Are we about to become batteries for AI? A 2030 thought experiment on work, energy and human worth

For most of human history, strength did not need branding. If someone had thick wrists, a heavy gait, a back that curved slightly forward, you could assume the day had demanded something of them.

Fields had to be tilled, stone had to be moved, timber had to be cut and carried. The body recorded the requirement. Being muscular, what we might now call shredded, or even simply “looking hot,” was not a goal in itself; it was the by-product of work that had to be done.In a post-industrial world, that record has become elective. Broad shoulders now belong as often to someone who spends the day before a screen as to someone who moves freight.

The link between physique and profession has loosened; you can no longer read a person’s trade in their posture.The most sculpted bodies in a city are often built in air-conditioned rooms under fluorescent lights, lifting stainless steel that serves no purpose beyond being lifted. We run on belts that carry us nowhere. Protein is shaken in matte-black bottles, heart rates and calories flicker across wearable screens, macros are tracked with devotional precision, and compression fabrics are worn like uniforms.

A subculture hums around supplements, powders, and optimisation metrics.

We speak easily of “putting in the work” even when the work that defines our careers leaves no mark on the body at all. Effort has become aesthetic. The product is not timber or stone or steel. It is the body itself, a project under continuous optimisation.

The treadmill economy and the viral video

In a world where gyms already operate like commercial ecosystems, monthly subscriptions, branded supplements, premium tiers, personal trainers, influencer discount codes, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that all that exertion could be put to more “productive” use. If thousands of bodies are already burning energy on polished studio floors every morning, why not capture it? Why not turn the calories into electricity?The feasibility of it all can be debated later. To invoke a pair of optimistic lines that have inspired plenty of grand undertakings: Plato’s “necessity is the mother of invention” and George Herbert’s “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” History suggests we take such sentiments seriously when circumstances tighten. We have reorganised labour, redrawn borders, built cities in deserts and fashioned chips and computers out of sand and stone, And if turning people into energy sources feels morally excessive, it would be wise to remember that throughout history we have accepted harsher systems for thinner justifications. At the very least, one imagines, we would all emerge remarkably fit.

Now place that thought in a near future, say 2030, where automation has swallowed 80 per cent of jobs, leaving billions redundant, still needing money to get by but perhaps needing purpose even more. What remains as a universal credential? Limbs that move. A body that can exert itself. In a fragmented labour market, that becomes the one qualification almost everyone still holds.The idea is not mine, tempting as it would be to claim it. I have joked often enough about the theatricality of gym culture, about the performance of effort in rooms full of mirrors.

But the version making the rounds is a forty-second AI-generated video, and it leans into the thought more seriously than satire would allow.The premise is delivered through hyper-realistic versions of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman, who appear five years older and seated together as co-founders of a fictional venture called Energym. Their company’s proposition is straightforward: if AI systems and robotics have displaced most forms of employment, let humans generate electricity through exercise and feed it back into the infrastructure that replaced them.

Pay them for it. Frame it, as the Altman avatar later describes it, as a solution that “solved our need for energy and your need for purpose,” recruitment rather than redundancy.

The pitch rests on an unspoken recognition that money alone would not resolve the void created by mass unemployment, and that without work the day loses its structure. Even an affluent but unmoored character pacing through a large house, the familiar television trope of a spouse left alone once the husband leaves for work and the children leave for school, illustrates how provision does not equal purpose.

Work, for better or worse, has long functioned as proof of usefulness.

Remove it, and something more destabilising than income disappears.

The Energym pitch seizes on that inversion. If millions are no longer required for traditional labour yet still seek the structure and validation that labour once provided, exercise can be recoded as employment. Install generators in the equipment. Let human exertion produce electricity that feeds the AI data centres which rendered their previous careers obsolete.

Anyone familiar with the British dystopian anthology series Black Mirror, which first aired in 2011, will recognise the structure immediately. Its second episode, Fifteen Million Merits, is set in an enclosed, self-contained world where people spend their days cycling on stationary bikes to generate electricity. The bikes power a vast, screen-saturated complex in which they also live; there is no visible life beyond it.

In exchange, riders earn “merits”, a digital currency used to purchase food, and other basic necessities, along with small digital luxuries that make confinement more bearable.Each person lives in a small grey room lined entirely with screens; there is no window in the conventional sense, only moving images. Advertisements interrupt constantly, and attempting to avoid them is not an option. If a rider closes their eyes or looks away, the screen emits a piercing alarm, flashes red and displays a command to “CONTINUE VIEWING”, the sound persisting until their gaze returns.

Muting or skipping the advert results in merits being deducted.

Attention is enforced.

Even identity is mediated through a digital avatar, known as a “Doppel”(short for doppelgänger), which functions as the individual’s stand-in across this enclosed world, in games, in social spaces, on the talent show like "Hot Shots" that promises escape. Riders spend their hard-earned merits customising these avatars with new hair, clothes and accessories, small cosmetic upgrades that signal status within a system that offers little else.The society is stratified. Those fit enough to pedal form the middle tier. Those who gain weight or can no longer sustain the physical demands are demoted to a cleaning class known as “lemons”. They wear yellow uniforms, clear away the cyclists’ waste and are openly ridiculed. In video games played by the riders, they appear as targets, and some are pushed into a grotesque in-house programme called Botherguts, a virtual game show built around humiliating them for entertainment.

Class contempt is not incidental; it is structured into the system, much like ours.The only apparent escape is a talent competition called “Hot Shot”, and entry costs 15 million merits, a sum that ordinarily takes years of cycling to accumulate. The protagonist, Bing is able to afford it because he received the merits as an inheritance from his brother, who had recently died. Rather than spending it on himself, he gives the entire amount to Abi, a quiet singer he has grown close to, convinced that her talent might offer a way out of the enclosed world they inhabit.

