not with that attitude it isn’t

The next breakthrough we need is with fusion technology. With unlimited fusion energy, room temperature superconductivity, and (soon) artificial general intelligence, the singularity won't be long off.

Yes, a combination of fusion, superconductivity, and AGI would indeed be transformative. It's hard to anticipate what the results would look like.

Good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale then follow it up with a bit of 1993, https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html and https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

(oh, huh, I just noticed that There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom starts with a reference to the discovery of superconduction)

We’re nowhere near AGI dude, even with several breakthroughs.

AI today is a glorified search algorithm.

That doesn't mesh with the daily insights I gain from asking GPT-4 novel questions and receiving answers that integrate a much wider knowledge corpus that I have in my head.

You can argue all language is a form of search, but that is missing completely what transformer models are bringing to the table, and not just within language.

Injecting random noise into your brain and finding intelligent connections says you are smart.

Your comment says nothing about whether we are “near AGI”, only that we find images within Rorschach blobs (as a metaphor for GPT4 generated text).

The context of my comment should make it clear that I am responding to this

> AI today is a glorified search algorithm.

and not the comment about AGI, given as that is a pedantic argument I have no wish engaging in.

> only that we find images within Rorschach blobs

I'm sorry, I'm not sure you understand what GPT-4 offers. Things like generating novel code to solve a novel problem are not finding "images within Rorschach blobs". I think you should sit down with the technology and explore with a more open mind.

I hate to break it to you, but your brain is also just a glorified search engine.

What fusion breakthrough is needed that isn't superconductors?

It's one of the biggest ones.

My understanding is that there are still some others that need to be figured out, like "The physical structure holding the thing getting the everloving shit bombarded out of it by high energy neutrons and causing it to degrade and fail over time"

Computational electrodynamics.

We need to design better geometries for reactors so that we can channel the plasma flow to better improve containment while quickly removing wastes from the highly compressed energetic region where fusion mostly occurs. If we could do that, then that mostly solves the issues from reactor degradation and significantly improves efficiency.

The trouble is that at such high energy levels the plasma flow is relatively chaotic so high fidelity models are required to predict the behavior accurately.

Is this really a requirement, or a nice to have kind of thing? Commonwealth Fusion Systems are using a pretty basic design and seem pretty confident it will work

Fusion would be massively boosted by having room-temperature superconductivity anyways.

Well, if there is a breakthrough that puts us closer to fusion, it's room-temperature superconductors.

Careful with this logic, the same thing could have (and pretty much was) said 50 years ago about fission and microchips.