Ezra Klein wants us to think different:
This reflects some atrophy and some fear.
Most liberals can list the programs they want the government to create or expand.
Fewer can name the five technologies they want the government to finance or the five scientific challenges they want to see it mobilize to solve.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) February 14, 2022
Scientific challenges? You're speaking my language! But I assume we're not talking about things like reconciling quantum mechanics and General Relativity. We want to tackle practical scientific challenges. And we want five of them. Okey doke:
- Artificial intelligence. There is, needless to say, boatloads of private money already being spent on this, and money per se is not really the bottleneck. But money makes a difference, and whoever leads in AI will lead the world in 2040. Why not us?
- CRISPR. This is sort of a catchall for medical research, which we already spend tons of money on. But we could spend more!
- Climate change. We should be spending huge sums on every technology that looks even a little promising as a solution to climate change. Carbon capture, solar, geoengineering, biofuels, nuclear (fission and fusion), land use, adaptation, and more.
- Human genomics. Do our genes make us who we are? Do they vary systematically between different groups. Can they turn aging on and off? Which genes affect which human traits?
- Human stress. This is sort of a dark horse, but as societies get richer they also get more stressful. And more stress equals worse decisionmaking. We need more research into how to allow people to live more comfortable lives even as society becomes ever more complex and stress-filled.
Some of these, like climate change and AI, would probably show up on anyone's list. But there are others that are more contestable, including some I probably don't even know about. This is especially true in the social sciences, which most people don't think about when they talk about funding "science." But there's a marriage of social science and medical science that needs to happen if we want to accelerate our understanding of what's needed to live fulfilling lives in the face of constant change. Someone just needs to figure out what that marriage looks like and how to study it.
You're cheating. "climate change" isn't a technology. And then, once we've decided that the private sector is doing a fine job of funding research into AI and CRISPER, we can decide to target various climate change technologies with public money.
And here, it's not clear that we need money so much as mandates. "Green" cement exists and it isn't all that expensive. As does "green" steel.
The kind of thing I'd expect you to advocate for is direct air capture of carbon.
"Green Cement" is not expensive? How very interesting, as a bland assertion. Queerly that is not what we observe in the market, presuming green cement means actual carbon neutral relative to primary production.
Although yes, climate change is not a technology, in fact even his basket of technologies is not per se coherrent as it is quite a pot pourri of different technological areas.
I should rather think that all the technologies really should be climate focus as the No1-10 of problems to address
Technological responses to climate change, which is what Kevin is actually referring to - and he names several specific ones - on the other hand, -are- technology.
To Kevin, climate change is a technology. Whichever allows him to continue to drive atriums California in an ICE vehicle on his photo jaunts, and to het off to other continents on a whim.
As Kevin says, and as I and others have been advocating for years, if global warming is going to be reduced there will have to be big technological advances, and soon. This is one thing we should be spending hundreds of billions if not trillions on instead of the military. Most of the other things are not really significant in comparison - AI, human genomics and stress are not urgent matters. The problem with responding to climate change is not lack of imagination, it is political opposition for various reasons.
What could be a very urgent matter is preparing for another pandemic, or maybe just the continuation of this one. The response has to be prepared in advance and this will take spending by government because private enterprise does not act unless they see profit in the immediate future. We don't leave it up to the last minute to prepare for war - we spend enormous amounts to be ready in case we are attacked or we pretend that someone (like Iraq) is about to attack us. Of course bringing the entire health-care system up to world standards would be very useful, both in terms of improved health and saving money
Strongly endorse this. The disruptions to the global economy from climate change and Covid-19 far exceed the localized impact of this or that country leading in some specialized area; technology diffuses rapidly, anyway.
Hmmm. I'd say fusion power would be a good one. Yes I know all of the jokes about "it's been twenty years away for the last sixty years", but there really has been progress made, the advent of things like practical high-temperature superconductors are offering the possibility of scaling down the reactors into the "economically feasible to build and operate range" and if it works the payoff would be enormous.
Fusion will never arrive in time to help with climate change, whatever breakthrough happens.
In part, at least, because the issue isn't one of technology--it's of immediate price and planning horizons. An electricity grid that swapped out fossil for solar-plus-batteries would be short term ~2x (or less) expensive than keeping the fossil plants online. But that fossil electricity system causes climate change, asthma, aggravates heart conditions, poisons drinking water, etc., and is accordingly far more expensive overall. Yet we don't switch (or aren't switching nearly fast enough).
