And let's give it a density of the densest elemental metal (Osmium), at 22.6 g/cm^3
Assume the battery stores pure energy (I know, I know). So E = mc^2, which is like 8.99 x 10^16 J / kg
So that battery would hold about 22.6 g/cm^3 * 3.85 cm^3 * 8.99e16 J / kg = 7.8 * 10^ 15 joules = ~2.2 TWh, about a trillion times more than a normal AAA battery.
Doing some LLM-assisted sleuthing, a large cruise ship can use over 80,000 gallons of fuel a day [1]. A bit of searching indicates marine fuels have a density of approx 39 MJ/L (I'm using volumetric density for consistency), so 80,000 gallons * 39 MJ/L = about 1.1 x 10^7 megajoules = 3.2 GWh.
So a 2.2 TWh AAA battery could power that ship for 671 days.
Of course, the practical physics here are nonsense and there are obvious safety considerations associated with your AAA-sized nuclear weapon, but maybe that's what the author was getting at?
Exactly, I assume this is the kind of thing the author is thinking about. But going this far into the extremes of theoretical physics and calling it "hard, but possible" is silly on their part.
Energy density. This would be approximately 10^9 to 10^10 times the capacity of a real cell, would be better than fusion fuel, and almost 1% of the theoretical maximum.
You don't even need to be an expert to poke at why this is extremely implausible.
Think about the materials involved. What material stores all this energy, which one assumes is inert and room-temp? And if it's not inert/room-temp, what material contains the other material?
In each case, how much mass is needed of each - to store, and to contain? Noting also that the more mass you need of the energy-bearing material, the more you will need of the other. Can that mass be compressed into 4 cubic centimeters?
I personally have no idea, but it's sure sounding impossible.
The article starts that section with “As the Big Bang has so loudly illustrated” so I assume the author is imagining a machine that replicates the conditions of the Big Bang. Exactly how that could be constructed and used safely is left as an exercise for an AI.
I understand and maybe even agree with the general “vibes” here, but I think we need to be careful about making the assumption that AI will just figure out every style of “hard problem.”
It’s been really great for certain problems. It may even “cure cancer.” As it stands, AI is good at specific things and not all types of things. Yet.
Hand-waves the negatives and the positives. Makes no real effort to contend with the drawbacks of AI, and leaves out the biggest one (IMO) - the potential harm created via delegation of arbitrary authority/capability to AI, whether in government, industry, or military. But we've apparently solved alignment, so maybe it's OK.
The rest is essentially just a short list of consequential problems facing the world, with "maybe AI will help us fix it" tacked on to each paragraph.
The last two problems don't even mention the role AI would play in their solution. That's a bit of a tell.
> But we've apparently solved alignment, so maybe it's OK.
Yeah and it is such an absurd point. You take a brief look at world right now and the history and you find ... constant fight over what exactly "the values" should be. There is no single human aligned answer to "what we should do". There is no way to align AI simultaneously with liberals, transhumanists, right wing, tech CEOs and all the world religions.
And there, I am even ignoring situations where interests of one group go against another group.
This is obviously written by a sycophant with major issues in magical thinking. The basic idea of this article is
"What if AI could make everything good happen and nothing bad?"
The ideas in "the great" section are laughable and sound like they're written by an overly optimistic undergrad
- Fusion Reactor / Battery Density / Carbon Capture
It's hilarious to believe that a language model is simply going to solve these problems. While it does make a number of lab tasks simpler for folks this isn't some super intelligence that can just "think" its way into new solutions. And the author doesn't provide a single reason they believe this could happen just the "maybe AI could do it", the new battle cry of the intellectually weak.
- Sustainable Mass Food Production
The problem as stated here shows an individual with zero understanding of the current food production problems. They major problems are not that we couldn't have a more sustainable food production model. One that focuses on environmentally friendly practices, protein sources that require much less energy to mature, eating more seasonally and locally to reduce the impact of large scale refrigeration. It's that people want meat with every meal and limes in the winter.
