Notes: Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil
Janky, unedited, written to help myself retain and understand better.
What follows are a bunch of random riffs I wrote down while reading the book, but the larger big picture takeaway I had from the book is just contingent economic development seems to be on the laws of physics.
Suppose coal just didn’t exist - fossils decompose in a different way, for example. In that world, it’s hard to imagine how we could have crossed the chasm between waterwheels and charcoal to nuclear power plants and solar panels. The laws of physics just happened to place these transitionary fuels right where we needed more runway? I guess theoretically we could have started the industrial revolution (but slower and more inefficiently) with only charcoal. As Tyler Cowen reminds us, do not underrate the elasticity of supply. But still, I’m skeptical.
People speak of the increased energetic cost of the brain between other primates and humans in terms of inference energetic costs. Human brain consumes 20% of our energy whereas for chimps it’s 8-9% Â
But we don’t usually put the energetic cost of the scaling in terms of training costs. Humans have the a 15-20 year maturation phase, where they must be cared for, educated, etc. Which is exactly what you’d expect from normal ML scaling laws - bigger brain (aka more parameters) requires more training.
Primates seem to have had a scalable neural architecture, and furthermore humans were in an evolutionary niche where intelligence was really useful so as to offset the marginal energetic costs of a bigger brain:
Bipedalism allows tool use and other dexterous fine-grained activities. Tool use requires intelligence to a much greater extent than typical mammalian hunting strategies (chase down the gazelle). Therefore intelligence is rewarded.
Greater intelligence allows us to find and cook energy-dense foods, processed for easy consumption - nuts, cooked meats, etc. This allows us to get by with smaller gastrointestinal tracts. We can re-invest this energy we’ve saved on digestion into our brain, which gives the intelligence to further process and find foods…
The charcoal -> coal transition may teach us about how LLMs will have their impact. In this analogy, coal is AI labor, wood/charcoal is human labor.
For one, it took a long time to go from coal superseding charcoal to the industrial revolution (coal superseded biomass as main source on energy in Great Britain in 1620, but the 2% growth regime only began in mid 19th century). Though this process went much faster in societies who already had the British/American example and industrialized later (Japan, China, etc).
This is in large part because we didn’t know how to properly utilize the tremendous amount of energy available from coal. Only in 1840 did someone invent much larger more productive blast furnaces for pigiron which were properly calibrated to use shittons of coal instead of scraps of charcoal.
every transition to a new form of energy supply has to be powered by the intensive deployment of existing energies and prime movers: the transition from wood to coal had to be energized by human muscles, coal combustion powered the development of oil, and, as I stress in the last chapter, today’s solar photovoltaic cells and wind turbines are embodiments of fossil energies required to smelt the requisite metals, synthesize the needed plastics, and process other materials requiring high energy inputs.
Key point. And not only does the new energy form require the previous one, but it also requires bubble-like dynamics with itself. Railroad production is financed (to the tune of 7% of GDP!) on the expectation that there’ll be a bunch of coal to move around, and more coal is mined on the expectation that there’ll be a bunch of railroads to move it around (pulled from Hobart and Hubert on Mimesis [find link]). Coal mining and steam engines also had similar dynamics:
Coal mining and steam engines reinforced each other’s development. The need to pump more water from deeper mines was a key reason for developing steam engines. The availability of cheaper fuel led to their proliferation, and thus to a further expansion of mining.
The coal powered revolution not only unleashed more energy but allowed it to be used anywhere. Previously, factories had to be located next to waterwheels - now they could be built anywhere you could get coal - and this boundary also kept expanding with the railroads and steam ships which were themselves powered by coal. This trend of not only more plentiful energy, but more liquid and efficient access to energy, was continued by electrification.Â
Oil took this trend to the next level. Since oil is incredibly energetically dense, it’s a technology of decentralization. Your car doesn’t have to be connected to the grid.