> What about the ten thousandth one? Will "a nuclear fusion plant" become something that models couldn't possibly get wrong?
For what it's worth, ten thousand terawatt fusion plants probably approaches the level at which the sheer intensity of energy production would cause significant disruption to the climate (it's roughly 5% of the Earth's entire solar input). Every energy source becomes dirty past a certain point. It would be wiser to learn how to build a utopia within a limited energy budget than find a way to produce enough of it to cook the damn planet, but who am I kidding, we're going to build a million of these things.
If we had such arbitrarily large amounts of energy to handle, it would be conceivable to beam excess energy into space. It is a bit on the sci-fi side, but so is that kind of energy production.
This assumes other technological breakthroughs don't also happen in parallel. I'll go out on a limb with nothing more than a hunch that we are in the beginning stages of understanding mathematics, physics, and biology.
It does not. This is basic thermodynamics. Unless we are using computers made out of something other than matter, powered by something other than energy, thermodynamics bounds us all.
Even today we're recognizing that compute does not need to happen here.
When we're talking about creating powerplants equal to roughly 5% of the insolation of Earth, I think we're sci-fi enough to discuss orbital datacenters or Mars datacenters or Jupiter fusion candle datacenters.
Orbital datacenters suffer from the same problem: limited surface area. You think cooling is a problem now? Try not having conduction or convection. Radiation is all you get. A huge proportion of the mass and size of the ISS is radiators, and that only has to deal with the heat of low-power electronics and a few measly human beings.
Using an entire Mars only nets us about a 2x multiplier for our energy expenditure budget. Then we need four planets to double it again. Exponential growth is a bitch.
Thermodynamics and the tyranny of exponential growth are going to win this battle every time, regardless of the unobtanium technology you try to invent.
Not quite the same problem, because only a small portion of that energy radiated from space will make it back to the environment on Earth. For convection that is 100%.
> Using an entire Mars only nets us about a 2x multiplier for our energy expenditure budget.
That is not the problem being discussed. Radiators can be scaled up, but the thermal mass of Earth is finite. GPUs can survive at temperatures the organisms of Earth cannot.
I am quite certain that you are drastically underestimating the scope of the problem of "getting rid of heat" when you're dealing with the discussed levels of power production.
Compute doesn't need to happen here, but it can, so it will. Building datacenters on Mars or Jupiter doesn't reduce our ability to build datacenters here, so naturally, they will still be built, everywhere that they can be. It's an orthogonal capability.
Maybe, but there are counterexamples today. The processing of raw materials can be done all over the world, but it's not. Modern nations actually disassemble their blast furnaces and ship them out at a certain point.
It's quite possible that with "infinite" energy we could do mass scale carbon capture to offset the increased temperatures by rolling back the greenhouse effect.
This is basic thermodynamics, not greenhouse gases. If you put some amount of energy into a system with a fixed surface area, you will get a minimum equilibrium temperature.
Greenhouse gases and Earth’s internal nuclear decay engine make the situation worse, but even without them this would boil the oceans.
The more I think about space elevator, the less I believe in it.
The material alone is in a quantity beyond what we can reasonably manufacture.
and the material needs to be perfect. All design we have today have cascade failure mode -- any material failure translates to a total catastrophic failure.
and geostationary does not really meant Geostationary. There are lots of jiggling everywhere. It wear down over time. and let's hope nothing resonance
and we need some maintenance / decommission plan. How can we decommission this when it fail or need upgrade?
We're not going stop doing something locally just because we can do it in space. There are definite physical advantages to producing next to consumption. We will most likely do both -- things that can be done in space will be done in space, and things that are better done locally will ramp up. There is no upper limit to energy demand, none whatsoever. Stopping production anywhere it could theoretically happen is a matter of will.
I don't think "abundance" is a stable state. There are always ways to use more resources and more energy, so no matter how much we have, it will never be "enough" -- abundance is just a transition state where a population or system has not yet figured out how to grind the surplus. The faster the progress, the shorter I would expect these periods to be.
