Computers have become so integrated into our lives that it's sometimes easy to forget how much energy is required to keep them going. Silicon chips use a lot of power and Nanowerk has a great article today on the consequences of that energy use:
...about 200 billion kWh of electricity a year used by computers.... That means that generating the electricity for using 1 billion computers will release some 128 million tonnes of CO2 (280 billion pounds) into the air.
Maybe we can find the way forward by looking backwards.
Dr. Robert Blick at the University of Wisconsin is developing nanomechanical computational devices -- chips that sacrifice a degree of speed but in return are vastly superior to silicon in terms of energy consumption and robustness. Soft Machines adds to the discussion and distinguishes Dr. Blick's work from Eric Drexler's rod logic.
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