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To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy
Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.
but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input.
a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.
Generative AI has no internal, designed momentum towards truth and accuracy (beyond the absurdly diminishing returns of energy-hungry multi-layered LLMs), but a person or an institution can (and should).
because a lot with electricity, a lot of the downstream benefits actually came to like the users of the electricity rather than the rather than the actual entity producing the electricity. On the other hand, with social media, it was the opposite case, right? Social media, you know, it was everywhere. Everybody uses social media, but the rents went to the platform.
So, I think there is a world where it is concentrated, in which case it's going to be really hard to index AGI. There is another world where it is not It's electricity, then like basically every company has access to AGI. So, you just buy you use buy the index. So, like, you know, Nigeria just needs to buy the index.
the joke I made was pre AI, I would spend 95% of my energy thinking about what to do and 5% of my energy doing it. Now I spend 96% of my time thinking about what to do and 4% of my time actually doing it. So yeah, it's like a 20% improvement, but dayto-day it feels as hard as ever.
What the current conflict in the Gulf - in particular the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - is going to do is to provide a further push to global attempts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
We are about to see the Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 - a discontinuity in energy markets as profound as the oil shocks of the 1970s, and one that could bring forward the peak in fossil fuel use and emissions to this side of 2030.
Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.
What I see now is, well, "I'm a a programmer and I've got six agents. So, really I'm managing a team." No, you're not. You're using six tools at once, which is fine. But, it's that's very different than having a conversation with somebody who believes things that are a little different than what you believe.
We may have a handful of genies, but that's different from having a handful of friends, right? In part because the energy's different, the conversations are different. Also, they just agree with us constantly.
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
Their words now
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation
In general your body would rather use glycogen than fat, because glycogen loses almost no energy in the conversion from and to sugar and fat loses a lot.
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency like that's actually the retention that matters the most is that like of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern how sticky is your product and it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that builds that daily habit.
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.
They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life.
no one carries the full legitimacy inside of a company. Legitimacy is a currency in a companies. No one carries the full legitimacy in a company, even the CEO. The CEO just has a lot of input on the plan. The plan carries the legitimacy.
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter.
I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it's the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission.
Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.
Many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that's the case.
While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.
But my point is that this is still not the reason (or is only a very small reason) why these goods from China are cheaper than elsewhere. The main driver of lower labour costs has been automation; not having a human worker at all.
That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).
this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.
CCS can never be competitive in the sense of working economically in the absence of a policy framework to price in the cost of carbon, unlike clean electricity.
The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.
I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed.
And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.
Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.
Interesting thing is certain regions of the US transmitting power cost more than actually generating it because the grid is so slow to build. And the demand for power, and the ability to build power, and re-ramping on a natural gas plant or even a coal plant is easy enough to do, but transmitting the power's really hard.
So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don't get to use it all.
Each shift takes its toll, and everyone has a limit of how much energy they’re willing to expend on a new platform that will eventually, like its predecessors, join the graveyard of defunct websites.
I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.
But many of these gains have already been achieved: the best data centers already use just 10% of their electricity for cooling and other non-IT equipment.
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists accuse physicists, like you say, of losing the plot because they need dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want dark matter and dark energy; I want something much cooler than that. I’ve tried. But you got to listen to the equations and to the data.
I think this is one of the biggest things that physics can help with, and it’s an obvious kind of low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation, the inefficiency, the waste of existing high-level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It’s hilariously worse, and we haven’t tried to optimize that hard on that frontier.
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
There are children's books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children's books are a drag.
But compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that, where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is, at price X, the world will use this much compute, and at price Y, the world will use this much compute.
And each major accident, that means global freeze on the nuclear reactor production for at least another 10 years. So that’s what I mean that nuclear industry is politic, not just in terms of technology and not just in terms of radiation, impact on health, but also politically a very, very unreliable option.
And then guess what? A few years later, the Soviet Union collapses very much also thanks to the mobilization of people over the issue of Chernobyl and nuclear energy.
Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain's work—in Everett's own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story.
Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.
So if I generalize what you're asking, you are talking in general about truth-telling and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.
I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.
In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.
One of the things we do as physicists is we actually want it to break down at some level, we’re looking for the precision measurement or the energy or whatever it will take where the standard model is no longer working. Not that it’s not working approximately, but we’re looking for the deviations.
So energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms, one third electricity, one third transport, one third heating. And so in order for everything to go sustainable, to go electric, you need to triple electricity output.
I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it.
You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do, is make housing and food dirt cheap. Right? And that’s the good world. And actually, let’s go into what we should really be making dirt cheap, which is energy.
Ships are great at carrying bulky and heavy stuff with minimal cost and energy usage. We need a battery chemistry that leans into that and sacrifices performance to reduce cost.
But the thing is, you can’t have this if you don’t have an oxygenated planet because it’s all, in the end, it’s about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat? And if you don’t have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you’ve got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out.
The drone-like architecture of the multicopters is simple, but as the rotors are responsible for keeping the unit at a constant altitude with hover power, they represent an energy-intensive version of VTOLs. Their range is, therefore, short, typically less than 20 miles.
the electric technology used for cars only has to beat energy hogs that are below 10% in efficiency, our everyday car. But to qualify for aircraft use, the technology has to equal or beat what is used today, which is at the 30% to 40% efficiency level using modern turboprop or turbofan engines.
A fine intro to investing if you think you can reliably beat the market or that active trading is a good use of energy. If you're already bought in on index funds though, you won't find much here.
No matter what your model of obesity is, in order to explain the development of an obese body, energy imbalance has to be a link in the model’s causal chain.
And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.
Their words now
Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.
Add these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.
This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.
The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
It's basically the Vim of audio editing software, so I wouldn't recommend it if you don't have the time and energy to heavily invest in customizing it for your workflow, but I can move like lightning in this thing.
A fascinating book exploring the role of energy in biology and evolution. It explains how eucaryotic life emerged and why it grew in complexity, while bacteria have remained unchanged in their simplicity for billions of years. It also presents the best theory of abiogenesis we have, and a lot more.
An ecopragmatist book making a compelling argument that urbanization, nuclear energy, and genetic engineering are good for the environment and must be pursued. This is all counterintuitive — environmental movement traditionally despises those things. But we’ve gone so far changing Earth, there might not be another choice.
Articles happen in Word, but I'm leaving it behind more and more, and just writing in Textedit to save myself all the time and energy associated with Microsoft.
I write my books and comics scripts in Scrivener. Articles happen in Word, but I'm leaving it behind more and more, and just writing in Textedit to save myself all the time and energy associated with Microsoft.
While wave power may be useful for small communities on remote islands, I suspect it can’t play a significant role in the
solution to Britain’s sustainable energy problem.
Just like Britain, Europe can’t live on its own renewables. So if the aim is to get off fossil fuels, Europe needs nuclear power, or solar power in other people’s deserts (as discussed on p179), or both.
For most materials, the embodied energy per unit weight is greater than or equal to 10 kWh per kg – the same as the energy per unit weight of fossil fuels.
planes are already almost as energy-efficient as they could possibly be. Planes unavoidably have to use energy for two reasons: they have to throw air down in order to stay up, and they need energy to overcome air resistance. No redesign of a plane is going to radically improve its efficiency.
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