The Energy-Aware Future: Distributed Intelligence
Energy is the hard limit. The future is distributed, local, and incredibly disciplined about when to compute.
We are hitting the wall. Not the Moore’s Law wall, but the Physics wall. Data centers are drinking rivers dry and consuming small countries’ worth of power. We cannot scale linearly anymore. If we try to give everyone a GPT-6 agent running in the cloud 24/7, we will boil the oceans.
Energy-Aware Computing
The compute of the future must behave like a biological system. It must be Energy Aware. It shouldn’t ask “Can I compute this?” It should ask “Is it worth the energy to compute this?”
- Does this query need a 1 Trillion parameter model (Massive Energy)?
- Or can it be answered by a 3 Billion parameter model on the user’s phone (Battery Energy)?
The State’s Role: Rules, Not Machines
The state shouldn’t own the server farms. It should own the Protocol. It should design a system where compute capacity is distributed using local coworkers at every level—from the smartphone in your pocket to the edge server in your neighborhood.
Intelligence Distributed is better than Intelligence Consolidated. If the internet goes down, your local agent should still work. Your library’s server should still work.
Disciplined Systems
The cheapest way to increase national compute isn’t to buy more GPUs. It’s to reduce wasted thinking.
- Don’t use a massive model to add two numbers.
- Don’t use a cloud agent to do something a local script can do.
The Long Game
In the long run, the advantage will not come from how much compute a nation owns. It will come from how intelligently it combines:
- Shared Infrastructure (The Grid).
- Energy-Aware Design (Efficiency).
- Human Capability (The ultimate low-power computer).
Efficiency is the new dominance. And the most efficient computer in the known universe is still the 20 watts running between your ears. Use it well.
