Big Data

AI and Cloud "services" exact a huge toll.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

Back in the olden days, I produced “For the Birds” at the KUMD studio, copied each program on tape for the stations carrying it, and sent those tapes out via the U.S. Postal Service. My only computer use was in writing the scripts. Now every element of production involves my computer.

Sometime before I started producing “For the Birds” in 1986, Russ and I bought our first computer, from the Whole Earth Catalog, and our first word-processing software, WordStar. Until 1995 or so, I typed every one of the scripts for the program on that trusty machine, printing them out on a dot-matrix and then a daisy-wheel printer. In 1993, I wrote my first book, For the Birds: An Uncommon Guide, that way, too.

My publishers switched to Word Perfect by the time I wrote Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids in 1996, so I had to learn a whole new word processing program.

I liked Word Perfect a lot, but by the late 90s, all the newspaper, magazine, and book publishers I was working with wanted everything sent to them as Word documents, so I had to buy Microsoft Office 97. Suddenly, every time I started a new document, a weird animated paperclip with googly eyes would pop up out of nowhere to ask if I needed help.

“Clippy” (the proper name was Clippit) seemed intrusive even as it was, at least occasionally, a little helpful. When Office 2000 added a few other “office assistants,” I went with Rocky the dog, whose intrusions at least seemed warm and friendly. And like a real dog, Rocky would occasionally take a nap or give himself a good scratch right there on my screen.

A lot of very vocal Microsoft users found these Office Assistants annoying and intrusive. Two decades ago, that was enough to get Microsoft to discontinue them entirely—Office 2003 was the last release to include them even as an option.

How times have changed! Now just about every program, app, or search engine I use bombards me with intrusions far, far more annoying than poor Clippy ever was. Many offer to do something for me exactly the way Clippy did, only in a much wider range of contexts, often using AI technology. These intrusions, whether I’m using a search engine or putting together a PowerPoint program, are inescapable. The software or apps I’ve been depending on for my day-to-day tasks—researching and writing about birds, editing and organizing photos, producing this radio program, and putting together presentations for my speaking gigs—have all evolved into AI-content generators, and whether I use these AI elements or not, the software costs the same.

Also, most of the programs I use are now “cloud based,” meaning even if I’m not using any AI services, my work no longer stays within my own computer but suddenly involves huge data centers gobbling up water and power resources and generating vast amounts of heat that require vast cooling systems, all damaging air and water quality and exacerbating the climate crisis. Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the water usage of a small city, and globally, data centers consumed an estimated 15 percent of the world’s total electricity production in 2024. And more and more of these huge new data centers keep popping up.

In my neck of the woods, our power company, Minnesota Power, was just bought up by private equity firms led by BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Suspiciously, almost immediately afterward, plans for a new data center in Hermantown, just outside Duluth, were announced, meaning there would be a huge, very profitable increase in power usage here.

Who will own and operate that data center? No one knows—town officials of Hermantown signed non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from disclosing critical details about the plan to the very people they ostensibly represent, and they refuse to disclose who’s behind the $650 million project other than that it’s a “Fortune 50” company.

This kind of secrecy has become a standard operating procedure among today’s politicians, billionaires, private equity firms, and “tech bros,” who all seem to understand that the price of admission into the exclusive circle of power and influence in America today is keeping secrets, whether they involve dangerous environmental damage, corporate malfeasance, or pedophilia.

People here are banding together to fight the proposed data center even as the AI and cloud technologies that require them are taking over our computers. Twenty years ago, people’s complaints were enough to get rid of Clippy. Microsoft’s new “Copilot” is far, far more intrusive and squanders far, far more natural resources, but like those frogs in hot water, we’ve had two decades to slowly acclimate ourselves to technological intrusions and to paying out of our own pockets for even the most environmentally damaging services, whether we use them or not.

If we don’t complain as loudly now about all these AI and cloud services taking over our computers, phones, and lives as we did a quarter century ago when innocuous little Clippy and Rocky intruded in a much tinier way, our children and grandchildren will pay a heavy cost for our complicity. Indeed, they, and we, already are.