Vaclav Smil — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Vaclav Smil — On AI. 14 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Data Center Energy Consumption
The aggregate electricity demand of facilities housing computational infrastructure—rising from ~460 TWh globally in 2022 to projected >1,000 TWh by 2026, driven primarily by AI workloads.
Imagination-to-Artifact Ratio
Segal's term for the gap between what a person can conceive and what they can produce — which AI collapsed to approximately the length of a conversation, and which Gopnik's framework reveals to be an exploitation metric that leaves the exp…
Jevons Paradox of Intelligence
Smil's application of the 1865 efficiency rebound to AI: productivity gains make cognitive work cheaper, expanding total computational demand faster than per-operation efficiency improves.
Material Substrate of Computation
The physical infrastructure—electricity grids, cooling systems, semiconductor fabs, water supplies—that computation depends upon, invisible to users but thermodynamically non-negotiable.
S-Curve Deceleration
The inevitable slowing of technology adoption as markets saturate, constraints bind, or superior alternatives emerge—every technology follows this curve; AI will not be the exception.
Semiconductor Supply Chain
The geographically concentrated, extraordinarily complex production network—TSMC fabs, ASML lithography machines, rare earth processing—through which all frontier AI chips must pass.
Thermodynamics of Computation
The physical law that every computation generates heat as waste; no efficiency gain eliminates this, only reduces the heat per operation while total heat scales with total computation.
ASML Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography
The Dutch company's $380 million, 180-ton machines that pattern circuits onto silicon using 13.5-nanometer light—fewer than 200 units worldwide, indispensable for frontier chips, irreplaceable if disrupted.
Claude Code
Anthropic's command-line coding agent — the specific product through which the coordination constraint shattered in the winter of 2025, reaching $2.5B run-rate revenue within months.
Cooling Infrastructure
The industrial-scale systems—evaporative towers, chillers, heat exchangers—that remove computational heat from data centers, consuming 30-40% of facility electricity and millions of gallons of water daily.
