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Interesting articles, November 2024

The pace of Russia’s territorial gains in eastern Ukraine has accelerated.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-defenses-in-east-are-buckling-russian-advance-is-accelerating

However, this is coming at the cost of enormous Russian casualties.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3nv7j1xkxo

One of Russia’s biggest tank storage bases has 75% fewer tanks than it did before the Ukraine War, and most of the remaining vehicles are in such poor condition that they can’t be restored for combat.
https://youtu.be/mUzuAMp73I4?si=6E3JubyT_Xg8fh7B

The Red Army is so low on weapons that Russia’s biggest film studio donated to it dozens of antique tanks and other vehicles that it normally used for making war films.
https://www.twz.com/land/russias-largest-film-studio-donated-antique-tanks-to-the-military

With North Korean help, Russia is recapturing its land near Kursk.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-hoped-force-russia-pick-111953225.html

North Korean artillery pieces are making their way to Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/land/north-korean-long-range-self-propelled-artillery-appears-in-russia

Russia is giving North Korea more advanced antiaircraft missiles in exchange for its help in Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/land/north-korea-getting-new-air-defenses-in-return-for-supporting-russia-in-ukraine-official

Many Russians are enlisting in the Army solely for money. The pay is excellent. Problematically, the Russian government is paying for these salaries as well as most other war-related expenses by printing huge amounts of money and handing it out, which is causing very high inflation.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/economics-death-why-russians-poor-161637106.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-signs-law-allowing-russian-171726947.html

After Biden authorized Ukraine to fire advanced, U.S.-made missiles deep into Russia, Putin announced Russia might use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-nuclear-doctrine-putin-91f20e0c9b0f9e5eaa3ed97c35789898

Russia also fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile into Ukraine in revenge. This is the first time such a weapon has ever been used in anger.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-intercontinental-missile-war-putin-d50183ccfc28b10c71e93f3e68159a61

‘Ukraine’s drone units are inflicting 80% of the frontline casualties on Russia, report says’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraines-drone-units-inflicting-80-121327010.html

Israel’s most recent airstrikes on Iran destroyed most of the latter’s missile fuel production facilities, which will effectively limit missile production for years. The jets also destroyed many of Iran’s S-300 antiaircraft missile sites, showing how inferior the Russian-made systems are to American technology. Most of China’s antiaircraft missiles have the same level of technology as the S-300, meaning a U.S.-China air war would probably be more one-sided than people think. The U.S. is unique in that its military pretends to be weaker than it is.
https://youtu.be/oQtRdL36FVs?si=lN40_YCEHMAHJ5i2

2% of Gaza’s population has been killed in the last 13 months.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-11-20-2024-5da3ce43df8662fe9eeab4ad804bdc0f

A U.N. analysis found that most of the people killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza have been women and children.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/partial-un-probe-gaza-war-094427985.html

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince accused Israel of genocide in Gaza.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8x5570514o

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and two top leaders in the Israeli and Hamas armed forces for war crimes.
https://apnews.com/article/icc-israel-hamas-warrants-netanyahu-palestinian-arrest-73c854d072e0a1a41b19b2cb2cdd07fa

This video shows how the Israeli Air Force practically destroyed Syria’s Air Force in 1982.
https://youtu.be/F33h9-oUfDU?si=c3yQos_YepVP9ald

The F-20 was the greatest fighter plane that never was.
https://youtu.be/5ypSn108HuY?si=J-cp60LpkDuyjPhd

Here’s an interesting and simple video about how artillery is aimed at targets. The “Fire Direction Center” (7:20) will be made obsolete by intelligent machines.
https://youtu.be/PrullIWGqX8?si=acW-XgN2SQ8a2Z_7

We know of ways to design better shotgun shells, but no one has tried to commercialize them due to path dependence. In other words, there are so many shotguns that use the old shells that we are locked in to continuing their use.
https://youtu.be/3iLSCNtogc8?si=0s8Uqt9nCXQD3YA-

In November of 1950, U.N. forces captured Pyongyang from North Korea’s battered army. At that point, there were two options: 1) Build a strong defensive line north of Pyongyang clear across the peninsula or 2) pursue the fleeing enemy and take over all of North Korea to the Chinese border. In retrospect, we should have chosen the first option because even if the Communists had retained control over the northern mountain region, they wouldn’t have had enough land, resources or people to make a viable country, and there’s no way it would have been able to build nuclear weapons 50 years later.

Halting our troops north of Pyongyang would have also left us much abler to repulse any Chinese counteroffensive, which some in the U.S. military high command correctly believed was coming. In any case, not advancing to the border would have signaled to the Chinese that our goal wasn’t to eventually invade them, and that we were willing to leave rump North Korea as a buffer zone. General MacArthur really blew it.
https://youtu.be/VWlZ6Xf4Bp8?si=5f1gtV8rRLvhzHAA&t=524

In a shocking turn of events, rebels captured the second-largest city in Syria, Aleppo, after just a day of fighting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly27r5p0yno

From this February: “There’s this very powerful and seductive narrative around a soft landing, and we’re just not seeing it in the data,” Citi’s chief US economist, Andrew Hollenhorst, said in a CNBC interview.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-soft-landing-us-economy-022146984.html

Does Joe Biden believe in the Singularity?
https://x.com/i/status/1838721620808208884

“Search engine optimization” worsens political polarization by providing people with political articles that support their existing biases.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241031-how-google-tells-you-what-you-want-to-hear

Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The vast majority of polls showed a tied result up to the day of the vote, and were badly wrong: Trump won the popular vote and the electoral vote count by healthy margins. Here’s a roundup of right and wrong predictions.

The saga of veteran Democratic strategist James Carville:

Elon Musk’s 2023 prediction right after it was announced Trump would be charged with a felony in New York and forced to have his mugshot taken:

In September 2023, Tucker Carlson predicted Trump would be assassinated. In 2024, there were two attempts on his life, one of which nearly succeeded. “They indicted him three times, and every single time his popularity rose. If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, then you go to indictment, and none of them work, what’s next? Graph it out, man! We’re speeding toward assassination, obviously. No-one will say that, but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12470861/Tucker-Carlson-breathlessly-says-speeding-Trump-assassination-liberal-establishment-running-options-stop-president-Russian-propagandist-says-ex-Fox-News-host-dead-man-walking.html

A robotic guard dog is patrolling Trump’s Florida estate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c30p16gn3pvo

Trump has vowed to negotiate and end to the Ukraine War, even if it means forfeiting conquered territory. A cease-fire would allow Russia to rebuild its forces faster than Ukraine, and then attack again in a year with a large advantage. Trump should not substantially lower U.S. aid to Ukraine for the first year of his coming term to ensure that Russia burns through the remainder of its Soviet-era weapons stockpiles, making rapid rearmament after any cease-fire impossible.
https://youtu.be/cZoJKFfZ7nw?si=dzoVreJXTfp2EAlt

NVIDIA’s market cap is now over $3 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-rides-ai-wave-pass-211002574.html

In his final book, Henry Kissinger warned of a future where technologically enhanced humans and machines rule the world. ‘In a section titled “Coevolution: Artificial Humans,” the three authors encourage people to think now about “trying to navigate our role when we will no longer be the only or even the principal actors on our planet.”’
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/nov/19/henry-kissinger-final-warning-prepare-superhuman-p/

‘A painting by an AI robot of the eminent World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing has sold for $1,084,800 (£836,667) at auction.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqdvz4w45wo

An online variant of the Turing Test showed humans can barely tell human-made art from AI-made art anymore.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing

‘AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

AI-generated music is now as good as what most human musicians can make. The two are also indistinguishable in most cases.
https://youtu.be/qj1Sp8He6e4?si=JLpjUDh91kKkV4mY
https://youtu.be/u2pYNRNdcNc?si=ChwlfJj7bgk3jmYD

This high-res simulation of Rome is almost indistinguishable from reality.
https://youtu.be/Qhucdyzkeis?si=xJrIQElA53R7ru_K

Machines can recognize emotions from the facial expressions of goats. Someday, they will be able to empathize and communicate with animals better than humans.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241107193106.htm

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts machines will probably surpass humans in all areas of thinking by 2030. Roadblocks to that milestone are unlikely to appear.
https://youtu.be/GrloGdp5wdc?si=aGM_PDGv0vXNQqvr

The anonymous tech analyst “Gwern” predicts AGI could be invented as early as 2028.
https://youtu.be/a42key59cZQ?si=opLEiYab3pZmkAJr

Even the eternal pessimist Yann LeCun predicts AGI could be invented in as little as five years.
https://youtu.be/JAgHUDhaTU0?si=hpMZqC30F22U_EVM&t=4410

Greg Brockman has returned to OpenAI.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/12/openai-co-founder-greg-brockman-returns-after-three-months-of-leave.html

There are rumors GPT-5 is not as good as was hoped, leading to questions about whether AI progress is slowing down.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/09/openai-reportedly-developing-new-strategies-to-deal-with-ai-improvement-slowdown/

“[Today’s investments in AIs and data centers are] the biggest gamble in business history”
https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/18/will-the-bubble-burst-for-ai-in-2025-or-will-it-start-to-deliver

‘US government commission pushes Manhattan Project-style AI initiative’
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/us-government-commission-pushes-manhattan-project-style-ai-initiative-2024-11-19/

Despite all the jokes about it, the Tesla Cybertruck has rapidly become the #1 bestselling electric truck in America.
https://autos.yahoo.com/data-shows-tesla-cybertruck-dominating-110031477.html

The “Jellyfish UFO” was probably a bundle of party balloons.
https://youtu.be/ojotsKjshHc?si=80VvDR50SsQ4xIBq

The U.S. military says the “GoFast” UFO was probably a balloon and only seemed to be moving fast because the jet that filmed it was moving fast.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6364948499112

‘Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.

