Do you know what fusion energy is? If not, that’s the nice point

“A revolutionary approach is taking shape: the combined power of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing is being used to drive innovation in fusion and shorten development time by decades.” This is what the WashingtonPost by Steven Cowley, professor of astrophysics and laboratory director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.

If “fusion energy” is beyond your understanding, rest assured it is beyond mine too. That’s a good thing. Progress is not defined by what each individual knows, but by what each individual doesn’t need to know.

In the future, knowledge will become increasingly narrow as more and more people in the world perform the work and acquire the knowledge most closely associated with their unique skills and intelligence. Just as the division of labor is the path to enormous increases in production, the division of knowledge will enable even greater increases in individual productivity.

And that’s the joy of the direction we’re heading in: knowledge is wealth, and thanks to advances being made by artificial intelligence that thinks and acts for us, knowledge creation will soon accelerate in remarkable ways. As Cowley reports, knowledge creation that once took months and made its acquisition “impractical and slow” will now be achieved within hours through the combination of computing power and AI thought.

Stop and think about what this means from an energy perspective alone. Oil is as old as the earth, but has only been in use since the last third of the 19th century.^th In the 19th century, it became clear that the commodity had significant economic value. Life without oil would be one of endless misery, as without it we would be forced into a terrible deindustrialization.

Oil is abundant now and probably will always be. The only limit to how much more we can extract is knowledge. At the same time, it would be short-sighted to assume that oil and its byproducts represent the limit to electricity generation. Cowley suspects the same.

He writes: “The pursuit of fusion energy – that is, replicating the same nuclear process on Earth that powers the sun and the stars – has seen a remarkable surge in interest over the past five years, reflected in over $6 billion in private capital.” The obvious answer is that $6 billion is quite small compared to the investment in oil exploration and production, but it is a start.

Also, don’t forget that the above figure ignores the exponentially larger amounts of wealth going into computing power and AI advances in general. The combined investments will fund a global division of labor and thought between humans and machines that will rapidly accelerate the creation of knowledge about everything, while significantly decreasing the cost of creating it.

Cowley doesn’t think he’ll live to see the fruits of the quest for fusion energy, but he suspects it will power cities, towns, data centers, factories, and certainly all kinds of advances not yet even conceivable. That’s exciting, considering how awesome oil is. Just think of the wealth it has enabled us to create.

In that case, imagine again how life-changing and enriching fusion energy must be to replace oil even a little, or perhaps a lot. The bet here is that advances in electricity generation, among other things, will soon move outdoors the advances that have made living indoors in the coldest and hottest places so easy. In other words, generations yet unborn will wonder at our suffering outdoors in summer and winter, and advances like “fusion energy” will inspire awe at what will surely be primitive living conditions in the 2020s.