She performs with sincerity, but the judges dismiss her voice as ordinary and instead focus on her appearance, offering her a place on an adult entertainment channel rather than the artistic recognition she hoped for.The humiliation is not immediate spectacle; it unfolds gradually on the screens that surround Bing’s room. In response, he returns to the bike and spends months pedalling to earn another 15 million merits for his own audition.

When he finally steps onto the stage, he does not sing. He speaks, holding a shard of glass to his throat as he denounces the emptiness of the system that has commodified everything, including Abi’s dignity.

The judges listen, deliberate, and decide that his anger has commercial potential. Instead of punishing him, they offer him a contract, a larger living space, and a regular platform from which to deliver rehearsed versions of the same outrage, now packaged as entertainment within the very structure he sought to challenge.

The bikes in that episode ostensibly generate energy. Yet the more persuasive reading is that they generate compliance. They exhaust the body, occupy the mind and circulate currency back into the same closed loop of consumption. Riders spend merits to skip ads or buy digital clothing for avatars that exist only on screens. It is difficult not to see in that loop a reflection of how much modern work functions less as intrinsic necessity and more as participation in a hyper-consumer economy, where effort sustains the system itself rather than producing anything fundamentally required for survival. The Energym concept borrows this architecture but replaces anonymous overseers with familiar tech magnates. Instead of merits, it offers purpose. Instead of a bunker, it offers the open promise of employment. The mechanism is the same: exertion sustains the system; the system sustains the illusion of upward mobility. If you think that sounds distant from our present, consider how often digital economies already trade in status symbols. In games like Fortnite, players spend real money on cosmetic “skins” that alter appearance without altering ability. On platforms like

Snapchat

, users curate Bitmojis and filters to signal belonging or aspiration.

We pay to skip advertisements. We upgrade to premium tiers to remove interruptions. Even dissent is folded back into the system; Bing’s fury leaves him with a choice between monetising it or returning to the bike, and in our own media ecosystems outrage often survives only if it generates engagement. The mechanics may be less overtly coercive, but the pattern is familiar.

The Matrix and the battery logic

Long before Black Mirror imagined people pedalling for survival, The Matrix had already staged a harsher scenario.

In its backstory, humans create intelligent machines, lose control of them, and a war follows. In a final attempt to weaken their opponents, they scorch the sky to block out the sun, cutting off the machines’ primary energy source. The machines adapt. They turn to what remains in abundance: human beings.

Humans are grown and suspended in pods, their minds plugged into a simulated late-20th-century reality while their bodies generate bioelectric and thermal energy to power the machine civilisation.

Morpheus tells Neo plainly that the Matrix exists to keep humans under control while they are used as batteries. Early drafts reportedly imagined humans as organic processors rather than literal power cells, but the premise is unchanged: Human life becomes a resource within a system designed to sustain itself, and that is the rearrangement Energym hints at.

The difference is that this time the arrangement would arrive wrapped in the language of choice.

You walk into the gym. You sign up. You generate power. But if work elsewhere has vanished and survival still depends on earning, how voluntary is that choice? Consent begins to look a lot like necessity.

If the Energym video unsettles, part of the reason is that its fictional co-founder is not an obscure character but a recognisable figure. Sam Altman is not merely another technology executive; he leads OpenAI, the company that released ChatGPT and accelerated what many now describe as the first full-scale AI race.

When someone in that position speaks about energy, efficiency and the future of intelligence, it is not idle commentary.

Executives at the centre of this transition shape the direction of capital, research and policy, and the way they frame the problem often signals where the industry believes it is heading. In a recent discussion about AI’s environmental footprint, Altman responded with a reframing rather than a denial:“One of the unfair comparisons in this case is that people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model versus how much it costs one human to do an inference query. It also takes a lot of time to train a human. It takes 20 years of your life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart. Not only that, it took a very wide spread of evolution, like a hundred billion people who have ever lived, who learned not to be eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science to produce you. The fair comparison, if you ask ChatGPT a question, is how much energy it takes to answer that question versus a human. And AI has probably caught up on an energy efficiency basis that way.”Altman made those remarks at the recently concluded

AI Impact Summit

in India, in response to questions about the environmental cost of training large models. The point he was making was technical, almost accounting in nature, yet the framing lingers. In that comparison, the human being is described as a lengthy training process, twenty years of food, schooling and evolutionary inheritance before “inference” begins, while evolution itself becomes a kind of pre-training phase spanning millennia.

The language is not cruel, but it is clinical. Food turns into input cost, childhood into a burn-in period, and intelligence into an energy equation to be optimised.

The comparison does not attack humanity; it measures it. Biological and artificial intelligence are placed on the same grid and assessed according to expenditure and efficiency, as though both were systems competing for resource allocation. Once that lens is adopted, it becomes easier to see how value might drift toward output rather than experience, toward optimisation rather than meaning. It is difficult not to recall the Architect in The Matrix, who treats humanity as a variable to be managed within a larger design. In that mode of thinking, the central question is not what a human life signifies but what it yields and how smoothly it fits into the structure surrounding it. And from that vantage point, the Energym proposition no longer feels like a piece of speculative satire. If human beings are already being compared in terms of energy input and productive return, then redirecting their physical exertion into the grid begins to resemble continuity rather than rupture.What lingers is how narrow the distance now feels between those imagined worlds and our own. The Matrix reduced the body to infrastructure. Black Mirror reduced effort to currency inside a sealed system. Energym is, on paper, another piece of fiction. We like to think of these as exaggerations, yet much of the logic, optimisation, engagement, productivity at any cost, is already threaded through daily life.