Our Smart Society
We live in a smart society! This smartness has been increasing for a few decades even if there is no evidence of a sudden and strange evolutionary upturn in human intelligence. Instead, our machines are becoming ‘smarter’, or at least, meriting the ‘smart’ label more frequently.
In the ‘old’ days, we had a simple phone, now we have a smartphone, smart refrigerator, house, car, electricity meter, and the list could go on forever. Our governments proudly proclaim their use of smart drones and bombs — equally lethal — the main difference is their smart label.
This generalized machine smartness is possible thanks to the increased production of silicon wafers, the base for semiconductors. This increase is happening not just in the machines themselves, but also in the growing number of extensive data centers that support the machines’ smartness.
We are told that this is an improvement in our lives — the extra silicon wafers can help machines optimize functioning and improve convenience and efficiency. All this sounds like a great thing but there is little talk about how this might clash with all the promises advocating for sustainability and environmental responsibility. Even fewer mention how this addiction to smartness is increasing our vulnerability to any shortage of resources –events that will certainly increase as the climate disaster unfolds.
One of these ‘small’ problems is the incredible thirst inherent in semiconductor production, combined with the increasing droughts. How can governments and world institutions advocate for sustainability while encouraging a future with increased smartness and semiconductors?
It is strange but true! On Aug 10, 2022, President Biden signed the CHIPS Act which provides US$52 billion to boost the domestic semiconductor industry, and in September 2021, the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, announced a similar act.
Semiconductors not only need incredible amounts of water, but a great percentage of that water must be ultra pure water or UPW. To achieve this pureness, water has to undergo several processes until it reaches a state of the utmost purity, lacking microorganisms, minerals, or any trace of organic or non-organic materials.
Semiconductor production follows an extremely aseptic process needed for the complete cleaning of the grit and slurry of fine grist that is left after the chemical and mechanical polish of the chips. Once the water is evaporated, it is essential that no mineral residue is left on the chips, otherwise short-circuiting and other defects may occur.
This elaborate process sounds like the skin treatments available at a spa: filtration, micro flocculation, activated carbon, reverse osmosis, degasification, electro-deionization, and ultraviolet radiation. The difference is that most of the water becomes quite toxic, due to the inherent toxicity of the materials, making it impossible to recycle.
World leaders seem to want to have their cake and eat it too! In a year when the news is filled with reports about extreme droughts and their effects on crops and food safety, they have still managed to conveniently ignore the complete unsustainability of increased semiconductor production –the basis of our society’s smartness.
This smartness, rapidly spreading to every machine and appliance, can be exemplified by one of the pillars of the American dream, the car. In the good old days, a car was a mechanical machine that could be easily repaired. In contrast, our present cars have increasingly become computers on wheels, sometimes smarter than the driver.
Modern cars and trucks have about 100 distinct electronic modules, each with multiple semiconductors. The number of modules increases exponentially in electric cars and even more in semi or entirely self-driving ones. The wiring of all these components is not only expensive but vulnerable since the information has to be evenly distributed to avoid further problems.
Let’s see what these new car wonders bring to the table. For one, safety has improved with airbag controls, collision avoidance, parking and breaking assists, vehicle diagnostics, power locks, and tire pressure monitors. The drive has become smoother thanks to engine, transmission, and fuel injection controls, and for hybrids, hybrid-electric controls. Most drivers would be quite lost without driver displays and navigation tools, and much less comfortable, without climate controls, video, and audio. All this smartness requires a central controller area network or CAN, which manages the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, broadband, and over-the-air software updates.
All this smartness has made the car very vulnerable to any semiconductor crunch, especially to the increased droughts that the inevitable progress of the climate disaster will bring. Few people know that an average size semiconductor processing plant (fab) uses between 2 to 4 million gallons of UPW per day, the equivalent of the daily freshwater use of a city with a 50,000 population.
