Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host and
Speaker 2: the single most punished man alive ed Zetron. Everyone hates me,
Speaker 2: but the people don't hate the man who's joining me today.
Speaker 2: I've got Paris Marks, the host of Tech Won't Save Us,
Speaker 2: the writer of the Disconnect blog, and the actual host
Speaker 2: of the brand new series is about to tell us
Speaker 2: about data vampires. Paris, thank you for joining me.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's so fun to be on the show.
Speaker 2: So tell me about the new show. I'm excited.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh, you know, I think everyone has kind
Speaker 3: of been paying attention a bit more to like the energy,
Speaker 3: use of data center as a cryptocurrency and all this
Speaker 3: kind of stuff, and you know, especially what powers generative AI,
Speaker 3: and you know what's been kind of fueling the hype
Speaker 3: for the past two years. And so in this series,
Speaker 3: I wanted to go into why we're actually building so
Speaker 3: many data centers, What is behind these things, how much
Speaker 3: energy are they actually using, And on the one hand,
Speaker 3: like the commercial impulses to do this, but also like
Speaker 3: the kind of weird ideological reasons that these people want
Speaker 3: to build these massive AI systems in the first place.
Speaker 3: Relating back to all these like things about AGI and
Speaker 3: you know, trying to make computers with human level intelligence
Speaker 3: and all this kind of stuff where they eventually want
Speaker 3: to merge their brains with machines. So it goes into
Speaker 3: like the wide range of all these sorts of things
Speaker 3: over over for episodes.
Speaker 2: So talk to me about the scale of this. How
Speaker 2: many of these data centers are they building? Like, give
Speaker 2: the audience some idea because it from what I know,
Speaker 2: it's not great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, and it's quite a lot, right, especially when
Speaker 3: you see it scale up over the past number of years.
Speaker 3: So we've seen this like really significant escalation over the
Speaker 3: past five years, in particular in the construction of these
Speaker 3: data centers. So there was something like five hundred or so,
Speaker 3: you know, about five years ago, and now we're looking
Speaker 3: at more like a thousand that were completed by the
Speaker 3: end of or in the early part of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: We have many more than that now, and we know
Speaker 3: that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in particular are making these
Speaker 3: huge investments to increase the number of data centers that
Speaker 3: they're building in to build them more quickly. And so
Speaker 3: you know, the thing is some people might listen to
Speaker 3: this and say Okay, Yeah, but data centers have been
Speaker 3: around for a long time, and I think that this
Speaker 3: is an important distinction to make, right. Data centers as
Speaker 3: we knew them were like a floor in an office
Speaker 3: building that a company was using for their own purposes,
Speaker 3: or you know, maybe even a specific room in the
Speaker 3: basement or something. But what we're talking about in particular
Speaker 3: with Amazon, Bikersoft, and Google and this move to the
Speaker 3: cloud and this kind of centralized computation is the hyper
Speaker 3: scale data centers that exist on the scale that is
Speaker 3: so much greater than what we used to have before
Speaker 3: the cloud, and how we've really seen that escalate over
Speaker 3: the past few years in particular. So that is the
Speaker 3: specific problem, right. It's not that we have computation, and
Speaker 3: it's not that there is some degree of centralized computation.
Speaker 3: It's the scale that these infrastructures exist. That and then
Speaker 3: the question of why we're actually building all these in
Speaker 3: the first place.
Speaker 2: So why are we building them? What? Like, what are
Speaker 2: they actually putting in there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's an essential point, right, And I think
Speaker 3: there are a few different ways to look at it, right,
Speaker 3: Some computation is always going to be necessary for the
Speaker 3: types of things that we're doing online. You know, there's
Speaker 3: there's no question about that, right. I think it's fair
Speaker 3: to say that we want some degree of Netflix, we
Speaker 3: want to have easy access to our email, you know,
Speaker 3: we want to be able to socialize with one another
Speaker 3: on these various platforms that we use. And I think
Speaker 3: that that is totally legitimate and that we should be
Speaker 3: able to do those sorts of things, right. But then
Speaker 3: you ask, okay, but what is really driving this significant
Speaker 3: growth that we have been seeing over the past while.
Speaker 3: And we see on the one hand, certainly that is
Speaker 3: generative AI. The cryptocurrencies are a little bit separate from
Speaker 3: that because generally that stuff is not being run on
Speaker 3: say like the Amazon, Microsoft and Google servers. Those are
Speaker 3: like specific things I don't even think if they let you, right,
Speaker 3: So these are specific infrastructures being set up by like
Speaker 3: crypto miners and things like that. So it's a little
Speaker 3: bit different. But we can still kind of, you know,
Speaker 3: look at the amount of energy use that's being put
Speaker 3: into those sorts of use cases. But the other piece
Speaker 3: that I think that we tend to you know, not
Speaker 3: think about so much, especially when we talk so much
Speaker 3: about generative AI, is this sort of you know foundation
Speaker 3: that we have built the Internet on over the past
Speaker 3: number of decades. And for a lot of these companies,
Speaker 3: the business model is collect as much data as possible
Speaker 3: so that then we can target ads, and we can
Speaker 3: target product recommendations and all this sort of stuff to you,
Speaker 3: And that like surveillance piece and storage of massive amounts
Speaker 3: of data on all of us and everything that we
Speaker 3: do online is also a big component of it as well.
