Digital cathedrals /
We are now witnessing the build-out of society's first foundationally new infrastructure in nearly a century, the Cloud. It is an ecosystem of information-digital hardware, at the heart of which resides massive warehouse-scale datacenters unlike anything ever built. Given the resources committe...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Encounter Books,
[2019]
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| Edition: | First American edition. |
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Table of Contents:
- The information infrastructure era
- The world's computer-communications systems now use twice as much electricity as does the country of Japan
- Digital-infrastrcture masons caught between profit seeking and virtue shaming
- A single smartphone's annual pro rata energy use
- in the network, not in your hand
- amounts to as much electricity as a modern household refrigerator
- Defining structures of epochs : cathedrals, skyscrapers, and datacenters
- Economists and pundits generally underestimate infrastructure-anchored transformations
- The invisible and voracious "information superhighway"
- The pursuit of machines to save labor and to create new services and comforts is as old as civilization
- Expanding and accelerating the "information superhighway" with 5G
- Once there's a general-purpose supercomputer, we'll see far more of them than cruise ships
- Are CAFÉ-like fuel efficiency standards on the horizon for AI and robots?
- The architecture and appetite of artificial intelligence
- Untethered robots, whether winged, wheeled, or walking, are bound by the same energy architecture as humans
- Supercomputers and AI supercharge the cloud
- Shock and awe as déjà vu all over again
- Humanity now fabricates 1,000 times more transistors annually than the entire world grows grains of wheat and rice combined
- Robocars are coming, but robots eat too
- Annual global cloud traffic is today counted at some 40 zettabytes, an impossibly large number to imagine
- The relentless pursuit of and confusion over efficiency : Jevons paradox
- The ineluctable energy magic of silicon engines
- Data is a resource that
- unlike its natural analogues
- humanity literally creates by inventing tools to sense and measure things
- Metrics for measuring the future : from medieval barrels to AI's bytes
- Everything about the present and future digital infrastructure, especially its aggregate energy apetite, is captured at the intersection of extremes : the withering decline in the nanoscopic energy used per byte and the scale and blistering growth in bytes consumed
- Data is the new oil.