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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

Perspective on Managing Different Projects: Cultivating a Garden v.s. Hacking Away in a Mine Summary: A friend suggested thinking of my projects as a garden, where some ideas will flourish while others won't. It's less predictable but more enjoyable than physically laboring in the mines. Transcript: Speaker 1 I remember one point when I was pretty stressed out, and I was saying to my wife, oh my gosh, I've got all these different projects, and I have to work on this one, and I have to work on that One. I have to go to work in the mines. I have to go chip away at this project. And it might work out, it might not work out. And she said to me, you should think of all your projects as more of a gartan. You're planting lots of ideas. Some of them will come up, some of them won't. That's a little unpredictable. But you should think of it that way rather than going down with your hard hat and your pick and toiling away in the pit to find the seam of truth.

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Risk tolerance in org change: When 1 bad thing happens, don't pave over it with rules Transcript: Speaker 1 Two is, and Sam, like you and I have talked about this a million times, like there is such a bias around risk where it's like this thing happened once. Now we make a rule for it. Now we have to uphold that rule in perpetuity. And that is what we call work debt. We don't even know if that one thing would ever happen again. But now we have hours and time and money and cycles and cycles and cycles probably forever because let's be honest, we're never going to unwrite that rule for what might have been a one Off. And so on the one hand, I think like that person's perspective is really valid. On the other hand, I'm like, if you want to be strategic, you have to learn to look at risk a little bit differently, which is that you can never eliminate it. You are always doing stuff with the issue in the rear view.

The Future of HR — Building Your Capabilities, Pt. 1 - Getting to Level 3

At Work with The Ready

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