by SHAHZAD SHARJEEL
Life keeps getting more complex and guilt-ridden by the day. As if the carbon footprint calculation was not enough to turn one into an off-grid hermit, now we have the water footprint to feel guilty about. I hereby declare you ‘guilty’, dear reader, of all the charges I am framing against all of us in this piece.
Ask me how much water I consume in a day, and I will start with the few glasses I drink, then quickly move on to the litres used for washing and bathing. Push a bit more, and I will confess to being an obsessive car washer. Some of us would mention the ‘green patch’ in the house that must be watered year-round. Push harder still, and we will grudgingly divide the 3,000 to 7,000 litres of water needed to produce each pair of denim by the period we own them to arrive at a daily average. Since I am terrible at mental math, I will do all these calculations on my smartphone to determine how much water each listed activity costs. In doing so, data centres globally will consume 0.26 millilitres, about five drops of water, for each search. Mind you, this data on water consumption pertains to regular web searches; AI searches consume more water.
It took a media outlet to take the Oregon city government to court to obtain data on the water used to cool the Google data centre. In 2021, the search giant used about 12.4 billion litres of water in the US alone. In 2023, it used 23bn litres worldwide. WHO guidelines recommend 50 to 100 litres of water per person to meet drinking, cooking, and hygiene needs under normal circumstances. However, in a post-disaster or humanitarian crisis, 15 litres per person is the minimum required to meet basic needs.
To fully grasp how much we are all contributing to water stress, particularly owing to our web wanderlust, let us consider that Google is not the only search engine in the world. Microsoft’s internal projections estimate that, in 2030, the water required to cool its 100 data centres will be 28bn litres. To make things even more complex, the data centres use water both physically and virtually. While the usage in the physical sense, ie, water used to cool the data-processing centres at these facilities, is one measure, virtual usage pertains to the water used by their electricity providers to cool their production plants.
Imagine the water consumed in even a day of web searches.
Before we jump to condemn the tech billionaires for destroying the world’s ecology in their quest for private gain, let’s consider the fact that we are as much part of the problem as we are beneficiaries of these technological developments. It is amusing to watch developing countries lay all the blame for global warming at the doorstep of the developed North. The argument goes something like this: ‘It is the North that burned all the coal and oil in its pursuit of capitalist greed; we, the South, are not even industrialised yet.’ To buy into this simplistic logic, one would have to discount all the benefits of advancements we have derived since the Industrial Revolution. While developing countries may not have released greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they have benefited from everything that resulted from the North’s ‘greed’, from jet engines to search engines to diagnosis and treatment of all manner of diseases.
The next time you are told to work smarter and put AI to use to complete one inane task or another, think hard if you can put your natural intelligence to use before resorting to AI.
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