10 ms·

It's like if only we put more resources towards potential societal altering technologies like these instead of [insert random SAAS app]. Maybe tech investors a

by gzu 2y ago

It's like if only we put more resources towards potential societal altering technologies like these instead of [insert random SAAS app]. Maybe tech investors aren't very comfortable with projects outside their domain knowledge and expect an quick return. Quaise last financing round was something like $20M...

baq 2y ago
one (1) good thing that may come out of OpenAI is thirst for electricity only satiable by fusion, just as demand for heat in UK could only be met by digging deeper for coal which ultimately spurred the industrial revolution.
- m463 2y ago
  and coal mining (kind of) saved the forests and and drilling for oil (kind of) saved the whales.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Completely unintended side effect, but coal and oil might have created the need for massive rewilding efforts that might, ultimately not only save the forests, but winding cover back to pre-industrial levels.
- dylan604 2y ago
  what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept. Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with us poors again.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      I hope that in your scenario that everyone that can afford this notion of yours receives a robot that at the minimum is as annoying as C3-P0 if not closer to a Jar Jar.
    - hunter-gatherer 2y ago
      That's a naive outlook. AI will do for humanity as much good as every other alleged redeeming technology has.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        Or worse. Personally, I think social media has been a net negative. It was done intentionally by their makers. AI seems like it's just a victim of that, but seeing as how they have stolen all of the data they've built their tools on, then of course it's going to be no better than social media at best
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. You get them because people can make money making the same product cheaper and sell it to a lot of people. That's why all the capitalist countries are the ones where we have to keep increasing the standard of living that's counted as being in poverty. Up we go.
      - tivert 2y ago
        > You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. No. Capitalism means you need to rely on being useful to the people who own things. If you're not useful to them, they won't pay ("share with") you. For a capitalist, employees you have to pay <<< loyal robot slaves. Once you have those slaves, I predict the economy will make an abrupt shift away from consumer goods to vanity projects.
        2y ago
  - baq 2y ago
    yes. that's the game we're told to play, so might as well try to play it. there's literally truckloads of money in AI and the hyperscalers themselves point to power as a major issue for their datacenters, so why not try to allocate some of it to fusion?
- zeristor 2y ago
  Don’t forget about heat death. More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere, it doesn’t simply just disappear.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere We’re nowhere close to this being a problem. (Our total energy production is dwarfed by the natural flux.)
    - 0x0203 2y ago
      Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this, do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking in various places about what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but usually just get accused of being a climate change denier and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious about methodology, want to build a better mental model of how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen any discussions/papers talking about direct heating effects, so don't know where to start.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth, 44,000 TW [2]. So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of our entire civilisation. That is why emissions are the problem. Not our direct heat production. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum... [2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_balance_trifold21.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
        pfdietz 2y ago
- palata 2y ago
  That's based on the (flawed, IMO) idea that fusion just needs more resources to go faster [1]. We won't have serious fusion before decades, it's just too late to save our energy (and climate) problem. Better go with fission at this point (preferably 4th gen because uranium 235 is limited). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
  - nateglims 2y ago
    I think the idea is more that the potential profit or the need for energy to prevent limiting this profitable venture will drive more capital into fusion projects. It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. Of course that doesn't mean it will solve the problem faster.
    - palata 2y ago
      > It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. I read: "it's not clear that parallelization will not help, because they are parallelizing", which doesn't really make sense. Ok, it's not clear that parallelization will not help (just because it's hard to prove). But we have to acknowledge that fusion energy is not a new thing, and it's currently unsolved. So let's not bet our future on the hope that it will be solved in the next 10 years in such a revolutionary way that it will beat all our expectations by orders of magnitudes, shall we?
      - nateglims 2y ago
        The Man Month essay describes a breakdown in work throughput because of the exponential increase in communication channels and complexity of administration. Parallel startups do not communicate with each other. It appears from the outside that fusion does not have a known critical path to completion so increasing the number of bites at the apple seems like a logical way to scale attempting to solve it. I agree we should not count on fusion (or wide spread carbon capture) to solve our problems and pretend we can continue as if there aren't any limits. Unfortunately unrealized miracle solutions are presented all the time to problems and since a lot of tech revolves around startup culture, our industry is prone to believing in them.
mateus1 2y ago
I mean, we’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the US routed 20% of the defense spend to STEM.
- okdood64 2y ago
  We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the Middle East was stable, China wasn't so aggressive in the South China Sea, and Russia didn't have some illusion of being able to restore the Soviet Union.
  - DrNosferatu 2y ago
