Dear Friends,
In our apartment complex, 7 out of 14 bore pumps are not functioning, despite a depth of 100 ft. One of my relatives’ apartments has had a bore well that has been dry for the last month and has been dependent on a tanker. Of course, we are in the middle of a hot summer now. I understand this is a usual scene for the last 40–50 years. But the context is different now!
In my childhood, when we used to hear the news on the radio, weather reports were more prominent. During summer, we used to hear about a few places, like Ramagundam, in the combined Andhra Pradesh that crossed 40°C. Nowadays, more than 60–70 mandals in the state have registered maximum temperatures above 40°C.
While we are talking about the climate crisis, the IEA says data center electricity consumption reached 415 TWh in 2024 and could more than double to 945 TWh by 2030 in some projections. America today has 4,011 data centers. By 2030? More than 7,000. Power consumption today: 29 gigawatts. By 2030: 134 gigawatts. That is 12% of all U.S. electricity. Are we heading towards a climate crisis?
Electrical Engineering researchers have a significant scope for research to meet this demand; otherwise, it could lead to another energy crisis.
Recently, Uber reportedly exhausted its 2026 AI budget in just 4 months on Claude Code, highlighting how token-based AI pricing can undermine traditional enterprise budgeting. It also appears that Microsoft is reportedly cancelling many internal Claude Code licenses because of rising AI coding costs and shifting users toward GitHub Copilot, though there is no official statement yet.
What does this mean? This may be the beginning of a computational crisis
If an engineering graduate learns coding using these tools, assuming free GPT availability, what happens if these tools suddenly stall? What happens to these students' learning?
On top of this, recently I saw a video of a few workers wearing head-mounted cameras and doing ironing, clothes folding, gardening, cooking, and walking in public places, while donating their experience to machines that could eventually perform the same tasks. Interestingly, they are being paid only 12 cents per hour for this activity. One day, they may be powering their own replacements. This may be the beginning of a capability crisis
Meanwhile, Christopher Olah, Anthropic Co-Founder, was invited by the Vatican as one of the few technology representatives, signaling a rare collaboration between the AI industry and religious institutions. Olah emphasized that AI governance cannot be left only to Big Tech companies.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII addressed similar concerns during the Industrial Revolution. Again, after 135 years, in 2026, Pope Leo XIV called for protecting human dignity in the age of AI.
In this chaos, while the world debates who will build the biggest AI model, a 16-year-old student from Gujarat built a solar-powered AI rover (Edge Computing without WiFi) that helps farmers save water and improve yields using simple, affordable technology. These prototypes remind us that India's AI future may be shaped not by trillion-dollar models, but by solving real-world problems at scale.
What is your preparation to avoid falling into the trap of the Climate Crisis, Capability Crisis, and Computational Crisis?
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