this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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So my GPU is about 300 watts and a still blatantly stupid LLM can write a little faster than me. Take off 100w to bring that down to my own writing speed then make it 10x slower to turn that 200 watts into 20 watts. Even with that heavy bias in the LLMs favour (forgiving it the entire power cost of my PCs other components that it partially utilizes) what we get is something slow, dumb, and incapable of learning because any local model is statically weighted.
That's one way to compare it.
Now, take your privileged writer status human brain and factor in all the other power required to keep it comfy in an air conditioned room, the labor required to put a roof over your head, keep your home plumbing working, make your food, deliver you pen and paper to write with - or are you using an electrically powered appliance to record and later communicate your thoughts? Oh, did you need to go to sleep for a while?
Do I get to include the gargantuan cooling system for the data centre and all the infastructure required to keep that going?
Total impact is the only fair comparison. Pollution from the power plants included, sewage treatment from the houses too.
Humans living is the whole point of civilization, though. We don't need the LLM to pay for the techbro carbon footprint or olichsrch child abuse, so we should similarly exclude the human's base sustensnce and survival from their budget.
You can include the human writer's coffee, music, and writing snacks / cigarettes.
All a matter of which externalities you're willing to overlook.
80 years ago, the solution to pollution was dilution - nobody gave a flying F if you dumped raw sewage in the ocean so long as you did it far enough offshore that it didn't come back to the beach... That works when you've got a total human population under 2B and most of them aren't burning significant fossil fuels... with 8B of us and rising, and half of us capable of hopping in a jet plane for a round-the-world trip whenever we feel like it, the pollution really does start to matter.
War is one of those side effects of civilization, and I haven't seen the war yet that gives a F about what it does to the environment, beyond maybe - just maybe sometimes - not wanting to kick off global winter.