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President Donald Trump has dismissed legitimate concerns about the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), comparing them to the “hoax” of the climate crisis.
“The same people that said, ‘We’ll all be dead in twelve years because of Global Warming’ … are the people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us, that robots are going to attack us, and everything is a DISASTER,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The president’s comments came a week after reports about the U.S. military nearly starting a war with China after relying on false information from AI, and after the world experienced its hottest month on record in August.
Trump also claimed that “nobody was dead” due to climate change, and compared AI concerns to the investigation into election interference by Russia during his first term in office, and his impeachment over withholding aid from Ukraine in order to get political “dirt” on Joe Biden, wrongly describing both of those situations as “a Hoax.”
In dismissing worries over the expansion of AI — which tech experts and developers themselves have said should be slowed down until proper safeguards are instituted — Trump made a false claim about the climate crisis: that no one has died from it.
In fact, millions of people around the world have lost their lives due to its impacts.
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According to a Lancet Countdown report published last fall, which was authored by 128 experts from 71 different academic institutions, 546,000 deaths have occurred from heat exposure on average each year over the past decade. It also found that 84 percent of heatwave days in the past five years of data wouldn’t have happened without the effects of the climate crisis, and that droughts induced by the climate crisis have also led to 123.7 million more people experiencing food insecurity around the world than observed between 1981 and 2010.
“We’re seeing millions of deaths that are occurring needlessly every year because of our persistent fossil fuel dependence, because of our delay in mitigating climate change, and our delays in adaptation to the climate change that cannot be avoided,” said Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown at University College London.
Extreme weather events, which are becoming more numerous and severe due to climate change, have caused at least hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past 20 years.
“From 1995 to 2024, more than 832,000 lives were lost … driven by more than 9,700 extreme weather events,” reads an explainer from GermanWatch’s Climate Risk Index. “The frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters continue to rise, and these figures underscore the urgent need for climate action.”
A University of Wisconsin-Madison study published in 2022 found that eliminating air pollution from energy-related activities could reduce premature deaths in the U.S. by more than 53,000 annually. Put another way, by ending the country’s dependence on fossil fuels and shifting to renewable energy sources, the U.S. could save a number of lives nearly equivalent to the population of Madison every five years.
AI data centers will also worsen the climate crisis.
According to a 2015 analysis from Cornell University researchers, by 2030, the current rate of AI growth will add 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. That amount is equal to 5 to 10 million cars added to U.S. roads annually. Water usage to cool these data centers would also equal the annual household usage of 6 to 10 million Americans per year.
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