Landauer's Principle

Landauer's principle says that the minimum energy needed to erase one bit of information is proportional to the temperature at which the system is operating. While it specifically mentions information erasure, this is not different from information writing as a bit flip from 1 to 0 is an erasure of 1 but a writing of 0, and vice versa.

Bottom line: information = energy.

But energy was never free.

Even if there is a term in Physics called Gibbs free energy, what you have is "usable energy" and this energy requires some investment of time, skills and effort to acquire. That is, money.

Energy on earth is actually plentiful. The only problem is that we have gatekeepers called governments, so most people have to beg for energy the way ancient peasants had to beg their clan leader for a piece of mammoth meat. As if the mammoths and deer and etc weren't plentiful in the forest.

The thing you want is for the energy to come freely from the people.

You want people to ACTUALLY be rich i.e. to have so much energy access that they will power the AI themselves. They have enough surplus.

Today, about 90% of people have energy deficit budgets and cannot afford refrigeration, air conditioning, or even just an oven. Many even lack sufficient lighting to study all night, and definitely not enough energy to work on a computer.

They basically have to choose to use energy only for survival needs.

They have to use firewood and other toxic energy sources to get by.

And you want them to pay enough to make AI profitable?

You want them, basically, to pay for electricity they will not use directly but simply to get some dopamine hits, while they continue to suffer energy poverty?

Yes, granted, they just might get insights into how to get democratic access to more energy be it by civil action or actually making ITER to work. But that will not happen so easily. We're in a new era of software and the energy piper will have to be paid big time.

Software is dead. Long live software.

To refer back to the traditional view of software where you make one Excel app and boom, millions and billions of people and profit: that was a discovery phase. Just like the discovery phase of physics.

Harsh truth : The discoveries of unique simple physics — simple machines, F = ma, PV = nRT, Q = mcθ, are moreless over just as are the discoveries of unique simple software tools with exponential curves. We've done design tools like Figma and Adobe, data analysis tools like Excel, maths tools, game tools, database tools, software design tools like Python. I mean, what next?

What next is the physics equivalent of particle physics or rocket launches by NASA to go to other planets (SpaceX's rocket business is still on the money). Big energy business.

The high energy of AI must be paid for by the people for the people, for a novel outcome later.

So in particle physics, we are curious about nature, with SpaceX, we are curious about Mars. With AI, we are curious about democratic access to usable energy which, if we're to go the route of intelligent discourse and not fists, will take a considerable energy equivalent to dig out that intel from the ether of possibilities.

But that is too long a route. There is a short cut.

Make Energy Access Free of Crude Politicking

For the first time in human history, human kings and queens will have to stop gatekeeping energy and let it flow freely, so that people all over the world are actually rich enough to power AI to the future. For while information = energy, energy = wealth.

Oil from wherever will have to be let to flow, Nuclear will have to be let to nuclear with no doomsday talks of a boogieman nuking the world (and with all these cameras we should get that boogieman if he ever so much as inappropriately looks at nuclear material).

Printing dollars never created more energy.

Landauer's principle will not be cheated.