Fusion hype has a familiar ring to it

We'll be coming back to this Holdren essay and what it says about techno-optimists' fascination with fusion, but for now, but for now, there's one aspect of one paragraph I'd like to focus on. The hype/investment bubble around companies like Commonwealth and Helion is very much a part of the tech story of the 2020s, including the most troubling aspects. If you replace fusion in this paragraph with AI or with humanoid robots, you will still have a statement that is both accurate and timely.

From John P. Holdren of the  Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
(Originally published in June 2024 and updated in January 2026.)

But the recent hype about the chances for early success in the Earth-bound electricity-generation role has been far over the top, in my view, and is dangerous in the sense that large early investments in the false expectation of early commercial returns—which would be only the latest in the long cycle of overoptimism about fusion followed by disappointment―could well set back the timetable for eventual success, not least by locking in technological dead ends in premature pursuit of commercialization. The hype is dangerous, as well, in feeding the false hope that there is a technological silver bullet that will save us from the challenging problems of addressing climate change with the means now available or easily foreseeable. 

 

With all three technologies, tremendous investments have been made based on assumptions of imminent massive ROI, assumptions that range from questionable to highly unlikely. In all three, this combination of capital expenditure and hype has locked research into questionable paths (see our previous post on steam-powered airplanes). With artificial intelligence, large language models, a promising and impressive technology but one with notable limitations, have sucked much of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to pursuing other types of AI. With humanoids, the situation is far worse. This is a branch of robotics that was relegated to little more than a curiosity a few years ago and which owes its success to an embarrassing publicity stunt where Elon Musk brought out a dancer in a robot suit. 

We looking at the largest technology-driven market bubble in human history, but we are also seeing potentially disastrous public policy being justified by promises that the tech is unlikely to ever fulfill. The chairman of the Fed assures us that the coming wave of productivity will fix our economic woes. Op-ed pieces tell us that AI can help solve the problem of climate change. Silver bullets for everybody any day now.