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Microsoft deal would reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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I keep coming back to this sense that technological advancement has just sort of hit a wall. In the last 20 years we've seen processing power become cheaper and not much else. This has given us new, arguably shittier forms of mass media, but nothing really different. And notably it's given us a parade of bullshit and bubbles pretending to be the Next Big Thing. The VR dream keeps recurring in various forms, 3D displays, 3D printing, blockchain, the gig economy, "AI," almost everything in the "green" apocalypse mitigation field, and now I guess cold fusion.
The only thing I can see as having real potential is quantum computing, because scaling it up would obsolete fundamental security features of almost every computer on the planet, but that's still in the early experimental phase and the bullshit artists haven't figured out how to market it widely.
Funnily enough quantum computing has hit a wall as well.
No, most of the tech advances are happening in China now. It's the only place with a future.
The promise of quantum computing isn't to break encryption, that would make it a pointless billions-dollar Y2K-like makework project to reconfigure all our systems to use post-quantum cryptography schemes. Quantum computers are primarily interesting because they promise to get a "native" speedup at simulating quantum-mechanical objects like molecules and proteins. So drug & material design could benefit. However, the field has been stalled for the past decade.
I do disagree that technological advancement has hit a wall, though. Things are moving faster than ever. To choose a single example, the impact of cheap energy-dense lithium batteries has been enormous. Displays also really have improved a lot.
I think 3D printing has potential because it can close the gap between hobbyist crafts and commercial grade manufacturing. Print the item for a run of 25, then you can move up to a real mould for 25,000.
It also leans into repairability-- replacement parts that might not be feasible to whittle one at a time from wood can be reliably made in a plastic comparable of strength to the original, and tge designs shared widely