2026-09-13 21:00:00
When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect non-computer work. Sure, progamming has sped up massively with Claude Code etc, and models like Astra seem posed to make similar changes to work with spreadsheets and other common business tools, but what about work that doesn't include computers at all?
The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do. Leaning into the way the world has become very scifi, we could call this "teleoperating" people. Many things that are hard for robots are very easy for people, there are strong economic reasons that push towards teleoperation, and this bypasses many legal and social limitations on what AI can do. We should expect this to lead to large and rapid changes in the physical world.
One of the most widespread examples today is driving. I put my destination into the GPS, and it tells me what to do. I handle the low-level physical motions and responding to the local circumstances; the GPS has a broader view of the world and handles the strategy.
When I think about why this happened much earlier than the huge amount of "teleoperation" I expect to see soon, a few factors. Driving is a major human activity, so it was worth making navigation software at a time when AI wasn't very good yet, even though this meant a ton of human hours going into building the system. It was also a place where the strategic component was a very strong fit for automation. You can memorize the map with enough work, but even then you won't have real-time street-by-street traffic information. AI solved this problem so well we don't even call it "AI" anymore. On the other hand, driving is a realtime control problem in an unconstrained environment where people die if you screw up and you can't even always safely stop. This makes it hard to automate, but also would make it impractical for an AI to guide non-drivers through the process. The only reason Uber etc have been able to commodify driving as they have is that so many people already know how to drive.
Thinking about where else we might see this, most AI use today looks a lot like management. You figure out what you want it to do, and describe in detail. It asks you some questions up front and others while it works. After some churning you get some a work product to assess. Maybe there's more back-and-forth, or maybe it's good as is. You set strategy and give context; the AI handles the implementation. Today's AI is normally only applied to the implementation to the extent that the task can happen fully within the computer. In cases when the AI can't physically, legally, or intellectually do something, the most efficient path to completing the task will often be the for the AI to handle strategy while delegating to a human to fill these gaps.
To illustrate what this delegation pattern can look like, let's look at how I recently got my Whistle Synth app into the Mac App Store.
At a high level, I set the strategy: "Can you walk me through the process of getting this into the Mac App Store?" But everything after that was either handled by the AI or delegated back to me. It handled included figuring out what tasks needed to be done, modifying the implementation to be compatible with the App Store restrictions, building the app, and giving me instructions. And then it delegated to me to record a demo video involving whistling (physical), register as a Mac Developer (legal), and clean up its App Store description (intellectual).
This was mostly pure instruction-following on my part: I was being teleoperated. Here's one example:
Claude Code:...
- Open the Profiles list https://developer.apple.com/account/resources/profiles/list — sign in with the account for [team].
- Click the blue + next to "Profiles". You land on "Register a New Provisioning Profile", a page of radio buttons grouped into Development and Distribution sections.
- Under Distribution, select "Mac App Store Connect". Not "Developer ID" — that's for distributing outside the store. Click Continue.
This was relatively mindless work for me. Just like being navigated through a city I don't expect to return to, I didn't bother trying to learn how this worked. I was loosely paying attention to make sure I wasn't doing anything dumb, but for future more capable systems I expect people to stop attending even that little.
Once it finished walking me through submission I had to wait a few days for review. It was accepted in the first round with no reviewer comments. This is a pretty big deal: App Store rules are notoriously complex, the reviewers very picky, and as a first-time amateur Mac developer there's no way I would have gotten this all right on the first attempt pre-AI.
Even though this was an almost entirely within-computers case, the important thing here is the pattern: by following AI instructions I did something that would have taken me a ton of work to learn how to do alone.
Note that in this case I was both doing the high level strategy ("put this in the app store") and filling in gaps for the AI (clicking a blue plus in App Store Connect). As "teleoperation" becomes more common I expect some of this, as people automate away parts of their jobs. Other times I expect it will look like, for example, a highly AI-pilled startup founder directing AIs that direct employees. A lot like gig workers "below the API" today. I expect early iterations of these jobs to be frustrating, with the AI not delegating well. Then, as AIs get sufficiently good at directing and anticipating, they'll be pretty mindless, for better or worse, as you stop needing to think for yourself at all.
