Ritual Robots - Havan at the Data Kund

Data centers, which run all the AI of today globally consume about 143 million books’ worth of data everyday. Every second, they need water which is enough to provide daily water for about 2 million people. AI is the central reality of our times. It’s a reality centered on massive amounts of human data scraping (often without awareness of humans) and massive amounts of extraction of Earth’s resources. AI machines collect every aspect of our lives in data and are able to manipulate that to influence our lives in all kinds of ways- from potentially naive aspects like what shoes to buy to influencing elections at scale. We are caught within filter bubbles and have no awareness of the ideological walls we are trapped within. We, as human consumers share all this data willingly- almost like offerings, very much like making offerings in ritualistic practices. This data requires processing with huge amounts of compute powered by indiscriminate extraction of resources- with data centers set to account for 21% of the global energy needs within 5 years. The offering we are making, in massive amounts to the robots is that of data and the climate. This work highlights that process, hinting at the evolution of the superior being to AI robots and our evolution of rituals along the same lines.