TL; DR
The BoE’s Bailey says artificial intelligence will soon do more than electricity grids can handle, forcing trade-offs between health, defense and other sectors.
Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey warned on Friday the AI may need to be rationed as the power supply cannot match its capabilities. He said that companies and governments are facinghuge social options” as energy constraints force trade-offs between sectors. The question is not whether AI can do more, but whether there is enough electricity to enable it.
“Artificial intelligence will probably get to the point soon enough that it can do much more, much bigger things, than the power supply we can access.Bailey said at an event in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, with Bloomberg’s Stephanie Flanders and former Cabinet minister Ed Balls.
He framed the dilemma as a choice between competing priorities. “Do we want to make more great strides in health?” he asked. Or “Do we want more advances in drone technology to fight the Russians in Ukraine?” Bailey said the issue of potential rebates was raised with him recently by the head of a large AI firm, which he did not name.
The concern is not theoretical. The EU recently asked households to stop using electricity during peak hours as AI data centers strain the network. US utilities plan to spend $1.4 trillion infrastructure by 2030 to cope with the data center boom. Every megawatt devoted to artificial intelligence is a megawatt unaffordable for housing or manufacturing.
Bailey previously argued that the UK economy was caught between waves of technological innovation. The last wave was the internet. He sees AI as the most likely candidate to become the next general-purpose technology, but cautioned that productivity benefits will take time to materialize.
Bailey was less worried about the job. He said AI will both create and destroy jobs, pointing to roles such as data scientists as examples of new positions to emerge. “There will be jobs that no longer exist,” he added, but expressed that he was not worried about the increase in mass unemployment.
It follows more extensive warnings The UK’s AI ambitions could clash with its climate commitments. Bailey’s comments suggest that the conflict goes beyond carbon: the main constraint may be physical infrastructure, which simply cannot be built fast enough.
