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0 pointsnirav723y ago0 comments

For most part of the 20th, a bulk of the energy humanity was able to extract was used for industrialization. Now it seems that a vast bulk of the energy being extracted will go towards computation.

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xmcqdpt23y ago

I doubt it frankly. Computation consumes a lot of energy, true, but it is dwarfed by how much energy we use in transportation and food production. Energy use per capita in most of the Global North is about 75,000kWh per year,

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use

That's like the average person running 27 NVIDIA A100s at max capacity at all times!

vasco3y ago

Yeah but every time we discover a new interesting thing to do with computers the requirements go up by several orders of magnitude. How many more orders of magnitude of energy can we spend on food production from here with current projections of world population to peak in 2100?

alchemist1e93y ago

The singularity and fusion power are probably interlinked because of this. Once one happens the other will and in either order.

ben_w3y ago

Doubt it, unless you include solar as fusion, but then we've already got it.

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