Cold Compute Farm

Wikipedia user Віщун Illustration of a Dyson swarm - a large number of independent constructs orbiting in a dense formation around the star. Love it or hate it, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely here to stay. Its ravenous need for computational power has overwhelmed chip manufacturers and power companies alike. While our current AI obsession is likely a bubble ready to burst, we won’t simply stop using computers. Since their first invention, computers have continued to grow more powerful, and our civilization has grown ever more dependent upon them. Computation defines our civilization. Perhaps computational power is what defines any advanced civilization. If that’s the case, then the most advanced civilizations in the universe would push computing to its most powerful and efficient state. That’s the idea behind a new paper on the arXiv.1 In it, the author argues that hyper-efficient computers would be central to any alien civilization. The author further argues that this would…