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It’s no secret that the hottest topic in oil and gas is the energy needs of data centers. And when you see the words “data centers,” read that as “artificial intelligence.” Because the biggest job for data centers is facilitating the explosion of artificial intelligence. I regularly read James Wicklund’s weekly column on pphb.com—a column from which I excerpt content and distill into the “Wicklund Journal” column that you see in this magazine every month—and James, who attends and/or speaks at industry conferences year-round, is constantly referencing the data center phenomenon. Natural gas is the fuel most cited as powering the A.I./data center tidal wave.
Witness this remark he dropped on Oct. 3: “The primary builders of AI data center capacity are hyperscaled conglomerates like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta, who are developing vast, specialized facilities known as ‘AI factories….’ The bottleneck will be power.” In another installment, this: “A joint initiative by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank has announced plans for five new AI data centers in multiple U.S. states, with an estimated investment of over $400 billion.” And this: “The Meta Data Center in Louisiana is the size of 94 football fields.”
Already, A.I. is everywhere. And yet for all of the phenomenal transformation being wrought by artificial intelligence and other technological advances today, I have to say, reflecting on the changes I’ve seen over my life, that the most deep-impression moments came with what I would call “first of their kind” breakthroughs. I speak here of tech advances that were earlier and more rudimentary than what we see today, but that were, in some way, more pivotal or transformational.
Take the pocket calculator, for instance. I’m old enough that I can remember its predecessor, the slide rule. We were told in high school that if any of us were to venture very far in post-secondary education in the STEM field, we would need to invest in a good slide rule. Good ones were expensive. Everyone in the math disciplines used them, and others besides. Yet I can remember, in my freshman year of college, living in a dormitory, there came a night when many of us gathered around Trey, an engineering student, as he displayed his new purchase—a pocket calculator. It was an invention that would put slide rules in the museums. On that night, we were all dazzled and mystified. How could it do those calculations using electrons?
A.I. is about to gobble up your world the way Pac-Man gobbled up dots and was himself eventually gobbled up by Inky, Blinky, Pinky, or Clyde, the “ghosts” of that game.
I remember learning that Trey had paid $150 for it. Another thunderbolt! A person then could live in the dorm for a full month for less than that much. That pocket calculator would run $1,200 in today’s money. Yet your smart phone today came with one installed already on it, and hardly anyone pays attention. You have to tell your kids it is there because they’re too occupied with gaming to notice.
Meanwhile, smart phones keep coming out with apps that have mind-boggling capabilities, but hardly any of these get more than a yawn from anyone.
The same is true for me with just about any technological advance. It’s hard to top my amazement felt at earlier advances, no matter how less powerful they may have been, compared to today’s prodigious products.
Another mind-bender hit me and others in my college years. An electronic game called Pong appeared. Drop a quarter into the slot (it was a table game for two people) and on the screen something appeared that simulated ping pong. The screen was black, and there was a cluster of pixels that simulated a moving ball, with each player controlling a “paddle” (a bar of light that could be moved horizontally to meet the oncoming “ball” and return it). That was it. And yet it was a marvel of marvels. Pong was the forerunner of a generation of stand-alone, arcade-style video games, such as Asteroids, Galaga, Pac Man, etc. Those impressed me too, but nothing like the stunner that was Pong.
And I’ll never forget my first encounter with networked computers. But first, the contrast. In my first year on the college newspaper, I can remember being summoned to the composing room (look that one up) to proofread some pages. Mistakes had to be fixed by someone hand-setting (or in this case, re-setting) lead type—all letters and punctuation were placed individually, sequentially, into flat wooden racks the size of newspaper pages! In my second year on the college paper, the state government had determined that Oklahoma State would have a state-of-the-art newsroom. And so I walked into a space where every workstation had a “terminal.” Work done on a terminal was stored on the mainframe. Everyone could access anyone else’s work. Unbelievable!
This also happened to be my first encounter with word processing, which for me was the last great step forward. Nothing that the computer world will ever come up with will fill me with more wonder and awe than the ever-so-simple (by today’s standards) act of manipulating text. I’m seeing it now as I key in these words, and if I pause to think about it, I’m again amazed. It’s the tool that’s earned me my living for 40+ years.
I could go on… about personal computers, typesetting machines, direct-to-plate printing.
We think of artificial intelligence and the rest of today’s technological sophistication as the be-all and end-all of civilization, and certainly it brings ease, but whether it creates a better working world remains to be proven. In my parent’s day, or maybe in your grandparent’s day, a man could go to a job and work without computers or digital technology and, when paychecks arrived, he had enough to support his entire family. All on his own—letting his wife be a homemaker. Where did THAT money go—that difference in income (now erased) that allowed that family to live just fine with a one-earner livelihood?
Sometimes progress is a double-edged sword that cuts more than one way.
I’d say the same thing is true in oil and gas. No matter how much technology advances in the patch, there is always genius to be recalled in the work that preceded that most recent technological leap. I wrote about that in September in this article.
In the same way that “the child is father to the man,” so are the predecessors and progenitors of technology to the heirs and beneficiaries of that technology. If we stand tall, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Jesse Mullins, Editor
Jesse Mullins, editor of Permian Basin Oil and Gas, was an ace on Galaga but was meh on Pac-Man. Nothing could irk a Boomer more than having, say, Inky nab Pac-Man and then seeing that ghost quiver all over (with excitement? What was that about?) just as he ends your game for you.
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