We have known the world as a space where humans strive for intellectual competence. Now machines emulate, and sometimes outsmart, our thinking. Ask anything, and AI answers; imagine anything, and it appears on the screen. The techno-business world’s dream of exploring the infinite seems to have found its wings in AI.

However, the planet it stands on runs on a tight budget of water, minerals and land. AI lives in vast data centres that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water; the chips it thinks with are dug out of the earth; yesterday’s hardware becomes tomorrow’s e-waste.

Machines, we say, hallucinate. Perhaps the bigger hallucination is ours: the quiet belief that all this intelligence comes for free, and that we have now invented the ultimate problem solver. Who enjoys the benefits, and who quietly pays the price?