Saturday, January 20, 2024

Oh, NOW you want nuclear fusion power?

At DAVOS, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares new sources of power to meet the energy demand of AI, particularly nuclear fusion. Like the cryptocurrency clusterfuck, AI is consuming vast amounts of power, and Sam Altman finally says maybe we should get commercial fusion power going.

Hey, I'm all for it, but rather than create the bloated turd that is ITER, with a corrupt and sclerotic bureaucracy, and piece meal efforts of various institutions, we could have provided a concentrated, multi-hundred billion dollar effort to get there. Had we wished to, we probably could have had fusion power by the year 2000. We did not wish to. Money wasn't a problem, as we managed to throw tens of trillions at stupid  wars. Just a fraction of that money gets you nuclear fusion.

Part of the reason is a rather wise choice not to pursue such superdense energy systems due to lack of knowledge and technology. That's fair. If the tech and knowledge was in place (now they are), do you really want chain saws and off road vehicles run on Mr. Fusion? Why the planet would be a wreck in no time. For that matter, what if it is easier to build a fusion rocket than a reactor. A fusion rocket gets you to Mars, but it can also be a devastating weapon on terrestrial targets.

The spending of $100 billion to date on self-driving cars (replacing cheap human drivers with shoddy expensive robots) probably could have gotten us a aneutronic fusion power source. My vote is for hydrogen boron fusion  being pursued by HB11 and Helion Energy. Billionaires are now finally throwing their money at it, and devoting AI architecture to the now familar problems. 

But for what? Don't we have enough scams already? More than half the stuff on the internet is AI generated garbage. It's clogging Google search, which I can personally attest is getting worse. Not to mention this AI adventure is still a Mechanical Turk, with humans tasked to sift out the horrible and hallucinating content to be fed to the robots. Not to mention glean out the AI generated garbage to be scrapced as data. The only people I see making money on this is the billionaires who already have a monopoly on, well, everything. Looks pretty grim.

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