I feel like 1984 stole the thunder of what is a far better story in Brave New World and poor and Brave New World doesn't get the credit it should while ppl talking about 1984 all the time.

I agree in 300 years we almost certainly can copy and render the human mind in a computer/machine which lets us do an amazing amount of stuff we can barely imagine, including living on hostile planets, traveling between receiving points at the speed of light with minimal energy, immortality, a massive endlessly intellectual resources of 'digital' humans that don't die, age or mutate, also.. really good video games!!

Oh yeah blame the kids instead of the adults and their radicalized news!

Why did you pick 1022 instead of a date more like 300 years from now?

I don't think a Carrington Event actually has enough energy to do that much damage. You'd probably need many magnitudes greater energy to really bring down most industry and even then a lot of it would not be effected much because it's not sensitive electronics.

Volcanism is probably the most commonly reoccurring major global disaster beside just good old fashion climate change over time. I don't think disease or nuclear war will change the outcomes all that much really. Most people would still live in almost any of those kinds of scenarios and that means progress would probably just keep going.

It's only been like 200-300 years since steam power and the Industrial Revolution, so relative to progress I wouldn't exactly call that the near future compared to the rate of change these days.

300 years is such a long time the predictions will look more like science fiction because people will barely believe it's possible.

I'd say one of the more powerful innovations in 300 years will be the ability to copy and render the human consciousness in a computer. That will change a lot about our existence and space exploration/expansion will become far more practical. Humans will become somewhat immortal at that stage and this also means the greatest mind of humanity will live on to keep doing work instead of there being such a bottleneck of great minds.

Seems like you could just limit the solar output to the grid to match the local grid vs upgrade anything. Few homes would be sending out more power than their home draws at peak use.

The trees are my biggest enemy, I feel your pain there. I just buy solar from a solar farm and it's the same price as coal power would be here all the way up in Maryland so I can't really complain there other than I have to shop for the best deal every year which is annoying.

Energy storage is dropping in price too fast to make nuclear viable really. The LCOE costs for nuclear are too high so either the cost of nuclear needs to go way down or it's doomed like any generation method that's just too expensive.

Supposedly they are opening grid storage in the US that's 1/10 the cost of lithium ion, soo even if that's only half true you are still looking at costs lower than nuclear to use wind/solar and storage and you can make that in a factory mostly and distribute to the entire world vs custom site specific builds of nuclear power plants as slow as molasses in a polar vortex! More important is just the costs, but realistically the build time, major disasters risk, water use issues, uranium mining nastiness and total lack of engineerings to really build enough highly custom nuclear plants. There isn't much economics of scale working for nuclear unless it's like modular reactors you can build in factories and ship around the world.. but who the hell really wants mass produced nuclear reactors desperately trying to get compete with the ever falling price of solar and energy storage mass proliferated all over the world. That would be a huge mess and solar and energy storage would still zoom right by the overly complex solution that is nuclear.

If I was wrong the LCOE of nuclear would be much lower, but that price reflects most of the problems with nuclear and still leaves out long term pollution and disaster potential or that uranium could become hard to source OR that nations that can't build nuclear would become 100% reliant on ones that can.

At best it's just an ok stop gap solution while grid storage drops in price and then you just have a lot of clean-up and decommissions to do.

You'd have nuclear power plants that in 10-20 years would start to be 30 and then 50% and then 100% more expensive to run than solar and energy storage and limited time to get a payback for the build/investment cost.

It just doesn't make sense to invest in such an expensive way to make power when you don't really need to.

Moore's law is every 18 months, so that's obviously not what they mean.

Solar cost per megawatt hour is MUCH cheaper than anything else beside wind, so really it's the lack of grid storage that slow mass adoption. If you have grid storage at $20 per mega watt hour then most places can't afford not to switch to solar because running their coal and gas plants is 30%+ more expensive than gas and probably around 100% more expensive than coal. They might not switch over immediately, but the downward price trend will continue for solar/wind and energy storage and you'll probably only get higher fossil fuel prices as volume of sales decline while the tech also isn't improving.

Wish big, I want grid storage at 1/10 the cost of lithium ion! That will add more buying pressure to wind and solar than anything by making it capable of baseload.

