The information infrastructure era -- The world's computer-communications systems now use twice as much electricity as does the country of Japan -- Digital-infrastrcture masons caught between profit seeking and virtue shaming -- A single smartphone's annual pro rata energy use -- in the network, not in your hand -- amounts to as much electricity as a modern household refrigerator -- Defining structures of epochs : cathedrals, skyscrapers, and datacenters -- Economists and pundits generally underestimate infrastructure-anchored transformations -- The invisible and voracious "information superhighway" -- The pursuit of machines to save labor and to create new services and comforts is as old as civilization -- Expanding and accelerating the "information superhighway" with 5G -- Once there's a general-purpose supercomputer, we'll see far more of them than cruise ships -- Are CAFÉ-like fuel efficiency standards on the horizon for AI and robots? -- The architecture and appetite of artificial intelligence -- Untethered robots, whether winged, wheeled, or walking, are bound by the same energy architecture as humans -- Supercomputers and AI supercharge the cloud -- Shock and awe as déjà vu all over again -- Humanity now fabricates 1,000 times more transistors annually than the entire world grows grains of wheat and rice combined -- Robocars are coming, but robots eat too -- Annual global cloud traffic is today counted at some 40 zettabytes, an impossibly large number to imagine -- The relentless pursuit of and confusion over efficiency : Jevons paradox -- The ineluctable energy magic of silicon engines -- Data is a resource that -- unlike its natural analogues -- humanity literally creates by inventing tools to sense and measure things -- Metrics for measuring the future : from medieval barrels to AI's bytes -- Everything about the present and future digital infrastructure, especially its aggregate energy apetite, is captured at the intersection of extremes : the withering decline in the nanoscopic energy used per byte and the scale and blistering growth in bytes consumed -- Data is the new oil.
Summary:
"We are now witnessing the build-out of society's first foundationally new infrastructure in nearly a century: the Cloud. It is an ecosystem of information-digital hardware, at the heart of which resides massive warehouse-scale datacenters unlike anything ever built. Given the resources committed to them and the reverence afforded to the companies that build and own them, datacenters might be called the digital cathedrals of the twenty-first century. The emerging Cloud is as different from the communications infrastructure that preceded it, as air travel was different from automobiles. And, using energy as a metric for scale-since there are only two kinds of infrastructures, energy-producing and energy-using-today's global Cloud already consumes more energy than all aviation. Yet, as disruptive as the Cloud has already become, we are in fact just at the end of the beginning of what the digital masons are building for the twenty-first century"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.