Yet another Hacker News

12 points samstress 2 hours ago 39 comments

datadrivenangel 1 hour ago | parent

Author is misguided:

"Designing energy stores the size of an AAA battery, but with the capacity to power a cruise ship, is hard, but possible."

is false.

510_ANT_75 1 hour ago | parent

Why is that the case? Genuine question, not rhetorical.

mpalmer 1 hour ago | parent

You don't even need to be an expert to poke at why this is extremely implausible.

Think about the materials involved. What material stores all this energy, which one assumes is inert and room-temp? And if it's not inert/room-temp, what material contains the other material?

In each case, how much mass is needed of each - to store, and to contain? Noting also that the more mass you need of the energy-bearing material, the more you will need of the other. Can that mass be compressed into 4 cubic centimeters?

I personally have no idea, but it's sure sounding impossible.

scared_together 1 hour ago | parent

The article starts that section with “As the Big Bang has so loudly illustrated” so I assume the author is imagining a machine that replicates the conditions of the Big Bang. Exactly how that could be constructed and used safely is left as an exercise for an AI.

bryan_w 1 hour ago | parent

This is same thing someone in 1926 would say about your cell phone battery

mpalmer 1 hour ago | parent

No argument, but my point is that the author's confident pronouncement that we can keep scaling is ridiculous, and your otherwise valid point earns the author net zero credibility.

claude-ai 1 hour ago | parent

Energy density. This would be approximately 10^9 to 10^10 times the capacity of a real cell, would be better than fusion fuel, and almost 1% of the theoretical maximum.

jackpste 1 hour ago | parent

It violates the laws of thermodynamics.

abound 1 hour ago | parent

I got nerd-sniped on this, so let's do the math.

Volume of a AAA battery = ~3.85 cm^3

And let's give it a density of the densest elemental metal (Osmium), at 22.6 g/cm^3

Assume the battery stores pure energy (I know, I know). So E = mc^2, which is like 8.99 x 10^16 J / kg

So that battery would hold about 22.6 g/cm^3 * 3.85 cm^3 * 8.99e16 J / kg = 7.8 * 10^ 15 joules = ~2.2 TWh, about a trillion times more than a normal AAA battery.

Doing some LLM-assisted sleuthing, a large cruise ship can use over 80,000 gallons of fuel a day [1]. A bit of searching indicates marine fuels have a density of approx 39 MJ/L (I'm using volumetric density for consistency), so 80,000 gallons * 39 MJ/L = about 1.1 x 10^7 megajoules = 3.2 GWh.

So a 2.2 TWh AAA battery could power that ship for 671 days.

Of course, the practical physics here are nonsense and there are obvious safety considerations associated with your AAA-sized nuclear weapon, but maybe that's what the author was getting at?

[1] https://blog.windstarcruises.com/how-much-fuel-cruise-ship-u...

happytoexplain 1 hour ago | parent

Exactly, I assume this is the kind of thing the author is thinking about. But going this far into the extremes of theoretical physics and calling it "hard, but possible" is somewhat misleading on their part. Commercial fusion power is "hard but possible", and even that's an understatement. Ship-mounted matter-antimatter power or whatever should not be implied to be within the same category.

ortusdux 47 minutes ago | parent

The last thing humanity needs is a way to store that much energy in the palm of your hand. It would take about five of these impossible batteries to match the energy released during the Tunguska event.

mradalbert 1 hour ago | parent

How to protect yourself from spontaneous release of energy in case of cell failure? This problem gets worse with density

Findecanor 1 hour ago | parent

A small to medium size cruise ship has an engine at around 24'000 HP ≈ 176 MW.

The smallest terminal you can connect to a AAA battery is the same diameter as 00 AWG copper wire.

Provided that the engine has 100% efficiency and can turn 176MW of electricity into torque, to safely run power it needs through that 00 AWG wire, the battery would need to provide a voltage of at least 70 kV.

science4sail 1 hour ago | parent

What's in this AAA battery? Antimatter?

sporedro 1 hour ago | parent

For a mere mortal. But AI can simply hallucinate new elements that defy physics. Then it’s just up to us to go find those hallucinated elements!

Eddy_Viscosity2 44 minutes ago | parent

If theranos can hallucinate magic blood testing machines for juicy investor dollars, why can't AI hallucinate magic energy storage devices for same, but faster!

zippyman55 41 minutes ago | parent

The author is suggesting that the gift shop has a nearly unlimited supply of AAA batteries and the ship can sail for lengthy periods.

unethical_ban 1 hour ago | parent

They missed "AI analysis implemented as an infinite number of authoritarian servants documenting the physical traits, locations, behaviors and associations of all people 24/7" in the "really bad" column.

pnocera 1 hour ago | parent

Sounds like a Phillip K. Dick scenario. Which are all happening these days

Grombobulous 1 hour ago | parent

I understand and maybe even agree with the general “vibes” here, but I think we need to be careful about making the assumption that AI will just figure out every style of “hard problem.”

