In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a ‘Please consider this environment before printing this email.’
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
I’m on my phone so I can’t fully crunch the numbers, but I took a few minutes to poke around and I think I found the stats to put both of these in perspective.
https://www.arbor.eco/blog/ai-environmental-impact
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle
So yikes and without a doubt unsustainable energy usage, but comparing this to wikis article on COVID environmental impacts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_the_environment?wprov=sfla1
My napkin math says that we would need ~532,407,407 AI queries to match the 2020 work for home drop, but unfortunately, Chat GPT alone is estimating 2.5 billion prompts, daily.
I started writing this assuming the opposite was true but unfortunately AI is a bigger environmental impact than an RTO. Which is honestly shocking. I hope someone corrects my math and tells me it isn’t this dire. Work from should be the norm, but AI is truly just a massive environmental burden.
you got an error in magnitude there: its 5.32*10¹⁴ requests, so 532 407 407 407 407 requests
(2.3 × billion tonnes)/(4.32 grams) 2.3 billion tonnes = 2.3 trillion kilos = 2.3 quadrillion grams ≈ 532 407 000 000 000 requests needed for equivalence to Covid CO2 drop ≈ 912 500 000 000 requests made per year
calculator output below:
\\\\\\
912 500 000 000/532 407 407 407 407 ≈ 0.001 7% (2.5 × billion) × 365 = 912 500 000 000 (2.3 × billion tonnes)/(4.32 grams) ≈ 532 407 407 407 407 \\\\\\\
See what i mean? Stop ChatGPT, achieve 0,0017% of the reduction that Covid brought.
To put this into perspective: imagine smoking 4.32 grams of weed every day and imagine how that would add up.
its more like 0.0017% of 4.32grams of weed, see my response above