Created by Joel Gladd

My name is Joel Gladd, and I initially built this site to help with difficult conversations about AI and the environment. The Digital Life Calculator is my attempt to bring some clarity to how our digital habits—most of which rely on cloud-based technologies—relate to water and energy use. I don’t have a particular policy or political agenda here. I just noticed that a lot of people in education and professional settings crave clarity around this topic. Hopefully this site helps with that.

The Sources & Method page gives more detail about the research and methodology behind the site. Researching this topic is challenging, and I invite others to improve on what’s here.

Credit and lineage

I owe an explicit debt to Jon Ippolito’s What Uses More?. His site was an early blueprint for the comparison frame used here: put AI tasks beside streaming, meetings, search, and other familiar digital activity so the comparison stays grounded. This site keeps its own calculator, source registry, and method notes, but the family resemblance is intentional.

Jon’s public note on reuse is a good model. He marks his app as shareable and adaptable, gives a preferred citation, and points readers back to the underlying source sheet. I’m trying to follow the same basic posture here. The calculator is for orientation. When a claim matters, the better move is to trace it back to the linked studies and source pages.

License and reuse

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. CC BY 4.0 requires appropriate credit, a link to the license, and an indication of changes when material is adapted. If you reuse material from this site, keep those three pieces visible.

I also want the lineage to stay visible. That’s why What Uses More? is named here as an inspiration and early blueprint for the calculator frame.