✨ AI (but not supersmart AGI) and the world of 2030

Also: The potential of geothermal energy: A Quick Q&A with … physicist Rhett Allain

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently predicted that humanity — via OpenAI, I would assume here — may achieve AI superintelligence in “a few thousand days.” Doing so would be quite the civilizational milestone, especially when you consider that in the past Altman has described superintelligence as a future AI system “dramatically more capable” than even human-level AI, also known as artificial general intelligence. 

I have no way of personally gauging that timeline or even knowing whether we are really on the right track toward superintelligence or AGI. I talk and listen to business folks (like Altman) and technologists, as well as check out prediction markets. 

But please remember this, Faster, Please! readers: The path to a fantastic future — a healthier, wealthier, more resilient world —  doesn't hinge on SI or AGI or anything close to it. We need only replicate the economic and tech-driven productivity growth we've already experienced, though achieving this in today's American economy would certainly defy current expectations. Economists at the Federal Reserve and on Wall Street forecast long-term US growth of around two percent (a bit less, really) annually after inflation.

But we should aim to double that pace through enhanced productivity via accelerated technological advancement. This would mimic the growth seen in the prosperous 1960s and 1990s. The contrast between two and four percent growth over 50 years is stark: maybe a $50 trillion economy versus $150 trillion by 2076. The former might feel stagnant, but the latter could set America on course for a true science-fiction reality.

But let's set aside the world of America’s Tricentennial. What about the world of 2030? The Wall Street Journal recently asked 10 experts to predict whether, in a mere five years, AI will have lived up to the current hype or turn out to be a disappointment.

This is key: From my best determination, none of them explicitly assume that SI or AGI will be achieved by 2030. In fact, some experts specifically argue against that possibility. Still, the world of 2030 would look markedly different thanks to the sort of AI advances we are currently seeing.

It would be a world transformed by the seamless integration of AI — a true general purpose technology — into every aspect of life. A few examples:

• Personal AI assistants would manage our daily lives with remarkable efficiency, anticipating needs and handling complex tasks with ease.

• In the workplace, AI collaborators would revolutionize productivity, allowing humans to focus on creative and strategic thinking. 

• The business landscape would undergo a radical shift, with AI-native companies leading the charge in innovation and economic growth. These new titans would reshaped industries, creating novel job categories and driving economic prosperity. (“Over half the Fortune 500 vanished, replaced by a wave of new titans, including an unprecedented number of trillion-dollar enterprises.” - Economist Erik Brynjolfsson.)

• AI-powered diagnostics and personalized treatment plans would make healthcare more preventative and effective while allowing doctors to focus on patient care and empathy.

• The education sector would evolve to incorporate AI companions, providing personalized learning experiences and emotional support to students.

Let’s flesh out one of those examples. Here’s Amy Webb, chief executive, Future Today Institute:

As a business traveler, you have a coming trip from New York City to Munich, and there are no direct flights. Your Personal Large Action Model, or PLAM, would let airline carriers know it wants a deal and allow them to compete for your business. After brokering an itinerary optimized to what you specifically like (preferred seating configuration, just the right amount of time to make your connection, ability to accumulate points), your PLAM completes all of the tedious steps involved in actually purchasing the ticket: signing in to the airline and authenticating, entering your information, selecting which credit card to use, authenticating for payment, submitting payment details, entering the receipt details in your company’s accounting system and posting travel details to your calendar. With enough PLAMs deployed, yours could work to find you the perfect seatmate, too.

Sci-fi writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That is not the AI-enhanced world of 2030. But it is one, I think, where human creativity, empathy, and decision-making would be augmented by technology. So maybe a little magical.

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Q&A

⚡ The potential of geothermal energy: A Quick Q&A with … physicist Rhett Allain

In a rapidly developing world that’s turning its attention toward energy-intensive tech (like AI), we’re going to need a lot more energy to power the future. Fortunately, we have that. In a recent Wired article, Rhett Allain writes if everyone on earth were to switch to 100 percent geothermal energy today, we would have effectively endless energy — at least enough to outlive the sun. I asked Allain a few quick questions ranging from tapping into geothermal energy to applying physics to our favorite science fiction technologies.

Allain is an associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University. He writes for Wired and Medium magazines.

1/ They call geothermal energy “the sun beneath our feet.” How did it get there?

When we say “geothermal energy,” we mean the increased temperature inside of the earth, and so the question is: Why is the inside of the earth warmer than everything else? Why is the inside of the earth so hot? And it really comes down to two things.

The number one thing has to do with the formation of the solar system. We started with this big ball of gas, and it's all gravitationally attracted to each other, and as it starts getting closer and closer together, gravitational collapse, they start having collisions. So things start colliding with the earth, and as the clump of the earth forms, more stuff — more mass — starts colliding with it. The energy from those collisions has to go somewhere, and it causes things to heat up. You could take a metal ball and drop it, and if you drop it a couple of times, you could actually determine that it does indeed warm up, and that's exactly what happens with the earth. So that's the number one reason why the interior of the earth is warm: because of the way it formed.

Now you could say, “Well, it formed five billion years ago, why is it still warm?” It turns out that, in order to radiate energy — which it does, because it's warmer than everything — it radiates energy outward, but it only radiates energy through the surface of the earth, and so the amount of energy depends on the volume of the earth. So we have this classic scaling problem where big things act differently than small things. So as you double the radius of a sphere, you increase the volume by a factor of eight, because it's R cubed, but you increase the surface area by a factor of four, because it's R squared.

So big things have very big volume compared to their surface area, and so they take a long time to radiate all that energy out. Smaller objects like the moon are much colder on the inside because their ratio of surface area to volume is very small.

Now, for the second reason the earth is warm on the inside, it has to do with radioactive decay. There are certain elements in the material of the earth that go through radioactive decay. That produces energy, that's the same thing that we get from nuclear reactors, and that just makes things get warmer too.

So it's those two things, the two primary reasons that the interior of the earth is warm, and then we can just say, “Hey, we're going to use some of that temperature difference between the surface and the interior to power your house or whatever you want to do, or run a podcast or whatever you want to make with that.”

2/ I think the number you came to was 17 billion years of energy. And even if we started using a lot more energy, we're talking several billion years, so I think it's effectively infinite. Why don’t we talk more about geothermal?