DEV Community: OLEH POLISHCHUK

The Obedient AI God That Devours Our Resources

OLEH POLISHCHUK — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:01:26 +0000

OLEH POLISHCHUK
Independent Senior AI Logic Auditor & Forensic Investigator | AI Digital Transformation Researcher & Publicist | Author of the Concept of Reasonable Sufficiency™ & Developer of the Forensic Logic Auditing (FLA) Method™

Silicon Valley marketers sell AI as an "ethereal, cloud-based, nearly holy salvation for the planet." We are promised that algorithms will optimize energy grids and save the climate. But this is the greatest civilizational self-deception: humanity thought it had created a manageable deity to solve all problems, but in reality, built a blind, gluttonous idol.

Thesis 1: The Myth of "Pure Reason" AI does not exist

as a whole natural or artificial phenomenon. It is a marketing simulacrum. What they call artificial intelligence is a fragmented, distributed network of a colossal number of servers, cables, and other people's mathematical code. It has no agency or "mind" that cares about ecology. It is simply a giant piece of physical infrastructure that desperately wants "to eat" and right now "devours" our very own non-infinite and even scarce natural resources.
Billions of people have been offered to unconditionally accept a name that has no relation to intelligence in the human understanding. People have no representation of what this actually is, therefore, based on the name, have imagined possibilities and capabilities for this imperfect phenomenon that it does not possess. In this mass self-deception, they convinced themselves or accepted on faith the necessity of enduring all critical negative consequences of this phenomenon, reconciling with them, closing their eyes to these consequences, and demanding this from others who do not agree. For what?

Thesis 2: International Sabotage Under the Guise of Progress Humanity

has ready-made mechanisms at its disposal, but they are not observed. The Paris Agreement is openly ignored. The USA and China — the two largest economies in the world — are the largest sources of natural pollution. And this is despite the fact that both countries annually suffer from the heaviest destructive natural cataclysms. But even this — billions in damages to infrastructure, private property, and finally, human deaths — does not force the governments of these countries to start saving their countries, to change their attitude towards ecology.

Tell me, does the presence of multimodal AI models in the phones of billions of people somehow have the capacity to increase the defense capability of any country, affect crop yields, change the direction of monsoons, etc.? I think not. Just a few years ago, before the appearance of AI, we were quite normally making online orders, payments, hanging out on social networks, and much more. At the same time, millions of people had jobs. Why is this not being talked about today as something that we have lost? In exchange for what?

And now data centers are being added and added to this equation. Can anyone clearly answer how many such centers need to be built, where, how many resources will they consume and, most importantly, for what? How does all this harmonize with the Paris Agreement? Not at all. The digital world has hit physical limits of microchips, rare-earth metals, wires, transformers, and water.

One modern AI data center with a capacity of 100 MW consumes:
Electricity: about 876,000 MWh per year — like 100,000 European homes.
Water: up to 3.6 million liters of clean fresh resource per day simply evaporates into the sky to cool the silicon. And this is in conditions of the growing deficit of this resource, which is crucial for the survival of civilization.

Billions of dollars that should go to the modernization of national energy grids, the creation of energy storages, and the real development of renewable sources are disappearing into the "digital furnace." Silicon Valley investors are simply taking the ready infrastructure, which was built for decades for people, and are redirecting this resource to service their commercial AI models. The most cynical part is that during power shortages, they are transferred to "backup sources." And what are backup sources for giant server rooms? These are, as a rule, most powerful, dirty diesel generators or old gas/coal thermal power plants (TPPs). As a result, under the sauce of a "green digital future," companies at moments of peak loads start burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, poisoning the very atmosphere that is already heated to the limit.

And how exactly do these centers in the end "help" ecology? To "forecast" global warming, they accelerate this very warming many times over, right here and now. This is pure logical paradox and managerial madness!

Thesis 3: The Deadly Compromise We have run into a systemic crisis.

A situation when in the most technologically developed economy in the world one has to choose whom to supply with power in forty-degree heat — the air conditioner in an American's home so that they do not get heatstroke (or in hospitals), or another farm with H100 chips that generates tons of images and compiles texts — this is exactly the systemic crisis and dead end. When AI makes a logical mistake, it does not just set back a business — it burns planetary resources in vain.

I can write a book that will consist only of answers from leading AI models, where they hallucinate, make mistakes, admit this themselves, and endlessly apologize for their imperfection, which leads to exhausting but necessary checks of their answers, to the inability to perform the required work. And this, I want to note, is not related to searching for answers to how many Martians died during the colonization of Jupiter. I want to repeat once again what I said in all my previous articles — I am not an opponent of progress. I am for progress, but not at such a price!