Speaker 3: That I think it's under considered. And so my provocation
Speaker 3: is like, do we really need to be collecting all
Speaker 3: that data in the first place? That requires so much
Speaker 3: you know, computation but also storage, which is driving the
Speaker 3: creation and the building of so many of these hyperscale
Speaker 3: data centers.
Speaker 2: Building them just for generative AI or as generateve AI
Speaker 2: just kind of an excuse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I certainly see it as an excuse it, you know,
Speaker 3: if we're really digging into it, it is a bit
Speaker 3: of both, right. On the one hand, these companies are
Speaker 3: trying to build a ton of data centers in order
Speaker 3: to power generative AI, because we both know how computationally
Speaker 3: intensive not just the training of those models is, but
Speaker 3: also then using those products. As these companies are trying
Speaker 3: to roll them out into so much of what we do,
Speaker 3: so many of the services that we use.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: But then the other piece of it is that even
Speaker 3: before the generative AI moment like I was talking about,
Speaker 3: over the past five years, we can already see that
Speaker 3: there was this scale up in the number of hyper
Speaker 3: scale data centers being built in particular, and so in
Speaker 3: that way, I see generative AI as an excuse to
Speaker 3: continue building these things that they were already building in
Speaker 3: the first place. And this is like the foundational point here, right,
Speaker 3: is that if you think about a company like Amazon,
Speaker 3: Microsoft and Google that has this massive cloud business, and
Speaker 3: especially Microsoft and Amazon where they're getting so many you know,
Speaker 3: you know where the profits from those businesses are so
Speaker 3: important to their to their wider business model and being
Speaker 3: able to expand into so many different areas of business.
Speaker 3: You know, there is an inherent incentive then, and you know,
Speaker 3: we know how capitalism works. These businesses always need to grow.
Speaker 3: They need to be making more profits in order to
Speaker 3: keep shareholders happy. So if your business is, you know,
Speaker 3: providing centralized computation at scale, you need the amount of
Speaker 3: computation that we all collectively use to continue growing year
Speaker 3: on year, and you know they want it to be
Speaker 3: growing very quickly, and that means you're not just going
Speaker 3: to need more hyper scale data centers, but you need
Speaker 3: to sell people on more computation and to make the
Speaker 3: things that we use more computationally intensive to justify you know,
Speaker 3: this this kind of business incentive that that's driving you.
Speaker 2: So it almost kind of sounds like they have just
Speaker 2: been trying to find computationally expensive or intensive even things
Speaker 2: so that they could build more ways to compute and
Speaker 2: justify these expensive It's kind of sickening, pisses yea off.
Speaker 2: It's like when I think about that, people say to me, Oh,
Speaker 2: you're angry. Why are I don't know why other people
Speaker 2: aren't angry. I feel like you and I are about
Speaker 2: as angry. We're very about this.
Speaker 3: Maybe we express it in different ways.
Speaker 2: Sometimes perhaps agree, yeah, you're a little nicer than I am.
Speaker 2: Perhaps it's just frustrating because I was just on a
Speaker 2: podcast actually just before this, and I was talking to
Speaker 2: them and they were talking about the promise of AI.
Speaker 2: But when you get past the promise, it's really just
Speaker 2: kind of shit, like it's mediaoka, it's and they're building
Speaker 2: all of this infrastructure for nothing, And one theory I
Speaker 2: have is that it's not being used. I don't know
Speaker 2: if you've seen anything that suggests that or what I mean,
Speaker 2: you've likely working off of public documents, I'm guessing. But
Speaker 2: what if this is for nothing? What if they've just
Speaker 2: built a bunch of data centers for no reason.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that is something that I've talked to a
Speaker 3: number of people about, right, because I'm trying to understand
Speaker 3: that question as well. And I think that there's two
Speaker 3: potential past that this takes. So one of them is
Speaker 3: that maybe they don't end up using some of these
Speaker 3: data centers that they're currently building, or they scale back
Speaker 3: some of the projects that they're currently planning to build.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, my kind of example to point
Speaker 3: to for that being a potential pathway is you know,
Speaker 3: remember in the early kind of probably year or eighteen
Speaker 3: months of the pandemic, there was a lot of people
Speaker 3: who were using like Amazon to get more things delivered.
Speaker 3: And as a result, Amazon kind of created this plan
Speaker 3: to build a ton more warehouses than they were actually
Speaker 3: going to need. And as like you know, people went
Speaker 3: back to kind of shopping a bit more normally. As
Speaker 3: you know, the threat or as the lockdowns ended and
Speaker 3: things like that, what you saw is the demand for
Speaker 3: Amazon or the demand that Amazon had projected decreased, and
Speaker 3: so they canceled a bunch of warehouse projects and expansions
Speaker 3: across the United States and their wider warehouse network because
Speaker 3: they felt that they weren't actually going to need all
Speaker 3: that capacity that they thought they were going to. So
Speaker 3: that's one potent path. But I think, you know, because
Speaker 3: of what we were saying, and because of what was
Speaker 3: what I was explaining about, you know, this need to
Speaker 3: grow the amount of computation that we are like collectively using,
Speaker 3: I think that it is less the chance with data
Speaker 3: centers that that is the pathway that we see, and instead,
Speaker 3: I think that the amount the number of data centers
Speaker 3: that these companies are creating, if generative a AI falls off,
Speaker 3: which I think we you know, we both think is
Speaker 3: going to happen ultimately, that there's going to be this
Speaker 3: this collapse, this crash, I think they will ultimately try
Speaker 3: to find some other use case to justify building out
Speaker 3: that computation because I think that that is like the
Speaker 3: inherent project that they want to realize. On the one hand,
Speaker 3: on the commercial side, but also because the people who
Speaker 3: are running these companies really believe that everything that we
Speaker 3: do in our society needs to have computation like inserted
Speaker 3: in there somehow, and that this is the way that
Speaker 3: we build like the future right.
