Comment by keeda

Sure, let's put some numbers on the thought experiment. Oversimplifying everything: say before AI, 100% of the world's energy enabled 100 units of productivity. Now, adding 2% more power for AI (which includes the training!), 102% buys us 105 units of productivity at the lower end? That's a good deal!

Of course, realistically speaking, the 5-30% boost is only across certain domains in knowledge work, not all work ever, so we're not gonna see a 105% boost globally. To get a fairer comparison, let's look at the US in 2024 where we have some broad data about AI power usage for and its overall productivity impact.

For power [1] indicates datacenters accounted for about 4.4% of all US power demand in 2024. From [2] it seems upto 20% of that was for AI workloads. That gives us 0.88% of total US power consumed by AI in 2024.

Now look at [2]. This is a St. Louis Fed study based on broad survey data which finds similar ~25% productivity boosts across multiple industries, which is comparable to other randomized studies on empirical data (some included in my previous links.) They estimate that current levels of AI usage in only the industries and roles exposed to it may already be improving total US labor productivity by upto 1.2%!

So we are probably already a bit better than breakeven!

Now consider that productivity will only keep increasing as people and companies learn to harness AI properly. As anecdotal evidence, notice how the sentiments about AI-based coding have shifted on this very forum; you see way more converts than skeptics.

Also consider that [3] found that people still use AI for a small part of their workday. As usage increases, so will productivity. Power consumption will go up too, but from all the above it looks very much like the tradeoff is very favorable to AI.

Yes we need more studies and data, but the ones we have so far are already sort of mind-blowing.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/24/what-we-k...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/new-research-energy-electricity-...

[3] https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2024/2024-02...