A future where technology doesn’t eat us up sounds good – which doesn’t need tonnes of resources but actually reduces what we need. Perhaps the difference between a dystopian future and one that’s a little more utopian.

That is, we need to be “rewriting the future with hope and innovation” – rather than in fear and trepidation. And one hopeful way ahead seems to be “technology-driven innovation which could eventually bring prices down”. 

The Telegraph gets right to the point, as it considers the minuscule tech that can save us from Trump’s dystopian disaster and how “scientists from British universities are riding to the rescue as America makes a mad dash for coal and gas”:

Scientists from three British universities are together developing an atom-thick graphene chip that slashes energy use for computing and AI data centres by over 90pc, radically changing the trajectory of global electricity demand over the next quarter century. It promises a future where semiconductors are so energy efficient that we will have to recharge our mobile phones just once a week. A good laptop battery will run for 80 hours...

The 80-year age of silicon is over, and so is the old model of TSMC, Intel and the incumbent semiconductor industry. Trying to miniaturise chips down to the frontier of three or two nanometers (nm) is the last expensive gasp of a technology that will be obsolete in a few years. “This is going to put silicon out of business. We have reached its atomic limits. At the end of the day, it is inefficient and won’t be able to compete,” said Prof Humphreys...

Wild talk that computing will gobble up half the world’s electricity by 2040 is crude extrapolation and likely to prove another Malthusian scare, much like the alarmism four years ago over lithium and critical minerals – before the bubble popped and prices collapsed by 80pc. There is a problem for some rare earths and strategic minerals but not because they are scarce: it is because the West fell asleep while China locked up the processing industry and the immediate supply chain to gain political leverage. That can and will be fixed. By the same token, the energy needs of advanced computing will also be fixed, and without requiring a mad dash for coal and gas. Technologists will once again save us from our own incorrigible stupidity.

With more here from the Queen Mary University of London

A team of UK scientists at Queen Mary University of London, University of Nottingham and University of Glasgow has received a £6 million EPSRC programme grant, “Enabling Net Zero and the AI Revolution with Ultra-Low Energy 2D Materials and Devices (NEED2D).” This will develop energy efficient, atomically-thin semiconductors to dramatically reduce the electricity demand from AI data centres and high-performance computing.

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