Explaining Irrational Tech Pessimism

Quote of the Issue

“Productivity grew 1.3% over the last year and has grown at an annualized rate of 1.4% since the end of 2019, in line with the pre-pandemic trend. Productivity growth appeared strong early in the pandemic and weak more recently, but this was partly due to a compositional effect caused by low-productivity service workers first being displaced and then being brought back. We expect artificial intelligence to provide a large boost to US productivity growth eventually, though the timeline is uncertain.” – David Mericle, Goldman Sachs, August 7, 2023

Room Temperature Superconductor Update:

The Essay

☹ Explaining irrational tech pessimism

A brief recap: If LK-99, the tantalizing material created by South Korean researchers that might be a superconductor able to carry electricity at room temperatures with zero resistance, proves to be legit, it would be a scientific breakthrough and general-purpose technology of civilizational impact. Science fiction becomes fact. We could start looking at all those clean, green 1960s dreams as a checklist for what we could do next: nuclear fusion, space colonies, undersea cities, flying cars. If not a Star Trek future, something pretty darn close.

Yet despite all that potential, the only folks I see really excited are people like me: pro-progress, accelerationist, “bring on cool-sh-t futurism, ASAP.”

It's kind of instructive that I don't think I've seen a single climate activist group show any interest in LK-99. pic.twitter.com/YAeJeXFxGs

— James Clark 📈📉¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (@mr_james_c) August 6, 2023

Of course, one could argue that LK-99 obsessives like myself have been intemperate in our enthusiasm. There’s been nothing yet like a conclusive replication of the South Korean discovery, a lack of hard evidence reflected in the “not impossible but more unlikely than not” status of the LK-99 in various prediction markets (as seen above). Perhaps the silence of folks who talk most about a sustainable, zero-carbon future — something a real-deal LK-99 would enable — reflects their more sober judgment.

But I don’t think that’s the entire story here.

As we await for (hopefully) clear and conclusive replication of LK-99 and its mind-blowing superconductor properties, we just got an important scientific confirmation of a different kind. As reported by the Financial Times:

US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power. … Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results.

Score another one for star power. Back in December after the first ignition, US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm described the achievement as “one of the most impressive science feats of the 21st century.” That’s a correct assessment, especially given the civilizational impact of being able to generate nearly infinite, pollution-free energy anywhere — a power source that’s 10 million times more energetic, kilogram for kilogram, than coal — on Earth or across the Solar System. If that milestone were achieved, the cynical scoffing at humanity someday becoming a multiplanetary species would stop.

Yet after that December fusion announcement, we saw a similar strange silence as after the recent LK-99 announcement. On the same day as the FT broke the story, one degrowth advocate tweeted this:

I can think of three explanations for hand-waving away both bits of promising nuclear fusion news:

• Intellectual laziness. In the 1920s, British astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington suggested the fusion of hydrogen into helium as the stellar energy mechanism. As Eddington observed, “If, indeed, the sub-atomic energy in the stars is being freely used to maintain their great furnaces, it seems to bring a little nearer to fulfillment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race – or for its suicide.” By the 1950s, scientists started seriously exploring how to advance from nuclear fission to fusion as the energy source of the future. The failure, so far, to do so has led to the hoary joke that fusion is 30 years away and always will be. But that reflexive cynicism ignores the import of the Lawrence Livermore achievement, as well as other recent advancements in the field, such as the powerful magnets used to compress and heat plasma developed by startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems. These advances have not only excited scientists but also investors.
• Short-sightedness. Many skeptics make the point that the method employed at Lawrence Livermore, firing lots of lasers at a fuel pellet, is unlikely to lead to a commercial fusion reactor — unlike the magnetic confinement method used by many startups that has yet to achieve net-energy fusion gain. In my December 2022 podcast chat with Arthur Turrell, the plasma physicist and author of 2021‘s excellent and must-read The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet made a great point on this issue:
  • We, today, don’t know what version of fusion, what way of doing fusion is going to ultimately be the one that is the most economical and the most useful for society. But what I think this result will do is have a huge psychological effect because throughout fusion’s history, researchers have said, “Hey, I’d really like to, you know, build a reactor, a prototype reactor.” And funders have quite reasonably said, “We don’t even know if the principle works. Go off and show us that it can produce, in principle, more energy out than is put in.” And of course, fusion research has been trying to do that since the 1950s. Now we finally and absolutely have proof of that. I think that it’s going to crowd in innovation, interest, and investment in all types of fusion because even though this approach got to that milestone first, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is going be the most economical or the best in the long run.
• Ideology. I think this is what the (non)reactions to the possible superconductor breakthrough and to the actual nuclear fusion breakthrough have in common — and, to some extent, generative AI where the reactions have been about risk rather than reward. For some environmentalists, particularly where they crossover with degrowth activists, the problem isn’t how to fuel more economic growth in an ecologically sustainable way, it’s the growth and consumption itself. That, either because (a) they think we’ll use up all of the resources on Spaceship Earth … (b) they don’t like the role of market capitalism in the process … or (c) they have a cultural or aesthetic personal preference for a certain type of “small is beautiful” future that rejects globalized society at scale and yearn for a localized, artisanal economy powered by solar and wind to displace “capital-intensive, polluting, centralized, mass-production technology,” writes historian Thomas P. Hughes in American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Nuclear fission/fusion and room-temp superconductors would counter that decades-old desire stemming from the 1960s emergence of “limits to growth” environmentalism. In short, a reaction to big technological advances is a great litmus if you want a world of mass abundance or one of managed scarcity.

If we get an LK-99 replication or a net-energy fusion reaction from one of the many startups — or even weak artificial general intelligence from Google or OpenAI or some other entity — my theory about ideology (perhaps partially rooted in risk aversion or other behavioral quirks) will get a compelling test.

Micro Reads

▶ Will a New Superconductor Change the World? Editors, Bloomberg | LK-99 may come to nothing. Sometimes things that seem too good to be true are just that. Such is the nature of scientific progress: trials and errors, triumphs and setbacks. It’s a process that rewards risk, ambition and — every once in a while — off-the-wall optimism. In this case, it may well change the world as we know it.

▶ Why it’s so hard to tell if LK-99 is a room-temperature superconductor – Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, New Scientist |

▶ Nuclear fusion breakthrough: Is cheap, clean energy finally here? – Matthew Sparkes, New Scientist |

▶ SpaceX conducts a mostly successful test of its Super Heavy booster – Eric Berger, Ars Technica |

▶ A Zoom Call, Fake Names and an A.I. Presentation Gone Awry – Erin Griffith, NYT |

▶ Welcome to a world where AI can value your home – Carlo Ratti, FT Opinion |

▶ Why ChatGPT Is Getting Dumber at Basic Math – Josh Zumbrun, WSJ |

▶ Asteroid-Spotting Software Could Help Save the World – Robin George Andrews, NYT |

▶ Silicon innovation is colliding with jurisdictional steel – Will Rinehart, The Exformation |

▶ ‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unintended test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth – Paul Voosen, Science |

▶ New technologies, automation, and productivity across US firms – Daron Acemoglu and others, VoxEU |

▶ Big Tech Rebounds and Preps for Transformative A.I. Investments – Trip Mickle, NYT |

▶ Converting Brown Offices to Green Apartments – Arpit Gupta, Candy Martinez & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, NBER |

▶ Accelerating Innovation Ecosystems: The Promise and Challenges of Regional Innovation Engines – Jorge Guzman, Fiona Murray, Scott Stern & Heidi L. Williams, NBER |