The point is that fusion as a zero-emission electricity tech won't save us from climate change, unless it's miraculously way cheaper to install and operate than burning fracked gas is (which it undoubtedly won't be). By all means, keep working on fusion, but please in the meantime let's install the zero-emission electricity tech we already have.
Fusion is a game-changer. It decouples power consumption with CO2 emissions. The sooner it comes, the faster we hit zero CO2 even as the global economy grows.
We already have things that enable power consumption with zero CO2 emissions--solar, wind (including offshore wind), plus nukes and hydro. Are they as cheap and easy to build and operate as existing fossil? Maybe not (although in many cases actually yes), but they are certainly a hell of a lot easier to build and operate than fusion, which thus far only exists in science fiction.
Either you hope for fusion power will _both_ actually exist pretty soon here AND be cheaper than, say, gas combined cycle (i.e., <~$40/MWh), or you should advocate for zero-carbon electricity implementation now.
Fission also "decouples power consumption with CO2 emissions", and we already know how to do fission.
Increased computing power might provide better modeling (and control) of fusion reactors. "Unstable" fighter aircraft can now be flown because computers respond quickly to alter thrust and flight control surfaces.
Materials science. Stronger, more durable materials such as composites reduce the extraction of metal ores, with potential benefits for the environment. Also better enables developing economies to advance without massive expansion of extractive industries.
Less damaging "plastics." Ways to deal with the megatons of plastics already crapping up the environment. Particularly in the oceans, where it's been "out of sight, out of mind" for the last several decades, except to the inhabitants.
Cleaning out LEO (Low Earth Orbit) of debris from 70-odd years of space missions and other orbital junk.
Curing cancer? Tens of billions a year keep getting dumped into that black hole. Time to go all out on prevention -- and that's not just a "personal responsibility" to eat right and exercise. Making living areas safe, even for non-rich people, needs to be a priority.
Less damaging also through better recycling of plastics; more recyclable/compostable plastics; non-petroleum feedstocks.
"Preventing" cancer is a pipe dream unless you can tell me exactly which environmental trigger is the cause for every cancer.
Sharks sure seem to be able to prevent cancer. And other mammals, like whales, elephants, and naked mole rats, are pretty cancer-proof, too. So maybe it's less of a pipe dream than you think.
You think one thing "causes" every cancer? There are lots of things we know of that increase the likelihood of various types of cancers; look at "Cancer Alley" around NOLA and various other Superfund sites.
Maybe I should have just used the shorthand "Environmental Justice" phrase.
New lightweight material is stronger than steel,
https://news.mit.edu/2022/polymer-lightweight-material-2d-0202
It uses an aramid monomer, similar (same???) to the stuff used to make Kevlar.
But beware science by press release--even if the work has been published.
Synthesizing liquid fuel from CO2 and hydrogen. (I don't know how realistic this is, but if you could do it, you could theoretically replace mined/drilled hydrocarbons entirely, even for airplanes).
Plus they're studying it in China https://www.pnas.org/content/116/26/12654#:~:text=Synthesis%20of%20liquid%20fuels%20(C,%E2%80%93Tropsch%20synthesis%20(FTS).
This is realistic, though whether it is achievable or not in the medium term, I don't know. My cousin works in this field. Here's a random research paper I found on the topic to prove you didn't just make this up:
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/26/12654
It's not, it takes so much more energy to do.
Indeed! This is what people tend to forget, or gloss over, or not understand in the first place. Oil is useful for two reasons: (1) it's a reasonably energy-dense, reasonably stable, reasonably easy to engineer store of energy, and (2) natural processes already made a colossal amount of it for us.
We can make other reasonably energy dense stores of energy (batteries, hydrogen, etc.), but they don't already exist for us. We have to gather the energy to store in them. So, figuring out a way to make our own oil solves a storage and usage problem, but it doesn't solve the energy source problem. Some people argue that we can just build lots of solar farms to power machines to make synthetic liquid fuel, to which I say, why not skip the middle man and just use the solar to power what we want in the first place?
"why not skip the middle man and just use the solar to power what we want in the first place?"
Because liquid fuels are easy to store and transport compared to batteries.
