I am not a member of a cult, but I have my rituals. So, I was playing CS 1.6 with my homies the other night. We like them classics. Every Friday from dusk till dawn.We have smoke and beer breaks. We’re locked in when playing. Old school.Joe Rogan is one of our go-to topics during these “hydration breaks.”That night, it was a Joe Rogan Experience episode with Danny Jones.Now, I don’t remember how we got there. That’s how these conversations work. You start with “Why the fuck is this guy camping?” and 20 minutes later you’re discussing the metaphysics of consciousness, dark matter, and whether humanity has accidentally invented a new way to destroy the planet.Anyway, Danny Jones was talking about Rolf Landauer.Landauer was a physicist who worked on the thermodynamics of information. The interesting part is that information isn’t just some abstract thing floating around in cyberspace. Information has to exist physically. Bits have to be represented by something.Then Danny took it somewhere else.He said that Landauer had this theory that if you weighed a hard drive after putting data on it, it would weigh more than when it was empty.Wait.What?Apparently, according to the discussion, all the data stored around the world would currently amount to something like a kilogram.No big deal.Except the amount of data is growing.Danny and Jason Jorjani discussed a calculation in which, if data kept increasing at roughly 25% annually, the mass represented by stored data could eventually become comparable to the Moon’s mass. In approximately 340 years, give or take.What’s fair is fair. Landauer’s actual work concerns the thermodynamics of information and, famously, the minimum energy required to erase a bit. He did not publish a paper saying, “Congrats, your hard drive is now 0.00000000000000000001 grams heavier because you downloaded a cat video.”The leap from that to “information has mass” is a theoretical interpretation, and the Moon calculation is an interpretation built on top of that interpretation.Now, imagine every AI data center on Earth.Every server. Every terabyte of training data. Every Reddit argument ever written. Every TikTok dance.All of it, stored somewhere.Now imagine that invisible mountain of information actually has weight. Actual weight. And the machines keep adding more. More ChatGPT conversations. More AI-generated videos.We are building enormous digital warehouses and filling them with information. And apparently the information itself wants to become a planet.Houston, we have a problem.Except Houston has already been replaced by a hyperscale data center.And this is where my CS homie came up with the obvious solution.“Why don’t we just stop using computers?”Silence of the CS lambs.Insane in the BrainThe human brain is biological computing hardware. Are you getting the Borg vibes?It runs on roughly the nutritional equivalent of a sandwich and doesn’t require a dedicated nuclear reactor, liquid cooling loop, transformer farm, or 400-acre industrial campus.And this is where the conversation got weird.Because somebody said: “Isn’t that basically the original idea behind The Matrix?”Remember? The machines using hoomans as batteries.The popular story is that this wasn’t necessarily the original idea.There are repeated claims that an earlier version of The Matrix had humans functioning as biological computing resources rather than simply as batteries. The idea was that the machines could exploit the processing power of human brains to help run the Matrix.There is even a strange piece of evidence in Neil Gaiman’s Goliath, one of the official Matrix webcomics, in which humans are explicitly treated as distributed computing resources.But no publicly verifiable early Wachowski script conclusively proves the famous “the studio executives made them dumb it down” story.Then my other homie dropped the real bomb.“You know who already wrote this?”No.Dan Simmons.Hyperion.Now we’re talking.Because Simmons didn’t just entertain the idea of biological computing. He built the whole civilization around it.In the Hyperion Cantos, the TechnoCore is a civilization of artificial intelligences that has become deeply dependent on humanity while simultaneously exploiting it. And in The Rise of Endymion, Simmons gets remarkably explicit.The TechnoCore had been using the neurons in billions of human brains passing through the farcaster network as a kind of neural network for its Ultimate Intelligence project. Billions of human brains. Not batteries. Not power plants. Computing resources.The ultimate distributed computing architecture.And suddenly the idea of solving the AI data-center problem becomes incredibly simple. We don’t need more data centers. We need more humans.The Human Instead of AI Data CenterThink about the advantages.A traditional AI data center needs electricity, cooling, land, transformers, fiber, servers, GPUs, maintenance, security, backup power, more electricity, more cooling, and eventually another data center because somebody decided the next model needs 400 times more compute.A human data center needs food, water, and occasional sleep.We’re self-replicating. We walk around. We communicate wirelessly. We don’t need liquid cooling.Well…The really interesting part is that this isn’t entirely science fiction anymore.The AI industry is already running into the physical limits of its infrastructure.The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers consumed around 415 TWh of electricity globally in 2024 and projects that consumption could reach around 945 TWh by 2030.In the United States, the Department of Energy says data centers consumed about 4.4% of American electricity in 2023, with that figure potentially reaching between 6.7% and 12% by 2028.Back to the human brain. Nature already built a general-purpose computer. It is ridiculously energy efficient. It processes vision, sound, language, movement, memory, and prediction simultaneously.Silicon Valley looked at this and said:“We can build that.”Then spent trillions of dollars trying.Meanwhile, nature’s prototype is sitting on the couch screaming at a CS teammate because he didn’t cover B.Maybe the solution to AI isn’t building bigger computers. Maybe it’s connecting computers to the computers we already have.Our brains.The Matrix almost hit it.Dan Simmons predicted it.And AI is now making the idea more and more realistic.If this sounds terrifying, don’t worry. There is a simple solution: just don’t put your brain in the machine.Keanu Reeves stars as a data courier with a digital storage device implanted in his brain in the 1995 cyberpunk action film Johnny Mnemonic.Whatever you do, don’t take the red pill. Don’t take the blue one. Hey, don’t take any pill.You saw the movie. You know how it ends.