The boffin said in his country around '15% of people include gender pronouns in emails', the carbon emissions of which 'may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year'
20:14, 21 Mar 2025Updated 20:15, 21 Mar 2025
Cringey email signatures burn IT energy and kill the planet, says top boffin
Are you guilty of the offence?(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Cringey email signatures are killing the planet, a top boffin has claimed. Joshua Pearce says that needless sign-offs including extra gender pronouns make IT infrastructure use more energy.
Dr Pearce, an IT professor at Western University in Canada, said in his country around “15% of people include gender pronouns in emails”. He added: “The carbon emissions from this small change (three extra words) may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year.
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“If you receive an email with a long signature, you might consider asking the sender to switch to a hyperlink instead, or eliminate their signature altogether.”
Cringey email signatures burn IT energy and kill the planet, says top boffin
Needless sign-offs including extra gender pronouns make IT infrastructure use more energy(Image: Getty Images/Tetra images RF)
Dr Pearce also took aim at legal disclaimers, attachments, images and logos, adding: “Images and logos, which contain even larger amounts of data, cause more emissions and deaths still.”
His warning comes after a study by OVO Energy found that the millions of unnecessary messages sent daily contributed an extra 23,000 tonnes of carbon a year to the UK’s footprint.
Boffs said cutting back on one “thank you” email a day could save 16,000 tonnes of carbon a year – the same as 81,152 flights from London to Madrid or taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road.
It comes after boffins warned we've got just 10 years before being terminated by psycho scumbag robots.
Nobel Prize winning Brit Sir Demis Hassabis – ranked as one of the most intelligent people in the world – predicts humans could be made “obsolete” by artificial intelligence systems by 2035.
Cringey email signatures burn IT energy and kill the planet, says top boffin
'The carbon emissions from this small change (three extra words) may contribute to the premature deaths of one person a year'(Image: Getty Images)
Sir Demis, 48, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for his work on AI research into protein structure prediction, said advances in the tech will soon make us all totally defunct.
Warned about the astounding speed of its development, he said: “For the next 10 years I think there is going to be an amazing flourishing of creativity, empowered by AI. For those who understand and are native with these tools, it’s going to be a sort of superpower.
“Then there’s the question of what happens after that.”
He predicts AI will stomp out the need for humans when it evolves into AGI – Artificial General Intelligence. Also referred to by boffs as ‘Strong AI’ or ‘Human-level AI’, Sir Demis says AGI will be “revolutionary”.
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Experts predict it will outperform humans’ abilities to think, reason, plan, learn, and communicate.
AGI would also mean artificial intelligence sources would be able to see and hear better than humans – as well as being able to move, explore and manipulate objects better than us.