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rimeice

> Some people think artificial intelligence will be the most important technology of the 21st century.

I don’t, I think a workable fusion reactor will be the most important technology of the 21st century.

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How so?

The maximum possible benefit of fusion (aside from the science gained in the attempt) is cheap energy.

We'll get very cheap energy just by massively rolling out existing solar panels (maybe some at sea), and other renewables, HVDC and batteries/storage.

Fusion is almost certain to be uneconomical in comparison if it's even feasible technically.

AI, is already dramtically impacting some fields, including science (eg deepfold), and AGI would be a step-change.

Cheap, _limitless_ energy from fusion could solve almost every geopolitical/environmental issue we face today. Europe is acutely aware of this at the moment and it's why China and America are investing mega bucks. We will eventually run out of finite energy sources. Even if we do capture the max capacity possible from renewables with 100% efficiency, our energy consumption rates increasing at current rates will eventually exceed this max capacity. Those rates are accelerating. We really have no choice.

There is zero reason to assume that fusion power will ever be the cheapest source of energy. At the very least, you have to deal with a sizeable vacuum chamber, big magnets to control the plasma and massive neutron flux (turning your fusion plant into radioactive waste over time), none of which is cheap.

I'd say limitless energy from fusion plants is about as likely as e-scooters getting replaced by hoverboards. Maybe next millenium.

I mean, the limit to renewables is to capture all the energy from the sun, and maybe the heat of the earth.

But then you start to have some issues with global warming (the temperature at which energy input = energy radiated away)

We probably don't want to release more energy than that.

Fusion at 100% grid scale might be better for the environment than solar at 100% grid scale.

It might be nice if at the end of the 21st century that is something we care.

We’ll probably need to innovate one of those to power the immense requirements of AI chatbots.

I think we'll need a few hundred, if spending continues like it has this year.

My vision of fusion power comes from Sim City 2000 where one plant just powers absolutely everything forever.

What makes you think we'll have fusion reactors in the 21st century?

I don’t think we’ll have the choice.

> I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it.

> But fusion as a power source is never going to happen. Not because it can’t, because it won’t. Because no matter how hard you try, it’s always going to cost more than the solutions we already have.

https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-wi...

Yeh current tech is expensive and would likely be uncompetitive. At the very very end of that article is the key to this though:

> I fully support a pure research program for radically different approaches to fusion.

We've got by without them so far and solar is cracking along.

That's not how invention works though. Something has to be technically possible and we have to discover how to do it in a viable way.

ITER apparently fires up in 2039.

That date means nothing though. We have yet to figure out how to run a fusion reactor for any meaningful period of time and we haven't figured out how to do it profitably.

Setting a date for when one opens is just a pipe dream, they don't know how to get there yet.

isn't the ROI on current AI investment kinda similar though? Both are built on elements of hope.

Helion has one under construction https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/helion-energy-starts...

Whether it works or not is of course another matter.

Is it a fusion reactor if it can't maintain a fusion reaction and generator energy?

A non functioning fusion reactor? So far I think they've achieved fusion but not net energy.

What makes people think we'll have AGI in the 21st century? LLM is not AI, and as far away from AGI as self-parking car.

Deepmind are working on solving the plasma control issue at the moment, I suspect they're probably using a bit of AI.... and I wouldn't put it past them to crack it.

This is the thing with AI: We can always come up with a new architecture with different inputs & outputs to solve lots of problems that couldn't be solved before.

People equating AI with other single-problem-solving technologies are clearly not seeing the bigger picture.

Can we? Why haven't we, then? What are the big problems that were unsolvable before and now we can solve them with AI?

Auto-tagging of photos, generating derivative images and winning at Go, I will give you. There's been some progress on protein folding, I heard?

Where's the 21st century equivalent of the steam locomotive or the sewing machine?

They did/are(?).

> Accelerating fusion science through learned plasma control

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/accelerating-fusion-sc...

(2022)

Time travel will be the most important invention of the 21st century ;)

Time travel was the most important invention of the 1800s too, but that goes to show how bad resolving the temporal paradox issue is, now that entire history is gone.

but people say that AI will spit out that fusion reactor, ergo AI investment is prior in the ordo investimendi or whatever it would be called (by an AI)

We'll finally have electricity that's too cheap to meter.

And we'll use it all to run more crypto/AI/next thing

Why would it be too cheap to meter? You're still heating up water and putting it through a turbine. We've been doing that for ages (just different sources of energy for the heating up part) and we still meter energy because these things cost money and need lots of maintenance.

But that's the whole reason fusion is so important. Just like it was the whole reason fission was so important.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

As we have more and more solars, we see rises for being connected to the grid more and more while electricity stays relatively cheap. Fusion won't change that, somebody has to pay for the guy reconnecting cables after a storm

Residential will still cost more somehow.

Because it’ll power AI!

I mean, we already have a giant working fusion reactor (the sun) and we can even harvest it's energy (solar, wind, etc)! That's pretty awesome.

Using gravitational containment rather than magnetic containment is a pretty cool approach.

if AI won't be a fad like everything else, we're going to need these, pronto

...and it does seem this time that we aren't even in the huge overcapacity part of the bubble yet, and won't be for a year or two.

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