Technology firms are ceaselessly promoting new AI products, but climate activist Sage Lenier says AI is useless, unsustainable and has given the industry an existential problem.
"AI has no benefit to society," she told AFP on the sidelines of the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.
The CEOs who have become enraptured by a "useless" product class have smashed the idea of tech as an essential utility.
"And now they have an existential problem," she said.
Lenier first garnered attention as a 19-year-old student in 2018 when she founded and led a course at the University of California, Berkeley, titled "Solutions for a Sustainable & Just Future".
She has said students like her were sick of the kind of climate education that offered no hope -- she wanted to focus on the solutions not just the problems.
Hundreds joined the course at Berkeley over the years and eventually hundreds more online, and Lenier has since built a nonprofit around it and now hopes to launch a documentary series.
The California native, who now lives in New York, said she was largely positive about tech.
But her climate focus makes her an outsider at the Web Summit -- "I'll keep coming if they want me to shout at them," she said.
Last year, she told the crowd: "Some of you could be considered directly responsible for architecting the ecological crisis."
She implored tech bosses to embrace the circular economy, which relies on reusing and recycling rather than creating products that end up being junked.
But one year on, Microsoft, Google and others have unleashed an endless stream of energy-gobbling AI products.
They have rushed to reopen nuclear plants, pledged to build many more data centres -- and crashed through their climate targets. | BGNES, AFP
