Bill Gates on Energy: Innovating to Zero!

There will be no world by the year 2050. I am con­vinced that if an aster­oid has­n’t tak­en us out by then, the djinn we’ve let out of the bot­tle will have destroyed us (read: “We will have killed our­selves and our plan­et”) by then. Carpe diem! Ave atque vale!

Yes, it’s a com­pelling tale, IF:
* to use Bil­l’s own ter­mi­nol­o­gy, you can rely upon his ‘WISH’ for a ‘MIRACLE’ com­ing true (they ARE his own choice of words!). And sor­ry Bil­ly, but the mod­ern com­put­er isn’t a mir­a­cle, as you well know; it is the cul­mi­na­tion of many decades’ work, or mil­leni­a’s if you include all the foun­da­tion­al prep.
* you can blithe­ly ignore all of the con­text with­in which this mir­a­cle is sup­posed to hap­pen. (Hyper­pop­u­la­tion, peak ener­gy, peak resources, aware­ness of first world bank­rupt­cy due to fis­cal mis­ad­ven­ture)
* You imag­ine that Bill Gates is an ‘expert’ who’s opin­ion is worth rever­ing, giv­en that his exper­tise is found­ed upon busi­ness mod­els of mas­sive wealth extrac­tion; glam­our dri­ven devel­op­ment (“look at our new Shiny ver­sion!”), renowned lack of indus­try co-oper­a­tion in favour of com­pe­ti­tion, resource con­sump­tion (would a ‘bet­ter’ Win­dows not run on ANY old com­put­er and the newest then make the best of resources avail­able?!)

The indi­vid­ual and con­ver­gent effects of the issues we are now fac­ing in the 21st Cen­tu­ry make build­ing fur­ther super­man cas­tles in the sky the most fool­ish, short-ter­mist, tech­no dream. They are all pred­i­cat­ed upon abun­dance which we have already squan­dered.

Look else­where for real­ism.