Information Industry, AI, and Energy
It’s interesting how information has now become an industry. I don’t mean in the sense of the various compute technology and communication, but the actual physical storage of information. This physical storage now demands its own massive energy consumption. The FT has a piece on the growing energy needs for data centers and remember, investors, this doesn’t include the massive new energy capacity needed for AI to scale into any sort of mass usable technology.
“Governments around the world are intensifying scrutiny on the building of data centres over fears that their huge energy usage is putting excessive pressure on national climate targets and electricity grids.”
“Ireland, Germany, Singapore and China as well as a US county and Amsterdam in the Netherlands have introduced restrictions on new data centres in recent years to comply with more stringent environmental requirements.”
“The threat to new projects is highest in Ireland, a hotspot for server farms built by cloud computing companies such as Google and Microsoft, because of its low tax rate and easy access to high-capacity subsea cables through which global internet traffic is run.”
The whole article is worth reading. It is an issue that’s been ignored with all the AI hype. AI demands not only massive new amounts of energy for the AI compute processes themselves but also the data storage it utilizes.
Which brings up a larger point about technology and how initial technologies can lock in ways of doing things not just because they are “best,” a value judgement, which Norbert Wiener warned is, “in a society like ours, avowedly based on buying and selling, in which all natural and human resources are regarded as the absolute property of the first business man enterprising enough to exploit them.” He added specifically regarding information and compute technologies, “It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market."
We need a reformation of value(s) and how they are derived.
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