The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and “Symphony No. 9,” suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity. “Similar to how cells in biological materials interact in complex but organized ways to perform a function, Beethoven’s 9th symphony arranges musical notes and themes to create a complex but coherent musical experience,” says Buehler.’
https://news.mit.edu/2024/graph-based-ai-model-maps-future-innovation-1112

‘We took the standard human model (75kg), and made smaller and smaller models down to 100 grams. We also made the models bigger, up to 2,000kg, and challenged them to run as fast as they could.

Several fascinating things happened when we did this.

First, the 2,000kg model couldn’t move. Nor could the 1,000kg model. In fact, the largest model that could move was 900kg, suggesting an upper limit to the human form. Beyond this size we need to change shape in order to move.

We also found that the fastest model was not the biggest nor smallest. Instead, it was around 47kg, a similar weight to an average cheetah.

…Interestingly, many of our fastest long distance runners such as Eliud Kipchoge weigh around 50kg.’
https://theconversation.com/not-too-big-not-too-small-why-modern-humans-are-the-ideal-size-for-speed-241668

China has now produced more greenhouse gas emissions than Europe has since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/19/climate/china-emissions-fossil-fuels-climate.html

The FDA is finally prohibiting the sale of the decongestant “phenylephrine” because it doesn’t work. There were indications of its inefficacy as early as 2007. It took them this long to do anything.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-proposes-ending-use-oral-phenylephrine-otc-monograph-nasal-decongestant-active-ingredient-after

Lead poisoning is pervasive among Afghans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-022-00431-y

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The coming baby boom

Something that has been getting an annoyingly large amount of attention recently is human population decline. While this is old news for some rich countries like Japan and Italy, whose populations started decreasing around 2010, the same phenomenon has struck even middle-income countries like China and Brazil many years sooner than demographers projected. This is causing alarm as people ponder the ill economic consequences of having fewer working-age people but more elderly, and the changes in demography and the global balance of power as African and Muslim countries become the most numerous. 

Rather than tread the same ground that the mainstream media has on this topic, I’m going to consider how future technologies and the cultural changes that go hand-in-hand with them will mitigate the effects of population decline. Below, I’ve listed each of the main depressors of birthrates along with how they will be counteracted.

Women

Female empowerment is probably the biggest reason why birthrates have dropped. Women across the world want more for themselves than being housebound mothers who are dependent on their husbands for money; they want education, careers, and the option to prosper independently. To a modern woman, the opportunity cost of having children, in terms of delayed or abandoned matriculation and forfeited lifetime salary, is massive. As a result, women delay starting families until they’ve finished their degrees and gotten good jobs, often pushing the start of motherhood to 30 (as is the average age for a first-time American mother). Because their fertility windows close around 40, it’s common for mothers to not have as many children as they wanted. 

This ties into ANOTHER topic that has been getting an annoyingly large amount of attention recently: job automation. The last four years of rapid advances in LLMs have inflamed worries that machines will soon get smart enough to take all of our jobs. I think this will happen eventually, though the length of time it takes (30 years? 100 years?), the order in which jobs are automated (White-collar managers before blue-collar laborers or the reverse? Artistic jobs or scientific jobs first?), and how societies respond to the transition are totally uncertain. Regardless, if every human loses their job, then by implication every woman loses her job, which eliminates a major impediment to having children: With no possibility of having a gainful career, there will be much less of an opportunity cost for women to have children. Without jobs to worry about, men will also have more time for fatherhood. 

In the far future, it’s also unclear if higher education will continue impeding parenthood. Aside from the pure pursuit of knowledge for one’s own gratification, there will be no point in getting a college degree at some point because machines will be much smarter than even the smartest human. Even if you had a PhD from the best university, you would not be able to contribute anything useful in your field since machines would be so much more advanced and faster than you. The value of a college education would plummet, and more women (and men) would rightfully find it a better use of their time to have children during early adulthood. 

Therapies that delay or even eliminate menopause will be particularly popular because they will not only extend female fertility, but they also promote youthfulness, beauty, and other aspects of personal health. The added luxury of more time and youthful energy to have children will of course raise birthrates.

These therapies could eventually be subsumed by more advanced treatments that slow, halt, and reverse the aging process as a whole. The benefits would accrue to men just as much as to women, and would further raise birthrates by granting everyone the strength and stamina to bear and raise children well into what we’d today consider old age. Medical immortality is the ultimate cure for population decline. If everyone lives forever, even if the average person has one child a century, it’s only a matter of time before Earth is literally clogged with human bodies. If you believe in the feasibility of medical immortality–and there’s no reason not to–and that biological humans won’t go extinct for some reason in the relatively near future, then you should acknowledge overpopulation as a likely long-term prospect. 

Infertility

Aside from menopause, there are many kinds of health problems that can render both sexes infertile. Additionally, same-sex couples and single males who want to be fathers face obvious roadblocks to biological reproduction. Again, science will offer solutions. In the future, we can expect cures for most diseases, including infertility. This will include better ways to surgically repair or replace damaged or malformed sex organs, or replace defective DNA inside of some tissues through CRISPR. Genetic engineering and greater use of IVF screening will also ensure that fewer people are born with fertility problems to begin with.

An illustration of a fetal lamb inside the “artificial womb” device, which mimics the conditions inside a pregnant animal.

In the shorter run, techniques that allow sterile people to create eggs and sperm of their own by inserting their DNA into empty donor gametes will be developed and help raise the birthrate. In the very long run, artificial wombs will be created and will let anyone have a biological child, probably at much lower cost and risk to the fetus than the “traditional” method. The logical place for artificial wombs is in medical labs, but there’s no technological barrier to eventually putting them into female androids, allowing for true robotic surrogacy.

Time and Money

A second cause of reduced fertility is the high cost and time commitment of raising children. Bigger housing, babysitters, healthcare, tutoring, clothing, and a slew of other expenses accompany a child, and typically run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in rich countries. These costs dissuade many young and middle-aged adults who already feel stretched, or who don’t want to give up the modest financial cushions they have, from having as many children as they want, or from having any at all. Additionally, cultural norms have shifted so that adults accept children will be monumental time commitments whose emotional and intellectual development and personal interests will have to be nurtured. Long gone are the old days when children were largely ignored and most households were authoritarian. 

Our old friend mass job automation again offers solutions. Though it would, at first glance, seem likely to depress birthrates since people would no longer have jobs and hence money to pay for child expenses, machine labor would make every good and service cheaper, allowing humans with a modest universal basic income (UBI) to afford things that only the rich can today. Importantly, this would include babysitting, tutoring, house servant services, and autonomous transportation, which would greatly ease the parenting workload and make it more enticing to have children. Having a house robot that was infinitely patient, fair, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of parenting skills and communication styles would be very beneficial to any family, and at scale would create social benefits.

Going a step further, it’s just a matter of time before robotics and AI get advanced enough to allow for the creation of androids who could function as spouses and foster parents. This would entice even more humans to have children by reducing the parenting workload substantially. With almost no exceptions, marriage rates dropped and divorce rates rose across rich countries from 1990 – 2021, and unsurprisingly, this has contributed to the birthrate decline since fewer people are interested in shouldering the burdens of parenthood alone. Robot spouses will fill the gap, in what might, counterintuitively, be a positive development for the human race.

Conclusion

While the decline in birthrates across upper- and middle-income countries will hurt the economy for decades, there’s no reason to think the negative trends will continue beyond this century, let alone reach the logical endpoint of human extinction. Future technologies and their attendant cultural changes will raise birthrates, reviving older fears of overpopulation and overcrowding. 


