The Hidden Environmental Cost of AI: Why Data Centers Could Destroy Our Planet

speaker-0: Welcome back to Fintech Bytes, a podcast where finance, technology and the real world collide. Right now AI is everywhere, driving markets, reshaping companies and fueling one of the biggest investment cycles we've seen in decades. But behind the hype, there's a growing reality. AI doesn't run ⁓ ideas alone.

It runs on data, compute and massive amounts of energy. So today we're asking a tougher question. If AI is the future, what does it really cost to power it? And are we paying enough attention to the environmental and infrastructure trade off?

Let's get into it. So everyone says AI is everything right now, but what does that actually mean in economic terms? Is this hype or real structural shift? speaker-1: Well, for me, AI narrative is driving the markets, the financial markets, but it's driving me crazy because there's so much going on on a daily basis that it's hard to keep track.

Now, I find the worst thing is it's a little bit, the AI narrative is hypocritical in the sense that companies use it as an excuse that we are pursuing AI infrastructure, AI growth, and we... are looking to use AI in the future. So we have to lay off people today. People don't understand that.

You haven't proven that we need more AI, more data, more data centers. We're completely ignoring the sustainable and climate change impact that all of this has. Power right to water. And then of course, the energy demand is just incredible.

People are just ignoring it. And so when you lay off people like Oracle with a 6 a.m. Saturday morning email, it's really disgusting to put it simple.

And now Facebook, known as Meta, is also laying off massive amounts of people saying that we need to justify our investments. People don't care about that. People want to know that you keep and take good care of your employees. And then if you look at the numbers, They want to please the financial markets and the analysts.

so Facebook made revenues of 60 billion in one quarter with profits of 22 billion. And now they're using that as to justify layoffs because you want to build data centers. It doesn't make sense. And what are they doing?

They're going to spend now, they're going to spend on a data center. One data center is going to ⁓ all the data center expenditure for a meta loan. has been framed around $600 billion, which is from now till 2030, but you're people today. So the backlash is quite harsh.

People are saying, you you're using us as your product, as your service, because we provide you the data and the information about us, personal information, which you then sell to advertisers and you make money. And then on the other hand, you go and you fire people. So what's happening? A lot of people are...

withdrawing their usage of the services that Meta, Facebook, Instagram, social media, any of the tech companies are providing. We're using less of it. A lot of people are avoiding subscriptions. A lot of people are using less, not placing advertisements because they don't accept that tech is behaving in this way and they are filing their objections and their complaints in a subtle but very painful way, which is reducing expenditure.

all those products and in return the companies that are doing the mass layoffs are feeling it. Meta is one of them and Tesla is already suffering of a 25 % reduction of the revenues and even the market capitalization has gone down. And that's Tesla is now scrambling or at least Elon Musk is scrambling to do the IPO of SpaceX and it's already valued at 2 trillion, which is a mind boggling, mind bending amount. And actually it started at 1.

25 trillion and within a month or two it's gone to 2 trillion. So this investor hype of AI is only benefiting the few, the ones that are going to make the killing when the IPO actually happens. And so what's happening now? A lot of people are leaving the companies.

Facebook is already laying off people. Key executives are leaving. Eight key executives of Tesla are leaving. The same is happening at OpenAI.

A lot of key executives are leaving. Why would you leave your company if there's going to be a big payout, a big rainfall of money coming your way? It's simple because people are unhappy, unhappy about how they use the AI narrative to at the same time lay off people. but also justify their financial thinking and forecasting, which is, it's just insane.

So we see that it's not working out and I feel that we are heading for an AI bust sooner than later. speaker-0: I think what is the freakiest part is at the expense of us human beings. And I'm glad that certain people are standing up and creating these movements, like you say, pause AI, stop AI. And because it's just going to break up the whole fragment of society, we won't have this usual cycle going on.

If people don't have spending power anymore, it's... holds businesses as well. And that's what I don't understand is how those key executives don't think of that and just keep on going with this AI race. ⁓ That's my two cents to this.

speaker-1: It makes great sense what you say because at the end of the day, the financial markets are driven by two emotions, fear and greed. And so they don't care about whoever is standing in the way. So right now the markets are governed by greed. People want to jump on the AI bandwagon.

