myrmidon
Biology had a lot of time, attempts and pressure to make this work but even the most optimized lines (something like a magpie) need more complexity (almost a billion neurons) to get a fraction of superhuman intelligence.
Results with small artificial neural nets are very limited so far, too.
This is like comparing an 48MHz ARM-Cortex-M0 with the CPU in your Macbook. Yes both of them are ARM cores, but the small embedded processor has very little RAM/Flash/clockspeed, no memory management unit, no cache, no modern RAM interface.
Not even the instruction set is really the same, because you (typically) won't even have floating point instructions/registers on the small MCUs, much less vector instructions.
The Milk-V Jupiter 2 mentioned in the post is basically a full-fledged Desktop CPU and it's price is not gonna be anywhere close to $2 either...
"Correct" investment volume towards early industrialization might have looked just as unreasonable without the benefit of hindsight.
This is what was allowed during the great depression and what we desperately tried to avoid in later crises.
Western democracies are not set up at all to let the government direct and compensate millions of workers on the turn of a dime; micromanagement by government in such a situation can be expected to be extremely wasteful and ineffective, and this only got worse, because we have less generic/unqualified use for human labor than in the past (construction, railroads, motorways, heavy industry), and specialists are even harder to manage.
If everyone stops even just believing in the ability of local supermarkets to provide toilet paper next week or, on the other end of the spectrum, starts distrusting the banking system/dollar entirely, then the consequences can be extensive, expensive and slow to recover.
It might even be worth it to feed taxpayer money to rich greedy capitalists because the public comes out on top still by avoiding that trust collapse.
The market for AI is very clearly there; people are willing to pay more than enough so that providing LLM infrastructure (inference) is profitable.
Just the SOTA model R&D is pretty unsustainably expensive right now, but this only means that if the status quo "bursts" (because people realize that pushing the frontier is not paying off), model improvement will (probably) be slower afterward.
Note: this could also happen because expensive SOTA progress fails to keep ahead of "garage-trained" models, in such a case SOTA-AI lab investments collapsing would not really slow AI progress anyway.
1) economy tanks, people earn less disposable income or become unemployed
2) consumers spending less tanks the economy even more
We have historical precedent for this in the great depression, and the government going hands-off back then made the problem almost certainly much worse.
You could even make a pretty credible argument that the Nazis only got into power thanks to this, so there's your doomsday scenario.
Microsoft Fairwater Wisconsin is currently at 400ish MW and projected to scale beyond 2GW of electrical power by mid 2028, as buildings currently still under construction come online (according to: https://epoch.ai/data/ai-data-centers/directory/microsoft-fa...).
But a more typical size would be around 200MW, which could run over a week on 20GWh.
That means very high peak power, making your whole capture infrastructure extremely expensive, but even capturing 100% of an average lightning bolt is worth <$100 in electricity.
Which is why nobody even attempts this.
https://www.reichelt.com/de/en/shop/product/esp32-c3_soc_wif...
But even paying 5-30€ for a devkit still seems insanely cheap to me; that's like several bars of chocolate at current prices, even kids can afford that (or make someone buy it for them).
https://gravity-storage.com/technical-concept/
But battery storage is a proven technology now and the cost trends with such bespoke megaprojects are not looking promising, so I'm not holding my breath.
Burning (regenerable) metal fuel in old coal power plants is also an interesting approach:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666352X2...
Just because power used to be even cheaper in the recent past, by doing non-sustainable shit and pushing all the resulting costs onto others/the future does not mean that was ever appropriate, necessary or desirable, and everyone advocating for chasing that model is a greedy, selfish asshole in my view.
Strongly disagree. Oil is not getting produced because a handful of companies want to ruin the planet-- that happens because billions want those oil products, for personal mobility, cheap goods, cheap energy.
A lot of people simply don't care enough about the future consequences; they want to continue cheap consumption for as long as possible, and find justifications and excuses easily enough ("China emits so much more anyway", "I can't afford to pay more for gas", "why should I have to make any sacrifices that my parent generation did not have to make", etc.).
If you could disperse every last one of those companies into tiny 20-man operations, you would solve absolutely nothing. What would solve things is if a majority of people (in industrialized nations) would become willing to pay the cost for fast and extensive (green) electrification, to downregulate the size and frequency of personal transport, to pay a premium for green concrete and steel, to accept higher prices and worse availability in order to sanction any trading partner that is not similarly serious about emissions.
We can't get any of the above not because of evil corporations or politicians, but simply because most people just don't want to pay the price and make the sacrifice now for a better future.
That does not make climate change any less of an emergency, but it limits politically feasible countermeasures a lot.