I think it's more like your imagination/paranoia. The US and all the other countries in the world do roughly the same shit.

Rules are just shit people said one time, they aren't decrees of justice. Just like all nations have idiotic laws that maybe once made sense but don't anymore, rules are all dynamic, laws are all dynamic. You adjust them to get the outcomes you want, not because they are divine rule.

So the real question is what's the actual global and national consensus vs what does WTO think. WTO doesn't represent a global democracy so we can't just assume they represent all that much.

Rules need to be consensus based, not tradition based, so you really need to know the consensus domestically and globally on the issue not just whine about rules being broken sometimes and not others.

I think their dreams of digital worlds appeals to a broad audience, but the reality of the tech only appeals to a niche audience. Its pretty far from being immersive enough to warrant all the inability to interact with real life or all your other apps.

Like how do you do your homework WHILE playing Minecraft and watching a movie if you have a display over your eyes vs a monitor or two? The world wants to multitask a lot more than it wants VR, imo.

I think it’s rather impossible to say until it happens.

I like that this is a fair headline, because clearly we are not getting very good information.

I think plants are chemical like self assembling factories so they have potential to be used like factories today, but it's probably not worth the risk of unpredictable interactions in the biosphere which seem far more likely if you engineering biological factories vs mechanical ones.

It's good imagination fuel and while plants are best at making other biological products their is some overlap .. like plants can make fuel even though we don't view it in the same category as food and medicine which they also make, but if we tried to make flat screen TVs with plants I think their rate of production vs land use would not be worth it.

I think self assembling robots will generally be better than involving biology unnecessarily, we have a lot more control and less chance of side effects in out giant soup of a biosphere.

One problem about a lot of people being on solar is that we do know volcanic activity can significantly reduce incoming solar radiation for awhile.

Most other scenarios are not ubiqie to green power, but something like a super volcano, could specifically exploit a weakness in high reliance on solar and large volcanoes are one of the most common global disasters.

I do think you have a point that management and a lot of other office jobs are easier to automate than those working the jobs would like to believe.

I don't think you'll have a choice because you're not really going to develop AI unless you limit the directions it can evolve in some meaningful way otherwise you'll probably just have something that's more like a computer cancer where you just have it basically mutating faster than it can handle.

I think the only way to develop sentient AI is to give it some effective challenges and rewards and then have nearly infinite amounts of cycles of iterations try to build living code.

It's kind of like here on Earth for evolution to happen there had to be certain challenges for evolution to select against and if we don't set some type of environmental limitations and sort of like goals then you don't have any specific or focused enough goal for the organism to evolve to whether it's a computer or biological.

I doubt you have AI in devices and drones, it's just not necessary for them to be that smart vs machine learning and good standard programming.

Why put way more brains in a machine than needed?

AI will be large computer banks and machine learning will do the rest. If you get real smart AI you can make it so it can't reprogram itself much like how humans can adapt but only so much. Core code stays the same and the AI is limited to it's original design vs just being able to do anything it wants.

AI will also be limited by the hardware so exponential growth in intelligence is not likely just like humans can't get smarter than their brains limits and instead require many humans working together for the most complex thought.

I disagree you should not mass distribue false information. It's just another form of fraud like posting fake stats on consumer electronics or bait and switch pricing.

If we had true freedom of speech fraud and threats would be legal cuz they are just harmless words, but the reality is that words are not always harmless when they are meant to mislead or threaten.

We don't need so much freedom of speech or press that fraud is legal and that’s the direction we’ve been going recently.

Antibodies persisting doesn't mean immunity and the levels of antibodies vary too much from person to person.

Having antibodies for 12 months still might mean you're only immune for 6 months and that can vary from one to six months or from one to 12 months which winds up not being useful enough information to build policy around.

I still don’t see a practical use other than tax dodging and money-laundering because otherwise it’s way too much effort just for an alternative to Western Union. Like currency that is resilient against government and central bank and corruption, seems like an OK idea, even though it’s probably more dangerous than usual, but the fact that it’s completely relied on the Internet makes the entire idea a joke.

I don't like the Iron catch phrase, its an energy weapon, it has nothing to do with iron.

Everybody who left Africa at the rate of movement back in those days became Asian before they got anywhere else so yeah.