In previous articles, I argued that for AI to be green, it needs to be trustworthy (which is why Dedoctive exists). But why do we even need AI? Would the world be greener, and perhaps better off altogether, if AI didn’t exist?

Shown below are current estimates of world population growth, showing how it’s slowing down and may soon reverse.

Less people means less value creation, especially as average age is going up globally – by 2030, 1 in 6 people in the world will be aged 60 years or over. With less workers per retiree, we are producing less per person. This puts the 20th century dream of pension-funded retirement under existential threat, so how are we to support long-lived people that eventually become incapable of working? And the pension crisis is only one of several threats to global financial stability, alongside housing, government debt, climate adaptation, and continual conflict.

In previous centuries, new sources of economic value emerged from sources that are no longer acceptable – extracting resources from colonies (e.g., silver mined in South America), gunboat diplomacy (e.g., forcing China to accept the opium trade), and large-scale human exploitation (e.g., Lancashire cotton mills). So where can we now look for the massive injection of value required to support an aging population, rectify a housing market derailed by financialization, and sustain government borrowing?

By augmenting human efficiency and effectiveness, AI can potentially step in. However, this won’t work if AI value-add is swept away by running costs – not just the energy consumption of data centres but the possibly far greater human effort required to check then correct AI outputs.

For AI to save us, it has to be trustworthy. Learn more about Dedoctive here.