In The New York Times today, there is an important article on data centers built for AI and their effects on the water and electricity supply of local communities.
The article is entitled “From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy: As tech companies build data centers worldwide to advance artificial intelligence, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages.”
I am very sorry to see the stories shared as they are awful. I don’t know as much about this topic as I’d like. I will study it more. I am sure there are people trying to solve the problems, and at the same time bad things happen fast to vulnerable persons. We’re likely not going to get it right in the beginning, so how do we build-in protections?
In healthcare, with biomedical devices, when we introduce them into the patient care environment, we follow policies to protect from human harm that generally allow us to:
(1) monitor the environment for risks (including methods to report risks)
(2) triage the risk (assess the severity and what it affects) and communicate with those affected
(3) resolve the risk in a timely manner
(4) close it out (prevent the human harm)
I’m looking forward to learning more about the newer technologies and risk mitigation strategies that are working to protect local communities. I will try to share what I learn.
I am sure we’re investing in new technologies to try to address the energy challenges. We also need to invest in strategies that monitor surrounding communities and respond real-time to problems for people. If we can guarantee 99.9% uptime on a server, we can ensure community water & electric needs are met and mitigate fire risk.
We are collectively smart enough to figure out win/win solutions that take all needs into account. This is also why I am working day and night to understand alternate solutions like distributed intelligence that consumes less power and presents less risk of human harm.
Updates – below are links to related posts and articles:
Using Generative AI in Healthcare Settings in Sustainable Ways