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Energy has always been of huge importance to mankind.
Even when we were cave-dwellers, the ability to create energy by way of fire was critical to our survival in harsh climates.
Later, as the industrial revolution took hold, energy to drive the machinery we developed became crucial.
Gas and coal were the backbone of our early technological advances but then we discovered the utility and convenience of electricity -- albeit that this was, more often than not, also generated by the combustion of fossil fuels.
Now we approach the dawn of "the AI age" and there has never been a greater demand for energy, especially of the electrical variety.
Not only are computers consuming countless gigawats of electricity but we're also in the process of transitioning our personal transport fleet to run on the flow of electrons rather than the flow of hydrocarbons.
The rise of AI has seen a huge spike in demand for clean, reliable electrical energy. Without this, the gigantic server-farms that provide the virtual neurons for the like of ChatGPT, Grok and a raft of other AI systems progress in this area would be severely hampered.
Then there's that other drain on the world's electrical generation capacity -- cryptocurrency.
Between AI and crypto, a growing amount of our electricity production is being channeled into computers that quitely hum away, day after day, week after week, year after year.
Just this week OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced plans to form Stargate, a new company that will invest $500 billion in AI computing infrastructure across the United States. (full story)
This venture alone will consume astronomical amounts of power and it is just one of many humungous projects that will doubtless appear in the near future as more and more companies seek to cash in on the benefits that AI promises to deliver.
The big unanswered question however, is where all this extra electrical energy will come from.
We can't just keep adding thermal generation and nuclear power stations have quite a significant lead-time for construction plus they suffer from a degree of pushback by those who cite the events at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Shall we pin our hopes on nuclear fusion? Well it is only a decade away, after all.
Or maybe true fusion-based generators are closer than we actually think.
China claims to have run its Tokamak-based system continuously for almost 18 minutes.
That's pretty impressive, although it's not clear whether the system produced more energy than was used to run it -- a rather crucial factor when it comes to actually generating power from a fusion reaction.
Of course we all know, as I continue to mention regularly, there's a handy fusion reactor just down the road in the form of our sun. The problem is that it's only available for half the day (less in winter), can be significantly diminished by the effects of bad weather and we still don't have any really cost-effective way of storing the electricity we might generate from solar panels in large quantities.
Like all problems, I have no doubt that we will eventually solve the ones that might stand in the way of the advance of AI but the question we should perhaps be asking ourselves is "are we ready for the world we are about to create?".
We never asked ourselves this question before the industrial revolution and look what that's done to our planet. The effects of the AI revolution could be even more far-reaching and devastating. The time to create mitigations and coping strategies is NOW, not years down the track when it's already too late.
Carpe Diem folks!
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