Are they, though? What's all-in price per kwh of gasoline synthesized out of CO2 and I guess hydrogen hydrolyzed off of water? Keep in mind, to close the carbon cycle, you'd have to centrifuge the CO2 out of ambient air, which ain't easy. Given that electricity costs ~$0.10/kwh, even with electric drivetrains being somewhat more expensive on the front end (although significantly cheaper lifecycle because they have so many fewer moving parts to maintain and replace), electric seems much cheaper to me than (as of yet nonexistent) synthetic liquid fuels tech.
I'm not saying that there are no applications--airplanes seem like something pretty hard to electrify, and ships can't recharge batteries at sea--but why build out a vast synthetic fuels delivery infrastructure when we can just use the already-existing electric grid to power car batteries?
Ships and airplanes can use liquid hydrogen as fuel. In the case of airplanes, the LH would be burned in jet engines (it would only take slight modification of current engines), and it might well be more cost effective to make synthetic kerosene because of fuel tank issues.
Handling and storing LH is scale sensitive; the bigger the tanks the better, so ships using LH to supply fuel cells makes very good sense as a replacement for oil burners. Fuel cells are efficient but heavy, which is why they make sense for ships but not for airplanes; airplanes are very weight sensitive, which ships are not. Fuel cells also want straight hydrogen, so synthetic diesel would not be a good answer.
Like everyone else has observed, the thermodynamics stink. And you end up with just another fossil fuel, having cracked natural gas (or similar) to make the hydrogen in the first place.
"Blue hydrogen". Obtained from cracking natural gas. The H2 generated yields less energy than the original methane, and takes even more energy to produce. The governor in New Mexico, ordinarily a smart and level-headed person, is pushing this, goaded by the oil'n'gas industry which is really, and too, big in the state. But as energy goes, the process is a big loser. The only value of H2 is as a chemical feedstock for production of synthetic fertilizers and the like.
So your process would take apart methane to form H2, then combine the H2 with CO2 to get methane back?? How does that make any sense?
Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels would only make sense if electrolytic hydrogen was used. Even then, they would only be useful in special cases where a fuel with high energy density is needed and liquid or compressed hydrogen would not be practical.
Stress,
https://i.redd.it/rxv8iearln141.png
Social conservatives, already isolated, become self-conscious that everyone else may not be doing the same kind of nothing that they're doing and so their nothing becomes meaningless, and then they feel threatened.
The US relies on private sector funding in research more than it should, especially when China will just shovel endless amounts in every direction, and with the full power of their state intelligence services to provide raw data.
We need to stop shooting ourselves in the head over a feeble principle that only ever existed to gratify the corrupt and the thoughtless.
I'd vote for more research on autonomous robots intended for deep space work, but maybe that's because I'm an SF nerd. I feel like progress in this areas will be the real proof that we are making progress toward becoming a space-faring civilization. Like, say, robots that can mine hydrogen from asteroids or comets and then bring it places where it might be useful. Or even better, robots that can mine iron or some other metal in deep space and refine it. Yes that will be hard, but it will be a lot cooler than sending a bunch of billionaires on a glorified rollercoaster ride.
Robots like that could replace humans in mines and other hazardous circumstances on Earth as well.
Robots like that could replace humans, period.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to it. "They're a better, cleaner breed than us." -- roboticist Dr. Susan Calvin
"But money makes a difference, and whoever leads in AI will lead the world in 2040."
So now it's 18 years away? Wasn't what Kevin vaguely refers to as "true" AI only 10 years away back in 2010? Or am I thinking of self-driving cars?
You're thinking autonomous cars, yes, and we have them in limited use today.
We've had them in limited user for at least 5 years the same way we've had jet packs in limited use since at least the 1960s. When people talk autonomous cars, limited use is not what they have in mind.
We need something that can pull methane and carbon out of the atmosphere.
I'm assuming it would have to be some kind of particle that can be sprayed from planes, and it would have to be something than can be implemented essentially immediately.
Aside from that we're doomed. Where will the new shoreline of Hudson Bay be? Maybe a sound investment.
Batteries. Any other not physically impossible means of storing energy. Cat-cracking levels of waste handling (i.e. heat it and break it down to atoms or at least very small molecules). Plastics digestion (both large scale and microplastics). Probably more cancer treatments.
Also, the Epstein drive.
But mostly, I don't want government investing in much research at this point beyond what already happens. I want government (the US government in particular) to spend crazy levels of money on "infrastructure" to make the future-that-is-already-here more widespread. Power grid, internet, health care, housing, mass transit ... spend, baby spend!
