6 ms·

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 dee

by 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.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. The only exception to this is taxes, which don't require mutually agreed exchange.
        tivert 2y ago
        > People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. That's not super clear, but I think I get what you're saying. My whole point is AGI breaks that idea, and frees capital from the need for labor. > I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. And when an AGI can do your job better and cheaper than you, your employer fires you and stops paying you. And all the other employers don't hire you because they don't need you either. Then, if you're lucky, you get to live on the dole, otherwise you (eventually) get to be homeless have the opportunity to try scrape by at the margins (maybe you can squat and live off a garden for a few years, until a solar megaproject evicts you from now unprofitable farmland). In all cases you're marginalized and economically irrelevant.
- 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.

by baq 2y ago

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.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. The only exception to this is taxes, which don't require mutually agreed exchange.
      - tivert 2y ago
        > People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. That's not super clear, but I think I get what you're saying. My whole point is AGI breaks that idea, and frees capital from the need for labor. > I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. And when an AGI can do your job better and cheaper than you, your employer fires you and stops paying you. And all the other employers don't hire you because they don't need you either. Then, if you're lucky, you get to live on the dole, otherwise you (eventually) get to be homeless have the opportunity to try scrape by at the margins (maybe you can squat and live off a garden for a few years, until a solar megaproject evicts you from now unprofitable farmland). In all cases you're marginalized and economically irrelevant.
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.