Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving day is special because unlike Diwali or Christmas, it is non-religious. It has a special appeal to me because the motivating emotion is one of gratitude.

I have a ritual which I do several times a day: I pause for a minute and focus my mind on how fortunate I am for all the unearned blessing I have. I thank the universe for conspiring in my favor. Certainly things could have been better but it could have been a lot worse too.

But today’s special. I can be specific about what I am grateful about. First of all, I am thankful for my friends and family. I don’t have many but those that I have are wonderful. They give without measure and I do my best to reciprocate. You know who you are. Thank you.

Now on to gratitude to others. I am grateful for the many inventors and innovators who make this a magical world. They solve problems, and in doing so, they improve the world. Related to that, I am grateful for the problems that humanity faces.

My perspective is that problems are blessings. They motivate the inventors and innovators to create solutions. The solutions invariably push the world into a better state than it was in before the problem arose. It’s true that the solutions also create other problems in their wake but that’s the beginning of another round of solutions, and thus a better world.

Let’s consider one problem that has plagued the world for a while, namely the climate change doomerism, the pessimistic worldview that insists, contrary to the evidence, that humanity is inevitably headed for collapse, with little or nothing that individuals can do to change the outcome. The drumbeat was that humanity must immediately stop the use of fossil fuels because “carbon emissions.”

It is not clear why the life-giving molecule, CO2, was the villain. Fact is that CO2 is good and the more the better. But whatever. So then many countries were moving to renewable sources such as wind and solar. But renewables should be more accurately described as “intermittent, unreliable and costly.”

Anyway, the fear of climate change and the loathing of fossil fuels led to the increase of energy costs, which is particularly hard on the poor across the world. It looked hopeless. Who was going to push the government policies away from the madness of renewable energy sources?

Then AI came to the rescue. The thing is that AI requires tons of compute. Computation requires energy. All the mega corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Amazon, etc., have an interest in keeping energy prices low. Without cheap energy prices, they don’t make as much profit. (BTW, the more profits the mega corporations make, the better it is for humanity. That’s a topic for another day.)

So this year I am particularly grateful for AI. It has solved the climate change hysteria problem. And in doing so, AI has unintentionally helped the poor of the world have access to cheap energy.

Energy, as I have argued before, is the key resource. As energy becomes cheaper — it does so all the time — the world gets better. Now the big guys have a very urgent reason to make energy cheaper. So they will invest heavily in energy tech. This could be SMR (small modular reactor) being mass produced on an industrial scale, or it could be fusion. In any event, AI has turbo-charged the richest people to make sure that they abandon the climate change band wagon and get on the “let’s make sure that we have gazillion terawatts of electricity now.”

So, dear reader, have a wonderful Thanksgiving day with family and friends.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Here’s a bit of music. My excuse for choosing this song: The original is a favorite, I’m Indian, this is AI generated, and I’m in the heart of where AI got started (the Silicon Valley).