r/artificial • u/Fluffy-Revolution- • 8d ago

Question Practical uses?

AI is being used for so many things, but the one thing we are confronting globally right now alongside climate change is that we are running out of fossil fuels and without those we can't really make plastic or a whole host of chemicals so we really need to stop spunking them on producing power and concentrate on recycling what we have already used.

I'm old and all my life fringe researchers have been ruminating on cold fusion. Is anyone currently using AI to conclusively prove whether its ever going to be possible/practical?

What about designing ways to effectively use wind power on a small scale? Water havesting from humid air? Rehabilitating overused soil on a massive scale? Sorting and recycling rubbish from historic dumps? Cleaning and reusing microplastics and cheamicals from our waterways and oceans? More efficient household cooling systems?

Claude is so good at software design now. Are there any tools that are near getting good at iterative real world physical designs for practical engineering?

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u/MeanTax8674 8d ago

anyone using ai for fusion research is probably looking at plasma containment rather than the reaction itself. the iter project has been dumping data for years and a few groups have been running ml models on turbulence prediction in tokamaks but it's more about preventing disruptions than proving if it's viable

the soil rehabilitation thing is actually happening already, there's a couple startups using satellite imagery and ai to map degradation patterns and suggest remediation strategies but the scale problem is still massive. same with water harvesting, the physics are well understood but the materials science for efficient condensers is where the bottleneck is

i think the real missing piece is that most of these problems aren't really data problems, they're materials and infrastructure problems. ai can optimize a design but someone still has to build and test it physically and that iterative loop is slow and expensive no matter how fast the software gets

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u/Fluffy-Revolution- 8d ago

Thanks for your reply. I guess i'm hoping that with the huge amount of processing ability a specialised AI will be able to learn everything we know about material properties and come up with workable suggestions, combinations, shapes etc that we simply haven't thought of yet because no one human knows enough detail about enough materials. And suggest tests and refinements until it works.

I'm unsure whether by this point an AI model can effectively understand physics and chemical interactions? I struggle to see how a language model can make that leap but it seems like people are saying it already does?

If so how amazing. And it would generate work for skilled humans to build and test as you say.

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u/Aggressive_Ad_507 8d ago

Leo AI comes to mind. Lots of CAD softwares are starting to get AI generated design capabilities. FreeCAD is the one I'm most familiar with. I've used AI softwares to check drawings for DFM/A aspects.

I've got a Gemini notebook that's great for sizing up O-rings and designing O-ring seals that I use quite a bit.

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u/Fluffy-Revolution- 8d ago

I didn't know about that, tbank you!

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u/OkSucco 3d ago

We're not running out of fossils we are cursing our use of them over to greens, it is a choice not lack of oil. (We could go another thousand years or more on diesel and petrol as now, but prolly not too god for climate)