What sort of jobs might switch to being teleoperation? The top candidates are any where the physical motions are relatively straightforward, timing is not critical, and people today are paid a lot for their knowledge and judgement. If you had an expert looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do, I expect most of you could do most of the work of an electrician. In fact, that's the bulk of how electricians learn their trade: through apprenticeship. Same goes for mechanics, healthcare technicians, inspectors, etc: they combine physical and intellectual components, where it's the knowledge that keeps a random person off the street from being able to do the job. People wearing glasses with built-in cameras, connected to today's strongest AIs could already do a lot with a bit of scaffolding.
To have a large impact, teleoperated workers wouldn't need to be able to do 100% of an existing job category. As long as the parts that can and can't be done this way can be easily separated, 90% could be done by teleoperated novices, while some of the former professionals spend their time on the remaining 10%. When I think about how these other jobs are likely to go, I expect we start with ones without regulatory barriers: HVAC techs (typically unlicensed) before electricians (licensed) before surgeons (licensed + heavily regulated + realtime + high stakes). [1]
So, teleoperation is probably very economically productive. Is it a good thing? I think mostly no, for several reasons. The big one is that I expect it to speed up the rate at which AI advances turn into additional AI advances. This shortens the time our society has to figure out what to do about these massive changes, and increases the risk that immature technology is rolled out widely. Rushed deployment is more likely to lead to disaster, and there are many ways this could go extremely wrong. And by "extremely wrong" I mean "AI kills everyone wrong". Creating minds smarter than ourselves is the most consequential thing humanity has ever done or will ever do, and we have to get it right.
Which is why I'm heartened to see a lot of support, including from the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, for managing the pace at which these systems become increasingly capable. But even if we held constant at the capabilities of models publicly available today (let alone trained but not yet released) I think widespread teleoperation is still very likely. I expect this to be a massive disruption, one very difficult to integrate into our existing societal system.
The first issue is just that I expect these to be unpleasant jobs with low negotiating power. Since there are many tasks that almost anyone could do if expertly advised, and the employer can easily filter out the people who can't or won't, there's very little to keep wages or working conditions up. Then add in competition from laid-off knowledge workers, and I expect unprecedented unemployment.
So even if we can avoid the large risks of losing control of the future, falling into AI-enabled authoritarianism, facilitating bioattacks, etc, how we handle a world in which most people can't find work that pays them enough to live on will be an serious challenge. I expect this will require very large scale redistribution. [2] I'm not sure this happens by default, but I think it's achievable with significant effort. And as a very small fraction of spending in a vastly larger economy it would be a much easier sell.
[1] For a future post:
$ echo "[redacted]" | sha512sum 7820a2ecae1fcab8d7a29fe4f98f56b96c403cdfb9a6833fad0198070e118233490a078c9230de0c6ed5cf1c6cf557fef493aeb33118e75b401deabbf3a1aae4 -
[2] Looking at what there is already, the US does less than most rich countries, but even here we have medicaid, EITC, CTC, WIC, SNAP, SSI, TANF, Section 8, LIHEAP. We spend maybe 3-5% of GDP on means-tested programs. Then ~7-10% of GDP goes to things like universal public education and medicare which aren't directed specifically at the poor but are still effectively redistributive. Internationally there's been some of this, but much less; until recently the US was spending maybe 0.04% of GDP on the kind of foreign aid (ex: PEPFAR) that is really about helping the world's poorest, and then the private sector (Gates etc) adding maybe 0.1% of GDP.
2026-09-11 21:00:00
We should end net metering, including for existing solar installations, and compensate people with a one-time subsidy for battery purchase. I'm going to give an argument from grid efficiency, which I expect to be the main consideration for most people, though the benefit that makes me enthusiastic about this change is actually increasing societal resilience.
Net metering is a common form of solar subsidy where you only pay for your "net" usage: the difference between how much you consume and how much you produce. At first glance this doesn't even seem like a subsidy: if you take 800 kWh and put back 800 kWh, then did you really use any? But it's not like a bank account: the kWh you put back are usually much less useful than the kWh you used.
