Gerry McGovern
As we navigate our paperless offices and admire our sleek compact computing devices, it can be hard to imagine the impact that our digital experiences are having on our communities and the planet.
Gerry McGovern studies the environmental impact of the digital industry. He has uncovered an alarming story of unsustainable growth, toxic side effects, and human misery, which he shares in his book, World Wide Waste.
We talked about:
how he became an environmental activist focused on the impacts of digital
the phenomenal pace of growth of digital infrastructure
the impact on local communities of the big data centers that house cloud infrastructure
how the compute-intensive nature of AI exacerbates
his observation of the long-standing lack of transparency in the AI industry
the "snake oil sales" aspects of AI
the troubling use of "forever chemicals" by the semiconductor industry
the material impact of computer chip manufacturing
how human over-consumption and the environmental impacts of AI overlap
his advice for actions you can take to mitigate your personal impact:
slow down and use your brain more
think local - local foods, local computer storage, etc.
prefer text over images and other high-bandwidth communications
Gerry's bio
Gerry’s latest book, World Wide Waste, examines the impact data waste and e-waste are having on the environment and what to do about it. Gerry also developed Top Tasks, a research method used by hundreds of organizations to help identify what truly matters.
Connect with Gerry online
Mastodon
LinkedIn
GerryMcGovern.com
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/W5-BMTTEUik
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 23. It's easy to think of digital media and experiences - including our new AI explorations - as ethereal things that magically traverse the computing cloud to enlighten and entertain us. Gerry McGovern is here to remind you that that's far from the case, that "digital is physical." The data centers that power cloud computing are lapping up water and consuming electricity at an alarming pace, and the arrival of AI is accelerating these troubling patterns of overconsumption.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 23 of the Content + AI podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Gerry McGovern. Gerry is the author of the book The World Wide Waste: How Digital is Killing the Planet and What to Do About It. He's also probably better known ... and I originally met him almost 15, 20 years ago when he was talking about customer care words, and subsequently out of that arose, I think, his work on top task methodology. So anyhow, Gerry's a well-established figure in the discipline, has a lot of important stuff to tell us about the environmental costs of AI. But welcome, Gerry. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Gerry:
Thank you, Larry. It's lovely to be speaking to you again. I suppose what I'm up to mainly is ... In a sense, I never thought it would happen, but I've become a type of environmental activist focused on the impacts of digital and how to use digital in a better way, in a less damaging way. I don't think digital can be green in any sense, but I think it can be used to help more our environment and at least to reduce the damage it causes to our environment. So, that's the main stuff I'm focused on.
Larry:
Yeah. Well, I got to say, I love the idea that you're an environmental activist now, because we need plenty of that. But one of the things about your work that I think has really driven home the point to me that we think of digital as this ephemeral thing happening out there in the ether. It's like no consequence. You can just throw stuff in a hard drive or share something. But this is still connected to the physical world, right?
Gerry:
Absolutely. And the first sentence in The World Wide Waste says, "Digital is physical," and basically, the cloud ... It's on the ground in these mega data centers that are ... They say between now and '27, data centers will add the equivalent electricity demand of a Germany, or perhaps a Japan, of electricity demand to the global electricity network. So it's growing at a phenomenal pace, the quantity of architecture that's out there. It's very, very much physical.
Larry:
That's just amazing. And one of the things that the people building those giant server farms and things they're good at is, you don't really hear that much about it. They're almost doing reverse PR or something.
Gerry:
Oh, yeah. It's one of the most secretive, least transparent industries on Earth, and deliberately so. It's all part of the plan. They will never reply to a press call, or very, very rarely. They've become a little bit more in the last, but it's secrecy, secrecy, secrecy, secrecy, doubled on secrecy, secrecy, secrecy, secrecy. When they buy, you don't even know who owns the data center until the very last minute in the process. So it's all super, super, super, super secrecy stuff, because they know they don't have a good story to tell to the local community or the local area, because data centers are absolutely horrible for a local community. There's little or no jobs, a couple of security jobs. There might be 20 people, maybe 40 people maximum in a mega, mega data center running it, so they bring little or nothing to the local community. They might bring some tax, but behind the scenes, they're often getting more in tax breaks than what they're bringing. So there's not a good story to tell, and therefore they try and stay as secretive as possible.
Larry:
Interesting. And one of the things you were talking about, that I'm reminded that these are often in small communities out in the boondocks, because a key driver in these things is the need for water to cool. And can you talk a little bit about that, the types of communities that are affected by this, and that thing that you said, that the local governments are giving in tax breaks but getting almost nothing back?
Gerry:
Yeah. Certainly a large data center, which is a lot, mainly these big ones, these super data centers ... There are these massive, big warehouses, and they can be quite nice as well, so you don't want them close to homes. You don't want them very close to homes, and they need a huge electrical infrastructure, so you need utilities and backup. A lot of them have these mega backup diesel generators so that they've all sorts of redundancies. And then they've a massive water demand, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of liters, of gallons of water a day. And with AI, that's going to grow maybe five or 10, because with artificial intelligence, it's much more processing-driven, and the more processing there is, the more heat there is in the environment. The more heat there is, the more need for cooling. So Microsoft's water demand, I think, went up 20% in a year in 2022.
Gerry:
So we're talking about mega water demands, and ironically, still, you find them in places like Phoenix or whatever, which is strangely ... Phoenix, Arizona in the United States, which is undergoing a hundred-year drought, which is essentially close to a desert. But water is really cheap, or certainly historically has been really cheap in the process, because they've got this massive underground aquifer that has built up over millions of years and that they're essentially draining dry. It's not just the data centers. It's the industrial farming. And now the chip manufacturers, who are incredibly water-intensive as well, are coming there for political reasons, because of the US-China conflicts. So, you've got a lot of incredible material intensity behind the scenes of this stuff. I saw one study that said that by 2030, an average European would be using as much water for their digital activities as they drink on a daily basis.
Larry:
Wow.
Gerry:
And that's just the water.
Larry:
I have to tell you, I lived in Phoenix. Before I moved to Europe, I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, and on a flight back to Phoenix from someplace ... I can't remember where ... I was seated next to a guy who worked for one of those big chip manufacturers, and I said, "What are you doing in Arizona? There's no water here." And he goes, "Oh, there's plenty of water." So like you just said, the chip manufacturers think that, and those are unreplaceable aquifers. Is there data about ... For example, you can probably compute when Phoenix, Arizona will run out of water, or any number of other places in the world. Are there people looking at that?
Gerry:
There are. I think in the US, it's not the only place, but something like 80% of US aquifers are stressed, so watersheds are stressed. Arizona has a weird plan at the moment. They're looking to send a pipe down to the ... I don't know if it's the Gulf of Mexico, the ocean in Mexico ... and pipe water from the ocean, which is going to be very expensive, because it's much more expensive to desalinate water than it is to use fresh water. Because these data centers, they need very clean water for all sorts of reasons. You can't get dust or pollutants in the pipes and et cetera in the process.
Gerry:
So there are some plans there, but generally speaking, there was a study there recently in the New York Times that says the East Coast of the US is saggy because they've extracted so much water. And I think if you would've driven around Arizona a bit, you would've found quite a bit of collapsed land, because when these aquifers empty and the ground subsides and collapse, they'll never fill again, even if it rains, because there's no space for them to actually fill, or at least certainly take them a million years to fill.
Gerry:
So, yes and no. The scientists are saying yes,
