AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking

Video Description

Emily  Bender is a computational linguistics professor at the University of Washington. Alex Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Bender and Hanna join Big Technology to discuss what their new book, “The AI‑Con," which they describe as the layered ways today’s language‑model boom obscures environmental costs, labor harms, and shaky science. Tune in to hear a lively back‑and‑forth on whether chatbots are useful tools or polished parlor tricks. We also cover benchmark gaming, data‑center water use, doomerism, and more. Hit play for a candid debate that will leave you smarter about where generative AI really stands — and what comes next. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year, which includes membership to our subscriber Discord: ⁠https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b⁠ Chapters 0:00 Intro + guest bios 2:15 “Nested cons” explained 10:30 Environmental impact: water, carbon, diesel backup 19:05 Benchmark gaming and the Arc‑AGI debate 26:45 Host’s Paris‑trip use case — critics respond 40:55 AI in medicine: ambient scribes, privacy, labor 57:20 Doomerism and the Tescreal bundle 1:00:45 Takeaways + what we can all watch for next