Say I started a solar farm, putting out a lot of panels somewhere out in the less populated part of the state (MA), and sold the power to the grid. Averaging over the year, the electricity market might pay me $0.05/kWh. On the other hand, when the panels on my house send power back to the grid I get $0.32/kWh. [1] There are several factors that pull these apart, but I think the most illuminating one is how the value of electricity varies over time.
The $0.05/kWh that the solar farm might receive in direct market compensation is an average. It's a market-based system: when supply is high relative to demand you don't make much, and vice versa. In the summer, you might see lows of ~$0.02/kWh in the middle of the night (low power usage) or middle of the day (lots of solar), and highs of $0.08/kWh in the late afternoons and early evenings (solar diminishing; lots of AC).
In the winter the mismatch between what solar can supply and when power is demanded is even more stark, perhaps a high of ~$0.20/kWh in the mornings and evenings when solar isn't producing. As people install more solar and heat pumps, this supply-demand delta will continue shifting towards these times when solar isn't producing: on a cold winter morning the sun isn't up yet, but the heat pumps are working very hard.
Which is a long way of saying that if I send kWh to the grid when it's convenient for me (lots of sun) and draw kWh from the grid when it's convenient for me (no sun) the kWh I send are significantly less valuable to others than the kWh I draw. Then add in the large cost of maintaining the grid, and it's really very strange that my electric bill treats them the same. More than strange: when I described this system to a UK friend who has thought a lot about power, they assessed net metering as "completely insane". In MA, ratepayers are spending somewhere in the $150M to $300M range annnually [3] subsidizing households with solar.
So how did we get here? Net metering started out as a very simple technical solution. In 1978, after the oil shocks, congress passed PURPA. It required utilities to compensate based on (what today would be) the market value of their production:
the cost to the electric utility of the electric energy which, but for the purchase from such cogenerator or small power producer, such utility would generate or purchase from another source.
Residential solar installations back then were rare and small, and this number was hard to calculate. Collecting the information you'd need to get to the actual number would have been very hard, while letting the meter run in reverse was very easy, so net metering came about through technological expedience. When solar was a tiny part of the overall generation mix the overall effect was tiny. [2]
Over time it became practical to use other metering systems, but solar advocates fought to keep net metering: it's unusually politically acceptable for the scale of the subsidy, and really gets solar installed. But at the cost of making power more expensive for everyone else. Many states have stopped allowing new net metering customers, but discontinuing net metering for existing installs is much more controversial: people bought expensive systems or signed long-term leases under the assumption that net metering would continue.
Technology has changed a lot in other ways since the 1970s, and a big one is that batteries are also far cheaper. You can charge at times of low demand, and discharge a few hours later when demand is higher. When you can't do net metering, residential rooftop solar is often still worth it as long as you also install batteries. Instead of using the grid as a giant battery, drawing and exporting kWh as needed, you do it with an actual battery. This doesn't fully solve the incentives problem, because the right to draw as many kWh as you want whenever you want it is underpriced, but it does help.
The other advantage of batteries, which is the big reason I'm interested in this, is a battery is the expensive part of making a system that produces power when the grid is down. Regular residential grid-tied solar is useless in power outages: it shuts down and produces nothing. If people install batteries, however, making the house operate as an "island" during a blackout is standard.
I think people in places where the grid has been reliable are massively underrating the benefit of having power during blackouts. Living in Somerville it's been decades since we had an outage long enough to even spoil food in fridges. [4] If the power grid maintained this level of reliability, backup power would resolve an inconvenience at best. Looking at other countries, however, grids have become unreliable through natural disasters, war, and state mismanagement. And looking forward, I'm especially concerned about how the recklessly rapid pace of AI development increases the risk of all kinds of instability. Electricity is so useful for so many things that I see a lot of value in a distributed and resilient power system that can continue to make even small amounts of power available in many places if the grid goes down.
