Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

Sometime before I started producing “For the Birds” in 1986, Russ and I bought our first computer, from the Whole Earth Catalog, and our first word-processing software, WordStar. Until 1995 or so, I typed every one of the scripts for the program on that trusty machine, printing them out on a dot-matrix and then a daisy-wheel printer. I wrote my first book, For the Birds: An Uncommon Guide, that way, too. My publishers switched to Word Perfect by the time I wrote Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids, so I had to learn a whole new word processing program.

I liked Word Perfect a lot, but by the late 90s, all the newspaper, magazine, and book publishers I was working with wanted everything sent to them as Word documents, so I had to buy Microsoft Office 97. Suddenly every time I started a new document, a weird animated paperclip with googly eyes would pop up out of nowhere to ask me if I needed help. “Clippy” (the proper name was Clippit) seemed intrusive even as it was, very rarely, a little helpful. When Office 2000 added a few other “office assistants,” I went with Rocky the dog, whose intrusions at least seemed warm and friendly. And like a real dog, Rocky would occasionally take a nap or give himself a good scratch right there on my screen.

The vast majority of Microsoft users found these Office Assistants annoying and intrusive. Two decades ago, that was enough to get Microsoft to discontinue them entirely—Office 2003 was the last release to include them even as an option.

How times have changed! Now just about every program or app or website I visit bombards me with intrusions far, far more annoyingly than poor Clippy ever managed. Many offer to do something for me exactly the way Clippy did, only in a much wider range of contexts, often using AI technology. These intrusions, whether I’m using a search engine or putting together a PowerPoint program, are inescapable. The software I’ve been depending on for my day-to-day tasks—researching and writing about birds, editing and organizing photos, producing this radio program, and putting together presentations for my speaking gigs—have all evolved into AI-content generators, and whether I use these AI elements or not, the software costs the same. Most of the programs I use now are “cloud based,” meaning every second I’m using them, my work no longer stays within my own computer but suddenly involves huge data centers gobbling up water and power resources that are exacerbating the climate crisis. Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the water usage of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people, and huge new AI-focused data centers are mushrooming.

In my neck of the woods, our power company, Minnesota Power, was just bought up by private equity firms led by BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and, suspiciously, almost immediately afterward, plans for a new data center in Hermantown, just outside Duluth, were announced. Who will own and operate that data center? No one knows—town officials of Hermantown signed non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from disclosing critical details about the plan to the very people they ostensibly represent, and will not disclose who’s behind the $650 million project — only that it’s a “Fortune 50” company. This kind of secrecy has become a standard operating procedure among today’s politicians, billionaires, private equity firms, and “tech bros,” who all seem to understand that the price of admission into the exclusive circle of power and influence in America today is to keep secrets, whether they involve dangerous environmental damage, corporate malfeasance, or pedophilia.

People here are banding together to fight that data center even as the AI and cloud technologies that require them are taking over our computers. Twenty years ago, people’s complaints were enough to get rid of Clippy. Microsoft’s new “Copilot” is far, far more intrusive and squanders far, far more natural resources, but like those frogs in hot water, we’ve learned to accept technological intrusions into our daily lives and to pay out of our own pockets for even the most environmentally damaging services whether we use them or not. If we don’t complain as loudly about all the AI and cloud services that are taking over our computers now as we did when innocuous little Clippy and Rocky once did in a much tinier way, our children and grandchildren will pay for our complicity.