Futurism

Soft paywall.

Wright's Law (more generally) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

Frith’s group puts the battery cost decline at 18% per production doubling at the pack level. As an example, from 2010 to 2015, lithium-ion battery capacity doubled seven times, from 0.48 gigawatt-hours to 62 GWh. The average price of batteries at the pack level plunged from $1,194 per kilowatt hour to $384. Strictly speaking, the 18% rule should have taken prices down to about $261 ($384 is about what Wright’s Law calls for with six doublings). But it was still a roughly two-thirds plummet.

From 2015 to 2020, battery capacity grew 2.7 times and the price again plunged by two-thirds, to an average of $137/kWh. That overshot the 18% rule, by which the price should have dropped only to about $213/kWh. But if you had strictly tracked the 18% rule from 2010 to 2020, the price ended up right around where it should have been.

Now, BNEF is using the rule to project what happens next. Following Wright, battery prices should drop to $84 per kWh in 2025, well below the holy grail milestone of $100/kWh. In 2030, they should be an astonishing $58/kWh, and $45 in 2035. The price movements in the 2030s seem dramatic, but they are less so than the prior two decades, namely because it will be harder and harder to double total capacity, Frith said.

Assuming no breakthrough in battery materials, there's still a somewhat predictable price drop. What are the side effects that you see?

I posit that even the utopian futures will require something like it to preserve the utopias. Defensive Democracy will eventually see it as a necessary evil. The questions become: when? where first and where last? etc.

Discuss :)

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/323511

But that-

ONCE AND FOR ALL!

tl;dr:

Although on average the corrections failed to accomplish their objectives, they worked better when the issue in the correction was emotionally more positive than the misinformation, the correction matched the ideology of the recipients, the issue was not politically polarized, and the correction provided abundant details as to why the earlier claims were false.

Is this one of those things we will look back at from the future and say: "I can't believe that we did that?" like leaded fuel?

Some veracity checking: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1912-article-global-warming/

Mark R. Sullivan, San Francisco, president and director of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., said in an address Thusday night:

"Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy:

"In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent, and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk.

'Who knows but what it may actually translate from one language to another?"

The other day over lunch I was talking to a coworker about Trek, when Isolinear Chips came up in the conversation. I happened upon some articles regarding light based computer chip research while looking up the wiki info and I was intrigued.

What other interesting things do you see in our fictions becoming reality? A dream of a Station in the clouds of Venus is one I often fall back on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism

I think, until the signal to noise ratio gets distorted by a hypothetical future influx of new users, retrofuturism, and the aesthetics that go with it, are appropriate for this community.

I want my flying cars and lunar domes. But what will that future look like?