While not about digital technology, the lessons presented are valuable. The technology of refrigeration changed every aspect of our lives — what we eat, when we eat, where we eat and much more. It created industries and jobs that we never could have imagined. From the story of frozen concentrated orange juice to refrigerating bananas, we learn why we can now eat avocados, and about the high technology of clothing developed for people who work in subzero freezers. Refrigeration changed our diets, our health, our economy and international trade, and it had a profound impact on all aspects of our environment — from the development of the refrigerated truck and rail car, to the use of refrigerants and their effect on the atmosphere.
Why read this book and think about refrigeration? Because the growth of today’s high technology is having an even more profound impact on our lives than some of us ever imagined. From this perspective, it is easy to see lessons to be learned, and questions to be answered and discussed with our students. We need to talk and think about our race to AI, supercomputers, quantum computing and their environmental and sociological effects. We’ve seen some of these already, far too many to cover here. But from phantom cellphone vibration syndrome (the idea that our cellphones are ringing when they aren’t) to the fact that many people end their night and begin their day by checking their cellphones, we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness noted the unpredicted, but now extreme, harm the extensive use of phones and other electronic devices has done to our youth. It stimulated discussions followed by action that changed how phones are used in schools. He documented the situation created by new forms of news reporting that created unfounded parental fear of harm, causing parents to unnecessarily “Bubble Wrap” their children (my words) and keep them from fully experiencing life. Haidt is concerned that taking away our children’s ability to play freely, and allowing them to live on their phones, changes how children grow up and mature in very destructive ways, and I think this discussion needs to continue.
Two more items to keep you up at night and make you want to create new lesson plans. One is the recent story in The New York Times, "How A.I. Is Changing the Way the World Builds Computers." Many lesson plans can be built around some concerns it raises. New chips are going into new supercomputers, “a collection of up to 100,000 chips wired together in buildings known as data centers to hammer away at making powerful A.I. systems.” The energy needed for these increased computing demands is enormous. “OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, hopes to build about five facilities that would collectively consume more electricity than the roughly three million households in Massachusetts.”
Computing power consumption is not limited to the U.S., and it creates cooling demands never seen before (here we are back at refrigeration). Worldwide demand for increased computing power has forced “tech giants to hunt for the electricity to power them and the water for cooling systems to keep the chips from frying in their own heat.” This hunt for energy and cooling capacity is relatively new, but the demand graph is steeply vertical in the foreseeable future.
The New York Times article makes clear that this is all new, and it’s changing every aspect of the computer industry: “Back in 2006, Google opened its first data center in The Dalles, Ore., spending an estimated $600 million to complete the facility. In January, OpenAI and several partners announced a plan to spend roughly $100 billion on new data centers, beginning with a campus in Texas. They plan to eventually pump an additional $400 billion into this and other facilities across the United States.”
We educators need to discuss this unpredictable change with our students as they look forward to leading their world. In our classrooms, we have to ask where we will get this energy, and at what cost. What are the predictable and unpredictable effects? Combined with the growth of electric cars and trucks and the general increase in consumer power use, we have a problem! The solutions to these problems will reshape our lives in ways that could make the effect of refrigeration and prior technologies seem insignificant.
Among the energy solutions is using nuclear energy as a power source. An October 2024 New York Times article "Hungry for Energy, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Turn to Nuclear Power" starts: “Large technology companies are investing billions of dollars in nuclear energy as an emissions-free source of electricity for artificial intelligence and other businesses.” Again, as part of our high-technology studies, discussions with our students about the use of nuclear energy are vital to them making informed decisions.
And last, read Thomas L. Friedman’s April 2, 2025, New York Times piece "I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America." He outlines his visit to China’s “massive new research center, roughly the size of 225 football fields, built by the Chinese technology giant Huawei,” where he saw the future. “Built in just over three years, it consists of 104 individually designed buildings, with manicured lawns, connected by a Disney-like monorail, housing labs for up to 35,000 scientists, engineers and other workers, offering 100 cafes, plus fitness centers and other perks designed to attract the best Chinese and foreign technologists.” This is a lesson plan topic about economics and trade. The concept that “everything is connected to everything” is something I repeat and discuss every day in my classes.
There are many more examples of topics like these. Technology does not exist in the abstract. We are linked in new ways, and we live in a world of rapid change and ever-increasing information availability. As digital educators, we have to take the time to talk about what we are doing and what we are teaching students. An unpredictable and brave new world is being created in which we think nothing of the possibility that our computers are smarter than we are, or will be in just a few years.
The work we do now, and that our students will do shortly, will have far-reaching and often unpredictable effects on life on the planet. We need to talk about it before it’s too late!
