Imagining a world where energy is clean, available in plenty and almost free
Authors
Many years ago I read a book called “Telecosm: how infinite bandwidth will revolutionize our world” by George Gilder. I was fascinated over time to see how indeed it did. At the time that I read that book, internet bandwidth was extremely expensive. I recall paying over Rs.10 lakhs a year for a 64kbps leased line for my business in the year 2000. At a time like that, it was hard to imagine how things would be today. Even ten years back, it was too expensive to watch a Netflix show using my phone’s mobile data plan. The first thing people did, till not so long ago, when they went to a friend’s home, was to ask for the Wi-Fi password. No one does that anymore. The global economy would have completely collapsed if we had to have a “lockdown” like the one we had in 2020 if the pandemic had occurred in 2000. The economy survived only because a large percentage of people were able to work from home supported by cheap and abundant bandwidth.
The bottleneck for progress in 2000 was telecommunications and in 2025 it is energy. Artificial Intelligence promises to increase productivity of economies exponentially, reduce time for drug discovery and if it is in the right hands, would solve world hunger. However, it is a technology that is unprecedented in its hunger for energy. A lot has been written about how we need more clean and cheap energy to feed this hungry giant but can we for a moment forget about how we solve this energy problem? Let us assume it is solved and energy is available as easily and as inexpensively as we now take internet bandwidth. What then? What will the world look like?
We would live wherever we wanted to and travel at great speed if we wanted to meet in person. No one would die because it is too cold or too hot because climate-controlled homes would be available to the poorest among us. Desalination plants would be everywhere, and the deserts would become large farms and forests. Clean drinking water will be available to all. Industrial production would go through the roof with energy costing next to nothing and manufactured goods would cost very little making it affordable to all. With everything costing so little, and available in plenty, it would be a post-scarcity world. Boredom may be the biggest problem to solve. Seems very hard to imagine this future but it is coming.