Going nuclear over going nuclear
Here’s a question that I think might be worthwhile asking ourselves: Why is technology such a demanding industry?
By this I don’t mean the obvious meaning of ‘demand’ in terms of the pressure it places on people who work in the industry to create products, market, sell, install and implement them. That’s clearly demanding but that’s nothing extraordinary compared to other industries.
No, what I’m talking about here is the demands that technology places on people, business, organisations and governments to use its products and services.
Now, a lot of people are going to be thinking, “what on earth is that supposed to mean?”. Technology has been supplying applications and features to meet the demand to make things easier and more effective to use and do for decades. It hasn’t always been a smooth process but there’s no doubt that IT has become the platform that makes a very large number of processes and interactions more efficient.
It’s probably also true that this has required some adaptation on our behalf to be able to ensure those processes and interactions can be delivered digitally. We can see huge changes in many industries that we interact with on a daily basis from banking to retail to media and entertainment. All have been subject to dramatic upheaval and disruption – and we have had to make the necessary adjustments to adapt to use them.
It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has demanded we operate in certain ways to meet its way of doing things. Journalism, for example, has become too much of an exercise in SEO and key words. Scraping and rewriting rather than researching and investigating. Endlessly recycling material from other sources who recycled it from other sources. There’s a formula to get attention and clicks for stories – and that has less to do with the journalistic skills of the human doing the writing and more to do with the technology of the search algorithm.
Meeting the moment
We’ve become accustomed to meeting the demands of technology to a large extent, to the point where we don’t even think of it in those terms at all. There have been occasional flickers of concern. For example, the energy requirements of data centres has sparked some controversy. I have no qualms about being one of those expressing anxiety about Ireland’s enthusiastic endorsement of data centre expansion despite the pressures it puts on the country’s net zero ambitions and its parasitic absorption of renewable energy originally destined for the general populace.
But it’s when you combine the energy demands of data centres with the projected exponential increase because of the surge in AI, that you begin to appreciate the nature of how demanding technology has become. Think of the rush to adopt and implement AI in all manner of products and services. It’s being layered into all sorts of applications where no one asked for it to be included. There was no appreciable need for it but technology had a demand for it because it has generated a momentum for AI’s adoption and it doesn’t want to slow it down. Not for our sake, at any rate. As far as I know, most people haven’t been clamouring for AI generated writing, design, music or video. So the demand hasn’t been generated by people, it’s coming from tech.
That night not be a problem except for the fact that AI is already an energy hog and is projected to be a massive drain on power going forward. Again, that energy demand is not coming from the people, it’s coming from tech.
Which leads us to the story featured on this website concerning remarks made by Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), in an interview with the BBC where he stated that the UK needed more nuclear energy to power its growing AI industry.
On this side of the Irish Sea, there is a longstanding opposition to nuclear power because of disasters and leaks from Windscale, Sellafield and Chernobyl. There are still plenty of people willing to advocate for nuclear power despite the fact that other forms of renewable energy have now become more established and are cheaper to implement and run.
And yet, nuclear is being forced onto the energy agenda again at the risk of upending huge progress in solar and wind power. That has not come as a result of pressure and lobbying from the general populace. There has been no radical surge in public support for nuclear power.
The ground is being prepared however, with supporters of nuclear power quick to skate over any safety concerns and appearing remarkably sanguine about the costs of storing spent nuclear waste. This despite estimates that the cost of decommissioning Sellafield alone has risen to £136 billion.
With that in mind, it’s clear that Garman’s call for more nuclear power to fuel the AI industry has not been made in response to demand from people in the UK for more nuclear power for their own ends. It’s a demand from tech.
And the more that tech and AI embeds itself in the applications, content, devices and activities we engage with in our daily lives, for work or leisure, the more will be demanded of us to fulfil its parasitic demands for energy. Possibly at the expense of our own needs.
How demanding is that?
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