Comment by llsf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by llsf | Hacker News Reader

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Energy is the fuel for machines. And machines build more and faster than humans. To increase productivity, we need more machines, and so more energy.

If energy was 10 times cheaper than currently and still available (no shortage) then we would automate more tasks and increase the global productivity. We could mine more, build more, to train/run more LLMs.

GDP is tied to energy price and availability. It is likely the main reason why US enjoyed a growing economy thanks to its free oil reserves (and the reason why Texas alone is the 8th economy in the world). Now one could argue that after pumping oil for a century now, it might not be as cheap or plentiful to extract in the future, and we better be prepared for it.

It is all about energy. No energy, and we will reduce to human/manual or animal (bring back the horses!) labor. Productivity will decrease significantly.

One issue I have with the paper, is that it equates energy and electricity. My favorite chart about US energy: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...

shows that in 2022, electricity was just 13.3 Quads of the 76.07 Quads of the energy consumed in US by residential, commercial, industrial and transportation. So unless US "electrify" the whole economy having more electricity would only help a small part of the economy.

> Energy is the fuel for machines. And machines build more and faster than humans

Sure.

> To increase productivity, we need more machines,

That is just one way to increase productivity. You can also make more efficient machines, come up with more efficient production processes, find alternatives to existing products that are more useful for a given task per quantity, and similar kinds of concepts. This is the point GP was making (there are more ways production changes than increasing energy used), not that energy is completely unrelated to production as a whole.

At any given efficiency, more energy means more productivity (in the same way: at any given amount of energy production, more efficiency means more productivity). Yes, we should be increasing efficiency where reasonable, but we should also be increasing energy production.

There is a reason that the Kardashev scale is about energy utilization.

Correct, we can innovate and make the "transformer" (i.e. machines) more efficient (i.e. use less energy for same output). But the thing is, if energy was cheaper and more available we would just produce more.

The reason why now we most enjoy some time off (weekend, vacation, retirement) is thank to the machines that can produce more with less humans. Now humans mostly drive the machines.

I guess the ultimate extreme evolution would be machine driving machines, so humans could be out of the loop, except for the initial input goal. And machine would extract/mine/recycle, transform, transport, deliver everything we ever need. It would be one big machine (with lots of energy) extracting (and hopefully recycling) earth elements to satisfy humans.

> "It would be one big machine (with lots of energy) extracting (and hopefully recycling) earth elements to satisfy humans."

See also that machine in fiction, breaking down: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" from 1909, available free at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72890/pg72890-images.ht...

Given that electrification would help the 67.3 Quads of energy wasted, primarily by fossil fuel systems, that your diagram shows, not electrifying would be incredibly dumb.

A graph of major economies percentage of electricity in final energy:

https://preview.redd.it/china-is-electrifying-far-faster-tha...

I agree that huge benefits would come from electrification of residential and commercial (e.g. heat pump, induction stove, etc.), industrial (starting with the dozen of blast furnaces in US), and transportation (e.g. trains, trucks... more technologically difficult for ships and planes).

Electric "transformers" (aka machines) are more efficient in general than their fossil fuel counterparts (less heat).

Electrification (with matching electricity production) is a matter of national security. If/when fossil fuel would become either more scarce or more expensive (or both), all hell will break loose. There would be conflicts and chaos.

China is planning for long term, and putting resources in to it.

Unfortunately, the US democracy is not suitable for long term planning (while politicians can have very long terms, they are always busy planning for their re-election, not planning long term for the country). Who would have the fortitude to plan for a 10, 20, 50 years time horizon ?

US should plan for electrification (production + grid) and give a strong signal to the industry so the industry can plan ahead (e.g. GE,etc. can prepare production from gas stove to electric stoves, car manufacturers and dealers to electric vehicles, logistic companies to be ready to use electric trucks and trains, etc.), and no flip-flopping signals like we get now. The industry needs to feel confident that their investments would hold decades from now.

All this would takes years, and cost a lot. And the benefits would only be visible decades from now (no incentive for politicians). But at the time, any nation still dependent on fossil fuel, would be crushed.

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