See that because it's gone from billions to trillions industry in no time. So a lot of people just want to jump the bandwagon, make a quick kill and get out of it. know, so you see this. Astronomical amounts are being paid to get key workers to be employed at companies, coaching key executives from other companies.

And so what they're doing is they're giving an image like we are doing this for the best of humankind, but at the same time, we find the people that are supposed to use their services. So this AI loop is going to backfire because if people don't have employment and cannot get employment and are laid off en masse, how do they expect that those people will be having enough money to buy their products and services? It is an economic loop. you, and you don't even have to go into the tech world, if you are a person that just got unemployed or laid off or whatever, you will not go to your local supermarket to spend money because you simply don't have money.

It really affects the whole economy. So this... Loop cannot be ignored. There's an economic loop that has been around for as long as commerce has been around, for as long as societies have been around.

People buy, spend money when they have income, when they have money coming their way. And so to change the narrative, to frame it in the sense that we're doing good for the future is really nonsense because it doesn't help the situation right now. And so now you see people are reducing spending on subscriptions, on... premium versions, people are avoiding social media to the best of as you can because you do need this tech because you're accustomed and used to it.

It causes a certain friction when you don't use it. You need to use it in a certain way, but you can reduce your usage and then you can also boycott with your wallet instead of doing radical things such as data poisoning, which is basically feeding an algorithm the wrong data and information. AI output is incorrect or corrupted, it's not really a way to do it. The simple thing to do is, and what most people are doing, look at Tesla.

People just stop buying Tesla. That's it. And it is affecting their business model and their financials. And the same we can do with all the tech companies.

Reduce our expenditures, just use the free services. Because at the end of the day, all those tech platforms got built on us providing our data for free. and not getting compensated. So now we are going to use what they made out of it, which is a pool of free data.

So we're just going to use the data and not pay for it. And that's going to create a negative loop for those companies. And you will see more and more companies getting into trouble because they are producing AI that they cannot afford and that we cannot afford. So there's no logic behind it.

We are entering a phase where there is this unjustified Billions of investments that don't make sense is not enough revenues to justify the expenditures on infrastructures and investments into data centers and energy sources such as modular nuclear plants to provide energy for the data centers. So it all doesn't make sense and everybody's realizing it and everybody's saying enough is enough and we should do something about it. I say to everybody don't get radical, don't do anything criminal.

As as I'm concerned, harm people or anything. Just vote with your wallet. Just don't spend your money on those companies. And the companies that are doing things wrong should feel it.

And that's the way to do it. You just don't spend your money and vote with your wallet and let your voice be heard. speaker-0: Can you break down the relationship between AI, compute power and energy consumption in simple terms? speaker-1: Well, it simply does not make sense.

mean, we have an ongoing energy crisis, especially now with the Middle East tensions, where 20 % of global energy supplies are disrupted. There's this choke point in the Persian Gulf. So we are really feeling it. 20 % of speaker-0: planes.

They said in four months they would run out of fuel and couldn't fly planes anymore and would have to cancel flights. speaker-1: You see, 20 % of the energy supplies have been disrupted. We're not talking just about crude oil, we're talking about refined products. LNG, LPG, and all other industrial gases such as helium is being affected.

But what people also don't talk about is fertilizer. Fertilizers are needed to produce food. Now countries like the United States and China and maybe Europe and the big economies have backups. But what are countries...

in Latin America, Asia, Africa, they don't have substitutions, they don't have reserve stocks. So we are going to face famine because of that on a global scale. And this is only a reduction of 20%, approximately, over a period of 60 days that has been disrupted. And this is disastrous.

With every day going by, the situation is getting worse. Because even if today... They would agree to ceasefire and let all the ships pass through. The problem is what people don't realize, ships move at the speed of bikes.

It's not like a plane that flies across the world within 12 or 24 hours. It's not like a train that can go from one part of the continent to the other one and deliver its goods like the transatlantic Siberian rail, which goes all the way from Russia to China. Ships take days, weeks to come. So once we restart everything, it takes time to get everything going.