Speaker 2: Kind of makes me think of Peloton. No sure, if
Speaker 2: you remember the twenty twenty one stories of Peloton was
Speaker 2: like pos the next trillion dollar company. Everyone was furiously
Speaker 2: excited about Peloton, and then the moment people got allowed
Speaker 2: outside again, it started to kind of fall apart. Well, okay,
Speaker 2: I'm getting my dates wrong because twenty twenty one was
Speaker 2: when it started to fall off. But nevertheless, I have
Speaker 2: to wonder if that could happen here because while you
Speaker 2: say they'll come up with a reason, what is it
Speaker 2: and how does that lead to money? I just add
Speaker 2: Zephyr teach out on and we were talking about this.
Speaker 2: It's like, what if there is no plan? What if
Speaker 2: they don't other than bigger? Because it's based on what
Speaker 2: I've what the series you're doing is about. It seems
Speaker 2: like they're committed to this at least, like this is
Speaker 2: they need to do this to prove that they are cool,
Speaker 2: rather than researching or developing things, it almost feels as
Speaker 2: if they think this is inevitable.
Speaker 3: That's what I feel, right, And part of that comes
Speaker 3: not just from the commercial imperative, but also like these
Speaker 3: broader ideological things that I'm sure that you've discussed on
Speaker 3: your show and that I've been discussing with people as well.
Speaker 3: But when you hear people like say Sam Altman or
Speaker 3: Eric Schmidt or you know, Elon Musk talk about how
Speaker 3: ais are going to become so intelligent, and you know
Speaker 3: Sam Altman specifically saying that he wants to make sure
Speaker 3: that we like I'll merge our brains with machines and
Speaker 3: all these sorts of things, Like I think that suggests
Speaker 3: also like the direction that these people want to go,
Speaker 3: not because you know, not just because of commercial reasons,
Speaker 3: not just because they think they're going to make you know,
Speaker 3: more profits or try to realize some kind of world
Speaker 3: that they want to realize this way, but because they
Speaker 3: think that if this is the direction that we don't
Speaker 3: take as a society, then you know, the future that
Speaker 3: they think is the one that we need to realize
Speaker 3: in order to have this you know, wonderful, glorious future
Speaker 3: where humanity exists forever and we colonize all these planets
Speaker 3: and all this kind of stuff. If we don't take
Speaker 3: this direction, if we don't develop these incredibly powerful ais,
Speaker 3: then in their mind, this isn't going to happen. So
Speaker 3: it feels like, yes, there's the commercial element of this, right,
Speaker 3: They're they're trying to drive investment with this AI boom
Speaker 3: by promising so much about it. But like ideologically, in
Speaker 3: their in their kind of minds and world views, they
Speaker 3: think that this is the direction that we have to
Speaker 3: go or we're basically all doomed, even though in the
Speaker 3: process they're kind of dooming us by destroying.
Speaker 2: At the time, destroying the environment to make sure we
Speaker 2: don't do ourselves. That's the Eric Schmidt thing. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: let's talk costs. Yeah, what is being put into this?
Speaker 2: Because I have bullpop numbers, but maybe you have some
Speaker 2: better ideas. How much is actually going into this?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's hundreds of hundreds of billions, let me
Speaker 3: get that, right, if not trillions of dollars? Right? And
Speaker 3: I can't remember the exact figures off the top of
Speaker 3: my head, but over the past year, say from June
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty three to July of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Microsoft has been plowing hundreds of billions of dollars into
Speaker 3: data center expansions around the world. Amazon committed I believe
Speaker 3: it was one point five trillion dollars early this year
Speaker 3: or last year to data center expansion, with about five
Speaker 3: hundred billion of that going out in the short term.
Speaker 3: So these are like massive numbers. We know that Microsoft
Speaker 3: and open Ai have talked about building a one hundred
Speaker 3: billion dollar data center complex that would need nuclear energy
Speaker 3: in order to power it because they be so energy intensive. Yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker 3: So like these are the kinds of numbers that we're
Speaker 3: talking about, and I feel like these are the types
Speaker 3: of numbers that we often hear, like, you know, governments
Speaker 3: talk about when we're when they're making like massive investment
Speaker 3: projects or something, right, not like private companies. But because
Speaker 3: these private companies are so huge, it's like they can
Speaker 3: build out these infrastructures that have, you know, such a
Speaker 3: huge impact that they have impacts not just in communities,
Speaker 3: but like nationwide globally because they are so significant.
Speaker 2: Almost feels like a kind of authoritarianism. It feels like
Speaker 2: they're building out a new governmental system that they control
Speaker 2: that they meeter out which includes I guess it's a
Speaker 2: vampiric element to it as well, where they control the
Speaker 2: power of America, even though power is theoretically a civic good,
Speaker 2: like a civic cutility.
