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The original was posted on /r/singularity by /u/outerspaceisalie on 2023-08-07 21:42:07+00:00.

*edit*u/TrueCryptographer982 reminded me that this has a big impact on battery technology and I can’t believe I forgot that when writing this. He’s 100% right that this is a very revolutionary function with short term application. I stand by everything else I said but with this one caveat: battery technology revolution is massive and could change a lot of things for the better quickly (within a decade) and significantly. However, I do think most of the other discussed applications are approximately how I described them below.

This is predicated on LK-99 being a step forward even if it’s not itself a RTSC (room temperature superconductor). I’m not skeptical that an rtsc could change society. They could. The obvious applications are significant. However, I don’t think the changes are likely to happen very fast and I don’t think they’d be very significant (for the average person) even after multiple decades. As always, it all comes down to one thing: economics. Costs are proxies for efficiency, and costs tell us whether things are efficient advancements. If it’s not efficient, it can have a hard time justifying itself, why would you raise the cost of something like energy simply to use new technology? Energy cost is the most important metric for energy efficiency (followed by pollution, which is a deeper discussion about externalities and internalizing costs). It can take decades before a breakthrough actually hits the mark on efficiency, and even more before it hits the mark on something like pollution reduction.

Now, I’m basing this on the past and the present, not any specific knowledge about this technology. A lot of people might find this take unpopular because it’s not optimistic enough, but I disagree that it’s not optimistic. I think one can be both grounded and patient while also being optimistic. I think LK-99 is a breakthrough even if it’s gonna change the world within the decade because science is a long process and we must respect the process and not consider it pessimistic to acknowledge the hurdles we face. Quite the opposite really, acknowledging hurdles is how we make even more progress. Pragmatic approaches to innovation keep us from boomeranging our optimism into cynicism when we become disappointed at the real pace of advancement.

So what are these hurdles? These are my primary concerns, the same hurdles that regularly dampen the enthusiasm around other technological breakthroughs, and leave optimistic people feeling defeated. I think we need to steel ourselves against such excess optimism, it’s only setting yourself up for even more pessimism next time. Remember, these are theoretical concerns, as of right now nobody knows what will happen. But these are the kinds of concerns that technological optimists often forget, so I want to have us include them in our projections. After all, this is a sub about future projections. Here are mine:

1. Even if superconducting powerlines are extremely efficient, it is still not likely to be efficient enough to justify replacing old infrastructure on a cost-calculation basis, meaning it could actually increase the cost of electricity instead of reducing it on this vector. Similarly, building new powerlines with it will likely be useless without replacing the entire grid, meaning that there would be no reason to build new powerlines for twice the cost with very few actual advantages except in the very, very long term (and it’s hard to even say that long term advantage would ever justify the compounding short term cost).
2. Accelerating the speed at which we can advance quantum computing is a pretty useful feature. However, this is not one of the major hurdles of quantum computing. It’s a smaller hurdle among many complex hurdles. This would be a pretty good thing, but not exactly revolutionary for quantum computing as a whole.
3. For fusion reactors, we can be a bit more hopeful. This does solve a major hurdle for fusion. However, it still is not the hardest fusion hurdle. Fusion still has a handful of very difficult problems we would have to solve that superconducting doesn’t help with at all. Solid advance here, probably the best and most important one over all, but still only just knocking down one target where there are still a dozen other harder targets we still have to work on. So, a major breakthrough, but not going to change the progress of fusion over night. More likely it just accelerates the development of fusion by maybe 15 - 20% (which is important but not exactly world changing for anyone, because fusion itself will take decades or even centuries to fully roll out AFTER it’s ready for prime time).
4. Trains. This is an area where we could see significant roll-out, and amusingly the hyperloop could become feasible. Now, the fact is that we probably wouldn’t replace standard steel rail, and we would continue to build out steel rail. Why? Well, simply, steel rail is going to probably stay cheaper for a very, very long time. Steel is very cost efficient and a very mature supply line and manufacturing process. Eventually I would expect superconducting rails to outpace the cost on this one, but it could take a century before it was competitive with the overall cost of steel and at that point it would still be unlikely to be cost effective to replace old infrastructure and be relegated exclusively to new infrastructure roll-outs. Steel is nowhere near the end of its own efficiency potential, in fact superconductors could make producing steel even cheaper through electrolytic advancements in the cost efficiency of producing steel with lower carbon pollution, which is likely the bigger advancement of the two, and would ironically make steel even more competitive (and less polluting!).

I do think rtsc are a game changer. But not for us, and not for our kids. Much like how Charles Babbage invented the computer 100 years before the first personal computer, I expect the roll-out of rtsc technology to take decades before it impacts anything, and even longer before it causes major impacts except on the edge of technology’s most complex problems. Should we be excited for these advancements? Yes, if you love science, this is exciting stuff. However, should we expect major revolutionary changes in our society? Honestly no. This is for our kids, kids, kids, not for us. This is Homer Simpson’s sign at his job where it says “Do it for her” covered in pictures of Maggie. We need to do this for the future of humanity, it should give us hope. But we shouldn’t expect the world to change any time soon, excessive optimism is only setting us up to become cynical later when we end up disappointed. We need to be measured so that we can remain hopeful. Managing expectations is playing the long game and we need to manage expectations to stay honest and stay in the game, societal progress is a very, very long game.