The Download: computing’s next leap and permafrost’s climate threat
This newsletter covers the stagnation of traditional computing scaling, the climate risks associated with thawing permafrost, and the potential for AI to design new life forms. It highlights current technological and environmental challenges.
Why it matters
These topics represent critical frontiers in technology and climate science that will shape future infrastructure and biological research.
Plus: AI has uncovered a decade-old flaw threatening much of the web.
This is today's edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.
On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued. We simply had not built the tools yet.
He was right, and for decades, computing took us into that space almost for free, as transistors repeatedly halved in size. But that easy descent has now stalled. Today, the industry is increasingly turning to brute force, building ever-bigger data centers to boost performance.
Yet the laws of physics leave plenty of room for improvement.
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