Speaker 3: Well, it definitely feels that way, especially when you look
Speaker 3: at like the politics that they're embracing too, right where
Speaker 3: you have so many of these influential people in Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley not just embracing like Donald Trump, but embracing this
Speaker 3: form of far right politics that is, you know, gaining
Speaker 3: steam in a number of countries around the world that
Speaker 3: is explicitly anti democratic. You know, Elon Musk is talking
Speaker 3: a lot a lot about that these days and saying
Speaker 3: that he thinks the Democrats are going to end democracy. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: like Donald Trump is saying quite explicitly that you know,
Speaker 3: he wants to impinge on democratic rights. And these people
Speaker 3: have no problem like working with anti democratic leaders around
Speaker 3: the world as long as they see it as the
Speaker 3: way to like advance not only their kind of personal
Speaker 3: interests and to make sure their companies do well, but
Speaker 3: also again to try to realize this like type of
Speaker 3: future that they think is desirable. I was just recently
Speaker 3: talking to Julia Black, who's a reporter at the Information
Speaker 3: about this, and she did a profile on Curtis Jarvin,
Speaker 3: who is like, you know this guy who yeah, this
Speaker 3: guy who like calls himself a dark Elf, but you know,
Speaker 3: as one of the co founders of the Dark Enlightenment.
Speaker 3: This like you know, this this like political movement that
Speaker 3: wants to see a monarchy established in the United States,
Speaker 3: that structured more like you know, the CEO of a
Speaker 3: corporation to have you know, the United States ron as
Speaker 3: an authoritarian state. And we know that Peter Teal and
Speaker 3: Mark Andriesen and a ton of these guys like support
Speaker 3: these ideas, so you know, like you can you can
Speaker 3: see that with the data centers, you can see this
Speaker 3: like concerning power grab as these infrastructures expand and they're
Speaker 3: in the hands of these major tech companies. But even
Speaker 3: when you look at like the leaders of these companies themselves,
Speaker 3: you can see that they very much want to make
Speaker 3: sure that, you know, the power of the people through
Speaker 3: democracy is curtailed so that they can do whatever they want.
Speaker 2: And if you want to know more about Curtis Yarvin,
Speaker 2: somehow behind the bus has had ed helms On to
Speaker 2: talk about Curtis Yarvin. Want to hear comedian Ed Helms
Speaker 2: talk about one of the worst people alive, like, definitely
Speaker 2: a bottle popper. When he pops his clogs, there will
Speaker 2: all be celebrating. So has there been any pushback against
Speaker 2: these data centers you've seen, either from governments or people. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And that's part of the reason that I wanted
Speaker 3: to make the series and also like why it came
Speaker 3: much more on my radar because I started hearing these
Speaker 3: stories of pushback happening really around the world, right. And
Speaker 3: it started with just hearing like the story of the
Speaker 3: dolls in Oregon, where these people were trying to find
Speaker 3: out the amount of water that Google's data centers were using.
Speaker 3: And then Google or sorry, then you know, there was
Speaker 3: actually a lawsuit because Google wouldn't share that information and
Speaker 3: it took a year for them to share it with
Speaker 3: the Oregonian, which is the local newspaper, and they found
Speaker 3: that over the past few years, Google's water use, I
Speaker 3: think it was over the past five years, Google's water
Speaker 3: use had tripled, you know, just in that city alone. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so these are really significant developments, right, But then I
Speaker 3: started to hear about how, say in Phoenix or northern
Speaker 3: Virginia or many other parts of the United States, there
Speaker 3: were also growing concerns about data centers. And then I
Speaker 3: started to learn about in Ireland how now twenty one
Speaker 3: percent of all electricity goes to data centers, and that's
Speaker 3: causing concerns about the ability of the power grid to
Speaker 3: keep up, you know, but also about whether you know
Speaker 3: it makes sense to be allowing this many data centers
Speaker 3: to be built. You know, concerns in Spain about the
Speaker 3: amount of water usage in areas that are increasingly facing droughts.
Speaker 3: You know, concerns in France and the Netherlands, but also
Speaker 3: in parts of Asia, in South America, where communities in
Speaker 3: Chile were saying like, if you build this massive Google
Speaker 3: data center, will we still have running water into our homes,
Speaker 3: and Google not being able to say like, yeah, definitely,
Speaker 3: we can make sure that will happen, and so then
Speaker 3: they campaign to try to stop it. Like around the world,
Speaker 3: you're seeing the opposition to these things grow, and I
Speaker 3: would say part of the reason for that, going back
Speaker 3: to what I was saying earlier, is that, you know,
Speaker 3: it's not just the scale of these structures, but it's
Speaker 3: because these companies are trying to build out so many
Speaker 3: more of them around the world, and when they get
Speaker 3: located in these communities, once one is established, they usually
Speaker 3: try to build more around it to cluster them, right,
Speaker 3: because they're usually beneficial reasons why they've located one there
Speaker 3: in the first place. And so then you have these
Speaker 3: these increasingly you know, greater demands being placed on the
Speaker 3: power grids and the water infrastructure of these communities, and
Speaker 3: eventually it reaches the point where where many of them
Speaker 3: start to break and start to say, like, wait, this
Speaker 3: doesn't make sense anymore. You're threatening our own access to
Speaker 3: electricity or to water or whatever. And so, you know,
Speaker 3: that is why I, you know, I've been paying so
Speaker 3: much more attention to this issue because I think it's
Speaker 3: something that we're all going to be hearing much more about.
