Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likens AI to surgery: ‘in order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first’
As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change — but only if it inflicts “an enormous amount of pain and suffering” first.
The Nvidia CEO discussed the future of energy and AI’s impact on our planet in the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show. But his comments boil down to the same accelerationist spin we’ve seen from a variety of tech leaders as well as President Donald Trump. They promise that AI will be such a gift to humanity that it’s worth the damage caused by data centers currently running on dirty energy.
Huang’s extreme level of privilege is glaring in the interview. He’s right that there will be pain. People are already suffering from fires and floods exacerbated by climate change. People are already dying earlier because of air pollution from fossil fuels. But Huang, with a net worth of around $192.6 billion, will not pay the price of the pollution his company creates through energy-hungry chip factories and data centers.
Huang tells Klein, after complaining that the US hasn’t built out enough fossil fuel plants, that:
It’s kind of like, in order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first — that’s the nature of surgery. They’ve got to cut you open to save you. They’ve got to inflict an enormous amount of pain and suffering on you so that they can save you. And so I think AI’s kind of like that.