Is AI here to stay?

15 August, 2026

Are you worried about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will impact our lives and our planet?

If so, you’re not the only one.

While AI is promoted as the technology of the future, that may not be the case. And that’s because AI is not sustainable, says Diego Hidalgo, Founder of the OFF Movement.

Here he explains why.

Economic problems

Hidalgo says that a key problem is that AI is massively expensive and requires an unprecedented level of investment. He points out that:

·         in 2025 xAI spent 5 billion dollars on R&D alone

·         the four largest AI companies plan to spend 470 billion dollars this year

·         OpenAI anticipates investing 750 billion dollars between now and 2030.

‘The scale of these figures is unprecedented compared to the investments made to date by the big tech firms,’ he says.

Legal problems

Secondly, Hidalgo points out the legal problems regarding AI’s use of other people’s information without their consent.

‘Large models are trained on millions of data points, in most cases without the consent of their authors or owners,’ he says. ‘Broadly speaking, the hyperscalers of AI built their foundations on the plunder of articles, videos, books, artworks, faces, sounds, personal data, etc. produced by third parties, without reimbursing them.’

Energy and environmental problems

Thirdly, Hidalgo explains just how much energy AI technology consumes.

·         A question to AI uses 200 times more energy than an internet search.

·         Generating an AI image uses 1,450 times more energy than an internet search.

·         Creating a short AI video uses as much energy as 200,000 spam messages.

He says that by 2030:

·         AI will use three times more energy than Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined

·         AI data centres will use 9.3 trillion litres of water per year (enough for the entire population of Africa)

·         and AI will generate 2.5 million tonnes of waste per year.

Further, Hidalgo points out that ‘data centers can increase temperatures in their immediate surroundings by as much as 9°C (16.2°F)’. In countries like Australia, where heat and bushfires are problems, that’s a massive concern.

Social problems

Hidalgo says that a fourth problem of AI is its potential to harm society, which has already made it extremely unpopular in the US for reasons such as these:

·         job loss

·         the building of data centres

·         lack of security  

·         potential for surveillance and population control

·         and the psychological and cognitive risks of addiction to AI platforms.

Security problems

Hidalgo says that, with the advent of AI, ‘we are faced with a real problem of the utmost importance for the security of our critical infrastructure, including military systems.’

In other words, AI may be more effective at breaking security than humans are at designing it.

‘According to a report published this month by MIT based on the opinions of 272 AI experts, it is estimated that there is a 21.5% probability of a large-scale catastrophe occurring between now and 2030,’ Hidalgo says.

So what can be done?

That’s up to us.

As Hidalgo points out, ‘What is at stake is not just technology, it is the kind of future we are building.’ We must ‘demand that the rollout of technology is NOT at the expense of human beings.’

EMR Australia would like to give thanks to Diego Hidalgo for the information in this article.

You can see more details here. https://offm.org/so/62P-H1Row?languageTag=es&cid=c58c50f0-fa8f-468a-b27b-813c9eb2b8d7

You can see more about the OFF Movement here. https://www.offm.org/en/manifesto