Speaker 3: And I think that the earlier that we do start
Speaker 3: to take notice of these problems and start to push
Speaker 3: back on them, you know, the hopefully the earlier we
Speaker 3: can start to curtail these effects and make sure that
Speaker 3: you know, these companies can't just get away with doing
Speaker 3: whatever they want.
Speaker 2: Have we seen any situations where they have actually stopped
Speaker 2: people accessing power or water?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So in a few places we have seen like
Speaker 3: the grids actually be threatened. So for example, in Ireland
Speaker 3: now the grid operator in the winter often has to
Speaker 3: issue these amber alerts to basically say to people like,
Speaker 3: reduce your energy consumption or we're going to start doing
Speaker 3: rolling blackouts. There were concerns. There's a story that Karen
Speaker 3: Howe wrote in The Atlantic about what was going on
Speaker 3: in Phoenix, and one of the biggest concerns there is,
Speaker 3: of course, is you know, Phoenix's has a lot of desert. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Phoenix experiences drought a lot. And so as more and
Speaker 3: more data centers are being built there because the energy
Speaker 3: it tends to be cheaper and tends to be have
Speaker 3: a higher kind of percentage of renewables in there is
Speaker 3: my understanding that they're going there regardless of the water impacts,
Speaker 3: and so they're growing concerns about people's ability to you know,
Speaker 3: access water when these data centers need much despite the
Speaker 3: drought conditions that so many people are facing. And how
Speaker 3: we know that you know, governments tend to turn off
Speaker 3: water to the populations before the businesses that that just
Speaker 3: on these sorts of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's truly awful like that It's why every time
Speaker 2: I think of stuff like that, I start getting a
Speaker 2: bit crazy, because it's just like you'd think that they
Speaker 2: would say, well, actually, what we want to do is
Speaker 2: turn it off for the business. No, no, no, we
Speaker 2: must make sure the businesses can keep generating AI garfields.
Speaker 2: If we don't have garfields with AK forty seven, well
Speaker 2: what use is being able to drink water?
Speaker 3: Exactly. One of the wild things too, that I was
Speaker 3: learning about in Ireland in particular, is that so you know,
Speaker 3: like I was saying, there's twenty one percent of all
Speaker 3: the electricity now in that country is going to data centers.
Speaker 3: It's projected to be about a third by twenty thirty.
Speaker 3: And so for a while, the government there, or at
Speaker 3: least in certain jurisdictions of the country, kind of stopped
Speaker 3: connecting data centers to the grid, stop making new grid connections,
Speaker 3: because you know, they were like, there's not enough power
Speaker 3: to supply these infrastructures. And so what these data centers
Speaker 3: started doing instead was to build local methane gas generation
Speaker 3: facilities to bring in the gas themselves to the empower
Speaker 3: the data center because they couldn't connect directly to the grid.
Speaker 3: And then of course you you know, you can imagine
Speaker 3: all the additional emissions that that creates with this kind
Speaker 3: of like local gas generation infrastructure, and that's one of
Speaker 3: the things that's contributing to Ireland, you know, not you know,
Speaker 3: being able to meet its climate targets, or that not
Speaker 3: really being in reach. One of the local tds or
Speaker 3: members of Parliament who I spoke to there basically told
Speaker 3: me that, like, there is renewable energy being added to
Speaker 3: the grid in Ireland, but the problem that we face
Speaker 3: is that because the energy demand is increasing so rapidly
Speaker 3: that you know, the renewables just go to powering the
Speaker 3: data centers and we can't turn the fossil fuels off.
Speaker 3: And we're seeing a ton of stories about that in
Speaker 3: the United States as well, where yes, renewables are being
Speaker 3: added to the grid, but the fossil fuels are not
Speaker 3: being turned off next to it, and in some cases
Speaker 3: fossil fuel infrastructure is actually being reactivated. Or there was
Speaker 3: a story and I can't remember what was Bloomberg or
Speaker 3: the Financial Times recently that basically said the United States
Speaker 3: is investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure at the fastest
Speaker 3: rate it has in years, which is.
Speaker 2: Like Northern Virginia the data center rally. That's a very
Speaker 2: depressing thing. I want to die. My question is why
Speaker 2: don't we I know this is perhaps a little bit
Speaker 2: blunt force, but why are we not making them pay
Speaker 2: to upgrade the infrastructure? Why why is the government not
Speaker 2: just being like, you want this shit, go and build
Speaker 2: it for us, give us the money, we'll do it.
Speaker 2: Is that happy? I know we've this nuclear power plants, but.
Speaker 3: In some places that is happening actually, so in the Dolls,
Speaker 3: for example, in Oregon, you know where I think maybe
Speaker 3: most people probably heard the story of that because Google,
Speaker 3: you know, was trying to hold back its water use
Speaker 3: you know, data and whatnot and eventually had to share it.
