“On average, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search. In that difference lies a coming sea change in how the US, Europe, and the world at large will consume power — and how much that will cost.” [ref]
Sorry, but “consume power” and “how much that will cost” presupposes what all neoclassical economists know, i.e. that any shortage increases price which increases supply, which solves all problems. So the only concern is how much will it cost in money to increase electricity supply 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x… to meet whatever the demand is.
Unfortunately for modern humans (but good for biosphere), conventional economics is a pretend science and what most of its practitioners are paid to know is wrong per the nature of things (e.g. laws of nature).
Those who want to live in a Borg-like future of illimitable taking (first the home solar system—turning Earth into a tourist attraction while building a Dyson sphere before spreading out in all directions to the nearest stars to turn their energy/matter resources into humans) — presuppose there is illimitable energy/matter out there for the taking (and that humans are clever apes who can take it).
This worldview is what John Livingston calls ‘zero-order humanism, the ideology of the necessary primacy of the human enterprise’, which is based on the premise that the cosmos has no meaning without humans in it, ergo ‘necessary’.
We are Lord Man… for a time. We expansionist form of human started our taking of a planet 75k years ago…, but modern humans don’t like that story.
