Week 1

Generative Ai’s environmental impact

  • rapid development and deployment of powerful generative AI models comes with environmental consequences, including increased electricity demand and water consumption

  • computational power required to train generative AI models demand a staggering amount of electricity = increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressures on the electric grid

    • researchers have estimated that a ChatGPT query consumes 5x more electricity than a simple web search

  • “cloud computing” does not mean files or hardware live in a cloud

    • physical data centers exist

    • chilled water is used to cool a data center by absorbing heat from computing equipment

  • beyond electricity demands, a great deal of water is needed to collect the hardware used for training, deploying and fine-tuning generative ai models

    • strains municipal water supplies and disrupts local ecosystems

    • estimated 1 kilowatt hour of energy a data center consumes = two liters of water for cooling

data centers have been around since the 1940s

    the rise of generative AI has dramatically increased data construction

    the first was built at UPENN in 1945 to support first digital computer, the ENIAC

Early homo-spirituality: When Neanderthals walked the Earth

paleolithic hunting technologies

  • paleolithic - earliest stone age

  • Atlatl - bone point spears and spear thrower

    • flake tools (flint) spear tip

  • bone flute, 35,000-40,000 yrs old

neanderthals among us

  • The Paleolithic Era (??-10,000 BCE/~35k yrs ago)

    • Ecological time or Deep Time

  • actually, neanderthals developed these technologies thens of thousands of years before humans

Early Hominin and Neanderthals

  • neanderthals lived in Europe at least 400,00 years ag

    • are they humsn? natural?

    • did they use tools? have culture/belief?

    • why do you think they died off? did they?

    • high pitched voice theory

  • hypothesis

    • body was an inconvenience

      • was not made for communication

    • language/voice prevented proper communication

      • had to learn a new language every life time

Venus figurines

  • over 200 extant Venus

  • between 3 and 40 cm (`1 to 15 inches) tall

  • most date from the Gravettian period (26-21k years ago)

    • some examples over 8,000 years old

  • figurines carved from soft stone (steatite, calcite or limestone), bone or ivory, or formed from clay

    • Oldest known ceramics

Paleolithic Gender

  • paleolithic people did not distinguish betweenn nature and culture

    • saw themselves as “one: with nature, part of a larger whole

      • cave stmbolic of the womb

    • prehistory both sexes lived in harmony with each other and nature

      • men and women buried side-by-side as equals

      • birth, death, regeneration reflected in female deities with large buttocks, pregnant bellies, and cylindrical necks

The Great Migration

Megalith Findings

Neolithic Culture: Megaliths and Sacred Sites

  • deep past where hunter/gathering bands lived comfortably in the wilderness - over 20,000 years

    • final ice age disrupted ecological relationship c. 10,00 BCE

      • animals and grains domesticated

  • what makes a structure a “Megalith”?

    • stone

    • size

    • prehistoric

  • what makes a particular location significant?

megaliths and sacred sites

  • map showing the hypotheical route of the megalithic expansion in three main pahses

    • red- green - yellow

    • periods of megalithic stasis (brown - white)

    • episode of a megalithic mediterranean revival (orange) in the second millennium BCE

Megalithic Tombs

Stongehenge

The Celts of Ancient Europe

  • ancient Indo-european people

    • shared similar language and cultural attributes

  • communities stretch across modern-day Britain. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Balkans