Ethics are not the problem. Damaging behaviour is.

Someone commented: “I don’t think there will be an option to opt out due to ethical reasons.”

I’ve seen two quotes about AI that made me sit up and pay attention this week. This was one of them. It was from someone expressing concern about Elon Musk’s Memphis data centres, known as Colossus, which have been accused of polluting the community with toxic emissions. It’s alleged the centres are burning methane without legal permits.

But then they concluded that ethics are not a good enough reason to stand against developments we don’t like.

I’m sorry, what?

If ever there has been a time to stand up for our ethics it is now.

What terrifies politicians? Losing elections.

We need to make protecting our environment and our rights electoral issues. It means contacting representatives directly.

You probably just rolled your eyes or sighed.

I’m not naive about this. Evidence of politicians doing things we don’t like is all around us. I also wrote an assignment a couple of weeks ago about representation in the British Parliament and one of the issues I raised was how the electoral system does not lead to outcomes we want. Turnout at the last UK General Election was 59.9%.

I wrote: “A large proportion of people genuinely did not vote for this. Many of those who did vote wanted a different outcome.”

So no, the system isn’t perfect but politicians pay attention to what they receive letters about.

It takes effort to contact a representative directly.

We are far less politically active than the generations that came before us. The number of people who would contact their MP has fallen.

But disillusionment with the system cannot lead to apathy. There is far too much at stake. People are already falling ill. Communities are without water. Government contracts are being awarded to companies who are carrying out morally dubious actions elsewhere in the world. And this is just the start of the damage allowing big tech companies to do whatever they like will do to our lives.

The second quote that stopped me in my tracks this week was this:

Patrick Galey, the head of investigations for the Global Witness climate campaign, told The Guardian: “We have a handful of years until our carbon budget is exhausted.

“To waste what little bandwidth we have left – when 750 million people worldwide lack access to electricity – assisting some of the richest men ever to hone their plagiarism bots would be a historic idiocy that future generations are unlikely to forgive today’s leaders for.”

I’m not completely against AI. Using it for medical advances or to solve problems like how to deal with forever chemicals or plastic pollution are all good things. But using it to make cartoons of ourselves, cat memes, and make us feel like we’re being productive when we’re actually creating things with no value, while damaging people’s quality of life are not.

Politics is a series of choices. Ours as well as those we elect to act for us. We can say we do not support this. We can refuse to give these companies our time, attention, and data. And we can definitely refuse to give them money.

It’s very easy to be convinced online that all of this is inevitable and we should just roll over and take it. But look around you. Ask yourself what you enjoy. What makes your life better. What do you really need in order to make a contribution.

And how much you value your freedom. Because when we start saying ethics are not strong enough reasons not to allow corporations to do things which make them money at our expense, we’re saying we do not value ourselves or our communities.

If we all sit back and say ‘there is nothing we can do’ or that our ethics do not matter, we are effectively voting for a much worse world.

And if that is the case, we have truly lost our humanity.