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Interesting articles, October 2024

The pace of Russia’s advance in Ukraine has accelerated. Ukrainian troops are falling back across the eastern front line.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-ukraine-maps.html

After almost two years of costly attacks, Russia has captured the Ukrainian town of Vuhledar. This is bad news for Ukraine’s eastern defensive line.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-troops-reach-centre-ukraines-vuhledar-east-ukrainian-governor-says-2024-10-01/

North Korea has sent somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 of its troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine. North Korea is getting money, battlefield experience, and military technology from Russia for this.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/politics/lloyd-austin-north-korea-troops-russia/index.html

Manpower shortages probably also convinced the Russians to pay the North Koreans to fight.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-cant-sustain-attack-ukraine-121503562.html

Russia might be re-importing 1940s howitzers that it sold to North Korea long ago.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-rolled-soviet-howitzer-1940s-060646676.html

Russian second-line forces have been stripping obsolete 73mm cannons from obsolete BMP-1 armored vehicles and mounting them on little wagons they can tow to the front lines and fire at Ukrainians. I might understand mounting these old guns on the beds of pickup trucks, but if you’re so broke that you only have wagons for them…
https://armourersbench.com/2024/10/13/dismounted-2a28s-as-improvised-support-guns/

Russia has moved a captured German Leopard 2 tank to one of its tank factories for analysis.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/10/16/captured-leopard-2-resurfaces-at-russias-main-tank-factory/

Croatia will give some of its Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine if Germany gives tanks to Croatia.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/croatia-offers-ukraine-tanks-military-092743231.html

“Darwin’s War” profiles on of Ukraine’s best suicide drone pilots. It’s amazing how easily he shrugs off missions that end with probable kills of Russian troops and resets for the next one.
https://youtu.be/WipqeFgzdTc?si=owAUkjjdU-8pzZHa

Hezbollah has a larger and more advanced fighting force than Lebanon’s national army. Hezbollah is an Islamist terrorist group whereas Lebanon’s army is multireligious and recognized as the country’s legitimate military.
https://apnews.com/article/lebanese-army-laf-israel-hezbollah-78f6ad2da82d64d1ae266aa5394e6d4e

Iran launched a second mass missile attack on Israel in response to the latter’s invasion of Lebanon. The missile attach was more successful than the first, but still failed to do significant damage.
https://www.twz.com/air/clearer-picture-of-damage-to-israeli-airbase-from-iranian-ballistic-missiles-emerges

The only fatality from Iran’s missile attack against Israel was, ironically, a Palestinian man.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gazan-buried-only-known-victim-iranian-barrage-against-israel-2024-10-02/

Did Iran actually pull its punch in the missile attack because it didn’t want to escalate the conflict?
https://thehill.com/opinion/4942123-iran-retaliation-israel/

An Iranian missile embedded in the ground somewhere in Israel, like something out of the Looney Tunes.

Israel hit back with airstrikes across Iran against its missiles and their support infrastructure. The attack appeared calibrated to avoid escalation but to also leave Iran vulnerable to future air strikes.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/israels-reprisal-strike-carefully-calculated-unclear-if-jets-ever-flew-over-iran
https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-attack-shahroud-guard-base-satellite-photos-b9cdb18b252d6dd9014dc4dcb3dd4b2f

U.S. stealth bombers blew up several underground missile storage bases in Yemen as punishment for that country’s continued missile attacks on ships in the Red Sea. The attack was also meant to show Iran that America can also destroy the former’s underground nuclear and missile facilities.
https://www.twz.com/air/b-2-spirits-just-sent-a-very-ominous-message-to-iran-that-only-they-can

‘One year ago, Saudi Arabia and Israel were supposedly on the brink of a deal to normalize relations.

That deal has seemingly evaporated as Iran’s foreign minister visits the kingdom on Tuesday to discuss efforts to halt Israel’s incursions into Gaza and Lebanon.

“Our dialogue continues regarding the developments in the region to prevent the shameless crimes of the Zionist regime in Lebanon, in continuation of the crimes in Gaza,” Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a video broadcast on state media. ‘
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/iran-foreign-minister-saudi-arabia-deal-israel

The destruction of Gaza and its population is comparable to what some countries suffered in WWII.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-anniversary-statistics-e61765035c725b3c8d4840e2bab565cd

Israel wants to build fortified roads across Gaza to separate it from Egypt and to separate it internally, allowing Israeli troops to control the population more easily and to respond to problems faster.
https://youtu.be/qZhD4G7ENSY?si=qHrDVn7aBTzYk47V

Israeli forces have killed the head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar. In his final moments, he was trapped inside a wrecked house, injured and exhausted. An Israeli hover drone flew in through a broken window and filmed him from a few feet away. He impotently threw a stick at it and missed. An Israeli tank parked outside then shot the building, followed by a volley of gunfire, killing him.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-leader-sinwar-made-critical-100313977.html

An Israeli airstrike killed the new leader of Hezbollah, Hashem Safieddine, just a few weeks after it killed their old leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
https://apnews.com/article/hashem-safieddine-killed-obituary-hezbollah-leader-lebanon-8b74c45dc6b6028bc18c61a06db4233d

A Hezbollah kamikaze drone attacked Benjamin Netanyahu’s beach house in an apparent assassination attempt. He wasn’t there at the time.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/netanyahu-bedroom-window-hit-hezbollah-160653866.html

61% of Taiwanese think China is unlikely to invade in the next five years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/most-taiwanese-believe-china-unlikely-040444122.html

People think Skynet will only replace soldiers with robots. Replacing the wasteful military bureaucrats working in offices will be just as important.

‘Cost overruns for cargo plane commodes have captured headlines in the past. In 2018, Defense One reported that the Air Force had spent $10,000 for a toilet seat cover on its C-5 cargo plane. Tuesday’s report redacted the price of individual soap dispensers.

One reason the Air Force overpaid for soap dispensers and other parts was that contracting officials failed to “review invoices to determine fair and reasonable prices before payment.”’
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/29/air-force-soap-dispenser-boondoggle/75914801007/

This prediction about the U.S. Vice Presidential debate was totally wrong.
This was totally wrong.
‘The takeaway: Expect a slugfest. Like his running mate Donald Trump, Vance prefers to go on offense, turning his opponents’ barbs against them and blurring the line between personal and political attacks. Walz, meanwhile, can get fiery when he attacks his opponents, but he tends to lean into his folksy demeanor to defuse tough questions about his record. Both men struggle at times to hide their tempers, and with plenty of bad blood between the two of them — stemming in large part from Vance’s attacks on Walz’s military record and Walz’s crusade to label Vance as “weird” — don’t be surprised if things turn personal.’
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/01/walzs-vance-previous-debate-slugfest-00181737

Nobel Prizes have been awarded to three scientists who did seminal work in AI:

  • Geoffrey E. Hinton: Physics
  • David Baker: Chemistry
  • Demis Hassabis: Chemistry
  • John Jumper: Chemistry

https://apnews.com/article/nobel-chemistry-prize-56f4d9e90591dfe7d9d840a8c8c9d553

Further testing reveals how powerful and intelligent OpenAI’s new “01” LLM is.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18486
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03169-9

Anthropic demonstrates the Claude LLM’s impressive ability to code websites.
https://youtu.be/vH2f7cjXjKI?si=1W8dnU7JA-IVnUel

Apple has released a study that calls into question whether LLMs are actually “reasoning” in the same way humans are. By adding irrelevant text to question prompts, the team was able to decrease the accuracy of every LLM’s response. Notably, the performance hit and the newness of the model were inversely correlated.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine-logical-reasoning-apple-researchers-suggest/

18 months ago, this guy (“David Shapiro”) predicted AGI would be created within 18 months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXQ6OKSvzfc

He doubled down on it 12 months ago.
https://youtu.be/M5eQwl4YmGU?si=bcRO93a3wreDFfOJ

A recent experiment measured whether GPT-4 could help doctors make better medical diagnoses. The results:

  • Doctors using GPT-4 made the right diagnosis 76.3% of the time
  • Doctors NOT using GPT-4 made the right diagnosis 73.7% of the time.

Does that mean GPT-4 is barely helpful? Not once you consider that GPT-4 WORKING BY ITSELF made the right diagnosis 89% of the time.

The doctors who were given GPT-4 as an assistant were ignoring its correct diagnoses some of the time in favor of their own. Things like this challenge the conventional wisdom that “Humans+AI” will be the best combination in the future, so there will always be some role for us. Machines might surpass us at everything.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.12.24303785v1.full.pdf

OpenAI has a financial incentive to declare that it has built an AGI. For a while, I’ve suspected that “the creation of the first AGI” will be a historical moment mired in controversy from the start, as it will fail to pass some tests of intelligence and will make mistakes uncharacteristic of an intelligent mind. The claim will nonetheless be defensible given our lack of an agreed-upon definition of what “intelligence” is.

‘Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html

AI will accelerate scientific discovery and scientific fraud.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/helpful-robot-assistants-will-fake-it-you

There have been recent advances in robotics.

‘AI helps uncover hundreds of unknown ancient symbols hidden in Peru’s Nazca Desert’
When will all archeological sites be discovered and excavated?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/science/ai-nazca-geoglyphs-peru/index.html

An airborne scan of southern Mexico uncovered an unknown Mayan city hidden in the jungle.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmznzkly3go

A Chinese company has unveiled the biggest and most powerful wind turbine ever made:
‘Dongfang on Saturday rolled out a 26-megawatt turbine off the production line, the company said in a statement. That’s 31% bigger than the previous record of 18 megawatts…It said the blades were 310 meters (1,017 feet) in diameter.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinese-firm-announces-huge-leap-043855364.html

Google says it will buy small nuclear reactors from “Kairos Power” by 2035 to power its planned data centers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c748gn94k95o

Other big tech companies are also considering nuclear.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/business/energy-environment/amazon-google-microsoft-nuclear-energy.html

Samsung’s stock has sharply dropped because it has fallen behind in making AI chips.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/samsung-sudden-122-billion-wipeout-220000518.html

Bill Gates writes about the positive impact “digital public infrastructure” will soon have, particularly in poor countries.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Digital-public-infrastructure

We’ll never run out of sand, but it will get more expensive.
https://youtu.be/SB0qDQFTyE8?si=LPBOhpUfqSXDWgyD

Computer modeling shows that, if you’re trying to optimize a beer glass so it keeps its contents cold for as long as possible, the best shape is to have a narrow base and a wider, flared-out opening at the top. Depending on the volume of the cup (e.g. – Imperial Pint, American Pint), the proportions change slightly.

