Indeed. The incentives to put new ones on the market are very limited, due to legalities and economics.

A corporation has a limited window of patent monopoly, so a fairly short time period to recoup their investment to develop, licence and build out manufacturing capacity - thus need to sell it for a high price or sell high volumes.

It is a long and expensive process to get a new compound approved for use as a food additive, and it needs to be done separately in each major jurisdiction - at least China, USA and EU.

A new sweetener is directly competing against all the other ones that are already on the market - merely 'being much sweeter' isn't enough.
It has to be significiantly better in some other way, if only because it will be considerably more expensive at first.

I think there is a significant societal difference, because that last step is a lot bigger than the ones before.

In general, businesses tend to try to reduce headcount as people retire or leave, even if it means some workers have very little to do. Redundancies are expensive and take a long time - the larger they are, the longer it takes.

Businesses are also primarily staffed and run by humans who do not wish to lose their own jobs.

For a real-world example of a task that is already >99% automatable, consider real estate conveyancing.

The actual transaction is already entirely automated via simple algorithms - the database of land ownership is updated indicating the new owner, and the figures representing monetary wealth are updated in two or more bank accounts.

The work prior to that consists of identity confirmation, and document comprehension to find and raise possible issues that the buyer and seller need to be informed about.

All of this is already reasonably practicable with existing LLMs and image matching.

Have any conveyancing solicitors replaced all of their staff thusly?

1000x energy consumption in 10-20 years is a really wild prediction, I would give it a <0.1% probability.
It's several orders of magnitude faster than any previous multiple, and requires large amounts of physical infrastructure that takes a long time to construct.

1000x is a really, really big number.

Baseline

2022 figures, total worldwide consumption was 180 PWh/year^[1]

Of that:

• Oil: 53 PWh
• Coal: 45 PWh
• Gas: 40 PWh
• Hydro: 11 PWh
• Nuclear: 7 PWh
• Modern renewable: 13 PWh
• Traditional: 11 PWh

(2 sig fig because we're talking about OOM here)

There has only been a x10 multiple in the last 100 years - humanity consumed approx. 18 PWh/year around 1920 or so (details are sketchy for obvious reasons).

Looking at doubling time, we have:

1800 (5653 TWh)
1890 (10684 TWh) - 90 years
1940 (22869 TWh) - 50
1960 (41814 TWh) - 20
1978 (85869 TWh) - 18
2018 (172514 TWh) - 40

So historically, the fastest rate of doubling has been 20 years.

Build it anyway

It takes 5-10 years for humans to build a medium to large size power plant, assuming no legal constraints.
AGI is very unlikely to be able to build an individual plant much faster, although it could build more at once.

Let's ignore that and assume AGI can build instantly.

What's in the power plant

At current consumption, known oil, gas and coal reserves are roughly 250 years in total.
Thus at 1000x consumption they are consumed in less than three months.

Nuclear fuel reserves are a similar size - 250 years of uranium, so assuming reprocessing etc, let's say 1000-2000 years at 2022 consumption.

So the AGI has less than 3 years of known fuel reserves at 1000x current consumption.

However, "reserves" means we know where it is and how much could be economically extracted.
Exploration will find more, and of course there are many other, more esoteric methods of electricity generation known or believed to be possible but currently uneconomic or unknown how to build.

How about Space?

Solar irradiance is roughly 1380 W/m2 at Earth's orbital distance. Call it 12 MWh/year/m2, or 12 TWh/year/km2

We're looking for 180,000,000 TWh/year, so we need a solar panel area of around 20,000,000 km2 at >50% efficiency.
That's a circle >2500km radius - much bigger than the Moon!

Fusion

The hidden assumption is that AGI not only figures out large-scale fusion in 4 years, but rolls it out immediately.

1. ^{^}

   Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2020) - “Energy Production and Consumption”
   https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

I think the gap between AI R&D being 99% automatable and being actually automated will be approximately one day

That's wildly optimistic. There aren't any businesses that can change anywhere near that fast.

Even if they genuinely wanted to, the laws 99% of business are governed by mean that they genuinely can't do that. The absolute minimum time for such radical change under most jurisdictions is roughly six months.

Looking at the history of step changes in industry/business such as the industrial and information revolutions, I think the minimum plausible time between "can be automated with reasonable accuracy" and "is actually automated" is roughly a decade (give or take five years), because the humans who would be 'replaced' will not go gently.

