If everyone turned off their smartphones for a day it would account for less than 1% of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
If you have a fridge in your house it’s likely using almost 100 times more power than your smartphone. Your heating or air conditioning is using far more power. The steel industry, agricultural industry, transportation, are all pumping out greenhouse gasses at a rate that using electronics is negligible.
AI is becoming another one of those industries, but if everyone turned off their personal devices, they would still need to get up, go to work, which would likely use AI, because they need to buy groceries and pay rent and keep their home powered, and capitalism churns.
Being outraged at the systems around us is a good thing, pointing the outrage toward people living daily lives while wealthy corporations and people do everything in their power to do as little as possible for social good while farming maximum personal benefit, power, and profit is not.
Soot@hexbear.net 7 months ago
This is the funny thing, Capitalism basically ensures this is never true. Even in utopia, where everyone was super-pooper efficient and saved 99% electricity usage overnight, just one profit-seeking business (and they’re all profit seeking businesses) would buy up all the cheap electricity, make a bazillion dollars, and use so much power that we’d go right back to 100% electricity consumption.
The narrative of the ‘if every individual did <x>’ is pure myth. Systemic problems can only be solved by systemic solutions.