From AI fanatic to researching batteries and solving climate change problems
How I switched what technology I wanted to focus on
Hi, there I’m Theodore! I’m a 15-year-old high school student who is passionate about renewable technology and solving climate change problems. This month I’ll explain my process of going from being super passionate about AI to switching to lithium-ion batteries.
Don’t fit solutions to problems
This is the biggest takeaway from the month. I’ve always wanted to go into climate. It’s the number one problem that I’d want to solve in the future. Halfway through the year, I got into AI as I love building things and creating. AI seemed like a whole world of opportunity where I could create something just with my laptop alone. Naturally, since I wanted to go into climate, my thought process was to apply AI to climate.
This is how I got into lithium-ion batteries as AI has a lot of potential in this space. My original plan was…
get good at AI
Create an AI that could make batteries better
Yayyyy I’m now a billionaire!
Sadly this was a terrible thought process. Yes AI has a lot of potential in batteries, but mainly in electric vehicles, improving charge times. This did not fit with my main objective which is to create a renewable battery that stores more energy, therefore, eliminating the intermittency that comes with wind and solar.
When I told one of my friends about my situation he told me this:
“Climate change is a hardware problem, not a software problem. Nobody will solve climate change by starting a software company”
This made me realize that I was fitting a technology (AI) to a problem (renewable energy storage). Looks like I had to scrap my months of coding and go back to the drawing board.
Re-climbing a mountain
BATTERIES!! Enter the field of batteries, a huge field that is growing by the day. Lithium-ion batteries are creating changes everywhere from the electronics business, to the EV business and of course impacting renewable energy. After months of working on AI, going into a new field with almost no knowledge is pretty scary. It was like this huge mountain of knowledge I had to climb, and this time it wasn’t numbers on a screen it was electrochemical processes that made no sense to me.
I first started climbing this mountain by getting my hands on any research papers I could find. Also, in order to visualize these concepts and to keep track of my progress, I started using a lucid chart.
As you can see in a month I was able to accumulate quite a few notes on batteries. I’m going to make a video and an article in December describing these notes in 5 levels (the 4th level isn’t completely finished). This was extremely useful when visualizing my findings as well as interacting with experts because I had something the experts could improve on.
Lab opportunity
One of the most exciting things this month of November was getting the opportunity to get into a lab. On December 22nd a few days from now I’m going to be building a lithium-ion battery in a lab at the university of Quebec at Montreal (UQUAM). This will be an extreme privilege as one of the disadvantages of learning about batteries from research papers is you have to imagine the reactions taking place. This lab experience will give me hands-on experience and will deepen my knowledge. I must thank the expert that gave me this incredible opportunity.
Things to come
Lab on December 22nd
Finishing my video and article on a lithium-ion battery explained in 5 levels
Reading more research papers
Continuing to climb this battery mountain by meeting with experts in renewable energy and batteries
Thank you and see you next month!