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19:37 do things that are meaningful to you and you do them with other people, that having casual contact with other people who share your interests will eventually be likely to lead to building new relationships. So how might being alone affect longevity? There's a lot of research now in this area. So the best hypotheses are that it has to do with stress and the regulation of stress. 20:07 So if you think about it, if you have an upsetting thing happen during the day or a difficult conversation, you can feel your body rev up. And if you can come home and talk to a trusted listener, you can literally feel your body calm down. And what we believe is that people who are more isolated don't ever quite calm down. Their bodies are always in a mild stress response. 20:34 And that means that we have higher levels of circulating stress hormones, higher levels of chronic inflammation that breaks down body systems. So the best guess that we have with some research behind it is that good relationships help us relieve stress. Are relationships really necessary for longevity? There are people who thrive on solitude, aren't there? There are. And that's a really good point. 21:04 Actually, we're all on a kind of continuum. Some of us are more introverted, and that's not a problem, and some of us are more extroverted. Introverts actually find having a lot of people around stressful, so they might only need one or two close people. And that's all they need, that's all they want, and that's just fine for them. So one size doesn't fit all when it comes to how many relationships you need to have a healthy life. 21:32 It doesn't have to be done with another human. We know that pets provide us with a great deal of comfort and joy, and pets can calm us down. Monitoring levels of happiness was part of the original Harvard study of adult development. But it took decades for the full significance of those findings to be accepted more widely. We've studied people who, in their 70s and 80s, for the first time, start 22:02 investing in relationships, having warmer friendships, even find love for the first time in their 70s or 80s. So it is never too late. 22:19 There are no guarantees here, but it helps if you do more than one thing. Eat right, move more, find a human or animal to talk to. If you live in a country where older people outnumber younger ones, then wider changes might already be in progress to ensure that your twilight years are invigorating and comfortable. A widely available way to delay, stop or reverse ageing isn't available yet, but scientists are working on it. 22:48 So until that happens, Robert Woldinger suggests that you... Take care of your body like you're going to need it for 100 years. 23:02 This edition of The Inquiry was produced by Louise Clark-Robotham and Ravi Naik. It was presented by me, Charmin Koziya, and the editor is Tara McDermott. 23:18 Anyone that helps people who are accused of sorcery are also blamed for being sorceress. In parts of Papua New Guinea, many still believe in witchcraft. It's so ingrained in them. And to be accused of sorcery can be a death sentence. People started stoning a woman there. And everyone watched and they stoned this woman to death. One brave woman not only escaped from persecution, You could see them looking at you as the bad person and anything could happen to you. 23:46 but found the courage to help others like her and stood up for the most vulnerable in society. I've started having a strength in me. I have to stand up for other women. When we save the survivors, they become part of the family. Listen to Monica Powless tell her extraordinary story on lives less ordinary from the BBC World Service. The courage just came. I don't know where it came from. Search for lives less ordinary wherever you found this podcast.

14:32 The first one involves being able to delay the process. It's known as Dorian Gray after the fictional character who didn't age while a hidden painting of him did. The second scenario is what we call the Wolverine or the fountain of youth. Taking old people and make them young. This is very, very hard. This will be the most complex things we can do. 14:59 And the third scenario, and this is a very exciting scenario, and we have some evidence that it works, is the Peter Pan scenario. Peter Pan didn't grow old. The idea that you'll take people when they're 20 or 30 and give them a treatment every few months or every year, and you'll basically erase their aging and let them age very, very slowly. 15:25 which also will mean probably that it'll pass their 115-year maximal potential lifespan. To boost progress, there are plans to expand the original group of 750 centenarians to 10,000. Biomarkers are molecules that indicate underlying illnesses, like cholesterol does for heart disease. But finding ones to do the same for aging is tricky. We need a bunch of biomarkers. 15:53 But we're looking for biomarkers that are doing two things. One, they are distinguishing between our chronological age and our biological age, because you know that some people look younger and some people look older than their age. The second thing that we need from those biomarkers to change when we start giving what we call gerotherapeutics, you know, the drugs that we're developing to slow their aging. 16:21 Some of those drugs that it's hoped will target the hallmarks of ageing are already approved by regulators and in widespread use, but they treat other conditions like preventing organs being rejected after a transplant. Dr. Nia Baselai is leading a drive to complete clinical trials in order to repurpose one called metformin, which is used to manage type 2 diabetes. Do you expect to see a major breakthrough in this area in your lifetime? 16:51 Yeah, absolutely. Look, we're overestimating what we can do in two years, but we're underestimating what we can do in five or ten years. And I think there's such a wave in this field because people discovered that aging is the next frontier. Rich people all over the world that are investing now in moonshot approaches to aging. So it's kind of out there and it will accelerate. 17:23 Part 4 Friends for life 17:31 People who are more connected to others and have warmer relationships live longer and stay healthier longer than people who are less well connected to others. 17:47 Robert Waldinger is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the ongoing Harvard study of adult development. We are in our 84th year. This is, as far as we know, the longest study of the same people from the time they were teenagers all the way into old age. And now we've started studying their children, who are all baby boomers. The idea was. 18:13 that we had spent so much effort studying what goes wrong in human life and that it would be helpful to start studying what goes right and study lives that are on track to do well. The study began in 1938 and followed Harvard students. A year later, 456 poor men growing up in Boston were added. 18:40 There were originally 724 participants, almost all have died, but there are a few, less than 50, who are all in their 90s, a few even over age 100, who are still alive. Some of the findings covered ground that's familiar to us now. Those with healthy diet and lifestyle choices tended to live longer, but there was something else. The finding that we were more surprised by... 19:09 was that having more relationships with other people, being more connected to the people around you and having warmer relationships actually kept people healthier as they went through life and it predicted that they would live longer than people who were less well connected to other people. It seems it's not just what you do, it's also who you know. So what we find is that if you