Speaker 3: But in that case, you know, they have made an
Speaker 3: agreement with the local council in order to upgrade their
Speaker 3: water infrastructure so that they should have more water available. Again,
Speaker 3: that doesn't mean that the community isn't still concerned about
Speaker 3: water access and what's going to.
Speaker 2: Happen the finite. It's not an unlimited amount of it.
Speaker 2: More infrastructure isn't going to help it if we run
Speaker 2: out of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a pretty fundamental issue, right.
Speaker 2: How do you feel about the nuclear power side, because
Speaker 2: I'm kind of fifty to fifty. I like nuclear power,
Speaker 2: I think, say it back, but it seems like it's
Speaker 2: it seems like they're privatizing it, which is not solving
Speaker 2: the problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say I'm probably more on the skeptical
Speaker 3: side of nuclear power, and that's for a few reasons.
Speaker 3: Where nuclear power exists, I think it doesn't make any
Speaker 3: sense to turn it off, right because that's going to
Speaker 3: be far better than any kind of fossil fuel generation
Speaker 3: that we're doing, and that should be kind of one
Speaker 3: of the last things that we actually target for replacement
Speaker 3: with renewed or whatnot. Like, I don't totally agree with say,
Speaker 3: Germany turning off it's nuclear energy and going back to coal.
Speaker 3: I think that that is a mistake. But I'm more
Speaker 3: skeptical of investing in nuclear at this point and treating
Speaker 3: it as you know, like a climate response, because we
Speaker 3: know that nuclear energy is not only very expensive, but
Speaker 3: takes so much time to like set up a new
Speaker 3: nuclear plant, And it feels like at this point, when
Speaker 3: we've seen the cost of installing solar and wind energy
Speaker 3: declined so much in recent years, that it feels much
Speaker 3: more kind of not just cost effective, but much more
Speaker 3: rapid to just invest it in, you know, building out
Speaker 3: large gale renewables instead.
Speaker 2: Renewables don't generate power quite as fast.
Speaker 3: Well possibly, you know you can you can set up
Speaker 3: the battery storage facilities and things like that to store
Speaker 3: things for the times when it's not generating. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: kind of the way that that I see it.
Speaker 2: It's so funny. I think something's just come to me
Speaker 2: with this as well. That really pisses me off, which
Speaker 2: is I know, unusual for me, the sense that you
Speaker 2: just mentioned battery storage. What if they put all the
Speaker 2: money into investing into stuff like that, What if all
Speaker 2: of this money could go into inventing them that would
Speaker 2: be my make Casey brought this up recently. It's like
Speaker 2: one of the very clear places money could go that
Speaker 2: would be very good. Like if we had massive battery
Speaker 2: storage for power, this would solve many problems and actually
Speaker 2: probably create new things we could do, especially in double conscious,
Speaker 2: we could dug genuinely do amazing things in the world.
Speaker 2: Even describing it now, I feel more excited about this
Speaker 2: than Generative AI. But it almost feels like they're kind
Speaker 2: of lazy that they don't want to solve the actual
Speaker 2: problems to get to the point that they just want
Speaker 2: to build more and keep doing the bullshit they've been
Speaker 2: doing for years.
Speaker 3: I feel like part of it is profitability as well. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: when you think about investing in like so called tech
Speaker 3: or generative AI or what have you. Whenever we have
Speaker 3: investors thinking about tech businesses, we're thinking about these kind
Speaker 3: of really rapid takeoffs in the amount of money that
Speaker 3: they're going to make. That the chance for these like
Speaker 3: really significant payoffs is the money if the company really works.
Speaker 3: And so you often have these companies trading at multiples
Speaker 3: that are far above say, what a traditional company would
Speaker 3: trade at when it goes public. Right Whereas if you
Speaker 3: think of like a more traditional type of company, the
Speaker 3: possibilities with the chances that you're going to get this
Speaker 3: massive payoff are far lower, and so there's less of
Speaker 3: an incentive to put your money into that type of place,
Speaker 3: when say, some sort of tech business is going to
Speaker 3: have you know, this much greater chance of having this
Speaker 3: huge payoff. And so I think that that is like
Speaker 3: one place where you know, obviously we live in a
Speaker 3: capitalist system where our incentives are kind of misaligned, And
Speaker 3: it's one of the things that I find quite silly,
Speaker 3: where like, you know, the United States is having this
Speaker 3: big feud with China now and very concerned about the
Speaker 3: you know, the ability for Chinese tech companies and whatnot
Speaker 3: to compete with US companies on the global stage automakers
Speaker 3: and things as well. But one of the reasons that
Speaker 3: solar energy is so cheap and one of the reasons
Speaker 3: that we've had this like significant expansion in evs. You know,
Speaker 3: we often point to Elon Musk for example, is like,
Speaker 3: you know, the one who deserves all the credit for that.
Speaker 3: But the Chinese have really been successful in bringing down
Speaker 3: the costs of those types of technologies solar panels and
Speaker 3: batteries and things like that in particular. And yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I think that we should be trying to like build
Speaker 3: on that rather than just trying to like exclude the
Speaker 3: cheaper stuff from our markets.
