Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
To make maxwell’s demon obey the second law you have to add in his computing costs, which by landeuer’s principle will make the gas-sorting process entropic overall. BUT… if you could park the demon computer outside the zone of interest, you could in principle create arbitrary local entropy pumps, like heat pumps. Now imagine a solar-powered AI with its compute in LEO acting on earth. China is already pursuing a country scale version with its “eastern data, western compute.” Data centers parked in the cheap-renewables western China social deserts.
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John Grant
@jlg
Just as the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors made many cooling problems irrelevant, algorithmic breakthroughs could make the geographic distribution of energy-intensive hardware less of a competitive issue. Focusing on education and software engineering expertise could increase the rate of AI innovation while reducing energy consumption. In other words, China's advantage may lie in its massive pool of engineers working on algorithmic efficiency.
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