Seeing something this childish and frankly stupid make it to the front page HN makes me really sad for what was a pretty useful site for folks to keep up to date with actual tech news and discussion.
> Seeing something this childish and frankly stupid make it to the front page HN makes me really sad
Quite a lot of people active on this site and/or working in that industry believe in this nonsense. It’s really not that far from what the AI leadership is pushing, but written by a 14yo who watched a few videos on libertarianism. At least Amodei’s essays are well written
They missed "AI analysis implemented as an infinite number of authoritarian servants documenting the physical traits, locations, behaviors and associations of all people 24/7" in the "really bad" column.
I think its very reasonable for AI to speedup superconductor finding which will make medical scanning a lot cheaper, easier and better.
It will also allow for massive and easy energy transportation for large distances like afrika/spain <> europe.
In medicin understanding DNA and the results of it could lead to solving cancer and dementia.
New better batery chemicals will help us for solid state batteries. no AAA version of this but up to 1000kwh/kg + low temp and high temp stability and very stable against burning.
Will be used for mass surveillance and for further destruction of the democracy. Will be used to create powerful monopoly. Will make climate change worst due to huge energy consumption. This will be unfixable, because tech CEOs who will have more power do not care at best and are far right actors at worst. "The alignment" will be defined by the people who already shown themselves sociopaths.
This would be a great essay from a 3rd grader.
Explain
Author is misguided:
"Designing energy stores the size of an AAA battery, but with the capacity to power a cruise ship, is hard, but possible."
is false.
For a mere mortal. But AI can simply hallucinate new elements that defy physics. Then it’s just up to us to go find those hallucinated elements!
[delayed]
Why is that the case? Genuine question, not rhetorical.
I got nerd-sniped on this, so let's do the math.
Volume of a AAA battery = ~3.85 cm^3
And let's give it a density of the densest elemental metal (Osmium), at 22.6 g/cm^3
Assume the battery stores pure energy (I know, I know). So E = mc^2, which is like 8.99 x 10^16 J / kg
So that battery would hold about 22.6 g/cm^3 * 3.85 cm^3 * 8.99e16 J / kg = 7.8 * 10^ 15 joules = ~2.2 TWh, about a trillion times more than a normal AAA battery.
Doing some LLM-assisted sleuthing, a large cruise ship can use over 80,000 gallons of fuel a day [1]. A bit of searching indicates marine fuels have a density of approx 39 MJ/L (I'm using volumetric density for consistency), so 80,000 gallons * 39 MJ/L = about 1.1 x 10^7 megajoules = 3.2 GWh.
So a 2.2 TWh AAA battery could power that ship for 671 days.
Of course, the practical physics here are nonsense and there are obvious safety considerations associated with your AAA-sized nuclear weapon, but maybe that's what the author was getting at?
[1] https://blog.windstarcruises.com/how-much-fuel-cruise-ship-u...
Exactly, I assume this is the kind of thing the author is thinking about. But going this far into the extremes of theoretical physics and calling it "hard, but possible" is silly on their part.
How to protect yourself from spontaneous release of energy in case of cell failure? This problem gets worse with density
Energy density. This would be approximately 10^9 to 10^10 times the capacity of a real cell, would be better than fusion fuel, and almost 1% of the theoretical maximum.
It violates the laws of thermodynamics.
You don't even need to be an expert to poke at why this is extremely implausible.
Think about the materials involved. What material stores all this energy, which one assumes is inert and room-temp? And if it's not inert/room-temp, what material contains the other material?
In each case, how much mass is needed of each - to store, and to contain? Noting also that the more mass you need of the energy-bearing material, the more you will need of the other. Can that mass be compressed into 4 cubic centimeters?
I personally have no idea, but it's sure sounding impossible.
The article starts that section with “As the Big Bang has so loudly illustrated” so I assume the author is imagining a machine that replicates the conditions of the Big Bang. Exactly how that could be constructed and used safely is left as an exercise for an AI.