Speaker 2: Well, fundamentally disagree Paris, because I don't want any Chinese
Speaker 2: companies in like stealing my data, tracking Americans, using that
Speaker 2: to monetize them somehow and manipulating them using that that's
Speaker 2: for American businesses. We keep all surveillance capitalism in the
Speaker 2: US of A. It's just pisses me off as well,
Speaker 2: because I look, I'm not getting into geopolitics, but it
Speaker 2: feels like some of the AI boom is even driven
Speaker 2: by that cinephobia, the sense that if we don't build it,
Speaker 2: the Chinese will build their AI and their garfields will
Speaker 2: be even bustier than ours. And it's just frustrating because
Speaker 2: I don't know about working with the Chinese. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to get into that. But also it feels like
Speaker 2: a dumber, stupid world. What we have another country that's
Speaker 2: building things fast, probably in ways that we might not
Speaker 2: want to do labor wise, I don't know. But nevertheless,
Speaker 2: it feels like we're actually not all of this rapid expansion.
Speaker 2: All of this shit we're supposedly building doesn't actually seem
Speaker 2: to be innovation. It just is capitalist sprawl.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I definitely agree. Right, it feels like Silicon Valley
Speaker 3: left innovation behind quite a while ago. Like I think
Speaker 3: that you can very genuinely say that in the early
Speaker 3: days of the Internet there was innovation going on, right,
Speaker 3: whether it was in you know, software development, but also
Speaker 3: in hardware development too, right, you know, the emergence of
Speaker 3: the mobile phone, and you know, we can even say
Speaker 3: the iPad and those sorts of things, but it feels
Speaker 3: like now, you know, those types of developments, those innovations
Speaker 3: have matured, and it does feel like the industry is
Speaker 3: you know, kind of sort of trying to grope for
Speaker 3: whatever might come next, but really failing in doing that
Speaker 3: because you know, their profits and their whole businesses are
Speaker 3: tied up in what is currently successful at the moment,
Speaker 3: and I think a lot of them don't want to
Speaker 3: disrupt what is working for them and want to protect
Speaker 3: these what are now basically legacy businesses that they have
Speaker 3: built up and that they're now kind of soaking for cash, right,
Speaker 3: And so I don't think that we should be looking
Speaker 3: to the Googles or Apples or Amazons of the world
Speaker 3: for innovation and for the path forward for what is
Speaker 3: going to come next. And I think that even like
Speaker 3: if you think back to like the Internet era and
Speaker 3: things that came before, you know, often what a lot
Speaker 3: of people have observed, you know, Mariana Mazocato has this
Speaker 3: great book called I Think It's the Entrepreneurial State that
Speaker 3: goes into this as well. How a lot of the
Speaker 3: things that these companies were able to launch and able
Speaker 3: to make so much money from were ultimately things that
Speaker 3: were being developed in the public sector and that they
Speaker 3: were able to privatize and make a lot of money
Speaker 3: off of.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Obviously, the Internet was a public innovation before it was privatized,
Speaker 3: and all these companies could use it and commercialize it
Speaker 3: and whatnot. Right, And I feel like something has broken
Speaker 3: down there as well, where so much public research seems
Speaker 3: to be focused on a very early stage and like
Speaker 3: what is the commercialized potential of this, rather than just saying,
Speaker 3: forget about commercialization for a while and let's just like
Speaker 3: work on these things and see if it goes anywhere.
Speaker 3: And it just feels like in general, like you know,
Speaker 3: our deep commitment to capitalism in our society has broken down.
Speaker 3: Whereas before, like it used to be measured a bit
Speaker 3: because there needed to be like certain deliverables for people
Speaker 3: and you know, a different kind of an expectation. But
Speaker 3: at this point we've just gone so full tilt on,
Speaker 3: like whatever makes profit is what we need to do,
Speaker 3: that we've lost the things that ultimately contribute to that
Speaker 3: in the long term rather than just focusing on the
Speaker 3: short term.
Speaker 2: And it makes me think about like giving things time
Speaker 2: to build, because generative AI as an idea, you have
Speaker 2: to wonder if they left it alone for another five
Speaker 2: to ten years without doing this, whether it might have
Speaker 2: actually been good if there was potential for this, because
Speaker 2: I think with long gone with large language models on
Speaker 2: device stuff I think is cool. But nevertheless we're not
Speaker 2: talking about that. But it's kind of we instead of
Speaker 2: investing in public things or nonprofits that actually build the
Speaker 2: building blocks that make innovation happen, we've allowed companies like
Speaker 2: Qualcom to vacuum up various codecs and standards to the
Speaker 2: point that most of them are owned by one company,
Speaker 2: and then we pile our We don't really have anyone
Speaker 2: in power anymore, so who understands what the fuck's going on?
Speaker 2: So we pile all that cash into something that kind
Speaker 2: of looks like the future because I think about the iPhone.
Speaker 2: I was talking to someone about Jim Cavello and the
Speaker 2: Generative AI paper from Goldman earlier, and he was saying
Speaker 2: how one of the big things that made the smartphone
Speaker 2: revolution happen, one of the things that they knew when
Speaker 2: this happened, and we'd bring in was small GPS was
Speaker 2: the ability to have device level GPS and of course
Speaker 2: the chips that support and then someone would need to
Speaker 2: build the software layer, which is where Apple came in,
Speaker 2: and then Android to some extent, and we don't have
Speaker 2: that building block. We have one thing. We have generative AI.
Speaker 2: We have transformer based models, and we're going to put
Speaker 2: all the money in that in the hopes that no
Speaker 2: one's even thinking of what the next devices might look.
