Andrew Davidson, Senior Vice President, Product Management, of MongoDB, building and managing your data in the cloud.
Although I’ve spent most of my career in New York tech, I spent a year living in Bangladesh, helping advise on energy infrastructure. To radically summarize that period of my life, living in Bangladesh gave me an intimate view of one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia. Indeed, between 2011 and 2013—bookending my time there—Bangladesh’s population grew about 2.3%, and its GDP grew 16.6% (versus 1.5% and 7.9%, respectively, in the U.S.).
However, that sort of growth isn’t without its costs. In 2011, air pollution was a leading health risk in Bangladesh—and it still is today. Bangladesh might be the most exciting, vibrant place I’ve ever lived, but a rapid expansion of industry, combined with Bangladesh’s dense population, has taken (and continues to take) a toll on the people there—which brings me to the Industrial Revolution.
For much of human history, populations and economies grew—or shrank—more or less in tandem. But since the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s, both the global population and the world economy have exploded at an exponential and unprecedented rate. For example, between 1700 and 2000, the world population grew more than 950%. Likewise, global GDP grew more than 18,000% between 1700 and 2022.
But this taxed the planet. Rich economies got richer (in part) by burning the fossil fuels that powered industrial production. Conversely, countries without access to—or power over—natural resources didn’t grow or were repressed by richer countries. If the economy was growing, so were emissions, and if emissions fell, so did the economy.
A Shifting Order
Today, that relationship is changing. As we’ve moved from the industrial to the digital revolution, we’ve seen for the first time in history a decoupling of economic growth and emissions. In the U.S., for example, “GDP has doubled since 1990, but CO2 emissions have returned to the level back then.”
Broadly speaking, new technology—especially the internet—has lessened our dependence on natural resources and physical commodities. For example, instead of commuting to an office every day, my work depends on apps—some of which, like Adobe, are powered by MongoDB, where I’ve worked since 2013. I see huge promise in this tech-powered work model, which may cut people’s emissions by up to 29%.
Today, growth is increasingly less dependent on the construction of physical infrastructure or the exfiltration of fossil fuels. Since the 1990 benchmark, “there has been a 36% decline in the amount of energy needed to generate a unit of global GDP,” and the internet now has “a greater weight in GDP than agriculture or utilities.”
To borrow from Marc Andreesen, technology is eating traditional industry, and we’re discovering new avenues for progress and growth that are lessening our reliance on the planet’s resources.
AI To The Rescue(?)
AI is the hot topic du jour, and I’m particularly excited about the enormous potential it offers to accelerate innovation while mitigating the environmental impact of progress. I recognize that this might be an unpopular take, given stories about AI’s energy needs. According to a recent report by Goldman Sachs, for example, AI could double data center electricity consumption by the end of the decade, from 1% to 2% of global power to 3% to 4%.
Although this increase is indeed large, AI’s enormous potential—for example, possible GDP growth of 6.1% in the U.S. over the next decade—could more than offset its energy cost. What’s more, even projected data center electricity consumption (about 1,000 TWh by 2026, according to the IEA) would still be a fraction of other sectors, like industrial energy use, which accounted for about 10,000 TWh in 2020 or about 33% of global electricity.
Finally, Boston Consulting Group estimates that AI could help reduce overall emissions by 2.6 to 5.3 gigatons. Indeed, organizations worldwide are already using AI to combat climate change in a variety of ways.
For example, Google DeepMind has turned to AI to optimize industrial cooling and to increase the value of wind farm energy output. Meanwhile, MongoDB customers like AgroScout and Mortar.io are using AI to make agriculture and building more sustainable, respectively. In Brazil, Sipremo uses AI to better predict climate disasters, while London-based Greyparrot “has developed an AI system that analyzes waste processing and recycling facilities to help them recover and recycle more waste material.”
The need for solutions like these is urgent, as the climate crisis is exacerbating a number of already pressing challenges, like the burden of mosquito-borne disease. And climate change is disproportionately impacting much of the Global South, which has been dealing with a range of environmental and health concerns not necessarily driven by climate change (like unhealthy concentrations of ambient particulate matter and household air pollution).
But the road to recovery for developing regions is a challenging one. The barriers to climate innovation are high, and overcoming the debts (e.g., technical, infrastructure and financial) that developing countries are struggling under is a tall order. For example, a report from the ONE Campaign found that “more than one in five emerging markets and developing countries paid more to service their debt in 2022 than they received in external financing.”
I’m hopeful that, here too, AI will be a solution. In a world where AI becomes everyone’s intelligent companion, everyone becomes a developer, an innovator and a disruptor. Coding companions and tools that bring specialized knowledge to everyone’s fingertips will empower them to build modern technologies that transform industries for the better.
At the same time, AI will make it more cost-effective to innovate, removing the barriers that stand in the way of modernization in lower-income countries like Bangladesh. In those places, the promise AI holds—and that technology as a whole holds—is truly dramatic.
So, yes, you could say I’m optimistic about AI’s promise. After all, techno-optimism is in my bones: Before moving to Bangladesh and New York, I grew up and began my career in Silicon Valley. And although there’s much work to be done, the idea that technology holds this promise gives me hope. I can’t wait to see where it takes us.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?