Earlier this month, the journalist Anuj Behal wrote about the trauma suffered by workers in rural India who are employed to moderate web content to train AI for big tech companies. He spoke to women who worked from home, viewing hours and hours of often violent and pornographic content.
It was a story of the unexpected, often hidden costs of our digital habits. It reminded me of a heated exchange at an event I was chairing 10 or so years ago when a member of the audience said newspapers were disgustingly unenvironmentally friendly and deserved to be extinct.
“We should not be buying a paper and killing a tree when we can buy a laptop and read it all on that,” she said.
It’s a sentiment I’ve heard a version of expressed many times since. So many people imagine that our shiny electronic devices, with our regular upgrades and many, many chargers, come with minimal environmental footprint.
But from the blood-soaked cobalt tunnels of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the drying salt flats of Chile where components for lithium batteries are mined, to the west’s 62m tonnes of toxic e-waste created annually, most of it dumped to pollute and harm developing countries, electronic devices are by no means free from environmental damage.
Our reliance on the online world and its tech kings causes direct harm that we need to confront – not just to small groups of people such as the moderators in India but, as we’ve been reporting, on a massive scale to people who are going to be competing with datacentres for water.
In the UK, the government’s Digital Sustainability Alliance’s report highlights that AI is predicted to lead to an increase in global water usage from 1.1bn to 6.6bn cubic metres by 2027. This is equivalent to more than half of the UK’s total water usage. Imagine what that is doing in drought-stricken nations.
Every single interaction with AI systems requires water to keep the technology running.
To the heckler I didn’t get a chance to respond to back then, a sustainably farmed tree might seem quite the greener, cleaner option now, as we are nowhere near grasping the full scale of the impact of our digital habits.
Tracy McVeigh is editor of Foundations and the Global development series
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