SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Everyone has seen the warning. At the bottom of the email, it says: "Please consider the environment before printing." But for those who care about global warming, you might want to consider not writing so many emails in the first place.
More and more, people rely on their electronic mailboxes as a life organizer. Old emails, photos, and files from years past sit undisturbed, awaiting your search for a name, lost address, or maybe a photo of an old boyfriend. The problem is that all those messages require energy to preserve them. And despite the tech industry's focus on renewables, the advent of streaming and artificial intelligence is only accelerating the amount of fossil fuels burned to keep data servers up, running, and cool.
Right now, data centers consume about 2% of the world's electricity, but that's expected to reach 8% by 2030. Moreover, only about 6% of all data ever created is in use today, according to research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means that 94% is sitting in a vast "cyber landfill," albeit one with a massive carbon footprint.
"It's costing us the equivalent of maintaining the airline industry for data we don't even use," says Andrew Choi, a senior research analyst at Parnassus Investments, a $27 billion environmental, social, and governance firm in San Francisco.
[...] Choi says the problem is getting too big too fast: How many photos are sitting untouched in the cloud? Is there a net benefit from an internet-connected toothbrush? Is an AI model that enables slightly faster food delivery really worth the energy cost? (Training an AI model emits about as much carbon as the lifetime emissions associated with running five cars.)
Parnassus has been focusing on Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, companies that are researching more efficient storage technology. But Choi says real solutions may require more radical thoughts.
"Data is possibly overstated as an advantage for business, and no one's really asking the question," he says. "If a small group of people are the only ones really benefiting from this data revolution, then what are we actually doing, using all of this power?"
(Score: 3, Touché) by Barenflimski on Monday January 27 2020, @02:07AM (1 child)
I'm guessing the author did not scratch out this content on the back of a coconut leaf.
While there are some good and interesting points in this article it appears that "stop writing emails" was the most click-baity.
--
"I peeked, you peaked, we all piqued at a lemon." - Anonymous
(Score: 4, Informative) by vux984 on Monday January 27 2020, @03:31AM
Ironically click bait is itself a waste of energy. Page loads, network traffic, and all that assorted energy use to display a bunch of worthless content that people would have properly ignored and passed over if they hadn't been successfully baited into clicking it.
Then when you add on all the crapflood of ads, trackers, and frameworks to present the clickbait it amplifies it further.
One of those cases where if the author wants to make a positive contribution to the world, they can do the most good by not contributing.