I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up my parents taught me that we should turn off the lights when we leave the room because it wastes energy.
They instructed me to limit the length of my showers and even to turn off the water while brushing my teeth. They harped on me about not standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, surveying the contents as if something new and unexpected might show up. (I think that was a holdover from their “icebox” days when they, literally, relied on a block of ice to keep the food cold.)
They insisted we keep the thermostat no higher than 68 degrees in winter and no lower than 72 degrees in summer. Their concern, with each of these measures, was in trying to save a few bucks on the water, gas and electric bills.
So when I heard that a simple Google search now uses something like 10 times as much energy as it did a couple years ago — due to artificial intelligence-powered search engines, which deliver handy summaries at the top of the page whether you want them or not — I figured it might be time for an updated list of energy saving tips.
I figured that the first recommendation would be to skip or disable the AI overview, at least for the simplest of searches, but I’ve come to find out that depending on which search engine you’re using, it’s not always an easy thing to do — especially from your phone. You can do it, though, if you’re interested.
Just type in: “how to remove or disable A.I. features in [insert search engine name (i.e. google, Bing, Edge, Yahoo, Mozilla-Firefox, DuckDuckGo, etc)].” You may get an AI-generated response, but you can follow the steps to eliminate those overviews, though, take note as to whether the method you use actually stops the AI processing, or just hides it from view.
Some people say, why even bother, AI is here, so you might as well accept it and learn how to use it. But I say – just because something is “here,” doesn’t mean you should use it.
The herbicide, Roundup, is here, but should we use that, knowing the threats it poses to human health, and the health of the birds and bees and rivers and streams? Opioids are here, and from what I’ve read, they make people feel relaxed and “high,” but does that mean we should use them when we feel stressed or blue? Authoritarianism is here, but should we embrace it as a form of government? The task, as I see it, is not only learning how to use AI, but when to use it, and when not.
The trouble is, the big tech companies don’t even want to give us the choice; they’re forcing it down our throats.
Certainly, AI expands our capabilities, but in some ways it also narrows our possibilities. For instance, most people read the AI overview at the top of the page and never click the down arrow to proceed further through the document, let alone scrolling through further pages and search results to get different perspectives from different sources. Consequently, we’re all getting the same explanations and descriptions, resulting in a homogenization of information and thought.
It’s similar to what happened in the early 2000s when all the independent radio stations got bought up by Clear Channel; the DJs lost their jobs, the programming became the same all over the country, variety and adventurousness went out the window, regional headliners all but disappeared from the airwaves in favor of blockbuster megastars, and “local” became a vestige of earlier, simpler times (which is maybe why it’s such a big marketing term now).
Considering the amount of energy that is used in each AI search query, maybe it’s time to give further consideration to how and when to use AI and perhaps we can think of turning it off the same way we think about turning off the lights when we leave the room.