The IT industry has evolved at breakneck speed over the years. Trends have come and gone, and a few from the early 2000s are still relevant. In an impressive way, Microsoft has managed to keep the Office suite alive for over 25 years.

On January 9, 2007, Apple launched the iPhone at the Macworld Conference & Expo. It was a quantum leap in how smartphones changed our work habits and our private lives. At the same time, social media came along and glued us and our children to our mobile phones, which constantly had to be replaced due to increased memory needs, or because we wanted a different colour.

At the same time, Public Cloud went from something narrow and scary to something we all used at work and privately. Now we are all dependent on cloud services, and most companies have moved all or part of their infrastructure to the cloud.

The challenge is that there is no such thing as public cloud, all cloud services come from very physical data centres. Many of these require electricity and water like large cities.

Today there are many data centres and the forecast for 2030 is a doubling. There are no electricity, water or minerals for all these data centres.

Google in Skien and Tik Tok in Hamar are glaring examples of data centres that were built without any available electricity. Globally, there is the same conflict between the data centres’ needs for water, electricity and minerals and local needs. We see several examples of how digitalization requires land from and grain production and takes groundwater from grain production.

We see similar interventions in areas that were originally allocated to indigenous people, but which now have to make way for mining and data centres.

In Europe, Meta (Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) is trying to build data centres where there is a lot of grain production. These gigantic data centres require the same amount of electricity and water as large European cities. And agricultural land and rainforests have to give way.

The big technology companies are now introducing solutions that require endless consumption of electricity, water and minerals. There is much else that is also required, but in Ørjan's presentation "Digitalization gone wild" this is the focus.

In addition, our digital lives create enormous amounts of electronic waste. In this area, we in Norway are the worst – a dubious first place we share with England.

This is an important part of our follow-up. It is urgent to use digital tools in a sustainable way. Here, Ørjan has knowledge and experience that he shares with those who have already heard and watched "Digitalization on the Wild Side"

In this presentation, he focuses on, among other things:

• Increasing the lifespan of digital tools such as PCs, mobile phones and tablets
• Reducing the amount of electronic waste that we produce
• Ensuring that data we do not use is deleted.
• Ensuring that we stop copying data. Today, 90% of all data is just a copy
• Ensuring that everyone knows the climate footprint of artificial intelligence, and especially generative artificial intelligence.
• Ensuring that everyone knows the climate footprint of digitalization, and thus can make better decisions privately, and in the company or agency, but working in.