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ACCORDING TO LIZ - First computers then data-farming, and now cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence aka AI suck up more and more energy.
In 2016 scientists predicted that, unless radical improvements were made in the way humans designed computers, by 2040, computer chips would need more electricity than what our global energy production could deliver.
The problem is that even as those radical improvements were made and as computing elements become more energy efficient, the demand continues to go up. And, as the per-unit cost correspondingly comes down and the interconnectedness of tech expands, their numbers keep exploding.
It’s not just one home desktop, it’s several. And a bunch of laptops, and smart watches. It’s smart TVs and thermostats, Alexa and Ring and other home security systems. It’s car electronics, the traffic grid, the City’s emergency response systems. It’s the international financial infrastructure. It’s American military preparedness...
As of 2021 about 4.6 billion people used the internet every day, with 350,000 tweets per minute. People may think of the internet as a passive element, something our digital use passes along or through without consequence, but the servers that host and dispense all that data suck up vast quantities of energy, producing gi-normous carbon footprints.
Today we live our lives within the “Internet of Things” with over 30 billion internet-connected devices worldwide. While these technologies claim to be helping us transition to a cleaner energy future, aggregate power demand is dramatically increasing. In two or three years, info-tech is on track to consume 20% of electric power produced and generate over 5% of the world’s carbon emissions.
Consumers demand and so businesses rush in to profit.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the cryptocurrency networks, and a never-ending influx of wanna-bes maintain or rent space in massive data centers with high-core-count CPUs, supporting terabytes of RAM and petabytes of storage.
The computing that makes it happen – for ordinary folks’ day-to-day connecting, for the marketing mavens who track and aggregate the choices people make to data-crunch their way to the most profitable sales, for the massive amounts of tracking and profiling undertaken by the alphabet agencies to target potential threats, for ransomware hackers, for political and commercial enemies battering down firewalls – all comes at a price.
Last year alone, providers of public cloud services were the beneficiaries of over $750 billion in payments.
What rakes in bunches of moolah for some also sucks up Terawatts of power. According to Bloomberg, approximately one percent of the world's electricity now goes to cloud computing.
And that demand will only continue to escalate with Bloomberg conservatively estimating that as much as eight percent of all electricity will be vacuumed up by cloud computing by the end of this decade with exponentially increasing data storage demands, complex virtual gaming, and shifting the reliance of financial operations away from “real world” transactions.
This month a report in Science Daily credits AI with the promise of helping coders code faster, drivers drive safer, and making daily tasks less time-consuming. But a recent study demonstrates that, when adopted widely, AI could have a heavy energy footprint, one that could grow to exceed the power demands of some countries.
Demand for AI means the dizzying energy expansion driven by the Internet of Things will soar to new heights.
And then there is cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is one of many tech innovators vying for fortunes in a nascent and largely unregulated market. Any control comes only when other laws are broken – such as the fraud case that has brought down Sam Bankman-Fried, once ranked the world’s 60th wealthiest person.
Bitcoin is, however, the most widely known and most energy inefficient of currency options today with a massive carbon footprint. It’s not a swipe of a credit card or a tap on a smartphone.
To verify transactions, its “miners” compete to certify transactions by solving a mathematical equation. The quickest solution merits a small Bitcoin payment. As the math has become more challenging so has the energy required – by the winner and the wasted efforts of the hundreds of thousands of computers of the data-miners who don’t win.
This requires computers to solve ever more complex math problems, a process that is horrendously energy-intensive: 110 Terawatt Hours per year according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance amounting to 0.55% of global electricity production, more than the entire energy drawdown of Sweden or Norway.
Visa’s digital transactions are far faster with correspondingly less energy use, averaging 1,700 transactions per second instead of Bitcoin’s four.
And Bitcoin is just one of many – although most of its competitors are not as energy profligate.
Meantime, to fulfill ever-increasing energy demands in all sectors of modern life, the fossil fuel industry and those in their orbit are doing everything possible to extract as much of their dirty product as possible at the lowest possible cost to hyperinflate their profits, and with total disregard for people and planet.
And even as greener technology is coming on line, the infrastructure to support it is lagging behind and, in too many cases, deliberately undermined.
When cell growth in our own bodies starts to spiral out of control, we call it cancer and attack it aggressively. If bodily functions are impaired, we act to repair them.
If we are to preserve some semblance of a world for our children, we will have to better address this proliferation of energy use at a time when the use of fossil fuel-based power is putting our planet at risk.
Some is good but too much – energy demand, and leveraging by dangerous industries for short term profit – may mean the end of the world as we know it.
Progress today should never be made at the expense of future generations.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