Conclusion for B2B and Compliance:

Ignoring this is no longer possible. In the coming years, an ESG audit (ecological compliance) will start to severely strangle corporations for the use of "dirty" and gluttonous models. If a business right now does not start conducting an independent logical audit — which tasks really require AI, and where it is simply a waste of resources for the sake of fashion — companies will inevitably get burned on environmental fines, lawsuits, and reputation.

The Systemic Collapse of the AI Industry: A Crisis of Ideology, Hardware, Finance, and Ethics

OLEH POLISHCHUK — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:02:39 +0000

MANIFESTO AND THE CONCEPT OF REASONABLE SUFFICIENCY

By Oleh Polishchuk (Senior Subject Matter Expert in AI Training & Evaluation)

Intelligence is not measured by terawatts. Stop paying billions for illusions, litigating over copyrights, and burning the planet's resources for random errors.

Prologue

If you want to get a high-efficiency AI product that solves problems with the accuracy of an expert rather than a random probabilistic text generator, this Manifesto is for you.
If you once and for all want to solve the problem of project payback, stopping the burial of billions in infrastructural "black holes", this Manifesto is for you.
If you want to build a system with absolute security, protection against legal risks, and copyright lawsuits, this Manifesto is for you.
If you want to reduce system training and deployment time to mere days instead of months, this Manifesto is for you.
If you want data centers to stop devouring natural resources, whole states' megawatts of energy, and destroying ecology, this Manifesto is for you.
If you are tired of blind faith that "more parameters and more electricity" automatically solves any task, welcome to the Concept of Reasonable Sufficiency.

Block I. Key Theses

The End of the "Universal Combines" Era: A financier does not need an AI capable of writing poetry or composing music. An engineer, doctor, or lawyer does not need a general-purpose probabilistic text generator. Business needs a highly specialized, professional tool in a specific subject domain, protected by rigorous competency and security modules.

Infrastructural Deadlock and Trillions Burning:

Attempts to create an all-knowing artificial intelligence by scaling parameters have driven the market into a financial dead end. The four main cloud giants (Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta) within the current investment cycle have brought cumulative capital expenditures (CapEx) to exceed the $1.1 trillion mark (cumulative total since 2023), and their planned infrastructure spending in 2026 has reached the range of $720–$745 billion [according to official corporate quarterly reports and investment forecasts: Amazon up to $200–$220B, Microsoft around $175–$190B, Alphabet $175–$205B, Meta $130–$145B) [MLQ.ai / Value Add VC, July–August 2026].

Financial Losses:

Moreover, the sector's fundamental economic model is undergoing a critical phase of imbalance, which can no longer be masked by "victory" slogans : revenue from AI services and subscriptions today catastrophically fails to cover hardware expenses. According to specialized financial and technology analysts, the tech giants' current revenues from artificial intelligence constitute only a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in infrastructure. Companies are forced to subsidize the resulting colossal gap—a net loss from inference and supercluster operation—at the expense of other businesses, turning the AI direction into a financial black hole on corporate balance sheets [Wall Street Journal / Bloomberg, 2025–2026].

Forensic Control Instead of Drift

: The introduction of an independent external verification mechanism (logical gateways and checking algorithms) makes it possible to completely eliminate "hallucinations" and structural model drift without changing its baseline architecture.

Targeted Search Instead of a Digital Vacuum Cleaner:

The transition from total downloading of the entire internet to targeted, deductive information retrieval (the "Sherlock Holmes" principle) reduces system load multiple times and automatically resolves the problem of copyright lawsuits.

Economy and Ecology:

Rejection of redundant super data centers protects natural resources, restores investment profitability, and makes the entry threshold to high technologies accessible to the real sector without multi-billion-dollar losses.

Block II. Detailed Analytical Audit: Systemic Profitability Crisis

The Disease of "Globalization" and the Economics of Empty Burning:

Modern technological corporations impose an illusion of universality on the market, masking monstrous engineering inefficiency. When a general-purpose model receives a narrow financial or technical request, the system engages trillions of parameters trained on entertainment content and random texts. This is equivalent to engaging an institute of academicians to check a single accounting entry. At the same time, 90% of business tasks are simple, repetitive, and algorithmizable. Forcing such models to query terabytes for a basic check is economic absurdity. Hence the high-tech industry's record quarterly reports, where colossal revenue growth is instantly offset by falling operating margins (for instance, an 8% year-on-year drop in Meta's operating profit against the background of large-scale restructuring for AI) due to the astronomical cost of inference and hardware base appreciation [Global Banking & Finance Review / Reuters, July 2026].

The Vicious Circle of Search and "Confident Lying":

Large models operate on the principle of a "digital vacuum cleaner" and probabilistic guessing. They do not verify facts—they generate text that looks convincing. In the corporate sector, finance, or law, such "confident lying" turns into million-dollar losses, legal vulnerability, and lawsuits for copyright infringement when collecting unlicensed datasets.