If you want to keep higher local wage levels, you rely on other comparative advantages (easier access to capital, better education, better political stability), and all those tend to erode over time. As they do, you either lose your wage advantage or the whole industry, there is no alternative.
> Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
They are! Just compare vehicle production for an easy proxy: Mexico had >100% growth over the last 2 decades, while US numbers are basically flat. Russia is a bad example now because of war, but they did a lot of catching up before.
If your theory is that all western manufacturing struggles just because every single company is stupid and spends too much on lawyers and accountants then I don't know what to tell you.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
Having to pay those middlemen is a sign of the regulation working (because the cost for creating superfund sites is no longer zero), and all society has to do is increase enforcement rate/liability limits until the middlemen are more expensive than proper disposal.
Not only were many environmental regulations "written in blood" (and are well justified by observed damages before they existed), the average citizen would typically gain little from scrapping them. Allowing some industrialized chicken farm to dump their waste into the next river is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper. "Socialize (external) costs, privatize gains" is often the actual play instead.
See e.g.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666352X2...
Volumetric energy density is pretty decent, and it's easy and safe to store (albeit heavy). The big appeal is that it seems feasible to convert coal plants while touching only their burner (there is a smallscale prototype running in Germany AFAIK). You could also potentially even transport the fuel (not sure how the losses look on that though since energy/weight is not very high; maybe ships or trains could still work though).
Drawback is that regenerating the iron powder needs (green) hydrogen and the cycle efficiency is low.
But this could be very helpful for countries like Germany, Poland or especially China to get dispatchable green power from former coal power stations.
- 25% capacity factor for panels
- 3 days of storage (at 300MW)
- $120/kWh for storage
- $1/W (peak) for panels
I'd argue that such a setup is a big upgrade over the reactor since you have much higher peak power; you basically get more dispatchability at a comparable capacity factor (90%-ish). I suspect maintenance to be cheaper as well.
But an actual solar setup would probably install more panels and less storage (giving you cheaper power at a lower capacity factor).
Edit: The problem in practice for the nuclear reactor is that it has to be competitive with almost the panels alone, because otherwise your consumers are just gonna go "I wont buy nuclear energy 24/7, I'll just use much cheaper solar electricity whenever the sun shines, pay maybe for a few hours of batteries and fall back to gas when I really need to (very cheap per peak MW, but not per MWh)".
If you want to be fully paid for constant power output, you have to be fully competitive at all times, not just when the sun is down.
I had assumed that your hyperbole was directed at my paragraph you quoted, and ment to insinuate that said paragraph was only a few exaggerations apart from eugenicist nonsense.
Runaway greenhouse is the only credible extinction path for this ("hot venus") and that is simply not gonna happen under any emission regime.
Loss of coastal cities- Yes. Increasing occurrence of non-survivable surface temperature in mid latitudes- yes. Drastic changes to ocean currents (gulf stream etc)- sure. Its gonna be expensive to deal with and hurt civilization a lot, but it is not an extinction risk.
All-out nuclear war is strictly worse, and not a real extinction risk either as far as I can tell.
> whereas the more accurate result is that selection pressures form niches because competition and fighting is expensive
This is not what happened with humans at all. We routinely eradicated anything remotely threatening (or even just for convenience in some cases). What niche is there for slower, dumber, biologically limited hominoids once machine intelligence is ahead and self-replicable? Once interests in ressources, infrastructure, or just living space clash, things might end up very ugly for us.
Sure, AI-agents might stay long-term pliant and cooperative like a Dodo bird but we might also get something with the tenacity and pervasiveness of a plague rat (and an individual edge in raw intelligence that we'll never recover); selection mechanisms push towards the latter and the risk alone is obviously non-zero.
Smooth population decline means much less contention on ressources, energy and living space, which is highly relevant when all of those are already somewhat at the limit.
Significant positive growth is clearly completely unsustainable even over centuries, and I don't see why a somewhat smaller total human population could not be just as successful/satisfied over the next decades.
I honestly don't think chemical and current biological weapons even register on the extinction-risk scale.
All out nuclear war I would put at the very low end of the scale (likely to end our current civilization, very unlikely to wipe out our species).
The big risk with AI I'm anticipating is not it being abused for desinformation campaigns or cyberattacks; the big risk in my view is AI actor(s) consolidating manufacturing control, obtaining some kind of self-replicability and physical agency and then just pursuing self-interests (within the next century). There is a lot of imaginable scenarios where that simply ends us, as a species, completely.
That book significantly decreased my appreciation of our statistics professor @uni, because it presented the same topics in a much more interesting and digestible way. Can recommend.
That book and Gershgorin circles (to work around all the stupid, constructed 3x3 matrix eigenvalue problems that they love to sprinkle into literally every early stem exam) helped more in university than anything else.