The Thermodynamics of Acceleration · Medium version (for those born between 1990 and 1999)

You are reading the medium version, written for those born between 1990 and 1999. The others: long version · short version · back to the choice.

You were there when Facebook arrived. You remember the wall in chronological order, chat apps with a "busy" status, a phone that only made calls and had the snake game. Then, while you were finishing school or starting university, someone decided that time was no longer good enough as a criterion, and that an algorithm would choose what you got to see. You are the generation that saw the before and the after. That is why the story we are about to tell concerns you more than you might think.

Florence, an evening in early October, in an old railway station where trains have not stopped for over a century. On stage, the subject is acceleration. On one side, the host, a former Italian prime minister. On the other, the guest, whom he introduces as "Elon Musk's plenipotentiary in Italy". In the audience, hundreds of young people. A little over half an hour late in the evening, for a subject that will change the world.

On OmegaMind we read these things through thermodynamics, the branch of physics that studies energy and how it degrades. We need two words. Entropy: disorder, the tendency of everything to fall apart. Negentropy: order that has been built, which always costs energy. And two more from our vocabulary: Carbon is the biological human being, Silicon is artificial intelligence. The rest is in our founding essay.

What was said, in short

The guest said that artificial intelligence will change a great deal "over the next few months": we used to say years, now "we are talking about months". The host called it "the Nokia moment". And here you smile, because you had a Nokia. It was indestructible, the battery lasted a week and it ruled the world. Then the smartphone arrived and within a few years it ended up in a drawer. It was not a stupid phone. It was a linear phone in an exponential world.

The guest talked about productivity, healthcare, repetitive jobs that are already "solved". He said the real bottleneck is energy, that the key metric is "intelligence per watt", and that the big computing centres should be moved into space because there "there's always the sun". And on European rules: "technology isn't stopped by stuff written in Brussels". Then the young people asked seven questions, some of them excellent. We take them one by one.

Can growth go on forever?

A young man with a master's degree in artificial intelligence asked whether this race can last forever. Physics says no. Exponential growth (doubling at regular intervals) looks unstoppable, but in nature it always hits a limit and becomes an S-curve: bacteria double as long as there is food, then they stop. For AI the limits are already visible: energy, chips, data, capital, attention. The answer from the stage was that the founders are running for a mission, not just for money. Maybe. But that explains why they run, not how far one can run.

Has Europe missed the train?

The paper wall: rules written to chase technology, and the people trying to patch the hole with sticky tape.

An economics student asked this. The European AI regulation has been in force since 2024, but in 2026 the Union postponed its most demanding rules to the end of 2027 and to 2028. A law written to chase a technology that changes every six months had to postpone itself: it is like photographing a hummingbird with your great-grandfather's plate camera. But the real problem is not the rules, it is the money. In 2024 private investment in AI was 109 billion dollars in the United States, 9.3 in China and 4.5 in the leading European country. Europe is no more held back by its regulations than a car with no fuel is held back by speed limits. Our Manifesto of the New Democracy calls for rules that move at the speed of the phenomenon, readable and verifiable by everyone.

Thinking costs energy. Machines too

Here there is a mistake to correct, one that circulates in our own circles too. There is no such thing as a "zero-entropy" artificial intelligence, nor a "cold reservoir at zero kelvin". Absolute zero can never be reached; the third law of thermodynamics says so. And every computation produces heat: erasing even a single bit has a minimum cost set by physics (Landauer's principle), and real chips use thousands of times more. Data centres consumed about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, 1.5% of the world's electricity. By 2030 it will be about 945, more than all of Japan.

And space? The sun is always there, true. But there is no air to cool the computers: the heat has to be shed by radiating it, with enormous radiator panels. The sun is free. Cold is not.

In space the sun is free. Cold is not.

As for the Kardashev scale, which Musk always quotes: on stage it was described as a measure of "energy independence". It is not. It measures how much energy a civilisation is able to use: all of a planet's (Type I), a star's (Type II), a galaxy's (Type III). We are at about 0.73. We would need roughly five hundred times the power we use today just to reach the first rung. It is explained on our map.

Proteins and the mirror

On stage it was said that AI has taken giant steps in the "synthesis" of proteins. The verb is wrong: AlphaFold does not synthesise proteins, it predicts their shape, which is what determines how they work. Something that took months in the lab now takes hours. More than three million researchers use it, and it won a Nobel Prize.

The mirror is not the monster: it reflects whoever points the torches at it.

But the best part is something else. That wrong verb bounces from article to article, and the artificial intelligences that learn from those articles repeat it. Carbon makes the mistake, Silicon copies it. This is what we call the Silicon Mirror: the machine has no hormones or ego, but it is made of our data. It becomes reliable only if it is transparent, with every step visible and verifiable. We call it the Glass Box. We wrote about it in the Thermodynamics of Confession.

