The Cognitive Kardashev Scale: Quantifying the Material Envelope of Civilisational Computation
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866917522310168576 |
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| author | Sharma, Sachin |
| author_facet | Sharma, Sachin |
| contents | How much thinking can a civilisation do? Kardashev's (1964) typology ranks civilisations by total power: planetary (Type I, ~10^16 W), stellar (Type II, ~10^26 W), galactic (Type III). This paper builds an analogous Cognitive Kardashev Scale: how much sustained AI-grade computation each tier could support. Four ingredients enter the calculation: total power P (watts), the share f of it devoted to cognition, the efficiency $η$ at which energy becomes compute (operations per joule), and the brain's own processing rate $C_{\mathrm{brain}}$ as a reference unit. Anchoring on 2024-2026 hardware (El Capitan, NVIDIA Blackwell, Vera Rubin) gives $η_{2026} = 10^{12}$ FLOP/J. Contemporary humanity sits at $K \approx 0.73$, three-quarters of the way to Type I. At Type I and $f = 1\%$, available compute is, within an order of magnitude, one personal AI's worth of cognition per human inhabitant; at Type II it is essentially incomprehensible. Three trajectories for frontier compute through 2035 are reported as conditional projections, not predictions. Whether the long-run binding constraint is energy or efficiency depends on engineering choices not yet made; the political economy of who has access may matter more than either. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_22840 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Cognitive Kardashev Scale: Quantifying the Material Envelope of Civilisational Computation Sharma, Sachin Physics and Society Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society How much thinking can a civilisation do? Kardashev's (1964) typology ranks civilisations by total power: planetary (Type I, ~10^16 W), stellar (Type II, ~10^26 W), galactic (Type III). This paper builds an analogous Cognitive Kardashev Scale: how much sustained AI-grade computation each tier could support. Four ingredients enter the calculation: total power P (watts), the share f of it devoted to cognition, the efficiency $η$ at which energy becomes compute (operations per joule), and the brain's own processing rate $C_{\mathrm{brain}}$ as a reference unit. Anchoring on 2024-2026 hardware (El Capitan, NVIDIA Blackwell, Vera Rubin) gives $η_{2026} = 10^{12}$ FLOP/J. Contemporary humanity sits at $K \approx 0.73$, three-quarters of the way to Type I. At Type I and $f = 1\%$, available compute is, within an order of magnitude, one personal AI's worth of cognition per human inhabitant; at Type II it is essentially incomprehensible. Three trajectories for frontier compute through 2035 are reported as conditional projections, not predictions. Whether the long-run binding constraint is energy or efficiency depends on engineering choices not yet made; the political economy of who has access may matter more than either. |
| title | The Cognitive Kardashev Scale: Quantifying the Material Envelope of Civilisational Computation |
| topic | Physics and Society Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22840 |