As artificial intelligence outpaces human capability, the real question isn't whether machines will replace us, but how we'll find meaning in a world of abundance.
If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.
Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.
So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.
Go tell that to AlphaFold which solved a decades‑old problem in biology by predicting protein structures with near lab‑level accuracy.
It could have been done without burning the earth down to get there.
Oh yes, and how many chemicals did it cause to spew out and how much water did it deplete? That solution won’t matter if life is dead anyway.
Way to move the goalposts.
If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.
Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.
So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.