Speaker 2: I can't stop thinking about batteries now, because that really
Speaker 2: is it. It's if we had a battery that could
Speaker 2: power I don't know, I'm being a bit wanky here
Speaker 2: a city. Actually I'm not being wanky. This is less
Speaker 2: wanky than what Sam Mormon says every day. That feels
Speaker 2: like or incredibly small batteries which are powerful that would
Speaker 2: enable all sorts of things. EDGAI is exciting, but they've
Speaker 2: been working on it's been around ten years. None of
Speaker 2: the people in power seem to actually be aware of
Speaker 2: how good things are built, which I guess explains the
Speaker 2: data center expansion, because if you think of it like
Speaker 2: a dumb fuck, if you're like, huh, how do we
Speaker 2: make money? We got those data centers right, Well, if
Speaker 2: we build more of them. Yeah, what if they're really big,
Speaker 2: then the money will come out. I'm just are you worried.
Speaker 2: I'm a bit worried about the entire tech economy at
Speaker 2: this point. That's put the environment, but like.
Speaker 3: I'm worried about it all, you know, I'm less worried
Speaker 3: about the tech economy in the sense of like will
Speaker 3: they be profitable enough, will they make their money? Like
Speaker 3: I don't really care about that. That's not like it's
Speaker 3: something that's important to me, and I know that's the
Speaker 3: same for you. But it's like I do worry about
Speaker 3: where it's going because they're broad broader, like societal impacts
Speaker 3: to everything that they do. Right on the one hand,
Speaker 3: because of like the expectation that we need to adopt
Speaker 3: so many of these things, but also because our governments
Speaker 3: so much are supporting and you know, willing to push
Speaker 3: out and not regulate effectively whatever it is that they
Speaker 3: do until it's too late. And I feel like, you
Speaker 3: know what you're talking about with generative AI even you know,
Speaker 3: and I'm not going to claim to be, like, you know,
Speaker 3: the most knowledgeable person in the world about the technical
Speaker 3: angle of that, but when you look at what, say,
Speaker 3: open AI was trying to do, and what all these
Speaker 3: other companies have kind of chased after is they were
Speaker 3: trying to build like the general foundation model that could
Speaker 3: do virtually everything right, and you speak to AI researchers
Speaker 3: or you know, I've spoken to some AI researchers who say, like, yes,
Speaker 3: that is very energy intensive, that is going to take
Speaker 3: a lot of power, energy data in order to.
Speaker 2: Make it work.
Speaker 3: But you can like train very tailored, much smaller models
Speaker 3: that are not nearly as computationally or energy intensive as
Speaker 3: the direction that these companies have chosen to go in.
Speaker 3: But we are not doing that, you know. And I
Speaker 3: think for a few reasons, mainly because on the one hand,
Speaker 3: there is like the expectation of scale or the desire
Speaker 3: of scale that comes with these general foundation models. I
Speaker 3: think that there is the other side of it where
Speaker 3: it's very beneficial to the tech companies that exist, you know,
Speaker 3: the cloud giants, because if you're competing on this scale
Speaker 3: of general foundation models that need so much computation in
Speaker 3: order to train that, it's very difficult for smaller companies
Speaker 3: to like compete on level. But then I think it
Speaker 3: also plays into that ideological angle of it that I
Speaker 3: was talking about earlier, where you have these people who
Speaker 3: are leading the tech industry who fundamentally believe that we
Speaker 3: need to build like you know, AI with human intelligence
Speaker 3: and eventually merge our brains with machines. And so if
Speaker 3: we're not building these massive general models, then we're not
Speaker 3: getting closer in their minds to achieving this, which I
Speaker 3: think is ultimately something that's never going to get built
Speaker 3: because I don't think it makes sense. Actually, I think
Speaker 3: it's just science fiction, but I think that is like
Speaker 3: part of what's driving these people too.
Speaker 2: So to finish us off, So you've got two episodes
Speaker 2: out right, now, what have we got to look forward
Speaker 2: to with the rest of the series?
Speaker 3: Even yeah, absolutely, you know. The first one looked into
Speaker 3: like what these data centers are, where they're coming from.
Speaker 3: The second one looked into what this community opposition that
Speaker 3: we're seeing looks like. The third one that will you
Speaker 3: know come out soon, looks at the climate impacts of
Speaker 3: generative AI and the way that generative AI is helping
Speaker 3: to fuel this further construction of hyper scale data centers.
Speaker 3: And the fourth one looks into the broader impacts of
Speaker 3: this whether we can think about a different way of
Speaker 3: approaching this problem and these ideological you know issues and
Speaker 3: predispositions and and you know things that these tach billionaires
Speaker 3: are wound up with that they are trying to push
Speaker 3: on the rest of the world, and how that relates
Speaker 3: to this anti democratic politics that so many of them
Speaker 3: are adopting.
Speaker 2: Well, Paris, it's been such a pleasure avenue on Where
Speaker 2: can people find you?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, you know, they can find the podcast tech won't
Speaker 3: save us on any podcast app where they like to listen.
Speaker 3: I'm on you know, most of the social media, the
Speaker 3: tech based ones at least where you can find me
Speaker 3: at Paris marks Well.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening, Paris. Thank you for
Speaker 2: joining You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm the most
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