The Age of Volition: When the Power Wall Breaks
essay
Watching Elon Musk at the World Economic Forum
I'm watching the stream here:
YouTube (WEF) https://www.youtube.com/live/IgifEgm1-e0?si=vtKnwzt-wPTiyc5r
Musk is painting a picture of a future I've always dreamed of. Energy sovereignty. Automation doing the "work" we currently waste our lives doing. People no longer spending 80% of their time serving a company that isn't theirs.
But the vision isn't what strikes me most. It's the room's reaction. And the reaction I see in most people when I describe this future.
You can see it in their faces. Most people are simply unable to imagine a world where humans reclaim their own energy. Where scarcity becomes a history lesson instead of a daily reality.
They don't just doubt it. They actively fight the idea.
The New Amish
We are watching a strange, reactionary identity form in real time. A kind of "New Amish" movement where people define themselves by what technology they refuse to touch.
The irony is thick. Even the most "AI-defiant" people you know are already using AI constantly. They just don't realize it. Map routing. Spam filters. Banking fraud detection. Camera pipelines. Basically any serious internet use. They're protesting the tide while standing waist-deep in the ocean.
The Hard Math: Compute Is Outrunning Power
The amount of compute being built right now isn't just "large." It's industrial. We're pouring concrete for gigawatt-scale data centers that don't even have power lines attached yet.
We've hit a tipping point. We can manufacture intelligence faster than we can generate electricity. The old limit was silicon. That battle is basically won. The new limit is thermodynamics.
(Elon is currently talking about aliens right now. :DDDD)
This sounds like a crisis. But it's also the mechanism of the next leap. The demand for intelligence is effectively infinite. The market is forcing an energy revolution that politics never could.
The Efficiency Paradox
While training clusters explode in size, models are also compressing fast. What needed a warehouse two years ago is trending toward local. Reasoning is starting to decouple from sheer parameter count.
Combine the energy buildout with inference efficiency and the result is hard to emotionally process. The struggle phase of history might be ending. We may be moving into an Age of Volition.
The Freedom to Choose
The terrifying promise isn't that robots take your job. It's that you finally have to answer who you are when survival is no longer the excuse.
A world where you choose how to live.
And if you love the grind, the meetings, the spreadsheets, the rituals of work, you can still do all of it. But for the first time in human history, it would be passion instead of survival.
That's the freedom people are afraid of.
That's the future we're building.