My proposal is that we end net metering, and instead of counting exported energy 1:1 against later consumption it's compensated based on the utility's "avoided cost". This is a lot like what CA did with NEM 3.0, and they saw large increases in battery installations. Unlike CA, where they allowed in existing installs to continue to use net metering for up to 20y, I propose we end it for everyone but partially buy out the subsidy with a credit you can use towards island-capable battery systems.
How big that credit should be is not something I have strong feelings about, but I expect it would be very controversial because there are big winners and losers here depending on the shape of the policy. At one end of the spectrum you could size the payment to attempt to fully compensate owners for the net present value of their foregone subsidy [5]; at the other you give them a token amount that's just sufficient to get many of them to install a battery. My big question here is whether there's enough of a constituency for any point along the spectrum that this could actually become law. This is unfortunately not a free lunch: while the batteries do save money, they don't save enough to pay for themselves and someone, whether solar owners or general ratepayers, would need to pay the bill.
(While any subsidy would apply to us, since we have solar without batteries, I think the benefits of batteries here are large enough that we're planning to go ahead and install them regardless, so we wouldn't qualify for a subsidy.)
[1] Both of these numbers exclude state incentives for solar
production, beyond net metering. At maybe $0.04/kWh these help much
more for solar farms than for net metering installs, but they're not
enough to appreciably change the net metering picture. All numbers
for MA since I live here.
[2] Solar growing in the mix is a big part of why the marginal exported solar kWh today isn't that valuable. A while ago, in sunny places, people would use a lot of AC when the sun was shining, which meant solar production was reasonably well timed. But today there's so much solar going to the grid already that power when there's no sun is disproportionately valuable.
[3] Very roughly, MA has ~1.5 GW of residential solar, producing ~1.7 TWh/y. A little under half of residential production is typically self-consumed, so figure 0.9 TWh/y in exports. These are credited at retail (my bill is $0.32/kWh) but the value to the grid is more like $0.06/kWh on average (wholesale energy, plus a little for avoiding line losses and capacity increases). This comes to $234M, but with wide error bars.
[4] I don't remember this happening and tried to look it up, but didn't find much. Even the Northeast Blackout of 2003 probably wouldn't have qualified, since power in most places was restored in 2-6hr, plus it didn't affect this part of MA.
[5] A fully "make-whole" payment would need to be sized to the net present value of the delta between the value of the current system over the remainder of a 20y operation window, and the value they'd get from the battery (less its purchase price). Penciling this out, if someone is averaging 15 kWh/day at a marginal cost of $0.32/kWh and has 5kW of solar on their roof, and received permission to operate 5y ago, the net present value of their future net metering credits, less avoided cost compensation, over the 15y remainder of the 20y window, would be ~10k. A battery (let's say 13 kWh) would regain ~$6k of that from increased self-consumption and another ~$5k from battery-operation incentives (ConnectedSolutions in MA; assuming drops to ~0 after 5y). This means you about break even (~+$1k) until you get into the cost of the battery and installation. Which is unfortunately a lot more than $1k; I see quotes for $16k, though this doesn't fully reflect how much improvements in battery tech should be bringing the price down.
2026-09-08 21:00:00
The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered" thinking around bans.
In fact, one specific place where I'd like to see this thinking applied is adjacent to this rule: babywearing carriers on planes. When our babies were little, carriers were massively helpful in flying. The baby likes it, and your arms are free. But for takeoff and landing, the FAA requires you to take your baby out of the carrier and hold them in your arms.
The rule is that if an under-two is going to ride on a lap, they must not "occupy or use any restraining device," (14 CFR 121.311.b.1) and FAA guidance to parents is clear: "Baby carriers ...are not allowed to be used during ground movement, take-off, or landing."
This goes back to 1995, and if you look at the notice of proposed rulemaking it says:
This notice proposes to withdraw FAA approval for the use of booster seats and vest- and harness-type child restraint systems in aircraft during takeoff, landing, and movement on the surface. ... The FAA believes that, during an aircraft crash, the banned devices may put children in a potentially worse situation than the allowable alternatives.