Meh, that's debatable. I don't think the problems we have require much in the way of intelligence to solve, we don't have them because we aren't smart enough. I feel aligned AGI or ASI would get crushed by the reality of humanity and the sheer strength of its inertia, just the same way aligned smart humans get crushed by it.
Intelligence isn't magic. It can only overcome so much brute force and humanity, as a non-intelligent system made out of intelligent parts, carries an ungodly amount of brute force.
This is true for almost everything. The bank is still open for 2 hours a day if you want to check your balance. The point is that this anti-pattern is being pushed for more and more functionality.
The package tracking will literally come to your front door, which is definitely not true for almost everything. Maybe it is true of your bank balance, if you still receive that by mail.
It is possible that the works of black people are tested more, possibly by racist people systemically putting them through Pangram in hope of getting a hit.
If that's the case, unfortunately, they're bound to find legitimate fraud eventually. Given the subsequent hard evidence of plagiarism, it seems like this is one such case, and we can't exactly ignore it.
Can you post some links? I know some authors said that, but had used a different tool than Pangram, and I don't expect non-technical people to understand the difference. Pangram is reputedly the best of them and personally I couldn't get a single false positive on my own work (both French and English).
* Media ran the entire novel through Pangram and got a 94% AI score [1], whereas all other Goncourt finalists, Haitian/African novels and French classics they tested came out as 100% human. I recall they also tested works specifically from before and after the AI boom and found a shift, but I don't remember where I saw that.
* People on social media, as well as traditional media, have then found cases of blatant plagiarism in Orelien's work a decade ago (this includes one prized short story and several posts to blogs and media) [2]
I think we have to be careful not to assume that tools like Pangram are completely accurate and the word of God, but we can't dismiss them outright, and this particular author's history of plagiarism makes it much harder to give him the benefit of doubt.
It was relevant in this context because part of Grasset's defence (Grasset being the publisher) was that the Bible and other classics were sometimes flagged as AI by these tools and therefore they are unreliable. So they actually tested it with the same tool and found that it wasn't an issue.
Comparing to other Haitian authors was also relevant, because another defence from the author was that his "caribbean style" could have tripped up the detector.
But yes, other than that, that's a good point. My anecdotal evidence is that my own unpublished writing, both in French and English, contains no false positives, but even in that case, that's only evidence that my style isn't AI-adjacent. I'd be curious to see concrete examples of false positives, but it's hard to fully trust these if they don't have proven timestamps.
> the feelings and sense of need for human understanding of the now obsolete practitioners might hinder any benefits that the now solve field could provide
Wiping out an occupation that people enjoy and that gives them purpose (making them "obsolete") is a public mental health crisis, if anything. It's unclear that the "benefits" of the "solved" field actually outweigh that.
I think that generally speaking, the tighter the feedback loop, the better AI performs. Ask it to do things that are fast and easy to check and I suspect not much else matters. That's why AI's eating programming but has mitigated success elsewhere, feedback loops in the digital world are orders of magnitude faster.
The “using humans for compute” angle makes no sense either, if you’re living in the Matrix, your brain is obviously occupied processing the Matrix. The way to do it would be to trap humans in virtual classrooms and force them to solve math problems.
And they knew they were. The brain's computations are focused on what the brain sees, it's not magic. If someone in the Matrix is a writer, we know what their brain's computing: a book. So if the machines need your brain to compute something specific that they need, you'll know.
For what it's worth, ten thousand terawatt fusion plants probably approaches the level at which the sheer intensity of energy production would cause significant disruption to the climate (it's roughly 5% of the Earth's entire solar input). Every energy source becomes dirty past a certain point. It would be wiser to learn how to build a utopia within a limited energy budget than find a way to produce enough of it to cook the damn planet, but who am I kidding, we're going to build a million of these things.
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