The Ceiling

Against all the bookkeeping of the previous chapter there is an objection so obvious that any engineer will raise it first, without hearing you out.

Twenty watts is a historically accidental constraint. The brain came out this way because evolution assembled it from meat, at constant temperature, with oxygen delivered by pipes and under an obligation not to boil the contents of the skull; give it another material, another power supply and industrial cooling, and the ceiling will immediately rise. That is what we have been doing for the last seventy years, and a data centre that devours tens of megawatts does not complain of cramped quarters.