"Also, the Epstein drive."
More for ge gut de tumang? Sabaka inyalowda!
Sa-sa!
Supply chain tracking for tariffs instead of arbitrary industry/nationality.
Reusable spacecraft
Asteroid mining
Energy storage - build it. Just build it.
Rechargeable battery standardization that exceed alkaline.
I vote for the flux capacitor.
I’d go back in time and kick Donald Trump’s father in the balls several times really really hard the day before he conceived Donald.
You know that's what actually happened.
Thanks a heap!
Honestly, I thought it would make him fail to conceive! Sorry.
Kevin says we need to spend boatloads of money on climate change. But whose money? "Spend" implies government (taxpayer) money, but we don't actually need to spend a dime of federal money. Put a rising tax on carbon so that the fossil fuel companies will have to pay, and then route those billions to U.S. citizens equally per capita so that two-thirds of us will actually come out ahead (because the carbon footprints of the ultra-wealthy and big fossil fuel shareholders are so incredibly huge, they will end up picking up most of the tab).
Ezra is focusing on taking animals out of food production, increasing efficiency and ending the most cruel industry.
It's the year 2022.
When do we start processing Boomers into food?
Deal effectively with climate change and you'd reduce a helluva lot of stress.
Ezra Klein doesn't want liberals to think different, he wants us to think like him and he has for a long, long time. Ask Matt Yglesias.
1. Fusion. Over a decade the US spent less on fusion than Exxon spent on R&D in a single year. You can speed up development and widen the field of expertise by spending hundreds of billions. Fusion will be the dominant fuel of the future, the question is, how much can we speed up its delivery?
2. Battery Storage. No matter the energy technology, the world's transition away from fossil fuels will be delayed by a lack of cheap, useful battery storage.
3. Quantum Computing. Silicon (and any other physical semiconductor material) has already hit a wall. At 5nm, quantum effects are observed, requiring correction. Within a decade, either we're in that next computing wave or we're behind it. We're on the edge of falling behind with China now moving ahead of us.
4. Advanced Propulsion Systems. Our species will never reach beyond our solar system without it.
5. Lab Meat. We can't get away from climate change if we don't change our diet, and if we can't change our diet, we have to change how we grow our meats. As a fringe benefit, lab-grown meat would also allow a significantly higher quality of life and length of missions away from Earth.
You can't build a human genomics reference guide for the average CRISPR user without AI operating on top of Quantum Computing. At current estimates, there are 100K protein-coded genes in humans, each of which are expressed in combination with other genes, and are more than just on/off switched. The only way to ethically build this human genomics reference guide is to accumulate the DNA of hundreds of millions of individuals, tagged with characteristics and medical profiles, then build an AI subsystem to analyze and correlate each gene and protein. IOW, you're trying to put the cart before the horse.
Lab grown meat, and indoor farming generally, is absolutely something we should invest in massively.
It will use less water, less energy, occupy less space and can be sited anywhere.
Indoor farming wastes photons. Converting sunshine to electricity to light loses energy at every step. Fine for niche products or fresh veggies in winter for those willing to pay the price.
Best bet--solar panels over fields of tomatoes and peppers, i.e. plants that prefer indirect light.
Another thing we can flood with money!
Energy storage please.
Tear down the lines.
Unleash the renewables.
Neal Stephenson in "Termination Shock" has a Texas billionaire shooting self-propelled SO2 emitting missiles into the stratosphere.
Not a long-term solution to climate change.
Does not help with ocean acidification.
May cause side effects for global weather patterns.
3. What we need is less subsidy on the investment side (there's plenty of investment capital), and more contracts. The US government ought to approach the companies trying large scale air capture, and offer them a contract to capture and either store (or convert into carbon-neutral fuel) 50 million tons of carbon dioxide at whatever target price point they're aiming for in terms of sustainable sales.
Nuclear power might be hopeless in the teeth of rapid cost drops for solar, wind, and batteries, but some regulatory reform would help. Replace the ALARA standard for radiation mitigation with a specific threshold, allow for a particular plant design to be built by-right once it has been approved for safety, etc.
One thing I'd add to this would be
6. Anti-Aging. We have rapidly falling population growth rates, and eventually outside of pockets of smaller populations it seems like the overall fertility rate for humanity is going to drop below the replacement rate of 2.1. That plus disease prevention means we ought to be put a TON more funding and research into anti-aging medicine.
