No. of Recommendations: 4
I think these huge computing data centers will become like dead shopping malls within ten years, i.e. huge white dead elephants that no one knows what to do with their (expensive) corpses.
I agree that these data centres and, hopefully, the tremendous amounts of electricity they consume, may be unneeded in 10-20 years. However, the major long-term investment involved is, as far as I can tell, the production of all that electricity, and we will have no trouble finding something else to do with that.
And the malls that we no longer need, that get converted to data centres, will just have to be converted to something else again, or just demolished. The servers themselves are unlikely to have a life of more than about 5-10 years (is that right?), so we won't have to get rid of a bunch of brand new servers we just built, we'll be able to phase them out gradually, as they wear out, if they are no longer needed.
We will have lots of these challenges - tearing out all the gas pumps and even most of the gasoline refuelling stations, as we go to 100% electric vehicles. But the changes are likely to be slow enough that we can just not replace old fuel reservoirs and pumps, as they age out of the system, and occasionally close a marginally profitable refuelling station.
cars/trucks were more efficient than horses, to the tune of hundreds of horsepower packed into the space of a few horses. Also, as the efficiency of internal combustion engines increased, the need for road infrastructure still remained. Current neural net "AI's" implementations, with their huge computing and data center power needs, are horribly inefficient compared to the human brain operating at 20 watts.
Horses were much more efficient than the cars that replaced them, in the same way that a human brain is much more efficient than an AI data centre, if you are just looking at energy/functional unit. We have replaced horses, let's say they use 1 horsepower, with cars that typically use 200 times more power. It's a lot harder to say how much energy is needed per human brain, if we use a lot of AI, but it is surely orders of magnitude above 20W. So we need a lot more energy to get around than when we used horses, and will need a lot more to do some of our thinking with AI, but fossil fuels and now, cheap renewable power, make it possible for us to upgrade to the less efficient but more effective solution.
dtb