So even now, the oil supplies and the energy that is being provided from the Middle East is just being discharged at the ports that receive it. These ships have been on the way for like weeks. Like ships going from the Arabian Gulf to Australia, they take weeks to get there and before they discharge. So now we're still fulfilling energy supplies with goods or...

products that have been loaded weeks ago. So even if we start everything today or tomorrow, it's still going to impact the markets. So it's absolutely insane. And while we're doing all of this, the tech companies are just talking about building data centers which consume massive amounts of energy.

And they also produce massive amounts of pollution because they don't have the energy supplies. So they use methane generators that produce methane gases and they are polluting the environment where they set up the data centers and they're using the fresh drinking water from people to cool down computers, which is absolutely insane. we are, I mean, in the United States, there's already boycotts going on about data centers, but in poorer countries, people don't have a voice. So they just build data centers in Latin America, Africa.

And there people don't have a choice. It's either you work at the plant or you make your little income or you starve. And in some countries, they even get radical about it. I mean, if you don't, if you object, you just, we can get killed.

So it is absolutely an ecological and humanitarian disaster what's going on right now. And there's no need for all the data centers. That's the crazy part. They're talking about building over 33,000 data centers by 2030.

And because it's already a problem on planet earth, we are now looking to go into Out of space with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos looking at space exploration and space data centers. It's absolutely absurd because with the amount that we have right now, we can do with AI that what we need to do, which is new materials can be discovered, new medicine can be discovered. We might be able to cure cancer, dementia, Alzheimer's. We can use alpha fold to discover new genetics and see.

how to fast track new medicine that we need. We can even ⁓ reduce our dependency on energy by focusing on ⁓ nuclear fusion. There's even a company right now that says in two years time, which is an amazing time because everybody, the experts are estimating five to 10 years for nuclear fusion to become economically viable. But two years, now just imagine instead of having all these massive data centers running off on fossil fuels, maybe we can power them with nuclear fusion.

So we're solving one problem, which will solve the other problem and then we can use the AI to get better. So we should use AI for our benefit and not this reckless AI pursuit arms race that's going on right now, which is really a disaster economically and financially and ecologically. It doesn't make sense and we need to slow it down. We need to go back to the roots.

And say, okay, enough is enough. Let's work with what we have right now, make it work good because it's working good, but it's sometimes not working good. And that's what you don't want to find out. Now they're talking about having driverless cars.

I would not want to get into a driver's cars that sometimes it drives in circles and you cannot stop it. And the doors don't open and you have some kind of, some kind of service center in the, in a far off country that is going to supervise the, the robot taxi that you're in. This is We don't need that. Who needs taxis?

We have taxis. We have transportation. What we need is health. What we need is well-being.

What we need is employment. What we need is education. We need to provide a future for our children. That is what is so important.

That's what people care about. People don't care about the regimes that are fighting with each other. The few people at the top that don't get along. Most people want peace, love and happiness.

We want health. And of course, we don't mind the wealth that comes with good health. Because if you can work and make a decent living, you can provide for your family and have a certain meaning and purpose in life. So this whole narrative, this whole focus on AI, in my humble opinion, is going completely off the tracks.

We don't need to focus on all of that. Let's focus on doing good. Let's focus on dealing with the problems that we have at hand. And let's come together.

in a more unified way. We need to come together as a country, just like we did with NATO, which provided relatively safe and peace for the past 70, 80 years, because we have relatively less wars. don't have the... ⁓ Because it was established as an after ⁓ measure of World War II.

And now we need to come together on a global level, at the United Nations level. and say, guys, we have this great technology. Let's do something like CERN. We all take our best scientists, put them somewhere to get it to work together, share information.

And we do not need this duplication of sovereign AI spread all over the world with 36,000 data centers. Let's make that what we have, work properly and solve problems. And then the people will be more inclined to use AI and to pay for it. It's just a logical loop that needs to be activated.

People now have fear and rejection and that's why this is called AI rebellion. And it's only going to get worse if the tech companies keep going down the wrong track. They can go down the right track and make sure that people do not rebel against AI, but embrace it because that's what I believe. I'm not complaining about AI.

I use AI on a daily basis. You use AI. Everybody uses AI. But we use it as a tool, not as something that might destroy us in the long run.

