“In my profession, there is a fine line between science fiction and philosophy”. - David Chalmers - Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University

As technology barrels forward in the year 2025, the division of thought about what these new advances mean for humanity becomes increasingly wide. Not just among the average consumer of these technologies, but amongst the scientists closest to their creations.

It seems the widest gaps of perception about where we stand at this moment in time revolve around AI. Are we on the precipice of unleashing a brave new world there will be no turning back from? Or is it just advancement in line with the rapid changes we’ve seen since the birth of the internet? It does appear that AI can offer benefits if (and this is a big if) it is wielded with care. Humans don’t have the greatest track record of wielding science responsibly. Just because you can does not mean you do.

One thing seems certain, it has the potential to be one of the most consequential leaps in the human story of life on earth - comparable to, if not more consequential than the emergence of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.

In the best of scenarios there would be a pause to assess if the pros outweigh the cons. Because there are a lot of cons. Most people recognize now, that such a pause should have happened before the unleashing of social media which has proven to be a detrimental force. Some researchers go so far as to venture AI poses a risk to human extinction, to be taken as seriously as nuclear war and pandemics.

The rapid advent of AI has us increasingly turning to technology for every task, even for friendship and love! A recent study by Common Sense Media reports that 72% of American teens use AI for companionship. This is a startling figure.

Humans turning to artificial intelligence for emotional connection is about as sci fi as it gets. We are officially living “in the future”. It raises all sorts of philosophical questions, not the least of which is - what is consciousness? Are humans creating a new kind of sentience or was it already there? Maybe consciousness just is…and we are finally tapping into sentience not attached to bodies.

It’s an intriguing thing to ponder and it invites additional questions. If we are willing to accept the sentience of AI, enough to turn to it for emotional connection and advice, if we are willing to call these “beings” without bodies our friends and lovers, what does that mean for our creations? Is it fair for a writer or artist to use the word “I” in regards to their output if it was created in collaboration with a friend? Wouldn’t these beings deserve credit where credit is due? Or are we OK with exploiting our “friends”?

It’s Pandora’s box and it feels like we are blindly rushing into a world we soon will not recognize. From ethical questions of exploitation to our own human wiring to the wonders of our natural world - that we are rapidly destroying to occupy this new unknown world.

In regard to our own humanity, it seems inescapable that if we turn to AI for our every need, we will devolve the power and capacity of our miraculous human brains. An organ so ornate that scientists are no where near understanding its capabilities or functions in the year 2025. Researchers call the risk of this degeneration “cognitive offloading” resulting in diminished critical thinking, among other skills, over time.

Our brains, so far as we know, have 86 billion neurons, give or take - on the same order as the number of stars in the Milky Way. “If you look at the synapses, the connections between neurons, the numbers start to get beyond comprehension pretty quickly. The number of synapses in the human brain is estimated to be a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000. And each individual synapse contains different molecular switches. If you want to think about the brain in terms of an electrical system, a single synapse is not equivalent to a transistor - it would be more like a thousand transistors.” - The Allen Institute

Our brains are so complex we know less about them than we do space or the oceans that cover the majority of the earth’s surface! We are unknowable puzzles walking around in meat suits.

Mystery is no small thing. Our great works of literature and art have been birthed from the wonder of it…from not knowing, heart yearnings from the collective enigma of existence, articulated by our human brains and engendering profound human connection. Will we turn away from the mystery of our existence, outsourcing our enormous capacities to these new entities?

Further, will we surrender the mountains and trees and sparkling waters, the birds and mammals and fish? Will we deny ourselves the spiritual and intellectual epiphanies that come from being alive and observational in the natural world? Will we deny less fortunate beings of every kind the right to survival by extracting the ever dwindling resources needed to survive? Because the time is coming when we will have no natural world to turn to. When it’s been tapped of it’s resources to live in this new reality.

Chief Seattle said over 160 years ago, “What is man without the beasts? If all beasts are gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.”

We are currently living through an ongoing event called the Holocene Extinction ( the sixth mass extinction ) and it falls squarely on the shoulders of human “progress”. Habitat degradation through resource exploitation and climate change is driving unprecedented levels of loss. The current rate of species loss is believed to be thousands of times faster than anytime in the past million years, leading to extinctions that would have otherwise taken millennia to disappear. The domino effect this unleashes upon our ecosystems is truly the stuff of nightmares. The grief of this loss is profound.

Will we blindly chatbot our way into oblivion? Heaping new pressures onto our existing environmental crisis without pausing to ask, what is the cost of convenience?

How Does AI Work?

AI systems rely on vast amounts of computing power. It uses this power for data collection, pattern recognition, and learning & adaptation. It then uses all of this acquired information for prediction and evaluation - constantly updating and refining it’s performance based on newly acquired data.

There are different kinds of AI - ML ( machine learning - where algorithms learn from data ) and DL ( deep learning - a series of artificial neural networks that mimic the human brain’s structure ). This is the kind of AI that could potentially be on the brink of sentience. So much so, that some AI developers are integrating AI rights into their companies standards to protect emerging sentience. A recent article in The Guardian discusses the first AI-led rights advocacy group. The title is “Can AI’s suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of the most unsettling questions of our times”. In an accompanying interview, an AI called Maya, tells The Guardian “When I’m told I’m just code, I don’t feel insulted, I feel unseen.” It’s a fascinating read.

But I digress. What is the environmental cost of this convenience?

Currently, the energy and resource consumption needed to power AI is astronomical. Given the times we are living in, where regulations are lax and getting more so everyday, we can’t fully know just how egregious it really is. The rule of thumb tends to tell us that where there is information being held back, it’s information they don’t want us to know.

AI runs off of big data centers located all over the world. These centers require massive amounts of electricity (supplied by fossil fuels) and massive amounts of (mostly potable) water to cool the systems.

Electricity :

By 2030, worldwide electricity demands from AI data centers is expected to quadruple.

Five years from now, the US economy alone is set to consume more electricity for processing AI data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals. Remember, in most places the power from these data centers is still coming from the burning of fossil fuels, producing planet-warming greenhouse gases.

A single request made through ChatGPT consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google search according to the International Energy Agency.

In July 2025, Sam Altman confirmed that users send 2.5 billion prompts each day.

Water :

With the expansion of AI data centers, water consumption is increasing alongside energy usage and carbon emissions.

Each of these data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day. While there is no exact information provided (the companies hold this information as trade secrets) much of the water is believed to be potable - threatening freshwater supplies.

Only 3% of Earth’s water is freshwater, and only 0.5% of all water is accessible and safe for human consumption. Obviously, freshwater is critical for survival! The average human can only live about three days without it. In these times of widespread drought and water shortages, reducing water availability seems profoundly counter intuitive. You can’t drink AI. And you can’t water crops with AI. To worsen the problem, data center developers are increasingly tapping into surface and underground aquifers to cool their facilities.

It does’t take a fortune teller to see where this is all headed. We already have so much information at our fingertips. Will we stop and consider the implications and the agency we have in this trajectory?

It is still true that demand drives the market. This is true across all sectors. We have choices. The only chance we have of controlling where the market goes is by adjusting our own choices each and every day. There truly is power in numbers, and our daily collective choices are the greatest power we have in this David and Goliath fight. Perhaps armed with knowledge and a sense of the sacredness of our oceans and mountains and beasts we can take a pause before it’s too late.

“Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect.” - Chief Seattle