This content was translated from french to english with the conversationnal agent Le Chat de Mistral. Thank you for your attention.
In this article, I would like to provide you with various information to show that it is not responsible to consider that we pollute excessively by using our internet connection.
The reasoning with leveling down consists of saying that anyway, pollution with electricity consumption exists, so I can consume as well.
Perhaps you have some notions about cryptocurrencies or the electricity consumption related to the use of artificial intelligence to generate text, images, or video.
Regarding text, Google’s flagship search engine only displays text or a few images in the form of thumbnails on each results page.
The power of their algorithms and servers ensures that these results pages appear quickly.
Google’s search engine was designed to be the website where you spend the least amount of time finding the information you are looking for.
The text and thumbnails make Google’s results pages lightweight, and the electricity consumption related to daily use of this search engine consumes relatively little electricity on a household scale.
Then come the technologies for generating text and images via artificial intelligence, and more recently, audio and video on several online services.
The electricity consumption to display a structured response from artificial intelligence in text form is higher than that of a Google search page.
However, it remains less than for images or video, a video being a succession of images.
The production of images by artificial intelligence will consume more electricity than a response from a conversational agent, and you can also understand that this consumption is higher for a video of a few seconds that displays 30 images per second.
Without going into the numerical data, but reasoning on the principle of electricity consumption and associated pollution, there is more than one reasoning that does not make sense.
For example, if you tell yourself, I will not ask more than ten questions a day or write more than ten prompts a day on a conversational agent to avoid consuming too much, and then you listen to music online or watch a movie on TV or consult YouTube for an hour, your electricity consumption via the Internet will not make sense in view of your initial desire not to consume too much at the beginning.
As a reminder, the pirate site MegaUploads was tolerated and became popular by broadcasting many movies and documentaries without having obtained the copyrights beforehand.
The site offered an unlimited paid subscription, and the site owners became millionaires. It’s not really about the money; it’s the fact that this single site consumed several percent of the global bandwidth on the Internet network.
This represented significant electricity consumption on a daily household scale.
Then, not respecting copyright law, the site was closed by the FBI.
More recently, the most visited and most electricity-consuming sites were closed in France due to a lack of agreement on age verification at entrance: to general shame, three pornographic sites.
On the side: I pollute because I use my internet connection, we must relativize.
There is already a problem dating back to the invention of electricity that has not yet been resolved satisfactorily: the storage of electricity.
Every day, electricity providers make assessments of electricity needs on their network.
Logically, a greater quantity is produced in the event of an influx to avoid any power outages.
This surplus has polluted and is currently not stored for the next day, for example.
Moreover, with the different types of energy sources, we are not lacking in electricity, far from it.
The least polluting energies, which are nevertheless debated, are mainly solar energy, hydraulic energy, and wind energy.
For the most polluting energies, we have mainly nuclear energy in France, or coal, for example.
On this subject, new power plants, based not on nuclear fission but on nuclear fusion, have the advantage of producing more efficiently while polluting less.
We know very well that we do not know how to treat radioactive waste correctly according to our knowledge and means, and this is indeed a source of shame regarding our national electricity consumption.
It must be understood that with the very rapid development of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining, the demand for electricity has been, and will be increasingly greater.
Currently, the choice of nuclear fusion power plants seems the most suitable in this context according to my knowledge.
There will therefore be the electricity needs for electrical appliances and another bill for online consumption of artificial intelligence when it exceeds the authorized thresholds for free use.
The same goes for cryptocurrency mining.
We must certainly remain reasonable about the time spent in front of screens and consume electricity responsibly.
However, I can guarantee you that the system is designed to allow satisfactory consumption, that is to say, to be able to create quality content, whether articles, graphics, or videos, from your computer or tablet/smartphone and to sleep soundly.
Imagine being able to access knowledge and know-how and finally being able to live by expressing what you stand for.
Everyone, having a home connected to the internet and reasonable electricity consumption, can do it.
Rest assured that 100 well-designed queries on a conversational agent will pollute less than your car trip to go shopping or to work, or a round trip vacation by plane.
It appears that the technologies we have access to facilitate content production and allow us to gain visibility in a fulfilling context.
This is the vision of electricity consumption that I have today, concerning the daily use of the internet and in particular artificial intelligence.
Wishing you to make the best use of your current online tools and to progress daily,
José D.