We are our data, our data are us

Energy burden: We need to find sustainability with our information because our dataome won’t stop growing, but that growth can negatively affect the ecosystems that humans rely on. – 123rf

The largest individual data centres in the world, tucked into the semi-arid landscape outside the city of Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, each now extend across hundreds of acres to keep up with demand. Yet their microprocessors and storage devices that are state-of-the-art today will be ready for imperfect recycling tomorrow.

Even with such precautions, some projections suggest that within 20 years our global electronic data infrastructure may demand as much electrical power as the total amount we generate as a species today. We should venerate the engineers and coders who optimise and improve our data to save energy as much as we praise any green new deal.

Less than 100 years ago it jumped onto computer punch cards, whose peak use may have sucked up as much as 10% of the United States’ annual coal-burning energy budget. But, despite the demands of the dataome, we’ve seldom stopped to ask why we comply. Why are we so compelled by data and its information?

There is another way to see all of this. It involves a realignment of how we think about ourselves as distinct from our data. But if we take that leap, pieces of the puzzle of our existence fall into place. The key is understanding the dataome as just another part of a process that has been unfurling here on Earth over most of the past 4 billion years. That process is life itself.

At the same time, humans must have the dataome to function as a species. The outcome is rapid technological and behavioral evolution as we run faster and faster to try to stay stationary, trying to find sustainability with our information.

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