This is based on their 1994 study, where the FAA compared child restraint options. They looked at "booster seats, forward facing carriers, aft facing carriers, a harness device, a belly belt, and passenger seat lap belts." The "carriers" here are car seats; they didn't test babywearing carriers. I don't think that's a major flaw in the study, however, since I do expect babywearing carriers would have performed poorly. [1] The real problem is that they didn't test the most common alternative, holding the baby in your lap. So "may put children in a potentially worse situation than the allowable alternatives" seems clearly wrong to me.
In the 1996 final rule [2] they discuss why they're making a different decision than the UK (CAA) and Europe (JAA, predates EASA), and they avoid the obvious comparison. They say belly belts can be dangerous, acknowledge that lap-holding has risks, predict parents will buy a second seat, and then also say they don't want to require a second seat because people will drive. This isn't completely nuts, since it's possible that allowing belly belts would have caused some parents to choose them over a second seat. It's pretty unlikely for the effects to balance out in just this way, however, and I don't see any indication that they tried to do this balancing.
I expect that, if fairly evaluated, modern babywearing carriers would prove much safer than arms during turbulence, crashes, and evacuations. And I think this is likely enough that if we're not going to do these tests we should default to not banning carriers. In 2024 there was a bill proposing to do something like this (Rep Bill Posey's HR 8972), but it went to the aviation subcommittee and died without a vote.
I don't think the harm of the current rule is very large in the scheme of things: flying is very safe, even for unrestrained lap infants. Most of the harm is probably the inconvenience of waking happily sleeping babies. Still, it bugs me as a clear example of incoherent rulemaking. The FAA sensibly considered substitution behavior in deciding not to ban lap infants, but failed to balance it here.
[1] The closest thing to a carrier they tested was a 'belly belt':
"This belt is designed to be buckled around the child's abdomen and is
secured to an adult's abdomen with the adult's safety belt by routing
the safety belt through a small loop of webbing sewn on the belly
belt." They did not perform well: "In the test, these systems allowed
the anthropomorphic test dummy to make severe contact with the back of
the seat in the row in front of the test dummy. The child also may be
crushed by the forward bending motion of the adult to whom the child
is attached."
[2] Here's the section, if the PDF is hard to load or read:
CAA and JAA state that they permit the belly belt on the grounds that it provides a measure of protection to children and/or other passengers versus lap holding a child.
FAA Response: The FAA would like to emphasize that belly belts are not permitted under current regulations. Even if belly belts do provide some measure or protection, the CAMI study found that belly belts allowed the test dummy to make severe contact with the back of the seat in the row in front of the test dummy and that a child may be crushed by the forward bending motion of the adult to whom the child is attached. Consideration of revising this current prohibition is beyond the scope of the notice.
The JAA also stated that in a crash or severe air turbulence, parents are often unable to keep a lap-held child in their arms.
FAA Response: As discussed earlier, the FAA has determined that mandating child restraint devices could cause more deaths and injuries than it would prevent. However, the FAA does not encourage lap-holding children. The FAA expects, with its education campaign providing clear guidance on child restraint devices, parents will choose an approved device, rather than lap holding their children, in order to provide the safest traveling environment for their children. The two members of the APCS Working Group submitted identical letters that discussed the need to mandate restraints for children. In addition, they stated that the FAA's argument that the extra cost to families caused by mandating child restraint devices would force them to less safe road travel is invalid since the same cost situation arises when the child is 3 or 4 or 10 years old.
FAA Response: The APCS Working Group's argument is that the extra cost to families of mandating child restraint devices is no more of a deterrent to air travel than the price of a ticket for a child of any age. However, the FAA notes that this argument does not take into account that ordinarily there is no charge for a lap-held child, whereas certificate holders very often do charge if a seat is requested for this infant. Thus, many people would switch to less safe automobile travel as a result of mandating child restraint usage because unlike most rulemakings where the compliance costs are passed along to all travelers, mandatory use of child restraint would impose compliance costs only on families with infants.
2026-09-07 21:00:00
David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things? [1] This would be great, and seems like the obvious way for it to work: when the grid goes down the panels can charge the car when it's sunny, and the car can power the house when it's not. Unfortunately as far as I can tell the only way I could do this today is with a Cybertruck, and other systems are a long way off.
