One of the most important long-term outcomes of the rapid growth of Generative AI, isn’t AGI or ASI, it’s regulatory changes to allow small modular nuclear power…
Regardless of your belief that the scaling of Generative AI development will ever achieve a particular extreme computational performance level, one thing that everyone should agree on is that many companies will keep voraciously pursuing more compute resources to at least keep trying. That rapidly scaling compute is extremely power intensive, and data centers can’t just go anywhere due to the limitations of power transmission with current material science. Those data centers also require very stable baseload power at very large capacity, often approaching multiple megawatts or more. Even if you could get around all the environmental and political issues with fossil fuel-based power generation, it’s still bound by the geographic constraints of the natural resource sources that make placing the power plants tricky. The only option is nuclear power for high output capacity, stable, widely deployable power generation.
With the advent of high bandwidth wireless telecommunications systems like Starlink, and the continued expansion of fiber optic cable deployment throughout the US, the only thing missing to further distribute industry both digital and physical is power generation. We need scalable power generation solutions from 100K kilowatts on up through the multiple megawatt level. This would allow for the distribution and right-sizing of power generation to the local need for whatever the purpose might be. This would represent a major opportunity for any state or local jurisdiction, as it wildly opens the possibilities for new businesses, taxes, and residents. All of this would be possible, but is fundamentally blocked by the current federal regulations on nuclear power. Changing federal regulations takes a literal act of congress, and to do that some (or multiple) large companies need to lobby (“buy off”) the applicable congressmen and senators. That is expensive, hence it is rarely done for anything short of worthwhile return on that congressional influence. GenAI with its massive multi-billion dollar investment from all around the world represents just such an justifiable opportunity and need.
I would like to play with an AGI system one day to ask all kinds of interesting questions, but we NEED modular scalable nuclear power to enable the next step change in the industrial evolution of our country and the world.
