Comment by vidarh
3 hours ago
Yes, but isn't that pretty much the point of the person you replied to? We know that a lot of inventions were motivated by that, and so it is incredibly myopic to not pause and try to think through the likely far broader implications.
OK, so what are they?
Scaling photovoltaic production doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own. At best, it makes it easier to change the grid to renewable power, if you ignore the intermittency problem that still exists even at huge scales. PV fabs aren't really reusable for other purposes though, and PV tech is pretty mature already, so it's not clear what scaling that up will do.
Scaling rocketry has several fascinating implications but Elon already covered many of them in his blog post.
Scaling AI - just read the HN front page every day ;)
What are we missing here? Some combinatoric thing?