Units of intelligence

How much wood does it take to boil a kettle of water? This is a tractable question - we know the equations describing the physical processes of burning wood, how much energy this burning generates, and how much energy we would need to heat up the water. Given 120g of wood, we can produce enough energy to boil a kettle of water.

How much work does it take to light a room for an hour? When we were caveman, it would take us hours to find wood, chop it up, assemble a fire, and light it. Contrast this to today, when did you last worry about the lights going out? Light is so cheap, we don’t even think about it.

Finally, how much intelligence does it take to make light 10x cheaper? To perform the R&D work required to produce the inventions, as we’ve had in the past (from fire, to streetlamps, to LED’s), how much intelligence would that take? We don’t know.

Geohot talks about this.