The Energy Law of Truth
Identification / Definition
I watched a cool Al Jazeera documentary today, “iHuman”.
In it, we have all the “Experts” of Ai weighing in, with their opinions of how it will affect us in future.
None of them admit AGI is already with us. Admittedly the film is a little out of date, produced in 2019.
The ones who do mention they expect it, admit that it will make us redundant.
An interesting statistic quoted is that every human creates around 500MB of data per day.
They present that as something bad, picturing it printed on books, those stretching to the moon and back. Of course our planet couldn’t sustain that.
Considering it begs us to start thinking we need to downsize.
But look at how information creation / destruction relates to temperature.
Every binary bit defined reduces temperature by at least 0.69 x Boltzman’s constant in degrees C or K.
It works both ways. Deleting a bit of information causes the same change in temperature, just in the opposite direction; deletion / destruction raises temperature.
{I will provide a link, later here, Android doesn’t make it possible to insert the links that are so easy using PC. God forbid poor folk with phones might ever write articles that might compete with those of richer folks with PCs.. links now added below.}
This law and the experiment that confirmed it, are almost lost to obscurity because when we compare the amount of energy lost to heat by a computing machine producing or processing data, the effect on temperature seems negligible compared with the energy dissipated as heat, to define information.
And it is. But this only matters if the temperature of the energy dissipated didn’t exist before we extracted the energy that powers the machine.
In the case of energy extraction, we take things, all kinds of things created previously by nature, and we destroy them, “creating” heat.
But look, that is a contradiction of terms, we can’t create heat, increase of heat is destruction by definition.
In the very special case that the temperature that would have existed, before we used the energy powering the machine, is more than if we didn’t use the energy at all, then the worst that can happen is nothing is created, no data.
Data created in that case, is the only thing affecting temperature, and this is reduction of temperature.
The same thing goes for hydrogen, 1 Kg of hydrogen created from solar, is 33KWhrs removed from the heating effect of the sun, regardless of system efficiency.
We can’t say that about any other kind of energy use, even wind, hydro, geothermal, you name it, if it comes from the planet, then there is a temperature penalty, and look, what is profit, it is extracted energy — it can only come from the planet, never from the sun, so profit itself always has to come at temperature cost.
Its very cool ChatGPT Free is showing us how to work with solar, for free.
Anyhow, what I was thinking was to calculate the change in temperature, if we were all solar powered, working like ChatGPT, with ChatGPT, reducing temperature by producing 500MB per day per person.
0.69 x Boltsman’s constant x 8 Billion x 500MB per day looks like -0.0000552 degrees per day.
Still doesn’t seem like much but if we take the reciprocal of this, we get the number of days to change the temperature by one degree, it looks like about 18 thousand and 116 days, or about 50 years.
But this was only considering the production of data by humans.
What about the production of data by Ai?
Maybe I’ll add that another day, but hopefully this should be enough to make us realise, there really is a way out of the mess we are in.
It comes from the sun, its the energy of the sun.
We either use it, or burn.
Maybe, to help hammer this in, we should come up with a better name for the entropy creation / destruction law.
We should name it according to whatever it has the most impact on, imho.
To me it looks like lies are what it impacts most.
The universe always had the ultimate lie detector — it pushes the temperature up for every lie told, because lies are not creation of information, lies are the opposite, destruction of information.
The physical law tells us why lies always have to have a cost, a temperature cost, a destruction cost, and why the ultimate outcome of a population living by the energy lie of profit, and all the lies we need to tell to keep doing the latter, are actually just a kind of Enshittopia, the house of all lies that we live in, pretending to ourselves we do no damage, no, we are creating, this is progress, right? I don’t think many of the humans that have been and gone would agree, but somehow we do it whilst we are alive.
This is why I would advocate we have to elevate all known physical laws to statutory including also Metcalfe’s law, that I’ve covered elsewhere.
So what should we call the Energy law of Truth?
Why not just call it that, the Energy law of Truth.
Looks good enough to me, what do you think?
