💥 Science is popping! Now it's superconductors! I mean, maybe!
Also: 5 Quick Questions for … economist Gregory Casey on rising temperatures and economic growth
“The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.” - Winston Churchill
The Essay
💥 Science is popping! Now it's superconductors! I mean, maybe!
If we lived in the near-future world described in William Gibson’s 2014 book, The Peripheral (there’s also an excellent ongoing Amazon Prime series closely based on it), we would soon be entering a nasty, mid-21st-century period that Gibson ironically terms “the jackpot” where 80 percent of the global population dies. The cause isn’t some megadisaster like a comet strike or global nuclear war, just lots of really bad things all at once: a bit too much climate change, more COVID-19-level pandemics, too few good antibiotics, political upheaval in the US, and, yes, some limited nuclear strikes. “Everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit,” Gibson writes.
But after the horribilis jackpot came perilously close to wiping out humanity, the mirabilis jackpot began to emerge. Gibson writes:
[But] science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with.
If only in the world of The Peripheral science had “started popping” earlier. In our world, however, we might be doing a better job at getting the proper sequence.
Science and technology sure seem to be popping right now, from AI/machine learning to CRISPR to reusable SpaceX rockets to energy breakthroughs. So while the following news is superexciting, I’m starting to get a bit accustomed to such potentially revolutionary headlines. From the new “big if true” paper “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor” by South Korean researchers Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, and Young-Wan Kwon:
Since the discovery of the first superconductor, many efforts to search for new room-temperature superconductors have been carried out worldwide through their experimental clarity or/and theoretical perspectives. The recent success of developing room-temperature superconductors with hydrogen sulfide and yttrium super-hydride has great attention worldwide, which is expected by strong electron-phonon coupling theory with high-frequency hydrogen phonon modes. However, it is difficult to apply them to actual application devices in daily life because of the tremendously high pressure, and more efforts are being made to overcome the high-pressure problem. For the first time in the world, we report the success in synthesizing a room-temperature and ambient-pressure superconductor with a chemical approach to solve the temperature and pressure problem. We named the first room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor LK-99.
Translation: The problem with other recent advances in room-temperature superconductors — special materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance and energy loss — is that those materials require extremely high pressure to work, making them impractical for everyday use. But these Korean scientists contend they have solved the temperature and pressure problem combo with new crystalline material, named LK-99, fashioned from lead and copper. And as I best understand it, the lead atoms form long tubes that run through the crystal, and the copper atoms replace some of the lead atoms in the tubes. This causes the crystal to change its shape slightly, creating tiny gaps between the tubes. These gaps are called superconducting quantum wells, or SQWs, and they are the key to LK-99’s superconductivity.
I guess. Perhaps. I certainly understand any reluctantance to publicize a pre-print, non-peer reviewed paper.
Look, I’m not a scientist nor do I play one during my CNBC appearances. But let’s take a moment to be positive. I’m a sucker for reasonable optimism, especially after a lifetime of seeing the world not progress to the stage I had hoped for when I was a kid. And if this superconductor breakthrough doesn’t pan out, I will surely follow up with that news, too.
But, but, but … if it does pan out, this advance would open up the possibility of creating practical devices and technologies (this would be especially great news for nuclear fusion) without the need for extreme pressure conditions, leading to more efficient electronics, transportation systems, and energy storage, among other potential applications. What a world. Or as William Gibson might write it (via Anthropic’s Claude):
Room temp superconductors hit the street. New tech holy grail, the gods toss us a bone. Cities lit up atomically top to bottom now. Compact fusion the new crack, basements rigged into star cores. Gas graves, oil barons, old news.
Supercars. Dead quiet, no friction, slide you cross town in null time. Bullet trains floating on a mirror, making miles a joke. Smoke and mirrors too, netfeeds piping at lightspeed end to end on glass not much thicker than shadows. Processor crunchers mashing big numbers unheard of outside researcher fantasy.
Hospitals jacked with compact donuts that see your guts in wireframes. Electrodes sensitive as spiders watch your ticker, sniff out rads, defects years too early.
Gadgets faster, cooler, hungry as neon. Quantum CPUs unpack the infinities, everyday mysteries.
Atom smashers shrunk to fit college campuses, new physics for all. Cancer patients signing up to get beamed inside Ring accelerators barely bigger than bikes. Juice flows free end to end down glass thinner than air.
Less carbon in the wind than a whisper. Petro kings back to sand and dust. World lit up brighter than Vegas, thinking faster than traders jacked twenty-four-seven. New metals, new science sends us over the event horizon. Singularity maybe. Who knows. For now, we ride higher and faster than any cruise ship hydrocarbon ghost.
So we’re still talking sci-fi until proven science fact. But for a summer day in July, I’ll take it.
5QQ
💡 5 Quick Questions for … economist Gregory Casey on rising temperatures and economic growth
Gregory Casey is an assistant professor of economics at Williams College. Recently, he published the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter “How Long Do Rising Temperatures Affect Economic Growth?” with Stephie Fried and Ethan Goode, which examines the interplay of climate change and GDP growth. For a longer take on this topic, check out “Projecting the Impact of Rising Temperatures: The Role of Macroeconomic Dynamics” from the same authors. (Disclaimer: While the study that was published as a FRBSF Economic Letter, Casey isn’t an employee of the Federal Reserve System. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the views of the Federal Reserve System or its staff.(
1/ What impact do environmental conditions have on productivity and economic growth? What's the causal mechanism by which rising temperatures affect the economy?
