The Harmony of the Living World

Computation happens inside the world, and the world pays for it in energy, water, minerals, land and labour.

What this asks

The Living World asks that we stop speaking about technology as if it were made of nothing.

The language we use encourages the error. The cloud. The virtual. Streaming, as if things flowed from nowhere. All of it describes buildings full of machines, drawing electricity from grids, rejecting heat into air or water, standing on land that was something else, connected by cables laid across seabeds, built from metals mined by people we will never meet.

Every model trained is a quantity of energy. Every query answered is a smaller quantity, multiplied by an enormous number. Every device is an assembly of elements extracted from specific places, often with significant local consequence, and the largest environmental cost of most consumer hardware is incurred before it is switched on for the first time.

This Harmony asks that advancement be measured against these costs rather than beside them. Not as an external consideration to be handled by someone else, but as part of what the thing is.

Why it is difficult

It is difficult because the costs are invisible by design.

The point of good infrastructure is that you do not think about it. That is a virtue in a water supply and a hazard in a moral accounting. A person using an assistant experiences no weight, no heat, no smell, no bill. There is no perceptual channel through which the physical cost arrives, and things we cannot perceive are things we do not weigh.

It is difficult, second, because the costs are displaced. Extraction happens where the minerals are. Manufacturing happens where labour is cheap. Data centres are sited where power and land are available and where local opposition is weakest. Disposal happens somewhere else again. Almost no one experiences the full chain, and the people who experience the worst parts of it are rarely the people using the output.

Third, it is difficult because the benefits are real. Computation supports medical research, climate modelling, grid optimisation, agricultural planning and a great deal else that reduces environmental harm. This is not a case of pure cost. Some of the energy spent is spent on understanding the problem that the energy contributes to, and that is a genuine complication rather than a rhetorical one.

And fourth, it is difficult because the numbers are contested. Estimates of the energy and water used by large systems vary widely, depend heavily on assumptions, and are often produced by parties with an interest. We deliberately publish no figures here. We do not trust ourselves to have found reliable ones, and inventing precision would violate the first Harmony to support the seventh.

Where it is tested

It is tested in siting decisions, where a community weighs jobs and revenue against water and land. These decisions are usually made once, quickly, by people who will not be present for the consequences, and they are among the few moments when a community has real leverage.

It is tested in the ordinary engineering choice to spend more compute for a marginal gain. Each such decision is individually defensible. The pattern of them may not be, and there is rarely any point in the process at which the pattern is examined.

It is tested in hardware replacement, where the cheapest path for a person and the cheapest path for the world diverge sharply. Devices are frequently replaced while functional, and the manufacturing cost has already been paid.

And it is tested in labour. The Harmony of the Living World includes people deliberately, because the same logic of displacement applies. The work that makes systems safe and usable includes content moderation and data labelling that is often distressing, poorly paid relative to the value it protects, and carried out far from where the benefit lands. Ecosystems and workers are both parts of the world that bear costs on behalf of users who never see them.

What it does not mean

It does not mean that technology is unnatural. Humans are part of the world and what we make is part of it too. There is no clean line between the artificial and the natural, and drawing one usually smuggles in a judgement rather than an observation.

It does not mean that computation should shrink. Some of it should grow, particularly where it serves understanding of the systems we are damaging. The claim is about accounting, not about direction.

It does not mean personal restraint is the mechanism. An individual choosing not to use an assistant changes essentially nothing about the physical footprint of the industry, and framing this as consumer virtue mainly serves to distribute guilt away from those making the decisions that matter.

It does not mean romanticising the past. Life before industrial technology was not gentle on people, and traditions that idealise it tend to be written by people who would not have survived it.

It does not mean we know what the right level is. Reasonable people disagree about how much energy a given capability is worth. We are confident only that the question is currently not being asked in most of the rooms where it applies.

Practising it

Ask the physical questions. Where does the power come from. Where does the heat go. What happens to the water. Who lives nearby. These are answerable questions and asking them changes what gets built, because the answers have to be assembled by someone.

Treat compute as material. In practice this means noticing when a system is being used because it is available rather than because it is suited to the task. A great deal of computation is spent on problems that a smaller method would have solved.

Keep your hardware. Repair it, pass it on, resist the replacement cycle where you reasonably can. This is one of the few individual actions with a defensible physical justification, because manufacture dominates the footprint of most devices.

Find out about the labour. Who reviews the material that makes your tools safe to use. Where do they live. What are they paid. What support do they have. If the answer is difficult to obtain, that difficulty is itself information.

And practise attention to the physical. Visit somewhere that generates power. Look at a data centre from the road. Hold a device and consider that everything in it came out of the ground. The purpose is not guilt. It is accuracy.

Where it is tested

These are not worked examples with correct answers at the back. They are situations in which this Harmony genuinely conflicts with something else that matters. If one of them seems easy, it is probably worth re-reading.

01

A data centre is proposed for a rural area with high unemployment. It brings a modest number of permanent jobs, a large one-off construction workforce, and substantial local tax revenue. It also draws heavily on an aquifer that farms in the same valley depend on, in a region where drought years are becoming more common.

The tension The people who need the jobs and the people who need the water are largely the same community, and neither need is optional.

What this Harmony asks you to weigh Consider who is in the room when this is decided and who will be in the room in fifteen years. Ask whether the benefit and the cost fall on the same timescale; jobs arrive now, aquifer depletion arrives slowly. Weigh what the community can negotiate while it still has something the developer wants.

02

A team can improve their model's performance by a small margin with a training run costing many times the energy of the previous one. The improvement is real and will benefit millions of users slightly. No individual user will notice.

The tension A large, concentrated, physical cost is being incurred for a diffuse, marginal, mostly imperceptible gain, and the same reasoning will justify the next run and the one after.

What this Harmony asks you to weigh Consider whether marginal improvement is the right frame, or whether the question is what the compute could otherwise have done. Ask who would have to agree for the cost to be considered legitimate. Weigh the fact that the individual decision is defensible against the fact that the pattern of such decisions may not be.

03

The safety systems that make an assistant usable were trained partly on labelling work carried out by contractors in low-income regions, reviewing violent and abusive material for wages that are locally competitive and internationally very low. Several report lasting psychological harm. The work is genuinely necessary for the system to be safe.

The tension The employment is wanted, freely accepted, and better paid than local alternatives. It also concentrates the psychological cost of everyone's safety on people with the least ability to refuse it.

What this Harmony asks you to weigh Consider that voluntary acceptance under constrained options is not the same as fair terms. Ask what would be owed to these workers if they lived where the company's headquarters are. Weigh the necessity of the work against the fact that necessity has been used to justify almost every arrangement of this kind.

Practising it

• Ask where the electricity comes from and where the water goes, before asking what the system can do.
• Treat compute as a material with a cost, not as an abstraction that scales freely.
• Repair and keep devices; the largest environmental cost of most hardware is making it.
• Find out who does the unpleasant work that makes your tools usable, and what they are paid.