"Techno"-optimism? I barely saw a word in Andreesen's essay related to technology. It was all about "tech"--the business of creating monopolistic choke-points. It isn't hard to be a technology optimist and a tech pessimist.
“Scientific progress provides us, collectively, with a range of technological options. The choice between them should be made wisely and democratically, not by the whims of venture capitalists. “. Careful here. There is a lot of space between the proposition “democratic governments should regulate new technologies in the public interest” and “governments should choose which new technologies are deployed”. The argument for gatekeeping regulation is not that governments are better at picking winners, but that nobody else can protect the public interest at all. You can polemically pick examples of governments getting it right on technology (radar, the GSM phone standard), governments getting it wrong (concentrating solar power, fusion) and of successes down to pure luck (the WWW). All parties in this debate need to practice cognitive humility.
One very improbable model is the British Parliament of 1714, which set up the Longitude Prize of up to £20,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards This was not a triumph of democracy – Britain was ruled by a bunch of corrupt and grasping landed oligarchs. They did take the trouble to understand a difficult problem, recognize its importance, and take advice from the best scientists around, Newton and Halley. The oligarchs got several important things right: a very serious financial incentive (£20,000 was a duke’s income), partial awards for partial progress, neutrality as to methods (they did not pick a winner as between astronomy vs. chronometry), and a long-term commitment (an Act of Parliament not a reversible royal decree.) The watchmaker John Harrison cracked the problem in 1759, after decades of effort. He then needed more years of effort to claim the prize. Another nice touch is that the prize was open to foreigners. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler got a modest award for a contribution to the astronomical method.
So let a hundred flowers bloom - in a well-weeded walled garden protected from Peter Rabbit and other predators.
Disagree on CST, barely a cent was spent buy governments on CST when you compare the subsidies to the nuclear power and fossil fuel industries and the learnings have been extremely instructive for the next generation of thermal energy storage technologies about to explode onto grids everywhere and behind industrial meters to deliver process heat at low cost to industrial users. The new thermal storage processes mostly all eschew molten salts due to some of these project, and one company in particular being plague by corrosion issues. Molten tin heated to half the surface temperature of the sun passed trough all carbon pipes and containers is just one of many new thermal storage solutions targeting grid power storage and others like Rondo Energy are targeting process heat with the added use case of conversion back to electrical energy (with all the entropy losses that the 2nd law of thermodynamics dictates).
Nuclear is arguably the much bigger loser given seven superpower nations spent a kings ransom on civilian and military nuclear power for 70 years, partly as a PR exercise for nuclear weapons programmes. Only Fossil fuels have taken more subsidies on average, per year (and for longer than nuclear even) than nuclear power. Renewables and CST haven't even got started and already the subsidies are being scaled back to near zero over the projections to 2030. Nuclear have enjoyed much more per year for nearly 70 years and still their cost curve bent north not south. that's a loser technology, no matter how sophisticated and interesting it is for nuclear scientists and engineers and self-declared "nuclear geeks" and nukebros.
Talking techno-optimism and passing over the significance of solar and batteries seems out of date and blinkered. Forgot to enable automatic updates? The "but renewables don't really work" working assumption is one of the zombie myths that appears to live on because powerful interests doing Doubt, Deny, Delay as climate policy want it to. With increasing desperation.
Something like 3/4 of all new build electricity generation globally is now solar and that has happened within about 1 decade of showing itself to be cost competitive (in some circumstances); a cost tipping point of great significance has been crossed and "some circumstances" is turning into "most circumstances". Costs continue to go down and production ramps up.
For all the effort to blame renewables for the extreme energy prices from the brazen profiteering by gas and coal companies from the Ukraine conflict - whilst insisting renewable energy costs would be economically disastrous the fossil fuel lobbyists rejected reducing their hyper profits to mere extremely good profits to prevent economic disaster - I don't think energy planners or much of the public are fooled. More commitment to renewables, not their abandonment is the consequence of energy market price shocks.
I even suspect the rate of additions of new solar alone may already the growth of anything that exceed anything that has come before. Doing things at scales never done before looks like the default state for a healthy modern economy and it is failure to keep up that gives cause for concern. Even without options like Perovskite that may enable peel and stick solar cheap as chip wrapping solar PV continues getting better and cheaper.
Batteries? One more halving of battery costs will have profound market impacts for energy and transport and the levels of R&D efforts in that area are cause for optimism; even reluctant Toyota has made serious commitments to pure battery electric and, like most EV makers, expect their batteries to last beyond the life of vehicles.
I think any turning to nuclear at large scale - which is extremely unlikely without a sustained failure of renewables to thrive, as well as the collapse of RW Doubt, Deny, Delay to allow the biggest bloc of nuclear support out from behind the Wall of Denial, neither appearing likely any time soon - will still be highly dependent on continuing advances in battery technologies, that will further enable renewables. At the least we will need better batteries for electrifying transport, irrespective of the primary clean energy supply transport uses.
