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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

I believe that chips will get more efficient as they get tuned towards AI needs. Also, energy costs will continue to fall as they have for thousands of years. Think about this, at one time we would have to put a lot of wood or animal matter to get enough energy for a few hours of light at night. Now it takes very few resources to get enough light for a whole night. It's so relatively inexpensive that we can light an area all night without having to think twice about the cost.

Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?) from now that power consumption by AI will not be a problem.

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> Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?) from now that power consumption by AI will not be a problem.

By what mechanism? Wishful thinking?

By the continued progression of solar and storage down their aggressive experience curves.

> Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?)

Any evidence for that? I predict the exact opposite. The price of energy will rise.

Power so cheap that it did not have to be metered was the promise of Nuclear power but it got sidelined because of safety concerns. Given that climate change mandates a less polluting power source Nuclear power will get a new life which dictates that it become safe to operate. I predict that safety will increase over time. Even now there are experimental reactors that are fail-safe. It's only a matter of time before Nuclear reactors start to generate cheap safe energy. Here's a company that's working on it now: https://www.terrapower.com/about/

Also, solar power is making a large dent in our power needs.

https://climate.benjames.io/solar-off-grid/

It's a start but give it time.

I have a hard time imagining how any of that will lead to cheap abundant power in ten years. In principle on a high level a lot of this is easy. Actually doing it is not.

Are you kidding me, it's already cheap and it's going to get cheaper. I, a one-income person, can get up and use power throughout the day, every day at a fraction of my income. That's cheap. And I'm one of millions, if not billions. I think you're thinking free. Free is not going to happen anytime soon but cheaper than today is coming.

Heard of the Jevons paradox?

I guess your point is that as energy gets cheaper demand will increase therefore negating the savings. Well, that has not been the case when it comes to power. Look at the cost over the last 200 years and you'll see that the cost has dropped over that time. Energy cost is a fraction of what it was then but demand has exploded. There's no reason to think that things will be different in the future.

I've heard it's mostly a fallacy. Jevon's paradox is the assertion that demand for energy is so elastic that increases in efficiency increase demand so much that this overwhelms the savings from efficiency. And in most cases this isn't true. One must be careful when looking at historical evidence to not say "efficiency increased, and demand increased, therefore demand increased because of efficiency", which is just a post hoc non sequitur.

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