There was a minor backlash to Google’s Gemini promos during the ongoing Cricket World Cup that I chanced upon on X. Basically, Google wants fans to create their own AI image for supporting their teams (actually, to drive up adoption and get people used to generating AI images), but the crowd felt generating such images is wasteful, especially as debates around infrastructure required to power all of the AI innovation have been making the cycles.

I believe this is because we’re conditioned by our environment to have a scarcity mindset. We feel that if we don’t generate one AI image, we’re protecting some resource. However, the pie is not fixed. We can generate more resources (by some definition, technology is the ability to generate more resources).

Having been around digital resources for close to three decades, I’ve seen this cycle a few times. When computers itself were rare, we used to put them in Air Conditioned rooms and required folks to take off their shoes before going in to operate them. Gaming on a PC felt like a waste of resources. When bandwidth was precious, people downloaded copies. Burning CDs was deemed too precious, so only selected copies were made.

Now, everyone has a powered computer in their pocket and you can stream any movie you want on demand. Flash storage is everywhere these days.

Your scarcity mindset will prevent you from experimenting with new technology, which won’t save any resources, it’ll only harm your skillset.