Sometimes, it’s worth remembering that, in the end, reality is neither augmented nor virtual – just ask Meta. Despite the ongoing relentless efforts to reshape what reality is, many of our hallucinatory mirror-worlds are prone to shatter when they come into contact with the physical constraints of the world we live and breathe in.
For example, the current situation in the middle east and the Strait of Hormuz shows that while in his mirror-world, Donald Trump clearly believed attacking Iran would achieve results within a week, possibly two, reality did not agree.
As a consequence, here in the real world, we have suffered a huge surge in fuel prices and rising costs.
An interesting by-product of these real-world consequences could be a reverse in the current trend to reduce remote working and move more people back to the office. As we all know, remote working became an intrinsic part of our reality during the Covid pandemic but there was always bound to be an attempt to bring back the old order once things had settled down to normal.
Unfortunately, as we are currently discovering, normal is no longer an option. Ireland’s reliance on fossil fuels and inadequate public transport networks is making the reality of higher fuel prices a significant burden for employees commuting to and from work. No less a body than the International Energy Agency (IEA) has recommended working from home where possible to reduce fuel demand for commuting and lowering speed limits by at least 10 kilometres per hour to cut fuel use across passenger vehicles and freight.
On the other hand, rising fuel costs could make working from home more expensive for those still reliant on oil-based or gas-based heating systems, so there’s a potential trade-off from letting the employer meet that cost in the office.
We have the technology
The infrastructure is still there, more or less, for remote working. What is intriguing is that the current reality could, potentially, alleviate the effects of memory and storage shortages on PCs and laptops and slow down the breakneck acceleration to AI. If you’re wondering why that could that be, here’s a possible rationale.
Firstly, the machines people are currently using are probably equal to most of the tasks they need to perform working remotely and the infrastructure exists for them to perform those tasks. This means that there isn’t really a huge or pressing need for them to upgrade their existing laptops or PCs to work remotely. In other words, there’s a rationale for keeping things as they are for the time being to match the reality we are now living in.
Which brings us to AI. In an environment where, as World Trade Organisation leader Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala notes, the global trading system is experiencing the “worst disruptions in the past 80 years”, it seems perverse for anyone to try and justify more of our resources being surrendered to power-hungry AI data centres that devour huge amounts of energy. When you’re being urged to carshare and drive 10km/h below the speed limit to help conserve energy, you’re not likely to be amenable to your government giving the go-ahead to energy-guzzling AI data centres, especially when the benefits they deliver still seem nebulous in a lot of cases.
It also becomes increasingly hard to justify the proliferation of those data centres when the energy costs associated with them are going to be higher than initially anticipated. Recent research from BestBrokers, for example, estimated that ChatGPT consumes over 60 GWh a day to answer up to 3.2 billion queries. Over the course of a year, this would equate to 22.15 TWh, comparable to the annual electricity needs of a country such as Croatia or Slovakia.
And according to an IEA report published in April 2025 global electricity generation to supply data centres will grow from 460 TWh in 2024 to over 1,000 TWh in 2030 and 1,300 TWh in 2035.
So will the tech industry and governments currently making huge bets on AI be willing to “face reality” or will they seek to blithely continue unchecked in their own virtual version based on “artificial” intelligence? In that context, perhaps it’s worth remembering that two of the meanings of “artificial” are “man made” and “fake”.
Ltd
