortages, this can also mean blackouts. In fact, our prime minister has recommended people to decrease their energy consumption between 20:00-23:00. What this means is unclear. Should people not watch TV, disconnect their fridge, unplug their computer, renounce any entertainment at home? Liquid cooling also puts pressure on water reserves. Should we expect our prime minister to tell us to decrease our water consumption next?
Now, of course, liberal economists will come and say that the market will regulate everything and create a market for expansion of energy capabilities. This will probably happen. However, should we expect that this energy will be solar/wind energy? In large part, probably not. This is not how capitalism works, which needs the maximum valorisation of supply chains, especially in a semi-peripheral country like Romania. We can expect, therefore, the reopening of coal power plants and the generalised introduction of natural gas power plants, which are currently presented as a “greener” alternative. This also takes time, they cannot be built overnight. In turn, global warming gets accelerated.
Okay, what are the benefits of AI? One argument is that it raises productivity. Does it? Yes and no. Many companies build datacenters well before they know if it will actually generate profit in the end. There is no ready-made recipe to make internal processes more efficient, no ready-made recipe to increase production of commodities. This can become one of the causes of a generalised crisis of capitalism in the future.
For other companies, investing in AI could be a success. Does this mean workers will work less for the same salary? Of course not. It will mean layoffs and, in effect, lower wages. Also, less consumption, so another possible direction for a crisis. Remaining workers will produce more, especially in positions that require intellectual and creative input. One argument is that, while some companies lay workers off, datacenters will employ them. This is completely false. Datacenters are designed to require very few workers.
Are we, as socialists, against technology? Not at all, on the contrary, we see the immense capacity for technology to push the frontier of human society. In fact, we see the way the forces of production are being chained by capitalist relations of production, how the profit motive, the anarchy of the market and contradictions of capitalism mean that technology cannot liberate humanity. People still work, formally, 8 hours per day, in reality many times more than that, capitalism still has crises that means, in effect, destruction of the means of production.
Capitalism has also successfully managed to adopt AI for military purposes in drone technologies.
So, the question of AI is the general question of capitalism and class struggle. In a planned economy where workers would democratically decide what needs to be produced and would carefully plan where to build instruments of production, including datacenters, where energy production would be revolutionised, AI could be used for purposes useful for society. Automatic detection of medical problems, not just chatbots to cure boredom, tools for education and emancipation, not instruments of war.