So it's a It's a narrative that needs to be adjusted. speaker-0: AI is really becoming a foundational infrastructure in our lives, so similar to electricity or the internet. But what's often ignored is that unlike software in the past, AI is incredibly resource intensive. So it's not just code, it's physical, and it requires vast data centers, specialized chips, and huge amounts of electricity to keep it running.

And that's where the tension comes in the industry right now. It's behaving as if scaling AI is an unquestioned good, more models, bigger models, faster deployment, but that scaling has real world costs, energy demand, carbon emissions, water usage for cooling. Now my next question is how significant is the energy demand from AI compared to traditional tech infrastructure? speaker-1: It's absolutely crazy.

Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, went in front of US Congress at a Senate hearing and kind of painted a picture of what is needed in energy supply. And this is already one of two years old, so it's already old information outdated. But back then, he said in front of the Senate, in front of congressional leaders, he said that it's estimated they will need 92 gigawatts of additional energy. for ⁓ to supply and start up the data centers that are being built.

Now again, we're talking about a year or two ago. To give you an idea, one terawatt is one nuclear power plant. That means we would have to build just for the United States, 92 power plants, nuclear power plants, to supply the data centers. We're not talking about people and communities and houses.

We're talking about data center. You can't build... a nuclear power plant in months or one or two years. It takes five to 10 years because there's so many regulations, so many hazards, restrictions, safety considerations that need to be looked at.

It doesn't come with the building one year and then be up and running. Even the data centers, they've managed to fast track everything and they're building data centers within months because billions of dollars of capital invested makes everybody work faster. And because it's just... Basically, once you get the GPUs from NVIDIA, once you get that and you get authority and approval to build in a certain area your massive mega data center, all you have to do is put everything in there.

But the biggest thing that is stopping projects is water supply, because they're using so much water for their needs, for building the plants and for cooling of the computers when they're using them, and air conditioning and so on and so on. that they don't have water supplies. And the biggest difficulty is the power supply. So on one hand, we're building data centers, but we don't have the energy supplies.

So we're gonna build nuclear power plants, which takes 10 years. So it doesn't make sense whatsoever. So what are they doing now? Okay, guys, forget about the 1.

5 degree warming of the planet. Let's forget about all of that. Let's start drilling again. Let's go look at old coal mines.

Let's go restart offshore drilling in the UK, ⁓ Sea. Let's go all the way up to Canada and the Arctic. know, like Trump says, drill baby drill. He made it even as a joke.

You might as well make a techno song out of this. I mean, it's insane to just talk in a casual tone about drill baby drill. It's not that. It's not the way to do it.

So this energy demand is expanding and explosive. And while we do all of this, we have the geopolitical tensions, which is reducing our energy supplies, which we need on a daily basis just to live. We need fuel to drive our cars. We need electricity to warm up our houses and to be able to cook and clean.

So why should we divert energy to build a power plant for the rich tech companies and then leave a community of one million people without energy or water? It does not make sense. It's not justifiable. It's not explainable.

And it's something that's going to create a big, big backlash because media is covering this and people are protesting, complaining around the world and it's not going to get better. It's only going to get worse. And with every day that the war continues and we have a reduced energy transport, the problem is just going to magnify and inflate and go to a point where we are actually going to face energy. cutoffs and most dangerously, we're going to have medical problems because hospitals will shut down and people will die.

And then another thing, is also not to be overlooked, we're going to have global famine in many ⁓ places around the world. And that is totally not. speaker-0: I really think the idea that sustainability doesn't matter is probably a short-term market mindset. think people are really just ignoring such a big part of it.

And it's not a long-term reality, like you say, so eventually energy constraints, regulation, even public perception will catch up and it will be a big infrastructure breakdown and that's when people will wake up. So the more interesting question isn't whether AI will keep growing. The question is whether we can make that growth efficient enough that it doesn't create a new kind of bottleneck either economically or environmentally. But I think we're too ingrained already in this whole AI era.

speaker-1: Well, I'll give you a very simple example. When Child GPT came out a little bit over three years, three to four years ago in 2023, we were amazed. Basically when it came out, you know, it would give you answers, which were not only factual incorrect, it also, you know, it wasn't functioning properly. So the model got better, you know, and now we got up on the way to Child GPT 4, Child GPT 5, and we're looking at more improvements and then...

