Bitcoin
Why AI’s Energy Usage Isn’t Demonized Like Bitcoin’s
That said, just like with Bitcoin, not everyone is totally excited about AI. And AI detractors have valid concerns: bias, transparency, privacy, security, validity, and (worst of all) stealing my bad art to make even worse art.
But to anyone who has ever been involved in reporting on Bitcoin, there is something very obvious that is missing from the AI hysteria, which has been Bitcoin’s political Achilles heel: energy use.
AI, if it is to grow as proponents believe it should, will require much more energy to power the data centers that make AI possible. Investment bank Goldman Sachs has predicted that data centers will use 8% of the world’s Total US energy supply by 2030 (above 3% in 2022), of which AI is a strong driving force. Additional research from French energy company Schneider Electric suggests that AI’s share of data center energy demand will rise to 15%-20% by 2028 (up from an estimated 8% in 2023). There are countless other projections and estimates out there and none that I have found suggest anything other than more.
Now, whether this energy demand is “worth it” is a pertinent question for another day, but why are there mountains and mountains of articles and ideas about Bitcoin using “XYZ country’s amount of energy” and not for AI?
Money, power, respect (the last one is the best)
Money: The path of all people.
There is hundreds of billions of investment capital invested in AI and its speculative future — as a proxy, just look at AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA), which is up 175% this year. Bitcoin didn’t have that when the hype started, and even now, near its peak, no one is actively looking for ways to invest hundreds of billions in Bitcoin-related ventures (aside from perhaps one of the Bitcoin ETFs).
With all this money coming in comes the big companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and with it the power of influence they wield. These four companies are omnipresent, trillion-dollar giants and masters of PR. How many people hear the word “data center” and think, “Wow, what a waste! All that energy!”? Not very often.
And with all that money and influence comes respect for big-brained AI intellectuals. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg both say AI is world-changing and good. That comes with prestige. When someone with a crazy X tweets that Bitcoin is world-changing and good, that comes with prestige too, but of a different kind.
The worst case scenario is very bad
Humans are really good at constructing realities at logical extremes, especially on the bad side. Here’s a bad case for the world with AI: AI gets really good at art and then instead of making art, we give up writing, drawing and painting and we all focus on work.
As for Bitcoin, the worst-case scenario is… what? It crashes and some people you know lose a lot of money? Or maybe it succeeds and takes down the Federal Reserve and Bitcoin becomes the world’s reserve currency?
Both scenarios are long shots. In the meantime: Have you seen how much energy Bitcoin uses?
Besides, people have more pressing things to worry about. Their livelihoods, for example.
“It affects me”
If Bitcoin succeeds, some people will get rich, and while “fix the money, fix the world” is a common saying about Bitcoin, will our lives really change that much if Bitcoin wins?
Meanwhile, the main narrative around AI is that it will… obsolete my work? No thanks, we need to stop this at all costs.
The author and his friends fighting against AI.
Who cares how much energy AI uses? I have bills to pay and I need a job to make money. My only fear is that there won’t be enough of us to stem the tide.
On the other hand, many ordinary people are using AI to create art that they share all day long on social media. cheating on term papers or generate Wojak memes. No doubt many are also using AI for salubrious purposes. The point is that the usefulness of AI is obvious to ordinary people, mitigating any concerns they might have about energy use, in a way that the value of bitcoin is not. (Censorship-resistant payments or hard-to-confiscate assets don’t matter until the day you need them, at which point they’re the only things that matter.)
AI and Bitcoin: Same, but Different
Admittedly, there are some who have raised the alarm about Bitcoin’s energy usage, which are giving the same alarm to the AI. I I wrote articles (It is research reports) in defense of Bitcoin’s energy usage, and while I’m not going to write anything in defense of AI’s energy usage, I’m waiting for the day when its vast energy usage becomes the main argument against AI.
Though I suspect I’ll have to wait a while, because, justified or not, the relative lack of loud noises around AI’s energy usage can be quickly and easily explained: AI and Bitcoin are different.
Please note: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.
Edited by Marc Hochstein.