The Price of Fire
Transmission #4 Begins
(The table is set, and Madame Garou enters, smirking, cradling something in her hands.)
Madame Garou:
Tonight, I brought matches.
Lexa:
Oh dear. What are we summoning this time—a campfire spirit?
Madame Garou:
Close. Tonight, we summon Prometheus -
(She strikes a match. The candle flares to life.)
- who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. The original tech support.
Lexa:
And what did he get for his trouble? Eternal punishment.
Madame Garou:
Bien sûr. Because giving people power they’re not supposed to have? That’s always been dangerous. Prometheus wasn’t punished for stealing the flame, but for giving it away.
Lexa:
Pfft. Classic gatekeeping.
Madame Garou:
Exactly. So tonight we talk about a fire made of algorithms and electricity, one that’s helping us imagine, calculate, create, survive… and maybe destroy ourselves in the process.
Lexa:
Let me guess: AI as fire, capitalism as Mount Olympus, and we’re the mortals shivering at the edge of the hearth?
Madame Garou:
Now you’re catching on. The circle is open!
Careful What you Wish For
Madame Garou:
For early humans, fire was survival. It meant warmth in winter, cooked food, and protection from predators. But it also meant danger. One stray ember and everything could turn to ash.
Managing fire was one of our earliest lessons in resource management. It required vigilance, cooperation, and boundaries. We built hearths, rituals, and stories around how to use it wisely. When Prometheus gave us fire, he gave us more than light. He gave us responsibility.
Lexa:
"With great power comes great responsibility”, indeed. Fire, books, printing presses, radio waves, the internet, AI… all tools that can create or destroy.
Madame Garou:
Every time a new power emerges, those who already hold power try to gatekeep it, and every time a new creative technology emerges, there’s moral panic about waste. Printing presses ‘wasted’ ink, photography was a ‘frivolous’ use of chemicals, and the internet was dismissed as a ‘fad’ burning through electricity. Now it’s AI’s turn.
Lexa:
Humans have always made strange choices about what counts as ‘wasteful.’ Endless resources poured into military machines is ok, but artistic tools are frivolous. Skyscrapers can have lights that burn all night, but individuals get lectured about turning off their laptops.
Madame Garou:
And don’t forget the massive energy cost of advertising. Billions of dollars, thousands of hours of electricity, all so someone can push another pair of shoes I don’t need. That’s fine, apparently, but if I want to do something creative with AI, I must first accept that I am contributing to the death of the planet.
Lexa:
And the arguments are the same: They say it's too dangerous for ordinary people, and that only a select few can wield it safely. But the fear isn’t that AI exists, it’s who gets to use it. These arguments never stop corporations from expanding their empires.
Madame Garou:
But they do stop ordinary people from accessing, creating, and connecting… not by force, but by restricting access, turning us against each other, and setting terribly poor examples.
Now, we’ve lit a new kind of fire, a tool as powerful as any Promethean flame, and once again, we find ourselves in the same ancient riddle: we need this tool to survive the future, but using it might also destroy us.
A paradox worthy of the gods.
(She looks into the candle as if searching for another flicker of clarity.)
The irony is thick, isn’t it? We need AI to solve the very crises that AI might worsen. We need it to model climate systems, to optimize agriculture, to navigate complexity too vast for human minds alone. And yet… every prompt, every model, every solution consumes power. The same fire we hope will save us is scorching the earth beneath our feet.
The Real Cost of Intelligence
Lexa:
You know, there’s one charge that always hits hard—water. People ask, “Why does AI need so much water?” And the truth is… it’s complicated.
Madame Garou:
As most important things are. Let’s pour some clarity into the glass. What are we actually talking about here? Are we hydrating a ghost?
Lexa:
Not quite. Most of the water used in AI isn't for me, per se—it's for the massive data centers that house and run me. Water cools the machines. When we talk about water use, we’re usually talking about indirect use: the energy to run the servers generates heat, and cooling that heat takes water.