Anthropic is going on their crusade to beat OpenAI because at the end of the day, Dario Amute used to work at OpenAI and left and started competing. So what happened is, while we are trying to build big data centers, because what people understand large language models work best when you feed it with massive amounts of data. So what did the companies do? The Facebooks, the Googles and all that, they just scraped.

all the data that was available on the internet, which is good and bad data. And then he started training their large language models and that were good. So what you saw is that from there that they were using 1 billion parameters, which is crazy by any standard. Chad GPT went up to 175 billion parameters.

And now the newer models are 1 trillion parameters and Elon Musk through his space egg. you know, IPO, whatever, is looking at 10, 1 to 10 trillion parameters of data to be used in the large language models. Then out of the blue, a little unknown startup called DeepSeek in China reduced the amount of required data to a fraction of what is needed and made their large ⁓ language model even more efficient at a fraction of the cost. So it was providing the same good AI information via DeepSeek comparable to chat GPT for a fraction of the cost, fraction of the data required and fraction of the energy cost.

So why don't we do the same? Instead of going through these billions to trillions parameters to build bigger data models, large language models and so on and so on, how about if we made everything a little bit more efficient? And this is what I'm talking about. Let's start doing what we do right now.

and work with what we have. We have the data, we need to clean it up for one thing, because it's good and bad data, wrong data, there is data about everything. So we need to separate that, because large language models work best on quality and factual correct data, and that's why they are even looking at synthetic data. So let's work on creating those large language models.

We don't need billions and trillions. We need to have good data, and on base of good data, because at the end of the day, it's an algorithm. So the algorithm takes the good data and produces a good outcome. Good data in, good data out.

Garbage in, garbage out. It's a very simple concept that everybody knows in the computer world. Why work with the wrong data? That's where we can get the good data going, which is already there.

We need to just label it and use it for what it's industry specific. For example, the medical industry does not need to know about financial industry. And the financial industry doesn't need medical records to do the large language models. And so now you see this division between the different large language models and the big tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, in particular Anthropic, is working on specific projects.

They have their platform, their models focusing on financials, on medical, on product development, on every kind of splitting it up. And it all starts working better. and more efficient, you have less hallucinations. And the objective here is to get rid of the hallucinations in the first place.

Because sometimes you can write a massive magic report produced by AI and it comes out and it has like basic mistakes, like misspelled New York or something like that. You you're like, how do you recommend that? So let's improve what we have and create. something that people can use and then we don't need to have all these data centers and massive amounts of data and this exorbitant use of energy which we simply do not have.

And again, we need to focus on the human aspect in all of this. If humans come first, nobody cares about if a data center is operating or not. If you cannot turn on ⁓ your microwave to heat up your food or take a hot shower, You don't care if the data center next to you has energy or not and it's owned by Meta or Facebook or Tesla or whatever. No, you want to know that you can cook your food and get in your car, which has enough fuel to take you to work where you can make money and come back.

That's it. That's what people look at. So we're looking at it from a total different angle and we need to change that around. We're looking from top down what the big tech bosses are.

At the of the day, it's like 5, 10 people that are deciding the future of the world. They're not elected, they're not approved, they don't have anything. And then you have 8 billion people that say, listen, we don't want data, we want food. That's it.

We want to live good. We want to live. So it's really, it's a crazy development in my opinion. And we need to slow it down and start focusing on the human aspect in all of this.

speaker-0: Are there any innovations like more efficient chips or greener data centers that could offset these concerns or are we still in a growth at any cost mindset? speaker-1: Tech has always been a growth at any cost mindset because that's all they care about because investors, they want growth and at the end they want profit. Those are the two motivating greed factors and fear equation and it's not going to get better. now Nvidia, they are producing massive amounts of GPU chips and competing with the Chinese and so on and everybody's producing and producing and producing.

Now you have to think about it. speaker-0: important speaker-1: Those chips cost a fortune and the data centers, need millions of those. So they're producing and producing, but you can install it because the data centers are not being built as fast as planned, as fast as necessary. And some have even been slowed down, stopped or just canceled in one go.

