Here is an excerpt from an article written by Andrew Winston for the MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others,  sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Illustration Credit: Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images

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AI has the potential to help address societal problems like climate change, but challenges like high energy consumption threaten to negate its benefits.

The proverbial ship of artificial intelligence is moving ahead at warp speed, icebergs and societal risks be damned. The pace of change in what it can do is staggering. Breathless predictions say AI will add trillions of dollars to the economy through massive cost savings and entirely new products and markets.

While the capabilities of AI, along with both excitement and fear, are exploding, it’s a good time to ask what AI might mean for the world’s serious challenges (climate change, inequality, threats to democracy, and more). Will it help us or hinder us … or both? What does AI mean for the quest for a more regenerative and net-positive world?

This could obviously be a book-length discussion, but let me focus on four big categories of impact — AI’s upside for helping on climate change and sustainability, its rising energy demands, the dangers of AI-enhanced misinformation, and its impact on people’s livelihoods — and provide a snapshot of where we are right now.

[Here is the first “big category of impact.”]

1. AI Could Make the World and Business More Sustainable.

I wrote about the potential for AI to solve societal problems in 2018, but clearly what was once hype is fast becoming reality. Thanks to AI tools, we should see dramatic improvements in the management of our biggest systems: climate and emissions, energy and the grid, transportation, water, food and agriculture, buildings and cities, and more. Better modeling and more transparency into operations should help businesses and governments slash emissions (with a huge caveat, discussed in Point 2 below).

Here are some key examples of where AI is being used in positive ways. These benefits are generally coming from traditional AI rather than flashy generative AI chatbots and tools, but the distinction may be blurring, and both are developing capabilities at breathtaking speeds:

• Energy use — optimizing building design and controls, which the U.S. Department of Energy estimates can reduce a site’s energy consumption by 29% or more.
• Energy and grid management — balancing supply and demand on the grid, by managing the extreme complexity of a billion things drawing power, millions of things (as wide-ranging as rooftop solar panels and giant power plants) generating power, and some things doing both (such as electric vehicles drawing power for part of the day and, at other times, acting as mobile batteries feeding the grid).
• Food and agriculture — supercharging “precision agriculture,” which can boost farm efficiency 20% to 40% through better weather prediction and more precise application of water, fertilizer, or pesticides. AI tools are also being used to help reduce the shocking waste of food (an estimated 30% to 40% is thrown out in the U.S. alone), saving enormous quantities of embedded carbon and water.
• Logistics and transportation — improving traffic flows, reducing idling, and slashing the number of accidents.
• Supply chains — lowering risk, costs, waste, and inventory through better forecasting and management.
• Product design — creating products with lower life-cycle impacts.

And on the social side of the sustainability agenda and human well-being:

• Health care — accelerating drug discovery and disease detection. For instance, the Mayo Clinic used AI to reduce the time it takes to identify a form of kidney disease from 45 minutes to seconds.
• Education — personalizing learning and making wider access more feasible.
• Public safety — providing better predictions of crime patterns and natural disasters fueled by climate change.
• Inclusion — enhancing assistive technologies for people with disabilities.

On a tactical level, there’s also great hope that AI will help companies respond to significantly expanding reporting demands, such as gathering data and filling out seemingly infinite numbers of forms. Clearly, the list of possible benefits is long, and I admit I hadn’t thought of a couple of these on the social side. (Thanks, ChatGPT, for suggesting disaster preparedness and inclusion.)

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So, what’s the bottom line? Even putting aside the extreme downside of “AI tries to kill us all” — which appears so often in science fiction because it rings true — there are plenty of concerns. The loss of jobs could be unprecedented, as could the rising demand for energy, which could drive carbon emissions much higher, potentially offsetting a large portion of the world’s efforts to control climate change.

Like so many new technologies, AI is finding its way into flashy uses in entertainment and productivity. Behind the scenes, the real potential to improve our biggest systems seems very high. Will the benefits outpace the resource use and dangers to society? Maybe — but only, I think, if we are clear-eyed about the challenges and collectively make it a goal to address the downsides head-on. Will we focus this unimaginably powerful tool in the right way to save ourselves? That’s up to us … for now.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.