We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.
One can dream of dumb conspiracy theories.
Nuclear was not stopped by the environmentalists, it was stopped by the fact that it cost 4X more than coal at the time. You claim that solar wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off, surely you can also see that nuclear wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off as well.
The same country that invested the time and money to make solar profitable is also investing the time and money to make nuclear profitable, with nuclear reactors entering mass production...
It was never about "economical", it was about a system being mature enough to make long term investments. Ours simply can't do that anymore.
A big part of that is the insane culture of safety around nuclear. In a sane field like highway engineering or healthcare, you come up with the statistical value for a human life (or a statistical value for a quality adjusted life year), and then use that to make decisions about eg how much money to invest to make your highway a tiny bit safer.
Nuclear is forced to act as if the statistical value of a human life is pretty much infinity. While coal is allowed a finite and rather low effective value for a human life.
> It could have been half a century or more ago if we actually cared.
Interesting. What makes you think so?
Btw, just because China made solar cheap with huge amounts of effort doesn't mean that was necessarily the best use of those resources ex ante.
Just like going to the moon with Apollo wasn't necessarily a good idea. Nor do the wonders of computers justify world war 2.
I don't know why you are blaming greed so much? Profit seeking companies sell and operate wind turbines and solar cells just fine.
Really? I thought it was pretty obvious for anyone to see that the lobbying and bribing behemoth of the oil and gas industry is driven in no small part by greed. As others have mentioned, the short-sighted pursuit of profit drove those oil tycoons to not enter the renewables industry and actively oppose it.
So I don't think (differences in) greed explains what we are seeing.
Our system is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Nuclear reactors were never profitable compared to coal or gas, so it never succeeded in strongly capitalist societies, only seeing great success in socialist economies where the people can invest outside of a profit motive.
It's actually quite funny that socialism is saving the day. The mega-capitalist countries turned their backs on nuclear and solar because they were less profitable than gas and coal. But socialist China invested anyway, and now China is mass producing nuclear reactors and every layer of the solar stack. China produces 50% of all nuclear reactors, 90% of all solar panels, 90% of all battery systems for solar storage.
Now that a socialism-based society has proven market viability, suddenly the greedy capitalists want in. But they're decades behind and don't have the private debt appetite to compete.
Womp womp... At least someone is leading the energy revolution.
It might take a couple of decades and a lot of reorganisation to build the capture facilities. But CO2 is not an unsolvable problem with current tech.
What's missing is the political and organisational intelligence to make it happen. Part of that is solving problems at planetary scale.
AI is the only tech that might - possibly, maybe, perhaps - have a chance of solving that problem without breaking anything critical.
‘Figure out fusion powered CO2 sequestration’ is much better.
>> I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.
And you get "god" and "(human) salvation" out of that?
This is pure projection. Anti-AI zealots are projecting things onto the technology and its users that simply do not (generally) exist.
We don't need a revolutionary technology. We need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation so that we realize that innovation and tech is not the answer.
Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction. Your take is just your instinct for optimism, which in turn is just a trait that is only adaptive in primitive environments but is grossly misleading in a surplus-based society...
That doesn't seem correct to me. There is always energy available that is not used because it is not cost-effective to do so. (Consider - the grass in your yard is not harvested and burnt for power). AI may yet turn out to be a paperclip maximiser, but humanity itself is not there yet.
I expect datacenter load has a similar sort of day to day demand curve as everything else. Consider for example global bandwidth use during work hours versus in the evening when people get home and pull up a streaming service.
Of course you can use more flexible tasks to demand shift but the same applies to the electric grid.
The direction of technological progress is not just linearly/exponentially upwards. Significant global technological fallbacks have happened, as in knowledge and processes disappearing for hundreds of years. This could happen again.
Even on the trajectory of unfettered growth fed by unsustainable resource extraction, tech and innovation might potentially take us beyond local pessima. That seems to be happening with solar, wind and batteries replacing inferior tech today. Still unfettered growth of energy production and consumption. Still fed by unsustainable resource extraction. Less harmful growth than the inferior tech being pushed out.