This book was developed through more than a thousand exchanges with an artificial intelligence, often beginning with spoken conversations of around ten minutes. Added to this were the reading and rereading of a substantial body of material, the production and repeated revision of approximately 1,800 pages of the print edition, their translation into English, and the preparation of further language versions.

It would be misleading to claim that the carbon footprint of this experiment can be calculated down to the gram. No publicly available data currently makes it possible to measure precisely the electricity actually used by the different versions of ChatGPT involved in this work—primarily GPT-5.5 Pro, followed by GPT-5.6 Sol Pro—for a project of this nature. Converting that consumption into carbon emissions would also require knowing the actual electricity generation mix associated with the infrastructure used. The available studies allow only an approximate order of magnitude for the energy involved.

Published estimates vary widely depending on prompt length, context size, the volume of text generated, and the computational intensity of the reasoning involved. Applied cautiously to the more than one thousand exchanges, the documentary corpus, the revisions, and the translations required for this book, they suggest that the electricity consumed by the AI work plausibly falls within a range of a few kilowatt-hours to a few dozen kilowatt-hours

This range is not a measurement; it provides a

sense of scale.

To make that amount of energy more tangible, depending on where the actual figure falls within that range, it would correspond to anywhere from a few hours to a few dozen hours of electric-oven use, several hundred to several thousand hours of LED lighting, or a few dozen to a few hundred kilometers of driving in an electric car.

This energy use is not zero. Artificial intelligence depends on data centers, processors, networks, and infrastructure that themselves carry an energy and material footprint. This energy estimate does not claim to capture that footprint in full: the manufacture and replacement of equipment, cooling, electrical infrastructure, networks, and water consumption all belong to a much broader environmental assessment. But the overall impact of that infrastructure must be distinguished from the energy actually used to produce one particular book.

That is also why we have chosen to give overwhelming priority to the electronic distribution of this book.

A 1,800-page book represents a considerable quantity of paper, ink, manufacturing, binding, storage, and transport. A digital edition is not environmentally neutral—it requires devices, servers, and electricity— but it can avoid the systematic manufacture and shipment of an exceptionally large physical object.

Our choice, then, is not to pretend that this book has no footprint. It is to seek a form of distribution consistent with the experiment itself: to use digital technology intensively to produce and transmit a body of thought, while reducing its materialization as far as possible.

Print editions may still have a purpose—for preservation, libraries, reference editions, or simply because a reader wants one—but print no longer has to be the default mode of circulation.

The paradox may lie there: artificial intelligence helped produce a book whose print edition runs to 1,800 pages, yet the more resource-efficient way to circulate it may be precisely not to print those 1,800 pages every time a reader wishes to read them.