This is an interesting idea for waste heat. Is the waste heat a nuclear power plant produces significant? My understanding is you want all your heat working to spin your turbine.
That’s not really the argument monkeybutton is making, the point is lobsters’ neural complexity is similar to ants, and orcas are comparable to humans.
It is true that photonic systems can multiply/add very efficiently. The limiting factor for optical neural networks are activation functions. Non-linear relationships are hard for photonics. State-of-the-art nonlinear features require optical elements that are difficult to manufacture or op-amps which slow the computational potential of the optical neural network by orders of magnitude.
I concur with many other commenters here, this is a fantastic read. Though, I find the value in this book is not the discrete proposals Jaynes makes - his conclusions on schizophrenia are dubious at best. Jayne’s achievement is in his explaining of the mindset and thought patterns (what Jaynes calls consciousness) of the ancients.
So often ancient man felt alien to me. Not until reading this book have I felt I understand what it was like to have lived millennia ago.