Decomputerize to Decarbonize: A Climate Debate We Can’t Avoid

However, a major factor ravaging our planet seems to be missing in this conversation: autocratic computerization and technology adoption. Of course, this claim may sound strange to a practitioner – and sometimes a convert – of technology. But it was an article by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian (bit.ly/3HIbgeG) that got me thinking along the way, and an impeccable reading of the Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford took the issue home.

Let’s look at some of the facts that Tarnoff, Crawford and others, such as Nathan Ensmenger, allude to. A recent United Nations study showed that it takes 240 kg of fossil fuels, 22 kg of chemicals and 1,500 kg of water to manufacture a desktop computer. A team from the University of Massachusetts calculated that training a model for natural language processing—the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that helps ‘virtual assistants’ like Alexa understand you—emitted 626,155 pounds of carbon dioxide, 125 pounds of carbon dioxide. What are the New York-Beijing round trips will produce. As models become more complex, this increases exponentially. OpenAI estimated that the computing used to train a single AI model is growing by a factor of 10 every year. Then there’s the cloud, where giga-loads of computer-generated data mysteriously rises up and gets stored. This ‘cloud’ is actually hundreds of data centers that Google, Microsoft and others have connected our planet, and they consume water and electricity at alarming rates. Tarnoff reports that data centers consume 200 terawatt hours per year, roughly the same as South Africa, and are expected to grow 4–5 times by 2030, making it on par with Japan, the world’s fourth largest energy consumer. . The “cloud,” says Crawford, “is made up of rocks and lithium brine and crude oil.” However, in comparison, what is the guts of a computer, and what is in rapid supply these days – semiconductor chips. A ‘fab’ unit would take $20 billion to build and require 2-4 million gallons of ultra-pure water per day, which is roughly equivalent to the needs of a US city of 50,000 people. In fact, Crawford reports, the carbon footprint of the world’s computational infrastructure matches that of the aviation industry at its peak, and is growing at a faster rate.

So, to decarbonize, Tarnoff says, we have to decomputerize. And I reluctantly agree with him. Before you accuse me of being a Luddite, let me add that this doesn’t mean getting rid of computers, but just unnecessary ones. Think about the number of computers in your home and near it: laptops and PCs, mobile phones, voice assistants, smart ‘things’. Do we really need them all? Consumers, corporations and governments are digitizing everything. Cisco estimates that there will be 29 billion networked devices by next year. Each requires energy, minerals and water, and each generates data for an ever-growing cloud.

So, says Tarnoff, we really need a “Luddite revolution”; “Digitalization not only poses a risk to people, however. It is also a risk to the planet. Digitization is a climate disaster: If corporations and governments succeed in making too much of our world into data, we will have more opportunities to live. One world less for him.”

IBM founder Thomas Watson famously said that “the greater, world” [needed] five computers”. While it’s not even a Luddite’s dream, perhaps we should go back to Bill Gates’ fantasy, “a computer at every desk”, and stop there? On nearly every available square foot of our living space With computers now just a single computer sounds laughable. It’s time to debate the uninterrupted development of technologies that we consider ‘clean’ but could instead accelerate the demise of our home planet.

Jaspreet Bindra is Chief Technical Whisperer at Findability Sciences, and learning AI, Ethics and Society at Cambridge University.