Maybe we could just stop making plastic of all kinds. Reduce Reuse Recycle. Recycling is literally the last resort, we don’t need most of our plastic stuff today.
America’s second-highest ranking military officer, Gen. Paul Selva, advocated Tuesday for “keeping the ethical rules of war in place lest we unleash on humanity a set of robots that we don’t know how to control.”
Anyone concerned that the US will be “overtaken” by anything coming out of China right now needs to go read about what’s been happening in China for the last 5 years.
Export all your technology and jobs to cheaper labour to make more profit. Now you will slowly become bankrupt, as no one can afford the enshitification products and services.
AI does have little to do with it, but we can’t do housing the way people want housing. The land does not exist in sufficient quantity, in the desired areas, without other strings attached (such as private ownership). And it would still take a decade to build it all because there aren’t enough tradespeople in the places where you want the housing built.
This is complete and utter bullshit. We have enough of everything to start solving housing this second. Workers aren’t a problem, locations aren’t a problem. We lack the political will to do it, read: we don’t want to do it. Having “AI” tell you why you don’t want to do it is just wasteful
I won’t argue that AI won’t solve the housing problem. And I agree that we can build a bunch of housing. But it won’t be where people want to live, or it won’t be affordable. I’ve got people in my town screaming for affordable housing. Even with subsidies its hard to get things going when the local municipality is practically bending over backwards. Why? Because it has to be on a bus line. It has to be within walking distance of X services. And all the land that fits those criteria is millions of dollars an acre. Even if you could find them, the contractors can’t find enough qualified, reliable workers at premium rates to service their million dollar home builds. I’m in the industry and I don’t care how much “will power” you have; short of taking land through eminent domain and using it for free, you won’t have anyplace that meets any kind of criteria for livability. Hell, I could go buy 1000 acres just an hour down the road for $1M and put up 10,000 houses that only cost $50k each to build. Thing is, nobody is going to buy them. There is literally no demand, even for cheap housing, that takes an hour drive to get anywhere useful - and if you get closer in, you won’t find land that’s affordable. Heck, by the time I extended infrastructure to them or built it out, it would be 3-4 years before the first resident could move in, and that’s with zero delay on any governmental paperwork.
There’s nothing AI could do to help with that. It’s not a technology issue, it’s purely a political will issue. We could house every single homeless person in this country with no problem whatsoever. Right now. Today. But we choose not to.
Maybe AI could solve it – at least, that’s what Scott Alexander has proposed back in 2014. His idea was that of an AGI that would optimize human life (or the universe itself, I guess) for human values instead of profit or other things that drive the whole Moloch problem he thoroughly describes. I imagine housing would also be solved along the way lol
It’s a thorium based subcritical reactor. India tried to make something similar, but with some amount of plutonium to start this thing and to not include accelerator. The problem is that accelerator required is large and expensive, and needs to use up some fraction of power produced. As of waste, no heavy actinides are produced, and spiciest fission products have half-life of about 30 years, in particular there’s no plutonium or americium made with half life of 80 ish years and 430ish years respectively. This makes radioactivity drop in 100s of years instead of thousands. These problems can be solved in other ways, for example by using fast breeder reactors, but these are hard to make. So will be massive accelerator required, so i’m not holding my breath
freshly burned fuel is kept at nuclear powerplant spent fuel pool for months to years anyway precisely for this reason. heavy actinides have longer halflifes anyway
As countries look for ways to move away from fossil fuels, nuclear fission technology is poised for a comeback. At COP28 last year, 20 nations decided to triple their nuclear energy capacity in the next 25 years but plans for long-term storage of spent fuel have yet to be drawn up.
Where the alchemists failed, former scientists from CERN have been able to succeed. Using a particle accelerator, the researchers propose using a slightly radioactive element such as thorium and transmuting it into an isotope of uranium.
The technology is the brainchild of Carlo Rubbia, the former director-general of the physics laboratory at CERN.
While Rubbia might have had access to a particle accelerator at his old workplace, nuclear energy plants do not have the same luxuries. Building a particle accelerator near each plant can be quite expensive, considering that CERN spent nearly US$5 billion to deliver the Large Hadron Collider.
The other challenge is the opposition to nuclear technology itself. Interesting Engineering has previously reported how Germany phased off its nuclear power plants. Switzerland, too, has similar plans for its four existing nuclear power production facilities.
According to the Swiss national body, Transmutex’s technology could help reduce the volume of nuclear waste generated by 80 percent and reduce the time it remains radioactive to less than 500 years. More importantly, the technology could also be applied to 99 percent of existing nuclear waste.
Edit: added info below
Links in article:
Finland builds a facility to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years [Ameya Paleja | Jun 01 22 | Interesting Engineering]
No numbers in the article, so I'm going to assume that a modern smartphone would chew through several hundred of these per day and an EV would need a battery the size of a house.
This research was focused on the lithium battery anode. Ideally we could just put a chunk of lithium in there but the stripping and deposition chemistry doesn’t work well long term. Modern batteries use graphite instead. But of course you waste a significant amount of cell volume and weight with all of that carbon, and the potential is lower than Li metal. Alloying Li with silicon gets you properties more similar to Li.
So this paper talks about their efforts to make LiSi more viable as an anode. They gave it a coating to protect it from electrolyte side reactions and created a new gel electrolyte formation reaction. The capacity they report isn’t remarkably higher than what’s out there now since the cathode is the heaviest part of the cell.
As to the results I do have to say 60% capacity retention after 200 cycles is not nearly good enough for real world use. And I have no clue where they got the “1000 mile range” headline from.
I figure the 100km range is firstly km, not miles, but then an ignorant editor “trying to be helpful” by multiplying sone number from the article by something they consider a standard EV
interestingengineering.com
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