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>They've been working on AI for ages now with little to show for it. That's just not true, it's just that every time the AI crowd makes something really cool a

>They've been working on AI for ages now with little to show for it. That's just not true, it's just that every time the AI crowd makes something really cool and it becomes used, we stop calling it AI because it doesn't think like we do. > People have been saying the exact same thing about fusion, and it's always "20 years away", but we're no closer to having fusion power than we were 40 years ago. That's also not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

Grishnakh 11y ago
ITER isn't producing any power. If your fusion reactor isn't producing more energy than it consumes, then it's not a useful device. We've had fusion reactors since Philo Farnsworth made his "fusor", but what's always been a pipe dream is one that's actually useful. ITER is not. Go read your own link: they predict it might do something useful in 2027! Whoopee, I can make wild-ass predictions about things over a decade away too, that doesn't mean my predictions are worth anything.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  ITER is designed to make more power than it requires, it's now just an engineering problem rather than a theoretical one. You said we've made no progress; that is progress, a plant is in construction, yes these things take time but to deny progress is being made is simply incorrect. Having useful fusion, i.e. producing more power than being input is a matter of scale, it can't be done without building a full sized reactor and that's what ITER is, the first full size reactor. That's called progress.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    This doesn't sound right to me. The ITER is going to (supposedly, which of course is probably optimistic) take another 10 years to finish. When you have a workable design for something, it does not take multiple decades to build it, unless it's something on a really gigantic scale (like a continent-spanning highway system). It doesn't take remotely as much time to build a full-scale nuclear fission power plant producing many megawatts of power. That means this thing is not a real design, it's still an R&D project where they really don't know if it's going to work as planned or not, and they're going step by step, collecting data, seeing what works and what doesn't, etc. So, sorry, you can call it "progress" if you want, but there's no evidence that it's going to work as planned until they actually can demonstrate it doing so.

Grishnakh 11y ago

ITER isn't producing any power. If your fusion reactor isn't producing more energy than it consumes, then it's not a useful device. We've had fusion reactors since Philo Farnsworth made his "fusor", but what's always been a pipe dream is one that's actually useful. ITER is not. Go read your own link: they predict it might do something useful in 2027! Whoopee, I can make wild-ass predictions about things over a decade away too, that doesn't mean my predictions are worth anything.

gnaritas 11y ago
ITER is designed to make more power than it requires, it's now just an engineering problem rather than a theoretical one. You said we've made no progress; that is progress, a plant is in construction, yes these things take time but to deny progress is being made is simply incorrect. Having useful fusion, i.e. producing more power than being input is a matter of scale, it can't be done without building a full sized reactor and that's what ITER is, the first full size reactor. That's called progress.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  This doesn't sound right to me. The ITER is going to (supposedly, which of course is probably optimistic) take another 10 years to finish. When you have a workable design for something, it does not take multiple decades to build it, unless it's something on a really gigantic scale (like a continent-spanning highway system). It doesn't take remotely as much time to build a full-scale nuclear fission power plant producing many megawatts of power. That means this thing is not a real design, it's still an R&D project where they really don't know if it's going to work as planned or not, and they're going step by step, collecting data, seeing what works and what doesn't, etc. So, sorry, you can call it "progress" if you want, but there's no evidence that it's going to work as planned until they actually can demonstrate it doing so.