As I said to Erika Hall this week, if I had a nickel for every time a guy (always a guy) told me dismissively that I was just a feeble-minded fool who didn't understand AI, I would be able to retire early and comfortably.

And then on Tuesday — in a very contentious meeting where a client blamed me for calling out the fact that their AI-written content was actually plagiarized directly from a competitor's website — I was called a Luddite. Clearly I was just a technologically backwards idiot.

Buddy, do you even know who the Luddites were?

In the 1800s, the Luddites protested against the machinery that was causing widespread unemployment while reducing the wages of those who remained employed. (Sound familiar?)

The Luddites were pissed off about this. When their campaign of sternly worded letters didn't work, they broke into factories and started breaking shit. Of course, this was blamed on a wider conspiracy of influence by outside actors. Because clearly, those familiar with the advancing technology should welcome its inevitability.

It wasn't until the 20th century that "Luddite" became synonymous with "technophobe."

Look, I've been talking about the ethics of content harm for a while now. That concern has only intensified with the AI amplification of resource consumption, copyright infringement, health impacts of data centers on marginalized communities... the list goes on.

But now we have an added complication: energy. We already didn't have enough energy to run these data centers with renewable energy sources. But now all aspects of our lives, from help desks to medical care to policing and war fighting has some amount of AI component.

The war in Iran has all but turned the Strait of Hormuz into a ghost town. So where will the AI energy come from? How are they going to power this? They're going to pull from the rest of the grid. And maybe we can get away with that for a month or two, when the worst of winter temperatures have passed, but summer is coming and the grid will strain once again under ever-higher temperatures. I'm willing to bet that rolling blackouts will become the norm in the summer months. But shareholder value will go up! What a time to be alive.

Looking at the storm clouds brewing on the horizon, I'm just fine with being a Luddite.

With the limitations on oil exports from the Middle East, countries are looking for ways to reduce consumption. Sri Lanka has begun fuel rationing and has declared holidays for public officials to further reduce energy demands.

Not to harp on the war in Iran or anything, but the immediate environmental disaster, the ongoing shortfalls of fossil fuels, and the long-term impacts of the trauma are only beginning to be understood. Combine that with the most resource-intensive era of humanity on an already warming planet, and we've got a big problem ahead. (That degree in political science really comes in handy these days.)

​Climate adaptation and mitigation aren't in opposition. We can (and should!) do both. "Climate mitigation does not need to come at the cost of climate adaptation," says Ruthie Burrows, PhD of Project Drawdown. "We have solutions that can deliver meaningful adaptation benefits alongside emissions reductions. By focusing on solutions that do both, the pathway toward a safe, prosperous future becomes wider for us all."

"Only 6% of sustainability teams report estimating or reporting emissions from AI use today," says a report from Watershed. And these are the sustainability teams. So how do we expect regular employees to understand or focus on AI emissions? The top blockers in AI adoption by sustainability pros? It included "accuracy and reliability (52%), data and privacy risks (43%), and internal skills gaps (37%)."

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Alisa Bonsignore

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