09:48 So in some individuals, as they get older, the actual size of the brain will get smaller. And that decrease in size will, or seems to occur specifically in areas of the brain that are important for cognitive function. So older adults may experience memory lapses or a decreased ability to multitask or even behavioral changes. They may become more anxious or feel depressed. But it's important to stress that not all older adults 10:18 will experience these changes in the same way. You might know a family where one or more of them are in their late 80s or 90s, defying average life expectancies. Kathy Slack says genetics will have a very limited role there. We know that about 20% of why some people live longer than others is related to their genetic makeup. But that's only 20%. 10:42 but it's also your life history, your experiences over your lifetime and the environments that you experience over your lifetime that will also have a major impact on how well you age. So if we were to take identical twins and put them in different environments, they would age differently. So how can we improve our chances of making it to 100? People are already living longer. 11:09 but they're not living healthier. And that's one thing that we really need to address. I'm afraid it's rather boring and old fashioned advice, but it's to try and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Try and keep active, try and maintain your activity levels as you get older. Eat well, not too much, but not too little. Limit your alcohol intake, don't smoke. All those boring bits of advice that public health officials have been... 11:37 trying to tell us to do for a very long time. So basically anything that helps yourselves to renew and repair. Try to get enough sleep too. Scientists are also researching the anti-aging benefits of regular periods of fasting. There are still a lot of things we don't yet know about old age because this area of research is, unlike its subjects, relatively young. I would say only the last sort of 30 to 40 years has it been under intense study. 12:06 I think historically we've focused more on disease process. So we have scientists working on cancer, we have scientists working on Alzheimer's disease. And there's a group of us now who are kind of thinking of those diseases more as diseases of ageing. And perhaps if we look at the underlying process that drives those each individual diseases, we could develop 12:36 new treatments that combat multiple diseases at the same time. 12:42 Part 3. Dorian, Wolverine and Peter. 12:49 daily in my lab, we can show that there are interventions that can target aging and delay it, and in certain cases also stop and reverse it. Okay, all those things are possible. 13:08 Dr. Neha Basili is director of the Institute of Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He's also scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research. It's difficult to know exactly how many people in the world are 100 years old or more. The United Nations Population Division estimated that in 2021 there were 573,000. It predicts that number will rise. 13:39 We want to prevent frailty. We want to intervene before ageing starts making you have diseases and getting your life miserable. So he's testing and developing potential ways to move more people towards their 100th birthday and beyond with the help of 750 centenarians and their extended families. We're doing many things. 14:03 But our major goal is to find longevity genes. Those are genes that slows their aging and allow them to be healthier for so much longer and use this knowledge in order to discover drugs that will do the same for the people who are not one of those who can become 100 years old, but those who are actually aging much quicker. His lab team are working on three scenarios for the future of aging.

05:02 And we want to build communities where people could live for 100 years, staying healthy, active, connected and live with a sense of security. So this is not the retirement community. So we are not working only for older people, for people of all ages. With so many people living for longer, there's an opportunity to plug employment gaps in a shrinking workforce. In Japan, people who start brand new jobs after retiring... 05:31 are said to be entering their second career or second life. It's thought that, for some, employment brings a sense of purpose and regular routine, which in turn helps wellbeing. That inspired another of the social experiments, establishing community workplaces with jobs in schools, government offices and nursing homes. 05:53 Hiroko Akiyama is 78 and willing to her second career. So I was a university professor for a long time. And when I reached 70, I started farming. I mean, actually, four people, including myself, have many different skills. We created a company, a relatively large farmlands, and started farming. I wanted to be a farmer when I was young. So this is... 06:22 the dream for a long time. Do you want to live to 100? Well, I'm not sure. Well, I mean, my mother passed away, I mean, three years ago at the age of 98. She had a very good life. I'm not sure I want to live, I mean, longer than her. I mean, I think 100 years is probably enough to live. I don't have, I mean, a strong desire to live, I mean, longer than 100 years. 06:58 Part 2. What is aging? 07:04 Aging is a very individualistic process, so no two people will age in the same way. That's Cathy Slack. She's a senior lecturer at the Aston Research Centre for Healthy Aging in Birmingham, England. Her research lab is focused on why we get old and whether that biological process can be slowed down. The external signs are well known, like wrinkles and grey hair. That's if you've got any hair left, but there's... 07:33 much more going on under our skin. Aging really affects all tissues in our bodies. And many people, as they age, will experience multiple aspects of what we call age-related decline. So across the spectrum, from your brain through to your reproductive system. 07:52 So all of those physiological manifestations of age that we observe in older adults are caused by underlying changes in the molecules and the cells that make up those tissues. Those changes are key features of the process of getting old. They're called the hallmarks of aging. Nine of them have been discovered so far. And they include a number of cellular processes, such as a loss of protein quality control in the cell. 08:22 dysfunctional mitochondria within the cell. So your mitochondria are parts of the cell that generate energy and they stop working quite as well as you get older. Cells also struggle to split and reproduce rapidly. Old ones build up and trigger inflammation in newer ones. So what we find is that as we get older, we start to see an increase in the incidence of... 08:50 these chronic diseases that are associated with inflammation, things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, lots of chronic diseases increase in their incidence as the population gets older. And that's because increased age is the major risk factor for developing these kinds of diseases. So as you get older, you are at more risk of developing things like diabetes. The ability of cells to regulate the supply of nutrients is central for them to function. 09:20 malfunctions, DNA gets damaged, stem cells are exhausted. We have stem cells in our bodies that help to repair and replenish dead or dying cells. And those stem cells become fewer in number as you get older. Cells within your body lose the ability to communicate effectively with one another. And that's important to maintain normal function within our tissues. There are also changes in the brain.

