As is frequently the case I'm inspired by the often missed smaller details in life and right now that takes form in a coffee grinder. You see our barely 2 year old electric grinder packed up and the daily morning brew grind is now powered by moi.
Don't get me wrong, I've always really enjoyed my morning brew ritual which most days consist of a single coffee so I really do not mind additional extra effort that goes into around 60 seconds of manual grinding for a single dose. But I can see this becoming an issue if you have around 5+ coffees a day or even two of you have 3+. Come think of it the power rating of my grinder back in Colombia is 120W which is probably overkill.
And let's be honest as much as I like cars and internal combustion engines can be a marvel but they're not efficient any shape or form and the Citroen Oli is an example of a 248 mile range EV out of a 40kWa battery. Just review the Citroen press release:
...oli signals an exciting leap forwards. Rather than being a 2,500kg ‘palace on wheels’ filled with screens and gadgets, oli proves that more can be achieved with less, and showcases how inventive use of responsible materials and a sustainable production process can lead to inexpensive yet desirable zero-emission vehicles that meet multiple lifestyles.
Whether it be the power rating of your grinder, the horse power of your car or the compute it requires to resolve our AI power hungriness. We're not used to paying the price of friction, waste or inefficiencies.
And all of this takes me back to a weekend I spent at a farm of some friends some years ago in Chiquinquirá, Colombia. They had chosen the countryside rhythms of life in contrast to the busy frantic city. And they built a farm they were much more intuned with natural rhythms present to all of us under the concrete jungle. A cow cannot produce milk 12 months of the year if it's ever going to re-produce a calf. They can't feed off land without rotation. And as much as a they would have loved to buy a machine to milk the cows quicker every day at 4am the farm had taught them simple basic finances which would question even the cost of the wear and tear of the belt.
And yet their day was mainly finished by late morning so where was not the ever present pressure to squeeze more out of the day.
Many of us have grown accustomed to elaborate and complex abstractions removing us from natural constraints. Many modern bean counters have elaborated complex financial systems and yet have little grasp of the cost of maintenance of the belt to automate the milking of cows.
So my challenge for all of us today is to question:
- Do we understand the true cost of the compute and resources being used in AI?
It's taken us decades to understand that the fabulous cost efficiency of Cloud frequently does not add up and many tech-companies are now migrating back to bare metal servers to save money. - Is the industry subsidising and hiding the true compute cost? Do they benefit from have us hooked on their new gold rush supply?
- Are we subsidising their business while they scrap and rape the finite data to feed their models? Is it sustainable once we no longer produce any new human generated content?
- Good grief should I even mention governments where this can easily spiral out of control? Where is now new found independent 21st century freedom?
- Where can we embrace the beautiful constraint of the finite in our every day?
- How can we architect a future that leverages the finite? A future that understand and encourages sustainability?
Not all is doom and gloom. There's plenty of disruption boiling up in not so visible spaces.
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