This reminds me a bit of what I said once when someone asked me whether I believed P = NP would have any practical impact. What I said was that even if P = NP,

This reminds me a bit of what I said once when someone asked me whether I believed P = NP would have any practical impact. What I said was that even if P = NP, so that essentially every problem has a polynomial time algorithm, I suspected there were certain practical problems that would prove intractable to solve exactly, because the exponent would be too high, like n^10 or something. There's a good reason that consumer software either has small n, or basically doesn't use algorithms with exponents worse than n^2 (and, we only go to n^2 if it's really necessary). Throwing compute resources at the problem only goes so far when that exponent works against you. At that time, I wasn't thinking about it in terms of energy consumption, or carbon emissions, but, given the scale of things now, that does look like an appropriate set of units. Nor did I ever conceive of algorithms that would only be run once, because it was just too expensive to run it more than that.