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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
People's Understanding of Others' Lives Is Biased Based on the Structure of Their Social Network
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So there's something in that that I found really interesting about this social sampling, which is that as you mentioned, like if you happen to be worse off and everyone else is worse Off, as is the case with like income, for example, then being worse off, you're going to project your bias into that general population more accurately than if you're better off in some Situation for which the most of the population is worse off. And that these biases are not all created equal. Yes. It has to do with how they stand relative to the broader population. So what we show is that this kind of biases of judgments of the broader population can be explained by the structure of social network and not by some cognitive deficit or motivational, Motivational bias, some desire to be better than others or that or some idea that everybody's like me or some cognitive deficit that people cannot, that people are too stupid to understand How other people live. It's really determined by the context of memory, that by the content of one's memory, which comes from one social circle.
Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
When business leaders describe their organisational cultures as embracing what it means to ‘fail fast’ or suggesting that we are all in a ‘learning organisation’, it rings hollow if the aspirations are not lived and structurally supported. Employees see through the public relations of an organisation that markets itself as innovative yet executes the same playbook year after year.
Driving Data Projects: A Comprehensive Guide
Haskell, Christine
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