> To quantify this for his new steam engine, James Watt developed the unit “horsepower”, which he and Matthew Boulton standardized at 33,000 foot-pounds in 1783.

> By analogy to “horsepower”, AI can be measured in terms of “thought-hours”. Whereas horsepower quantifies physical work relative to horses, a thought-hour quantifies cognitive work relative to humans.

The idea of “the <mechanical device> does an amount of <type of work> equal to what the <biological creature> does per hour” fits, but the crucial part is the end of the first quote; having enough understanding to actually standardize that new made up unit in a physically meaningful way. For thoughts, intuitively, it would seem to map to information, entropy, that sort of stuff, but of course nobody has worked it out yet.

I think we’re still in the era where people are digging up black rocks and noticing that sometimes if they stick it in their furnace, it’ll heat it up. Or make the iron into steel. It is a mystery!

> It would be absurd to quantify the net generation of electricity generators in the U.S. in 2023 as “15.05 quintillion joules”. We have watt-hours for that (3,600 joules) and physics prefixes to quantify the orders of magnitude.

I don’t understand this bit at all. There’s nothing particularly absurd about using joules for these quantities of energy other than the fact that it is unconventional. We’d just have to switch the SI prefix.

But it is/will be quicker searching multiple sources for the most applicable data to regurgitate to the person asking the question.