We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall] AI: "Nuclear power. Double teachers' salaries. Build more houses. Distribute food more fairly. TRAINS—" — qntmyrrh (@qntm) November 24, 2023 I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure...
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Yes! This has been very frustrating for me as an engineer. I chose this path in order to help solve the big problems of our times. And then realized that we don't need engineers for that, solutions are lying unused on the floor everywhere.
Climate: We know electrification displaces fossil fuel usage. And we know how to produce electricity without emitting CO2 (yes, nuclear, but now increasingly renewables). We don't have one solution to get out of the climate crisis, we have a dozen. I don't have any work there as an engineer. There is a political opposition to overcome, from conservatives mostly but shockingly also from ecologists who refuse to do their homeworks and still claim EVs or nuclear energy is not part of the solution. We could have solved the CO2 emission crisis in the 90s.
Work automation: My main focus as a roboticist. I started doubting my path when I realized that subway trains were not automated 50 years after it became possible (and done in a real world deployment). We could be in a post-labor society today, but the transition period to it is so scary that we refuse to take the jump.
Inequality: Redistribution works. Proven, published, profitable to the majority. Ergo, the minority of rich make sure democracy remains broken.
Fascism: Education works. Population educated about critical thinking and media literacy spread far less misinformation. People who know about the Milgram experiment are less likely to fall for unethical orders. Yet we do not do it.
It is weird. I am a big technophile and hard science lover but if I were back in my 18s I would rather choose either social science or arts as a lever to change things for the best. Engineers have done their work. We will continue to make it easier to bring good to the work but when you see ecologists moan about wind turbines being ugly, EVs being non-ideal and conservatives about coal being manly and chunky vibrating thermal cars being cool, it feels a bit like installing an escalator to the fitness center: the problem is not in the accessibility, it is in the will.
Interested in other peoples take on it btw.
I agree. I've been thinking about this problem for a very long time. Since the mid-1990s. I'm not a fast thinker, or particularly good, so it took me 20 years or so to figure it out. It's really only in the last couple of years that I think I really understand where and how we went wrong.
I gave my first presentation on the greenhouse effect, as it was still called, while I was in high school (graduated 1974). It was reasonably well received and a small group of students started cooperating in letter writing campaigns and trying to speak at council meetings and other venues. We were part of a movement that was starting to make progress.
Meanwhile, those threatened by change, everyone from people fearful for their jobs and their ways of life to captains of industry and politicians were doing their thing. And they were far better organized and far better funded. The end result was that we got Thatcher and Reagan and others like them.
We joined a variety of so-called environmental groups:
By the mid-1990s, modern neoliberal economic and social theories had become so firmly entrenched that even those people claiming to be socially conscious, left wing thinkers were working from the premise that neoliberalism was not mere ideology, but represented a set of ground truth facts about the world equivalent to the law of gravity and the laws of motion. As a result, we had things like Saskatchewan's NDP, arguably the founders of the Canadian public health care system, closing hospitals and clinics, gutting the workforce, and reducing funding. Everyone, it seemed, had fully internalized the "reality" that the stock market and the economy are one and the same.
And here we are, completely incapable of imagining any large scale project that doesn't have it's roots and execution in "market" thinking. Cost/"benefit" analyses that are, in fact, strictly financial profit analyses that exclude any consideration of actual impact on quality of life or externalization of costs.
I think we overestimate the imagination of these "powers that be". I don't think they believe a post-labor society is possible. They think exploitation is a necessary and natural way for society to function. Imagination is on our sides, politics can't be more imaginative than the population that elects them.
I really think we have a crisis of imagination there.
Make it seem possible, make it desirable and most people will claim they have always wanted it. Problem is, most people don't perceive it as possible today, while it is. That's not an engineering, that's PR!
I think a lot of the problem is general apathy. As a software engineer I came into this world with a desire to improve the world through technology, and landed in a world where nobody gives a damn about anything besides getting paid. Though, to be fair, when you're a small cog in a huge company where half of the time you don't even know what's the bigger picture, and the product you're working on isn't yours in any way, it's hard to care, and this carries over easily into everyday life.
Climate: A lot of people don't even think it's man-made, or that it's serious, or that we can do anything about it. (Also I think that it's quite a shame that it's often mentioned as "Save the planet", as if Earth is going to get destroyed, and not "Save humanity")
Work automation: Even software engineers say how automation will "kill jobs", which betrays the worldview in which it's only important to have a job and make money, doesn't matter what your work is.
Inequality: Again, most don't care and believe that poverty is a result of moral failing, or just think that it's not their problem so they have nothing to do with it.
Fascism: Youtube is absolutely brimming with terrible content that leads people down that path because it's so simple and seemingly intuitive, and the prevailing opinion (at least around me) is that everything else is just "feminazi sjw feelings" propaganda. Even "anti-fascism" is often seen in a bad light.