Some of the shapes that minimize heat transfer look so top-heavy that they would be prone to easily tipping over, so optimizing for one quality comes at the expense of optimizing for another one (stability). It’s an interesting and simple lesson in engineering tradeoffs.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12043

In a spectacular display of technological prowess, SpaceX landed a giant Starship booster back on the landing pad, where two giant arms attached to the launch tower clasped around it. This ability will lower costs and shorten the time between missions of the reusable rocket.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-launches-fifth-starship-catches-super-heavy-booster/

Tattoos and piercings are more common among people who suffered child abuse (sexual, emotional, physical), and the more tattoos and piercings a person has, the more likely it is they are a victim.
https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-022-00811-x

Male facial features predict future leadership potential.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-023-09554-0
https://www.economist.com/business/2014/09/27/the-look-of-a-leader

Update on something I posted before: ‘An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.’
https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2024-09-30/montana-man-to-be-sentenced-for-cloning-giant-sheep-to-breed-large-sheep-for-captive-trophy-hunts

Scientists have mapped the locations of every neuron in a fly brain.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07686-5

AI-powered drug discovery has disappointed so far.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-does-not-make-it-easy

For the first time in history, the American obesity rate has declined, almost certainly because of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. I predicted this. The people of the future will be thinner, healthier, stronger, and more beautiful than we are.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obesity-rate-us-adults-cdc-data-map/

Here’s a list of ways human intelligence could be enhanced.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jTiSWHKAtnyA723LE/overview-of-strong-human-intelligence-amplification-methods

‘[Heliospect Genomics] is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement.’
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-charging-couples-to-screen-embryos-for-iq

DNA tests have confirmed the skeleton interred in Cathedral of Seville in Spain belongs to Christopher Columbus, as most suspected. It also indicates he was Jewish and likelier to have been Spanish than Italian.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/columbus-was-sephardic-jew-western-europe-study-finds-rcna175188

“But surely human interactions with nature are increasing, and the chances of picking up viruses is therefore growing because of things like deforestation? No. Southern China is reforesting rapidly, not deforesting, as rural peasants migrate to the cities to work in factories and eat food bought from supermarkets, not hunted in the jungle.

The same is true throughout much of the world. Intimate contact with wild animals is on the decline, thanks to economic development and urbanisation. Rural populations are now shrinking for the first time. The more that Africans can afford to buy frozen chicken rather than hunt ‘bushmeat’ the better. And peak human exposure to bat droppings probably occurred thousands of years ago when many of our ancestors were, literally, ‘cavemen’.”
https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/is-another-pandemic-really-inevitable/

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What would a robot submarine look like?

In the same spirit as my previous essays “What would a robot aircraft carrier look like?” and “What would a robot tank look like?” I’d like to examine what a robot submarine would look like. Specifically, an attack submarine, which is a sub designed to destroy surface ships and other subs (though sub-on-sub combat is INCREDIBLY rare). And by “robot sub,” I mean it is fully autonomous, with only robots and machines aboard and no humans. 

And since there are many different kinds of attack subs in service across the world, I’ll focus on just one: the Virginia-class. This is the backbone of the American submarine fleet, and they’re among the most versatile and advanced in the world.

Regardless of country of origin, modern attack subs like the Virginias all share some basic design features: The vessels all have a cigar-shaped hull and a stubby wing-shape called the “sail” sticking up vertically. The rearmost 30 – 40% of the hull is dedicated to propulsion and fuel. The frontmost 10 – 20% of the hull is dedicated to the sonar and torpedoes. The remaining middle part of the ship is for the human crew and their needs, and consists of spaces like the control room, galley, kitchen, bunk rooms, bathrooms, and laundry room. 

All of those rooms for humans could be deleted, allowing the sub’s overall length to be shortened by at least 20%. A shortened Virginia would be faster, nimbler and longer-ranged as a result thanks to reduced weight and drag: fluid dynamics shows that subs have the least drag when their breadth-to-length ratios are between 1:6 and 1:8. The latest Virginia-class subs are 34 ft wide and 377 ft long, a ratio of 1:11. Deleting the middle 25% of a Virginia would make its ratio 1:8.3, which is close to ideal. 

An automated attack sub would still need robot “crewmen” to do maintenance and repairs, and as such would still need open spaces around important ship components like the engine and torpedo launchers that were spacious enough for the robots to move around them and access them. Additionally, the rooms would need to be connected to each other so robots could move around to meet the needs of the moment. As a result, the basic internal layout of a robot sub would be recognizable to a human submariner. 

However, since robots could be created in any shape or size and could be programmed for any environment, many aspects of the sub interior would be very different. Because it is built around human ergonomics, manned Virginia-class subs have three decks (plus a curved storage space under the lowest deck), and on all parts of the ship the ceilings are high enough even for tall people. Without humans, things could be very different. The decks could vary in number and height from one compartment of the vessel to the next. Some might be too low for an adult human to walk through them. 

This wouldn’t be a problem since robots of different shapes and sizes could be made for different parts of the sub: Robots the sizes of humans and cats could work alongside each other, and even tight, irregularly-sized areas would be accessible to them. Machinery, tools, cargo, and pipes would be arranged more space-efficiently than it is in human-crewed subs, and I imagine the interior being a bit like an ant colony. 

Weird deck layouts could also be possible to maximize the use of space. Instead of three, perpendicular decks with the same ceiling-to-floor heights, imagine a much more complex arrangement where different parts of the ship have different numbers of decks. A human would struggle to keep track of this, but machines wouldn’t. Some of the decks might not even be flat. 

The more efficient use of internal space could let us reduce sub’s volume without sacrificing anything. The shape of the hull could be transformed from the straight, cylindrical cigar-shape to a more streamlined shape that reduced drag. The rear half of the sub would taper down more sharply until it ended as a point where the propeller was. Internal volume would be lost in the rear, but the sub could still retain the same power and weapons.

An orangutan’s legs are almost the same as its arms.

As for the robots themselves, I can only be sure that their limbs will all be designed for grasping, like those of orangutans or spiders. In small, confined spaces, human legs are much less useful than a second pair of “bottom arms.” Filling the interior of the sub with metal gratings, handholds and ladders will make this body form even more useful. They could climb the walls and even ceilings to access everything, allowing better use to be made of the sub’s interior space. 

For obvious reasons, they would also be waterproof to great depths. A crew of them could continue working even if their sub sank, and they might be able to fix and refloat it. 

A Virginia-class sub on the surface.

The sail (often incorrectly referred to as the “conning tower”) could probably be made shorter, or even totally deleted, in an automated sub. The structure primarily serves as a lookout post and a place for submariners to shelter from the elements when their sub is on the surface. If automated, the sub could watch its surroundings on the surface by extending its periscope, and if its robot crewmen had to do something outside, they would be much less affected by rain, waves, and temperature extremes than humans. Attaching themselves to steel cables while working outside would probably be all that was needed to ensure their safety. 

A sail greatly increases a sub’s drag and creates a “wake” behind it that interferes with the propeller’s rotation. Therefore, deleting or at least shrinking the sails should boost the sub’s top speed and fuel efficiency. 

The lack of a sail would also make it easier for an attack sub to roll over like a log or like a football spinning through the air. This would let it make tighter turns, which would be useful in combat or when evading enemy attacks. Anyone who has turned around a curve too quickly in a car and felt it dangerously tilt is familiar with the effect of inertia in this context.

 

A boat tilting as it makes a sharp turn

While a rollover is disastrous on land, it wouldn’t have to be underwater if the vehicle didn’t make contact with any objects while spinning. Of course, even if a manned sub were technically capable of such a maneuver, it would wreak havoc since crewmen would be thrown around inside. Conversely, on an autonomous sub, the central computer could wirelessly alert all of the robots to upcoming rollovers, giving them time to brace themselves against surfaces and to grab handholds.

Measures would also need to be taken to ensure all the machinery and cargo was properly secured so it wouldn’t be thrown around inside the sub during rolls, but this is easy to do. A bigger problem would be dealing with the service interruptions in pieces of machinery not designed to operate inverted or on their sides, like the nuclear reactor and backup diesel generator. However, given the rarity of rolls (a sub would only need to turn very sharply in emergencies) and their short durations (a handful of minutes per sharp turn), it might not be an issue. Adding a backup electric motor and batteries that would kick in during rolls might be all that is necessary. (To be clear, an autonomous sub would still have a preferred “right side up” that it would be designed around, and under normal conditions it would be oriented in that way.)

Not having humans aboard also removes the need to keep the submarine interior full of oxygen. This is important since oxygen is corrosive and flammable. A robot sub would probably be filled with pure nitrogen gas instead because it lacks those qualities. As an inert gas, nitrogen protects computer chips, which would have obvious benefits for the robots and other machinery. 

If, by the future date when autonomous attack subs are being built, backup diesel generators are still being used, then they will need oxygen. The generator room might therefore be the only place in the sub with an oxygen atmosphere. 

Putting this all together, what does our robot attack sub look like? It would be a Virginia-class sub, but shorter, sailless, and with a visible taper from the middle of the ship to the propeller. The two horizontal steering fins on either side of the sail would be relocated to the sides of the hull. The robot sub would look like a hybrid of the unbuilt Soviet “Project 673” and American Conform-class attack subs, shown below.