00:00 Anyone that tells people who are accused of sorcery are also blamed for being sorceress. Life's less ordinary from the BBC World Service. Real people with extraordinary stories. I've started having a strength in me. I have to stand up for other women. Find out more at the end of this podcast. 00:23 Welcome to The Inquiry. I'm Charmaine Koesier. Each week, one question, four experts and an answer. 00:36 It's Friday, January the 2nd. A baby is born in a small village on a southern Japanese island. Her name is Kane. The year is 1903. That's the same year that the first ever Tour de France bicycle race set off from Paris. It's also when the Ford Motor Company sold its first car. In April this year, Kane Tanaka died. She was 119 years old. 01:04 and had been officially recognised as the oldest person in the world. Her final years were spent in a nursing home, getting up at 6am solving math problems, playing board games, eating chocolate and drinking coffee and soda. There was a time when becoming a centenarian seemed impossible, but it's not anymore. So this week we're asking, how do you live to be 100? 01:33 Part 1 Second Life Now it is not unusual to live 100 years. 01:44 Higuroko Akiyama specialises in gerontology or the study of ageing. She's a former vice president of the Science Council of Japan and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo. Japan is one of the front runners of rapidly ageing societies. The average life expectancy of Japanese women is now 88 years and 82 years for men. 29% of the Japanese population. 02:13 More than one in four persons in Japan is aged 65 and older. Other countries with average life expectancies close to Japan's include Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Italy and Spain. Figures from Japan's Ministry of Health reveal that last year a record 86,510 of its citizens were aged 100 years or older. That's up by just over 6,000 people on the previous year. 02:42 A combination of several factors contributed to longevity in Japan. And one of them is universal health insurance system. We started in 1960s. And so people have easy access to health care. And secondly, Japanese are health conscious and have relatively healthy lifestyle. Many people have regular health checkups. 03:07 and Japanese do more physical activities in daily life. So there are preventative measures to reduce the risk of illnesses like cancer and heart disease. Japan also has one of the lowest obesity rates for developed countries. Food is another factor. Low fat intake and higher consumption of fish, vegetables, seaweed and green tea. And many Japanese believe 03:37 moderate is good in all aspects of life. People are living for longer, but Japan's overall population is shrinking. That's because birth rates have been declining for a while. Last year they hit record lows. The working age population has been steadily decreasing and the population aged 65 and older, and particularly aged 75 and older, increasing. 04:05 As the number of elderly grew, so did the realisation that older age groups have diverse needs. Various governments in Japan have acknowledged that, however efforts tended to adapt what already existed. So, kind of focusing on healthcare system and also pension system, and also housing, and also transportation system. The government, the society was built when the population was much younger. 04:33 And so we need to redesign both hard and soft infrastructure of society. So the government are doing a lot of things. A more radical approach was needed. Dr. Hiroko Akiyama and her team of researchers set up several social experiments in rural and urban locations to explore ways of keeping people living independently for longer. We are trying to redesign communities, for meeting the needs of a highly-aged society.

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21:26 and how we use them, at least in the short term. And maybe that's the lesson here. He uses power to log on to chat GPT and ask it for recipe suggestions. It takes even more power to use AI to produce funny pictures or folk songs in the style of Taylor Swift. And that's power that could be used for something else. Or even better, considering how much electricity we still produce from carbon-heavy fuels, not at all. 21:56 There's no doubt that AI will produce incredible breakthroughs for the planet and for all of us living here. But that's some way off in the future, and in the meantime we're facing a climate crisis. Perhaps our own human version of superintelligence will be to learn to use the power we do have more wisely. A final word from our first witness, strategic futurist Mark van Rijmenen. 22:24 You're not going to stop the development of AI. So we'll have to find novel ways. And if there's not enough sustainable energy, then I'm afraid we'll have to resort to other means. But I'm not worried that there won't be enough energy. There will be because it's too important to stop this, if we ever could. The inquiry from the BBC World Service was presented by David Baker. It was produced by Louise Clark, researched by Katie Morgan. The editor is Tara McDermott. 22:54 and it was mixed by Craig Boardman.

And so the dynamic is quite interesting for poor countries that are energy-scarce that the power requirements of AI and digital infrastructure can be less of a threat and more of an opportunity to actually build out this infrastructure and start plugging these energy access gaps. And even better, bearing in mind what our first two witnesses have said about the environmental costs of AI. 17:41 The energy that many African countries can offer is green. On the African continent, there's quite a lot of renewable potential, whether that's solar energy or wind power. In Eastern Africa, like in Kenya and Horn of Africa, we have a lot of geothermal power. And so a lot of digital companies have set for themselves pretty stringent carbon targets. And so they're hungry for clean energy. And there's a massive clean energy opportunity in Africa. So you could really connect these two dots together. 18:11 And we're seeing this already. A country like Kenya is actively trying to pitch itself as a destination for data center companies. And it's not only the big US-based tech giants that are getting in on the action. And one thing that is quite interesting about the African data center markets is that there are quite a lot of African companies that are at the forefront of this build out. So it's not just the big global multinationals. It's a mix of different players that are trying to get a piece of the pie. 18:40 as well as boosting investment in energy. More data centers in the continent, she says, will benefit the online life of the people who live there. For a lot of African users, when you log on to your Google inbox or you turn on your Netflix, you're downloading data from a server, a physical server that is most likely not on the African continent. It's somewhere in a different geography entirely. And the farther you are from a local data center that's housing your content, the slower it is. 19:08 Some users will be familiar with the dial that tells you loading. Loading. 8%, 10%, oh, back to 4%. Oh, wait, I'm waiting for my video to load. It's taking forever. If I'm in Kenya and my local device is sending a request all the way to Canada or Europe or whatever, wherever the Netflix server that contains my movie is, and then sending it back, it's quite inefficient. It's more expensive. 19:38 And having more local data centres will benefit businesses too. These days to be a modern business you're dealing with a lot of data, a lot of digital operations. You probably need to take advantage of cloud services to store your data or to access some digital services. And so as these digitally connected companies expand they just need this local capacity. It's actually quite a big dividend to have these local data centres. 20:05 Obviously, if you have more productive businesses that are taking advantage of these technological tools, they create more jobs, there are more opportunities. So there are all of these downstream overflow effects. This is always a big trade-off, is meeting the challenge of energy scarcity and energy poverty while investing in these productive centers, right? I think for many African countries, while trying to debate this balance of... 20:30 diverting infrastructure dollars, infrastructure investments into these new sectors. I think what is really, really important in that balance are two things. One is everywhere in Africa, there's extreme energy poverty. So these are households that just have no power. So that kind of extreme energy poverty is a social imperative. And so we need to address that. 20:56 So to come back to our question, will we have enough energy to power AI? Well, in the short term, it looks like we will. And as we've heard, there's a big opportunity here for Africa to be part of the solution. Our main challenge, though, is to make sure that as much as possible of the electricity AI data centers use comes from renewables. But looking further ahead, as data centers get even more energy hungry, we may have to limit what they do.

