The Reflexivity of Intelligence

Part 1: What Is Coming The Engine The engine is simple, and it is forced by basic economics. Anything useful that gets cheaper gets used more. When the cost falls far enough, the total quantity consumed rises by orders of magnitude. This happened with coal, with electricity, with bandwidth, with storage. Intelligence is the same shape of commodity, with one difference that matters. The new uses unlocked by cheaper intelligence include the production of more intelligence. The output of the system feeds back into its own input. That is the part that compounds, and the reason every projection that ignores the feedback loop comes in low. The Bottleneck The first hard fact downstream of this is that computation has two physical inputs, silicon and electricity, and these inputs face constraints no amount of cleverness sidesteps. A chip turns watts into operations, and the leftover energy comes out as heat that has to be moved with more energy. There is no engineering route around that…