The autonomous Virginia would have the same firepower, power plant, sensors, and stealth features as its manned variant, but it would be faster and more maneuverable, giving it an edge in combat and allowing it to attack targets across a larger geographic area. The deletion of the human crew would also greatly increase the ship’s mission endurance beyond the current 90 – 120 days, which is how long it takes for the food to run out. Thanks to the practically unlimited amount of energy provided by the nuclear reactor, an autonomous Virginia-class sub would only have to return to port if it expended all its weapons or had a serious mechanical problem.

The unmanned subs wouldn’t need to devote time to training missions since their central computers and robot crews could be reprogrammed in minutes as needed. The result of all of this would be a sharp improvement in submarine readiness rates and efficiency. Unmanned subs could patrol the same geographic area and do the same number of missions as a larger fleet of manned subs of the same type.

Links

  1. To minimize drag, a submarine’s width-to-length ratio should be between 1:6 and 1:8.
    https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/introduction-to-submarine-design/\
  2. It’s bad news if a submarine rolls over, but it’s probably a solvable engineering problem.
    https://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-if-a-submarine-rolls-upside-down-Will-that-ever-happen
  3. A history of sailless submarines.
    http://www.hisutton.com/Sailless_Submarines.html
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Interesting articles, September 2024

In an ingenious and remarkably precise mass attack, Israeli detonated the personal pagers and walkie-talkies of thousands of Hezbollah members in two waves. Thirty-seven of them were killed and thousands injured, many severely. Hezbollah adopted the old-fashioned communication devices due to fears that Israel was tapping and tracking their cell phones.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/middleeast/israel-pager-attack-hezbollah-lebanon-invs-intl/index.html

A few days later, Israel launched fearsome air- and missile strikes against Hezbollah targets across Lebanon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3wy8kpy3eo
https://www.timesnownews.com/world/middle-east/did-israel-nuke-lebanon-videos-spark-theories-article-113557573

In a colossal blow to the organization, one of the airstrikes killed the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-airstrikes-28-september-2024-c4751957433ff944c4eb06027885a973

Israeli ground forces have invaded southern Lebanon. It’s unclear what the objectives are or what the scope of the operation will be.
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-lebanon-war-hezbollah-09-30-24-intl-hnk/index.html

‘Israel destroyed a secretive missile production facility in northwest Syria last week in an attack that included inserting special operations forces by helicopter to retrieve equipment and documents, media outlets are reporting. The new details shed light on an attack initially described as only an airstrike. Not only did the raid strike at the heart of the Iranian military presence in Syria, but it also sent a clear message to Tehran that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can and will attack deep underground complexes with ground troops that it otherwise cannot destroy from the air.’
https://www.twz.com/news-features/israeli-commando-raid-in-syria-sends-a-message-to-iran-that-its-on-underground-bases-are-not-untouchable

‘Rafah a ghost town as Israeli military claims victory in Gaza’s southernmost city’
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rafah-gaza-israel-military-victory-destruction-rcna170991

The Houthi rebels are surprisingly advanced: they shot down two U.S. Reaper drones.
https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthi-rebels-american-mq9-reaper-drones-2ca2dc1c5316ca5473c3843d97780b2b

NATO might soon let Ukraine use their missiles against targets deep inside Russia. Is Putin’s threat over this another bluff?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/putin-warns-russia-war-west-ukraine-long-range-missiles-biden-starmer-rcna170980
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/26/us/politics/us-ukraine-strikes.html

Ukraine has debuted a brutal new weapon: drones that spew thermite down on Russian positions.
https://youtu.be/h8Noy-_A9-U?si=D4XZn_fjgOPB-7Oe

Glimpse the future: Russians cowering in fear as a Ukrainian suicide drone enters the ruin they are hiding in and searches for them.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/this-ukrainian-drone-hunting-a-russian-inside-a-building-has-big-horror-movie-vibes

“Eagle Eyes” drones navigate to their targets by sight: their cameras compare footage of the landscape to reconnaissance maps saved to their hard drives. Because they aren’t being guided by GPS or radio signals, they’re much harder for Russia to jam. As a matter of fact, besides blinding their cameras with powerful lasers, I don’t see how the new drones could be non-kinetically stopped at all.
https://www.unmannedairspace.info/counter-uas-systems-and-policies/ukraine-develops-software-to-allow-drones-to-fly-without-gps/

Ukrainian suicide drones hit a base deep in Russia where many missiles and bombs were stored. Those weapons were ignited by the attack, causing massive secondary explosions and fires.
https://youtube.com/shorts/pLPXYKGhesU?si=fqszz3gv3u6ZoqWy
https://www.twz.com/news-features/satellite-images-show-massive-devastation-at-russian-ammo-storage-sites-struck-by-ukrainian-drones

A minimum of 66,000 Russians have died fighting in Ukraine.
https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/11/casualties_eng

The Russians don’t have enough money to build high-quality applique armor and drone jammers and install them on all their tanks. That’s a microcosm for Russia writ large: Greatness foiled by a lack of money, and the problem largely owes to a culture of corruption.
https://youtu.be/X79ar5qpvzk?si=WIH0r_l9Wame3rnK

Russia has proven itself surprisingly adept at keeping its economy and war machine going in spite of sanctions and other challenges. However, the combination of massive government spending, autarky, exhaustion of Soviet-era weapons, and other factors leaves the country vulnerable to domestic economic crisis and loss of arms export clients once the Ukraine War ends. The War has accelerated Russia’s decline in every dimension of power.
https://youtu.be/8tHkwLSS-DE?si=he339Bho2ONh4hem

Russia’s economy is being buoyed by relatively high global oil prices, which could lead to economic problems over the next ten years as oil demand drops thanks to the clean energy transition. China will never buy enough Russian natural gas to replace what Europe consumed before the Ukraine War embargo. EVERYTHING I’ve seen indicates that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine was a negative inflection point for the former in every way (political, cultural, economic, diplomatic, technological) and accelerated its decline. However, it will take several years for the full scope of the disaster to be made apparent in Russia.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/02/russias-gas-business-will-never-recover-from-the-war-in-ukraine

1) Russia has been very effective at jamming Western-made precision missiles given to Ukraine so they miss their targets.
2) Russia’s airborne tanks, which have thin armor so they can be light enough to be dropped out of cargo planes, have proven useless.
3) Attack helicopters are becoming obsolete because antiair weapons have improved so much.
https://youtu.be/eWE1h0GA5fk?si=lvLkxvJl4Lfp7Qfi

This analysis from a month before Russia invaded Ukraine was spot-on: It identified their likely goals of establishing a land bridge to Crimea and destroying Ukraine’s regime, and predicted some fraction of their forces would attack from Belarus. It also predicted that Ukraine would be a tougher opponent than most people assumed, and that the war could turn into a quagmire for Russia if it strove for anything but very limited aims.
https://www.economist.com/europe/what-are-russias-military-options-in-ukraine/21807240

The NATO leadership’s early 2023 prediction that the Ukraine War would drag on indefinitely was right.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-nato-politics-mircea-geoana-e178af41a4f93ead9a427484ea06dbaf

The Russians have light tanks that can be airdropped onto the battlefield with their crewmen inside! This is as close to the Aliens dropship experience as you can get.
https://youtu.be/4RoISC1pI2Y?si=2ZimbV2-iMQPQ9-1

Some of the Russian mercenaries killed in the recent ambush in Mali have been identified.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-wagner-lost-veteran-fighters-071731167.html

China’s newest nuclear sub sank during a construction accident.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/26/politics/chinese-nuclear-powered-submarine-sank/index.html

After WWII, the Germans creatively reused their leftover military supplies for civilian ends.
https://youtu.be/YHs9OLgt8vI?si=UUB9vDi6KV-WvCDj

Looking back on the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden, it seems that if it had succeeded, it might have set the Allies up for a big defeat right after.
https://youtu.be/62GJdIRE9c0?si=vt0hdMYwQYXIswHe

‘Mahan agreed with Angell that the disruption of the international economic system caused by a major war would also strike back at the aggressor. Yet even this would not mean the end of war, for “… ambition, self-respect, resentment of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed, hatred of oppression” were more than enough reasons why war would not disappear.’
https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2019/01/14/the-end-of-the-great-illusion-norman-angell-and-the-founding-of-nato/index.html

The top economists, banks and hedge fund managers were terrible at predicting how the economy would perform during 2023. The consensus that raised interest rates would push the U.S. into a recession, and that rates would have to be sharply cut, was wrong. China’s post-COVID recovery was also much weaker than expected.
https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-2023-predictions-wrong-recession-inflation-stocks-europe-china-2023-1

Three years ago, Donald Trump said “We’re not going to have a country left in three years.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9994303/Trump-predicts-America-come-end-2024-election.html

Trump’s other extreme predictions have also failed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/apocalypse-delayed-trump-promising-doom-never-comes-rcna170151

Election forecasts are less accurate than people know.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/03/election-forecasts-data-00176905

Here’s a montage of politicians telling Americans “this is the most important election in history,” year after year.
https://youtu.be/hrRLhdDFhN0?si=szjMmlugZJG7MN5U

‘Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers’
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai

OpenAI has released “01,” it’s most advanced LLM yet.
https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/strawberry-has-been-announced.html
https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/massive-breakthrough-in-ai-intelligence

