AI and the Environment: A Philosophical Overview

Many spiritual teachers of XX century asked the question:

"Does the technological progress has the stop button ?"

It is not that they were against the technology - technology makes our life easier. But what they were concerned about is that our spirit doesn't receive equal nourishment. In other words - our psyche does not evolves as equally as our technology.

In result - we forget that technology is here to serve us, and technology becomes our master.

It is called technocracy.

In terms of Vedic Astrology it is called Rahu.

Svarbhānu was an asura (demon) who disguised himself as a deva (god) and slipped into the line to drink amrita, the nectar of immortality. The Sun (Surya) and the Moon (Chandra) recognized him and alerted Vishnu. Vishnu then severed his head with his disk ( Sudarśana Chakra. )

Because Svarbhānu had already tasted the nectar his head became immortal demon Rahu, and his body became Ketu, lifeless.

Thus, Rahu eternally pursuing the Sun and Moon - astronomically Rahu is the place, where lunar and solar eclipses occur.

Symbolically, Rahu represents expansion, inflation and illusion. He is pupil of Shukra (Venus), who is Guru of Asuras. Hence, Rahu is master of maya (illusion) - myth is symbolical language, in the modern context it also means "virtual".

Rahu also represents the latest technological progress. To give your analogy:

In 1991 when Al Gor "released" internet, for free, without patents - it allowed the Web to spread globally and become what we now call the Internet experience: websites, links, and browsers.

Think of how quickly internet-web spread across the all planet, and now we are not imagining our life without it. Symbolically this is Rahu - rapid expansion and always something new.

The same story happened when OpenAI released first AI in 2022 for public and for free.

Within just a few days, millions of people were using it, making it one of the fastest-growing consumer applications in history.

This post is not about the technology is "bad", there is not such a thing in Vedic though as "good" and "bad", since it is a non-dual philosophy. What matters is context.

We like to think that the progress is linear and we can go only in one direction.

Nicola Tesla almost one-hundred years ago said, that we can capture energy from Ether.

People thought that he was crazy. In Vedic though Ether is element from which all other elements are born: fire, water, air and earth.

It is only means we can harvest energy of Sun, Wind, Hydro and Tidal - technology we have now and finally implement. We don't have to extract the resources and the blood of the Earth, burn it and pollute environment.

So the question I want to raise here:

Later on 3 more big-tech joined the race: Google, Meta and Amazon.

Their products are different, but one thing is in common - they own hyperscale data centers.

This data-centers consuming so much power (~50MW), that heat emitted by servers can heat entire city (10,000-20,000 apartments in European climate). In fact, in EU it is obligatory now that data-centres are connecting to the city heating.

This data-centers are stacked serves with hundreds, or even thousands of GPUs (Graphic Processor Unit) and HBMs (High Bandwidth Memory).

Simply speaking GPU is a video card, and HBM - is computer working memory, newer version of RAM.

Because GPUs and HMBs are so good at parallel math, they can do millions of numbers at once - most of modern AIs are built on them.

And now is the interesting part:

Big-Tech companies are bought all the memory almost for decade. (Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft)

How come ?

There are companies who "own" technology of GPUs(NVidia, AMD, Apple, Intel, Huawei etc. ), but physical manufacturing is actually carried out by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) or Samsung (South Korea).

Then there are only 3 places on Earth who can produce HBMs at scale:

This is the hardware trinity behind modern AI. So most of contracts for the HMBs manufacturing are locked by Big Four Tech companies, who own hyperscale data-centres.

This is historical, because since the invention of RAM, it's price trend was always going down, meaning memory became cheaper and cheaper, but now with AI-boom it's spiked.

Second thing to consider, is that Big-Tech is ceased to be a "tech", but transforming is something else.

Did you think - why the AI emerged at all ?

We as humans made a lot of mess: wars, draining the resources, produced a lot of plastic, polluted the environment and because of inability to mange this complex mess - we created AI to help us.

A lot of things became possible with help of AI from Art to Science. By the way if you know, how AI helps, please share in the comments.

However, it comes with the cost.

This "helper" already competes with us for the land and finite resources. Remember, Rahu is something virtual and rapidly expanding.

As per research of Lincoln institute, even a mid-sized data center consumes as much water as a small town, while larger ones require up to 5 million gallons of water every day - as much as a city of 50,000 people.

Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana, for example, is expected to draw more than twice the power of the entire city of New Orleans once completed.

And of course, unlike actual clouds, data centers require land. Lots of it. Some of the largest data centers being built today will cover hundreds of acres with impermeable steel, concrete, and paved surfaces—land that will no longer be available for farmland, nature, or housing.

Early in the AI boom, in 2023, US data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly as much as the entire nation of Ireland (whose electric grid is itself nearly maxed out, prompting data centers there to use polluting off-grid generators), and that’s expected to double or even triple as soon as 2028.

So, water, energy and land.And then if you consider the AI hardware , we can add here more intense mining of natural resources, such as:

The manufacturing of HBMs and GPUs is taking place through hundreds of ultra-precise

steps in a high-security industrial fabrication factories (fabs).

