At the Green IO conference in New York City, there was a lot of talk about AI. (I know you're shocked.) Within the hallway discussions outside the broader apidays conference, there was a lot of talk about how AI is "just a tool," and what matters is how you use it.

I think that's an oversimplification. A hammer is a tool. I can use it to gently tap a nail into the wall so I can hang a family photo, or I can use it to smash a windshield. An ice pick is a tool, but it can also be used as a murder weapon. Just because the tool was designed without malicious intent doesn't mean that its use isn't harmful.

And when we start talking about AI — and to be clear, I'm talking about AI as a content creation tool, for everything from academic essays to Ghibli-lookalikes or convenient answers to questions — this isn't a necessary use of high-powered computing. I think it's about our weird relationship with convenience.

I know that AI is not a phenomenon that's uniquely American, but it feels like it. We've long prioritized convenience over quality, over accuracy. I feel like it's rooted in our glorification of independence: we think we should be able to do everything for ourselves, without help from others. We would rather ask for help from technology (a technology that we know is often wrong!) than from another person, and so we rely on it for math, for research, for companionship, for customer service, for therapy.

And so as AI erodes our environment and our trust in longstanding institutions, it also erodes our sense of community. Community: the very thing that is key to our survival in an era of increasing disasters.

There's no answer here, other than hoping that we can counteract that independence obsession with actual connections. So this week, reach out to someone you haven't spoken to in a while. Do something nice for a stranger. Build a connection to compensate for our tech tool-induced independence. Be what AI is not.

How much energy do your chatbot conversations consume? Hugging Face can tell you.

As with any exclusionary diet, veganism can be a tough sell. Unsurprisingly, an all-or-nothing mentality gets a lot of pushback. Aiming for meat reduction is a more successful tactic for most people.

Unsurprising: looks like my prospective client was right when they said that AWS wasn't providing them with the emissions data that they truly needed to make accurate assessments of their impact and progress.

When I see articles about massive companies like Amazon are cutting building emissions, I know that there must be a financial story in there as well. They're not just making these changes out of the goodness of their hearts.

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Alisa Bonsignore

Founder, Strategist, and Author