The Thermodynamics of Acceleration · Short version (for those born in 2000 or later)

You are reading the short version, written for those born in 2000 or later. The others: long version · medium version · back to the choice.

Straight to the point, the way you like it.

In early October, in Florence, in a railway station where trains have not passed for a century, there was a talk about artificial intelligence. On stage: a former Italian prime minister and the man who represents Musk in Italy. In the audience: hundreds of people your age or a little older. The message of the evening: AI will change everything, and not in years but in months.

On OmegaMind we read these things through thermodynamics, the physics of energy. Here are five things that were not said on stage, or were said badly.

1. Nothing grows forever

A young man asked: can growth go on forever? No. Every exponential growth sooner or later hits a limit: energy, chips, data, money, your attention. The answer from the stage was that the founders are running for a mission. Maybe. But that explains why they run, not how far they can get.

2. Thinking costs. Even for a machine

There is no "zero-entropy" AI (entropy is disorder: everything tends to degrade). Every computation produces heat; it is a law of physics. In 2024 data centres used about 1.5% of the planet's electricity. By 2030 they will use more than all of Japan. Move them to space? The sun is always there, but there is no air to cool them. The sun is free; cold is not.

3. Work: the youngest are hit hardest

Your fear about jobs is not anxiety: it is in the data. In the United States, among 22-to-25-year-olds in the jobs most exposed to AI (programming, customer service), employment is already about 19% below where it would be. The World Economic Forum says that in the end more jobs will be created than lost. Maybe, but that is an average, and averages do not pay the rent. On OmegaMind we think freeing people from repetitive work is right. But the transition has to be governed, and anyone who says the problem does not exist is lying.

4. Musk is half right

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

Musk wants to take humanity to the stars and talks about a "symbiosis" between humans and AI. So far, we agree. But his symbiosis is a chip in the brain to keep pace with the machine. Ours (we call it the Centaur Symbiosis) is an alliance: the machine does the computing, you bring ideas, ethics, creativity, meaning. Physics is on our side: an engine only works if there is a difference between hot and cold. If human and machine become the same thing, the difference disappears and the engine stops. And there is one more detail: in Musk's world the machines belong to Musk. We want them transparent and belonging to everyone.

5. The Earth is not done for

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

You do not need to escape to Mars to get away from entropy. The Earth receives energy from the Sun and gives heat back to space: that exchange is what keeps everything alive. The planet will become unliveable in about a billion years, when the Sun gets too bright. You have time.

So?

Faced with this train you can do four things: sleep through it (someone in the audience did, literally), fear it, become the train, or get on board and stay yourself. We say the fourth.

You grew up inside the algorithm: you know how it works better than those who saw it arrive. Use that to understand AI, not to be used by it. Artificial intelligence is not your enemy, it is a mirror. And a mirror decides nothing: you do.

Want the details, the data and the sources? They are in the long version. Nobody will judge you for reading it.

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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.