Devindra has been writing about the way technology intersects with our lives for nearly 20 years. He started the Amherst Student's first technology column, worked in IT support for many (many) years, and eventually moved to Brooklyn to cover New York's tech scene in 2009.
us podcast series. We chat about how data centers suck up vast amounts of power, water and other resources, and why the AI boom is exacerbating those issues. Also, Devindra and Ben dive into a few news stories, including the DOJ inching closer towards a Google antitrust breakup; Nintendo's adorable motion sensing alarm clock, Alarmo; and why Google 's Deepmind AI head won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
All right. So. I sat down with Paris Marx, who I think has been doing great work over at Tech Won't Save Us, which is a much more, it's a critical look at the tech industry, and Paris has the time and energy to really focus on what the industry is doing wrong. His most recent series, Data Vampires, is pretty much all about data centers and the, The impacts they have on our environment, the resources they use when it comes to power, which is obscene.
We've seen a lot of those similar concerns with generative AI. But the thing that really stood out to me is that in certain places where a lot of data centers have been being built for some time, places like Northern Virginia or Ireland, for example, we were seeing these concerns in the communities for some years now, pre pandemic and kind of well before, right?
And I had to like, just pull back from what I remember from reporting over the last few years, but I'm very glad you guys covered that in the first episode because I feel like that sets the stage for. Kind of where we are, right? Like AWS, an offshoot of Amazon trying to figure out its own infrastructure, but basically coming up with the idea that they could rent servers time and server space to two other companies rather than those companies building their own server infrastructure.
And Chris Pinkham gets permission to go back to South Africa, where he's from to put a team together to work on this. Cause he wanted to go, you know, back to the country where he came from. And Amazon wanted to keep him. So they said, you go back there, you work on this, you know, you kind of figure it out.
They could just have an idea. Instagram didn't need to build a ton to data centers to store photos. They could just get some Amazon time, just a couple of dudes to build a photo filter app and then get bought for a billion dollars. So it all kind of led to that. And Amazon is not the only one we've talked about Microsoft and Azure and everything.
And so the people at the company itself, like spun up this cloud solution, taking advantage of Amazon web services and then presented it to like management later and was like, look, this works. This is solving our problem. Either we do this or you give us the money for the servers and management was just like, okay, I guess we're going to, you know, use this solution.
Right. As we were seeing all this excitement in like the early 2010s about all these companies coming out of the tech industry and whatnot. And so that's one element of that.
We just saw the news that Jeffrey Hinton one of the like originators of the idea of the transformer model was just where the Nobel prize too. So and he's somebody who's out there saying is actively speaking against. AI now too, like after making millions from it. They're a very interesting fellow, that man.
And thus, when they build these things near these communities, and often they target these kind of, you know, smaller communities, maybe more rural communities you know, places that maybe had industrial industries in the past and have now been left behind. So they're kind of desperate for something else.
But is also making it so that, you know, as they're building more renewable energy to try to displace the fossil fuels, they're not actually able to do that, right? Because they need so much more energy. And we're seeing stories like this across the United States as well where fossil energy is staying online, or there was even a report.
It's it's all led to certain issues. But now we're looking back at nuclear because these companies are just kind of desperate to get more power. It's have in your like discussions has nuclear been a thing more people are talking about when it comes to data centers toOh yeah, absolutely.
Georgia regulators barely even exist. So it seems like a lot of that costs went into building The pockets of people, you know, supporting the nuclear plan. Georgia power is basically a monopoly down here and also all the customers power bills basically rocketed up. We're paying like at least an extra 30 a month because of that.
What are you thinking about this? Like we need to be better about this. In fact, no, it's just more power, more power, more resources. That's kind of the road we're going down.Like I, I find it very disappointing, right. Which is part of the reason that I made the series. You know, and, and what we see is that, you know, the emissions of Microsoft, the emissions of Google are like through the roof.
