How the SP System May Promote Sustainability in Energy Consumption in IT Systems

The SP System (SPS), referring to the SP Theory of Intelligence and its realisation as the SP Computer Model, has the potential to reduce demands for energy from IT, especially in AI applications and in the processing of big data, in addition to reductions in CO2 emissions when the energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels. The biological foundations of the SPS suggest that with further development, the SPS may approach the extraordinarily low (20 W)energy demands of the human brain. Some of these savings may arise in the SPS because, like people, the SPS may learn usable knowledge from a single exposure or experience. As a comparison, deep neural networks (DNNs) need many repetitions, with much consumption of energy, for the learning of one concept. Another potential saving with the SPS is that like people, it can incorporate old learning in new. This contrasts with DNNs where new learning wipes out old learning (‘catastrophic forgetting’). Other ways in which the mature SPS is likely to prove relatively parsimonious in its demands for energy arise from the central role of information compression (IC) in the organisation and workings of the system: by making data smaller, there is less to process; because the efficiency of searching for matches between patterns can be improved by exploiting probabilities that arise from the intimate connection between IC and probabilities; and because, with SPS-derived ’Model-Based Codings’ of data, there can be substantial reductions in the demand for energy in transmitting data from one place to another.