Because concern is warranted and required for ensuring safety. There are many top AI people who are concerned about how this could go badly.

Some people are way to sure about doom forecasting, but the dangers are too real to just leave it at “there will be some good stuff and some bad stuff.”

Same for the environment. If things work out ok, it will be because a lot of people expressed grave concerns. The situation with the environment does warrant a bit of noise.

…anyway, hard to know where the line is. But since some of the concern is coming from the very people building these systems, yes let’s be helpfully concerned. (But also a little optimistic)

The Luddites didn’t hate all machines, they only hated machines that were designed to deskill the working classes.

Sounds reasonable. I’ll make a personal bet on perovskites but happy for a chunk of my taxes to go toward fusion. I hope you’re right about sooner rather than later!

Honestly, I’m open to any plan if the people planning are actually reading and capable of understanding the science coming out.

My concern about fusion is that people seem to misunderstand the recent breakthrough, and that they will support very unrealistic plans.

To me it looks like a mix of renewables, storage, and next-gen fission is a better plan. PV perovskites and agrivoltaics are super promising.

…but if fusion starts looking more feasible on a timeline that will result in scaled energy before the 2050s, we should ramp up funding. I think it would be crazy to drop perovskites though. Are you following that stuff? Have you looked into off-river pumped hydro for storage? The cheaper solar gets, the better the incentive for storage solutions.

Note: we’ve had some crazy heat waves and heat domes and massive wildfires in BC (over a million hectares burning in a single year). The way things are going, the whole region will burn before fusion makes a watt of net positive energy. If your plan includes reducing carbon emissions while we work on fusion, sure.

But fusion is decades away. Do you mean fusion or fission?

Aha. Hey, I really appreciate the friendly answer. I had wondered whether my reply above had come across as too adversarial.

I'm open to the fact that energy is allowing us to advance and evolve in ways I can't entirely understand.

I'll be more thoughtful about saying things like "use less energy." Better to think in terms of using energy wisely.

Take care!

I would rather money go to fusion than Mars, definitely, as long as our highest priority is on things that can make a difference starting immediately.

Also, it's hard to say how much technology progress will speed up. The way machine learning is progressing, the future is getting increasingly hard to predict... and you know what they say about predicting the future!

The achieved "ignition" meaning the heat energy of the reaction was greater than the energy of the laser beams. It's a legit important milestone. But the energy in the laser beams is just a fraction of the energy it takes to run the whole kaboodle, so a long way to go before they are making more energy than they are drawing from the grid.

It's not a one to one relationship between energy and quality of life. We can have awesome lives while using energy wisely.

If we can make more energy while taking better care of the planet, I'm all for that. I see no evidence that free markets will take care of the planet. We'll need a combination of free markets and environmental protection laws.

I’m totally pro sustainable energy. We use way more energy than we need to in countries like Canada. I try hard to use less. I ride a bike. I grow food. I’m also not living in a cave.

My original point was that efficiency and more energy alone won’t solve our ecological problems. Fusion will help but only if we start enacting good political policies.

But for sure, the people in Africa need energy too.

That sounds provably ridiculous and probably pertaining to a cult of economics

I’m certainly more fission positive than I used to be. I wish we could just use less energy tho

Pretty sure we’re still a few decades from making net energy for the grid. So near term means spending a bunch more money on research while nobody does much of anything about climate change.

…I’m not saying don’t spend money on fusion research, I’m just saying it would be nice if we did more to avoid a climate apocalypse. Fusion probably won’t scale in time.

That’s going to change as climate shocks get worse. People will start to group organize as they become alarmed about their kids