The basic problem is that while several manufacturers support having the car power your house when the grid is down ("V2H"), they generally treat it as a separate discharging-only mode. For example, the GM V2H Bundle documentation says "During a power outage, the GM Energy Home Hub safely disconnects your home from the local power grid and enables backup power to flow from the GM Energy Inverter throughout your home" and "Once power is restored, your GM EV will automatically end the discharge session and begin charging" without any mention of recharging the car when the grid is down.
For Fords, automatically powering your house during a grid outage was a big selling point in the F150 Lightning marketing campaign, but they now say "The Ford Charge Station Pro, required for Automatic Home Backup Power, is no longer for sale", probably because the F150 Lightning has been discontinued. And it looks to me like even then they didn't support bidirectional charging during a grid outage. The only option today is V2H via a transfer switch, which doesn't let you charge an F150.
For Kia, there's Wallbox's Quasar 2. Unfortunately this is a mess where Wallbox is very enthusiastic and says V2H works, but then customers run into trouble actually trying to use it. And it doesn't work with current models, plus "Solar Charging cannot be used simultaneously with ... V2H".
The only way I can see to do this today is with Tesla Powershare + Cybertruck, which says "If the system includes a UL 1741-listed solar system and there is capacity in the backup panel, ensure the solar system is included in the backup circuit to allow Cybertruck to recharge during an outage." But I don't want a Cybertruck, and (counting the cost of a Cybertruck over a vehicle we'd normally buy) this would be way more expensive than the Enphase 10C I'm considering installing.
Another possibility is that Enphase is planning on shipping a bidirectional EV charger, but I don't see anything more recent than a 2026-02-02 announcement that they're "targeting volume production beginning in Q4 2026" and they say "projected vehicle compatibility and bidirectional functionality will depend on automaker enablement, vehicle software, applicable standards, and final product specifications." I suspect it will slip into 2027, MA availability will be even later, and when it does come out I'd need to buy a specific new EV (expensive).
I don't want to wait that long to get good backup power in place, since I want to be prepared for a world that might change quickly in the next few years. So I'll probably go ahead with the smaller emergencies-only battery.
[1] All of this assumes we have an electric car. Which we don't, but
our shared Honda Fit is a 2013 and while it's been a fantastic car I
don't expect it to last that much longer. A plug-in hybrid or full EV
are possibilities for a next car. I think our families are unusually
poorly suited for full EVs since we don't use the car much (minimal
gas savings and pollution reduction) and a larger than typical
proportion of our trips are long (ex: driving to play a dance).
2026-09-06 21:00:00
Like most houses with solar, our house is capable of generating a lot of power, and it's basically useless [1] in a disaster. If the grid is down, the panels shut down automatically. This is a lot of value lost, since in a long-term disaster, electricity would be incredibly valuable ( air cleaning, gas boiler or a tiny bit of resistive heat, sump pump, cooking, refrigeration, tools). When we installed a second round of solar in 2024 we considered either a battery backup or "best effort when the sun is shining" power. They priced out at many thousands of dollars and we decided it wasn't worth it, but recently three things have changed my mind:
Massachusetts has the ConnectedSolutions program, where you can get paid to send battery power to the grid during times of very high demand. With 10 kWh of storage that I'm ok draining fully this would be about $1k/y. [2] I don't care about reserving capacity because I'm trying to reduce risk from serious disasters lasting weeks or more, and losing power until the next morning is more of an inconvenience.
It also has HEAT loans, which offer seven-year 0% financing for eligible energy improvements, including installing batteries. Though our family has a $12.4k cap here because we used some on heating improvements in 2015.
As I touched on a few days ago, when I think about how AI is likely to impact the world I'm putting increasing probability on a messy middle path. That is, regardless of whether the long-term outcome is good or bad, we might have very large scale disruptions in the near future. I want to have power even if the grid becomes unreliable or is down for an extended period.
