How Big Data Hurts the Environment & What YOU Can Do to Help

TCAST

Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby discuss the dangers of relying on centralization and data centers for the environment, society, and the progress of humanity. They also talk about how a recent explosion in one of Google’s Iowa-based data centers, followed by massive outages around the world, led to three electricians being injured.

Building on an Unstable Foundation

Imagine the chaos that would happen if Google Maps just stopped working for a day. The average civilian no longer had the technology they needed to find the fastest routes to work and get a birds-eye view of the traffic in their city. Businesses and restaurants would struggle to help customers find their brick-and-mortar locations. Food delivery riders would have to map out routes on their own. A day without the Maps could set us back by several days in terms of global efficiency.

This just shows how fragile the internet and data processing is. Technology has become a part of our society’s foundation. But have we engineered and regulated it to be foolproof?

Is It Time to Decentralize?

Data blips can cripple society for far longer than the actual occurrence. So when they do happen, Jason believes that we need to look at the cloud and understand how we are missing out because we rely on centralized systems to process our information.

We could, instead, use the combined processing power that all of our individual smartphones and devices have to decentralize the system and manage how the internet functions from there. As blockchain technology develops, becomes more efficient, and is integrated into society, this should be the future of how we deal with data. There is no reason to keep a centralized server system when all our individual devices can have the power to run everything decentralized.

What’s your data worth?

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