The tech giant’s new "virtual power plant" is a beautiful opportunity for everyday citizens to sacrifice their home appliances on the altar of artificial general intelligence.
Last Tuesday, over a phenomenal sea bass with a senior vice president at Alphabet, I was struck by a profound realization about the human spirit. We were discussing Google’s new "virtual power plant"—a brilliant initiative to pay everyday citizens to turn off their appliances when the grid is strained by the company’s massive AI data centers. Listening to the sheer scale of the computing power required to generate a hyper-realistic video of a dog flying a helicopter, I felt a deep, almost spiritual shame. Why was my home air conditioning running? Why was my refrigerator drawing an obscene amount of wattage just to keep my produce crisp, when that energy could be expanding the frontiers of machine learning?
There is a certain segment of the population that will always complain when asked to sacrifice. You hear the grumbling already: It’s 104 degrees in Phoenix, my insulin is getting warm, I can’t read in the dark. But we must look at the bigger picture. In a very real sense, every time a family in the suburbs unplugs their washing machine to prevent a localized blackout near a Google server farm, they are participating in the grandest scientific endeavor of our time. Did the Apollo astronauts complain about the climate control in the lunar module? No. They understood the mission. By networking our domestic misery together, Google has created a breathtaking symphony of synchronized sacrifice.
We have forgotten how to be pioneers. When I visited a lab at MIT last month, researchers showed me a model of the coming decade’s energy demands. The math was clear: there simply isn't enough electricity on Earth for both human comfort and artificial general intelligence. Something has to give. And frankly, given the choice between allowing a middle-class family to comfortably binge-watch Netflix and ensuring a language model can instantly summarize a PDF of a corporate earnings report, the correct path is obvious.
The company itself has been incredibly gracious about the burden everyday people are placing on its infrastructure.
We are generously offering to pay residents pennies on the dollar to sit in a sweltering, unlit home so our servers don’t trip a breaker while processing a million daily queries about whether you can boil chicken in NyQuil.
It is easy to be cynical. It is easy to look at a trillion-dollar tech monopoly asking the working class to manually throttle their own life-support systems as a dystopia. But I choose wonder. I choose to see the beauty in a single mother receiving a push notification offering her $1.40 to shut off her child's nebulizer so a server rack in Nevada can complete a training run for a new chatbot.
As for me, I have already opted in. Last night, as the regional grid strained under the weight of a million simultaneous ChatGPT prompts, my lights flickered and died. The smart thermostat locked me out. As the temperature in my living room crept past ninety degrees, I didn't feel anger. I felt connection. I sat in the stifling dark, sweating through my shirt, comforted by the knowledge that somewhere out there, a vast and beautiful machine was using my electricity to write a perfectly mediocre poem about a sunset.