    We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if we would make a serious attempt to curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality. (ie: make returns on labor converge to - or at least track - returns on capital)
    - airstrike 2y ago
      > curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality. that assumes cooperation on a global scale between competing tax jurisdictions, which in my book is infinitely harder to achieve than net power via fusion
      - DrNosferatu 2y ago
        Either the US or the EU could do it: which global company can afford to not do business in any of these economic blocks? But the way the EU handled the COVID vaccine procurement, I think we’re still a long way.
      - DrNosferatu 2y ago
        Nevertheless, this was a good first step: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/03/global-minimum-tax-american-businesses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/03/global-mi... Maybe next time they actually make it work?
    - 2y ago
m463 2y ago
what if the amazing mathematicians / physicists / statisticians that are sucked into wall street worked on fusion...
- bluGill 2y ago
  Is that like trying to make a baby in 9 months by using more women?
  - esotericimpl 2y ago
    [dead]
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Sounds like a winning plan, except what are the extra women for?
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    That’s not an apt analogy. Right now we are trying to make a baby with less than one woman
  - navane 2y ago
    How about trying to deliver any baby, using more women, and you don't know which one are infertile
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Not really. The mythical man month fallacy of 9 women making a baby in 1 month is about rushing a specific project, and having the coordination between the individuals make it take longer. For something way bigger, like the whole field of nuclear fusion, as opposed to shipping an app next quarter, more people means more work can happen. Having more smart people work on fusion instead of HFT (eg Jim Simons), would lead to progress and advancement in the field, compared to not.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    9 women can produces babies 9x faster than one woman can
snarf21 2y ago
I don't think domain knowledge is issue. The issue is that SAAS apps or Twitter or w/e scale infinitely in an extremely short time. What is the time horizon for drilling geothermal all over the world? There are environmental factors to consider, etc. It is fairly trivial for 4B people to be on FB but getting 4B people to get their energy from geothermal doesn't scale the same way.
- aredox 2y ago
  Drilling and tunnelling is a huge industry with tons of markets. If Elon was the one to do this, tech bros and investors would be all over it with ad-hoc rationalisations ("this is the tech we need to build a mars colony!"). Instead he used his "boring company" to kill public transportation, and you are here dismissing Quaise Energy - people who actually have put up the work to try something groundbreaking (literally) and whose future is not assured yet.
  - Tagbert 2y ago
    But they are capital intensive with long timelines and a high risk of failure. It's hard to get investment in projects like that.
    - kolinko 2y ago
      The issue is with the lack of good quality startups than with financing really. Long-term is not a big issue, because funds can exit before the startup’s exit through secondaries. Also some of the funds in this field are ok with long term investments. (src: I tried setting up a climate tech venture builder / seedfund 2 years ago.)
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      This is, in my view, the biggest bummer about (what I see as) Musk's descent into madness in the last few years. It's absolutely true that this stuff is capital intensive, slow, and risky, and thus hard to get investment for. But Musk had solved that problem using showmanship and a series of successful (whether through genius or luck, it doesn't matter!) risky bets to back it up. So I think it just really is the case that because of Tesla / SpaceX / Starlink, that he could easily get however much funding he wants in private or public markets to take a giant risky bet on something like geothermal energy. But instead he got bored of doing useful things and lost himself in petty social media drama. Tragic.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
The issue is we have no mechanism for the sort of support this work needs, short of parallel development with military needs.
- defrost 2y ago
  Say what now? It's a gyrotron variation that requires tweaking to be useful in vertical and horizontal boring, currently supported with ~ $100 million raised from investors. Ongoing development might well require that annually for ten years or so. It can likely kick along fine with that amount every four or five years. This is easily within the envelop of currently ongoing development in both the energy and mineral resources exploration and aquisition domains. When I worked tracking mineral resource development we looked at any and all mineral prospecting lease aquisitions and ownership changes globally, but for development we ruled out any intial prospectus for under $50 million as "too small to be of interest". And that was just mineral exploration, O&G is where the big money plays. Current drilling costs within Oil and Gas (and geothermal, a small but growing field) are huge, any work that can bring those costs down will be pursued and supported as long as some small glimmer of light shines ahead. Eg: for a small example you could look to the R&D work being put in to reduce drill costs by 50% here: https://www.power-eng.com/renewables/fervo-energy-claims-70-reduction-in-geothermal-drilling-time-2 https://www.power-eng.com/renewables/fervo-energy-claims-70-... Fervo says it drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022. Fervo says the increase in efficiency has resulted in cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
lmihaig 2y ago
Since the 70s our society gradually started putting more interest in producing useless things "for profit" or providing inane services instead of actually improving quality of life. Imo it's a big reason for the productivity paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox The resources now go to "cheap plastic thing made in China but assembled in the USA" or "it's like Airbnb but for cat grooming" which don't fucking improve anyone's lives but make money.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  This is a nasty side effect of capitalism - it's misaligned with the best interests of society and, sometimes, completely opposite to it. Where all you measure is capital flows, you are not serving the humans.

