“A revolutionary approach is taking shape: using the combined power of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to steer fusion innovation, shaving decades off development timelines.” Those are the words in the Washington Post of Steven Cowley, professor of astrophysical sciences and laboratory director of the U.S. Energy Department’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
If “fusion power” is beyond your comprehension, rest assured that it’s beyond mine too. That’s a good thing. Progress is defined not by what we all individually know, but by what we all individually don’t need to know.
In the future, knowledge will become increasingly narrow as more and more of the global population gets to do the work and pursue the knowledge most associated with their unique skills and intelligence. Just as work divided is the path to enormous surges in production, so will knowledge divided power even greater surges in individual productivity.
Which is the happy point about where we’re headed: knowledge is wealth, and thanks to advances borne of artificial intelligence doing and thinking for us, the creation of knowledge is about to pick up speed in remarkable fashion. As Cowley reports, knowledge creation that used to take months, and that rendered its acquisition “impractical and slow,” will now be acquired through the combination of computing power and AI thought in a matter of hours.
Stop and think about what this means from an energy perspective alone. Oil is as old as the earth is, but it’s only been since the final third of the 19th century that the commodity was revealed as having substantial economic value. Life without oil would be defined by endless misery thanks to the horrifying deindustrialization that would be forced on us without it.
For now, and presumably forever, oil is abundant. The only limit to sourcing ever more of it is knowledge. At the same time, it would be short-sighted to presume that oil and its byproducts are the frontier of power generation. Cowley suspects the same.
He writes that “The quest for fusion power — replicating on Earth the same nuclear process that powers the sun and stars — has seen a remarkable surge of interest in the past five years, as reflected by more than $6 billion in private capital.” The obvious response is that $6 billion is pretty small relative to what’s being put into oil exploration and extraction, but it’s a start.
Also, never forget that the above number ignores the exponentially greater amounts of wealth being directed at computing power and AI advances more broadly. The combined investment will finance a globalized division of work and thought among humans and machines that will rapidly speed up the creation of knowledge about everything in concert with substantial decreases in the cost of its creation.
Cowley doesn’t think he’ll live to see the fruits of the quest for fusion power in particular, but he suspects it will power cities, towns, data centers, factories, and surely all sorts of advances not yet conceived. Which is exciting when the profound genius of oil is contemplated. Think about the wealth it freed us to create.
In which case imagine once again how life-changing and enhancing fusion power will have to be in order to replace oil even a little, or perhaps a lot. The bet here is that among other things, advances in power generation will soon enough move outdoors the advances that have made indoor living in the coldest and hottest locales such a snap. In other words, generations not born yet will marvel at our outdoor suffering in the summer and winter, and advances like “fusion energy” will be the source of awe about the surely primitive living conditions of the 2020s.