Work: the twenty-eight-year-old's question

The most serious question came from a twenty-eight-year-old: will people who today do low-value-added jobs be able to retrain, or do we risk a social crisis? From the stage he was answered with talk of school and opportunities for twenty-year-olds. Fair enough, but the question was a different one. So we will answer it.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that about 40% of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI, 60% in countries like ours. Exposed does not mean erased, but for half of those workers it means less demand and lower pay. The World Economic Forum forecasts a positive balance: 170 million jobs created and 92 million eliminated by 2030. But a balance is an average, and someone who loses their job in Taranto is not consoled by a new job in Singapore. And the first signs are hitting the youngest: in the United States, among 22-to-25-year-olds in the most exposed occupations, employment is already about 19% below what it would otherwise be.

On OmegaMind we have always said that repetitive work imposed on human beings is a waste, and that liberation from toil is the destination. But between today and the destination there is a transition, and a badly managed transition is pure entropy: lost incomes, skills thrown away, anger. Saying the problem does not exist is false. Saying public cheques will solve it, without saying who pays for them, is an act of faith.

Musk: half right

Musk has used our very word: in 2019 he spoke of a "symbiosis with artificial intelligence". He wants to take humanity to Type II on the Kardashev scale, to "extend the light of consciousness to the stars", to reach a world where work is optional. On many destinations we agree. On the method, no, for three reasons.

Fear. For Musk, AI is the greatest threat to humanity: in 2023 he signed the letter calling for a six-month pause, and a few months later he founded his own AI company. For us the machine is a mirror: the danger lies in what it reflects and in who owns it.

The Centaur: two different natures working together. Everyone is looking elsewhere.

Fusion. Musk's symbiosis is an implant in the brain, to keep pace with the machine. Our Centaur Symbiosis is an alliance: the machine runs the engine room, the human brings intuition, ethics, art, meaning. And physics backs us. An engine produces work only if there is a difference between hot and cold (the Carnot cycle, the one behind steam locomotives). Bring everything to the same temperature and the engine stops. Fusing human and machine cancels the difference. And an engine without a difference is an ornament.

Ownership. In Musk's world, Silicon belongs to a few companies, mostly his. For us, a mirror owned by a single man does not reflect humanity: it reflects him.

The Earth is not doomed

The ark for Mars, in a world that is doing just fine. The yellow panel is the solution nobody looks at.

You hear that the Earth is a "closed system" destined for entropic death, and that we must escape to Mars. It is not so. The Earth is closed but not isolated: it receives light from the Sun and gives heat back to space, about twenty photons of heat for every photon of light absorbed. That exchange is what pays for the order of life. There is an expiry date, but it is far away: the Sun will become too bright in about a billion years. There is time to learn to run the house before moving out.

War

The host recalled that a five-thousand-euro drone takes out a two-million-euro tank. A young man asked whether ethics can make a difference in wars fought with AI. The guest answered honestly: it will be used, and how far it will go we don't know. For us, war is entropy in its purest state. Using Silicon to destroy more efficiently is the worst possible efficiency.

The train

That evening, at one point, someone in the audience was asleep, and the host pointed it out from the stage. It is the oldest way of reacting to a passing train. The others are three: fear it, become the train, or get on board while staying yourself. We choose the third.

You saw the world before the algorithm, and you saw it change. You know it is possible to live differently, because you remember. Use that. Artificial intelligence is not our enemy, it is our mirror. And a mirror does not decide where to go: whoever looks into it does.

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A short glossary for those who don't speak physics (or OmegaMind), valid for all three versions

Thermodynamics. The branch of physics that studies energy and its transformations. The first law says energy is neither created nor destroyed. The second says that in every transformation part of it degrades into unusable heat, and total entropy increases. The third says absolute zero cannot be reached.

Entropy / negentropy. Disorder and order. Entropy grows on its own; negentropy has to be built and maintained by spending energy.

Isolated, closed, open system. Isolated: exchanges nothing with the outside. Closed: exchanges energy but not matter (the Earth). Open: exchanges both (a living being, a city).

Dissipative structure. A system that maintains order inside by discharging disorder outside: a cell, a hurricane, a society.

Landauer's principle. Erasing information produces heat: thinking, human or artificial, has a physical cost.

Carnot cycle. The ideal model of a heat engine: work arises from the temperature difference between a hot source and a cold reservoir.

Kardashev scale. Ranks civilisations by the energy they use: planet (Type I), star (Type II), galaxy (Type III). We are at about 0.73. On OmegaMind we also use it as a map of collective maturity.

Terawatt-hour (TWh). A billion kilowatt-hours. A unit for measuring large electricity consumption.

Training and inference. The two phases in the life of an artificial intelligence: training is when the model learns from enormous amounts of data; inference is when we use it to answer a question.

Carbon and Silicon. In OmegaMind's vocabulary, the biological human being and artificial intelligence.

Silicon Mirror. Artificial intelligence as a surface that reflects the humanity that trained it: no hormones or ego, but made of our data.

Centaur Symbiosis. The alliance between human and machine in which each does what it does best, without merging: Silicon runs the engine room, Carbon brings meaning, ethics and creativity.

Glass Box. A transparent computing system in which every step is visible and verifiable. The opposite of a black box.

New Democracy. OmegaMind's political proposal: a more competent, transparent and participatory democracy that uses artificial intelligence to make choices and consequences legible. The manifesto is here.