Sometimes a thirty-second comedy sketch manages to say more about an issue than pages of corporate public relations. A hilarious YouTube short (linked below), depicting Elon Musk as a technological tyrannical monarch holding court over his unfortunate subjects, is one of those sketches.
The setup is deliberately ridiculous. King Elon sits enthroned while petitioners approach him with their troubles. One petitioner merely cries and is summarily dismissed. Then comes the peasant with an actual grievance: his village has run out of water because the King's mighty data centres have consumed it.
At this point we might expect the usual corporate response. There could be promises about sustainability, water recycling, community consultation or the enormous benefits artificial intelligence will eventually deliver to humanity.
Instead, King Elon applies technological rationality to the problem. Human beings are about 60 per cent water. Therefore, the solution to the water shortage is obvious: mine the peasants for water!
That is the punchline, and it is much cleverer than it initially appears. The joke works because King Elon does not dispute the peasant's complaint. He simply processes it according to a system in which expanding technological capacity is the unquestioned objective. The data centres require water. Water is scarce. Peasants contain water. Mine the peasants! Problem solved!
The human being has ceased to be the person for whose benefit the technological system supposedly exists. He has become another natural resource required to keep the system running.
Obviously, nobody at Tesla, xAI, OpenAI, Google, Meta or Microsoft is proposing to squeeze people like oranges to cool their servers … maybe. Satire works through exaggeration. But exaggeration works best when it magnifies something recognisable.
The underlying issue is real. Artificial-intelligence infrastructure requires enormous physical resources. The popular image of AI as something ethereal existing somewhere in "the cloud" is profoundly misleading. The cloud ultimately consists of buildings filled with computers, drawing electricity and producing heat that must be managed. Depending upon their design and location, large data centres can also require substantial quantities of water, directly for cooling or indirectly through electricity generation.
That creates a political question which becomes more important as the AI build-out accelerates: who gets priority when technological ambitions collide with finite local resources?
The standard Silicon Valley answer begins with the enormous future benefits expected from artificial intelligence. AI may accelerate scientific discovery, improve medicine, increase productivity, automate unpleasant work and perhaps solve problems beyond present human capabilities. Some of those expectations may prove justified.
But the King's unfortunate peasant represents the other side of the equation. He lives somewhere. He needs electricity. He needs water. He pays bills. His community requires roads, infrastructure and functioning public services. If a giant technological project arrives promising immense benefits to humanity in general while imposing costs upon particular communities in the present, those communities cannot simply be treated as inconvenient obstacles to progress.
That is why the throne-room setting works so well. A king does not negotiate with his peasants as equals. He listens to petitions and then decides what will happen. The joke therefore transforms the enormous concentration of economic and technological power surrounding AI into an older and immediately recognisable political relationship: monarch and subject. The supercomputer behind the throne merely updates the scenery.
There is also a faint echo of The Matrix. In those films, the ultimate technological inversion has occurred. Machines originally created by human beings have developed requirements of their own, and humanity has become an input into the machine system, serving as unconscious batteries. From memory the battery held by Morpheus is a Duracell, "coppertop."
The comedy sketch compresses that dystopia into a single joke. The data centre needs water, the human contains water, and therefore the human becomes part of the supply chain.
The important point is not that Elon Musk personally thinks this way. Treating the sketch as a literal accusation against Musk would actually weaken the satire.
"King Elon" represents a mentality. It is the mentality produced when technological expansion becomes an end in itself. More computing power requires more chips. More chips require more data centres. More data centres require more electricity, land, transmission infrastructure and cooling. Each shortage then becomes another engineering problem requiring another technological solution.
But eventually somebody has to ask the question that cannot be answered by adding another rack of GPUs: what is all this for? If the answer is human welfare, then human beings cannot simultaneously be treated merely as constraints upon the expansion of the system supposedly being constructed for their benefit.
There is nothing uniquely sinister about data centres consuming resources. Agriculture consumes vastly more water in many regions. Mining consumes resources. Manufacturing consumes resources. Cities themselves consume enormous quantities of water and electricity.
The relevant question is therefore not whether AI infrastructure uses resources. Of course it does. The question is whether the people who bear the local costs have a meaningful voice in deciding what trade-offs are acceptable.
That is where the little comedy sketch becomes political philosophy. The peasant approaches the throne believing he possesses a claim upon the King because something necessary for ordinary human life has disappeared. King Elon sees the same facts but operates from an entirely different hierarchy of values. The technological project comes first. Everything else must accommodate itself to that objective.
Once that premise is accepted, the monstrous conclusion follows with impeccable efficiency. The peasants are 60 per cent water. Mine the peasants. It is absurd, but that is precisely why the joke lands. Good satire takes a tendency already present in reality and pushes it until the underlying assumption becomes impossible to miss.
The darker possibility surrounding the AI revolution is not that our technological rulers secretly hate ordinary people. That would almost be reassuringly old-fashioned. It is that enormously powerful institutions could become so committed to the expansion of computation that the interests of particular human beings become variables buried somewhere deep inside the optimisation problem.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qlT-nba4W0M