10k cycles is roughly 30 years at one cycle per day, so not quite long enough to be infrastructure grade. Of course if its capacity continues to degrade as slowly after that, it'd be entirely usable.
Aluminum is cheap enough, and already produced at large enough scale, for this to be actually useful within the next 30 years. That is, if there are no bottlenecks in supply of the fluoride salt or the fluoroethylene carbonate.
Engineering in general is a pile of kludges on top of other kludges. Theory looks good in physics textbooks but it hardly ever survives contact with reality
It cannot push wages below subsistence for essential workers: those involved in maintenance of infrastructure, logistics, national and local security, and secondary health care. In fact for any work in the world of atoms. There are many, many problems to be solved in robotics besides that of common sense. So, workers in those areas will be needed for many decades to come. Wages will be set at a level that keeps them alive and reproducing.
I'm rather tired of these "$LABORATORY_EXPERIMENT could sweep the world" articles.
If the complete supply chains for all the ingredients of the thing do not already exist and operate in the billions of dollars, it can't conceivably "solve" anything at global scale in under three decades. More likely, seven decades.
In the world of atoms, scaling is not just a matter of emailing AWS. It's a matter of project plans and environmental reviews and planning permissions and financing. Multiplied several thousand fold.
In the mean time, announcements like this serve mainly to keep us passive, waiting for the miracle.
As someone said recently, abundant energy is the basis of prosperity. There are no poor countries that use a lot of energy per capita, and no rich countries that use little. (China is a "middle income" country, not a poor one.)
> The Triassic–Jurassic (Tr-J) extinction event (TJME), often called the end-Triassic extinction, marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, 201.4 million years ago. It is one of five major extinction events, profoundly affecting life on land and in the oceans.[...]
> The cause of the Tr-J extinction event may have been extensive volcanic eruptions in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP),[8] which released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere,[9][10] causing profound global warming[11] along with ocean acidification.
While I agree with the general thrust of the piece, many details seem wrong.
Food shortages will not kill you.[1] Nor will mass migration per se.
But the author omits global thermonuclear war--the biggest, most dangerous risk, as it always has been--being made more likely by climate change induced stresses.
Water and/or electricity shortages and/or heat stress or wildfires or conflict may well kill millions who live in countries or states with incapable governments (those that are corrupt, or nepotistic, or otherwise have key personnel not selected for competence alone).
The author seems to think "reserves" is a meaningful figure for metals and other minerals. Reserves is a figure for the amount that companies have found and that they are are prepared to go through the process of developing within (approximately) the next 20 years (the standard permitting, financing and construction timetable). When they get to 20 years' worth, companies stop looking.
1. I have lived through at least two food price supercycles, with peaks in the 1970s and the 2005-2008 period. Food price cycles are self-correcting. There is a lot of slack in the food production and distribution system - think of all the corn grown for e-85 gasoline, for instance.
> The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs.
The interesting thing is the sheer number of different models designed for different tasks, all of which can be performed by one and the same standard-model human.
The robot revolution will be a very drawn-out, labour-intensive affair.
-> specialized robots is all we can do now.
-> General purpose humanoids become ready but are too spendy at first.
-> General purpose humanoids become less spendy and do some general farm tasks in specialty or small scale situations
-> Humanoids are used to cheaply build and design better large scale automation for large farms
-> Humanoids at scale for a new more decentralized agriculture (magnificent gardens cause labor is free and vibes are great )
-> "Row bots" and "humanoids" share the brunt of all human agricultural labor
Aluminum is cheap enough, and already produced at large enough scale, for this to be actually useful within the next 30 years. That is, if there are no bottlenecks in supply of the fluoride salt or the fluoroethylene carbonate.
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