4 ms·

Did you read the piece? They talk about VR.

• Ancalagon 7y ago
  Actually, they dismissed it pretty quickly I thought.
  • jbay808 7y ago
    I believe the "dismissal" is this cogent argument: Shuffling bits around takes energy; if your virtual reality services grow exponentially and energy production doesn't, then the price of energy must also increase exponentially or else one of your VR companies could buy all the energy and shut down the competition. Energy production (and computation) are limited by the capacity of the earth to vent heat into space at a reasonable surface temperature. So unless you allow for an exponentially expanding real-world physical economy, you can't have an exponentially growing virtual economy.
    • b_tterc_p 7y ago
      The price of energy is capped at the cost to privately produce it for yourself, which is probably pretty low in the scheme of all encompassing virtual real estate fiscal gods.
      • jbay808 7y ago
        Not unless the physical economy is growing at about the same rate as the virtual one. Or else how is that extra power generation capacity being added?
        • b_tterc_p 7y ago
          If the virtual economy grows 10%, that doesn’t mean we need 10% more energy to make it happen.
• orasis 7y ago
  1 additional bit of information allows exponentially more complexity to exist. Digital scales very very well.