The AI Blind Spot
I want to bring to your attention some things you may have yet to think about as you experience or hear about the fascinating, creepy, spectacular, and dreadful of what AI promises and has to offer. Because I'm your bud, I won't get too much into the terrifying threats and will only focus on how this ties into my work as a culture shifter.
This is the article [1] that prompted me. It discusses the increasing demand for data centers in Colorado to support AI, cryptocurrency, cloud computing, e-commerce, tech, entertainment, and other industries and the accompanying environmental concerns. As the need for data storage grows, more data centers are being built in the state, bringing economic benefits and significant environmental challenges.
Key concerns include the alarming levels of energy consumption, water usage, and potential impacts on local ecosystems. Data centers demand massive amounts of electricity, often from non-renewable sources, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the cooling processes for these facilities consume staggering volumes of water, raising serious concerns about the sustainability of local water resources, particularly in a state already grappling with water scarcity issues.
The article doesn't mention the impact of manufacturing the servers and equipment that run these data centers: carbon emissions and extractions of rare raw materials that devastate and exploit communities and ecology.
Their take on mitigating this challenge is familiar: Renewable energy! More efficiency! These are great and necessary, but there's that same blind spot I see in the view of Capitalist society. How about we reduce reduce demand? It seems like slowing down never gets mentioned.
One way is to factor in the environmental cost (make the data centers pay a power bill *and* an ecological bill). Another way is on the cultural influence side, where we can better understand this technology's actual cost and say, "No thanks." I know that's a massive over-simplification, but this is one of the ways to do it. It's not our responsibility to address this, but we have agency here.
We are building systems and feeding a culture with an insatiable hunger for MORE. Choosing the route of "less" or "enough" goes against this massive momentum.
What angers me is that this growth is only marginally serving us. A model born out of industrial capitalism is working to perpetuate the same model and even bring more destruction. At the same time, it gives us crumbs of its benefits. Instead of utilizing AI primarily to serve us and improve our resilience as a society, it's exploiting the earth and our humanity to maximize short-term economic profits. It's destructive. It's never concerned with our well-being as people, much less the well-being of a planet in crisis.
The effort to correct course is overwhelming to imagine, but what's easy to access is our personal, daily lives. I sincerely believe that the precursor to system change starts in our hearts and circles of influence. Before we start changing systems and demanding the same from powerful entities, we must practice. We begin at home and in our personal habits and choices.
Find your blind spots:
How do you see this attitude for "more" manifesting in your personal life?
Where do you find yourself consuming or hoarding data in a way that isn't nourishing or useful?
How does this line up with your values?
How can you dismantle it? Where does compassion fit it?
[1] Sill, Noelle. "As Demand for Data Centers Grows, So Do Concerns Over Their Effects on Colorado's Environment." The Colorado Sun, 25 March 2024, https://coloradosun.com/2024/03/25/as-demand-for-data-centers-grows-so-do-concerns-over-their-effects-on-colorados-environment/. Accessed 20 May 2024.