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by MrSkyNet
812 days ago
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Yes and a lot of better technology has this issue. The EV consumes more energy at the beginning, solar panels and wind turbines too. Unfortunate its hard for people to get 'economy of scale' and its super frustrating that we have the investment<>expensive<>benefit hen<>egg issue. Heat-pumps, EVs, solar and batteries could become even cheaper even faster if we would invest faster and more. In 10 years those have eclipsed every current alternative. What i think is a good example is Alpha Fold: The graph on this page https://www.moltenventures.com/insights/a-breakthrough-in-pr... shows the jump alphafold provided. Now tx to alphafold2 a huge library exists for all researchers. And i have seen many other breakthroughs. Segment anything from facebook is a LOT better in image segmentation than what we had before. This makes it much faster for everyone having segmentation tasks to segment faster. Wispher is really good in speech to text. It basically beats a lot of old school software on the market. |
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> we have the investment<>expensive<>benefit hen<>egg issue.
Maybe it's easy for people to get economies of scale AND path dependence. Unfortunately society has been put in a trajectory that maximized the profits of minerals rights holders in the industrializing US.
And yes, we are in a sub optimal local minimum in terms of efficiency and need to go over a hump to get to better minimums and going over that hump may mean increasing carbon intensity of the economy for a while.
Do we have time to do that though? Should we carbon de-intensify the economy and aim for a trajectory that minimizes climate related shocks or should we go all out on an accelerationist hope that we can bootstrap a better system by running the current one red hot? These seem to be the two sides of the debate we're in.