INSTALLATION

Concept: Duo LarbitsSisters

Production: Larbitslab

Coproduction: Larbitslab, Waag – technology & society, dyne.org

With the support of: Innovatieve Partnerprojecten Grant Flemish Community, TOKAS International Creator Residency Program

Thanks to: Lucas Evers, Minoru Hatanaka, Akihico Mori and Toru Kubota

DESCRIPTION

The Crypto Miner Car is in essence a self-driving car that gains autonomy to move, powered by force of mining cryptocurrencies and not as once by manpower or horsepower. A ‘Car’ which is fuelled by an AI deep reinforcement learning system and which will run driven by the ever-increasing computational-intensive tasks involved in this process. The idea is to power a vehicle with waste heat of cryptocurrency miners by hacking and monitoring the GPU units of crypto miners. But how might a vehicle actually move around by hashing cryptocurrencies and solving mathematical equations?

It is well-known that cryptocurrency miners farms and data centers generate enormous amounts of heat that is usually evacuated as fast as possible. An overlooked problem of the data industry. Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to crypto mining, it is embedded into the heart of these wasteful systems in the form of an operation called mining. Based on Thomas Seebeck discoveries on thermoelectrics we set up a heat recovery system that harnesses the waste heat from crypto-miners’ GPU units and produces electricity. Seebeck discovered that thermoelectric generators (TEGs) convert heat into energy and produces electricity when exposed to a temperature difference, as a heat source on one side of the TEG module and cold source on the other side.

Starting with a mining rig with 6 GPU miner units, we designed a vehicle that acquires autonomy by turning the crypto-mining process into a power-fuel energy source. Driven by an AI reinforcement learning system, the car learns to feed itself with energy by exploiting waste heat and to move around with that residue, after being rewarded with waste heat credits as a result of AI’s ‘ethical’ behaviour.

With this project our concern is to prototype a future of fuels that confronts today’s technological and ecological challenges with disruptive thoughts for an alternative vision of uses of energy and social and economic renewal, as in the 19th Century, oil and the automotive industry fuelled the economy and created the car as a status symbol of daily modern life and individual freedom.