The Dataome: The Energy Intensity of the Digital World

The generation and usage of digital data requires a significant amount of energy and resources./nSilicon chip production is an energy-intensive process due to the creation of ordered structures from disordered material./nEfforts to generate electric power for the current informational world are hindered by the fight against entropy./nThe energy requirements for computation, data storage, and data transmission are increasing exponentially./nWithout significant improvements in efficiency, the energy needed to run our digital data homes may soon match the global civilization's total energy usage.

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Chances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of data. A common sentiment among the smartphone-enabled human population is that we not only don’t own our data, but our data owns us — or, at least, the pressure of responsibility to keep providing data to the Internet and its devices (and the wider project of human knowledge construction) implicates us in the evolution of a vast, mysterious, largely ineffable self-organizing system that has grabbed the reins of our economies and cultures. This is, in some sense, hardly new: since humankind first started writing down our memories to pass them down through time, we have participated in the “dataome” — a structure and a process that transcends, and transforms, our individuality. Fast-forward to the modern era, when the rapidly-evolving aggregation of all human knowledge tips the scales in favor of the dataome’s emergent agency and its demands on us…

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on Complexity, we talk to Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, about his book, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, and LIfe’s Unending Algorithm. In this episode, we talk about the interplay of information, energy, and matter; the nature of the dataome and its relationship to humans and our artifacts; the past and future evolution of the biosphere and technosphere; the role of lies in the emergent informational metabolisms of the Internet; and what this psychoactive frame suggests about the search for hypothetical intelligences we may yet find in outer space.

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Mentioned and related resources:

Caleb’s Personal Website, Research Publications, and Popular Writings

Caleb’s Twitter

We Are The Aliens
by Caleb Scharf at Scientific American

We Are Our Data, Our Data Are Us
by Caleb Scharf at The Los Angeles Times

Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?
by Caleb Scharf at Nautilus

Where Do Minds Belong?
by Caleb Scharf at Aeon

Autopoiesis (Wikipedia)

The physical limits of communication
by Michael Lachmann, M. E. J. Newman, Cristopher Moore