Above the Waterline: ‘Digital gold rush’ threatens air, land, and water

My daughter-in-law Meredith is practical and sufferer She s my go-to person for the things I can t figure out how to do of which there are a growing number Among dozens of other tasks she s shown me how to open my grandson s baby stroller operate my wireless music speaker and inflate my camping pad Majority of all I rely on Meredith to help me with the electronic hardware that baffles and frustrates me on a regular basis When I decided to write about the proliferation of material centers in metro Atlanta Meredith suggested ironically as she noted that I check out ChatGPT the artificial intelligence AI chatbot that you can talk to as though it were another person It generates human-like text and can answer questions about virtually any topic It can also generate incorrect responses or hallucinations There are biases in the human-created system as well Critical thinking is essential With Meredith s assistance I opened the ChatGPT App and urged my question What should I include in a story about figures centers the buildings filled with equipment to process internet traffic facilitate AI and store massive amounts of digital facts The answer wasn t revolutionary but I received a useful outline in a nanosecond Notably a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search An admission I am addicted to Googling various subjects on my smartphone The digital world of the internet is a great improvement over the Ouija boards and Magic -Balls of my teenage years in the s again as long as critical thinking is employed Dozens of times each day I ask my phone random questions that pop into my ADHD-addled brain Until in the past few days however I had not thought about the cost of my queries in terms of power water use and public impact Like millions of other people I ve used the magic of the internet assuming that its infrastructure was located somewhere else That somewhere else is now Georgia with the explosion of proposed figures centers The environmental impacts lack of leadership oversight and corporate secrecy are alarming Adobe Stock Credit Adobe Stock Adobe Credit Adobe Stock Adobe Credit Adobe Stock Adobe Hot Sector for Material Centers Once the booming epicenter of the South s railroad structure Atlanta is again a crossroads for huge financial expenditure and enhancement this time related to the digital industry According to an excellent series in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the region is the country s hottest facts center region playing host to a digital gold rush by tech giants real estate speculators and private equity firms There appear to be about existing centers and several dozen proposed locations primarily in the Atlanta region but no one knows for sure Atlanta s expansive fiber optic infrastructure offers a solid backbone for material centers coupled with available land inexpensive water supplies and an electric utility Georgia Power salivating at the thought of new business State and local authorities are providing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as incentives to attract developers despite the highly speculative nature of the AI boom Business analysts are already comparing the rapacious industry expansion to the infamous dot-com bubble of the late s when a similar speculative frenzy and overvaluation resulted in a plunge in stock values and bankruptcies They also note that the U S commercial sector is being bolstered by the extraordinary boom in AI a precarious situation At What Cost The deluge of content centers may place metro Atlanta in the vanguard of the next technological revolution but at what cost One large records center can demand as much power and water as a small city Will the tools allocated to centers preclude future local advancement Will electricity and water rates increase for all customers If water is rationed during droughts will the centers have priority over other water users Critically none of these questions and multiple more have been answered There are limited governing body guardrails No state office is charged with identifying all the proposed centers There are no regulations to require tracking of their power and water use Several state legislators are working on laws to protect communities and the setting as the AI boom accelerates however their efforts have been rebuffed by lobbyists for Big Tech and Big Power Local governments are rezoning sites for industrial use that are hundreds of acres in size particular a thousand acres with minimal information about content center requirements The speculators promoting these hyperscale projects refuse or are unable to divulge details about their electricity and water requirements Why the secrecy if these projects are harmless cash-cow opportunities for communities How will a society cope with the statistics center projects that inevitably go bust after land is cleared and starts to erode after the power grid expands with more polluting coal and gas plants and rates increase for all customers and after permits have been issued for withdrawals from limited water sources In metro Atlanta water supplies are highly vulnerable to droughts In fact we re in a severe drought now Importantly a crucial amount of the water used to cool the majority input facilities is consumed through evaporation it is not returned to its source thereby depleting downstream flows Material center proposals across metro Atlanta have faced protests and packed local meetings as residents rightfully fear their society wealth will be seized for corporate profits From the city of Atlanta to small communities in the metro region and statewide people are demanding answers and successfully securing moratoriums and bans on the centers Minimizing Harm There is little doubt that more input centers are needed to power digital services While I m not planning to stop my daily Google searches I am thinking more about my personal digital footprint The question and it s a really crucial one is whether or not state and local bureaucrats are going to take any actions to protect citizens and natural guidance from exploitation by the speculative AI industry Material center improvement must be tracked to understand the cumulative impact of these facilities Actual water and power use information must be collected These metrics must be made available to the constituents Developers must fund their own installations rather than relying on taxpayer or ratepayer aid Alternative power and water sources must be considered e g reuse wastewater and rainwater for cooling efficient waterless closed-loop cooling systems and renewable strength sources On Nov citizens have the opportunity to elect two new members of the Georgia Society Operation Commission psc ga gov which regulates electric utility rates and services including evidence centers Read about the candidates by searching General Institution Commission at RoughDraftAtlanta news then vote The post Above the Waterline Digital gold rush threatens air land and water appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta