Nvidia and the Black Forest

Question: How is Nvidia like the Black Forest? Nvidia, of course, is the maker of the AI chips that have recently revolutionized the computer industry and put the company’s stock on a 100%/yr appreciation curve. The Black Forest, on the other hand, is home to Hansel & Gretel, Rapunzel, Snow White and various giants, dwarves, heroes, trolls and gnomes from German mythology.  

Serious AI, not the stuff of science fiction, has yet to celebrate its 10th birthday. On the other hand, the first modern forests evolved about 100 million years ago. But unlike some pre-teens I’ve known, Nvidia seems very willing to learn from its superannuated cousin. 

Well, ‘cousin’ might be a bit of a stretch. One has the surface area of a postage stamp, the other covers an area the size of Delaware. One is Silicon’s proudest achievement. The other may be Carbon’s (my apologies to the genus homo: you were ‘runner-up’).

With differences like these, why even look for similarities? What can they possibly have in common? Well, for one thing both are massive consumers of natural resources, only grudgingly surrendered by their environments. Their growth, even their survival, depends on their ability to manage those resources efficiently.

Nvidia needs two things, electricity (energy) to power its chips…and water to cool them. Forests need sunlight (energy)…and water for circulation. Both need copious amounts of each! Without resource management, both technologies have the potential to destroy their environments, and themselves in the process.

It makes sense for Nvidia to research this: its chips are the mitochondria of modern data centers. Forests, on the other hand, have already evolved an ingenious social structure and communications network. It’s time tech turns to trees for tips!

The Alpha-tree is not shy. It shoots for the sky, and it doesn’t mind taking more than its ‘fair share’ of sunlight. But while the Alpha puts itself in position to absorb as much sunlight as possible, it tries not to do so at the expense of its neighbors. Often, the canopy self-organizes into a pattern that ensures all players get what they need to thrive, but when that fails, the Alpha is ready to use its prosperity to benefit the forest generally and threatened trees specifically. 

An anthropologist encountering an unstudied culture will first try to understand the structure of kinship and the distribution of power in that society. Who’s got what and who’s got whose back? When we approach the forest with an anthropologist’s mindset, we uncover a complex social structure. 

Generalizing, trees know their kin, i.e. their ancestors and their offspring. As with many animals, they prioritize the welfare of their closest relations. Primarily through root systems, aided by a ‘wood wide web’ of fungi, trees first share resources with kin.

Junior is struggling to get established, its parent will help. Grandma has gone the ‘way of all wood’, leaving only her stump behind; a dutiful daughter will continue to feed that stump until, sometimes, new life sprouts.

My father always said, “Charity begins at home,” and he practiced that. The mother of an activist friend of mine once told him, “Don’t trip over the Christ in the kitchen on your way to the Christ outside.” Consciously or not, they had both adopted the ethic of the forest.

Once the Alpha has provided for its kin, it’s happy to share its prosperity with other trees, first members of its same species, then all trees in the forest. And when Alpha detects an environmental threat (predators, drought, blizzard), it puts out an airborne chemical alert that is detected and disciphered across species. 

Mindless consumption and wanton waste is unsustainable. We’re just figuring this out now; forests understood it at least 100 million years earlier.  Now Nvidia has filed a patent application for an ‘intelligent’ data center that would manage power resources down to the individual server rack, allowing them to adapt to fluctuating resource demands. 

Typically, data centers are designed to satisfy peak demand, everywhere, all at once, leading to higher than necessary energy costs. Rather than equally distributing power and cooling resources among a data center’s server racks, Nvidia would shift resources between server racks as necessary. For that it needs local intelligence; it needs to monitor continuously every inch of its architecture.

For example, if one cluster of server racks is experiencing above average power demand while two others are idling, don’t allocate max power to each. Continuously measure the demands at each node and shift power and coolant so that the supply is always adequate and waste absolutely minimal.

Over-engineered, centralized data centers are expensive to build and operate. Ideally, Nvidia will create its ‘brave new world’ following a decentralized (blockchain) model. The forest has no ‘brain’, it has no cerebral cortex. Its intelligence is distributed throughout, from the top of each pine needle to the tip of each root.

A forest does not lack a brain, it is a brain, and its branches and roots are its ganglia; it is a true ‘thinking machine’ or better, ‘thinking organism’. How did the woods get so wise? Simple, they mimicked the architectural scheme God used when creating Universe.

Unfortunately, unlike the forests, we did not follow Nature’s model. Instead, we selfishly clung to the model deployed at Babel, even after the abject failure of that project.

We sought to create our own isolated homo-sphere, where ‘command and control’ is centralized.

Initially, that provided our species with some competitive advantage; but it’s terribly inefficient and rife with all sorts of adverse social and environmental consequences. It’s neither advantageous nor sustainable in the long run. Hopefully, as Nvidia rebuilds our world, it will learn from our arboreal cousins, and follow a model of distributed intelligence akin to ‘blockchain’.

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