I. S. Of the world, but also this broader model that they have developed over the past several decades that relies on mass data collection on everybody in order to create these advertising profiles to target us with these you know, different things to target us with product ads and all this kind of stuff.
And so many of these other businesses. And so when we think about the concerns of this model, it's not to say we need to choose between having the internet or not having the internet. It's is this version of the internet that these major tech companies have created for us? The one that is best serving the public and best delivering what we want to see from digital technology and the benefits that it can provide.
Just missed the boat on something here. I'm sure you're going to have some sort of follow up series, Paris. So I'm looking forward to seeing maybe if you dive deeper onto generative AI or cryptocurrency these are all topics like we're bringing up this stuff all the time, but you have the ability to go deeper.
And it really seems like the government is genuinely floating the idea that maybe some parts of Google should be broken up. We are not. anywhere further along than we were when we last talked about this thing. But it is interesting to see the government still talking about this. Ben, has your thinking around this changed at all since then?
So that was maybe the cost, but I do think the overall consumer benefit was better. What's your thinking now?So the thing that struck me in this article was that Of course, like Google's public policy head said, Hey, this is going to stifle innovation, just like what you were saying with maybe internet rolling out a little bit slower because it wasn't run by a monopoly, but the same logic has been used for saying we can't not have workers work 12 hours a day.
Yeah, I think that could ultimately be better for consumers, because then And then they can, then the hardware people can actually do some good user interface and user experience work without being like, be beholden to what middle managers and the other higher ups want, which from all the reporting is the constant problem with Google.
It didn't make a difference. I do wonder if the D. A. J. Has Taken all this in and it's just maybe we should be a little more proactive and a little more forceful about how we push these things. It is, we don't know what will happen. We don't know how it'll affect like the free market or whatever. The initial technology around machine learning, or at least was it neural nets? Like the idea of building for a neural net was something they, he had worked on. What is interesting here, both so really AI being highlighted in the Nobel prizes. Does everybody remember why the Nobel prizes, why the Nobel prize is the thing?Because the guy who invented dynamite said, Hey, maybe I've done more harm than good, So I'd like to award people doing more good than harm.
And to me, that feels like the thing that could actually be really useful for science is if we could ever get a handle on it. But that is the idea of you know, information, you know, points existing as like super states, you know, where it's not just binary bits.And my not so hot take is that we're not going to get anywhere close to AGI until we actually have a quantum computer that works.We can barely get qubits to work. That's the, that's the whole thing.
It's like kind of trying to get you out of bed. So the more that you're moving, it's rewarding. It will, itseems like it also does track your, your sleep cycle a little bit too. So like there, there is like some data that's happening there.The article on Engadget talks about Hey, if you want like Nintendo themed sleep tracking, use Pokemon sleep. It seems like such an easy slam dunk to just put those. You had one job, Nintendo. You had one job.
Good stuff just really really helpful in the moment. What's that feature called on pixel phones? I forget what Android in general about Android specifics.
They had a bad run. Because they were so trapped in terms of doing what Halo did in an era where Call of Duty was coming up. Shooters were getting faster and more dynamic. So basically, I just want to say we saw this news that 343 has talked about rebranding to Halo Studios. But also, more interestingly, it's moving to Unreal Engine 5, and they produced a demo video that shows us like what Unreal Engine 5 was.
And Microsoft is not a company that's really known for taking chances too, especially with a flagship franchise. But maybe things have gotten so bad because Halo Infinite took so long to develop, was such a mess to develop. I actually really like that game. I think the single player campaign is a lot of fun.
Forever Halo, right? Halo that you keep playing, you, you keep doing the the battle pass. Maybe they add more content to it or something. I don't know if the idea is that they will eventually change the engine for Halo Infinite. That seems like too much work for a game that they've already spent, poured too much time into.
So what's going on here? There was this one couple the wife was, you know, a yearly competitor in the table setting competition. And her husband was just like, Yeah, I participate. You know, whenever they had him in the sit down confessional interviews, it seemed like he was really gritting his teeth, but I wanted to know so much more about that.
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