Blaise Agüera y Arcas

speaker

213 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

There is cloud cover.

There's the changing angle of the sun, which means that you get less when it's not overhead.

So intermittency is really the big issue.

And the fact that battery technology is still not anywhere close to where it needs to be in order to smooth that power curve from solar.

So at least on Earth...

It won't be able to fulfill the entire demand until or unless we make really radical changes in how we store power.

And even if we do that, we also need to think about how much of the Earth's surface we're willing to cover with solar panels.

I think we can certainly afford to cover a lot more of it than we have today, but there is a limit, which is not just human habitation and so on, but the rest of nature.

The whole planet is solar-powered, and so there is ultimately going to be a zero-sum game there.

Basically, the concept is that you move AI into space and you use solar power.

But rather than solar power on Earth, you have orbiting solar panels that are in sunlight almost all the time in something called a sun synchronous orbit.

These are orbits that go around the Earth in such a way that the solar panel is facing the sun.

So those sun synchronous orbits allow a solar panel to gather about eight times the energy of a solar panel on the ground.

because there's no nighttime and there's no atmosphere.

The good that it does you is if you move the actual computation to space also.

So if you want your farm-to-table distance, as it were, to be as short as possible, then the way to solve for that is by putting the data centers in space with the solar panels.

So there's a short-term answer and there's a longer-term answer.

The short-term answer is that, you know, of course a data center is a giant building.

And we can't be talking about literally moving those buildings up into space.

This is not the Death Star.

Showing 161–180 of 213 · page 9 of 11