Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand binary thinking.
Black/white. Human/machine. Intermediated/disintermediated. Jedi/Sith.
Reality isn’t a semantic padel court with a net in the middle.
(Actually, padel—along with reggaeton—is one of the few areas where I do accept binaries: both are, respectively, a terrible sport and terrible music.)
And yet, here I am reading yet another statement from Sam Altman, and I feel a strangely Luddite shiver creeping up my spine.
Me—the same person who has always argued that technology isn’t anti-human, but rather an extension of our humanity.
In an interview with The Indian Express, Altman complained that many discussions around ChatGPT’s energy consumption are “unfair,” especially when they compare the energy required to train an AI model with that needed to “train” a human being.
To quote him:
“(…) training a human also takes a lot of energy. It takes about twenty years of life and all the food consumed during that time before someone becomes intelligent.”
And honestly, I could almost grant him that provocation.
After all, many of us grew up on absurdly sugary snacks and processed junk. If natural selection didn’t wipe us out back then, maybe we do deserve to be compared—energetically speaking—to a data center.
But that’s not the point.
The issue isn’t how much energy a prompt consumes versus a chocolate egg.
The issue is the framing.
Comparing AI training to human evolution is classic Silicon Valley rhetoric—invoking Darwin as if he were an advisor at Sequoia Capital.
It’s like claiming a highly energy-intensive hotel isn’t polluting because “guests breathe too.”
And it’s not the human vs. machine comparison that bothers me.
It’s the self-justification.
Because once we start excusing everything in the name of progress, we can excuse anything.
Twenty years from now, our children won’t ask how many parameters GPT-5.2 had.
They’ll ask what this madness cost us.
As they walk across a burning planet in protective suits.
And at that point, quoting Darwin won’t be enough.
See you next week,
Simone
SIMONE PUORTO
