We consider nonequilibrium systems that obey local detailed balance and are driven by an external system such that no work is dissipated for some initial distribution over states $x \in X$, $q(X)$. We show that in general work is dissipated under that driving if instead the initial distribution is some $r(X) \ne q(X)$, calculating that amount of dissipated work. We then use this result to investigate the thermodynamics of computation. Specifically, we suppose a Markov partition of $X$ into a set of coarse-grained "computational states" labelled by $v \in V$, and identify the dynamics over those computational states as a (possibly noisy) "computation" that runs on the system. We identify the initial distribution over computational states as the distribution over inputs to the computer. We calculate the work that such a computer dissipates, if it is designed to dissipate no work for some input distribution $q(V)$ but is instead used with a different input distribution $r(V)$. This dissipated work is an extra thermodynamic cost of computation, in addition to the well-known Landauer's cost. We also calculate the extra expected dissipated work if there is a probability distribution over the possible input distributions rather than a single one.
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