That is far faster than either of the previous revolutions though, and a lot faster than the vast majority of people are capable of adapting. Which would lead to Interesting Times...

The main reason for everything being in a crappy state is almost certainly (>90%) widespread corruption.

Everyone who can is creaming off a little bit, leaving very little for the actual materiél and training.
So shoddy materials, poor to no training, missing equipment, components and spares.

That said, while it is very likely that the Russian nuclear arsenal is in extremely poor state, and I'd possibly go as high as 50/50 that their ICBMs could launch but cannot be aimed (as that takes expensive components that are easy to steal/not deliver and hide that fact), missing the target by a hundred miles or more is basically irrelevant in the "ending the world" stakes.

A 'tactical' device doesn't need much in the way of aiming, and on the assumption that it does in fact contain nuclear material there's not a huge civilian difference between it exploding 'as designed' or "just" fizzling.

If only the initiator went off, the weapon disintegrated during launch/firing, or the weapon/aircraft was shot down, it would still spread radioactive material over a wide area.

While that wouldn't be the "shock and awe" of a mushroom cloud, it's still pretty devastating to normal life.

It is absolutely certain that there will be more "variants of interest".

This is basically the evolutionary modelling that pretty much all Governments have ignored, every time - Delta and Omicron were predicted by all eviolutionary biologists.

The open questions are:

• Whether there will be a new variant of interest that is notably more infectious, and thus becomes dominant after Omicron.
  In the UK, Delta completely outcompeted all other variants in around 3-4 months (>95% of all sequenced cases were Delta). Omicron is expected to do the same by Feb if not earlier. USA is likely similar, albeit delayed by a few weeks.
• Whether future variants cause more or less serious disease than Omicron.
• When this will occur.
  To me, it seems most likely this will be Feb/March 2022 or Fall 2022

If the answer to the first question is Yes, and the second question is "far less serious", then the pandemic is over When it occurs - it has become another 'common cold' and is unlikely to mutate further to produce more serious disease (because it didn't).

However, if it is Yes and The Same Or More Serious, then we will certainly need further booster jabs in Fall/Winter 2022, perhaps tailored more closely.

In many ways COVID19 is irrelevant.

It's already spreading in multiple countries, and is very likely to become endemic.

However: It is not alone, there will be future viruses.

We should be looking to create habits that will protect us from both COVID19 and all future local epidemics and pandemics.

That means habits that can be maintained indefinitely, not short-term changes that are not sustainable.

Things like washing hands and using hand sanitizer and creams are habits you can learn and maintain.

Checking everyone for fever, selling your stocks to buy X is not sustainable, and so these behaviours will be quickly forgotten.

Hand sanitizer is a poor substitute for actually washing your hands with soap and water.

Coronaviruses are "enveloped" viruses, which means they have a fat-based shell that protects the genetic material and (presumably) aids it in infecting a cell.

Destroying this shell "kills" the virus.

While an alcohol sanitizer can of course dissolve the fats in the shell, it is difficult to get enough alcohol all over the skin to do this.

Soap is more effective because it actively attacks fats, and of course washing your hands provides far more volume and time in which to destroy the virus shells.

Some data from the BBC comparing them: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105

The current overall death rate is estimated at approx. 1%, with a fairly large number of cases.

It has spread much further and faster than SARS or MERS, but is far less dangerous than either.

Which makes sense - a disease which incapacitates or kills in a high percentage of cases is unlikely to spread as fast as one which has mild symptoms in most infected people.

It now appears almost certain to become endemic. The real goal is to slow down the spread sufficiently to develop vaccines before this happens.

That worked for bird flu and swine flu. It remains to be seen for Covid19

Couple of numbers to think about:

A flu shot covering the four or five "most common" viruses (inc. bird flu) in 2019/2020 cost $10 privately in the UK, and $20-$75 in the USA.

In the UK, everyone registered with a GP who is at increased risk of pneumonia is offered the shot for free, regardless of status. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/who-should-have-flu-vaccine/

In the USA, the Affordable Care Act made the flu shot free for most people who have health insurance, and for some groups without insurance. Approx. 10% of US citizens have no health insurance at all, these are of course those who either don't work or have low-paid jobs.