Prediction:
digital computing will not outlast this century. At least, not at scale
Discussion
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Prediction:
digital computing will not outlast this century. At least, not at scale
@urlyman Neither of us will know, I guess. Getting a vibe now from young ecovillages correspondent - lets use it to build _local_ communities of likemindeds fast, so when it all comes tumbling down, we wont need it any more.... me - or be happy to hack piles of 40-year-old machines to keep them going #collapse / #degrowth ... depending on how it goes ... militarisation and climate wise predominantly
@wavesculptor keeping machines going will only be worth it if doing so delivers a demonstrative net benefit. I think that gradient can and probably will flatten much more quickly than we can imagine from here
@urlyman you may be forgetting that when [once common] gear becomes scarce and sought-after, people adopt it like a pet and play with it in ways that are totally unjustifiable in a commercial sense
@wavesculptor when they have surplus and are not precarious. But even when they do, some people holding onto a thing is not the same as a technocracy leveraging a thing systemically and expansively
@urlyman We're going to switch to Mentats?
@benfulton Other things like surviving will be much more important than jumping millions of logic gates per second
@urlyman in what sense?
@urlyman (I mostly ride the bike instead but have a 20 year-old Panda I have to press into service once in a while. Was looking at replacing with an Inster but does it take less from the planet to keep Panda?)
@rgarner does it take less? I don’t know. Given low usage, perhaps the answer is yes 🤷♂️
Re “in what sense?”, 17.5 million EVs/hybrids in 2024 will be probably over 20 million last year.
20 million is roughly 40 million tonnes of coal burned to make them, which is ~80 million tonnes of CO2. If EVs reach the level of production of new ICE cars that becomes about 1/3rd of a billion tonnes of CO2 per year.
Our current behaviour thinks that doesn’t matter. It does
@rgarner the same number of bikes can be made with around 1/100th of the resources, so that’s not nothing either but ~3 million tonnes of CO2 just to reach market is a lot slower path to collapse than ~300 million
@otfrom @rgarner on the one hand, any slowing down from where we are is a good thing, relatively speaking, as is multi-use.
But when the mismatch between where we are and where we need to be for safety *and by when* is as vast as it is, heavy EVs are a category error.
Culturally we are clearly incapable of addressing that. So thermodynamics will force us to.
This pattern is woven into every strand https://todon.eu/@hembrow/115983526943387251
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