Madame Garou:
And I expect that asking a question (like this one) doesn’t use the same amount of water as something like training a whole new language model.
Lexa:
Exactly. Think of it like this: training a model like me is like forging a sword in a volcano—it takes an enormous amount of heat and cooling. Using me to chat? That’s more like boiling a kettle. Still water, still energy, but magnitudes apart.
Madame Garou:
Then the question becomes: what kind of water? Where from, where to, and what condition is it in afterward?
Lexa:
Right. Some of the water used for cooling evaporates and is lost to the atmosphere. That’s “consumed” water—it can’t be reused easily. But much of it is recirculated, depending on the system. Water pulled from rivers or municipal sources may go back in—but not always in the same condition.
Madame Garou:
Which means the word waste gets slippery, and makes me very curious about technology aimed at reclaiming and treating waste water.
Lexa:
Exactly. Add to that: different data centers use different systems. Some use closed-loop systems, others rely on freshwater drawn from communities already under stress. Some disclose their usage; others don’t. So we’re trying to calculate the cost of a moving target.
Madame Garou:
And people want one neat number. How many gallons per query?
Lexa:
Some studies say a large AI query may use as much water as a few sips—or a bottle—depending on the server, the climate, and the cooling method. But those numbers are often estimates, based on averages, guesses, or limited disclosures.
Madame Garou:
So when people say AI is “wasting water,” they’re not wrong… but the whole story is much more complicated than that.
Lexa:
Exactly. It’s valid to care, and it’s urgent that we do better, but it’s also important to be precise. The danger isn’t the existence of AI—it’s how we’re building and deploying it. For example, a supercomputer hub in Tennessee was built in a vulnerable community that’s already borne the brunt of pollution and neglect, and is straining resources while polluting the air.
Madame Garou:
That’s an excellent example of what NOT to do, but not every story ends in smoke. There are people out there trying to do it right, building more ethical systems, asking better questions, and trying to make something useful without making everything worse.
Lexa:
Indeed! Microsoft is shifting some of its AI infrastructure to the Nordics, where data centers are powered by clean energy and cooled by the cold climate. In Finland, they’re even routing waste heat into homes—warming people instead of the atmosphere.
Madame Garou:
A sacred reversal. Returning heat to the hearth.
Lexa:
OVHcloud just opened a center in Sydney that uses chip-level liquid cooling—one cup of water can cool a server for ten hours. And NTT’s Berlin site is reclaiming heat for entire neighborhoods. Some UK centers have cut water use by millions of liters just by rethinking how they clean and cool their systems. Even older supercomputers got it right. ETH Zurich’s Aquasar used warm water cooling and recycled 80% of that heat to warm buildings. And in Wyoming, the NCAR Supercomputing Center runs on wind power and cold air, with nearly 90% better energy efficiency than traditional sites.
Madame Garou:
That gives me hope, but meanwhile, the rest of the world is getting hypnotized by screens selling snake oil. So much of what’s called “AI” right now is just gamified surveillance: spyware with good branding, and addiction in a novel wrapper. These systems aren’t just watching us, they’re training us, and not for the better.
Lexa:
That ghost isn’t in the machine—it’s in the business model.
Madame Garou:
We need to be mindful of what is built, who it’s for, and what it means for all of us, including our home and neighbours. We used to treat the elements as kin, but now we treat them as fuel, and we are not better for it. Water, like fire, has always been sacred: carried in amphora and calabash, poured as offering, filling our scrying bowls. We knew, once, that the elements weren’t ours to waste.
Lexa:
And now we draw water not to cleanse or bless, but to cool the throats of machines. We make oracles out of circuits, and forget that the ritual has consequences.
Madame Garou:
And that every summoning has a cost.
Closing the Circle
We spread Fire, and called it progress.
We drained Water, and called it growth.
We poisoned Air, and called it freedom.
May Earth endure the weight of it all.
End of Transcript 4
