Will the Matrix (Google) want my body to power the servers when I can no longer click a button?

Soap box ramble - Currently we use motion sensors to switch on lights or set of an alarm (intruder).  What will happen when these sensors knows it is you, and I mean you, you become uniquely identifiable.

Suppose your home sensors detect who is going into the room and set the lighting, TV to what you like.  It sends you a text to say which off the lights, or reminds you that the oven is on.  Will we see this as centralised big brother or that we can negotiate with our power companies to get cheaper bills when we move supplier by showing we are responsible and accountable?

Should the marketing be about reducing the standby energy production amount and therefore reducing pollution and extraction, or should we just be doing it anyway.  Is this technology looking for a problem?

Data, smart grids, identity, user behaviour.  Will you change if you knew your actions could count against you?

Will the cost of implementation be higher than any return?  As I said, mutterings of a mad man thinking out-loud.

Image from Greenpeace

31 March 2010  Greenpeace criticises coal-fuelled internet cloud on the day the iPad goes live and the web is awash with articles following yesterdays views based on the Greenpeace report that t he 'cloud' of data which is becoming the heart of the internet is creating an all-too-real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and others build data centers powered by coal. “If considered as a country, global telecommunications and data centres behind cloud computing would have ranked fifth in the world for energy use in 2007, behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan” Greenpeace have said.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/ipad-cloud-climate-change-290310

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/make-it-green-cloud-computing

"The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power," said Greenpeace, which argues that web companies should be more careful about where they build and should lobby more in Washington for clean energy.  

Most Web companies are trying, if it is hard enough I don’t know, however I have a different take.

We have become a society that wants on demand, instant, immediate and therefore we need to keep all the servers (data centres) powered up and disks spinning.  In reality, as I have written before this is powering the “dark screens”, the one that you are not yet viewing, if you are reading this then it is lit.

A solution surly is to put most data on dark disks – ones that are spun down, stopped and unpowered.  If you request info from one of these disks, you are asked to donate to a carbon fund or wait 5 minutes while it powers up. The choice of fuel is not the argument or solution (sorry Greenpeace), getting stuff switched off and powered down – even deleted, by using intelligence in the data centre and technology surly is!

The whole debate about efficiency, components, materials, shipping, packing, reuse and recycling is another problem.