I marked an essay a couple of years ago that read much like Andreesen's manifesto. I gave it a fairly bare Pass, accompanied by comments about the need to walk back the swingeing assertions and provide evidence and arguments in support of the points being asserted.
To each his own. You point to Ancreessen's lemons; I'd have preferred you showed him (or the rest of us) how to make lemonade. For example, don't "enthuse" about nuclear fission, just regulate its safety like any other large industrial activity. Maybe that means zero nuclear power generation facilities in 2050 maybe thousands. We don't have to speculate about that.
thank UNSW and ANU and a handful of scholars and reserach scientists for most of the developments in commercial PV. Ironically John Howard was beaming Australia's lack of skill at commercialising around our inventions when the baby PV industry in Australia needed some priming of the pump to get across the valley of death. Nope, Howard was a hater.
So one of the UNSW masters grads, now known as the Sun King in China returned to his homeland with licences for Australian university IP around PV and started one of the biggest industries the world will ever see. It could have been ours for longer, labour costs are a small factor for semiconductor manufacturing (pollution is another one though, and China turned a blind eye to that)
I identified with some of it. I'm not much good with tech, yet reading something like this offers insights into to stuff I might need to know about and understand, but can't usually get a handle on.
Especially after the Octopus Outrage of yesterday.
his main argument isn't about technology, its about political economy and he's a extreme libertarian neoliberal. he's right about that if you sympathises with a fascist take on political economy.
Andreessen is a coke head surrounded by sycophants that use him. Look at his last big investment that came from a party. He invested $350 million with WeWork founder Adam Neumann, who is worth $2.2 billion after driving WeWork off a cliff.
That coke head invested in a richer billionaire, one who most considered a drugged up con man.
The only thing Andreessen is correct about is nuclear fission power.
I don't think there was much in the way of actual fraud in the WeWork case. Neumann announced that he could make billions of dollars selling ice to Inuits, and people were eager to invest.
Ok. I'm not a lawyer! I watched a doco about it and the implications of the doco were that he appeared to be committing financial fraud on a grand scale. Maybe my memory is not
"Techno"-optimism? I barely saw a word in Andreesen's essay related to technology. It was all about "tech"--the business of creating monopolistic choke-points. It isn't hard to be a technology optimist and a tech pessimist.
This is a neat distinction, which I will definitely use from now on.
“Scientific progress provides us, collectively, with a range of technological options. The choice between them should be made wisely and democratically, not by the whims of venture capitalists. “. Careful here. There is a lot of space between the proposition “democratic governments should regulate new technologies in the public interest” and “governments should choose which new technologies are deployed”. The argument for gatekeeping regulation is not that governments are better at picking winners, but that nobody else can protect the public interest at all. You can polemically pick examples of governments getting it right on technology (radar, the GSM phone standard), governments getting it wrong (concentrating solar power, fusion) and of successes down to pure luck (the WWW). All parties in this debate need to practice cognitive humility.
One very improbable model is the British Parliament of 1714, which set up the Longitude Prize of up to £20,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards This was not a triumph of democracy – Britain was ruled by a bunch of corrupt and grasping landed oligarchs. They did take the trouble to understand a difficult problem, recognize its importance, and take advice from the best scientists around, Newton and Halley. The oligarchs got several important things right: a very serious financial incentive (£20,000 was a duke’s income), partial awards for partial progress, neutrality as to methods (they did not pick a winner as between astronomy vs. chronometry), and a long-term commitment (an Act of Parliament not a reversible royal decree.) The watchmaker John Harrison cracked the problem in 1759, after decades of effort. He then needed more years of effort to claim the prize. Another nice touch is that the prize was open to foreigners. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler got a modest award for a contribution to the astronomical method.
So let a hundred flowers bloom - in a well-weeded walled garden protected from Peter Rabbit and other predators.
(Cross-commented from jq.com.)
Disagree on CST, barely a cent was spent buy governments on CST when you compare the subsidies to the nuclear power and fossil fuel industries and the learnings have been extremely instructive for the next generation of thermal energy storage technologies about to explode onto grids everywhere and behind industrial meters to deliver process heat at low cost to industrial users. The new thermal storage processes mostly all eschew molten salts due to some of these project, and one company in particular being plague by corrosion issues. Molten tin heated to half the surface temperature of the sun passed trough all carbon pipes and containers is just one of many new thermal storage solutions targeting grid power storage and others like Rondo Energy are targeting process heat with the added use case of conversion back to electrical energy (with all the entropy losses that the 2nd law of thermodynamics dictates).
