In Folds Of Smile

There are things our parents say so often that they eventually become background noise. Growing up—and honestly, even now—Papa has had a running commentary about electricity in our house.

Why is the light on if no one is in the room? Why is the fan running? Who switched on the geyser?

And God help you if you were the last person to leave a room and forgot to switch something off.

His logic has always been simple: “Power saved is money earned.”

He wasn’t trying to save the planet. He was trying to save electricity and, consequently, money. Obviously, I knew that.

Years later, I learnt a more polished word for some of this at work: frugality—being thoughtful about resources and doing more with less. Papa would probably just call it common sense.

Recently, I had to complete a mandatory training at work on the ethical use of AI. I expected conversations about privacy, bias, copyright and responsible use of data. I didn’t expect to leave thinking about the environment.

I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that AI had an environmental impact. But while trying to explain it to my parents, I realized I needed to understand it simply enough to explain it simply. So here it is, the way I finally understood it.

When I type a prompt into ChatGPT or Gemini, the answer isn’t magically created inside my phone. Somewhere, powerful computers inside a data centre have to process my request.

Those computers need electricity. They also generate heat. Think of how your laptop gets warm when it works hard, except now imagine buildings filled with far more powerful machines working continuously. Those machines need to be kept cool, and some data centres use water as part of that cooling. The electricity matters too because, depending on how it is produced, generating it can release greenhouse gases.

Stripped of all the technical language, this is what it comes down to:

I type a prompt (question) → computers work → electricity is used → heat is produced → cooling is needed → resources are consumed.

One prompt can sound insignificant. And individually, it can be.

In 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman estimated that an average ChatGPT query uses about one-fifteenth of a teaspoon of water.

One-fifteenth of a teaspoon. Seems like almost nothing. And that is exactly why it is so easy not to think about.

But we don’t use AI once. We ask another question. Rewrite the email again. Generate an image. Change the background. Try another version. Multiply that across millions of people using AI every day, and something individually tiny becomes part of a much larger demand for electricity, computing infrastructure and resources.

The exact impact isn’t the same for every prompt or every AI system, and the technology itself is becoming more efficient. But learning about it changed one assumption I hadn’t even realized I was making: Small doesn’t mean limitless.

AI feels almost weightless from our side of the screen because we don’t see anything being consumed. Even the word cloud adds to that illusion. It sounds like some invisible place in the sky.

It isn’t. The cloud is physical infrastructure—computers working somewhere every time we ask them to do something.

And then, last week, almost perfectly timed with all of this, the internet decided we all needed to find out what we would have looked like in the 1980s.

Naturally, my family and I participated.

We generated pictures of practically everyone. My mother loved it, and so did my 11-year-old cousin. Then they asked me, But how does this actually work? What happens in the background? And I realized we had taught them how to use the technology without really talking about what happens when they use it.

We teach our parents how a new smartphone works and how to ask ChatGPT or Gemini a question, while children seem to pick these things up almost instinctively. But the lesson shouldn’t end at how to use it. We should understand what is happening behind the screen too.

It reminded me of the fine print in an insurance policy. We are excited about the benefits and barely read the conditions underneath.

Technology has fine print too.

Not something sinister. Just consequences we don’t see.

And until that office training, I hadn’t really read it either.

I still loved our 80s photographs. I just looked at them a little differently.

Did I need another version because Mum looked better in one? Or because I preferred the background in another? Probably not.

This isn’t about taking the fun out of technology. I use AI every day. I find it fascinating, useful and, sometimes, ridiculously entertaining.

For me, responsible use has started to mean something quite simple:

Know what happens behind the screen, and then use technology with intention.

That curiosity sent me reading. I found Green Algorithms, an initiative that helps estimate the carbon footprint of computational work, and CodeCarbon, an open-source tool that helps track and estimate emissions from computing workloads.

The calculations can get technical very quickly. But the idea itself is simple: even an algorithm leaves a footprint.

And somehow, that made me start noticing my own.

My parents have one AC in their house.

Just one. Not because they cannot afford another. They can. They simply don’t think they need one.

And this is the part I don’t particularly enjoy admitting: it has embarrassed me.

I have wondered what happens when friends come home. Why can’t we have an AC in the living room like other homes? Why can’t we simply buy another one?

If it gets unbearably hot, we sit or sleep in the room with the AC. Problem solved.

For years, I looked at the house and saw something missing. Today, I look at the same house and wonder why I thought it needed more.

Perhaps that is frugality in its simplest form.

Not I can’t have it. Just I don’t need it.

There is nothing wrong with comfort. I like comfort. I like technology. I like nice things. I am certainly not about to pretend otherwise.

But somewhere along the way, I began confusing having more with having enough.

When did “I can have more” become “I need more”?

And then there is Nepal.

In August, a catastrophic glacier collapse near the Nepal-Tibet border triggered devastating flooding, sending mud, rock and water through communities and destroying homes and infrastructure.

We hear words like climate change, global warming, glacial retreat and extreme weather so often that they can begin to sound like subjects rather than lives.

Then you see a home covered in mud and remember that it was a home before it became a photograph. Someone woke up there. Someone expected to come back.

The science behind any individual disaster is complex, and we should be careful about reducing every calamity to one cause. Nepal itself has since placed climate justice at the centre of its appeal for recovery, arguing that climate-vulnerable countries can bear consequences far greater than their contribution to global emissions.

Maybe awareness begins with empathy before it begins with statistics.

It is easy to see a disaster somewhere else, feel terrible for a moment and keep scrolling. Caring means allowing some of that discomfort to stay with us.

Our individual choices will not prevent every flood or solve climate change. But the size of the problem cannot become our excuse for being careless.

Doing our bit doesn’t always have to be dramatic. Sometimes it is simply wasting less, repairing before replacing, switching off an empty room, or pausing before buying—or generating—something just because we can.

None of this requires us to reject technology or comfort. It simply asks us to pay attention.

We are teaching one generation how to use these tools while another is growing up never having known a world without them. Surely the point of creating smarter technology isn’t only to make more things possible. It should also make us smarter about how we use what we have built.

Because nature isn’t separate from our progress. It is what makes our progress possible.

And lately, I keep thinking about our old camera.

When I was growing up, there was a physical roll of film inside our camera. A typical roll gave us 36 photographs.

Thirty-six. That was it.

We couldn’t immediately check whether someone had blinked, delete the bad ones or take seventeen versions until everybody looked perfect. Every click used one of those frames.

Papa would eventually take the roll to be developed, and only then would those moments return to us as photographs.

There was something about knowing you had only so many clicks.

Today, that feeling of an ending has almost disappeared. We can take 200 photographs of the same evening. Generate another image. Regenerate it. Change the background. Try again.

Photographs, purchases, upgrades, deliveries, AI generations—there always seems to be one more.

Nature doesn’t work that way.

Some things do run out.

Which brings me, strangely enough, back to Papa walking around the house switching things off.

I used to think it was only about the electricity bill. Maybe it still is.

But I understand the habit differently now.

Use what you need. Don’t waste what you don’t. And don’t assume that because something is available to you, you have to consume it.

Perhaps being educated and aware isn’t only about knowing more. It is also about knowing when we have enough—and remembering that the world we consume from is the same one we will leave behind.

What we save today may belong to someone tomorrow.