If you look at absolute numbers (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-worldbank-constant-us...), it seems likely that China will surpass the US economy pretty soon (they're a lot more people though, so per-capita is much worse).

Personally I think its most likely that chinese GDP will be larger than US GDP within 2035, but that the median citizen is NOT going to catch up to US standards in the next 50 years.

And their whole society will run into the exact same problems that many western countries are dealing with already (increasing fraction of retirees), so I'd be very careful with extrapolating their currently superior growth rate past 2040 or so.

But its relative GDP growth has been higher than the US for decades, is higher stil and is probably going to stay higher for years:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/real-gdp-growth?country=U...

Electrify everything where possible (especially transport and heating), get electricity CO2 neutral, get concrete and steel production CO2 neutral (lots of those would be an inevitable consequence of the emission pricing).

This would allow western democracies to basically fix the global situation on their own, by exerting economic pressure on developing countries (those want/need market access, like China).

It would make goods (and especially individual transport!) more expensive though (even if you re-emit the tax income), so you can be sure it's not gonna happen, because too many people are too selfish.

What we need is (global) electrification of transport and heating, CO2 free electricity and CO2 neutral concrete and steel.

Very effective ways to make this happen would be high prices on emissions, enforced on every local industry and all imports.

But too many people love their cheap fossil-based transport too much and are unwilling to make even small sacrifices to keep the climate stable; sad reality.

But my point is that it fills (in China) a very similar role for the electric grid and countries don't get to choose what fossils are in their soil.

The US using relatively more gas than coal is not any kind of laudable achievement, it's simply whats cheaply available.

Norway does not get any credit in my book for being full renewable either (because they have "free" hydro power literally everywhere).

Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, but would have required very costly (economically and politically!) investments over the last few decades, and those basically went into renewables instead which turned out fine.

See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Coal+gas electricity is basically the same fraction in China than in the US.

But countries like Germany or Spain are significantly ahead in this regard, with much higher fraction of electrical energy coming from solar/wind.

See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Sorry, but that's a ridiculous take.

Thats just like saying that public schools are a wealth transfer from the working class to students, or that health insurance is a wealth transfer to old and sick people.

It's neither useful nor precise. Things are never an actual "wealth transfer" when both sides consider it worthwhile-- that's just an ordinary trade.

Has also been the case for things like chess computing; a lot of the progress we made over the last decades there (even before involving neural networks!) happened thanks to software improvements because the problem got so accessible, not just faster hardware.

I expect similar trends with AI; I'd expect to get decent, human comparable capability with <200GB/s of memory bandwidth and under 60GB of RAM long term (SSDs with very high read bandwidth looks also promising, but we'll see).

I hope that in a decade or two, training will also be somewhat feasible for "pro-sumers".

Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time).

Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).

What exactly are you talking about here? Meltwater amounts would be roughly the same compared to the last millennium, until glaciers start vanishing (only, in that obviously favorably scenario, in 500ish years instead of this century).

I get the impression that you think that manmade climate change is somewhat helpful compensation for natural trending towards ice age. This is not the case at all, because the rate of change is too high. See https://xkcd.com/1732/.

A (natural) looming ice age is not problematic or threathening at all because that happens so slowly that we get many centuries to act.

Not sure what your benchmark for shortage is, but if we had similar price development with fuel people would've gone ballistic.

It's quite possible that this will further escalate over the next decades, because demand is continuously rising and mining/recycling is not keeping up with it.

There is not even jurisdiction over Chinese companies, because they don't sell their LLM subscribtions, unlike US companies, and those comitted much more severe violations in getting their training material than a ToS violation or two (Anthropic already found guilty).

edit: I don't see this as legal argument against the ban, more like a justification for why basically no moral person is gonna side with OpenAI and Anthropic on this. US gov can try and ban as many weights as they want, I expect that to be similarly effective as banning numbers was in the past (i.e. not).

I'm kinda tempted by the frameworks because they are somewhat energy efficient and compact (which I both value highly!) but my concern is that the GPU is on the low end for 1440p gaming (while being barely price-competitive with a self-built Ryzen9950 + 9070XT combination).

In my view advertising is in big parts (your category 3) basically a constant side-channel attack against peoples minds, eroding decisionmaking and purchasing decisions (mostly!) to peoples detriment.

The net-beneficial aspects (product information, and, arguably, boosted general demand) could be better achieved otherwise.

According to eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cac...) that is two thirds of freight volume and it probably still eclipses even rail transport in CO2 efficiency (until full CO2 free rail electrification), so this probably distorts things completely...

If you actually compare the emission fractions, you can see that the US uses much more CO2 per capita on transport compared to Europe (about 3 times as much!):

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-ghg-sector?cou...

Some fraction certainly is. Here is trade-adjusted CO2 per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

Note how this still trends down for most western industrialized countries despite positive economic growth over the last two decades.

If you want meaningful CO2/capita comparisons, you also have to be very careful with countries that get ("free") hydro power opportunities for electricity because that distorts the picture massively (same for e.g. Norway).

Big producers of hydrocarbons, on the other hand (like the US) have to work hard to resist the allure of cheap & convenient fossils.

Switzerland is so far ahead in this comparison because they get a lot of CO2-free hydroelectricity (>50%), have to import most hydrocarbons (=> incentive against) and also save massively on transportation because density is much higher.