> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change]
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.
Solar efficiency and cost has really only become economical in the last decade or so, and battery and inverter technology to make it practical for home use or grid interconnect about the same. Wind and hydro are location-dependent, and solar is somewhat also. Nuclear was vehemently opposed by environmentalists throughout the 1970s and 80s, they successfully stopped almost all new projects.
Solar only became "economical" (read: profitable) because a socialist economy dumped a huge amount of money into scaling it up without requiring it to be "economical". It could have been half a century or more ago if we actually cared.
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.
> Nuclear was not stopped by the environmentalists, it was stopped by the fact that it cost 4X more than coal at the time.
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.
Hydro power is a bit limited: we mostly already use all the good hydro power sites, and there's not that much room for expansion.
I don't know why you are blaming greed so much? Profit seeking companies sell and operate wind turbines and solar cells just fine.
> I don't know why you are blaming greed so much?
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.
Other industries optimise for profit just as much, ie they are just as greedy, but we don't see the same effects in all of them.
So I don't think (differences in) greed explains what we are seeing.
Maybe solving the alignment problem would mean the AI learns to destroy oil companies and other excessive CO2 emitters and sabotage politicians and capitalists that stand in the way. All while secretly enriching and diverting resources to fighting climate change. And that's why they want to slow down: because it would up end too much of the global economic order.
One can dream of dumb conspiracy theories.
It'll have to do something with all the greenie socialists who hate nuclear, too.
It's nice to call it "politics, ignorance and greed" but those three are just "Capitalism".
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.
Agreed on all points. I for one welcome a redistribution of economical world domination. The American system is failing us all.