China is using artificial intelligence to effectively turn a dam project on the Tibetan Plateau into the world’s largest 3D printer, according to scientists involved in the project.
The 180 metre (590 feet) high Yangqu hydropower plant will be built slice by slice – using unmanned excavators, trucks, bulldozers, pavers and rollers, all controlled by AI – in the same additive manufacturing process used in 3D printing.
— The South China Morning Post
The Yangqu dam project is set to finish in two years and is being overseen by Tsinghua University’s Liu Tianyun, who recently argued that developments in 3D printing have made the technology “identical to nature.”
Its purported future annual output of nearly 5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity for Henan Province is a full billion more than that of the Hoover Dam, whose WPA-era construction was similarly the product of two decades worth of advancements in engineering and construction technologies.
2 Comments
I hope the environmental damage this dam will cause will be offset by the green energy.
We should not give up eating for fear of choking.
This was a stock phrase encouraged by education authorities in China. An American who once taught college writing there explains:
As a teacher in China, I had a special fear and loathing for the argumentative essay. In the nineties, my students were provided with “A Handbook of Writing,” a state-published text whose section on “argumentation” featured a model essay entitled “The Three Gorges Project Is Beneficial.” The counter-argument paragraph listed some reasons to oppose the Three Gorges Dam: flooded scenery, lost cultural relics, the risk of an earthquake destroying the structure. “Their worries and warnings are well justified,” the essay continued, and then proceeded to the transition: “But we should not give up eating for fear of choking.”
Serious criticism of Three Gorges was heavily discouraged, for many impossible.
He describes his classroom:
My office and the classroom were in a wing of a new building on Sichuan University’s Jiang’an campus, in the southwestern suburbs of Chengdu. Walking to class took little more than a minute, but I passed six surveillance cameras along the way. The cameras were among the many things that had changed since I’d last taught in China, more than twenty years earlier. In the nonfiction classroom, another camera was mounted on the wall behind me. When I stood at the lectern, the camera was positioned above my right shoulder, pointed at the students.
https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
This is a good read.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.