What a Wonderful World: What Would Jane Do?

I'm writing this from the garden at Amazon's San Diego office, where hummingbirds dart between dahlias and passion fruit vines, where bees work their way through marigolds. Enormous heirloom tomatoes hang heavy on their vines, not yet ripe but full of promise. Pumpkins sprawl across their patch like they own the place. The basil smells like summer refusing to let go.

I came out here right after a meeting about generative AI—the latest developments, the newest capabilities, the ever-expanding possibilities. It's my job at AWS to understand this technology, to see its potential, to help shape its future. And I do find it fascinating. But standing here among the gourds and the goldfinches, I can't stop thinking about Jane Goodall.

The Woman Who Watched

Jane Goodall, who passed away this week at 91, spent her life watching. Really watching. She sat in the forests of Gombe and observed chimpanzees with a patience that would be incomprehensible in our current age of instant everything. She named them. She learned their personalities. She discovered they made tools, felt emotions, had complex social structures. She changed our understanding of what it means to be human by deeply understanding what it means to be not-human.

In a final interview she requested be released upon her death, she said—with characteristic wit—that she'd put Elon, Trump, Netanyahu, and President Xi on a spaceship and send them far, far away from Earth.

I laughed when I read that. Then I thought: What would Jane do about AI?

Ten Years of Artificial Intelligence

My professional relationship with AI started in 2014, my first month at Amazon. I'd sit in a room with pre-release devices—before she was even called Alexa, when we were still testing names—and read prompts off an iPad. This voice intelligence opened my eyes to something powerful: the potential for machines to assist people through "heads-up" technology, keeping our eyes on the world instead of glued to screens.

This was years before COVID-19 would turn screen addiction from a concerning trend into a full-blown crisis.

The irony? Recent reporting shows that young people's device time is actually declining now, while older cohorts are increasing their screen time and social media usage. The generation we worried about has figured out what we haven't: there's no such thing as a free app.

The Real Cost of "Free"

We all know the first-level transaction: our data and eyeballs for ad revenue. Advertisers pay media companies for access to us, and we pay with our attention and information. Standard stuff.

But there's another cost, one that's far more tangible and terrifying: the planetary one.

These apps don't run on clouds. I dislike the term—"the cloud"—because it makes everything sound so ethereal, so weightless, so consequence-free. The cloud is actually massive data centers consuming staggering amounts of electricity to store all the data we're generating and power all the experiences we're demanding.

I've been in the data center business since I was a college junior interning at VMware in 2012. When I joined AWS, executives I still respect deeply were already raising alarms: there's only so much power on the planet, and eventually we—as in AWS, as in humanity—will hit a breaking point.

My biggest fear? We're hitting it sooner because of the AI craze.

The Memphis Problem

Take xAI's massive data center in Memphis: preparing to be built with essentially no permits or regulation, preparing to build a new plant capable of generating over a gigawatt of electricity, enough to power around 800,000 homes, which will drive electricity prices through the roof for local communities. [WSJ reporting October 5, 2025]

Or Meta's data centers polluting clean drinking water that civilians previously had access to.

And for what?

So people can fill their boredom making videos that seem like magic—type a prompt, watch your imagination become digital reality. Fun, sure. Worth draining Earth's resources? I'm not convinced.

The Sora Situation

OpenAI launched Sora last Friday, their new video generation social media app. Their initial approach to copyright? Rights holders had to contact them to opt-out of having their work used in model results.

That's not how copyright law works. That's actually completely illegal.

They backtracked Monday after obvious backlash and threats of lawsuits. But Sora still hit #1 on the App Store. One out of every ten people on Earth is using ChatGPT.

The genie isn't going back in the bottle.

The Pull-Up Ad

I saw a ChatGPT ad during an NFL game last weekend. A man, probably in his twenties, asking ChatGPT to help him make a plan to do pull-ups.

Here's what that interaction cost: at minimum, the equivalent of eight glasses of clean drinking water, evaporated into the atmosphere to cool the servers processing that request.

The answer? Just... do a pull-up. Try one. Fail at it. Try again. Your body will tell you what you need to know.

We're using planetary-scale infrastructure for problems that require zero computational power to solve.

What Would Jane Do?

Jane Goodall became Jane Goodall by being present. By watching chimps instead of screens. By spending hours in observation rather than seconds in consumption. By understanding that every action has consequences, every choice ripples outward.

She once said: "You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."

Standing in this garden, surrounded by life that grows without apps or algorithms, I think about that question differently.

I love technology. I always have. I believe in its potential to help us, connect us, free us to be more human. But I also believe we need to be ruthlessly conscious about the planetary cost of our digital lives.

My Challenge to You (and to Me)

Before you use AI for something this week, ask yourself: What would Jane do?

Would she use computational power equivalent to hundreds of glasses of water to generate a workout plan? Probably not. She'd probably just try the damn pull-up.

Would she use it to analyze decades of chimpanzee behavioral data to find patterns no human could spot alone? Maybe. Probably, even.

The difference? One respects the resource. One understands the cost. One makes a choice about what kind of difference to make.

I'm not saying don't use AI. I work at AWS—I'm literally selling the infrastructure that powers it. But I am saying: don't use it for stupid shit.

Use it when it genuinely helps. When it solves real problems. When it makes impossible things possible, not when it makes easy things slightly easier.

And sometimes? Turn off the apps. Walk away from the screens. Go stand in a garden and watch the hummingbirds. Let the bees teach you about purposeful work. Let the tomatoes remind you that some things just need time and sun and patience.

What kind of difference do you want to make?

Reply to this email and tell me: What's one AI tool you're going to stop using for trivial stuff? Or one place you're going to be more intentional about your tech use this week? I read every response.

P.S. — Jane's final wish about that spaceship made me laugh, but here's what I think she really meant: the people with the most power to shape our future need to spend less time in boardrooms and on social media, and more time on the ground, watching, listening, being present to the consequences of their choices. Maybe we all do.