In 2019 there was a severe drought in Taiwan, a country that makes about 60% of the world’s semiconductors. Its main company, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) supplies chips to Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and other important users. While the farmers and the general public in Taiwan suffered scarcity of water, the company used about 63 million tons of fresh water, without caring about the food security and well-being of the Taiwanese people. The infuriated farmers protested trying to get a share of water, paving the way for a new type of competition: machine smartness versus farmers and the general public -all vying for one basic commodity, water.
Thinking about drought and smartness, the cherry on the cake goes to the US company Intel, who very unintelligently chose to build its semiconductor US single fab in Ocotillo, Arizona. The US South West is known for its aridity and lack of rain in normal times, but these have been exacerbated by the ongoing climate woes. To make matters worse, the extended droughts in the West have caused a dramatic dwindling of the Colorado River and its reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell. This water system provides water to 7 states: Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, and New Mexico.
It is hard to imagine the supposed ‘intelligence’ of the Intel experts, who chose to build a fab on such a site, knowing that it can consume about 927 million gallons of fresh water (the equivalent of 14 Olympic swimming pools) in just 3 months.
It is quite obvious that the main reason for building the fab in Arizona was not the climate and geographic reality, but our current culture’s main obsession — reducing land and labor costs to increase gains.
These monetary gains would also be in peril if the company didn’t dutifully promise adherence to sustainability and net-zero (carbon neutrality) for a faraway date, like 2050. These promises are usually vague but act as a magic label to improve their image and please the shareholders. This has become the new fashion for all companies — even oil companies like Shell and BP have been forced to go through these motions to appear green!
One of the ‘green’ cards in this sustainability and net-zero monopoly-type game, is the increased use of ‘renewable’ and ‘clean’ energy. This monopoly game is very easy to win — you just need a good dose of creative math with complicated carbon offsets, based on miraculously efficient carbon capture devices and unbelievably effective renewable energy.
A good example is TSMC, which promises net-zero for 2050, while it hogs Taiwan’s water and uses 7.2 percent of the electricity of the country. Intel makes similar ‘green’ claims while their fab used about 561 million kilowatt-hours and produced about 45,000 tons of waste (60% hazardous), in its first 3 months of operation.
The promises of more renewable energy and fantastic carbon capture facilities used for all net-zero calculations necessarily imply a high use of semiconductors and additional smartness for the correct coordination of the machine networks.
Just to begin, solar power is based on the same silicon wafers, turned into photovoltaic cells. Wind power’s functioning is optimized by the use of smart turbines with control modules that can calculate wind availability and coordinate the asps’ movements accordingly. Hydro and nuclear power also boast smart controls to better calculate the water flow and optimize their respective functioning.
In addition, the known intermittency of both solar and wind power means they must be supplemented with other types of energy to ensure smooth energy transmission to the public. This complicated calculation is performed by smart modules that can assess their respective inputs and improve coordination to hopefully reduce the need for supplemental local energy (mostly natural gas) or from another country.
In essence, our world is increasingly dominated by semiconductors, the basis of our society’s smartness. Our culture is completely mesmerized by this smart tech prowess and inventiveness. Few link this sleek modernity to the high amount of water it consumes and how unfeasible it will become in a future with increasing droughts. Taiwan and Arizona are not the only places where this is happening, the competition for water and other resource is already happening all over the planet.
Just like the sham net-zero promises of corporations, our whole culture is based on a huge denial of how the increasing smartness of our machines can threaten our food safety and survival. Astonishingly, even the brightest minds can still believe in a glorious future in which A.I. will substitute humans in the most drudging and dangerous tasks, allowing us to live in an imagined Eden. The whole culture is also obsessed with digitizing every aspect of our lives, but few think of the high inputs of energy and water required for these digital dreams, and how vulnerable these are to extreme weather-caused shortages.
It is certain that the present Zeitgeist precludes connecting the dots to elucidate much reality. We are kept in a fantasy world in which solutions to any problem rely on more technology, making it very difficult to understand the convoluted relationships between technology, lack of resources, decrease in energy availability, and survival. Unfortunately, our survival instinct — characteristic of all species — has been fogged up, preventing us from noticing the threats to our survival inherent in our addiction to technology and smartness.
