https://news.mit.edu/2023/autonomous-vehicles-carbon-emissions-0113

I know the article is from 2023 but the math, if I read it correctly…

If earth has 1 billion vehicles with self driving, if they drive for an hour per day, it would consume as much total compute as in use to run all data centers as they are configured now (2023), just to do self driving calculations.

Now I wonder how far we have come in 2026. Thier models seem to be very hungry ones. Apparently they calculate 840W as the average compute consumption of a self driving vehicle. Which I must say is a lot. Plus I bet data center usage has been unlinier in growth since covid.

Data processing. Abstract data processing. Is kind of the most compute intensive tasks we do.

Often computer problems come down to Thermodyanics. Simply, you must move the data, manipulate it, display it. All of that has cost, it is easy to from behind a terminal forget that. As humans, myself at least, its fun to “push it to redline” see how much we can get out of our hardware. In building I always have leaned towards very simple things, but I am still young.

We must I think always remember that at the end of the day this is all electrical manipulation. There are real costs in heat and raw materials usage always.

Idk, just interesting to think about.