It exists, but it won't cover the whole country, or it exists, but it won't always be providing the reliable power that people need. And just as people in Southeast Asia need more electricity to run air conditioning systems, the more the world uses AI... 13:29 the more energy it needs? There's two reasons we're going to need more energy for AI. The first is that some of the bigger AI models are going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and need more energy to train and to run. But the second and probably actually the more important one is that we are likely to use AI models more and more and more. And therefore, the total amount of energy we need for them is going to increase. 13:58 And that could lead to bottlenecks. In some countries, data centres are already using a big chunk of the electricity that's available. And so a really great example is in Ireland. About 30% of the whole country's electricity supply is used for data centres. And that's massive and means you can't use the electricity for something else. And even if a country's electricity grid can cope now, can it cope in the future? It might increase by 50% in the next five years. 14:28 and might double over longer timeframes. So a significant increase over where we are today. It's important to remember two things, though. One is that the energy for data centers isn't just driven by AI. It's also driven by you wanting to stream video or load websites and store your data on the cloud. So that is driving a lot of the growth. Sam sees an opportunity here, though. That extra demand could create an opening for new countries to enter the energy market. 14:58 Countries where there's lots of opportunity for renewables, so where there's lots of wind, lots of opportunity for solar, they have great potential to expand their clean energy production. And many of those countries will be in Africa. There is an opportunity for countries in sub-Saharan Africa to generate their own electricity to use renewables. The real challenge that they face is... 15:25 the investment in infrastructure and the investment in transmission, and how do we actually unlock that so that they have access to cheap, clean electricity? It may sound paradoxical, but one way countries in Africa could deliver more electricity to their own citizens would be to attract some of those energy-hungry data centres to the continent. Our fourth witness is Rosemontiso. 15:54 research director of the Energy for Growth Hub, a think tank that's focused on solving global energy poverty. Africa accounts for less than 1% of global data center capacity, and actually the total number of data centers in Africa is roughly equivalent to the total number in Mumbai, so one city in India, so very much lagging on the global scale. So very big concentration in South Africa. 16:18 And South Africa is also where the really big major, what we call hyperscalers. So this is Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google. They have really large data center footprint in South Africa and nowhere else really in Africa. We do have other centers of data center capacity are in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, some North African countries, just basically correlates to where it is. 16:45 pretty, the more productive economies in Africa, where there's quite a lot of local demand. So people using the internet, enterprises using the internet, which then creates demand for these data centers. And building more data centers, she says, could bring about big improvements in a country's electricity infrastructure. Part of my work is to try and see the opportunity. So you can actually use this electricity-hungry data centers to act as an anchor customer for your utility. So now utilities have a customer that... 17:13 uses a lot of electricity, drives revenues, and then improves the quality of power for the entire network.

08:56 How can we use alternative energy sources, renewable energy, such as solar, such as thermal energy. But in actual fact, we simply aren't increasing the amount of renewable sources into the grid to meet the increasing demands that are particularly coming from the technology sector. So what's filling that gap at the moment? It's really been a return to traditional non-renewable sources like coal and of course 09:23 nuclear, which has now been the focus, particularly in the tech sector. There's even talk of seeing nuclear reactors sitting alongside data centers in order to. 09:35 is that the AI industry will start to think about sustainability in a much deeper way. We don't have sustainable AI practices at the moment. We've actually got the opposite. We've seen a push to greater scale towards this sort of monstrously large AI infrastructures and models and that has come with this increase in energy demand which comes along with an increased demand for the water to cool that infrastructure. 10:04 But we are also seeing that these infrastructures require enormous amounts of essentially minerals that are in high demand from lithium to rare earth. So you're seeing a whole range of environmental impacts at a time when already suffering from extraordinary climate instability. So in this sense, AI is actually contributing to these problems at a time when we really have to be thinking much more carefully about our water and energy use. 10:35 Part three, the energy matrix. Electricity is really a powerful source for standard of living. And so as the standard of living across the world rises, particularly in less developed countries, the demand for electricity is really increasing. Our third witness is Sam Young, the AI manager at Energy Systems Catapult, a UK-based consultancy that's working towards a net zero future. 11:05 He says it's not just AI that's going to be using more and more energy. It's all of us as we enjoy a higher standard of living. So we see in South East Asia, lots more demand for electricity because lots more people want air conditioning. Everyone's having to build more and more and more power capacity and transmission capacity to cope with that. We should be able to meet that demand. We're already using three times more electricity than we were in the 1980s. And for the most part, it feels like we're managing. 11:35 In theory, we could generate enough electricity to meet all the planet's energy demands. In practice though, the business of generating power and getting it to where we need it is a lot more complex. There's a few important things to realise when you're thinking about producing energy. The first is that you need to produce the energy and transmit it. And the further you transmit it, the more it kind of leaks out. 12:02 of the wires, so you don't want to be transmitting it all the way around the world. There'll be a lot wasted. But also you need to produce it at exactly the right time that you need to use it. Some forms of energy generation, like coal or oil or nuclear, you can turn on and off when you like. But other forms of generation, often the renewables, like wind and solar, the wind is either blowing or it isn't. The sun is either shining or it isn't. And so it's the way you're trying to use it. 12:31 and when you're trying to use it, are really important. The issue is that the generation of power is not equal around the world. There is no such thing as the global power grid. Each country generally has their own power grid and in some places in the world, like Europe, all of those national power grids are really connected together. And so electricity that's generated in Sweden by hydropower can be sent along wires. 13:00 all the way down to Italy, for example. But in other parts of the world, you don't have the same connections and the country just has its own power grid. And in some parts of the world, you don't even have a reliable power grid at all.

