A tax on AI could help to reduce inequality

As thousands of workers commence working from home due to Coronavirus, the Internet is awash with memes about the tempting distractions of YouTube. The artificial intelligence used by YouTube to continually serve relevant distractions is a modern shoulder devil for the home worker. Baby Shark has nearly 4.8 billion views on YouTube. In 2011 Google revealed that streaming 1-minute of video on YouTube consumes 0.0002 KwH of energy. That means that so far, people watching the 136-second-long Baby Shark video have collectively consumed about 2,112,000 KwH of energy. To give that context, in 2019 the average UK home consumed 3,100 KwH of electricity.