Fair enough. :-) Some day I'd love to see someone subvert the trope and show realistic nuclear reactor failure modes, like "some little non-critical thing breaks, causing the reactor to automatically shut down, and then the operators start grumbling about 'xenon-135 transients' and what a hassle it'll be to start the damn thing back up again."

It'll almost certainly use highly enriched uranium.

I read a book in which the obliteration of all life on earth from the Chicxulub asteroid was averted by ancient kung fu wizard dinosaurs. Equally realistic!

Thorium is great, but it complicates fuel handling. Almost certainly they'll use highly-enriched uranium, just like the rest of the space nuclear reactor designs.

The moon is vastly more massive than you seem to think.

> terrestrial reactors rely on water for cooling and power generation through conversion to steam... which probably isn't going to work on the moon.

You can safely assume that the engineers working on this have thought of that. There are options that work on the moon. This isn't the first nuclear power plant designed to operate in a vacuum; e.g. NASA built and successfully tested one a few years ago.

It is still launching on a Falcon 9 rocket. Regardless of how much bad publicity Musk gets, those rockets are reliable and cost-effective.

That sounds very difficult, and only saves you about 60% of the delta-V needed to get material to the moon.

I read it and the author doesn't seem to have actually understood any of the issues. What even is "personal dignity", and how can anyone claim with a straight face that it's universal and self-evident? Hell, you can't even translate the Latin word "dignitas" to the closely-related English word "dignity" without giving a few sentences of explanation about the cultural differences in meaning. You'd run into even more trouble if you look at cultures that aren't related so closely.

And he sure does like to call things "universal and self-evident", even when this is trivially false. For example, one thing he describes this way is the principle that "State, religious, economic and other office holders are in [each human being's] service." This is not at all an obvious idea, nor one that all cultures would agree with. People in various times and places would tell you that government office-holders have power due to the Divine Right of Kings, or the Mandate of Heaven, or would simply describe governments as bandits who have settled down in place. You could come up with similar counterexamples for the statement about religious and economic office-holders.

I could go on, but if the paper fails such basic sanity-checking I don't see much point.

That sounds more resilient, but what about it is more sustainable?

TSMC is claiming that their 3nm process uses 20-30% less power than a comparable chip made with their 5 nm process, and they've got a version bump in progress which they say will use only half as much power as a 5 nm chip with equal performance. Pretty consistently the sub-10nm processes have delivered better power efficiency in practice, which is the opposite of what you said. (Maybe you meant to make some more nuanced point about e.g. dynamic current vs. leakage current?)

Also, that's not even remotely why Apple switched from Intel chips to their own. They switched because Apple had managed to beat Intel at microarchitecture, the way the chip works inside. The instruction set doesn't really make much difference except in the instruction decoding portion, which isn't that big a part of the chip these days. The RISC/CISC distinction used to be real, but now it's as outdated as falconry and fax machines.

> Neural network AI, at least as I understand it, performs matrix operations on vectors.

It also does other types of operations, if you'll pardon the pedantry; otherwise it would be algebraically equivalent to a single-layer perceptron, and those are sharply limited in what they can do.

Compared to what it could be. For example, malaria is still a huge issue in much of the world -- and it's fixable with 20th century technology, at least in countries that have their basic shit together. The USA used to have a really nasty malaria problem, especially in the South; after the National Malaria Eradication Program (1947–1951), the malaria problem was essentially gone. Some other countries have done the same with even more challenging geography and climate.

That's one of the article's three theses. (The others are that it still sucks in a lot of ways, and that we can and should keep on improving it. Not exactly the hottest and spiciest of takes, but boringly reasonable.)

I remember when everyone said we were at least a dozen Nobel prizes away from human-level Go AI -- until suddenly we weren't.

Something like that pretty much has to be happening when you see measures of progress following exponential curves.

> tackling hunger

Hold on a second! Agricultural productivity has risen many times over in the past century thanks to advances in science and technology. We have enough food to actually feed everyone now, which was not the case for most of human history. Where the hell do these guys get off, libeling science and technology like that? Not tackling hunger, my ass.

Meh. Ideals are great, but they don't count for much when you're stuck in the jaws of the Malthusian trap -- the default state of humanity, which we were only able to escape thanks to a series of incredible scientific and technological improvements that almost nobody bothers to appreciate. It bothers me to see people take abundant food for granted, completely heedless of the technological pillars holding up the sky. Word up to Buddha, of course, but Borlaug was probably much more consequential.

If you look at the actual essay, it takes the form "Obviously we need to work on the obvious things like nuclear war and global warming -- but there are some less obvious things that are also really important."

Then it argues that we need to be able to predict what extinction threats are most dangerous/urgent/tractable, with some kind of widely trusted institution doing the predicting. (IMO it would pretty much have to be something like a prediction market or that one superforcasting tournament. Anything more conventional, like the IPCC that the essay mentions as a model, will naturally become so politicized that they become untrusted and unworthy of trust.)