04:24 coming up and helping us finding breakthroughs for nuclear fusion or improving solar panels. Now if you look a lot further in the future where we have artificial super intelligence, the AI might come up with finding ways to extract energy from thin air. And that sounds very much like science fiction, but who knows? You know, if we have an intelligent being that is infinitely more intelligent than human species, anything is possible. If we achieve artificial super intelligence... 04:52 then I think there will lie an age of abundance in front of us, where we have technology that's vastly outperforms humanity from an intelligence perspective, and all our problems in the world will be resolved by this intelligence. 05:09 Part Two, AIs Need for Power. AI is really all around us doing things like detecting your face to unlock your phone, through to making predictions on your email to filter your spam, all the way through to large language models that will attempt to help you do your homework or write your next set of work documents. So it's really something that has become part of the infrastructure of everyday life. 05:38 AI's presence in our lives is going to give us a very bright future indeed. The challenge though is that the computers that run AI algorithms already use huge amounts of power. One estimate is that by 2027, AI could be using the same amount of electricity per year as a country the size of Netherlands. Our second witness is Kate Crawford, a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 06:05 who researches the physical effects the growth of AI is having on the planet. The common story is that it's a very immaterial set of mathematical calculations, just so many algorithms in the cloud, if you will. In fact, it's an enormous material infrastructure that's really planetary in scale. And certainly what we've seen in the last two to three years is an enormous increase in this sort of material footprint of artificial intelligence. 06:34 through strings of large-scale data centres like large-scale warehouses without windows and inside them you have these gigantic computational stacks. There are something like between 9,000 and 12,000 of those data centres around the world. And in many of them are those computational stacks that Kate mentioned. These do all the calculations that AI involves and they're full of what are called GPUs, superpowered computer processors, 07:03 that are especially good at running AI algorithms. And just like our laptops, they give off heat. Data centers are quite commonly placed by a river or near a water source in order to actually cool down the very heat-intensive processes, the GPUs that are inside them. And all of that needs power, both to run those processing chips and to pump the water that keeps them cool. A lot of power. 07:32 Depending which estimate you believe, AI is already using somewhere between 8 to 10 percent of the world's electricity budget. I mean, that's just enormous if we think about it as the amount of energy being used here. And that's only going to increase as we keep on developing what's called generative AI. The kind of AI that can chat with us online or which can create images or even write music from prompts we feed into it. 08:00 At the 2024 Davos World Economic Forum, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said that new AI models will use far more energy than we previously thought. And Kate agrees. AI is headed for an energy crisis. Generative AI systems consume vastly more power than expected. All of that energy is coming from our existing grid and our current. 08:29 are struggling to cope. There's no way to resolve this without a breakthrough in terms of how we are generating energy. Ideally, of course, the energy we generate to run those AI data centres will come from renewables. We're already facing a big climate crisis without AI putting more carbon into the atmosphere. But that may not be possible in the short term. There has been an increasing focus on

00:00 Welcome to the inquiry on the BBC World Service with me, David Baker. Each week, one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. 00:12 Feel underneath your laptop after you've been using it for a while. Chances are it's warm. That's heat produced by the thousands of calculations that your laptop is doing to keep that spreadsheet up to date, display your emails, and yes, listen to this programme on the BBC World Service. And even though there are pretty much no moving parts in a modern laptop, all that activity needs energy. 00:40 which is why your battery seems to drain so quickly when you've been hard at work. 00:46 Now imagine a network of millions of computers around the world, all connected and working together to produce not spreadsheets, but artificial intelligence algorithms that could help stop global warming, do the jobs we humans hate to do, and even develop medicines that could cure everyone of cancer. How much power would we need to operate that? 01:11 not to mention to run the massive cooling systems that we'd need to stop it overheating. So for the inquiry this week, we're asking, will we have enough energy to power AI? 01:27 Part 1. AI changing the world. 01:33 Artificial intelligence is the name we give to super advanced computer programs that can do much more than what we're used to using computers for. They can process huge amounts of data and work out ways to do things that are far beyond the capability of the human brain. And they're already delivering amazing breakthroughs. Our first witness is Mark van Rymannum, a strategic futurist based in Sydney, Australia. 02:00 who researches the effect emerging technologies are having on the world. There are numerous ways how we already benefit from AI right now. A clear use case is healthcare. Google launched MetGemini, which is a sort of a chat GPT for the healthcare industry, which would allow doctors to have sort of an assistant to look over their shoulders when they make analysis of what's wrong with the patient. At the same time, we see AI being developed such as DeepMind AlphaFold, which is able to predict... 02:30 how proteins fold. And that is very, very useful to create personalized medication where we are able to move health care from a passive reactive health care system to a preventative, proactive health care system. So there are a lot of benefits where we can use AI to create new solutions for the problems we face today already. DeepMind's Alpha Fold is an artificial intelligence program and a great example of the astonishing benefits we can look forward to from the growth of AI. 02:59 One doctor we spoke to researching this programme compared it to Newton discovering gravity. And AI may also be able to help us solve the biggest problem facing the world right now. Global warming. There are ways where we can see AI already helping today to fight climate change. We have now also availability of tools to predict where disasters will strike. To a much higher degree of certainty, we can now predict weather events almost to the meter and a second. 03:28 which helps us prepare for if a disaster is striking due to climate change, we can better prepare and warn citizens how to go about that. So there I already see quite a lot of examples of how the AI today can help combat climate change. If we fast forward a little bit further, then we see the integration of quantum computers. And quantum computers together with AI will help us solve the really, really big problems when it comes to fighting climate change. And beyond that, Mark says, 03:55 is the possibility of what's known as artificial superintelligence, something that could transform the lives of everyone on the planet. This is basically intelligence which is as intelligent, or vastly more intelligent, than the entire human species. And this is where things become scary, as well as very, very interesting. Because now we have a technology that we as humans can no longer understand. But also, we'll offer solutions to sort of the world's biggest problems we have.