Machines are now in the low end of the human range of performance across many common tasks.
‘Questions like Is that image AI, or is it just sort of ugly? Is my student’s essay AI-generated, or is it just repetitive, low effort, and full of clichés? Is this menu AI, or is the food just kind of disgusting? Is this photo AI, or is her face just that symmetrical? Is this book AI, or was it just written by a cheap ghostwriter? (Or both?) Is that post from a stranger on social-media AI, or are people really just that dull? Is this email AI, or has my co-worker started taking lots of Adderall? ‘
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/is-that-ai-or-does-it-just-suck.html

Helen Toner, one of the OpenAI board members who was removed after she voted to fire Sam Altman last year just testified in front of the Senate that some high-level people in that company think they might create the first AGI in as little as 1 – 3 years. To be fair, even more of them think it could still be 20 years away.
https://www.youtube.com/live/WVU7Awba3VM?si=wtgNjWx9lJNuINGz&t=1039

Meta has unveiled its first augmented reality glasses, “Orion.”
https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/

In 2019, Samsung patented a smartphone whose screen could be extended like a paper scroll. It was never mass-produced, and thus serves as a good reminder that not every piece of technology that a company releases a sketch of or even builds a working prototype of turns out to be viable.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7136591/Samsungs-vertical-rolling-phone-prototype-extend-60-CENT.html

The “water jet loom” is an incredible piece of technology.
https://youtu.be/SVWkZiHjreI?si=khKLvKiUUjIKpfV3

A cool roundup of “futuristic mega projects.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20240525195043/https://www.pinktentacle.com/2010/06/futuristic-mega-projects-by-shimizu/

‘The tsunami waves — some at least as tall as the Statue of Liberty — ran up the steep rock walls lining the fjord. Because the landslide struck the waterway at a nearly 90-degree angle, waves bounced back and forth across it for nine days — a phenomenon scientists call a seiche.

…In 2017, four people were killed and 11 houses were destroyed after a landslide touched off a tsunami that struck the village of Nuugaatsiaq in west Greenland. The wave was likely at least 300 feet tall. ‘
https://www.yahoo.com/news/650-foot-tsunami-greenland-fjord-180212833.html

‘Earthworms have “completely scrambled” genomes.’
https://www.science.org/content/article/earthworms-have-completely-scrambled-genomes-did-help-their-ancestors-leave-sea

Not everything that comes out of the RAND Corporation (or any other esteemed think tank) is right.

‘The following appear to be the most significant effects and issues:
-Increased quantity and quality of human life. A marked acceleration is likely by 2015 in the expansion of human life spans along with significant improvements in the quality of human life. Better disease control, custom drugs, gene therapy, age mitigation and reversal, memory drugs, prosthetics, bionic implants, animal transplants, and many other advances may continue to increase human life span and improve the quality of life. Some of these advances may even improve human performance beyond current levels (e.g., through artificial sensors). We anticipate that the developed world will lead the developing world in reaping these benefits as it has in the past.
-Eugenics and cloning. By 2015 we may have the capability to use genetic engineering techniques to “improve” the human species and clone humans. These will be very controversial developments—among the most controversial in the entire history of mankind. It is unclear whether wide-scale efforts will be initiated by 2015, and cloning of humans may not be technically feasible by 2015. However, we will probably see at least some narrow attempts such as gene therapy for genetic diseases and cloning by rogue experimenters. The controversy will be in full swing by 2015 (if not sooner).’
https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1307.html

This is interesting, though it makes no sense to only enhance women with the technology. Also, if the synthetic cells and organelles are so superior to natural ones, what’s the point of keeping the original tissue around? Why not completely transform your body so it is 100% synthetic cells and organelles?
https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2024/08/03/synthetic-organelles-the-future-of-medicine-and-human-enhancement-the-eternal-woman/

If machines will surpass humans in every area, it must include moral behavior and making moral judgements.
https://futuristspeaker.com/artificial-intelligence/silicon-whistleblowers-when-autonomous-robots-become-our-moral-compass/

If AI will become better than humans at everything, that means it will also be better at matching humans with jobs. H.R. offices are staffed with incompetent people anyway, so what would we lose by replacing them with machines?
https://work.mercor.com/faq

The transition to electric cars has proceeded slower than most of the big car companies predicted just a few years ago, forcing them to make costly adjustments to their product lineups.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/volvo-reverses-goal-make-only-evs-2030
https://youtu.be/ODG59UjBiGg?si=7uU66hC_R1CzHgD9

OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati is the latest senior member of the company to quit, raising questions about Sam Altman’s leadership and the direction of the company.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-slow-motion-train-wreck

‘Seurat Technologies has invented a novel area printing approach which has the potential to break through the limits of today’s metal Additive Manufacturing. Rather than increasing the number of laser sources, this new technology uses a completely new method of beam manipulation to increase melted volume per time. While the usual metal AM system works with a spot diameter of 100 μm, the Seurat system delivers two million points of laser light into a 15 mm square area, with each point of light having a roughly 10 μm diameter. With this method, Seurat can simultaneously increase build rate massively, while also improving resolution. Seurat TechnologiesTM increases the build rate up to 1000x compared to other single laser system.’
https://www.seurat.com/single-post/seurat-insights-volume-1-a-new-era-in-metal-part-production

Boeing’s troubled “Starliner” space capsule returned to Earth, sans the two astronauts it was supposed to carry due to fears it would malfunction and kill them. We now know they would have survived, but it wasn’t worth risking it.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-boeing-welcome-starliner-spacecraft-to-earth-close-mission/

The first spacewalk on a private spacecraft took place.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-private-spacewalk-polaris-dawn-e5635c75b15b2f298e426b4992bcde86

Elon Musk says he will send his first, unmanned rocket to Mars by the end of 2026, and if that mission goes well, a second rocket will carry humans there in 2028.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-predicts-crewed-spacex-flights-mars-2028-hopes-self-sustaining-city-planet

Of course, he has been wrong before.
‘Elon Musk is aiming to land spaceships on Mars in 2022. The hard-charging tech mogul said his rocket company, SpaceX, aims to land at least two cargo ships on the Red Planet in 2022 in order to place power, mining and life support systems there for future flights.’
https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/29/technology/future/elon-musk-spacex-mars-iac-conference/index.html

‘Robot Metalsmiths Are Resurrecting Toroidal Tanks for NASA’
Every lost trade skill will be resurrected by AI through a sort of reverse-engineering process. They will probably even discover more efficient techniques than our ancestors knew.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/metal-forming-robot

Yes, “what if?” And what if energy is superabundant, along with intelligence thanks to AGI, and labor thanks to robots? All kinds of things will become possible.

‘Terraform says that a cheap-electrolyser/off-grid-solar demonstrator it has built along these lines shows it can generate hydrogen at a cost of $2.5 per per kg, and that it has a roadmap for getting to $1 per kg, the level which analysts reckon hydrogen must reach in order to compete with fossil fuels. That it is well-suited to developing markets is not a coincidence. Mr Handmer thinks people should be able to “throw solar panels on the ground and hook up some equipment, anywhere on Earth”, in order to make any hydrogen they need.

Once you start to think in terms of energy being really copious and all-but free, at least at some times and in some places, brute-force approaches to all sorts of problems begin to appear. One way to drastically reduce the spread of airborne disease is to speed up the rate at which the air in the world’s buildings is vented and refreshed. If energy is expensive this is not feasible. But what if…? One way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to grind certain sorts of rock into fine dust that is then dispersed across the oceans. Given that this needs to be done at a scale of billions of tonnes a year, again the energy requirement is incredible. And again, what if…?’
https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar-power-is-going-to-be-huge

Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, just wrote an important essay about the future of AI.
‘We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.’
https://ia.samaltman.com/

Here are proposed infrastructure projects that we could execute given more resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_canals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_transport_infrastructure

Building a Dyson Sphere is technically feasible, but building a Dyson Swarm would be much easier.
https://youtu.be/zU_R2ghfsBE?si=wwDvUwifcgOpoAvk

This critique of the “Grabby Aliens” theory is so deep that I can’t understand much of it. Basically, it’s quite plausible that we don’t see aliens because we humans, warts and all, are the first intelligent species to arise in our galaxy and perhaps our whole part of the universe.
https://youtu.be/tR1HTNtcYw0?si=Q0eypYM22RHV4MLw

Bob Lazar is probably the most polarizing figure in the UFO community. He became famous in the early 1990s after going public with claims he worked on an alien space ship at Area 51 and had circumstantial supporting evidence. However, an investigation into Lazar’s personal history reveals a long pattern of dishonesty and lawbreaking.
https://youtu.be/hRbkOGu6Z78?si=_OYefQwEuvgzGU9N

Donald Trump says he will release any secret footage the U.S. government has of UFOs if he wins reelection.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30246387/trump-release-pentagon-ufo-videos-lex-fridman/

An important but overlooked benefit of global warming is the lengthening of growing seasons in colder climates. The already-vast farmlands of Canada and Russia will get larger and more productive.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/13/nx-s1-5002049/climate-change-farming-alaska-native

John Kerry’s 2009 prediction that the Arctic Ocean would be free of ice by 2014 was wrong, and climatologists now think it won’t start happening until the middle of this century.
https://youtu.be/z3WR4_am-3Y?si=Pytiyl1LHtQfW391

In the U.S., construction of structures in flood-prone areas has continued unabated, with expensive consequences.
https://news.miami.edu/rosenstiel/stories/2024/09/over-two-million-acres-of-floodplain-development-occurred-in-us-in-last-two-decades-study-finds.html

A person’s birthdate affects their academic and athletic performance, which has lifelong consequences.
https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/youngest-kid-in-class-syndrome
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-affect-who-goes-pro-and-who-becomes-a-star/

This drug researcher claims Pfizer could have released Ozempic in the 1990s.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/missing-out-glp-1

More evidence that the drug metformin probably slows human aging.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/small-molecule-drugs-and-longevity

The research that identified specific parts of the world where people had abnormally long lifespans was probably flawed.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-work-debunking-blue-zone-regions-exceptional-lifespans-wins-ig-nobel-prize

‘Of the 1060 small molecules that are theorized to exist, most are likely extremely challenging to create.’
https://www.owlposting.com/p/generative-ml-in-chemistry-is-bottlenecked

“So for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon.”