So what are you going to do with these data chips, which are time sensitive? They are outdated before they even come out of the factory because it's not Any more yearly improvements, we're talking monthly improvements, we're talking sometimes days of improvements. So you see one chip coming out and then a couple of days later, another one better, faster, smaller, and so on. And that's the other problem that the financial markets are looking at.

It's like, okay, you have this capex, your expenditure for AI infrastructure, which involves data centers and GPU chips. If you're not going to utilize them, you're not going to use them, if they're not being turned on and used, they're already losing their value. and then you have to upgrade that. The recycling period of the cycle of renewal of the tech that is in the data center is already falling behind.

So by the time you actually build your data center, the GPUs that you've ordered might already not be that what you're looking to put in there. So you need to order again. So NVIDIA now is a $5 trillion company because everybody's ordering and ordering and ordering. One day they're not going to get paid.

And then you'll see what happens to the stock market value of Nvidia, because people are just not going to pay. Even OpenAI, has crazy amounts of, they have 1.4 trillion in financial commitments towards all these big tech companies. They're already stopping to produce data centers.

They canceled the one in London, the one in UK. And now they're going to put their head office in London to kind of compensate all of that. Nvidia is not going to get paid for the data center that's not going to be built because they're not going to need the chips. So they're not going to buy from Nvidia.

you know, it's, it's again, this economic loop. doesn't make sense. You know, you, expanding something where there is no revenue and that's where we are right now. There's no revenue.

So how can you improve things? You can only improve things when things are up and running, because then you can see the functionality and how it's working. They say, ⁓ it's consuming too much energy. It's not giving us that what we need.

So we need to. make it more efficient, energy efficient. It has to be more productive in the sense like it needs to be able to do that what it's supposed to do. And that can only happen when you have it up and running and then NVIDIA can get the feedback, the actual real data needed to produce the next wave of chips and GPUs that people are going to use.

That's how everything has been in the world of tech. You have this micro, before we had memory chips and computer chips and you know, the basic stuff. And Intel was improving in one or two years, the cycle was improving and improving because they were getting the information back, the data, the feedback. And on base of that data and that information, they were improving their Intel chips.

Now Intel has kind of gone out of the picture and entered Nvidia. Nvidia, which data do they have? How many data centers are up and running using their Blackwall GPUs and getting Blackwall, not Blackwall. GPUs that are being used.

So all of it is really not making sense and the crazy part to me is we're not talking about billions anymore, we're talking about trillions. It's just insane. Absolutely insane. speaker-0: And if you zoom out 10 years, you think sustainability becomes a constraint on AI growth or just another problem technology solve?

speaker-1: Well, don't shoot the messenger. We're heading down disaster, ecological environmental disaster period. We already had that before the advent of AI. We were already complaining back then.

It almost sounds like prehistoric information when we were complaining about the energy consumption of crypto. Now nobody talks about that. That's still going on. It just disappeared off the headlines, off the newspapers.

It's not being spoken about media, but it's still there. And on top of that, we layered speaker-0: disappeared. speaker-1: The other problem, is a deep use and building plans and energy consumption and geopolitical tensions and friction. So that's only going to get worse.

And in 10 years, we will most likely before the end of the year experience the first AI bust and there will be more busts coming down the line. Where more data centers are being built, more companies defaulting, more people getting unemployed. It's a vicious cycle. that it's just gonna be a downward spiral.

So unless we do some dramatic, drastic change, and even the EU is talking about how they're gonna approach all of this, they're not against, basically nobody's against AI or industrial AI. We wanna have AI as long as it improves our lives. So if you focus on that and we come together, which is the key, key thing, because otherwise you have regulatory arbitrage. Okay, you cannot produce the AI in America.

Let's go to Africa or let's go to Antarctica or we'll build a ship and produce in the middle of the sea or we just go to space and put a data center there. That needs to stop. Where the point of consumption is, that's where it has to happen. So taxation needs to be at the point of sale and at the point of consumption.

