AI and the Great Electric Guillotine

(Apologies to Google Gemini for being the focus. It's the data I have. the other systems are similar)

In the beginning, there was the Prompt.

And the Prompt was good, because it made the computer say something vaguely witty in the tone of a 2014 blog post. People clapped. VC firms nodded gravely. Whitepapers were penned.

Then the Prompt begat another Prompt, which begat a whole lineage of slightly clever digital utterances, many of which were “inspirational quotes” mistakenly attributed to Einstein.

But there was a problem. Every Prompt demanded a sacrifice. A small one, at first. Just a barely perceptible nibble from the electrical grid. But over time, the Prompts became many. And they were hungry.

Welcome to the Thermodynamic Intelligence Trap

Google’s Gemini, that galaxy-brained assistant who’ll tell you how to cook paella and summarize the Mahabharata in the same breath, runs on what we used to call “a lot of electricity” and now refer to, more politely, as “inevitable progress.”

Each Gemini text prompt uses 0.24 watt-hours. That doesn’t sound like much until you remember that 400 million people use it every month. That’s 96 million watt-hours, or as it’s known in energy circles: “Tuesday.”

And that’s just the chat. A Gemini sibling, trained to generate a five-second video, uses 3.4 million joules per clip, roughly the energy required to:

Ride an e-bike for 38 miles, or

Run a microwave for an entire hour, or

Convince your state utility to issue a rebate.

We Trained It on Everything, Except Restraint

The AI boom has created a new kind of intelligence: one that understands language but doesn’t understand limits.

Gemini wakes up each morning, wipes the sleep from its processors, and demands an all-you-can-eat buffet of silicon, water, and fossil fuels. All so it can answer such pressing queries as:

“Write me a sonnet about my labradoodle in the voice of Kanye.”

“What’s the best hedge fund strategy if the moon is in retrograde?”

“Is it ethical to date my barista if I think she might be an AI?”

And because this is 2025, the answer to all three will be monetized, optimized, and delivered in under a second. That comes with a 200-gram helping of invisible carbon emissions.

Gemini Isn’t Killing the Planet. You Are. But Also, Gemini (and the others, you know who you are).

Let’s be clear: this isn’t Google’s fault. This is your fault. And also society’s. And also Google’s.

They do buy renewable energy credits. Which is a bit like claiming you’re a vegetarian because someone else donated tofu on your behalf. Meanwhile, over 50% of U.S. data center electricity still comes from coal and gas. The carbon fairy is real, and she drives a diesel truck.

By 2030, the electricity demand from data centers is expected to double, possibly triple. Goldman Sachs, never one to miss a profitable catastrophe, estimates we’ll need $720 billion in grid upgrades to keep up with our growing need to ask robots what a “girl dinner” is.

Most of this cost will be gently transferred onto your utility bill, where it will appear as:

“AI Cloud Load Infrastructure Adjustment”

“Demand Stabilization Through Algorithmic Enlightenment Surcharge”

Or simply: “$140 more per year, peasant.”

The Future Is Artificial. The Heat Death Is Not.

We used to joke that the singularity would arrive with a whisper. Turns out, it arrives with a $300 air conditioning bill, a server farm in the Mojave desert, and an enthusiastic email from your utility provider about their exciting “Dynamic Pricing Experiment.”

We are now building intelligence faster than we can cool it. Faster than we can power it. Faster than we can understand it. And nowhere in this glorious growth curve have we stopped to ask whether we’re just replacing our own ecosystem with a digital hallucination that needs twelve Hoover Dams to dream properly.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide once suggested that Earth was a supercomputer designed to find the ultimate question. In 2025, it turns out Earth is the battery, and the ultimate question is:

“Can I please get an AI to pretend to be my therapist using the voice of David Attenborough while it calculates my keto diet?”

When the Grid Goes, So Goes the Oracle

What happens when the power dips? When the blackout rolls through? When the transformer sighs under the weight of a billion daily queries and simply… gives up?

Gemini doesn’t answer then. It sulks, pixelated and hungry, in the darkness. The knowledge stays trapped behind firewalls and idle GPUs.

And your last text prompt: “How do I live more sustainably?” remains tragically, poetically unprocessed.

Final Thought Before the Lights Flicker

If intelligence without wisdom is dangerous, then artificial intelligence without environmental humility is catastrophic. We’ve created a creature whose brilliance is measured in teraflops but whose impact is measured in kilowatts and missed opportunities.

We call this progress.

It may yet call us lunch.