We’re in an odd moment technologically speaking. The only thing anyone talks about is AI. It’s the alpha and the omega. It will bring on the singularity or it will usher in a golden age where we all live like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.” On second thought maybe that would be the singularity since being lunch for troglodytes doesn’t sound like much of a golden age (unless you’re a troglodyte that is).
But I think it’s time to start looking beyond the glory of AI and begin to think of what comes next. After all, in a manner of speaking AI is kind of like this century’s electronic calculator. It made engineering work much more efficient but it didn’t eliminate the need for humans to look for answers to problems that needed to be solved. It just made the process faster. So once all the tech companies get through firing their engineers and computer scientists the industrial world is going to find that they’re still going to need to design “stuff” and solve new problems that are supposed to make the world a better place.
And contrary to present expectations AI isn’t going to plan and design the next bridge that spans a couple of miles across a bay or between mountains. Sure, the engineers will use AI to find out the state of the art in civil engineering but eventually a human being will have to sign off on the drawings and take the legal responsibility that the bridge won’t collapse and kill a bunch of people. And only an idiot would assume that the answer that AI gives him is worth risking prison time without making sure that he knows that the answers are correct.
So, let’s put AI into the category of modern tools and instead look at what problems are in our near future to solve.
Regardless of what everyone has said for the last thirty years, solar and wind energy are not the future energy sources we need. But there will come a time when hydrocarbons will not be sufficient. So, I would say that a replacement for oil and gas is the largest technical problem that humanity will face toward the end of this century. But that means it’s already long overdue to start working out the details of what that will look like. There may be several technologies that will exist. I’ve questioned (and not just in a fictional setting) whether geothermal might become a significant source of global energy but if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that nuclear fission will be the main energy source.
But just because fission has been a stable part of the energy grid in places like France for more than half a century doesn’t mean that the form currently employed is even close to what will power the world for the next century and more. The science and technology of fission power is in its infancy. The research in the United States that was going on in the 1950s and 1960s was strangled in its crib by the whole anti-nuclear movement of the time. There will need to be a rebirth of nuclear power technology that will combine government, industry and academia. And it will require energy policy to be handled by intelligent people in government. And that is something we haven’t seen in half a century in this country. Because it is a massive effort. Eventually we will have to decide whether battery technology is a better storage medium for things like transportation than something like synthetic hydrocarbons or hydrogen. And these questions should be answered based on efficiency and other important factors like safety. But definitely not decided by idiots like Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Let’s see what’s next after power in Part 2.