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For some people the thought of being underground in a confined space and worrying about getting out in the event of flooding or a fire is just too off-putting. It would also need for us to take into consideration 19:11 the psychological impacts of living underground because people might feel a sense of isolation or claustrophobia or the absence of direct connection to the natural world might make them, you know, more prone to depression. There are other limitations or disadvantages. For example, 19:34 the fact of having limited outdoor space and particularly natural space, natural access to the sky. Then there are the negative associations. The Oscar-winning film Parasite tells the story of a Korean family living in a basement bunker in Seoul. The characters are fictional but the problems it depicts are very real. Around 200,000 people live in so-called Banjia homes in Seoul. 20:02 making up around 5% of households in the capital. Occupants are vulnerable to the risk of flooding, poor ventilation and insect infestations. These problems are fixed in modern developments, but the difficulty of lingering negative perceptions is hard to resolve. Living underground historically has been associated with a lack of resources to live above ground in large cities. We see that, for example, that 20:32 people that live underground are the ones that cannot afford to pay rent or mortgage elsewhere. And they are usually spaces that are less well ventilated and lighted than others. That doesn't need to be the case, but that is the way it has happened in history and has provided for this large perception of the deficiencies of living underground. Humans have been designed to live above ground. 21:02 We are wired to have an attraction to natural light and natural ventilation and the natural world. And the other thing is that we are animals of custom. We like traditions and it is hard to make changes to our habits and habitually we live above ground. So adapting and adopting new habits to live underground is also an enormous... 21:32 transition an enormous challenge to consider. So if you were to plan a city now from scratch, would you put the shopping malls underground and the offices, or would you put the homes underground or a mixture of both? What we currently have is mostly shopping and offices and casinos and transportation hubs in most of the cities that have explored this option of partial living underground. 22:00 But I think that towards the future we need to conceive of more robust models that would also integrate residential use. In short, we need to keep developing ideas to make underground living work. This is uncharted territory to a large extent. We need to be creative. We need to push the boundaries of knowledge. And we need to be daring and courageous in this exploration 22:30 breakthrough with very good models of healthy living underground, I think it will be a phenomenal contribution to the multifaceted way in which we need to conceive living. Now we return to our question. Is our future underground? As more people gravitate towards cities we need more space for people to travel, work, shop and enjoy leisure time. 22:59 The temperature in underground spaces is easier to control. We can stream natural light into them and even grow vegetation. The problems we have yet to conquer are mainly ones of perception and of course finding the money to do it. Is our future underground? The short answer is that in the face of climate change and overcrowding, we really don't have a choice but to start digging deep. 23:26 This inquiry was presented by me, Tania Beckett, produced by Ravi Naik, researched by Matt Toulson and edited by Tara McDermott. The programme was mixed by Craig Boardman.

14:11 beautiful public park that can be visited year round, no matter if it's day or night. Daylight would be brought in by fibre optic cables and it would actually facilitate green growth underneath as well. The low line is an attempt to deal with not just the problem of the lack of natural light that results from being underground, but also the benefits we miss out on by being separated from the natural world. 14:38 And if it's possible to provide the right conditions for plants to grow underground, like the plans for the lowline, why not take that a step further and build underground farms to secure food supplies no matter what the weather is like on the surface? Those farms already exist and Antonia has visited two of them. I've been, for instance, in the Rowing Underground project in London that is being developed 15:08 had this idea, let's grow some food underground in this old form of bunker that's no longer used. And they're now a very successful business, growing food, microgreens in these spaces and they're fully LED lit. And we also have a prototype in Switzerland that I've just visited recently, where also the same concept applies. I've also heard of many mushroom farms that are growing underneath. 15:37 Seoul for instance also has one in a metro station where they grow greens in the metro station and can freshly produce salads and smoothies for the commuters. A similarly groundbreaking project in France in the cities of Strasbourg, Bordeaux and Paris also plans to grow food underground for inhabitants. It's even been suggested that disused coal mines in the UK could be converted to underground farms. 16:05 Cultivating crops not only cuts the carbon emissions generated by transporting supplies into the city, underground farms have no insects or birds that can destroy crops, and it uses less space and water than growing vegetables above ground. And there are other wins for the environment. Underground spaces as a whole need less heating and air conditioning because the temperature is more stable throughout the year than it is above ground. 16:35 Not only that, whilst they take more energy to construct because of all the digging, once built they don't need as many repairs. There's no wear and tear as such in terms of there's no facade or interior works that really need a lot of maintenance. Of course you have to kind of look at structurally and sort of do the normal asset management, but it has a different life cycle than the buildings on the surface. 17:03 So from that point of view, it also has an advantage in that sense. Time for our fourth expert witness. Part four. Can you dig it? 17:24 We have a world that is urbanizing. It's becoming an urban world. The majority of the population is living in cities now and in urban settlements of different kinds. So the more efficient use of land we can get, the better we can accommodate this growing population. Urban density brings opportunities and advantages that can be facilitated by living underground. 17:53 It is a new frontier and for the most daring architects and planners and engineers out there, an opportunity to make lasting contributions to the well-being of humanity. Clara Arraza-Bowell is Programme Director of the Urban Studies and Planning Programme at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland. 18:17 She points out that whilst underground buildings can have advantages because they're protected from the elements, both construction and upkeep are expensive. Cost will be higher building underground and it might require greater technological complexities and innovation. And then issues of maintenance, repairs and systems of waterproofing, ventilation and the keeping of structural integrity. 18:45 my proof more challenging underground. Part of the design and planning also needs to take account of how time underground may affect our psychological health.

