Data abundance is not a must for artificial intelligence

A hundred and thirty-eight years ago, almost to the day, Thomas Alva Edison switched on his coal-fired power plant at his Pearl Street station in lower Manhattan and provided commercial electricity for the first time in history to 59 homes within a square-mile area of his power plant. Many see this event as the birth of the modern era, as it marks the origin of our dependence on electricity to the extent that it is integral to almost everything we take for granted today.

But the kind of power generation that Edison pioneered on that September day in 1882 put us on a trajectory that has had unfortunate outcomes. He kicked into overdrive our reliance on fossil fuels for energy, allowing it to permeate all aspects of our lives—from the electricity we need to power our homes, offices and factories, to the petroleum we need to run our cars, ships and planes. This forced us down a path of high-energy consumption that has resulted in the rapid depletion of naturally occurring carbon-based fuel sources and inflicted near-irreversible damage on our planet.