Big Tech water demand is exploding – and the hotter the climate gets, the greater that demand becomes

Imagine something that hardly existed in 2020, that in 2025 consumed the water of 600 million people, that in 2030 will consume the water of 1.3 billion people and the electricity of 2 billion. Now, that’s growth!

That’s what seem to excite the politicians of the Growth Death Cult. That’s why the Irish government loves and adores AI – because in a world of lagging growth, AI is a super-fuelled growth success story. And in a global economic system where the only thing that matters is growth, AI is embraced by the political elite as a saviour of capitalism.

Because, let’s be clear, it is more important to save capitalism than to save our environment – even if our environment is the only truly, really, existentially important thing that is too big to fail. Because our politicians are cultists. They have faith in infinite growth on a finite plane. And we, the public, have this cultist faith too, even if in the pit of our stomachs we know that something is terribly wrong.

AI is the ultimate economic scam in a global pyramid economy that is based on the devouring of life’s precious foundations. AI ushers in an orgy of devouring at the very moment we need to massively slow down to have any hope of survival. With AI, we are doing the exact opposite of what we should do, in order to save our environment from collapse. And every single organisation that I’m aware of – from the UN to governments to NGOs – are cheerleading this collapse. Let nobody dare question the fake foundations of AI, like nobody dares question the fake foundations of the Green Transition. Delusion is spread everywhere because we are all living in a Growth Death Cult – and we dutifully play our part in building the gas chambers and digging the graves for future generations.

AI DELIBERATELY CREATES DEPENDENCY

I have been following AI since the mid-1980s. The dreams of the “mind children” and the “soul of a new machine” go back many decades before that. And they are male dreams.

Since men discovered how babies were made, they have had a big dreams of creating male life independent of women. Down through the centuries, the top male philosophers have championed the great sperm, explaining in their diligent, well-thought treatises that all the life-giving, soul-enhancing forces were found in the sperm and that woman was merely an empty vessel to be filled by great men. AI is the ultimate expression of that male fantasy.

Its core foundation is the greatest of great lies upon which so much of male civilisation and order have been built over the past couple of thousands of years. The lie is that you can lie your way to success. That you can win by lying and brute strength. That you can remake the world by lying. That there is no truth that cannot be remade and reshaped. That everything can be bent to the will of great men. That impossible is nothing. That we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. And that even if we destroy this planet, great men can simply will their way to the stars where they can occupy the moon, Mars, and do exactly to the universe as they have done to our beautiful home, earth.

But that’s all a lie. Nature is truth. And the truths and the laws of nature are now coming sharply into view. Great men think they conquered nature. They did not. Instead, nature is likely to conquer them – and all of us too.

AI is built on this core lie that data and information and knowledge are merely bits and bytes and units that can be ordered and reordered, to achieve the aims of great men. That’s why AI lies so easily and so well. It was designed to lie. AI is designed to be a tool by which great men and Big Tech achieve total global dominance, and the subservience of governments and peoples.

The essential AI philosophy is: if the truth works, it’ll use it; if the lie works, it’ll use it just as quickly and just as often.

All AI knows it what worked and what didn’t. AI has no truth, no soul, no ethics, no empathy, no real memory. It is a word prediction engine, there to achieve corporate objectives. It is there to be pleasing and always have a confident answer in order to create dependency. AI seeks to turn us all into functioning addicts, who cannot think for ourselves or remember – and are easily sold to advertisers or politicians. This is the AI of today and this is the AI of tomorrow.

DUMPING GROUND FOR BIG TECH

From the point of view of being genuinely useful on a broader scale, this is a fatal flaw of AI. It is indeed genuinely useful to cruel big swinging dicks like Trump and Musk, as it pumps out endless lies and fascist propaganda.

AI has helped them and other fascists gain and consolidate power by churning out more and more functioning propaganda-addled addicts. However, when it comes to areas where truth and facts matter, AI fails miserably because it doesn’t know – and can never truly learn – what is a fact and what is a lie. It only can know what works: what got people to believe, to click, to buy, to keep using it, to become more dependent on it.

For real world stuff where facts actually matter, AI will regularly make the most horrendous mistakes because it has no mind, no common sense, no cop on. AI can make ridiculous mistakes at critical moments that a 4-year-old would laugh at. For all the enormous amount of water, energy and materials it consumes, AI is hugely, massively unreliable and inefficient.

All is not lost. Communities all over the world are starting to organise vigorously against data centres. Yet Ireland sets records for data centre electricity use, with more than 20% of our electricity being sucked up by them.

In the USA, opposition to data centres is one of the only things that is unifying Republicans, Democrats and Independents. In Ireland, our government has aggressive plans to roll out even more, ever-faster. Ireland has well-earned its reputation as an ecological desert. Now, we want to turn the country into an ecological dead zone. All for growth. All for jobs – even though data centres deliver hardly any jobs.

Since the 1970s, it has been State policy to aggressively advertise Ireland as a dumping ground for Big Pharma, Big Tech, or whoever. With an Irish wink and a nod, we told the multinationals that we are “flexible” when it came to environmental rules.

For a few more jobs, we will push way past the limits on all and any environmental limits. It’s all for progress and development, lads and lassies. You can’t have the modern world without breaking a few eggs.

Tell the local community nothing. That is the Irish government’s approach. They wouldn’t understand anyway. This is all technical stuff, says a government that gets it tech policy emailed to it by Big Tech. A government that starts jumping as high as it can, even before Big Tech enters the room.

WATER DEMAND IS EXPLODING

We left the British Empire to join the Roman Catholic Empire, and from there jumped into the Big Tech Empire. We do as we’re told by Big Tech, and damn the consequences to our environment or to future generations.

At least we don’t have to worry about water. We can give the data centres as much water as they want, the thinking goes. That’s what they said in Switzerland. That’s what they said in Uruguay. They too thought they’d never have to worry about water. And then the droughts came.

In Ireland, we don’t know how much water Big Tech is using and we have no idea what future Big Tech water demand here might be. We do know that all around the world, Big Tech water demand is exploding and the hotter the climate gets, the greater that demand becomes.

Big Tech has been super-secretive about its water use, forcing governments everywhere to keep quiet about how much public water they are using – and abusing. Then, they roll out their multimillion-euro PR propaganda, gushing about their latest “efficiency innovations” and how the water problem has been “largely solved”.

Well, if you believe that, I’ve got an AI slop machine to sell you.

• 99 Days: A Warning About Technology by Gerry McGovern is out now and available from shop.hotpress.com