09:22 many many cities have underground facilities where they are to be safe, to avoid bombing. People now are seeing those spaces either as a touristic feature or to use those spaces to do something else inside like keep wines or to put restaurants. It's a little bit fashionable, trendy to do that, to go there, to live in bizarre environment but... 09:49 It's quite interesting to refurbish with the modern taste those spaces. We are then, it seems, quite used to existing at subterranean levels, at least for limited periods of time. But as cities become more crowded and global temperatures continue to rise, we may be encouraged to do it more often and for longer. But you do think that going underground is a solution to the threat from climate change? 10:17 Climate change has various effects. It could be flooding, it could be fires, but also in summertime in our cities, it's too humid and hot, and people prefer to maybe to be inside with climatized spaces. When it's raining, it's the same. People prefer to be inside, to shop inside, to walk inside from the subway. So I think rain and humidity are an important factor for the future to be considered. 10:46 and the underground space is a solution for that. The case for spending more time beneath the Earth's surface is certainly becoming more compelling. Montreal's underground city was developed 60 years ago. Now, with climate change becoming ever more pressing, how are architects in the 21st century developing ideas for a more challenging era ahead? Time for our third expert witness. 11:16 It all started with me asking my friends and family to write letters to my daughter, Coco, sharing their experiences and giving her advice for her life ahead. The idea blossomed into Dear Daughter from the BBC World Service. The podcast where, with the help of your letters, I'm creating a handbook to life full of advice for daughters everywhere. Listen now by searching for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Dear Daughter. 11:46 Part 3 I saw the light 11:52 My name is Antonia Conaro. I work at Amborg Engineering, an engineering consulting firm based in Switzerland and I'm also the co-chair of the ITA committee on underground space. One of the most daring plans for underground construction is in South Korea. The vision for the light walk is a subterranean thoroughfare over half a kilometer long, carved out beneath a large area of green space in the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. 12:19 A crystalline glass roof above it will diffuse natural light into the spaces below. Seoul is densely developed and has too little park land for so many inhabitants. And they want to kind of have a state-of-the-art park like New York has Central Park or London has Hyde Park. They want to have this light walk park, but at the same time it will have several other functions. 12:49 integrate with the underground lines with the very extensive metro system of Seoul and it will also create recreational areas for people underground. Let's say when the weather is too humid or too hot or too windy or whatever it might be on the surface they can be in these lower line park-like spaces. 13:12 A glass roof can help solve one of the persistent problems of underground spaces, which is they lack natural light. We know that not enough sunlight is bad for our psychological and physical well-being, so modern projects have been using some clever new techniques to tackle the problem, including reflection, refraction and fibre optic cables. But there is another significant challenge and that is digging below earth requires 13:41 money. Lots of it. In New York's Manhattan, plans for the world's first underground park on the Lower East Side, the Low Line, began in 2019 but were put on hold a year later due to lack of funds. But there are hopes that this ground-breaking project will be revived and even, dare I say it, take seed. And they've tested various ways to grow plants underneath and it will actually be

04:52 So it's an ideal place and out of the population of, give or take a couple of thousand, there are probably two thirds of them live year round underground. And what's it like for them living underground? What are the rooms like? What's the interior like? And how do they get access to sunlight? I would say it's delightful. The rock has a slight orangey marbling to it. So the natural rock finish is quite attractive. 05:20 They tend to have the living rooms very near the entrance, possibly with some windows so they get natural light in the places they'll be spending most of the day. And then beyond that, storage and bedrooms without natural light but in an ambient temperature which in the outside temperature of 45 is very restful. Coober Pedy's homely feel is partly due to the fact that families have their living quarters underground. 05:46 There are however many cities around the world in which residents make their homes above ground but engage in many everyday activities beneath the earth's surface. Time for our second expert witness. Part 2. We built this city. 06:06 Over 60 countries around the world have a metro or underground transport system, and in many cases the subway stations are connected to a wider underground world of shops or the basements of office buildings. In practical terms, these allow commuters to exit a train and walk directly to their place of work without going up in a lift or escalator to ground level first. It allows the daily commute, work and even picking up something to eat for dinner. 06:35 to be a much more connected experience. It's not only a place to walk from the subway to the basement of the building. It's also a place to shop, to have fun. So the underground space is a part of the city and you need to plan it that way. My name is Jacques Bessner. I'm an architect and urban planner and general manager of the ACUS, the Associated Research Center for the Underground Space. There is, of course, 07:04 Another reason that we may want to spend more time underground. And that is climate. In eastern Canada, winters are often bitingly cold, with temperatures sometimes dropping to minus 30 degrees Celsius. In the 1980s and 90s, Jacques worked for Montreal's government, arranging for property developers to link their projects to the city's underground network. Montreal's underground city stretches for over 30 kilometres. 07:34 and is home to hundreds of shops and restaurants, not to mention several museums. About half a million people use it every day. Jacques says that such underground spaces are designed very carefully in order that they feel safe and agreeable, so that people are encouraged to stay there as long as possible, and of course, given plenty of opportunity to spend money. If it's a corridor, it should be as large as possible. 08:02 with a signing system very user-friendly people could feel lost inside those spaces especially if you don't have things on the wall so signage is very very important to know where are the exits and you should avoid square corridors, avoid doors hidden on the walls. People could be there to attack you by example so you should design those spaces 08:31 having in mind the safety of users. Modern technology and building materials mean that underground shopping malls can now be constructed without endangering existing buildings. And this is not always the case in cities with longer histories. When London's underground transport system began to be constructed over a century ago, the ground needed to be excavated at a very deep level so as not to disrupt the buildings already above it. 08:59 It's often not possible in older cities to connect underground stations to the basement of buildings because the levels are simply too far apart. What these and other historic cities do have, however, is a wealth of fascinating dugouts ripe for creative development. Since the Middle Age to the Cold War era,

