Signal 3: Let AI help us save the planet
Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data center cooling units — used to stop Google’s self-built servers from overheating — by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind (a British AI company it acquired in 2014) AI system. The engineers said they achieved the energy reduction by training DeepMind’s self-learning algorithms to predict how hot data centers were going to get within the next hour and ensure that the data center didn’t provide any more cooling than was necessary[1].
The implications are significant, given its potential to greatly improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions overall.
Currently, only Google has the power to realize the promise of the AI energy reduction program. It is easy to imagine that in the future, other companies could also use AI systems to achieve a tremendous reduction in power usage efficiency. Moreover, AI systems could be used to reduce energy waste in our daily life.
To realize this imagination, regulators must incentivize the society properly. They could provide subsidies for small companies to develop their own AI systems, or they could support more entrepreneurial projects like DeepMind. Regulators could also apply this kind of technology to public facilities and encourage more buildings to adopt this technology.
[1] DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-40/
