I'm 17 years old, and I graduated from high school early. I now tutor students of various ages and backgrounds. When I search for resources to create a lesson plan, an AI response appears at the top of my search results. This may summarize the thousands of results I would otherwise sort through, but I believe AI should not replace that process. Critical thinking is already declining among students, and I have seen that decline while tutoring. As a Gen Z teenager, I am also guilty of using AI at times. Before I knew about the environmental impacts, I thought, "Wow, this is great, I can just continue being lazy." Beyond the fact that AI is destroying our planet, it is also destroying our brains. The human species is incredibly smart, but I worry about how long that intelligence will last. AI may seem great on the surface, but it has so many detrimental impacts.
I do not believe we live in a utopian society, and I do not think eradicating AI is a likely goal or a first step. Rather, I propose that search engines such as Google Chrome should not have automatic AI responses. This way, those who don't want to use AI can continue without it, and those who would like to use AI can simply click a button to get an AI-generated response. This small change can have a huge impact. There are about 14-16.4 billion Google searches a day. Across all platforms, there are over 50 billion web searches. A regular web search uses 0.02 to 0.03 Watt-hours per query. An AI web search uses 0.24-0.34 Watt-hours per query. That is 10 to 15 times more. Imagine if even 1% of these didn't use AI. That is, 500 million searches not using AI. We would save 110,000,000 watt-hours. That is 110 Megawatts. A singular megawatt can power 2,000 houses. Imagine what saving 110 Megawatts could do for our world, and that's if only 1% of web searches did not use AI.
Of course, there are search engines that don’t use AI as an immediate answer right now. I applaud these companies for this, AND some people may have to use a specific search engine for a specific task. Also, not everyone knows that other search engines don't use AI. As much as I would like to say that people are very aware of current affairs and the impact of what we do, the truth is, most of us don't. Since I have the resources to know this information, I want to take it upon myself to make a difference. Even if we can switch search engines, it can be really helpful to target AI-reliant search engines. Any decrease in AI use is a big deal. Let's take care of our world because it has taken care of us. Let's write our own future, and instead of complaining, let's take action.