From Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence pg 31. Computation is a climatological event rather than has climatalogical effects?
In his book A Geology of Media, theorist Jussi Parikka suggests we think of media not from Marshall McLuhan’s point of view—in which media are extensions of the human senses—but rather as extensions of Earth. Computational media now participate in geological (and climatological) processes, from the transformation of the earth’s materials into infrastructures and devices to the powering of these new systems with oil and gas reserves. Reflecting on media and technology as geological processes enables us to consider the radical depletion of nonrenewable resources required to drive the technologies of the present moment. Each object in the extended network of an AI system, from network routers to batteries to data centers, is built using elements that required billions of years to form inside the earth.
Mark Carrigan 