Nuclear is arguably the much bigger loser given seven superpower nations spent a kings ransom on civilian and military nuclear power for 70 years, partly as a PR exercise for nuclear weapons programmes. Only Fossil fuels have taken more subsidies on average, per year (and for longer than nuclear even) than nuclear power. Renewables and CST haven't even got started and already the subsidies are being scaled back to near zero over the projections to 2030. Nuclear have enjoyed much more per year for nearly 70 years and still their cost curve bent north not south. that's a loser technology, no matter how sophisticated and interesting it is for nuclear scientists and engineers and self-declared "nuclear geeks" and nukebros.
Talking techno-optimism and passing over the significance of solar and batteries seems out of date and blinkered. Forgot to enable automatic updates? The "but renewables don't really work" working assumption is one of the zombie myths that appears to live on because powerful interests doing Doubt, Deny, Delay as climate policy want it to. With increasing desperation.
Something like 3/4 of all new build electricity generation globally is now solar and that has happened within about 1 decade of showing itself to be cost competitive (in some circumstances); a cost tipping point of great significance has been crossed and "some circumstances" is turning into "most circumstances". Costs continue to go down and production ramps up.
For all the effort to blame renewables for the extreme energy prices from the brazen profiteering by gas and coal companies from the Ukraine conflict - whilst insisting renewable energy costs would be economically disastrous the fossil fuel lobbyists rejected reducing their hyper profits to mere extremely good profits to prevent economic disaster - I don't think energy planners or much of the public are fooled. More commitment to renewables, not their abandonment is the consequence of energy market price shocks.
I even suspect the rate of additions of new solar alone may already the growth of anything that exceed anything that has come before. Doing things at scales never done before looks like the default state for a healthy modern economy and it is failure to keep up that gives cause for concern. Even without options like Perovskite that may enable peel and stick solar cheap as chip wrapping solar PV continues getting better and cheaper.
Batteries? One more halving of battery costs will have profound market impacts for energy and transport and the levels of R&D efforts in that area are cause for optimism; even reluctant Toyota has made serious commitments to pure battery electric and, like most EV makers, expect their batteries to last beyond the life of vehicles.
I think any turning to nuclear at large scale - which is extremely unlikely without a sustained failure of renewables to thrive, as well as the collapse of RW Doubt, Deny, Delay to allow the biggest bloc of nuclear support out from behind the Wall of Denial, neither appearing likely any time soon - will still be highly dependent on continuing advances in battery technologies, that will further enable renewables. At the least we will need better batteries for electrifying transport, irrespective of the primary clean energy supply transport uses.
I marked an essay a couple of years ago that read much like Andreesen's manifesto. I gave it a fairly bare Pass, accompanied by comments about the need to walk back the swingeing assertions and provide evidence and arguments in support of the points being asserted.
Andreeson was borrowing heavily from nuclear power booster/lobbyist/fantasist/serial-liar Michael D. Shellenberger of Breakthrough Institute infamy.
To each his own. You point to Ancreessen's lemons; I'd have preferred you showed him (or the rest of us) how to make lemonade. For example, don't "enthuse" about nuclear fission, just regulate its safety like any other large industrial activity. Maybe that means zero nuclear power generation facilities in 2050 maybe thousands. We don't have to speculate about that.
interesting point - i never thought about his omission of the success of solar
thank UNSW and ANU and a handful of scholars and reserach scientists for most of the developments in commercial PV. Ironically John Howard was beaming Australia's lack of skill at commercialising around our inventions when the baby PV industry in Australia needed some priming of the pump to get across the valley of death. Nope, Howard was a hater.
So one of the UNSW masters grads, now known as the Sun King in China returned to his homeland with licences for Australian university IP around PV and started one of the biggest industries the world will ever see. It could have been ours for longer, labour costs are a small factor for semiconductor manufacturing (pollution is another one though, and China turned a blind eye to that)
Another good piece commenting on the retro aspects of the manifesto: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-cant-our-tech-billionaires-learn
I identified with some of it. I'm not much good with tech, yet reading something like this offers insights into to stuff I might need to know about and understand, but can't usually get a handle on.
Especially after the Octopus Outrage of yesterday.
So, not an endogenous growth man John?
Andreesen readily admits we can make bad bets, but his main argument about technology is right.
his main argument isn't about technology, its about political economy and he's a extreme libertarian neoliberal. he's right about that if you sympathises with a fascist take on political economy.
So I'm a fash if I don't agree with you? Really?
Andreessen is a coke head surrounded by sycophants that use him. Look at his last big investment that came from a party. He invested $350 million with WeWork founder Adam Neumann, who is worth $2.2 billion after driving WeWork off a cliff.
That coke head invested in a richer billionaire, one who most considered a drugged up con man.
The only thing Andreessen is correct about is nuclear fission power.
did Adam Neumann and his partner never see jail time? how not?
I don't think there was much in the way of actual fraud in the WeWork case. Neumann announced that he could make billions of dollars selling ice to Inuits, and people were eager to invest.
Ok. I'm not a lawyer! I watched a doco about it and the implications of the doco were that he appeared to be committing financial fraud on a grand scale. Maybe my memory is not