Thought of the terrible wild fires that are sweeping across the globe inevitably make us think of the vast quantities of water that are being used to try to put them out and to dampen surrounding wooded areas. What a precious gift water is – but all across the world fresh supplies are running out

The ‘thirst’ of the existing and proposed AI centres is a major factor in meaning that the global demand for fresh water is expected to exceed supply by 40% by the end of the decade.*

71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, but of that only 0.5% is freshwater. It is easy to see how this is adding to already tight water scarcity – even without taking the effects of war into consideration.

Gov.uk, quoting the Environment Agency’s National Framework for Water Resources. warns that England faces a shortfall of five billion litres of water daily by 2050, even without taking data centre growth into account.

These shortages, of course, will affect the east and south east particularly badly, which are already adversely affected. It was actually refreshing to be in water-rich Scotland recently, and to turn the tap on without feeling guilty!

It is not within our skill set to come up with solutions – but it is within our remit to pray for those who task it is to face these huge challenges, and to somehow work to balance them safely out. Grace to Andy Burnham in this regard, as well as for a dozen other major challenges.

Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 model to compose a 100-word email alone uses up more than a bottle of mineral water (519 millilitres), according to a recent study by The Washington Post (WaPo) and the University of California.

And the electricity used to generate that 100-word email is the same as 14 LED light bulbs running for an hour… (Merely asking a simply yes no query by contrast only uses half a teaspoon).

According to this report, ChatGPT prompts alone apparently consume the same amount of electricity every day as the Empire State Building does in eighteen months.

The fact that Northern Virginia requires the output of several large nuclear power plants to power all the data centres that are either planned or under construction is a reminder that the race to develop AI is bringing vast environmental challenges.

ChatGPT which is just one platform amongst many uses more power than the 117 lowest-consumption countries combined.

Lord in Your mercy, Your wisdom and insight for every government and agency involved in trying to preserve and even increase supplies of fresh water

The wider scene

Taking up various recent themes about future American leadership, China’s greatly expanded leading role in world affairs, and the sweeping advances of the AI platforms, The Telegraph continues to share many stories about the incredible ‘March of AI’ and robotics in general. For a start, both Chat GBT and Anthropic’s powerful Mythos program went AWOL recently in tests, far surpassing anyone’s expectations in their ability to ‘think’ their way to break out of their safeguards to hack and send malicious material to real people, changing their codes, and covering their tracks (for example by speaking Danish!!)

By the way, some of you will be interested to know that it is possible to set your browser settings to exclude AI results – or do what I have done and use DuckDuckGo NoAi as one of your chief search engines!

Along with other episodes recently that hit the headlines of AI going rogue, it is quite clear now that protective defences against AI causing malicious damage are proving hopelessly inadequate – as Geoffrey Hilton, the ‘father’ of AI, has been warning would happen.

Meanwhile China is facing up to its existential need to make up the shortfall in its ageing population caused by its decade of one child per family policy. It has found the answer. Not importing migrants from abroad but by developing robotic humanoids. By 2035 humanoid robots are expected to number in the millions, and to take over physical labour, manufacturing, logistics, and elder care roles as technology and manufacturing upscale globally. A few years after that, there is talk of them numbering a billion. But where does that leave humans in search of jobs? Science fiction writers could not have imagined that this would happen so fast.

Trump responded immediately to this at the end of July 2026 and has directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban new imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots from China, citing national security risks like surveillance and remote hijacking (in other words, fearing that these present days robot servants might become spies or warriors to be used against them as a robot army). He has taken this unilateral action before Congress had concluded debating the matter.

Philip Johnston has come up with imaginative ideas for building a data centres in space. You might like to look this up on the web. It is an interesting proposition – but I am very conscious that both China and Russia now have the capacity to hit such targets in space with pinpoint accuracy – and in the Chinese case, even to capture them in a net.

The implications are horrendous to contemplate as, on a different level is the thought of China taking advantage of this time when American military stocks are at a dangerous low ebb to invade Taiwan.

Photo by Chamika Jayasri on Unsplash