This high-tech labs look like hospitals, because a single dust particle can destroy millions of dollars of chips.

Silicon is the base of all chips comes from quartz and silica sand (SiO₂).Quartz, due to its properties, is among the best conductors of energy. It was utilised in tech for a long time starting from the watches and not it is the main element of modern-tech. It is also revered as power and healing object among the shamanic cultures across the globe according to Michael Harner.

In fact, silicon (quartz) is the "new oil" Remember, internet was an element of warfare

initially; likewise AI is also used heavily in national security, so who controls fabs and silicon leads the game.

The single geological district produces the purest natural quartz on Earth:

Spruce Pine, North Carolina (USA) - the crown jewel.

Formation of such quartz takes millions to hundreds of millions of years.

Copper, requires open-pit mining and massive earth removal.

Many countries export copper ore, but China is the largest importer and also the biggest refiner of copper, turning imported ore into refined metal.

Cobalt is by byproduct of copper & nickel mining - often associated with social & ethical issues. Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In many areas, it is extracted by artisanal miners, including children, using bare hands and simple tools, often wearing only flip-flops. Cobalt dust is highly toxic, causing long-term health problems. Mining tunnels frequently collapse, leading to injuries and deaths. Sex violence and HIV is very frequent in this tunnels.

Behind the clean image of batteries and green technologies, cobalt often carries a hidden human cost.

Tungsten unlike copper, tungsten markets are smaller and more concentrated. China was by far the largest importer of tungsten ore , followed by the United States and Vietnam. This shows that many countries mine tungsten but then send it to China or others for processing/refining. China also holds the largest share of known tungsten reserves - over half of global reserves - giving it long-term control of supply.

Tantalum (chemical symbol Ta) is a rare, dense, and corrosion-resistant metal with a very high melting point and excellent electrical properties. It doesn’t occur in nature as pure metal; instead, it’s found in ores such as coltan (a mixture of columbite and tantalite) and other tantalum-bearing minerals.

Tantalum became famous as a “conflict mineral” because a large share of the world’s supply comes from Central Africa- especially the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -a region that has suffered decades of armed conflict.

The second largest producer of tantalum is Rwanda. Like, cobalt mining of tantalum involves artisan mining, meaning that it is extracted by bare hands.

The so-called rare gases (more precisely: noble gases) like neon (Ne), argon (Ar), and krypton (Kr) are chemically inert elements that exist in tiny amounts in Earth’s atmosphere.

These gases are extracted as by-products of industrial air separation.

Air composition:

Neon and krypton are not primary targets - they are “harvested from the leftovers” of oxygen and nitrogen production.

That’s why global supply depends heavily on: steel production, industrial gas plants, large oxygen facilities.

Before 2022, over 50% of the world’s neon came from Ukraine, as a by-product of Russian steel and Ukrainian purification plants. The war exposed how fragile this supply chain is.Neon is now a strategic material for the chip industry.

To put this all together - with emergences of AI the competition of the finite - natural resources will rise up to feed the growing needs of data centers.

There is a belief that our progress is fuelled by the wars we carry on, where the war serves as a good "pressure-cooker" for innovation. And this theory makes sense, for example war of russia against Ukraine forced EU to start continent-wide shift to renewable energy and to cut the dependency on russian fossil-fuels. Unprecedented event.

But there is also an another opinion.

If you trace closely the resource origin, you may notice that almost all the critical resource sources (except China and US) for AI are also hot-spot zones: Ukraine, Africa, Taiwan.

As the primate-descendants we compete for resources and territory. Before it was Oil & Gas and now it is silicon and cobalt.

Yes, we can fuel the technological "progress" like this. At the end the wars will drain all the Earth resources, atmosphere temperature will go even higher. And what remains ? Only wasted deserts.

The year 2025 was in the top-three warmest years on record, with average surface temperatures reaching around 1.44C above pre-industrial levels across eight independent datasets.

It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred. If you are in doubt about climate change, you check this page by NASA, and my article about the oceans.

If from the equation of the progress, we remove the finite resource consumption, and put into the equation regeneration - maybe we don't need to fight the resources anymore. Take for example, renewable energy: it is infinite.

We use to call "developed country", which consumes more.

For example, if everyone on Earth consumed like Norway, we would need 3.9 planets.

If everyone consumed like Nigeria, we would need 0.7.

One of these countries has a Human Development Index of 0.97.

The other, 0.56.

Imagine if the world's most "developed" countries were renamed for what they actually do:

-Resource Depletion Leaders.

-Emissions Overproducers.

-Ecological Deficit Nations.

All in all, what we call a "progress" is consuming resources and wasting the environment by it's byproducts and fighting for the resources in-between.

But what if we also start considering byproducts as valuable resource and design out all the waste from our manufacturing ?

If some product is polluting the environment, maybe it is better not to produce it at all?

We blame indigenous cultures who have connection with the Earth, as primitive.

Archeologists labeled other civilisations before us as primitive, because they didn't find the plastic in their excavations. So think about it - they see plastic as the pinnacle of development and evolution. But maybe this civilisations just decided not to produce plastic at all, because they possessed some kind of vision and wisdom ?

