The fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of the AI revolution

We are being forced to get the bots involved in even the simplest of tasks. Tasks we derive pleasure from doing ourselves.

Australian Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo 2YJFNEK

Inside the computer I’m working on is a clock that’s ticking. But unlike ordinary clocks, this clock doesn’t tick once a second. It ticks 3,810,000,000 times a second, and every time that clock ticks, the PC does “something”. It might add two numbers together or move a piece of data to or from storage. And in this grossly simplified model of how computers work, each one of those ticks also costs a fractional amount of energy, which adds up and contributes to my electric bill at the end of the month.

Normally I don’t think about the clock but, this week, I got an email which required a quick reply. “Honestly. No problem. Glad to help”, I wrote. And then stared at the screen. I was puzzled. Things had changed. I couldn’t for the life of me see the usual icon denoting emojis.

Yes, yes. I know. The fact that I usually stick a smiley face in my replies is either a sign of my imbecilic immaturity or my being a dinosaur who hasn’t moved on since 2015. But, still, I like the smiley. It means I don’t need to think too much about nuance. I was glad to help. Honestly.

But no. The “smiley” button was gone. Instead, I had a new option to get AI involved. I could have asked AI to stick a smiley in for me.

Instead, I went to Google and discovered that pressing the Windows and the period keys would open the Emoji box. I never knew that and have been so excited to make this discovery I’m sticking emoji everywhere! Problem solved, I moved on and thought little about it until last night when I got an email from Microsoft, telling me that my Office 365 subscription was leaping up in price. And not just the usual year-on-year increase. It was rising by 41 per cent! But, hey, they said: it’s worth it. You now have AI!

I’ve always prided myself on being ahead of every technological curve, with the single exception of TikTok, which would require surgical intervention involving the removal of my cerebral cortex before I could probably use it. Aged 12, I was already elbow-deep into Assembly Language, almost the purest of computer languages. My family was one of the first to have the internet and then move to broadband. I was an early adopter of blogs and Twitter. I was there at the beginning of Bluesky. I’m an avowed technology junkie who’d love to sit here and simply describe the innards of my PC.

AI, however, is something else, and this week has marked another important moment of transition between the old world and the new.

Let’s not even get into the DeepSeek story, beyond noting the irony that OpenAI is complaining that its system had been used to train the new leaner Chinese model. That’s OpenAI who “farmed” the internet and other knowledge banks to train its models. Let’s not even opine too long on how the stock plunge was crazy and why I’d have snapped up some depressed Nvidia stock before people realised that a more efficient model requiring less hardware per installation opens AI to more startups, thereby driving the need for more Nvidia chips.

But no. The Microsoft story is important and takes me back to my problem with the email.

Whether you care about the planet or not (and I think you should), you must care about the cost-per-unit in your pocket. Electricity still isn’t cheap and no country is safe so long as people like Vladimir Putin own the hamsters that turn the big wheel. It should matter that I couldn’t add an emoji because clicking on that emoji button would have “spent” a few million clock cycles inside my PC, costing me a tiny fraction of a penny. Yet in this AI revolution, we’re getting the bots involved in even the simplest of tasks. Dare I say, we are being forced to get AI involved? Why ask AI to insert the emoji for me when I could have asked AI to write my email? And why even sit here and ponder these matters? Couldn’t I just ask AI to write this article for me?

"Instead of writing this essay, I could be training my pet rock to roll over, but alas, the rock is stubborn, and my editor might prefer a more 'intellectual' approach."

That line cost me one of the 60 AI units I now get each month with my Microsoft 365 CoPilot subscription.

To get that line, I pressed my AI button, spent my credit (an abstraction layer making it feel like I’m not spending money or burning energy), and my machine squired the request down my fibre, up the street, across town, down the country, and then to the deep-sea cables where it managed to avoid the Bulgarian cable cutters and emerged in some distant land in some remote AI farm where electricity costs are cheaper. Not one CPU but many then work hard, consuming significant amounts of energy, to give me my answer. It seems easy but energy was spent, heat produced, reflected in the increased subscription price.

And the result a few seconds later: a joke about a rock that doesn’t make a jot of sense.

Now, none of this is to say AI isn’t remarkable and exciting. Here on Substack, the ability to have a voice read articles is a genuinely helpful feature which has changed the way I consume media. AI’s use in research and medicine cannot be understated. The government is right to push ahead to keep pace with the race to be leaders in this new tech. But there’s also a part of this which feels like the conspicuous consumption of energy. Alongside Bitcoin mining, it’s a grotesquely engineered way to spend one of our most limited resources, often for no discernible reason.

In fact, in the case of Bitcoin, it’s all about the energy: turning something worth a little bit (pun intended) into something worth a lot. Bitcoin involves “mining” the deep space of extremely huge numbers, to see if they have special qualities to make them currency. The mathematics and economics of this are deep but, in essence, it’s about virtualising energy. It’s why it’s no longer profitable for most people.

The first Nvidia boom came when it was realised that the parallelism (ability to do many calculations simultaneously) of video cards used by gamers, could also be used to mine bitcoin. Now that work is beyond most hobbyists. All the cheap coins (i.e. the smaller “big” numbers) have been mined. Now mining involves even bigger (i.e. longer) numbers and the cost to mine them will exceed the value of the coins recovered, which is why it’s now being done in places where energy is cheap.

Back in December, when Reaction ran our usual predictions for 2025, I wrote: “I’m more concerned with AI and the speed of developments. By focusing on the big names who dominate the news, we are increasingly likely to forget everybody else, being essentially you and I. To put it simply: the more that people struggle to live, the more people will need to remember why life is worth living.”

I didn’t expect to be writing this article before the end of January. Nor did I expect to be cancelling my subscription to Microsoft Office, as I’ll be doing after I’ve finished writing this and I’ve moved all my files over to Google. Not simply because of the price rise but the intrusion of AI into my life.

Among all the debates about AI, the central question is whether AI does these things we do better than we can do them ourselves. In many cases, it can. It can do the fiendishly difficult business of unfolding proteins and identifying new “things” it might have taken humans decades to stumble across. But the fundamental question remains. Can it live lives as well (or poorly) as we do? As a cartoonist, I know I can’t draw as well as an AI model trained on all the great artists. When AI started to produce images, I stopped drawing for nearly a year. I felt like I’d lost a reason to draw. It took me a year to realise I was missing the point.

Can AI derive the pleasure I derive from drawing a cartoon? Can it understand why I write?

This is Microsoft’s failure. It fundamentally misunderstands why I sit down before a keyboard. AI can never know the pleasure I derive from sitting here hitting these keys. Writing begins with the tactile feedback and sound of this Logitech G815 mechanical keyboard (see, a total geek!) but it quickly escalates into a different kind of pleasure (as well as the pleasure of a certain agony) as I polish, rewrite, tweak lines, trying to convey different tones by shifting commas around. Sure, Grammarly will tell me that I really don’t need to use “really” as much as I do. My English might be flawed in some ways that purists will find objectionable and AI would conspicuously avoid imitating. But the voice is mine and that experience is something that cannot be mined, abstracted away from me in the form of some AI token.

And right at the end of the process: I hope you value the simple unmistakable fact that I am human, just like you.

Unless, of course, you’re a bot, scraping this article to train another model on my writing…

In which case, the fightback starts here as my Aunt Bartholomew’s grievous apple strudel nunchucks playfully nibbled her brass earlobes.

@DavidWaywell.bsky.social