Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an incredibly funny thing to say in the face of Murdoch.
I said tend to. There are also liberals who have made a lot of money in business. A tendency doesn't mean 100%.
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US AI Action Plan
551–560 of 672 posts
Re: US AI Action Plan
#552Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth. But so is clean energy. And both right now are at an inflection point. It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter. We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy compan…
Overall US Energy production has been expanding, faster, each recent year. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/. This is all before you factor in the recent attention to Nuclear, which could come online within the next decade.
The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.
Re: US AI Action Plan
#553All talk no plan !!
Re: US AI Action Plan
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I believe that we should separate the general case of AI from the particular case of LLMs. AI models have been accelerating science for decades, and new technology helps drive economic growth. I am convinced that LLMs are not worth the money we've invested in them but I do believe that more "traditional" AI is a net positive in research fields. Traditional AI has also had a net negative effect on the quality of conte…
The interesting thing is that the AI you're talking about (the one with the economic growth) isn't even called AI. Those are specialized tools that work and they have names that reflect that. When a fuzzy and inaccurate term like “AI” is being used, you know you've entered the realm of pure marketing and hype.
Re: US AI Action Plan
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's part of the current administration's energy agenda, President Trump signed executive orders a couple of months ago, to increase nuclear energy capacity by 400% in the next 25 years, revising regulations, and expediting review and approval of reactor projects, which seems like the most effective strategy for expanding clean energy production.
A certain group of people keep saying that. But that particular idea of "clean" nuclear does not price in the 10.000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste materials (for the most dangerous HLW materials this number can go up to 100.000 years). Do you and your 3500 generations of ancestors volunteer to do this? Then it is cheap and clean. Otherwise it is yet another instance of "privatize the gains and socialize the…
My understanding is that every other form of energy production has similar or worse concerns, including renewables due to the materials used to build and operate and decommission solar panels and windmills.
The argument you're making about waste has even led to the decommissioning of nuclear in Germany to be replaced with coal... burning coal also produces radioactive fly ash. Everything has tradeoffs!
I guess we could just give up on electricity entirely! That might save the planet
Re: US AI Action Plan
#556In the energy section, they talk about using nuclear fusion to power AI... but not solar. What a joke.
Well yeah, AI power consumption doesn't match the solar production curve.
I mean, it could.
As we build out solar, daytime power will become cheaper than nighttime power.
Some people will eventually find it economical to time-shift their consumption to daytime hours, including saving any non-interactive computation for those hours, and shutting down unneeded compute at night.
Re: US AI Action Plan
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's part of the current administration's energy agenda, President Trump signed executive orders a couple of months ago, to increase nuclear energy capacity by 400% in the next 25 years, revising regulations, and expediting review and approval of reactor projects, which seems like the most effective strategy for expanding clean energy production.
A certain group of people keep saying that. But that particular idea of "clean" nuclear does not price in the 10.000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste materials (for the most dangerous HLW materials this number can go up to 100.000 years). Do you and your 3500 generations of ancestors volunteer to do this? Then it is cheap and clean. Otherwise it is yet another instance of "privatize the gains and socialize the…
Nuclear waste is a complete non-issue. It's trivial to just let it sit around in a corner of the power plant's property for a century or two until somebody nuts up and dumps it down a bore shaft or into the ocean where it belongs.
There's no technical or economic problem here. The problem is completely one of PR, with ignoramuses thinking it's a big deal being the entire problem.
Re: US AI Action Plan
#558Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth. But so is clean energy. And both right now are at an inflection point. It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter. We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy compan…
Overall US Energy production has been expanding, faster, each recent year. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ . This is all before you factor in the recent attention to Nuclear, which could come online within the next decade. The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.
The US has long since exhausted it's "easy" oil/gas reserves. Yes, there's tons more down there, but it's increasingly hard to get to. Lots of extraction methods only make sense when the price for oil is above some amount.
If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports.
And then we're worse off in several different ways.
Re: US AI Action Plan
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
A certain group of people keep saying that. But that particular idea of "clean" nuclear does not price in the 10.000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste materials (for the most dangerous HLW materials this number can go up to 100.000 years). Do you and your 3500 generations of ancestors volunteer to do this? Then it is cheap and clean. Otherwise it is yet another instance of "privatize the gains and socialize the…
Nuclear waste is a complete non-issue. It's trivial to just let it sit around in a corner of the power plant's property for a century or two until somebody nuts up and dumps it down a bore shaft or into the ocean where it belongs. There's no technical or economic problem here. The problem is completely one of PR, with ignoramuses thinking it's a big deal being the entire problem.
And just to be clear, it would be "a bore shaft", not "many bore shafts". The amount of nuclear waste generated per person per lifetime is so small you could pick it up and carry it. So a single well positioned mine with good geology could literally store all of it the US could generate for centuries.
Re: US AI Action Plan
#560Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth. But so is clean energy. And both right now are at an inflection point. It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter. We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy compan…
Whomever has more nuclear power generation will own energy. The cleanest energy is nuclear.
Everything I've read recently has emphasized that new nuclear installations will have difficulty competing with solar and storage.
Having a non-emitting form of base load is important, and nuclear has a place there, but it many applications it's just not cost competitive with renewables.