The AI bubble is expanding so fast it must surely burst, argues Jon Honeyball

Everyone on the internet appears to be outraged about something. You can’t move for social media postings lambasting some new cause or public issue. And yet many of these postings have little or no reference sources, and if they do, it’s to a site whose information integrity is often, shall we say, somewhat lacking.

- Jon Honeyball

So I was intrigued by a particular thread on the hellscape that is X showing a photo of a poster from the University of East London (tinyurl.com/373wifitrees). It said: “WiFi doesn’t grow on trees. Your screen time is damaging the climate.” Duly outraged, I went to read more at the University of East London’s website (tinyurl.com/373eastlondon).

This makes the claim that the “growing demand for digital services has created a new challenge for the environment. Sending emails, texts, browsing the internet, uploading videos and more all come with a cost - a few grams of carbon dioxide are emitted due to the energy needed to run your devices and power the wireless networks you access.

“With over four billion people across the world using the internet, it is estimated that three per cent of world electricity is consumed by data centres - accounting for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire aviation industry.”

All of these are reasonable statements. However, a typical WiFi access point is running at around 5W, and that is a really quite insignificant amount of power consumption in the broader context of a house's electrical requirements.