[tlb]

No one will ever agree on when AI systems have equivalent functionality to a human brain. But lots of jobs consist of things a computer can now do for less than 100W.

Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.

[9dev]

> Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.

Add to that the tier-n dependencies this urban lifestyle has—massive supply chains sprawling across the planet, for example involving thousands upon thousands of people and goods involved in making your morning coffee happen.

[wongarsu]

Wikipedia quoted global primary energy production at 19.6 TW, or about 2400W/person. Which is obviously not even close to equally distributed. Per-country it gets complicated quickly, but naively taking the total from [1] brings the US to 9kW per person.

And that's ignoring sources like food from agriculture, including the food we feed our food.

To be fair, AI servers also use a lot more energy than their raw power demand if we use the same metrics. But after accounting for everything, an American and an 8xH100 server might end up in about the same ballpark

Which is not meant as an argument for replacing Americans with AI servers, but it puts AI power demand into context

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/