I think he is to pesimistic, a tool is a tool and if AI progresses without hitting a ceilling, i will see a potential future of a society which might explore space.

Musks SpaceX Keynote was ridiculous, don't get me wrong, but we will be able to see AI progress in the next 5 years which will give us some kind of gut feeling were the journey can go.

Also AI solves another problem: Compute. It was clear that we want some kind of compute but its like with 4k; We have 4k for ages now but it is not the default resolution on all displays sold. We stoped pushing the boundaries because invest is not here. People do not bother too much with it.

With AI and the richest companies and people want to see what happens, pushes the envolope a lot faster, pushes us to find solutions.

This AI Compute based on ML/Neuroal Networks can also be used for physics simulation, protein folding, and everything else.

Stoping technology is not an option and not a solution. Education is. We need to educate people.

Actually, this AI Compute is not very useful for physics, protein folding or many other high performance computing.

The problem is that the connectivity required for much of AI is very different than that required for classic HPC (more emphasis on bandwidth, less on super low latency small payload remote memory operations) and the numeric emphasis is very different (lots of mixed resolution and lots of ridiculously small numeric resolutions like fp8 vs almost all fp64 with some fp32).

The result is that essentially no AI computers reach the high end of the TOP500.

The converse is also true, classic frontier scale super computers don't make the most cost effective AI training platforms because they spend a lot of the budget on making HPC programs fast.