Yes, I do think so. And I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

Right now the Sodium-ion tech is still in its infancy. It’s higher priced than it will be as the market scales. I expect it will find more use in stationary storage capacity than mobile devices as it’s power density is a bit lower, but the material cost is much lower and therefore potentially useful for utility grade or home power banks. It’s theoretically able to benefit from a lot of the same technology that Lithium cell batteries use, so cross-chemistry innovation potential is high.

What is the endgame here? If you were dictator of the world, how would you even propose ‘fixing’ this? It’s one thing to be angry, but point that anger in the direction of something that is actually possible to change.

Ban all for-profit use of LLMs or generative AI products. The models are in people’s hands now, we can’t stop that, but we can end their monetization. Selling AI tools or products should be considered on the same level as human trafficking with similar penalties.

A lot of proposals, but not a lot of approvals. Time will tell if their commitment to decarbonize holds but the fact developers are making proposals does not imply they’ll actually get approved. China is nowhere near as dependent on private corporate interests approval to maintain power and their clean energy export strategy is dependent on demonstrating domestic capacity gains.

Steel and concrete are the only industries that are going to continue to be coal dependent in the foreseeable future. China is already investing heavily in new plasma drilling tech for tapping deep, closed loop geothermal to augment nuclear, solar, hydroelectric and wind capacity. If Chinese battery tech continues to improve sufficiently to increase build out of utility grade power storage facilities, they’ll have more than enough capacity to continue to wean off coal for power. Their power grid makes the North American grid look positively quaint and backward already.

An AI tool is not going to produce higher quality work than a professional human.

Yes it will, because there will cease to be professional humans. If there’s no development pipeline, no one is going to achieve the pinnacle of art, because there’s no return on that investment. The AI will become better than any human, not by raising the standard by by kneecapping our ability to reach higher.

It’s ironic you chose to compare it to computers because we’ve seen that the generational decline in mathematical ability has fallen off a cliff as people now don’t even have to think about how numbers work. We have college graduates with zero reading comprehension or writing ability because they’ve never had to independently develop those skills. We have vanishing competency in critical analysis and the ability to carry a dialogue at levels that were considered natural and intrinsic a handful of generations ago. Everywhere we see the constant erosion of the capability of achieving objectives that are less than a generation removed from us. We’re not talking about forgetting how to knap flint or the decline of the buggy whip maker. We’re talking about the intrinsic capacity of the human mind to engage with the world suddenly becoming an investment on which there is no chance of return in a single human lifetime, because there is no economically sustainable path from raw novice to professional.

AI will absolutely surpass us, not by raising the bar, but lowering it into hell under a firehose of garbage.

Or, better idea, stop using AI for creative work people find genuine personal fulfillment in, and eliminating any pathway to excellence. If you can’t afford to pay real people to create genuinely human artistic works, you’re a terrible business person and deserve to fail. It doesn’t make you a “Genius Creative” finding shortcuts to success, it makes you a pathetic hack with no independent talent, a parasite, and a miserly cheapskate on top of that.