Not necessarily just "Hey, we can live to 500 now!" stuff, but more importantly "You feel like you're 30 years old even though you're 80" type of stuff.
Not really worried about pop growth. Seems most growth occurred when societies reached a certain level of healthcare and agriculture development.
A spike, as the culture of having children in a high mortality environment became much improved. Then as the societies grew into "first world" status, birth rates dropped society culturally shifted away from having as many kids.
Not sure there's a need for perpetual growth, than maintaining within a range. No need to restrict or push birthrates.
I wouldn't put AI in my top 10. Mostly I just think there are far more pressing issues than getting a better Alexa interaction (and I know it would be more interesting than that, but I don't think autonomous vehicles should be anywhere close to the top 10 either).
A bit more subtly I'm not sure what AI research means. It is not just Kevin's penchant for never coming close to defining what he considers AI, but I'm not sure what AI research even looks like. I studied this in graduate school in the early nineties, but when I graduated it just wasn't a good field to go into job wise, so I lost track of it. I got back into it around 5 years ago and assumed that so much had changed that everything I learned then would be irrelevant. Much to my surprise nothing much had changed. For the most part the same ML algorithms I learned were still the same ones in use today. The biggest "breakthroughs" were increased compute power, which we can thank the gaming and film industries for (if you don't know the same GPUs that power CGI in film and games power ML training algorithms), and increased access to training data, which we can thank the internet for.
So, other than just doing more of it, it's just not clear what fundamental breakthroughs there will be in AI directly and not just increased compute capabilities more broadly. A theoretical quantum computer, for example, that is many orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we have today would be a game changer, but that isn't specifically related to AI.
I don't buy the assertion that as societies get richer they get more stressful. Where's the evidence behind that? Even if you could measure historic stress as a hypothetical/perfect in-their-shoes exercise, I still just don't buy it. There's nothing particularly unique about human social dynamics/society today, aside from the technology. I'd expect the magnitude of various stress metrics to be basically the same. Different stressors, sure.
More advanced societies are not inherently more stressful, but rapidly advancing societies are. Dealing with rapid change is DIFFICULT for many, if not most, people. Alvin Toffler called it "Future Shock" and I believe it's responsible for much of modern conservatism, including Islamic fundamentalism.
If you're serious about stress (it ought to be #1), the answer is education, but a completely different kind of education, transformatively beyond anything that has yet been attempted or envisioned. This is because the stressor that dwarfs all others is cognitive dissonance.
And that is where technology comes back in. The tragedy of humanity is that we have the intellectual capacity to invent toys but absolutely no emotional capacity to comprehend the implications of possessing them or the consequences of using them. The most important examples are obvious, starting with the steam engine.
Conservatives love stress and anxiety, it's who they are.
Destroying capitalism will depopulate the world. Mass famine. War as a result. The debt based ponzi has created the massive immigration and loss of communal self. Everything is a commodity.
A bullet that puts out a spray of sulfuric acid as it hits it's target.
For duck hunting.
I don't think this is exactly the answer Klein asks for. He asks for two lists:
1. Five technologies (not fields of research in a generalized way, i.e. not "climate change" but e.g. carbon capture, nuclear fusion etc.). Kevin is avoiding Klein's call to prioritize. This is an engineering category.
2. Five scientific challenges (not technological challenges), not technologies. This is a scientific or research category.
Actually I doubt Klein himself is well positioned to give those 10 answers intelligently. It would require a depth of knowledge that journalists, especially pundit style journalists, rarely acquire (other than in politics).
Here my partial attempt on the first list (all the caveats that apply to Klein apply to me as well so I won't even try the second "science" list):
A1: An improved and fortified electric grid as a precondition of any climate change measure we want to adopt.
A2: High speed rail. I know this is not a new technology any more; outside the US it is routine. But it is time that we join the rest of the world on this (for climate reasons among others).
A3: An advanced playbook for fast vaccine development and distribution, building on and improving from "operation warp speed". The next dangerous virus may be just around the corner. And it may be more dangerous than COVID.
A4: Technologies to supply a growing population with enough water in the context of worsening droughts (a little parochial this one but urgent nonetheless).
A5: Technologies to make agriculture more environmentally safe without sacrificing yields.