ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and it’s safe to say the world hasn’t been quite the same since. With one billion monthly active users just three years after its launch, the ‘AI Boom’ has significantly changed the average person’s way of life. Even those who do not intentionally use ChatGPT and other generative AI models will find their usual Google search results replaced with an AI overview.
But what, exactly, does the rise of AI mean for our future?
Data centres and the climate crisis
It can be difficult to think of the internet as a tangible thing. But everything that we do on the internet, from emails to films, requires huge physical buildings to house all of the necessary servers.
In order to keep up with the enormous growth of AI and its subsequent demand for processing power, the UK is planning to build another hundred data centers. Both the construction and operation of data centres have serious environmental consequences, due to the resources required to build them and the enormous amounts of energy they use. While the internet is an invaluable utility, generative AI is still very new, and building so many data centres with the explicit goal of making the UK a leader in AI is a troubling thought.
The Earth is already experiencing a climate crisis, and the energy that data centres require –as well as the heat they produce– could spell trouble for our future. Data centres have been found to increase the temperature around them, even up to 6.2 miles away. This would be cause for concern even in a perfect world, but for Earth’s rapidly warming climate, it is downright frightening. 2026 saw multiple temperature records broken in Britain, as well as thousands of heat-related deaths across May and June.
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The extreme temperatures also caused a “firewave”, as the UK suffered a series of nineteen wildfires all across the country. This is not an isolated incident, as wildfires in Europe have increased by 57% in just four years. Over two million hectares of land have been destroyed and tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate. There is no denying the role that climate change has played in this, and as it worsens the number of fires will only increase. When Brits are struggling with a May heatwave before the summer has even started, and many have to flee the wildfires threatening their homes, it is hard to consider a hundred energy-hungry data centres to be a worthwhile sacrifice.
Not only will the proposed data centres impact the country as a whole, but they will also affect individuals. Citizens in London have been protesting the development of an enormous data centre on 85 acres of green belt. It is undeniably frustrating to see the government prioritise the development of data centres over protecting our country’s vital green spaces, as well as building them so close to people’s homes.
The issue of heat produced by data centres – both directly and due to the greenhouse gases they produce – is also particularly relevant to people who already struggle a lot in heatwaves. Almost 9 million Brits have been prescribed SSRIs, which can have the side effect of making hot weather much harder to tolerate. All in all, the rapid development of data centres is going to create a strain on Britain’s people as well as its environment.
Earth’s most vital resource
Another issue surrounding data centres is that they rely on water-cooling, and thus require an enormous amount of water. Only half a percent of Earth’s water is available for human consumption, and the UK’s data centres are using 6.6 million litres of drinking water every day– with this figure predicted to triple.
There is no denying just how much of a toll this is taking on the environment. Many of us try to save as much water as we can – we turn off the taps while we brush our teeth, and try to take shorter showers. Watching as data centres consume vast amounts of water while we do everything we can to conserve it is gut-wrenching. How are we supposed to save our planet when such rapidly advancing technology is making it easier and easier to destroy it?
A single email generated by AI can use an entire bottle of water. With more and more people becoming dependent on AI for their daily tasks, the amount of water being wasted is unthinkable. It plays a crucial role in the climate crisis, from droughts to floods, and it seems cruel for so much of it to go to data centres while so many people go thirsty. A quarter of the world’s population lacks safe drinking water and we are losing our freshwater supply, meanwhile enormous volumes of precious water are being used up by machines.
Parts of the world are in such desperate need of water that experts have floated plans to tow icebergs to arid regions. It seems ludicrous for us to be resorting to such outlandish ideas to resolve water shortages while simultaneously using millions upon millions of gallons every day for AI data centres. As the energy they require contributes to global warming and the water they need is in short supply, the haste to build more and more data centres paints a grim picture of the planet’s future.
The responsibility of preventing water wastage is placed on us, as citizens. The 2026 heatwave saw a temporary hosepipe ban put in place for many, with further bans and water-saving measures being recommended for the future. Of course, these are reasonable measures to take – water is a vital resource and it’s important to conserve it wherever we can.
But if the situation is severe enough to warrant hosepipe bans and climate change is threatening our water supply, how can we justify using so much of it for data centres? It is becoming harder and harder to watch as our gardens dry up and turn brown, and wildlife suffer from dehydration, all the while knowing that there are hundreds of data centres using up so much of our country’s life-giving water.
Profit over people
It would be easier to stomach the impact of data centres if we knew that generative AI was undoubtedly making the world a better place, but so far that is not the case. The UK government is convinced that AI is the future, but people are already afraid for their jobs, and AI is predicted to cause global revenue losses of up to 24% for creators.
As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve and advance, there will likely be fewer and fewer jobs available as automation becomes more widespread. Graduates are already struggling to find work, and this will hit their demographic particularly hard.
AI has also proved to be an especially harmful tool when in the hands of the wrong people. Kevin Gosden, father of missing boy Andrew Gosden, has been sent AI-generated videos of himself and his missing son. UK schools have been encouraged to stop posting photos of their pupils online in order to prevent criminals from manipulating them with AI and using the results as blackmail.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s plan to introduce AI as a secondary school subject therefore seems like a misstep – can we really expect the adoption of AI to benefit young people, or should we instead be concentrating on the threat it poses to them? While the internet has long been home to all sorts of unkindness and abuse, AI has empowered those with bad intentions, leading to upsettingly creative forms of online cruelty.
It is clear that the rise of generative AI has had a serious impact on our planet and its people. But who is benefitting from it the most? The CEOs and founders of major AI companies are billionaires. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is worth 15.5 billion dollars, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is worth 178.8 billion dollars, and founder of OpenAI and SpaceXAI (formerly xAI) Elon Musk is currently the richest person alive, with a net worth of three quarters of a trillion dollars.
Meanwhile, the median household wealth in Britain was last measured at £293,700, and a fifth of people in the UK are living in poverty. The billionaires profiting off of AI have the luxury of being able to live anywhere they choose, and can easily afford to shield themselves from the effects of climate change – even if that means building an enormous doomsday bunker. But the other 99% of us are losing our jobs to AI, our climate to global warming, and our water and green spaces to data centres.
More harm than good?
The big question to consider is whether the benefits of generative AI outweigh the downsides. One particular strength of AI is in the medical industry. It could prove helpful in speeding up the development of new medicines, and has the potential to help detect cancer in its early stages. But this does not mean it is beneficial in the hands of the public– instead, it could be putting people’s health at risk.
Young people who are the first to grow up with generative AI are also at risk of losing their ability to study and learn. ChatGPT has a notable effect on brain activity and memory, and considering it has only been around for a few years, there is no telling what the long-term effects could be.
So is generative AI truly worth it? The effects of data centres on the climate are even worse than originally estimated, and this blunder suggests we are simply not prepared for the consequences of our own actions. We’ve seen enormous, world-changing strides in technology before, from stone tools to the wheel to the internet. But is AI really comparable to these historic innovations? So far it seems that generative AI is doing far more harm than good, particularly given the public’s unrestricted access to it. Do we really want a future where AI is using our water, doing our jobs– even creating our art?
When it comes to AI there is so much talk of the economy, but what about daily life for real people? Stocks and profits are just numbers based on the social construct of money, but the amount of wealth billionaires hope for AI to pour into their pockets is meaningless in an arid, dying world.
As humanity continues to put all our eggs in the AI basket, I believe that we as people need to examine the world that we are creating and ask ourselves: is this the future we want?