by gzu 2y ago

baq 2y ago

one (1) good thing that may come out of OpenAI is thirst for electricity only satiable by fusion, just as demand for heat in UK could only be met by digging deeper for coal which ultimately spurred the industrial revolution.

m463 2y ago
and coal mining (kind of) saved the forests and and drilling for oil (kind of) saved the whales.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Completely unintended side effect, but coal and oil might have created the need for massive rewilding efforts that might, ultimately not only save the forests, but winding cover back to pre-industrial levels.
dylan604 2y ago
what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.
- tivert 2y ago
  > what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept. Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with us poors again.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I hope that in your scenario that everyone that can afford this notion of yours receives a robot that at the minimum is as annoying as C3-P0 if not closer to a Jar Jar.
  - hunter-gatherer 2y ago
    That's a naive outlook. AI will do for humanity as much good as every other alleged redeeming technology has.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Or worse. Personally, I think social media has been a net negative. It was done intentionally by their makers. AI seems like it's just a victim of that, but seeing as how they have stolen all of the data they've built their tools on, then of course it's going to be no better than social media at best
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. You get them because people can make money making the same product cheaper and sell it to a lot of people. That's why all the capitalist countries are the ones where we have to keep increasing the standard of living that's counted as being in poverty. Up we go.
    - tivert 2y ago
      > You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. No. Capitalism means you need to rely on being useful to the people who own things. If you're not useful to them, they won't pay ("share with") you. For a capitalist, employees you have to pay <<< loyal robot slaves. Once you have those slaves, I predict the economy will make an abrupt shift away from consumer goods to vanity projects.
      - 2y ago
- baq 2y ago
  yes. that's the game we're told to play, so might as well try to play it. there's literally truckloads of money in AI and the hyperscalers themselves point to power as a major issue for their datacenters, so why not try to allocate some of it to fusion?
zeristor 2y ago
Don’t forget about heat death. More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere, it doesn’t simply just disappear.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere We’re nowhere close to this being a problem. (Our total energy production is dwarfed by the natural flux.)
  - 0x0203 2y ago
    Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this, do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking in various places about what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but usually just get accused of being a climate change denier and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious about methodology, want to build a better mental model of how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen any discussions/papers talking about direct heating effects, so don't know where to start.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth, 44,000 TW [2]. So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of our entire civilisation. That is why emissions are the problem. Not our direct heat production. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum... [2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_balance_trifold21.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
      - pfdietz 2y ago
palata 2y ago
That's based on the (flawed, IMO) idea that fusion just needs more resources to go faster [1]. We won't have serious fusion before decades, it's just too late to save our energy (and climate) problem. Better go with fission at this point (preferably 4th gen because uranium 235 is limited). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
- nateglims 2y ago
  I think the idea is more that the potential profit or the need for energy to prevent limiting this profitable venture will drive more capital into fusion projects. It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. Of course that doesn't mean it will solve the problem faster.
  - palata 2y ago
    > It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. I read: "it's not clear that parallelization will not help, because they are parallelizing", which doesn't really make sense. Ok, it's not clear that parallelization will not help (just because it's hard to prove). But we have to acknowledge that fusion energy is not a new thing, and it's currently unsolved. So let's not bet our future on the hope that it will be solved in the next 10 years in such a revolutionary way that it will beat all our expectations by orders of magnitudes, shall we?
    - nateglims 2y ago
      The Man Month essay describes a breakdown in work throughput because of the exponential increase in communication channels and complexity of administration. Parallel startups do not communicate with each other. It appears from the outside that fusion does not have a known critical path to completion so increasing the number of bites at the apple seems like a logical way to scale attempting to solve it. I agree we should not count on fusion (or wide spread carbon capture) to solve our problems and pretend we can continue as if there aren't any limits. Unfortunately unrealized miracle solutions are presented all the time to problems and since a lot of tech revolves around startup culture, our industry is prone to believing in them.

mateus1 2y ago

I mean, we’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the US routed 20% of the defense spend to STEM.

okdood64 2y ago
We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the Middle East was stable, China wasn't so aggressive in the South China Sea, and Russia didn't have some illusion of being able to restore the Soviet Union.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if we would make a serious attempt to curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality. (ie: make returns on labor converge to - or at least track - returns on capital)
  - airstrike 2y ago
    > curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality. that assumes cooperation on a global scale between competing tax jurisdictions, which in my book is infinitely harder to achieve than net power via fusion
    - DrNosferatu 2y ago
      Either the US or the EU could do it: which global company can afford to not do business in any of these economic blocks? But the way the EU handled the COVID vaccine procurement, I think we’re still a long way.
    - DrNosferatu 2y ago
      Nevertheless, this was a good first step: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/03/global-minimum-tax-american-businesses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/03/global-mi... Maybe next time they actually make it work?
  - 2y ago

m463 2y ago

what if the amazing mathematicians / physicists / statisticians that are sucked into wall street worked on fusion...