I agree with you completely, the solutions are there, we're just not using them, and I think that the bulk of the problem is that most people have been conditioned to a certain worldview where everything is as it should be, and has been since forever (very often nationalists like to project their modern worldviews into ancient and medieval history), and your only concern is your day-to-day life, to have a job, make money and numb yourself to reality ("have fun") until you die.
We have to get people to believe in societies again, to make small mutual-aid agreements in daily life with our friends and family and make them seem normal and how societies should function. And that's something deeply entrenched in human culture, the "general wisdom" we tell kids and rarely do ourselves: "Be kind, help others". Just today I saw a woman accidentally get her front wheel stuck in a ditch, and she couldn't get out. Almost instantly a couple of complete strangers that were passing by came to help, and they managed to get the car unstuck. As Mencius said, if someone were see a child about to fall into a well, they would immediately and without second thought run to save the child, our default mode is to help those who need it.
and we even have cheap solar and wind, which today beats nuclear in cost.
About that in particular: this is true but mostly because we poured tons of R&D into renewables and we let out skills in nuclear energy slowly decay. Had we invested as much as we should have in the 90s, I am sure nuclear would be much cheaper nowadays. But that point is relatively moot now, I just remain pro-nuclear as in "Don't close our currently built nuclear power plant prematurely! We need them for the transition out of fossil fuels!" more than "build a lot more and quicker!" I think that ship has sailed. That was something to do in the 90-2000 but now we can and probably should switch to renewables for new plants. I am just bitter that we wasted 3 decades and burnt fossil fuel along the way.
According to the IEA even in 2022 we spend more money on R&D on nuclear then on renewables. There are some years before that, where we spend more on renewables, but those are rarer. We really try to make it work, but renewables are just plain the better technology and therefore it won out.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-technology-rdd-budgets-data-explorer
Lumping together fission (the kind we use today to produce energy) and fusion (a kind we have never made a power plant of but have high hopes in the future) is questionable.
You source says in 2022, fission + fusion totaled 4.94 billion in R&D funding. This source says that in 2022, increases in fusion investment raised of more than 2.8 billions. I am willing to bet that the huge majority of these 4.9B of R&D investments are in fusion.
You could say the same about renewables. Solar and wind are very different technologies. At the same time there are a lot of renewables, which have failed so far. I am thinking wave power, concentrated solar, geothermal and I am propably missing a lot of others. We did spend a lot of money at those as well.
Point is we have spend more money on fission R&D then we spend on either solar or wind. If anything we spend too much on it and should have spend more on solar and wind in the 90s.
Solar and wind are working power sources right now, like are several fission technologies. Nuclear fusion has never generated net power anywhere and has never gone out of the lab.
No one who promote nuclear energy right now is promoting nuclear fusion, it is a non-existent tech as of now.
Point is we have spend more money on fission R&D then we spend on either solar or wind.
[citation needed] The article was not showing that at all.
Here you go. It is fission alone in two year pairs and it still gets more funding then wind, solar, hydro and oceanic power combined.:
Quite frankly, I am interested in the actual answer. My gut feeling is that renewables received more R&D than nuclear fission but I would be happy to correct my misconception there. But the IEA numbers are really small. 1.3 billions for 2 years of nuclear R&D? France's CEA, that oversees nuclear R&D (among other things, but mainly) has a 5 billions yearly budget.
R&D of the 21 top leading solar firms has exceeded the billion since 2017: https://www.actu-solaire.fr/a-10681-les-depenses-de-r-d-dans-le-photovoltaique-depuis-cinq-ans.html
The IEA numbers seem biased in that they just include a fistful of countries. They do not include China (that does a ton of solar R&D) and include France (one of the last to do nuclear research).
CEA also hosts ITER and France pays 40% of the costs for that. It might go throu CEA. I honestly do not know.
Oh I know these. On the global scale though, you can make an argument that developing nations like India and China need coal.
What I am shocked more is that ecologists who are fighting on these issues and make it a sizable part of their lives are ignorant of these numbers.
I'm somewhat more optimistic, but some things are easier than others.
The transition to environmentally friendly energy production will happen, because it's cheaper. It ought to have happened sooner, because when accounting for the true costs of fossil fuels and other kinds of pollution it always was cheaper to use renewables. It just didn't appear so.
Similarly, I believe the costs of not doing the right things for work automation, fixing inequality and even misinformation, will eventually prove to be higher than just doing things right. It just doesn't show up as a direct cost at the moment.
The key to understanding the effects and true costs lie in education. Thankfully more people are better educated today than 30-40-50 years ago, so eventually and hopefully we will soon have politicians and other leadership who are also able to see past the direct costs. I don't think it's a gradual change. It'll happen quite fast with the change of a generation. The last dinosaurs and their voters will disappear and younger and better educated leaders with more realistic ideas will prevail.
But no, it's not a job for engineers. Education is the most important part of all this.
