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