1523: Film & Commentary 2: The Fifth Element, Speculative Futures, and AI’s Energy Appetite
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/05
How do speculative futures in film and media help us anticipate challenges like AI’s rising energy consumption?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, a film blending sci-fi, fantasy, and romance. Rosner finds it visually striking but narratively tedious, though he values its imaginative vision of the future. He notes that speculative works — films, TV, games — act like cultural consciousness, helping societies anticipate challenges. However, lazy depictions fail to provide meaningful foresight. Rosner connects these visions to real concerns, such as AI’s growing energy demands, including electricity and water for cooling servers. He critiques proposals like orbital power stations, suggesting lunar reactors as more feasible, while emphasizing the need for efficiency-focused AI design.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One movie that stood out in the last thirty years was The Fifth Element, with Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich. It was unusual, mixing a Blade Runner-like futuristic aesthetic with cartoonish elements and outright fantasy. It had romance woven in, too. What are your thoughts on that film?
Rick Rosner: I’ve never seen it all the way through in order, but I’ve watched large parts of it, some multiple times. I believe it was directed by Luc Besson, who specializes in spectacular, futuristic, often nonsensical stories. The Fifth Element is visually striking and entertaining nonsense, but I found it somewhat tedious — otherwise I’d have made an effort to watch it straight through.
That said, I’m always in favour of films that attempt to imagine the future. Even if they’re off-base, they can raise important questions. For instance, before you joined, I was about to rewatch the beginning of Idiocracy, which has its own satirical vision of the future.
I appreciate productions — whether films, TV shows, or even video games — that invest time and resources in envisioning possible futures. No imagined future gets everything right, but worthwhile ones touch on real issues and make attempts to dissect them.
In a sense, cultural visions of the future function like consciousness: just as the brain predicts what might happen in the next moment to help us orient and survive, speculative futures help us prepare for cultural and societal challenges.
Of course, some science fiction is made by lazy creators, producing equally lazy visions that don’t stand up. But even consuming flawed depictions sparks thought about what the future might hold — and that has real value in preparing us for it.
Speculative visions of the future can help us prepare for the real challenges we’ll face — like artificial intelligence consuming enormous amounts of electricity to power computation, and massive amounts of water to cool overheated servers.
For example, I read today that some billionaire claimed we’ll need “orbiting power stations” to meet AI’s future energy needs. That likely means orbital nuclear reactors, since covering Earth’s surface with solar panels would be easier and more efficient than deploying orbital solar arrays. In some sense, orbital reactors might be safer — if something goes wrong, they’re not on the ground near large populations.
Still, if we’re considering nuclear power off Earth, it might actually make more sense to build reactors on the Moon rather than in orbit. On the Moon, you have solid ground, you’re not working in zero gravity, and the engineering would likely be simpler. Once you’ve already reached orbit, getting to the Moon requires additional energy, but not dramatically more.
Is this necessary in the next fifty years? Possibly. AI’s energy appetite is real and growing. But so far, I haven’t seen a genuinely concerted effort to design models that dramatically reduce AI’s power consumption. There are lighter, more efficient models — often abridged versions of large language models — that perform reasonably well. However, the broader push to address AI’s energy demands has yet to take serious shape.
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