Live on CNN!

Just when I thought I was out, the AI energy hog dragged me back in

When this year began, I would have been puzzled if someone had told me that in mid-September I would be sharing my thoughts concerning the environmental impact of artificial intelligence on live television. I might even have been disappointed. I generally think of my technology reporting career as something dimly visible in the rear-view mirror. As one of my college roommates legendarily recorded me saying about a former girlfriend: “that part of my past is history!” I’ve moved on.

But earlier this spring, an editor at Sierra Magazine included me on an email requesting pitches on a variety of topics. One suggested story prompt was “will AI eat up all the renewable energy?” I was curious. Would it? And so began a reporting journey that violently interrupted my multi-part saga on soybeans and Chinese history, led me down some extremely abstruse investigations into the current state of the art on carbon accounting mechanisms, resulted in a magnificently illustrated feature in the current issue of Sierra Magazine, and, most surprisingly, elicited inquiries yesterday morning from a CNN International producer as to whether I would be interested in talking about my story. I’ve never been a particularly big fan of how live television mangles complicated topics, but the voracious energy appetite of AI is an important story. So I stayed up past my bed time and did my inarticulate best.

CREDIT: Glenn Harvey

My sister-in-law’s brother happened to have CNN on last night and miraculously captured the photograph featured above. This amuses me, because I am identified on-screen as the author of Bots: The Origin of New Species, a book that was published a whopping 27 years ago. In the fast-moving world of technology, this would seem to be a rather faded claim to authority, but, ironically, far more people are concerned about bots today than was the case in 1997! My ancient history feels more relevant to the current moment than when I was chasing Internet culture stories during the dot-com boom heyday – a period when opportunities for me to blather on about technology on live TV were considerably more frequent than they are now.

All this AI chatter may seem rather distant from the normal concerns of this newsletter, but there is a point of intersection. My next planned post is a much delayed exploration of “the Chinese computer” that ranges from Gottfried Leibniz and the Book of Changes to the transformational civilizational impact of Chinese language keyboard input systems. Leibniz was fascinated by everything; I can only imagine what questions he would have asked of ChatGPT. Can you prove the existence of God?

(Curious again – I asked ChatGPT that very question. An excerpt of the “answer” name-checked Leibniz! “Cosmological Argument (Aquinas, Leibniz): The argument from causality states that everything in the universe has a cause. If you trace the chain of causes back, you eventually arrive at an uncaused first cause, which is God.” And around we go!)

Anyway: I recall a humid spring day in 1988 in Taipei, sitting in front of a Taiwan-made PC clone watching my friend Philip walk me through the process of getting Chinese characters to show up on a computer monitor. It seemed like science fiction then; and whenever I stop to think about it today, it still feels like magic. Thinking back, it’s obvious that my curiosities about technology and China are intimately connected. That part of my past will never be history.

P.S. A week ago I had the good fortune to eat at Szechuan Mountain House in Flushing, New York. It was the best Sichuan meal I’ve had in a restaurant in the United States. If you get the chance, go for it!

P.P.S. My host for that meal was Chad Dickerson, who I met at Salon.com in 1998 and bonded with over our mutual love of open source software. Put some chili peppers on that intersecting point!