No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:55:48 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:55:48] S1: Energy is the fundamental input to the quality of human life. If you look backward into time and say, how did humanity go from one standard of living to the next? It's always unlocked by cheaper energy. Right? So when we went from essentially a solar powered world, which is what we were in agrarian age, like, literally human muscles were solar powered because you were either eating plants or eating animals, and both of those things were essentially chemical energy that is built up by the energy of the sun through photosynthesis. Life was hard. Right? Life was really, really hard. When we got into underground hydrocarbons, you had this massive explosion of quality of life, right, where we have, you know, heat in the winter and we have AC in the summer, where we're able to drive cars to get to the hospital. Even really simple things. You know, we're in a an aluminum strut building right now. Every one of these these struts that you could see behind us are made of aluminum. There was a time when aluminum was considered a precious metal, where kings would literally make jewelry out of aluminum because it was that rare. And the thing that changed it to a literally structural metal that we'd make buildings out of, is energy becoming cheaper. Right? We figured out you know, Charles Hall here in The United States figured out aluminum electrolysis, and cheap enough energy means that you can actually just separate that oxide from the aluminum, and you can have pure aluminum metal. And that is that is entirely downstream of of energy. So I would say that the standard of living that we enjoy today is entirely downstream of the fact that we figured out you can make pretty cheap energy with hydrocarbons. Now our goal is not pretty cheap energy. It's insanely cheap energy, and that's gonna be unlocked by by nuclear. What it will look like, I think, is fundamentally unpredictable, but I I have a few ideas. First of all, I'm very, very excited about transportation. Like, if you think about the fundamental limits of why is it that I can't go see grandma every week, you know, on a plane? Like, why is it just so hard to do? Why is it so expensive? Why is it so complicated? It really just comes down to the fact that we've kinda squeezed as much juice out of jet fuel as we can. Right?
00:57:59 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
It's just hard to imagine jet fuel getting 10 times cheaper than it is today, and it's polluting the environment and all of these different things. If you could make energy 10 times cheaper, then you probably could go visit grandma every other day. You know, just on a on a Saturday, it takes thirty minutes, and, you know, she lives across the country, but you you go and visit her on the weekend. I'm very excited about what I would call hyper techno industrialism. This is a term I invented for Okay. [00:58:28] S2: Haven't heard it.
00:58:29 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:58:29] S1: Yeah. For basically everything becoming free. It it this sounds like I'm I'm talking sci fi here, but, like, an approximation of this will happen. I'm let me put out a thought experiment for you. So let's take a a physical good that's manufactured today. Right? Let's let's take this microphone. So this microphone came from a factory, and the factory had sort of three inputs. Right? It had people in the factory that are working on it, assembling things. It had input materials. Right? And I would include in those input materials, you know, the plastic on here and this foam thing, also the machines, right, that, you know, maybe injection molded that plastic. And then the last thing it consumed was energy. Right? So energy is one of the three things that made this. What's interesting is with the introduction of AI, we're actually converting the human input element to energy. Right? So instead of, a person having to pick something up and put it onto the next tray, right, you're going to have a robot pick something up, put it onto the next tray, and consume energy. Right? And instead, that human will be able to coordinate hundreds of robots. Right? So their personal output will go from picking up an object and putting it onto a tray to essentially picking up a 100 objects and putting it onto a 100 trays. And the trade off we're making there is that we're increasing the consumption of energy. Now you could still say, okay. But you are consuming physical inputs. What's interesting about that, though, is let's dig into that. Alright? So there were some physical inputs and some machines that went into that factory. Well, where did those come from? Right? Those don't grow on trees. Those also came from factories. And you can ask the same question. What went into that factory? It was energy. It was machines, and it was people. Right? Apply the same rubric, and you realize, okay. Actually, it's really just machines and energy. Well, where did those machines come from? If you keep asking this question, what you realize is energy is the fundamental input. When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi autonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things. Right? The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it.
01:00:36 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
And to the extent that we can make energy 10 times cheaper and then 10 times cheaper, that is the extent to which we will be able to make basically everything free. And that's very exciting to me, because if we're going to go explore the stars and we're gonna set up, you know, a a place for us to live on Mars and explore the universe, we're gonna need a lot of stuff, and it's gonna be it's gonna need to be a lot cheaper than it is right now. So that's very exciting to me. [01:01:03] S2: Exciting to me too. That's a great place to end. Thanks, Isaiah. [01:01:05] S1: Thanks so much for having me. [01:01:08] S2: Find us on Twitter at no priors pod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you wanna see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at nopriors.com.