In the real world, birth rates are plummeting as populations urbanize. Most countries are facing demographic crashes over the next couple decades, and very low birth rates after that. Anti-aging could save economies and retirement systems.

We don't know how to reliably give AI a goal at all. All the innards of the AI are a bunch of incomprehensible numbers. We don't program it, we train it, until its behavior seems to be what we want. But we never know whether it might behave differently in a different environment.

To implement something as complex as the Three Laws we'd need an entirely different kind of AI.

Eh, the article says:

> Renewable energy and nuclear power will meet almost all of the growth in global demand for electricity over the next three years.

That's a long way from "renewables satiating the world's appetite for electricity." It's just the new growth and even that is partly taken up by nuclear. They say coal and gas will remain constant, globally. And even all this is based on not having extreme weather events or a big economic recovery in China.

Physical robots might help with the grounding problem. They could learn just like humans do.

Regarding conscious awareness, I don't necessarily think it's computable. We have no idea how to map computation to qualia. We've started assuming qualia is a type of computation, just because some types of intelligent behavior are, but really it might depend on a particular physical arrangement, or be something else entirely.

But that doesn't mean computers won't outcompete us. A chess program can destroy me at chess and I'm pretty sure it's not conscious. A more complex AI might do the same in the real world. And if we get wiped out by an AI that's just an unconscious automaton, that'd be even more horrifying.

If we could make farmers stop using antibiotics on all their livestock as growth promoters, maybe we'd be all set.

At the rate we're going, the steam engine and its successors might yet do that.

Selling just farm-raised fish doesn't do it. A lot of them are fed smaller fish that was wild-caught. Sardines in some areas are overfished for this exact reason. On the other hand Alaska salmon is all wild-caught and they limit the catch enough to keep the population sustainable (though there's not near enough to meet the global demand for salmon that way).

Catfish farming in the US is great, and same for mollusks.

Good, more baconbugs for the rest of us.

Yep. Software developers have been automating their own work for the past seventy years. According to one study I saw, their productivity has doubled every seven years.

This has not reduced demand for software developers. It's just made their contributions more and more valuable.

Yeah they probably never thought of...oh wait, from the article:

> Currently, the vast majority of CDR uses conventional methods, managing land so that it absorbs and stores atmospheric carbon dioxide — for example by planting trees, restoring damaged forests or replenishing soil so that it stores more carbon.

(CDR is "carbon dioxide removal.")

Calcite is a very common mineral, but I don't know which has more cooling effect for the same mass. But neither one is likely to be expensive, and preserving the ozone layer is a pretty huge benefit.

It's an extremely common mineral, found in all sorts of different rocks. You already have some in your backyard.

That's a problem with using sulfur dioxide, but using calcite particles instead would actually help repair the ozone layer.

Bitcoin uses as much energy as a small country, but the second-biggest chain, Ethereum, recently migrated to a system that's about 99.99% more efficient. It uses about as much energy as a hundred average American households.

See the book Where Is My Flying Car, which goes into engineering detail and agrees with you.

I feel like the AI driver would land it first, given that $100 drones do that now.

One. They put in about 2 MJ and got back 3 MJ, and the laser input energy was about 400 MJ. With 20% efficient lasers, you only need 10MJ into the lasers to get 2MJ in the laser beam. So a factor of five for breakeven.

If you're generating electricity, you've also got a factor of 3 for the heat cycle loss, so a 15X gain for engineering breakeven.

The pulse repetition rate is also due to the obsolete lasers. Modern petawatt lasers can do better than one hertz and are still improving (see my first link above).

And yet, plutonium-238 has flown multiple times, and that's way more radioactive.

Yes, about one order of magnitude.

Because the entire facility is old. They broke ground in 1997.

They don't need to replace the laser, because they're not trying to build a power plant. They're doing experiments. It costs money to replace the lasers, and it wouldn't give them any scientific advantage.

The half-life of U235 is 700 million years. The longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is, so even weapons-grade uranium at over 90% U235 is not particularly dangerous. You wouldn't want to eat it or inhale a large concentration of it, but you wouldn't want to do that with solid rocket fuel either.

Wow that's something I didn't know, that's interesting.

True, but on the other hand a lot of articles have been overly pessimistic about NIF's distance from Qtotal. They point out how inefficient the lasers are, while ignoring that NIF's lasers are old, and equivalent modern lasers are about 40 times more efficient.

There's no getting around that fusion research is pretty expensive. The payoff could be huge though. At this point it might actually be private funding that puts us over the top. CFS for example has about a billion in private funding, to do the same thing as ITER in a much smaller package, using better superconductors.

I saw a fusion guy mention that if you ever get a tour of NIF, they have a small room with a full-scale model of modern lasers that do the same thing as the huge, old lasers they use.

The kinetic energy doesn't disappear just because the neutron interacts with a nucleus. Any more than it disappears when a bullet hits a block of clay: the bullet mostly stops, but the clay moves and heats, because momentum is conserved. In the same way, ITERs breeding blanket is going to heat up plenty. Run water pipes through it and you're good.

The beryllium supply is a real issue though. CFS is working on a tokamak a tenth the size that should do the same thing as ITER, because it uses much better superconductors, but even that uses a lot of beryllium.