“Are current technologies sustainable?”
Not so "Green" Solar energy in the wake of the storm results in greater polution in the landfills.
By Scott Hamilton
We are always hearing about the importance of reducing carbon emissions to reduce the impact on climate change. However, the same groups of people that are pushing the climate change agenda are also pushing for advancements in technology. If you begin to follow technology in any close way you will quickly see that computing companies have conflicting goals.
Google is a prime example. They are promoting a sustainable business model promising to lower carbon emissions, and they are also increasing the computing capacity of their facilities at astronomical rates. These two goals cannot both be achieved together; you either have to develop sustainable low energy consumption computing platforms, or bleeding edge technology for artificial intelligence (AI). You simply cannot have both at the same time.
In the last year Google data centers have grown to the point that they are consuming 48 percent more power today than at the same time last year. A majority of this additional power is in place to support their AI initiatives. Google is one of the leaders in AI technologies and utilizes more computing power for AI than any other workload. The really bad part is that a majority of these new AI data centers are located in the United States and powered from coal-fired power plants, which vastly increases Google’s carbon footprint. This is the same company that markets “Google Cloud” as a green alternative to running your own data center.
This kind of leads me into another train of thought after hearing Kamala Harris attempt to describe the cloud. I really hope that she does not actually believe when she saves files to “the cloud” that they wind “up here in this cloud that exists above us no longer in a physical place.” So I think it is important to explain exactly what the term “saving files in the cloud” actually means. The best description that I have heard regarding the cloud is “storing your data in someone else’s data center.” In other words, instead of keeping your files, photos, music, movies, home video, checkbook register or medical records in a secure location locked in your house, you are keeping them on computers in secure data centers owned by Meta, Alphabet, Google, Microsoft or Amazon, just to name a few.
The cloud raises two main concerns for me. The first is in regards to the security of the data. In the last week around 2.9 billion people had their personal financial data compromised when a cloud-based background check company, doing business as National Public Data, failed to properly secure the information it gathered for doing background checks. In all likelihood, if you applied for a job or a loan, or volunteered at an organization working with children, your personal information is probably on the list.
The second main concern I have with the cloud is the sustainability of the technology. We used to take our photos and family video on physical film and store them at home or in a bank safety deposit box. All of these memories occupied physical space in our homes. We then shifted to digital photography and videography, capturing our memories on a computer, but we still kept them at home, taking space on our own computers. The cloud has allowed us the opportunity to store these memories outside our home and on computer equipment we do not own, and in most cases for free. This has resulted in an explosion of data.
We took a couple rolls of film on a family vacation and came back with between 24-36 photos to remember the vacation in the 1980-90s. By the early 2000s we started taking home video equipment on vacations and coming back with a few hours of home movies and still had a couple rolls of film. Around 2010 nearly everyone had a digital camera and the number of photos on the average family vacation went from less than 50 to over 1000, but we were still limited to the size of the memory card in the camera. Families today no longer even carry a camera, but use their cell phone as both a still camera and video camera. They use this device to capture every moment of their lives, not just vacations, and now we are talking about hundreds of photos a day, thousands a month and ten-thousand a year.
The more memories we capture, the more space we utilize on the cloud and the larger the data centers have to grow. The larger the data centers grow, the more power they consume. The latest estimates show that by the year 2030, nearly 10 percent of all the power generated in the U.S. will be used to power data centers to support our addictions to data storage and AI. This figure includes the fact that the average household may triple their power consumption with a shift to electric vehicles. The amount of power needed to sustain our current technology trends is unsustainable and will eventually reach a critical mass. This will result in the failure of the technology. We need to figure out how to reduce the demand rather than keep up the unsustainable pace.
Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
