Under this title the Future Foundation held the first lunchtime talk, as announced here.

Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff writes:

The Future Foundations 1st talk last week tackled the 5th Rule for the Digital World: “Do not destroy life and nature for technical progress.”  We invited in co-operation with WU Vienna Dr. Behnam Zakeri to tackle the question: 
What is the real impact of digitalisation on environmental sustainability? 
My personal take-away from his presentation is that from an environmental perspective it would be wise to treat AI services as a scarce resource rather than a mass-market application. A few facts that impressed me (for more see attachment)

• We underestimate the CO2 footprint of ICT. Everyone has a per-head CO2 budget to pace down global warming. According to a 2024 Nature paper, 41% of this budget is eaten up by ICT even before AI. This means that ICT is twice as damaging to the environment than SUVs/flying (20%) or eating too much meat (20%).
• One AI image generation consumes roughly 22 times more electricity (477 Wh) than charging a smartphone (22 Wh)
• Electricity consumption of datacenters is terrible for those regions where these centers are based. 50% of the city of Dublin’s electricity goes to datacenters for instance. And some US states now need to prolong fossil fuel burning in order to power datacenters. Data centres considered „national security“ are more important than environmental action.
• 1 ton of rare earth leads to.750000 litres of acid water and 1 ton of radioactive residuals. Regions like China who supply the world with these resources accept that the level of water toxicity in mining regions are 10-100 times higher than normal. 

Dr. Zakeri who is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Data, Energy, and Sustainability (IDEaS) at WU presented an impressive fact collection on the matter (attached). 

Behnam_final_digitalization-and-environment_BZDownload