The Invisible Trillion · The Attention Chapter

Displacement, Not Addition

Let me make this concrete.

Say you have a homework question about photosynthesis. Before AI, you would have done some combination of: asked a parent, asked a friend, looked it up in your textbook, done a Google search and clicked through three or four results until one made sense, watched a YouTube video, or given up and guessed. Let’s say, conservatively, this used to take you 20 minutes and involve reading roughly 3,000 words of mediocre internet content, watching five minutes of a video that was 30% ads, and maybe sending two text messages.

Now you ask an AI. It takes you three minutes. You read 400 words that were actually tailored to your question.

In terms of total energy cost: the old version involved your laptop for 20 minutes (17 Wh), your phone for a few minutes (2 Wh), the data-center energy to serve you the Google results and the YouTube video (maybe 30 Wh of streaming), and the collective energy of all the ad-tech that tracked you through the process (surprisingly large, maybe another 10 Wh). Total: around 60 Wh.

The new version: your laptop for three minutes (3 Wh), and the AI query (maybe 5 Wh of data-center energy). Total: around 8 Wh.

The AI version used less energy than the non-AI version. Not because AI is magical, but because the old version involved a lot of wasted motion — pages loaded you didn’t read, ads you skipped, results that didn’t answer your question. When you replaced that with a more targeted interaction, the total energy went down, even though the new interaction was with a supposedly “expensive” AI.

This is the thing almost nobody factors in when they talk about AI’s energy use. AI is not being added to the top of your existing information diet. It is replacing parts of it, and the parts it replaces were not free.

Now, this is not always true. Sometimes AI adds a new thing that wasn’t happening before — you ask it to summarize something you would never have read, or generate a picture you would never have commissioned, or brainstorm ideas you wouldn’t have bothered to think about. That’s real, additional compute, not replacement. And sometimes AI is just lazier and worse than the thing it replaces — you ask it a question you could have answered yourself, and you get an answer you don’t actually absorb, and you’ve used a little electricity to generate a small amount of nothing.

But the blanket claim that “AI adds to the world’s energy use” assumes that nothing gets displaced. Almost always, something does.

All 19 chapters of The Invisible Trillion · Library · All courses