Getting a 10 kWh system installed looks like it would cost about $16.2k (for the Enphase 10C, which works well with the existing panels' IQ8 microinverters). Since our property is only eligible for $12.4k available for a HEAT loan, we'd be spending $3.8k up front, and then ~$800/y after incentives during the next seven years. [3] After that we'd make some money, but this is definitely not competitive as long-term investments go and I don't think money earned that far out helps much. Overall, this seems likely worth it for us for reducing our personal risk in future long-term disasters, though it's still a lot of money and I'm not fully decided yet.
[1] Not quite useless: panels have standard MC4 connectors so you
could go up on the roof (yikes) in the dark so you don't get shocked
(yikes!) and connect them to cables that would power a solar
generator (portable power station with solar input). And then in
our specific case we do also have a small amount
of best-effort solar on one side of our roof.
[2] They pay $275 per kW delivered, averaging across each summer's events. A 10 kWh battery emptied over a ~2.5hr average event is ~3.6kW. At $275/kW that's ~$1k.
[3] The rate is only guaranteed for the first five years, so it could be a bit worse than this in years 6 and 7.
2026-09-02 21:00:00
I'm pretty worried about how AI might change the world a lot very soon. In some of these cases things go very wrong very quickly, in others things go very right very quickly, but I'm increasingly (relative to 2024) expecting a messy middle path where, whether we end up with a good or bad outcome, things might get weird for a while. Our supply chains are fragile, fulfilment is largely just-in-time, and if we'll suddenly need way more of some things they might not be available. Thinking a lot about biosecurity for my day job, I'm especially worried about how people, AIs, or some combination might release something to spread through the population.
What can we do about this? A few months ago Chris Bakerlee (program officer on Coefficient Giving's biosecurity and pandemic preparedness team) wrote up 10 big projects for reducing bio x-risk. Working on any of these professionally would be really valuable. Looking over the list, however, it occurred to me that most of them have solid actions we can do at the individual level.
Several of these have the form "X is important, figure out how to get countries to have X in an emergency", and since you likely care about your own welfare much more than that of strangers, they're typically worth just going and doing. Not on altruistic grounds, but they're competitive with other ways to spend your money to improve your own life in expectation. And this is the opposite of hoarding during a disaster: buying in advance stimulates pre-disaster production while also reducing disaster-time pressure.
Walking through the list:
"Boost countries' food stockpiles by >25%, especially countries with high industrial capacity": store food. If you have some space and like to cook, maintaining a deep pantry with three months of food foregoes ~$9/year/person in investment returns.
"Ensure PPE stockpiles and emergency distribution systems are in place in X country" and "Develop rigorously tested DIY protocols for making respirators out of common household materials": buy reusable masks for everyone in your household. About $30/person, and no need to improvise when you can buy something good.
"Create and use demos to communicate AI-bio uplift to policymakers": call your representatives to let them know you're worried about risks from AI including bio uplift.
"Develop rigorously tested DIY protocols for converting bedrooms into cleanrooms": buy air purifiers ($165) and maybe far-UVC lamps ($500). If you're buying in advance you don't have to figure out how to improvise air cleaners out of fans, filters, tape, blankets, vacuum cleaners; just buy the stuff we know works. Though there's still more to do here, once good protocols are available.
"Scalably monitor particle concentrations inside clean spaces and respirators": buy a particle counter ($70). You can use it to measure how well your air purifiers are working in your specific space. Now, it won't help with testing respirators (at least not without way too much work), but I'm pessimistic about anyone solving that problem generally.
"Raise awareness of engineered pandemic risks, especially among people who can do something about it" and "Headhunt the leads for these and many other projects": write blog posts, talk to your friends.
"Ensure strong, sensible mirror life policy is effective in X country": confirm that none of your housemates are attempting to create mirror life.
"Ensure systematic red-teaming of gene synthesis and AIxBio safeguards": I've got nothing here.
I also think it would be good for someone to spend some time thinking about how to give good advice on bio-informed prepping. So much of the prepping advice out there doesn't consider disasters involving anything infectious. I've done some thinking in my spare time, but none of this is close to the best you can do. It would be great to have a list of "buy / do this" in prioritized order, with detailed reasoning available for people who want to check the work, and people could start at the top and work their way down.