Related papers: AI Hastens Limits to Exponential Growth
Climate change poses one of the most significant challenges to humanity. As a result of these climatic changes, the frequency of weather, climate, and water-related disasters has multiplied fivefold over the past 50 years, resulting in over…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transitioned from a futuristic concept reserved for large corporations to a present-day, accessible, and essential growth lever for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). For entrepreneurs and business…
This study aims to evaluate quantitatively, albeit in arbitrary units, the evolution of complexity of the human system since the domestication of fire. This is made possible by studying the timing of the 14 most important milestones, breaks…
We use growth of structure data to constrain the effective field theory of dark energy. Considering as case study Horndeski theories with the speed of gravitational waves equal to that of light, we show how constraints on the free…
As AI inference scales to billions of queries and emerging reasoning and agentic workflows increase token demand, reliable estimates of per-query energy use are increasingly important for capacity planning, emissions accounting, and…
The population explosion of the 21st century has adversely affected the natural resources with restricted availability of cultivable land, increased average temperatures due to global warming, and carbon footprint resulting in a drastic…
A huge amount of good quality data converges towards the picture of a spatially flat universe undergoing the today observed phase of accelerated expansion. This new observational trend is commonly addressed as Precision Cosmology. Despite…
Competent-looking judgment, including selecting, ranking, attributing, and certifying, is now produced at scale at marginal cost approaching zero, inverting the dominant economics-of-AI reading that treats judgment as the scarce complement…
The computations required for deep learning research have been doubling every few months, resulting in an estimated 300,000x increase from 2012 to 2018 [2]. These computations have a surprisingly large carbon footprint [38]. Ironically,…
The currently available cosmological data yield, as a most striking result, that the expansion rate of the universe seems to be increasing at late times, contrary to the standard (zero cosmological constant) FLRW prediction. The usual…
It is widely believed that anisotropy in the expansion of the universe will decay exponentially fast during inflation. This is often referred to as the cosmic no-hair conjecture. However, we find a counter example to the cosmic no-hair…
Life finds a way. For sessile organisms like plants, the need to adapt to changes in the environment is even more poignant. For humanity, the need to develop crops that can grow in diverse environments and feed our growing population is an…
With exponential growth in the human population, it is vital to conserve natural resources without compromising on producing enough food to feed everyone. Doing so can improve people's livelihoods, health, and ecosystems for the present and…
How much thinking can a civilisation do? Kardashev's (1964) typology ranks civilisations by total power: planetary (Type I, ~10^16 W), stellar (Type II, ~10^26 W), galactic (Type III). This paper builds an analogous Cognitive Kardashev…
Although machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) present fascinating opportunities for innovation, their rapid development is also significantly impacting our environment. In response to growing resource-awareness in the…
Artificial intelligence has shifted from a software-centric discipline to an infrastructure-driven system. Training and inference at scale now depend on tightly connected data centers, high-capacity optical networks, and energy systems…
With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increasingly seen as common sense. But what is…
Currently we produce 10 to power 21 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, or 10…
The steady advances in computer performance and in programming raise the concern that the ability of computers would overtake that of the human brain, an occurrence termed "the Singularity". While comparing the size of the human brain and…
We demonstrate progress on the deployment of two sets of technologies to support distribution grid operators integrating high shares of renewable energy sources, based on a market for trading local energy flexibilities. An…