It sounds like we need to build automated labs to do experiments and fill in the data that he says are missing.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-biology

Bill Gates says world health authorities have failed to fully learn the lessons of COVID-19 that are needed to prepare for the next pandemic.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-says-world-facing-104029833.html

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Things aren’t so Past Tense

Plot:

“Past Tense” is a two-part episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine that aired in January 1995. It is noteworthy because it was set now, late August / early September 2024. This was another time travel episode where an accident or alien force teleports the crew into the past. For those of you unfamiliar with the Star Trek franchise, Deep Space Nine is set over 300 years in the future, in a nearly utopian era where humans have overcome tribalism, materialism, ignorance, and all forms of injustice, and reap the benefits of radically advanced technologies. Most people dedicate themselves to the arts, science, family, or the exploration of space.

According to Star Trek’s back story, this condition was only achieved after a series of disasters in the late 20th and 21st centuries convinced humanity that war, capitalism, nationalism, and injustice would lead to extinction. One of those events was the “Bell Riots” of 2024, named after the pivotal figure “Gabriel Bell.” By 2024, the U.S. had become a very unequal and callous society, and it was a matter of federal government policy to imprison unemployed people in walled-off urban ghettoes called “sanctuary districts.”

The San Francisco “sanctuary district”

Whatever initial hopes there were for the sanctuary districts to rehabilitate the underclass were dashed due to underfunding and government ineptitude. The sanctuary districts swelled with people, including criminals and the mentally ill, and the promises to provide them with jobs, medical care and other forms of support were broken. The districts effectively became open-air prisons where undesirable people could be dumped, out of sight and out of mind, so the rest of society could live unbothered. The bad conditions inside the ghettoes were not widely known in the rest of America because people just didn’t care.

In “Past Tense,” three Star Trek crewmen from the year 2371 are visiting San Francisco, which is an idyllic and highly advanced city in their time. However, one of their machines malfunctions and sends them back in time to the San Francisco of 2024. As if that isn’t enough of a problem, they materialize on the eve of a massive riot in one of the city’s sanctuary districts. The two male crewman–“Sisko” and “Bashir”–are mistaken for homeless people, immediately arrested by the police for vagrancy, and imprisoned in that sanctuary district. The female crewman, “Jadzia,” has the luck to run into a tech tycoon who takes her to his penthouse. This way, the viewer sees the extremes of 2024 American society.

Rude awakening

As Sisko and Bashir explore the sanctuary district, we see it’s essentially a big homeless encampment where the residents have been given free reign over several square blocks of the city. Residential townhouses are crowded with people sleeping in the rooms, hallways and stairwells, and the streets are full of tents and crude shelters. The public spaces are full of crowds of people of all ages and types. Everyone looks unhappy, poor and dirty. Stern policemen with shotguns patrol the streets while muggings happen in the alleys. The long breadlines, overloaded government waiting rooms, and mentally ill residents going without medicine attest to the state’s failure to serve the sanctuary district’s needs.

As Sisko remembers from history class, the sanctuary district would soon erupt in a mass riot over these problems. During the mayhem, one group of armed residents seized control of a small government office and took the staff hostage, refusing to release them until all the sanctuary districts were dismantled. One of the hostage-takers, “Gabriel Bell,” used savvy and force of personality to prevent his comrades from killing the hostages at crucial moments during the ordeal. During the heavyhanded government response, National Guard troops raid the office, shooting Bell and several other hostage-takers dead. Hundreds more, many of them unarmed poor people caught in the crossfire, are also killed elsewhere. The high death toll (Sisko describes it as “One of the most violent civil disturbances in American history”) and Bell’s martyrdom shift public opinion in the U.S., and the sanctuary districts are dismantled nationwide.

While Sisko and Bashir initially plan to lay low, stay out of the way, and await rescue during this pivotal event, they are forced into action when Gabriel Bell is stabbed dead while trying to save them from muggers. When the riots start the next day, Sisko–who bears a resemblance to Bell–impersonates him to ensure historical events proceed correctly. Sisko succeeds, though he manages to narrowly escape death because the police gunshot proves nonfatal. Though Star Trek has always avoided explicitly describing how today’s world evolved into a techno-utopia, it’s clear that the Bell Riots was a key event that spurred the U.S. to adopt democratic socialism.

On the occasion of this episodes’ set date arriving, there have been a flurry of internet articles praising its prescience. After rewatching the episodes, I’m skeptical of that, and think they’re getting undue credit from people who like anything that highlight America’s problems. In fact, most of the elements in the show’s fictitious 2024 turned out wrong or depict the same reality that existed in 1995 when the episode aired.

Analysis:

Poor people are forced to live in government-run ghettoes in America. As noted, the sanctuary districts are essentially prisons. The police can force people into them at gunpoint for legal infractions common to the homeless (e.g. – public sleeping, no ID), as Sisko and Bashir were. Another character says some residents willingly agreed to move into the sanctuary districts after the government promised to get them jobs, but when the latter reneged, the people discovered it was impossible to leave. This prediction has failed to pass, and everyone still enjoys freedom of movement within America.

Yes, there is enormous wealth inequality in America. Yes, people geographically sort themselves by income, race and ethnicity (as they do in all countries). Yes, this has led to the formation of impoverished ghettoes in most U.S. cities, where conditions are no better than in the fictious sanctuary districts. However, the crucial difference is no one is stopping anyone from moving out of those ghettoes.

“There’s a law against sleeping in the streets.” The older policeman says this right after waking up Sisko and Bashir at gunpoint. Most cities and states have laws against camping in public places, though the enforcement of them has always varied. A 2018 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court, which has legal authority over the whole U.S. West Coast, cited humanitarian concerns to forbid any authorities in that zone from enforcing such laws. Unsurprisingly, this led to a visible increase in the number of homeless people and their tents in places like San Francisco, and widespread complaints about their behavior.

In June of 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overrode that ruling, and city and town level police have resumed ticketing and arresting the homeless. In San Francisco since then, the police have typically been respectful when evicting homeless people from sidewalks and public parks, giving them warnings to leave and then maybe a written citation if they refuse. They don’t deal with the issue by pressing loaded guns to heads of sleeping homeless people to wake them up. Efforts to roll back the homeless presence in West Coast towns and cities are only gradually going into effect, and in many places have not started at all.

Not carrying an ID card is a crime. The other legal violation that lands Sisko and Bashir in the sanctuary district is their failure to produce ID cards. Contrary to myth, it is not actually a crime in any part of America to be in a public area without an ID card. I think this was put in the episode to illustrate how draconian the legal system had become in the alternate 2024.

San Francisco is a very unequal place. Having visited San Francisco recently, I think the episode correctly predicted the level of wealth inequality it has today. Moreover, the best estimate is that there are 8,323 homeless people in the city, which is close to the sanctuary district’s population of 10,000. If you add in people who are not homeless but chronically unemployed and living in squalid conditions, the number of San Franciscans whose lives are comparable to the sanctuary district dwellers is some multiple of 8,323.

At the same time, the city boasts a sizeable upper-class, disproportionately comprised of tech sector workers (the tech tycoon who rescues Jadzia personifies San Francisco’s rich). Twenty percent of the city’s households have annual incomes over $200,000, and millionaires are common. The city is home to the super rich and the super poor.

But before we applaud Star Trek’s ability to predict this state of affairs, keep in mind things were essentially the same in 1994 when the episode’s script was written. For many decades, San Francisco has been an unequal city with an unusually large homeless population due to fair weather, lenient laws, and liberal politics. The share of the city’s population that is homeless might even be the same as it was in 1994 (the statistics are imprecise due to methodological problems counting homeless people). And while it wasn’t as large or as powerful as it is today, San Francisco’s economy had a large tech sector back then. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Apple were massively profitable companies whose principal facilities were just outside the city in Silicon Valley.

Unemployment is high. The sanctuary district partly exists because there are so many unemployed people. The female case manager also confirms to Sisko and Bashir that not enough jobs are available for the district’s inhabitants. After taking the Processing Center staff hostage, one of the hostage-takers demands is the reinstatement of the “Federal employment Act.” The episode clearly envisioned a 2024 bedeviled by rampant joblessness. This is wrong: the U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.2% and has been below 5% (widely considered the healthy level) for three years. If you ignore the 18 month spike due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sub-5% era started in December 2015.

Computers are built into desks. Thankfully, no. Also, did the people who made the episode think about why anyone would want such a setup? Upgrading to a new monitor or PC would be harder if the devices were integrated into a piece of furniture. I don’t even see how this is more ergonomic or space-saving than having your monitor on top of your desk and your PC underneath it, like on a special shelf designed just for that purpose.

