I think the main benefit is not just that you can store energy, but you can store it in a way that sucks CO2 out of the air. Obviously if you're burning it then you can say "yeah but it ends up back in the atmosphere" but that misses the point that a fair amount of it will be processed into ethanol at any one time: there would be a lot in production, transit, storage at any time if this became a common fuel. So a lot of CO2 would be locked up in the process itself. You can make plastics out of ethanol as well, not just burn the stuff. Solar/wind plastics.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/10/23/0310200/a-british-supercomputer-can-predict-winter-weather-a-year-in-advanceHere's another nice one. Using improved climate models and supercomputers, as well as decades of data, the British have a program that could have forecast the weather
one year in advance with a 62% success rate, going back to 1980 data. With models like that maybe things like in Back To the Future II where they tell you the exact time that the rain will start/stop can become feasible.
Obviously, models like this can be over-trained (i.e. trained to a "just-so" prediction that fails on new data), but there are basic established techniques to avoid and test for that, which I assume they'd follow: e.g. you train your predictive model on
some of the data, then you use the remaining data, which the model has never seen before, to check it's predictive power. That's exactly the same in practice as training it on past data, and checking against future data. You're just moving the concept of "future" back a few years.
Just an idea.
If human work is automated than we could lose alot of jobs. Said humans may need to go back to school to learn and re-tool for newer jobs. But also if humans can just have these robots work then why work yourself?
A couple of points come to mind. This scenario firstly requires that humans can go back to school and re-tool for newer jobs faster than the robots can. That's been true before, when robots were only good at a few isolated things: a few "islands" of task-types but as robots get better, those islands grow and join up. Eventually, you're treading water to learn new skills faster than the robots do, and there are cases where the robot isn't as
good as a human, but they're "good enough" while being a lot cheaper and faster and more consistent.
The second point is that say you buy a robot then send that robot to work for you. Well, other people will be doing that as well, so your robot will be competing for jobs with other people's robots. Then, people who don't manage their robots in a cost-effective way will lose out, and more streamlined, larger robot-owning corporations will squeeze your home-owned robots out of the market. So you might have a situation where you personally own a robot that can
theoretically go out and earn money for you, but all the opportunities are already taken by other wealthier robot-owners who have economies of scale going on. Sort of like how bitcoin mining started on CPUs, went to GPUs, then went to ASICS, then went to super-clusters of ASICs. Someone is still making money off bitcoin, and your shitty PC can still theoretically mine it, but your actual share would currently be like 1 cent per decade. You probably couldn't afford the electricity to run your robot on the paltry amount of income it would earn when competing with giant robot-owning corporate groups.
But just think: we already have a solution for not being able to compete. And it's not robots. Say you want a slice of the action on soda sales. Do you need to go set up a small bottling plant and hope you can out-compete Coca Cola? Well not really. Coca Cola has shares which you can buy, and you get dividends. Similarly, if all labor is robots in the future then economies of scale will kick in, with large robot-owning corporations. But shares would probably still be a thing, so you can get a slice of the pie on robot labor by just buying shares.