Power vs Power

I was born in 1988, so technically I am a child of the 80s yet the bulk of my childhood was spent growing up in the 90s. Even though the Internet existed for a few decades before I was born, the World Wide Web, the software application that has now become synonymous with the word "Internet" wasn't invented until the early 90s, it grew up and came of age alongside me which gives me and many of my generation a particular perspective when it comes to recognizing the potential that a technology can hold and the realisation of its application.

I grew up seeing some people fear the internet, surreptitiously some might admit that stance proved prescient, but from a more pragmatic mindset that ideological opposition was beyond prudent and decidedly pedantic. That fear lead them to resist the internet as much as they could, to the point that some of the older opponents in particular still don't use it, and whilst they live healthy and fulfilling lives without it, they do make their lives needlessly complicated and suffer from the self-imposed disadvantage that result.

One of these people is a gardener, whose only means of finding clients for their services is through word of mouth, business cards, and advertising in a local paper. They have no online presence, no social media showcasing their work, no awareness of the reviews left online good and bad about their work and the reputation good or bad that develops from it, and very little awareness of their competition, both in terms of what they offer and what they charge for their services. Not surprisingly their income from this work is modest and whilst they maintain that this is something they're happy about, they're never short of complaining that there "isn't enough work" to go around.

Putting aside the "OK Boomer" memes and the ridicule that stems from the gap between generational views and experiences of the world, they are part of a generation that still believes the best way to get a job is to knock on doors, print a resumé, and cold call. Having worked in retail I can tell you when someone hands a resumé over, the second they leave the store it goes in the bin; having hunted for jobs I can tell you when someone cold calls they're advised to check a website or rather facetiously informed that their Recruitment department doesn't advertise posts but rather processes applications made in response to advertisements which is the most bureaucratic response I have ever heard.

Most people seem to have moved beyond this point of conflict however, the internet is now engrained in society, embedded in our lives, and even public services and interactions with government bodies are pretty much entirely online at this point. Choosing to live without the internet is a difficult choice to make, not because it isn't possible but because you create so many barriers for yourself for no other reason than ideology.

What I find interesting about this entire experience is that the emergence of Artificial Intelligence [AI] and in particular Large Language Models [LLMs] is now being met with the same thought processes and behavioural patterns as before but from a new generation. Some of the most vocal opposition to these technologies I have seen comes from Millennials who I would have thought would remember that intimate experience of emerging technology being opposed for no practical reason.

Every sociopolitical response that follows that statement can also be attributed to the internet in general. The information divide, the economic impact, the environmental impact, and the mutation of ideology are all issues that the emergence of the internet also created.

The criticism of AI and its power consumption for instance is a particular talking point, yet people who want to ban it because of this impact are perfectly happy to use Google, which is a search engine first and foremost but also provides a number of other services, this provision at present uses 37 datacentres around the world and as of 2023 consumes 25.9 terrawartt hours of electricity - the equivalent of approximately 100 countries.

AI uses power, so does the internet itself. AI has caused power consumption to increase, so has the internet itself. We would use less power if we banned AI, so too would we if we banned the internet as well.

If you want to talk about orders of magnitude and percentages, the internet as a whole globally uses around 260-360 TWh of electricity, or 1.5% of global electricity usage, that means Google alone at 25.9 TWh accounts for approximately 10% of the power used by the entire internet, and 0.15% of the entire world's electricity usage annually roughly equivalent to the energy used by the entire country of Denmark per annum with a population of approximately 33 million people.

The point I am trying to make is that AI is not unique in being a source of criticism for the concerns people have but those concerns don't translate into criticism of equal weight directed at other sources.

Social media causes much more damage to political stability than AI and for the most part there has been little substantive effort to regulate it. The internet more broadly consumes massive amounts of power and people aren't concerned about that or calling for Google to be banned.

The threat to jobs and the wider economic impact of AI was also an issue that lead many to oppose the internet, the ease of outsourcing digital service provision to third parties and overseas contractors was a particular talking point among conservative opponents, that old "they took our jobs" nugget directed at economic migrants has been all but abandoned now when it comes to digital migration, if a digital service provider requires 1,000 people to maintain its service the vast majority of those jobs are unlikely to be in the countries those services are primarily built for.

Google's largest market remains the US at 26.95% of its traffic as of 2023, as a company Google employs 180,895 people as of 2024, approximately 102,000 of those based in the US. That creates a disparity with 56% of Google's employees based in a region that accounts for 26.95% of its traffic. The other 73.05% of it's traffic comes from regions that collectively share 44% of the workforce. In economic terms measured by job creation that's a net outflow 29% or to put it another way, 52,460 jobs those non-US countries would otherwise have contributing to their own economies if Google's workforce was proportionate to its service provision.

This is overlooked by most, instead the focus is placed on Corporation Tax and the loopholes that companies use to calculate their tax based on where the company is headquartered for that region rather than where the revenue is generated, something which is now being addressed by larger geopolitical blocs, particularly the EU who introduced legislation to prevent this - something which cost Apple €13 billion [$14 billion] last month. Similar regulations known as MIFID II [the Markets In Financial Instruments Directive version 2] attempt to do the same with investment pools to prevent companies from hiding revenue inside investment instruments like Mutual Funds and Exchange Traded Funds [ETFs] - something which some speculated was part of the reason the UK wanted to leave the EU to protect the Cayman Islands [a UK overseas Territory] and other tax havens that fall under its jurisdiction and maintain UK companies ability to hide revenue in this way.

Everything you have read this far in this post is information I am only able to share with you because of the internet which brings us back to a point I made earlier - the information divide was an argument that many people tried to use both for and against the internet as a resource. Some argued that the provision of the service costing money would create a wealth divide that would dictate who had access to information and who did not, something which we have seen play out. Efforts have been made to connect poorer countries with less developed infrastructure to the internet to facilitate access to that information and remove the economic barrier to accessing it.

On the other side of the argument however proponents argued that the internet would make it easier for people to access information and that has also held true. So many self-publishing services now exist, from blogs and vlogs to print on demand and ePublishing services like Kindle Direct Publishing something which I personally use. Without the internet the possibility that anyone could read not only this blog but any of the books I have published through Kindle would be slim to non-existent. As a gay man who grew up under Section 28 in the UK it is within my living memory to have a government that actively censors your very existence. The internet makes that incredibly difficult to do now, but in my childhood the control of media was much more encompassing. There are countless scandals that we are now aware of that were completely covered up when I was young because the media was so concentrated.

The decentralized nature of the internet has given us access to information and has made it possible to share information at scale. The only barriers to utilizing that information stem from skill set and experience at this point.

In a recent post I wrote about how I want the AI bubble to pop, not because I want the technology to go away but because I want it to develop in its nascence with the absence of corporate interests. The internet arguably benefited from the dotcom crash and the interim period of use where those that actually used the technology got to discover its practicality. I want the same thing to happen with AI but that won't be the case if it is opposed for ideological reasons alone.

As I said before, the concerns levied at AI, in terms of political, social, economic, and environmental impacts are shared by the internet itself, if your opposition to AI is truly rooted in those concerns, why are you even using the internet?

The internet uses around 1.5% of our global electricity usage, and Google alone accounts for 10% of the power used by the internet, the equivalent of over 100 countries.