Heat or Light for the New Year
Let there be light!
Around the world, we see an incendiary spread of heat. As the light of freedom dwindles, the heat rises. “Burn Baby Burn” in many languages. Baffled by the crippling futilities of socialism, the political world moves toward the distraction of ever-hotter conflicts, seeking “national emergencies” to divert the electorate from the catastrophic effects of coercive leftism.
In the West, where a collapse of faith prompts public credulity toward fantasized disasters, the prime “emergency” is an “imperiled planet.” The favored doom theory comes from computer models geared to reveal “global warming” or “climate change.” These totems enable politicians to raise the heat behind the incumbent version of emergency socialism—some $2 trillion in the United States alone for a “net-zero” energy transition.
CO₂ fuels life. The “energy transition” is profoundly anti-life. Because the computer models cannot capture the surprises of human creativity, they tend to predict doom from “over-population.” Deemed to be mouths rather than minds, people become a “plague on the planet,” breathing out toxic CO₂.
At only 400 parts per million—0.04 percent of the atmosphere —we may well have too little CO₂. Look it up. CO₂ is plant food. To make a greenhouse optimal for plant growth, we infuse it with some 2,000 parts per million of CO₂. There is no evidence we have too much in the atmosphere and no correlation between actual atmospheric CO₂ levels and measured weather changes over the millennia.
As we begin 2024, renewed alarms of “climate doom” are merely a reversion to form after such triumphs of emergency socialism as the COVID lockdowns, with their masks, social-shunning, and mandated “warp speed” vaccinations. Lockdowns, the politicians noticed, were the only policy that actually reduces CO₂ emissions. A new great depression, engineered by new climate lockdowns, is the only path to net-zero.
Pumping up the heat, but adding little light, is the reemergence of “industrial policy” in the arena to which it is least suited and most destructive: the cutting edge of computing technology. The CHIPS act (and its imitators in Europe and Japan) and politicians jumping on the AI bandwagon as both pronoun-nags and nationalizers, will make our only real-heat crisis worse.
In the pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI), industry has plighted its troth to the big data that trains its machines in giant centralized datacenters. Measured by numerical “parameters” that may signify words, tokens, or pixels, the piles mount up from 175 billion parameters in Open AI-Microsoft’s ChatGPT3 to 540 billion parameters in ChatGPT4 and on to perhaps a trillion parameters in ChatGPT4 “Turbo.” Pretending to distill wisdom from data, what AI really does is trade volume and speed for authoritatively voiced simulations of intelligence. It makes heat-to-yield pseudo light.
A gigantic pattern recognition tool, AI takes all the available data on the Internet, and finds the most probable extensions of a particular sequence. It performs next token (word-part) projections or completions from prompts. It tells you what is most likely to follow from the existing series of words or tokens or pixels. The bigger the prompt, the larger the data, the more plausible the output.
Plausible outputs are the opposite of the creativity we value from human minds. Information theory tells us that only surprise counts as informative; answers that could be predicted by the receiver are merely tedious. It takes heat to generate, send, receive, and translate these plausibilities, but little light is shed. A splendid substitute for interns and other archaic input-output systems, AI offers not artificial intelligence but imitative intelligence.
AI churns parameters in parallel mostly on NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs), reaching collective speeds of terahertz or trillions of times a second. In the world, terahertz frequencies yield light. The visible spectrum is 350 to 750 terahertz. In AI, terahertz churning of data emits heat. As individual computing frequencies mount farther into the gigahertz, collective energy emissions and thermal effects inexorably rise.
Threatening to end Moore’s Law is a silicon crucible, a microchip meltdown. Our longtime colleague and sage Mark Mills sums it up: “AI is the most energy intensive use of silicon in the history of computing. Your smart phone and its apps use more energy than your refrigerator. The global ‘cloud’ uses as much energy as all global aviation, and the ‘cloud’ is growing 10 times as fast.”
Its vast consumption of data makes artificial intelligence an inexorable energy hog. As Google divulges, to upgrade its search system to Bard AI increases energy use by 400%.
This “data-warming” crisis is manifested everywhere, from the giant air-conditioner towers in leading-edge datacenters to melting trace wires in leading-edge chips. Today, the bulk of the power behind a datacenter goes to extracting heat rather than powering computation—to air conditioning rather than information processing.
Predictably, rather than spurring a move to new less-heat generating technology, the politicians are lining up to throw more fuel on the fire. It is what they do: pile in at the end of the line to support the teetering establishment. Propping up the past in the name of progress and crippling industry in the cause of national security, the United States is authorizing some $280 billion of “Chip Act” mandates and subsidies and has already appropriated $57 billion to extend a silicon era that is entering a smoldering dotage before our eyes.
Having written some seven books on the silicon era, I do not deny its magnificence. Just as aluminum remains prevalent in industrial materials, silicon will continue to prevail in mature information processing. The silicon epoch will persist for another decade or so, informing a vast industry of mature wafer-fabrication, silicon chip design and awesome computational advances.
But as signified by the need for subsidies, investments in silicon chip technology face a long era of diminishing returns. ASML Holding NV (NASDAQ: ASML), of Holland, now charges Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) some $300 million for wafer fab technology that occupies the space of a basketball court to imprint images the size of a virus. Centralized data center-refrigerators, huge klugey waferfabs, massive AI parameter banks and sizzling 5G millimeter-wave transmitter-receivers all signify that we are approaching the end of the line for the existing heat-sink-and-seethe paradigm.
On the horizon is a new era, which I have dubbed the “nanocosm,” and which is spearheaded by the miraculous new form of carbon called graphene. Offering answers to the computational heat crisis and our glow in the dark data centers, graphene conducts electricity 1,000 times as efficiently as copper—radically reducing the heat of resistance—and has the best thermal conductivity of any material known, to shed the little heat it generates.
The full-scale graphene computer remains—we suppose—some years in the future, although Huawei is piling up the patents on the requisite transistors and Ford cars for the last three years have been deploying graphene ever more widely. Even now, silicon substitutes, poultices, and complements appear. While graphene laboratories test new combinations of 2D materials, gallium nitride, with a bandgap three times as large as silicon, offers abatement for the heat crisis. Not only does it enable blue light-emitting diodes and other incandescence, GaN absorbs the sizzle far more readily than silicon. For power supplies and automotive electronics, silicon carbide sheds heat almost 3.5 times as efficiently as pure silicon and can endure temperatures twice as high.
A worldwide efflorescence of exotic new materials beckons in the laboratories of the world pioneering new miracles of “condensed matter physics.” From Rice to MIT and Manchester, United Kingdom, they are contriving exquisitely tunable “van der Waals” multilayer wafers and “magic angle twisted bilayer 2D sheets” building on the graphene breakthrough with its five Nobel Prizes and counting.
How many co-sponsors of the CHIPS Act even heard of these advances? We yearn for light, but our rulers only pump up the heat. If you want to learn more about how you can benefit from investing in the nanocosm, click here!