Artificial intelligence is changing everything. We are at the point where, over the next 10 years, society will be completely changed.
This conclusion is based upon the present pace of technological advancement along with the convergence of a number of technologies. This is going to put things on a powerful exponential curve. We already discussed the potential of another economic singularity emerging.
One of the characteristics of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the eradication of many of our present metrics. What we use to gauge things is simply outdated. I discussed, on a number of occasions, how GDP is basically an obsolete statistic.
At present, most of the global economy is denominated in US dollars. balance sheets all over the world uses this as the basis. Global debt is roughly 50% in USD. The FOREX market and Eurodollar system is overwhelmingly dollar denominated.
That said, we are embarking upon a digital age unlike one we never saw. Here is where we might see another massive change.
The Joule As The Basis For The Global Economy
One thing about AI is that it uses a lot of power. This is something that is garnering the attention of many. We are seeing a large number of initiatives driving the more to other sources of energy.
They say data is the new oil. This, however, overlooks the fact that data is worthless without compute. Naturally, the reverse is true so we see a partnered relationship here.
Going one step further, there is nothing happening without energy. electricity is required to kickstart the GPUs and keep them processing data. Without it, we have expensive paper weights.
When we look at the progress of robotics, we start to see the bridge into the physical world. This is compounded by the fact many are starting to look into spatial artificial intelligence, which moves this into the 3D realm.
Essentially, we are looking at this as the basis of the economy going forward.
Which brings me to the point of the article: what is the most fundamental unit of what we are talking about: the joule.
What is this? According to Groq:
@taskmaster4450/re-leothreads-27ggffzjh
If things unfold as I laid out, we could see this as the basic unit of much of our society.
For this reason, perhaps we can link this economically.
Energy As The Base Unit
This is not a novel idea.
Henry Ford proposed the idea 100 years ago. He offered up the idea of energy currency.
We see a similar sentiment with Bitcoin. The fact that the tokens are essentially backed by the energy required to run the network provides a link between the two.
The difference is, with AI, we are looking at output. That is the essential goal of money. It is a tool to be used to facilitate trade. Many overlook this idea. They believe money is the end when it is not.
Anyone who investigates AI and what is projected can see how we are looking at massive increases in economic output. This means that the number of joules needed to power things is going to keep growing, at least in totality.
However, technological deflation ends up operating in full force. For the sake of this example we will measure output as data. With LLMs this makes sense. It might be a bit different with robots and spatial but for the moment, this will illustrate the point.
Over time, we see the output of processors increase while energy input either remains the same or declines. Then we have advancements with algorithms, which can also increase the productivity.
We can see it clearly in these screenshots.
Here the same article was placed in the OpenAi tokenizer. Under the GPT3 we see it is 1,416 tokens. Things change when we get to the next level, GPT3.5/4.
The same amount of information, as measured in characters resulted in less tokens. This means we gained in efficiency across the system. Since we are dealing with fewer tokens, less energy is required to handle the same output.
With the anticipated crunch on inference compute, this is a big step forward.
It is also coupled by the advancements of entities such as NVIDIA will is increasing the output for the energy input in a massive way with their Blackwell line of processors.
Removing The Middleman
When we consider it, everything is energy.
Consider the idea of labor. Here we have a situation where workers exchange their energy for money. It is true that most of this is based upon time, but that is just another metric.
A certain amount of energy is provided by humans to generate an output. This could be in the form of a tax return, cup of coffee, or the selling of an automobile.
In exchange for this energy, the person receives money. The link between economic productivity and energy should be clear. Here is where our legal tender currencies (along with crypto) enter.
Going forward, more of the global economy will be based upon the digital. Until now, these were two separate entities. Going forward, my view is that the digital will end up driving the physical.
Hence we have a situation where there is a direct correlation between energy input and economic productivity. Therefore, when looking at something like the joule, this could be the unit of measure the world defaults to.
Then we see what is used as the representation developing into something much different.
Tokenization would appear to be a logical solution.