It is often said, and with good reason, that the most compelling and persuasive arguments against the AI industry and all who sail in it come not from its detractors but from its most vocal advocates. Take, for example, Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, who last week, in a public conversation in India about his industry, was asked to address widespread concerns about its extraordinary consumption of fossil energy and water. Such concerns, he claimed, were misplaced. The water usage figures in particular were wildly overstated.

He then went on to make a broader argument about the amount of energy consumed by AI relative to that required to produce an economically productive human being.

“People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model,” he said, “relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. So the fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take, once its model is trained, to answer that question versus a human. And probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

In one sense, the argument is a fairly banal one, amounting to a defence of the energy usage needed to run what he and many others believe, with some justification, is a socially and economically transformative technology. Its framing, though, seems to reveal something deeper and more troubling about the way in which Altman and people like him view their fellow human beings.

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