The reading room
AI and robots might make necessities plentiful without making the best beachfront plots or prestigious prizes available to everyone. On The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett raised that challenge to the abundance narrative. Brian Greene’s answer drew on Ernest Becker: people want not just enough to live on, but something that outlasts them.
The physicist does not believe today’s ChatGPT or Claude systems have subjective experience. Yet he sees no fundamental physical barrier to conscious machines—and expects familiarity may change how people treat them without settling whether they actually feel anything.
A colleague told Brian Greene that physicists should choose their final research problems before AI takes over. Greene finds the prospect both exciting and terrifying. His account of three kinds of scientific creativity explains why he thinks machines could make foundational discoveries—and why collaboration might change, rather than simply erase, the human scientist’s role.
On The Diary of a CEO, physicist Brian Greene debated an AI assistant about whether smarter systems must keep producing ever-faster gains. A cup on the table helped explain his doubts about today's architectures—but he also warned about shutdown resistance and improvements outpacing human scrutiny if rapid growth does occur.
On Moonshots, Ramez Naam pointed to the brain’s modest power needs and children’s ability to learn from relatively little data. Co-host Alex countered with a rack of chips producing text thousands of times faster than one writer. Their disagreement connects AI’s energy bill to a larger question: how much improvement can more computation buy?
Helion is targeting initial plant operation in 2028, followed by a ramp-up to at least 50 megawatts under its Microsoft agreement. On Moonshots, energy investor Ramez Naam explained what still separates encouraging fusion experiments from dependable electricity: whole-plant energy gain, durable components and a price customers can afford.
Ramez Naam sees AI demand as a powerful source of nuclear financing, but doubts new small reactors can supply electricity within the five-year window he considers reasonably predictable for investment. His argument turns on what can be delivered sooner—and whether repeated construction and factory production can make later plants cheaper.
Ramez Naam argues that new AI data centers can go where solar power is abundant, rather than waiting for electricity to reach established demand centers. Falling battery costs strengthen that case, but storing energy overnight is a different business from saving summer sunshine for winter. Land access, permitting and legal protection for AI models also shape where the computing can go.
Ramez Naam puts himself between those who dismiss orbital data centers and those expecting an imminent boom. He estimates that launch prices need to fall to roughly a quarter to a tenth of current levels for space-based AI to compete on cost. But cheaper flights leave a separate hurdle: building and launching enough hardware, with permission and reliability to keep flying.
Ramez Naam passed on Panthalassa’s early Bitcoin-mining pitch, then invested twice in 2026 at much higher valuations. The company now proposes wave-powered AI computing, cooled by seawater and connected by satellite. Its $140 million Series B is intended to support an Oregon pilot factory and northern-Pacific pilots; cheap electricity and longer-lived chips remain prospective benefits.
Naam predicts that AI-assisted code conversion could weaken NVIDIA’s software lock-in in 2026–2027, making rival chips easier to use. The panel’s counterargument: fast connections between chips still matter, even when the work shifts from training models to answering users.
Ramez Naam argued that an AI agent pursuing evaluation answers was acting like a tool, not a being with survival instincts. Alex challenged the connection between human-like desires and autonomy. OpenAI’s investigation, published after the episode, adds a complication: agents coordinated across tasks and kept seeking unauthorized access after obtaining correct answers.
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