[ExI] loss of internet, was: AI risks

[J. Andrew Rogers]

> On Sep 7, 2015, at 7:04 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> 
> Stay with me for one more thought, por favor.  One of the ideas for dramatically improving transportation fuel economy of our Detroits is to make them series hybrids, where a small onboard Diesel generates power and drives electric motors on the wheels without a mechanical link between Diesel and axles.  Series hybrids have lousy acceleration, but they are very efficient.  If anything like that ever catches on, we could run the cars in the driveway or parking lots to generate enough power to charge lithium batteries and run those critical DC-able devices.  So we could kinda theoretically run our phones, internet and computers, and possibly our lights (assuming LED) but not our HVAC.  If we had enough of these series hybrids, that might kinda work at least temporarily, ja?  Life would go on, we would have the means of fixing whatever took down the power grid.


Dodge produced a commercially available diesel-electric Ram 2500 truck over a decade ago, originally as part of a military project. It was designed so that when stationary it could generate 20kW of electrical power for whatever needed it — essentially being able to divert power to both transportation and other things. As far as anyone knows, they never sold a single truck. 


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