AI has an “invisible cost”: every prompt warms a server, pulls electricity, and - depending on the setup - uses water for cooling. That part is real, and it matters.
But here’s what’s missing from most AI sustainability takes: Knowledge loss is also environmental waste.
When an engineer retires and nobody remembers why the system works, we rebuild it.
When a report is buried under five versions, we rerun the experiment.
When last year’s “don’t do this” gets forgotten, we proudly do it again - now with even more meetings.
And every time we redo work that was already done, something physical happens. Machines run again. Labs test again. Prototypes get scrapped again. Supply chains ship again. And carbon gets emitted again.
So yes, AI uses energy. But so does humanity’s favorite hobby: starting over.
That’s the real tradeoff: Compute vs. Forgetting.
AI can absolutely make things worse - hallucinations, duplicated models, junk outputs, and the classic “I don’t trust it so I’ll redo it anyway.” That’s AI as a waste amplifier.
But AI can also act like a memory system, not just a content generator.
We need to find what already exists instead of reinventing it, connect old lessons to new problems, flag conflicting or outdated knowledge and identify “unknown knowns” hiding in archives
If AI prevents just one avoidable rework cycle - one duplicate study, one failed pilot, one wrong design - it may already pay back its footprint environmentally.
Because the greenest computation isn’t “zero compute.”
It’s the computation that stops you from burning energy to relearn what you already knew.
The greenest work of all? The work you never have to repeat.
REFERENCES
Ulhaq I, Nayak R, George M, Nguyen H, Quang H. Green knowledge management: a bibliometric analysis, research trends and future directions. VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems. 2024 Oct 2.
Abbas J, Khan SM. Green knowledge management and organizational green culture: an interaction for organizational green innovation and green performance. Journal of Knowledge Management. 2023 Jul 24;27(7):1852-70.
Yu S, Abbas J, Alvarez-Otero S, Cherian J. Green knowledge management: Scale development and validation. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge. 2022 Oct 1;7(4):100244.
Al-Faouri AH. Green knowledge management and technology for organizational sustainability: The mediating role of knowledge-based leadership. Cogent Business & Management. 2023 Dec 11;10(3):2262694.
Wang S, Abbas J, Sial MS, Álvarez-Otero S, Cioca LI. Achieving green innovation and sustainable development goals through green knowledge management: Moderating role of organizational green culture. Journal of innovation & knowledge. 2022 Oct 1;7(4):100272.
Sustainability of Artificial Intelligence - The invisible cost of intelligence (interview with Bonny Banerjee on innovative Sustainability channel). February, 15, 2026. Sustainability of Artificial Intelligence - The invisible cost of intelligence
No comments:
Post a Comment