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Cynics are those who actively oppose change. NOBL recognizes that “cynics’ negativity can be annoying,” but engaging with them and trying to convince them can often be a huge time suck when it comes to leading change. Here’s the magic: “cynics are just disappointed idealists.” Perhaps they have gotten their hopes up about change only to be let down. Unlike a fence-sitter, a cynic is at least actively engaged with the change effort so spend your time delivering “something that matters” to your cynics, because actions will speak much louder than words. And if you are successful, your greatest cynics, once won over, will often become your greatest advocates.
Becoming a Changemaker
Alex Budak
The Dataome: The Energy Intensity of the Digital World
Key takeaways:
• The generation and usage of digital data requires a significant amount of energy and resources.
• Silicon chip production is an energy-intensive process due to the creation of ordered structures from disordered material.
• Efforts to generate electric power for the current informational world are hindered by the fight against entropy.
• The energy requirements for computation, data storage, and data transmission are increasing exponentially.
• Without significant improvements in efficiency, the energy needed to run our digital data homes may soon match the global civilization's total energy usage.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Its everything, right? It's this conversation in recording to yr bits. It's the information that went to and from your phone when you picked it up in the morning. It's the video you made. It's all the financial transactions, it's all the scientific computation. And that, of course, all takes energy. It takes the construction of te technology. In the first instance, making silican chips is an extraordinarily energy intensive thing, because you're making these exquisitely ordered structures out of very disordered material. And so there too, we go back to simo dynamics. And you're fighting, in this sense, against entropines. In a local fashion, we're having to generate electric to power current informational world, that piece of the data. And the rather sobering thing is that already, the amount of energy and resources that we're putting into this, it's about the same as the total metabolic utilization of around 700 Million human and if you look at the trend in energy requirements for computation, for data storage and data transmission, the trends all upwards. Its an expedential curve. And they suggest that perhaps, even if we have some improvements in efficiency, unless those improvements are then in a few decades time, we may be at a point where the amount of energy, Just electrical energy, required to run our digital data home, is roughly the same as the total amount of electrical energy we utilize as a global civilization at this time.
Speaker 3
The
Caleb Scharf on the Ascent of Information — Life in the Human Dataome
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Layers of Information Continually Accumulate *Within* Objects Over Time
Summary:
Information can be shared between objects as evidence of a common history, indicating that objects are deeply rooted in time.
As the biosphere has evolved, it has increased the layers of information processing and abstraction, resulting in the generation of objects that are deeper in time. Consequently, some features of these objects appear less physical and more abstract.
Each individual accumulates information over time, making parts of them brand new and parts billions of years old.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And so information we talked about has a sort of interesting property that seems very abstract. And it seems to be that information can move between objects, like we're speaking the same language, but when you can share information between objects like you and I speaking, what That is is evidence of a common history. These things that we call information and abstractions, I think, are just evidence that these objects are actually deep in time. So things look more abstract, the deeper and timely are. And it's one of the reasons I think that as the biosphere has evolved over time, it's increased the layers of information processing and abstraction that it's built. But really what it is is you're generating these objects that are deeper and deeper in time. And so some of their features look less and less physical because they're not physical now, they're physical in the structure that's extended in time.
Speaker 2
You have a lovely line in one of your papers where you say that each of us are our own age, but in many ways, we're thousands and thousands of years old because we have accumulated all that Information instead of genes to be who we are today.
Speaker 1
That's right. So parts of you are brand new. And parts of us are all brand new from this conversation because we've exchanged information and generated new structures. Parts of us are billions of years old.
Big Ideas — Time
Simplifying Complexity
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