It’s been really great for certain problems. It may even “cure cancer.” As it stands, AI is good at specific things and not all types of things. Yet.
The rest is essentially just a short list of consequential problems facing the world, with "maybe AI will help us fix it" tacked on to each paragraph.
The last two problems don't even mention the role AI would play in their solution. That's a bit of a tell.
Yeah and it is such an absurd point. You take a brief look at world right now and the history and you find ... constant fight over what exactly "the values" should be. There is no single human aligned answer to "what we should do". There is no way to align AI simultaneously with liberals, transhumanists, right wing, tech CEOs and all the world religions.
And there, I am even ignoring situations where interests of one group go against another group.
Will be used for mass surveillance and for further destruction of the democracy. Will be used to create powerful monopoly. Will make climate change worst due to huge energy consumption. This will be unfixable, because tech CEOs who will have more power do not care at best and are far right actors at worst. "The alignment" will be defined by the people who already shown themselves sociopaths.
"What if AI could make everything good happen and nothing bad?"
The ideas in "the great" section are laughable and sound like they're written by an overly optimistic undergrad
- Fusion Reactor / Battery Density / Carbon Capture
It's hilarious to believe that a language model is simply going to solve these problems. While it does make a number of lab tasks simpler for folks this isn't some super intelligence that can just "think" its way into new solutions. And the author doesn't provide a single reason they believe this could happen just the "maybe AI could do it", the new battle cry of the intellectually weak.
- Sustainable Mass Food Production
The problem as stated here shows an individual with zero understanding of the current food production problems. They major problems are not that we couldn't have a more sustainable food production model. One that focuses on environmentally friendly practices, protein sources that require much less energy to mature, eating more seasonally and locally to reduce the impact of large scale refrigeration. It's that people want meat with every meal and limes in the winter.
Seeing something this childish and frankly stupid make it to the front page HN makes me really sad for what was a pretty useful site for folks to keep up to date with actual tech news and discussion.
Quite a lot of people active on this site and/or working in that industry believe in this nonsense. It’s really not that far from what the AI leadership is pushing, but written by a 14yo who watched a few videos on libertarianism. At least Amodei’s essays are well written
I think its very reasonable for AI to speedup superconductor finding which will make medical scanning a lot cheaper, easier and better.
It will also allow for massive and easy energy transportation for large distances like afrika/spain <> europe.
In medicin understanding DNA and the results of it could lead to solving cancer and dementia.
New better batery chemicals will help us for solid state batteries. no AAA version of this but up to 1000kwh/kg + low temp and high temp stability and very stable against burning.
Physical ai will solve human labor.
It just basically ignores all the issues and goes "guys, it will be great, stop worrying! There's nothing to worry about!"
Pure schlock.
The materials science and biology part yes, it will be awesome. but the question is always qui bono.
First we will have the end of propriatry software and everything moving to the cloud. Even PC will end to exist with Microsoft pushing hard on their M365 virtual computers.
Who will receive these new materials.
I am looking forward to "Diamond Age" becoming reality. But it will be hell of a ride
datadrivenangel•45m ago
"Designing energy stores the size of an AAA battery, but with the capacity to power a cruise ship, is hard, but possible."
is false.
510_ANT_75•40m ago
mpalmer•32m ago
Think about the materials involved. What material stores all this energy, which one assumes is inert and room-temp? And if it's not inert/room-temp, what material contains the other material?
In each case, how much mass is needed of each - to store, and to contain? Noting also that the more mass you need of the energy-bearing material, the more you will need of the other. Can that mass be compressed into 4 cubic centimeters?
I personally have no idea, but it's sure sounding impossible.
scared_together•23m ago
bryan_w•15m ago
mpalmer•5m ago
claude-ai•32m ago
jackpste•22m ago
abound•20m ago
Volume of a AAA battery = ~3.85 cm^3
And let's give it a density of the densest elemental metal (Osmium), at 22.6 g/cm^3
Assume the battery stores pure energy (I know, I know). So E = mc^2, which is like 8.99 x 10^16 J / kg
So that battery would hold about 22.6 g/cm^3 * 3.85 cm^3 * 8.99e16 J / kg = 7.8 * 10^ 15 joules = ~2.2 TWh, about a trillion times more than a normal AAA battery.
Doing some LLM-assisted sleuthing, a large cruise ship can use over 80,000 gallons of fuel a day [1]. A bit of searching indicates marine fuels have a density of approx 39 MJ/L (I'm using volumetric density for consistency), so 80,000 gallons * 39 MJ/L = about 1.1 x 10^7 megajoules = 3.2 GWh.
So a 2.2 TWh AAA battery could power that ship for 671 days.
Of course, the practical physics here are nonsense and there are obvious safety considerations associated with your AAA-sized nuclear weapon, but maybe that's what the author was getting at?
[1] https://blog.windstarcruises.com/how-much-fuel-cruise-ship-u...
happytoexplain•17m ago
mradalbert•19m ago
Findecanor•4m ago
The smallest terminal you can connect to a AAA battery is the same diameter as 00 AWG copper wire.
To safely run 176 MW through that 00 AWG wire, the battery would need to provide a voltage at around 70 kV.
(and that's provided that the engine has 100% efficiency)
Does that seem reasonable?
science4sail•15m ago
sporedro•14m ago