Ray D'Arcy

I checked it a few times because I have a bad history of doing maths live on air.

Of course, podcasts aren't live, so I can check them and check them again, which I have.

So they're saying just 35% of the fund, or 3.5 million, will be available to residents of the cities of Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford.

They're trying to encourage rural drivers to go electric.

But be careful if you go electric because there may be no electricity left.

Why?

Because all the data centres will have used up all the electricity.

I know it sounds funny, but I'm serious here.

Ireland has been cited as a cautionary tale in the UN report on the environmental impact of runaway artificial intelligence gold.

We mentioned this a few weeks ago.

Ireland's energy system, 21% of all electricity here is used for data processing.

We're a small country and we have a lot of European headquarters of tech companies in this country.

So that sort of makes sense.

But now the UN are saying, don't do what Ireland did.

Don't do what Ireland did.

And that figure of 21% is forecast to grow to more than 30% in the next few years as data centres expand to facilitate the huge processing capacity needed by AI.

I'll have to ease off on the ChatGPT.

I haven't produced an image for a long time.

Seemingly, when you produce an image using ChatGPT, that's when you really need a lot of energy and a lot of electricity.

The other things, like ask my questions, it just uses the same amount of electricity as Google would use.