If population stabilizes or contracts, then the only way this could happen is if per capita energy use continued to increase exponentially to the point that we were radiating enough heat to do this. That seems unlikely.
The only scenario I can imagine where per capita energy use goes that high is the "The Expanse LARP" scenario where people are rocketing around on fusion rockets, and that's not on Earth anymore so it doesn't matter.
What terrestrial products or services would demand power use per capita across the whole population that high?
GPUs are actually bad for AI. TPUs too. They’re available and general purpose but what you really want is something like a specialized tensor FPGA that can be loaded with the model. Memory and compute colocated.
There is research on this and a huge market but it takes a long time to go from design to prototype to production for something really novel. It’s also very expensive.
A lot of people are afraid AI is a big bubble. The more it becomes apparent that financial bubbles or not the tech is here to stay the more people will be comfortable making long term investments in building chips that are really optimal for it.
Even general chips get more efficient. Ten years ago my laptop was a lap roaster when I ran a big build on it. Now it’s barely warm and it’s twice as fast with four times the RAM.
Of course if there’s infinite demand for AI that won’t matter, but there isn’t infinite demand for anything.