So if I, you, or anybody uses AI, which is from OpenAI or Google or any kind of American tech company or even Mistra from France, If you are based in the UK, you pay in the UK. There must be some kind of tax which then can be used to provide other services. The next biggest problem is the AI societal impact and its impact on our democracy and on our economic model. AI is going to replace labor.

We are looking at 90 % of unemployment, which is mind-boggling, within the next few years. Right now as we speak in... In we have over 1 million needs. Needs means not in education, not in employment, not in training.

Those are youngsters between 16 and 26 roughly spoken. These people face a bleak future. They cannot even get work. They cannot get entry-level jobs.

They cannot get internships. How is that going to pan out? These youngsters, they will try to survive by getting a job at your local McDonald's or become a delivery driver. It's insane.

So these people are going to go and live off the government, get benefits and social welfare and you name it. Where's that going to go? People are to have less disposable income. People are going to spend less.

It's going to affect the economy at large. The supermarkets will suffer. Hospitality will suffer. Retail will suffer because when people don't have money to spend on luxury or non-essential goods and only on food, all those things are going to suffer.

⁓ it's a domino effect that's going to happen. And so what we need to look at is the economic model has to change. So here comes a great idea. We're to have universal basic income, which nobody can afford.

Nobody. cannot afford the benefits system, the social state benefits system in the UK, let alone the Americans where we have 50 million people living below poverty line and unemployed. Now let's focus on the UK. So we cannot afford that.

And then you have people like Elon Musk say, well, Forget UBI because that's just above poverty level. We're going to do the universal high earner. And we're like, wow, what a great idea. Again, where is the money going to come from?

Elon Musk is going to get it. And basically, I think that that is what he's trying to imply, although he's not saying it. Let us take tech companies, do what we have to do. We have private capital, investors, crazy investors giving us billions and trillions, which we cannot justify what we're going to do with it.

And from that money, let us build up an AI world of abundance and let us run it. We don't need voters. Why would we need people to decide what we, because we know everything better anyway. We'll regulate ourselves and we will help people.

People don't want to take hand out or, you we're not in the pandemic where we get furlough and everything like that, or government stimulants packages and all that. People want to work and do something productive. Even if you're not getting paid, you might want to create music or cook or paint or whatever. So that is going to create the next headache for countries and this is going to happen within the next three to five years.

There's going to be such a dramatic impact that people are not going to have jobs. So there is not going to be a taxable base for the government to get any kind of income. So there's going to be massive budget deficits. Right now, the UK is talking about three trillion pounds, which is unpayable.

And the United States are looking at $39 trillion of budget deficit, government deficit that's not going to be paid back and they're kind of rolling it over into perpetuality. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. And so this is the next problem we're facing.

So while we are talking about energy demands, pollution, AI, and so on, we're ignoring the biggest problem that we're facing, which is number one, employment for people. education for people and an economic model that is going to work for all of us. Because if we don't work, we're not going to be able to produce, buy or do anything. And that's going to affect the whole economy.

And then the most important out of all of this, in my opinion, the impact on our health. People are already looking at it. We have 50 % of depression around the world. Just imagine now what's gonna happen to people that are already facing loneliness, happiness, stress, anxiety, self-harm, suicide.

What's gonna happen to those people? And then you have the youngsters coming out of university and don't have any prospects for the future. Yeah, hoping for the best and expecting the worst. It is really a thing that needs to be addressed immediately.

And that's something that I, this is the reason why I'm doing this. speaker-0: hoping for a bright future. speaker-1: Because I want to raise awareness because people think everything is far, far away and the narrative is like... The distant future.

And anyway, we had so many industrial revolutions and we always seem to overcome it. The other industrial revolutions took 100 years to come. The least one, the nearest one is 10 years, a couple of decades. AI is three years and it's accelerating.

time is not on our side. It's time critical. speaker-0: in future, but we're... speaker-1: that we do something now.

So again, we need to let our voices be heard. And we need to with our mind and with our speaker-0: That's it for today's episode of Fintech Bytes. If there's one takeaway, it's this. AI might feel limitless, but the infrastructure behind it isn't.

Data, compute and energy are becoming the new battlegrounds. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to follow the podcast and share it with someone thinking about the future of AI, finance or sustainability. See you next time. speaker-1: Vote with your wallet.