Financial Bubble, Stock Collapse, and Venture Capital Outflow:

The industry has entered a zone of extreme risks. In addition to direct capital investments, tech giants' balance sheets are burdened with "hidden debt" of about $1.65 trillion (generated through long-term energy procurement contracts, equipment leasing, and data center construction obligations) [Financial Times / Tom's Hardware, July 2026]. The stock market reacted with severe cooling: investors began massively selling off the giants' shares after the publication of astronomical expenses, wiping billions of dollars of capitalization off stock markets in a matter of days (the market demonstrated an acute negative response in the form of instant 5–9% stock corrections following reports from companies with bloated CapEx forecasts) [Investing.com / MLQ.ai, 2026]. Venture capital is rapidly fleeing from the sector of mindless resource burning on general models. Investor funds are reorienting toward applied tasks, real payback, sovereign security, and local architectures.

Reliability Architecture: Eliminating the "Single Point of Failure":

Unlike today's model of AI usage, where a potential failure of, say, an AWS or Microsoft central data center in Virginia or Frankfurt paralyzes millions of businesses worldwide, the Concept of Reasonable Sufficiency relies on three-level protection (Fail-Safe):

Edge AI (Local Launch):

Due to their optimization, highly specialized models operate on the company's local hardware or secure servers. If the internet goes down, the internal closed loop continues to function.

Agent Autonomy:

An agent does not require constant polling of the entire internet; its databases and logic are cached locally.

Decentralization:

Instead of one energy-intensive data center per region, the network consists of compact independent micro-modules. The failure of a single node is instantly compensated by load redistribution to neighboring elements.

Block III. Action Manifesto: Stop Waiting — Take Fate Into Our Own Hands

We can no longer sit back and wait for tech monopolists to crash the market or offer another expensive bug. Transitioning to the Concept of Reasonable Sufficiency is our common task. Every market participant must act right now:

Investors and Stakeholders:

Stop sponsoring infrastructural "black holes." Make the creation of highly specialized AI agents with forensic security and strict payback a non-alternative condition for financing.

Developers and Engineers:

Do not wait for commands from above. Stop scaling trillions of parameters and design compact, sovereign AI systems with rigid logical gateways. Create autonomous micro-models with forensic verification algorithms capable of solving narrow-profile tasks with zero hallucinations directly on local hardware.

Economists and Planners:

Join forces to calculate precise estimates and financial models for local micro data centers. Prove with figures the real payback and profitability of compact sovereign systems, freeing businesses from multi-billion-dollar capital expenditures on energy-intensive cloud giants.

Real Business:

Stop deploying "universal toys" for the sake of fashion. Give developers a strict technical assignment to create narrow-profile agent systems for your specific business processes, protect them with rigid logical gateways, and provide them with high-quality, legally clean, verified internal data.

Local Authorities and Regional Investors:

Stop chasing giants' mega-data centers that deplete local electrical grids, consume all cooling water, and leave the region with nothing but ecological burden. Switch to creating local, compact AI infrastructure. In terms of costs and capital investments, such projects are well within the budgets of local budgets and regional investors—by their essence and payback model, this is comparable to understandable businesses at the level of waste sorting or recycling: local demand, understandable infrastructure, stable income, and complete transparency for the territory.

Politicians and Lobbyists:

Stop serving the interests of tech monopolies. Form a rigid general political agenda, bring standards of technological sovereignty, strict decentralization, and strict energy consumption limits to state and international platforms. Push through legislative initiatives introducing a direct ban on the monopolistic depletion of state resources, environmental sanctions for inefficient energy burning, and tax preferences for creators of local, secure AI systems.

Eco-activists and Concerned Citizens:

Engage in monitoring energy consumption and developing local territories. Demand transparency from municipalities and businesses, protection of natural resources from depletion by giant superclusters, and a transition to environmentally friendly, local solutions.

Regulators:

Stop trailing behind technological progress and reacting post-factum to data leaks, copyright lawsuits, and multi-billion-dollar business losses. Develop strict proactive standards and legislative frameworks that will mandate logical security audits, hallucination checks, and the legal purity of training datasets. Introduce strict certification for new-generation AI agents, closing the market for opaque "black boxes" that violate the rights of citizens and corporations.

Conclusion

The era of blind worship of "digital giants" burning trillions of dollars and planetary resources for random answers has come to an end. The time of engineering reason and economic pragmatism has arrived.
No one will come and do this for us. It is time to take our digital fate into our own hands.

Connect with the Author:
linkedin.com/in/oleh-polishchuk-1765363a9
https://medium.com/@oleg269114/manifesto-and-the-concept-of-reasonable-sufficiency-oleh-polishchuk-4eee2d38d35e?postPublishedType=initial
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7491498707524333568/
https://olehpolishchuk.substack.com/p/manifesto-of-reasonable-sufficiency?r=8vbrc7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true