Our study focuses on how rising temperatures affect economic output. Rising temperatures reduce the productivity of workers in construction and other outdoor settings, decrease the ability of students to learn in classrooms without air conditioning, and lower crop yields. There are also non-economic impacts of rising temperatures, like increases in mortality amongst vulnerable populations. There are many other environmental factors linked to climate change, like sea level rise and changes in the frequency/severity of natural disasters, that can also affect economic output.
2/ What is the scale of that impact on the US economy and on the global economy?
I think it is important to distinguish between our best guess based on historical data and uncertainty. Our work is about improving estimates based on historical data and making them more consistent with the existing literature on the determinants of economic growth. In particular, our main finding is that changes in temperature permanently affect the level of economic output, but do not permanently affect the growth rate of economic output. When we project the impacts of future changes in temperature, we find that they will decrease the level of GDP in 2100 by 2.4% in the US and 3.5% globally, relative to a scenario with constant temperatures. This estimate only covers the market impacts of temperature change. It ignores non-market impacts of temperature, like mortality, as well as other impacts of climate change, like rising sea levels. It also ignores “tipping points,” like melting ice sheets, that don’t occur in the historical data, but may be future consequences of climate change.
Personally, when I think about the impacts of climate change, I focus more on uncertainty. Climate scientists tell us that there could be large and unprecedented changes in natural systems if climate change continues on its current course. It isn’t clear how well these changes are captured in historical data. The potential impacts of these changes are hard to quantify, but it seems plausible that they will have sizable economic consequences. Wagner and Weitzman have a great book on this uncertainty called Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet. They argue that a key benefit of climate policy is protection from these “tail risks,” and I find this argument convincing.
3/ You and your coauthors write, "We find evidence suggesting that the level of temperature affects the level of [total factor productivity], but not the growth rate of TFP." Why is that an important distinction?
The impacts of a change in temperature on economic output will be much larger if it affects the growth rate, rather than the level, of productivity. For simplicity, let’s consider the effect of a one-time, permanent increase in temperature. An important question in climate economics is whether this increase will change the growth rate of output permanently or only temporarily. Growth economics tells us that the impact of the increase in temperature on economic growth will be temporary if temperature affects the level of productivity, and the impact will be permanent if temperature affects the growth rate of productivity. We find evidence that the impact on economic growth is temporary. In this situation, climate change still has a meaningful impact on global economic output in 2100, but that impact is about three times smaller than if the growth rate of the economy changed forever.
4/ In your paper, you write about "temperature shocks." But wouldn't global temperatures rise gradually rather than abruptly? Is this scenario plausible in reality?
We think about climate change as a sequence of annual changes in temperature. We use the term “temperature shock” to refer to each annual change. This is important for us, because we are focused on whether each of these shocks affects economic growth permanently or temporarily. As I mentioned above, we find that each shock only affects the growth rate of the economy temporarily. The full sequence of annual changes still slows economic growth, but the overall impact is considerably smaller than if each shock permanently altered the long-run growth rate of GDP.
5/ How might rising temperatures impact economic inequality between countries, particularly considering that many developing countries already experience warmer temperatures?
Rising temperatures will exacerbate global inequality. Developing countries tend to already have more extreme climates, which makes future changes more economically painful. For example, our estimates suggest that the impact of rising temperatures in India will be about three and a half times larger than the impact in the US. In my opinion, this is another important motivation for climate policy. Even if global impacts end up being moderate, the impacts in poorer and more vulnerable places will likely be much larger.
Micro Reads
Top tech companies form group seeking to control AI - George Hammon, FT |
Sam Altman’s vision for AI puts him on collision course with regulators - George Hammond and Scott Chipolina, FT |
AI will take more jobs from women than men by 2030, report says - Annabelle Timsit, WaPo |
How Do the White House’s A.I. Commitments Stack Up? - Kvin Roose, NYT |
What generative AI really means for the economy, jobs and education - Edd Gent, New Scientist |
Can AI Replace Humans? We Went to the Fast-Food Drive-Through to Find Out - Joanna Stern, WSJ |
Meta’s Llama 2 Elbows Into a Still-Open Field - Matthew S. Smith, IEEE Spectrum |
The AI-Powered, Totally Autonomous Future of War Is Here - Will Knight |
Can AI ever become conscious and how would we know if that happens? - Thomas Lewton, New Scientist |
Antony Blinken & Gina Raimondo: To shape the future of AI, we must act quickly - FT OpinioThe Generative AI Battle Has a Fundamental Flaw - Wil Bewn |
Unions Unite Against a Shared Enemy: Artificial Intelligence - Brooke Sample, FT Opinion |
Treading Carefully: The Precautionary Principle in AI Development - John Bailey, AEIdeas |
The Generative AI Battle Has a Fundamental Flaw - Will Bedingfield, Wired |
Why ultra-green Germany turned its back on nuclear energy - Markham Heid, Vox |
The Viruses That Could Cure Cancer (or Wipe Out Humanity) - Gideon Lichfiled and Lauren Goode, Wired |