Energy storage. We could already produce all the power we need and more using solar power, the problem is that we can’t store it in an efficient energy dense form. The word efficient there is doing some heavy lifting. It needs be comparable or better than our methods today in terms of cost, safety, energy density, climate impact. If we could solve energy storage, it’d change society and technology dramatically.
Climate change
Kind of a two-fer right there. Without “AI” sucking up so much power, we’d already be better off climate-wise.
True, but still only marginally.
I think concrete is still king.
I would specifically pick Fusion research.
That’s not a single endeavor, like, at all.
Neither is ‘AI’
I wrote Generative AI. Do you want to put the two on the same scale of complexity?
generative ai is not one thing.
I agree. Still it is a set with way fewer elements than action against climate change. Also, the nature of operations in the latter case is way more diversified than in the development of the former.
It is only my opinion though, you may find Generative AI a hydra compared to the other.
By the way, the money would be well spent indeed but not even close to enough for a sustainable change.
idk about that last part actually. some of the stuff we can do for the climate we just aren’t doing.
also we could just hire a few hitmen
Buying companies that create a lot of pollution and closing them down. (Coal mines/plants, oil firms, single use plastic suppliers, etc)
Another big one would be buying up pharma companies an their patents and releasing everything under creative commons license.
Question on this, how would you expect the millions of people that heat/cool their homes to get by? Or are you advocating for a return to caves ? Unless you’re saying shut those down to build nuclear/solar/wind, which also takes a lot of dirty manufacturing to build. It’s kind of a no-win with this many humans.
Bio gas is a lot better than coal and fossil oil for the mean time. But long term basically the whole world should be using heatpumps for heating and cooling, they are incredibly efficient and outperform any other system on every metric. Especially because electricity will become dirt cheap in a few years/decades.
The only reason they arent installed in every house yet is the fossil fuel lobby and their bought politicians, but even they are slowly realizing that its the inevitable solution.
which also takes a lot of dirty manufacturing to build
Solar compensates its production+installation footprint in around a year see here for the relevant numbers from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Wind power plants compensate theirs in a matter of a few months. See this part of Climate Towns latest video analyzing the typical propaganda that made you falsely believe that https://youtu.be/wBC_bug5DIQ?t=185
Nuclear is obviously stupid and does indeed cost way too much and take way too much effort for how bad of a deal you get out of it when its done.
I for one would love to live in this world where electricity becomes dirt cheap, as my rates have only ever gone up, usually in the name of installing more renewables, now don’t get me wrong I’m not against installing renewables but let’s not pretend it will necessarily make power cheaper for the end user
It will. Consumer electricity prices are completely artificially inflated. No matter how corrupt the the system is, eventually the prices will be pushed down because there is such an over abundance of energy output. Already we are seeing exchange prices regularily going into the negative.
We might ofcourse dump all that excess into garbage like AI training.
It is a singular endeavor with tons of moving parts, like pretty much every modern endeavor.
My problem with counting all climate change is that the goal itself is not unique: there are atmospheric greenhouse gasses to lower, which are something completely different than the acidification of the oceans, which are completely different from deforestation.
And the effects themselves are, it’s true, all originated from an imbalance in a system, but exactly because climate is a complex system, they differ wildly.
Just fund all the open source projects. Like, all of them.
It’s amazing the amount of ressources that are spent on creating an environment/platform that locks users in.
Like, shit, if we spent like 10% on that efforts into open source stuff we’d be living in a utopia right now or something.
In everything that has a realistic chance to stop or reverse climate change
Nuclear Fusion.
Get the plastic out of living organisms for fuck’s sake
I’m sure you’ll get a bunch of respectable answers, but keep in mind that secretly, everyone is actually thinking sex robots.
And if they were not, they should have been.
Which is an application that generative AI is important for, ironically.
Who wants an intelligent sex bot? You could as well do regular dating.
Really? Cause I was thinking climate solving, fusion powered sex robots.
The smart phone doesn’t do one thing, why shouldn’t my robot?
Who said anything about one thing? My robot is capable of performing 370 different sex acts! And before you ask, yes, even THAT one.
Speak for yourself, I want a hug bot.
That costs extra.
I’m not sure what technology I would choose, but surely it would be related to the climate change.
Nuclear fusion, right? That’s got to be the big one.
I’d rather a free and powerful energy source that’ll benefit humanity not have a logo and pricetag slapped on it so that only the ones who can afford it are allowed to use it.
Any energy source is going to be able to have a price tag and a logo slapped on it as long as energy generation requires infrastructure and capitalism is a thing. Wind, solar, and tidal are great; we desperately need more of them as part of our energy strategy. But they can also have a price tag and a logo. In fact, home solar has become quite a lucrative…well, not exactly scam, but “bad deal” in my area.
And fusion will have to be here, too, to fill the gaps that wind, solar, and tidal leave; at least for now. There’s no “forever” answer here, only some that’ll last longer than others.
You can slap a logo on anything. That’s not a problem of the tech itself.
Indeed. Any company can claim to own anything. The question is whether or not it’s lucrative enough to do so.
Precisely. It’s already done to our homes and our food and the water we drink, pretty soon it will be done to the air we breath unless we stop that unnamable thing that privatizes wealth and is defined by the ability to profit from it.
How do we stop it killing the global economy over night ?
Why would we want to do that? I hate the global economy.
The obvious point is the global economy that you hate will kill any free and limitless fuel before it is born .
how about pocket computers with the power of a smartphone but the common sense usability of a goddamn graphing calculator? i’m sitting on a magic rectangle with more computing power than the apollo mission and it doesn’t even let me blink the LED without installing an app?? these things should legally have to come with a scripting environment.
As someone who never managed to work with a graphing calculator, you made me want this.
the closest thing on android right now is an app called Termux, it simulates a linux scripting environment with several languages (including C, python, and javascript), and it can be programmed to do anything an app can do (including blink the LED).
but c’mon, that should be standard. also phones should come rooted.
As someone who has used a graphing calculator in high school, uhhhhhh I must have been using a different brand because it was always a struggle.
Steam Deck is a step in the right direction but a bit too big
Clean nuclear energy
cure for tinnitus
Healthcare, food, and housing for the poor.
Cultured Meat. Without relying on any major breakthroughs, a price competitive with “traditional” meat is feasible with a few rather reasonable and conservative assumptions and developments. Dropping cows as meat source globally alone might be sufficient to slow down further climate change significantly.
The problem is that we can’t make an immune system and don’t even know where to begin on that problem
Why would I need an immune system in CM? This is food. It’s cells, generally on a scaffold, that look like either ground meat or a steak or whatever you want. If you mean vasculature: That is an issue if you want to print organs or large, intact tissue, less so for foodstuffs.
Lack of immune system means everything has to be perfectly sterile, it has been the entire problem with scaling up. Entire batches regularly rot.
there is currently no viable solution to this, that’s why investors are backing out.
Everything has to be perfectly sterile anyway, this is cell culture. Open tops STRs are not exactly a thing. It doesn’t have to be pharma grade, sure, but food safety is a thing and you’re not going to get a process certified without it. Main issue remains to be the cost of medium, serum-free or not.
I do wonder where you got that idea from, though. I don’t intend to be rude, but have you got any kind of experience in the field?
Yeah that’s the problem… farms don’t have to be sterile. scaling that up has proven to be almost impossible. Cost of the medium is just one of the problems
I am very interested in the topic and follow it closely, here’s a recent video on the topic summarizing the problem made by a food scientist
The Internet Archive - long term storage of as many books/films/music/journals/games as possible.
Love this answer! I wish the EU could move it in as an EU agency.