00:00 Where to Be a Woman is the podcast celebrating the best of women's wellbeing. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Welcome to The Inquiry with me, Tanya Beckett. One question, four expert witnesses and an answer. Today, just over half of the world's eight billion inhabitants live in cities. 00:27 The United Nations estimates that that number will rise to more than two-thirds of the world's population within the next quarter of a century. Let's just say that again. By 2050, seven in ten people will live in urban environments. The vast percentage of the increase will happen in Asia and Africa, where the population is growing at its fastest and economic growth is more rapid. Cities will become increasingly overcrowded. 00:56 Not only that, because they're hotter than their rural surroundings, climate change will in some cases make the temperatures too unbearable or costly to live in. And as we use more energy to cool buildings above ground, this will add further to our carbon footprint. But there is a possible solution. And that is to expand cities not upwards or outwards, but downwards. This week on The Inquiry we're asking... 01:25 Is our future underground? Part one, going underground. 01:35 In the centre of modern Turkey lies a vast region of otherworldly beauty. 5,000 square kilometres of surreal landscape with cone-shaped rock formations that stretch further than the eye can see. These fairy chimneys, as they're often described, were created millions of years ago when ash tumbled from the sky after a storm of volcanic activity. Look more closely and... 02:04 carved on the sides of these naturally created peaks, you will see they are honeycombed with doorways. If we wander in through one of the entrances, a whole world of man-made passages opens up. One such underground complex is the city of Derinkuyu. It's a network of tunnels and rooms burrowed 85 meters below ground. 02:30 For centuries these subterranean labyrinths have been used as safe hiding places, the people inside blocking out their enemies with huge rocks. The millstone, which would roll across the entrance passage, and because that was being rolled from inside, then it really couldn't be opened from outside. And then they had a maze of side passages so that if people were attacking, then there were holes in the approach passage where you could poke them with. 03:00 presumably sharp sticks and worse, in order to protect the occupants from the conflict. Our first expert witness is a lifelong enthusiast of historic dwellings beneath the earth's surface. I'm Martin Dixon. My passion is man-made and man-used underground space. So largely through a charity called Subterranea Britannica, I've had the privilege of exploring underground space on every continent. 03:26 Martin says the tunnels of Derinkuyu in Turkey seem to have been inhabited for longer than just very brief spells. So these were built not for permanent residency as far as we can ascertain but to protect the residents and their livestock from conflict above ground. They would have wells for water, they would have sort of light shafts so they had a certain amount of natural light, they would have stables and mangers for livestock. 03:55 and they were very well protected. The idea of retreating to caves in times of trouble is, of course, nothing new. Since the beginning of human history, people have sought out natural shelters not just to flee predators and enemies, but also to escape hostile weather conditions. A century ago, in the outback of southern Australia, miners who came to dig for precious opals built a whole new world below ground to escape the searing heat. 04:24 Today the one and a half thousand inhabitants of Coober Pedy live, shop, visit bars and even worship in churches underground in what the locals call dugouts. A consequence of Coober Pedy being in the middle of the Australian outback is that in the summer in particular it is extremely hot, I mean mid to high 40s. In Coober Pedy the underground temperature is probably 21, 22 year round.

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20:14 plans are forthcoming. And it has agreed that some cleaning and organisation can take place for the convenience of visitors. So what might that all mean for Menkaure's pyramid? Using materials that are not going to damage the monument in any way is also a key component to any restoration project. Some people think if you can do anastylosis, which is basically looking at what's fallen down and putting it back in its place… 20:42 that is fine, but then adding to the building is not fine, while some people will say, well, if it helps in the greater stability, then one can add to that particular monument, but make it very clear that these are additions that are modern and have nothing to do with the original materials and the original structure. And Professor Ickram says any restoration work done on the pyramid has to be reversible. In case you get it wrong is one reason. 21:10 And sometimes if you're using, you know, in the seventies and eighties, people were using cement every which way. And now you need to get rid of it. And in some places use lime. And in certain instances, it's very difficult to get rid of that or various other materials that have been used in the past. So you end up damaging the monument when you try and reverse something like that, if it's cement, for example. Absolutely. So the whole point... 21:38 What we are supposed to do as restorers or conservators is to protect the monument and keep its inherent integrity, maintain that as far as is possible. These are complex and sensitive questions. Not just how any work should be carried out, but also who should have a voice in the debate. These pyramids are a world heritage site, but as we've heard they're also crucial to Egypt's economy. 22:07 So who are the pyramids for? That is a very good question. I mean, I am an archaeologist, and I would say my first duty would be to the monument. But then, of course, monuments are a very complicated thing, and should one do it for tourists and tourist revenue? But I don't think you should ever do anything that will compromise the safety of the monument. It's a very complicated issue because 22:36 We cannot only look to the dead, we have to look to the living and their well-being and economic well-being. 22:47 And so we return to our question, what's going on with the pyramids? 22:57 With something as precious as the pyramids, there's a risk that actions taken in haste could forever alter these monuments that have captivated human imagination for more than four millennia. We heard compelling words from Hebe Salah pointing out the centrality of the pyramids to Egypt's Aeneid economy. But we also heard from Salima Ikram of the dangers involved in restoring monuments without necessarily knowing what they looked like in the first place. 23:29 The irony at the bottom of all this is that the right course of action may simply be to do nothing for the time being. 23:40 You've been listening to The Inquiry with me, Gary O'Donoghue. The producer was Louise Clark, the researcher was Matt Toulson, and the editor is Tara McDermott. Technical production was by Nicky Edwards.