North American Indigenous Tribes have simple formula:

Here, we can find a profound wisdom which Indigenous cultures understood - humans are not owners of the land, but caretakers of it. The Earth does not belong to us. We belong to the Earth. Life is a web - touch one part, and the whole vibrates.

In many tribes: You never take more than the land can regenerate. You offer gratitude - songs, prayers, ceremonies. You “pay back” through conservation, respect, and balance.

In my opinion, our civilisation is only approaching to what can be called a real progress. With emergence of renewable energy, we can build circular systems, which align with natural, rather than exploit it.

Here, I enter the realm, which I don't understand completely ,since I am not a computer engineer.

But,

modern computers are built on:

the rigid von Neumann architecture

This became the standard not because it is “the only path,” but because:

it scales easily

But the price is high:

dependence on rare-earth metals

overheating and the limits of miniaturization

We have run into physical limits.

It is based on carbon compounds: polymers, organic molecules, bio-inspired materials.

Instead of rigid, crystalline wafers, it works with flexible, soft, sometimes even biodegradable substrates.

Organic transistors, sensors, and circuits can be grown, printed, or layered like ink.

They blur the boundary between machine and environment.

Not a computer as a stone. A computer as a living membrane.

An ion computer which instead of electrons use ions. Instead of tiny silicon switches (transistors), it uses individual atoms with electric charge (ions) as the basic units of computation. A normal computer uses billions of tiny on/off switches: 0 or 1. An ion computer uses single atoms floating in space, held by electromagnetic fields. Each ion acts as a qubit – it can be 0, 1, or both at the same time (a quantum state).

They are still experimental: require ultra-high vacuum and cryogenic or near-perfect environments. So today, an ion computer is more like: a laboratory organism rather than a household appliance. But philosophically, it is already a break from quartz: information is no longer etched into stone - it lives in vibrating atoms. Computation becomes dynamic, probabilistic, wave-like. A machine of resonance.

Neuromorphic systems are computers designed to work more like a brain than like a calculator.

Instead of separating memory and processing (as in the von Neumann architecture), they merge them - just as neurons do.Information is not moved back and forth between “CPU” and “RAM.” It lives and flows inside a network of artificial neurons and synapses.

Examples in the real world:

These systems are still born from quartz.But they no longer behave like stone.

Computation through: oscillations, resonance, waves, phase transitions, chemical reactions.

This is not “a computer made of parts.”

It is a tuned environment.

Instead of carving logic into rigid components, we shape conditions in which matter itself computes.

Examples:

the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, where chemical waves propagate, collide, and form patterns

wave-based computation, where interference and phase encode information

quantum–analog hybrids, where continuous physical processes perform inference

Here, matter does not represent information.

It is information in motion.

A reaction front becomes a signal.

A wave crossing another wave becomes a decision.A phase change becomes memory.

The material is no longer silicon alone.

It is the Earth itself:

The medium becomes the machine.

This kind of system does not “execute code.”It unfolds.

You do not program it line by line.You tune boundary conditions, gradients, fields, concentrations.

You plant dynamics.

And let nature think.

This is computation not as domination of matter, but as collaboration with it.

Not a machine standing apart from the world.

But the world, gently persuaded to speak in patterns.

To close up, I want to share some metaphors from the Vedic tradition.

No doubt, that in digital era - Rahu can expand rapidly, we become more and more immersed into virtuality. The goal of this article to bring this process onto surface.

Rahu is also an expansion, amplification. And in this case it is also amplification of our greed and consumption.

In the end, if all water is drained, and no single tree remains, what is the point in this virtual world ? It also requires resources to sustain itself, and it requires them more and more. This expansion has no end. But Rahu is an illusion, it is as long powerful, as long we don't understand it's nature. The mind has the power to cut through this illusion, and this power is called - awareness.

In Vedic tradition, same like in Shamanic wisdom natural resources are revered as a spirits, because every material aspect has it's energetic nature.In Vedic myth this spirits represented as Yakshas (or Yakshasas). They appear throughout the Vedas, the epics (Ramayana, Mahabharata), and later Puranic literature.

Traditionally, Yakṣas are associated with:

forests, mountains, caves

rivers and springs

buried treasures, gems, metals

fertility and abundance of the land

Their king is Kubera, the god of wealth. Kubera was the rightful ruler of Lanka (Land of Abundance) and the lord of the Yakshas.

From the myth we know, that yakshas are not gods, not humans, not demons. They are the spirits of the living world itself.

Yakshas have a dual nature:

In their benevolent form, they protect sacred places, bless travelers, and guard treasures.

In their darker form, they can be wild, dangerous, deceptive, or hostile to humans who disrespect nature or cross sacred boundaries.

This ambivalence is important: Yakshas represent raw, untamed natural power. They are not moral in a human way. They respond to attitude and behavior. Respect brings protection. Arrogance brings danger.

Why in the Biblical story about the Golden calf, Moses is devastated when Israelites chose it as their idol ? Because material object itself is not a Wealth. Our desires has no end.

But Abundance is Wealth.

Circularity is Wealth.

Flow is Wealth.

I invite you to join the discussion and share your vision below.

Nikita Ierisov