My monthly book blog: Living in a material (and ethereal) world

Alarm bells are ringing about generative AI’s demand for electricity and all computing capacity it will need to answer or every question and prompt. So, too, when it comes to the critical minerals for EV batteries, and all the copper we’ll need to power our net zero lives.

In other words, nothing ethereal without a lot of material.

I read two books last month that alerted me to the enormous challenges of both the AI and clean energy transitions — and how ill-equipped we are, at least right now, to flip a switch for either.

First to?The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman , one of the world’s leading AI voices and practitioners. Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and Inflection, led Google’s foray into generative AI, and is now CEO of Microsoft AI. And in this book, he shares astonishing detail about the progress in artificial intelligence, and the unintended consequences it will pose for civilization.?

“The debate now isn’t whether we are in a technological and AI arms race; it’s where it will lead,” he writes. Security, wealth, prestige — all the marbles are in play.?

In Suleyman’s mind, Gen AI can transform our lives and our planet for the better — better farming with smart robots, faster cures for diseases, and quicker answers to every question we have. It can also add trillions of dollars a year to the global economy, essentially adding another G7 economy by decade’s end.

But it’s not risk free.

We’ve enjoyed a half-millennium of progress largely on the backs of democratic institutions and accountability. Our social and political infrastructure is not perfect but they beat anarchy any day of the week. In fact, technology + democracy can lead to significant reductions in poverty and gains in human autonomy. But Suleyman cautions that AI is unlike any technology we’ve seen — and it will expand rapidly (exponentially) and increasingly become asymmetric (concentrating power), omnipresent (spreading risk) and autonomous (becoming uncontrollable).

He suggests more government and business capacity, and accountability, more international alliances and more individual control. But nothing will be a given. As he cautions, “containment is a narrow and never-ending path.”

Another challenge Suleyman presents is electricity, and how we will power the fourth Industrial Revolution. He presents a neat formal that states Modern Civilization = (Life + Intelligence) x Energy. It got us through three Industrial Revolutions, but may not work algorithmically in the fourth. Yes, we can hyperscale modern civilization with AI feeding the intelligence quotient — but it will need a lot more energy. In fact, if AI turns energy into a negative by depleting it, we risk going into a negative spiral for civilization.?

Suleyman is a believer in the energy transition that’s already underway, and the role technologies — fusion, among them — can play in hyperscaling our production of electrons to feed the AI beast. But I’m not so sure after reading?Material World, by British journalist Ed Conway.?

Conway has crafted a?tour d’horizon?of our history with sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. Each of those materials was foundational to a historic transformation in how humans live, work, play and fight. They were at the heart of those other industrial revolutions. And they all require a ton of energy to get out of the ground and be put to work.?

The word “energy” was all I could think of, chapter after chapter, through Conway’s epic. We are who we are, and we do what we do, thanks to our ability to produce super-human energy. The computer I’m writing on, the coffee cup from which I’m drinking, the slippers which I’m enjoying — none of them can be made with human hands alone. As Conway puts it, “Energy is pretty much everything.”?

And so, here we are on the brink of another revolution — the Gen AI revolution — and our ability to extract materials is about to be tested anew. Computer chips, electricity, drones and robots all require substances that come from the ground, and for which there could be massive shortages. Here’s just one of Conway’s many sobering facts:??we need to increase electricity’s share of power from 20% to 50% by 2050, and that will require us to mine more copper in the next 22 years than we have in the last 5,000.

How on earth can we do that? Suleyman might suggest Gen AI will figure it out for us. But ironically, to make all those calculations, Gen AI may require more power (and more copper) than we have for all our basic needs in the world today. Read these two books, and you will be hard-pressed not to see a series of conflicts emerging, in both the material world and the ethereal world. How we resolve those competing demands may not just determine our ability to manage AI and climate change; it may shape how we progress as a species. It’s that material.?