bluGill 2y ago
Is that like trying to make a baby in 9 months by using more women?
- esotericimpl 2y ago
  [dead]
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Sounds like a winning plan, except what are the extra women for?
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  That’s not an apt analogy. Right now we are trying to make a baby with less than one woman
- navane 2y ago
  How about trying to deliver any baby, using more women, and you don't know which one are infertile
- fragmede 2y ago
  Not really. The mythical man month fallacy of 9 women making a baby in 1 month is about rushing a specific project, and having the coordination between the individuals make it take longer. For something way bigger, like the whole field of nuclear fusion, as opposed to shipping an app next quarter, more people means more work can happen. Having more smart people work on fusion instead of HFT (eg Jim Simons), would lead to progress and advancement in the field, compared to not.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  9 women can produces babies 9x faster than one woman can

snarf21 2y ago

I don't think domain knowledge is issue. The issue is that SAAS apps or Twitter or w/e scale infinitely in an extremely short time. What is the time horizon for drilling geothermal all over the world? There are environmental factors to consider, etc. It is fairly trivial for 4B people to be on FB but getting 4B people to get their energy from geothermal doesn't scale the same way.

aredox 2y ago
Drilling and tunnelling is a huge industry with tons of markets. If Elon was the one to do this, tech bros and investors would be all over it with ad-hoc rationalisations ("this is the tech we need to build a mars colony!"). Instead he used his "boring company" to kill public transportation, and you are here dismissing Quaise Energy - people who actually have put up the work to try something groundbreaking (literally) and whose future is not assured yet.
- Tagbert 2y ago
  But they are capital intensive with long timelines and a high risk of failure. It's hard to get investment in projects like that.
  - kolinko 2y ago
    The issue is with the lack of good quality startups than with financing really. Long-term is not a big issue, because funds can exit before the startup’s exit through secondaries. Also some of the funds in this field are ok with long term investments. (src: I tried setting up a climate tech venture builder / seedfund 2 years ago.)
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    This is, in my view, the biggest bummer about (what I see as) Musk's descent into madness in the last few years. It's absolutely true that this stuff is capital intensive, slow, and risky, and thus hard to get investment for. But Musk had solved that problem using showmanship and a series of successful (whether through genius or luck, it doesn't matter!) risky bets to back it up. So I think it just really is the case that because of Tesla / SpaceX / Starlink, that he could easily get however much funding he wants in private or public markets to take a giant risky bet on something like geothermal energy. But instead he got bored of doing useful things and lost himself in petty social media drama. Tragic.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

The issue is we have no mechanism for the sort of support this work needs, short of parallel development with military needs.

defrost 2y ago
Say what now? It's a gyrotron variation that requires tweaking to be useful in vertical and horizontal boring, currently supported with ~ $100 million raised from investors. Ongoing development might well require that annually for ten years or so. It can likely kick along fine with that amount every four or five years. This is easily within the envelop of currently ongoing development in both the energy and mineral resources exploration and aquisition domains. When I worked tracking mineral resource development we looked at any and all mineral prospecting lease aquisitions and ownership changes globally, but for development we ruled out any intial prospectus for under $50 million as "too small to be of interest". And that was just mineral exploration, O&G is where the big money plays. Current drilling costs within Oil and Gas (and geothermal, a small but growing field) are huge, any work that can bring those costs down will be pursued and supported as long as some small glimmer of light shines ahead. Eg: for a small example you could look to the R&D work being put in to reduce drill costs by 50% here: https://www.power-eng.com/renewables/fervo-energy-claims-70-reduction-in-geothermal-drilling-time-2 https://www.power-eng.com/renewables/fervo-energy-claims-70-... Fervo says it drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022. Fervo says the increase in efficiency has resulted in cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

lmihaig 2y ago

Since the 70s our society gradually started putting more interest in producing useless things "for profit" or providing inane services instead of actually improving quality of life. Imo it's a big reason for the productivity paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox The resources now go to "cheap plastic thing made in China but assembled in the USA" or "it's like Airbnb but for cat grooming" which don't fucking improve anyone's lives but make money.

rbanffy 2y ago
This is a nasty side effect of capitalism - it's misaligned with the best interests of society and, sometimes, completely opposite to it. Where all you measure is capital flows, you are not serving the humans.