This is same thing someone in 1926 would say about your cell phone battery
I understand and maybe even agree with the general “vibes” here, but I think we need to be careful about making the assumption that AI will just figure out every style of “hard problem.”
It’s been really great for certain problems. It may even “cure cancer.” As it stands, AI is good at specific things and not all types of things. Yet.
After working with the frontier models for over a year I agree with you. Some problems are "AI shaped" but it's not a universal solution
If it can make a web page responsive and keep in bounds when I zoom in the font that would be a glorious future.
Hand-waves the negatives and the positives. Makes no real effort to contend with the drawbacks of AI, and leaves out the biggest one (IMO) - the potential harm created via delegation of arbitrary authority/capability to AI, whether in government, industry, or military. But we've apparently solved alignment, so maybe it's OK.
The rest is essentially just a short list of consequential problems facing the world, with "maybe AI will help us fix it" tacked on to each paragraph.
The last two problems don't even mention the role AI would play in their solution. That's a bit of a tell.
> But we've apparently solved alignment, so maybe it's OK.
Yeah and it is such an absurd point. You take a brief look at world right now and the history and you find ... constant fight over what exactly "the values" should be. There is no single human aligned answer to "what we should do". There is no way to align AI simultaneously with liberals, transhumanists, right wing, tech CEOs and all the world religions.
And there, I am even ignoring situations where interests of one group go against another group.
This is obviously written by a sycophant with major issues in magical thinking. The basic idea of this article is
"What if AI could make everything good happen and nothing bad?"
The ideas in "the great" section are laughable and sound like they're written by an overly optimistic undergrad
- Fusion Reactor / Battery Density / Carbon Capture
It's hilarious to believe that a language model is simply going to solve these problems. While it does make a number of lab tasks simpler for folks this isn't some super intelligence that can just "think" its way into new solutions. And the author doesn't provide a single reason they believe this could happen just the "maybe AI could do it", the new battle cry of the intellectually weak.
- Sustainable Mass Food Production
The problem as stated here shows an individual with zero understanding of the current food production problems. They major problems are not that we couldn't have a more sustainable food production model. One that focuses on environmentally friendly practices, protein sources that require much less energy to mature, eating more seasonally and locally to reduce the impact of large scale refrigeration. It's that people want meat with every meal and limes in the winter.
Seeing something this childish and frankly stupid make it to the front page HN makes me really sad for what was a pretty useful site for folks to keep up to date with actual tech news and discussion.
Not judging but I don’t understand why anyone would read pas the first point in “Really Bad”.
So much nonsense on HN front page these days, the algorithm desperately needs to be redone
> Seeing something this childish and frankly stupid make it to the front page HN makes me really sad
Quite a lot of people active on this site and/or working in that industry believe in this nonsense. It’s really not that far from what the AI leadership is pushing, but written by a 14yo who watched a few videos on libertarianism. At least Amodei’s essays are well written
They missed "AI analysis implemented as an infinite number of authoritarian servants documenting the physical traits, locations, behaviors and associations of all people 24/7" in the "really bad" column.
Sounds like a Phillip K. Dick scenario. Which are all happening these days
I find certain points woo wishiwashi.
I think its very reasonable for AI to speedup superconductor finding which will make medical scanning a lot cheaper, easier and better.
It will also allow for massive and easy energy transportation for large distances like afrika/spain <> europe.
In medicin understanding DNA and the results of it could lead to solving cancer and dementia.
New better batery chemicals will help us for solid state batteries. no AAA version of this but up to 1000kwh/kg + low temp and high temp stability and very stable against burning.
Physical ai will solve human labor.
The really bad
Will be used for mass surveillance and for further destruction of the democracy. Will be used to create powerful monopoly. Will make climate change worst due to huge energy consumption. This will be unfixable, because tech CEOs who will have more power do not care at best and are far right actors at worst. "The alignment" will be defined by the people who already shown themselves sociopaths.