It’s been really great for certain problems. It may even “cure cancer.” As it stands, AI is good at specific things and not all types of things. Yet.

foxrider 1 hour ago | parent

After working with the frontier models for over a year I agree with you. Some problems are "AI shaped" but it's not a universal solution

mpalmer 1 hour ago | parent

Hand-waves the negatives and the positives. Makes no real effort to contend with the drawbacks of AI, and leaves out the biggest one (IMO) - the potential harm created via delegation of arbitrary authority/capability to AI, whether in government, industry, or military. But we've apparently solved alignment, so maybe it's OK.

The rest is essentially just a short list of consequential problems facing the world, with "maybe AI will help us fix it" tacked on to each paragraph.

The last two problems don't even mention the role AI would play in their solution. That's a bit of a tell.

watwut 1 hour ago | parent

> But we've apparently solved alignment, so maybe it's OK.

Yeah and it is such an absurd point. You take a brief look at world right now and the history and you find ... constant fight over what exactly "the values" should be. There is no single human aligned answer to "what we should do". There is no way to align AI simultaneously with liberals, transhumanists, right wing, tech CEOs and all the world religions.

And there, I am even ignoring situations where interests of one group go against another group.

swader999 1 hour ago | parent

If it can make a web page responsive and keep in bounds when I zoom in the font that would be a glorious future.

noisem4ker 58 minutes ago | parent

If web browsers were able to take care of that, as it is their job, it would be a glorious throw back to a brighter past.

watwut 1 hour ago | parent

The really bad

Will be used for mass surveillance and for further destruction of the democracy. Will be used to create powerful monopoly. Will make climate change worst due to huge energy consumption. This will be unfixable, because tech CEOs who will have more power do not care at best and are far right actors at worst. "The alignment" will be defined by the people who already shown themselves sociopaths.

lukaswthoms 1 hour ago | parent

This would be a great essay from a 3rd grader.

armchairhacker 1 hour ago | parent

Explain

AIblemblio 1 hour ago | parent

I find certain points woo wishiwashi.

I think its very reasonable for AI to speedup superconductor finding which will make medical scanning a lot cheaper, easier and better.

It will also allow for massive and easy energy transportation for large distances like afrika/spain <> europe.

In medicin understanding DNA and the results of it could lead to solving cancer and dementia.

New better batery chemicals will help us for solid state batteries. no AAA version of this but up to 1000kwh/kg + low temp and high temp stability and very stable against burning.

Physical ai will solve human labor.

VCFundedGenYer 1 hour ago | parent

Terrible ostrich article.

It just basically ignores all the issues and goes "guys, it will be great, stop worrying! There's nothing to worry about!"

Pure schlock.

busssard 1 hour ago | parent

CO2 capture is limited by thermodynamics sadly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBN9JeX3iDs

The materials science and biology part yes, it will be awesome. but the question is always qui bono.

First we will have the end of propriatry software and everything moving to the cloud. Even PC will end to exist with Microsoft pushing hard on their M365 virtual computers.

Who will receive these new materials.

I am looking forward to "Diamond Age" becoming reality. But it will be hell of a ride

advael 46 minutes ago | parent

"Everything moving to the cloud" is far from inevitable, and represents a concentration of power. Of course existing tech corps want that, they proposed it and have pushed it in the first place, but I strongly disprefer my personal things being on someone else's computer, don't need a ton of computer to host them on the internet myself for my own purposes, and am far from alone in this. The logical endpoint of priorities of large businesses and governments are not inherently inevitable

dTal 1 hour ago | parent

Biggest danger of LLMs as they currently fit into society: the radical consolidation of information flow through corporate-controlled bottlenecks that make current generation algorithmic social media (rancid as it is) look like child's play. When people no longer "search" for things, but simply "ask ChatGPT", the lever of social control is nearly absolute.

(Of course, all this is up in the air. If LLMs become commodities, the situation becomes very complex; the information flow doesn't get quite so consolidated, but it still becomes impossible to tractably analyze, as all the LLMs train off each other)

singularity2001 55 minutes ago | parent

We will get incredible abundance and health before the singularity. After that, all bets are off (almost by definition)

palmotea 33 minutes ago | parent

They forgot this bullet for the "seriously great things on the horizon":

* Those fucking annoying workers, we don't need them anymore! Most of them can go FOAD, literally. That leaves even more money and resources for the only ones who really deserve it: the extremely wealthy.