OUR Ecological Debt

 2024.

The year of war, genocide, climate change, 8 billion people and of course, artificial intelligence.

The "deadline" or cut off for the Earth to become inhabitable is placed a ball park 30-50 years. But what about the winding road to that day?

Ecological debt is the concept that we are consuming resources that belong to our future generations as well. WE as in, the post-industrialization generations , which do not exercise any control over how many resources we consume. There is however a hitch. This consumption is far from being uniform. Certain individuals and companies are major drivers of the fossil-fuel induced global warming and climate change. And no, they are not ill informed. 

Then entered artificial intelligence.

The world wide web is mostly considered a boon, along with the social media boom where every other person is an influencer. But what is not visible to the eye are the energy-sucking data centres that maintain every swipe, like, and even delete that we smash away with our fingertips ever so absent mindedly. All in all, a netizen carries their own carbon foot print, one that is almost invisible. The usage of energy in other modes then adds to this foot print.

Sometime in 2022, lo and behold! entered artificial intelligence tools. These are basically existing concepts of language learning mathematical models freshly packaged after the deluge of social media driven data ensemble during the pandemic. AI is like a toy. Everyone likes to play with it- once again denying the invisible price of energy consumption by data centres. Recent legends (pun intended) have it that another danger of maintaining these data centres is of the contamination of water used in these data centres. 

So all in all the "path" to extinction is getting laid. GenZ for one do not stay silent about neither climate change nor the genocide, which itself leads to ecocide. The Earth, a single system, is constantly affected by events, even continents apart. As an Indian its both depressing and frustrating to watch GenZ elsewhere protest so strongly, albeit still invoking social media energy drain, but all in good faith I hope?

Everyday the news of floods and fires fill my social media feed. Apart from those of war and genocide.

I, am at a loss for justifying the ecological debt I am incurring. 

HBU?