There are no cell phones. I didn’t see one in either episode. This is obviously completely wrong. If someone from 1995 stepped through a time portal into San Francisco today, they’d surely be struck by how many people were staring at little screens held a few inches in front of their faces.

City governments are full of incompetence. After the police take Sisko and Bashir to the Processing Center, they sit in a crowded waiting room for three hours before seeing a case manager. Used to the highly competent and well-resourced bureaucracies of the distant future, Bashir becomes outraged. I don’t need to do any kind of research to conclude that incompetence and delays are common features of municipal and local governments. That said, things weren’t much better in 1995, so this depiction of 2024 wasn’t much of a prediction, it was just more of the same.

America uses the Metric system. Wrong.

Cashless payments are common. In the sanctuary district, a government worker gives Sisko and Bashir “ration cards,” which they can use to get free food. They look like credit cards that are scanned or swiped. Jadzia also speaks of receiving “credit chips” after tricking the local authorities into believing she’s someone else and merely lost her ID. We never see paper money in the episodes or hear people speak of it. This depiction of 2024 is mostly accurate.

Sisko receives his ration card

Though America has not gone fully cashless, electronic forms of payment are used for most in-person transactions, and many people can go weeks without having to use cash. Forms of “contactless” electronic payment that use near-field communication (NFC) are common now, and bear no resemblance to anything from 1994. I’m old enough to remember that year and the heavy use of cash and even credit card imprinters, and can say things are definitely different now.

There’s a housing shortage in California. The sanctuary district is visibly overcrowded and Sisko and Bashir have to spend hours walking around the first night looking for a townhome with free space for them. Ultimately, they give up and sleep in an outdoor stairwell. Housing has definitely become unaffordable in 2024, and government housing programs have ridiculously long waiting lists. The problems are particularly bad in California, and San Francisco is now one of the least affordable cities on Earth.

This problem is mostly due to a basic imbalance between supply and demand: the number of dwellings has not increased proportionately with U.S. population growth. Contrary to what you might think after watching “Past Tense,” cruel tycoons and the capitalist system have nothing to do with this: average people and government policy do. Overly restrictive laws and grassroots NIMBY activists have stymied the construction of new dwellings across the country, and the government’s decision to basically open the border has led to a recent surge in the illegal immigrant population, and their presence has helped drive up rents.

There’s a cure for schizophrenia. While wandering the sanctuary district, Bashir spots a man on the street who is clearly in the throes of a schizophrenic episode. Bashir is a doctor and says that a cure for the disease exists in 2024, and the fact that it has not been administered to the man is more proof of how callous American society is. Unfortunately, there still is no cure for schizophrenia. The best we can do is to ease and manage the symptoms with medicines and counseling and to keep schizophrenics surveilled as much as possible. Money is certainly a factor in determining the quality of care a sufferer receives, but because the receptivity to treatments varies across the schizophrenic population, some of them barely improve with even the best treatment.

A party among rich San Franciscans. “Jadzia” is at far left.

There is a new polity in the Caribbean. While rubbing elbows with San Francisco’s rich at a party, courtesy of her rich patron, Jadzia overhears them talking about “the Pan Caribbean government.” It’s unclear whether this is a nation-state or some kind of federation of nation-states. No new countries have been created in the Caribbean since 1994, nor have the borders of any preexisting countries there shifted. During the same period, no new trade blocs or supranational political bodies have formed in the region.

Seafloor mining is about to begin. At the same party, another rich guys says his company has received permission from the Pan Caribbean government to start seafloor mining under their waters soon. This prediction is accurate, so long as the word “soon” is strictly adhered to. Across the world, potential seafloor mining projects are being held up by environmental challenges, but it looks like some of them are finally poised to start.

Europe is falling apart. Star Trek got one thing right: Rich people sure do get around in 2024! At the party they also talk about Europe’s implosion thanks to social and economic disorder. The continent is definitely less stable and more under threat today than it was in the 1990s thanks to demographic decline, mass illegal immigration, Brexit, the rise of far-right, the decline of the strongest economy (Germany), and renewed Russian aggression. However, it goes too far to say “Europe is falling apart.” The E.U. is still the world’s second largest economy, living standards remain high in most ways and are rapidly improving in Eastern Europe, and NATO is still intact and now strengthening to confront Russia.

“The Net” is still a common term. In the episodes, the internet is called “the Net.” Only those of us who remember the 90s will remember this archaic term and fully appreciate how cringey saying it is in 2024.

Videoconferencing is common. While pretending to be Gabriel Bell, Sisko uses a computer inside the Processing Center for a videoconference negotiation with the police chief. This prediction is correct, and video calls are very common in 2024. In fact, the technology we have is more advanced since such calls can be made using handheld devices instead of through large computers built into desks.

Links:

  1. San Francisco has only recently started clearing out its large homeless encampments.
    https://www.kqed.org/news/12006541/sfs-homeless-sweeps-have-cleared-over-1200-tents-where-are-people-going
    https://abc7news.com/post/san-francisco-tenderloin-1-month-after-homeless-encampment-crackdown/15291543/
  2. The 2024 homeless count in San Francisco was 8,323.
    https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/research-and-reports/pit/
  3. Counting homeless people is notoriously error-prone, and there’s reason to believe the homeless share of San Francisco’s population is the same in 2024 as it was in 1994.
    https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/san-francisco-40-years-of-failure
  4. Cash is now used in only 12% of in-store transactions in America.
    https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/cash-vs-credit-card-spending-statistics/
  5. In 2022, 41% of Americans said they routinely went more than a week without using cash.
    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/05/more-americans-are-joining-the-cashless-economy/
  6. In 2024, San Francisco was ranked as the eighth least affordable city on Earth.
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/06/26/impossibly-unaffordable-housing-cities/74195450007/
  7. Schizophrenia still has no cure.
    https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/4568-schizophrenia
  8. After years of false starts, seafloor mining now looks poised to start.
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deep-sea-mining-could-begin-soon-regulated-or-not
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Interesting articles, August 2024

Ukraine staged a successful surprise attack into Russia itself, capturing a significant amount of territory southwest of the city of Kursk.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-flee-russia-battles-major-123112611.html
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-kursk-fighting-80671ef80c36b94dc1114506770cdd56

The Russians are close to seizing a strategically important city in eastern Ukraine called “Pokrovsk.” If it falls, a large section of the Ukrainian frontline will become unsupportable and will crumble.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c785z8917leo

While Russia is derided in the Western press for sending poorly-trained men to fight in Ukraine, the fact is Ukraine is doing the same.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-new-recruits-pokrovsk-ed2d06ad529e3b7e47ecd32f79911b83

North Korea condemned Ukraine’s invasion as a terrorist act.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/north-korea-condemns-ukraines-incursion-into-russia-act-terror-2024-08-18/

Russia destroyed a Challenger II tank the British donated to Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/GnYcTWuhSEA?si=gqC3UVY-XBWn8Jf6

The first F-16 fighters have been delivered to Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/air/f-16s-arrive-in-ukraine-report

And the first Ukrainian F-16 was also destroyed during a mission to shoot down Russian cruise missiles and drones.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-f-16-destroyed-during-200508160.html

Since October 7, 2% of Gaza’s population has been killed. That’s comparable to what some countries suffered in WWII.
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-war-hamas-dead-graves-40000-988d16b648e06e222f04964dc9440da0

Top U.S. officials say that though Israel has massively damaged Hamas, it’s unlikely that further attacks will destroy the organization. They’ve proven too adept at survival. Hamas is also so skillful at hiding the remaining Israeli hostages that rescuing them alive with commando raids is impossible. The huge civilian death toll has undermined Israel’s global image and diplomatic standing, and Hamas is so intermixed with the general population in Gaza that even the most surgical Israeli attacks will cause collateral damage.

At this point, Israel should declare victory, end military operations in Gaza, and switch to diplomacy to get its hostages back and to diminish Hamas’ remaining power as much as possible.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gaza-israel-military-reached-end-113642816.html

‘Planted Bomb Was Used To Kill Hamas Leader In Tehran’
https://www.twz.com/news-features/planted-bomb-was-used-to-kill-hamas-leader-in-tehran-report

The U.S. Navy announced it was sending a cruise missile sub to the Persian Gulf to deter Iran from retaliating against Israel.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-sending-powerful-submarine-middle-east-loud-warning-to-iran-2024-8

‘Mali’s northern Tuareg rebels said they had killed at least 84 Russian Wagner mercenaries and 47 Malian soldiers during days of fierce fighting in late July.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russians-pay-homage-wagner-fighters-125657362.html

This gives me an idea for a future weapon: robotic insects that are programmed to crawl into the fuel systems of enemy aircraft and, once they sense the aircraft have taken flight, to clog the fuel lines with some injected gluey substance.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ntsb-investigation-said-wasps-nest-132603368.html

An Air Force investigation concluded that the crash of a $450 million B-1B bomber earlier this year was due to crew error, and that poor discipline and lax standards in their unit set the stage for the disaster. Keep in mind that machines will never forget anything, suffer from skill degradation, or need to spend any time retraining.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/07/25/report-unhealthy-culture-ellsworth-air-force-base-units-contributed-b-1b-lancer-crash.html

The Indian Army’s INSAS assault rifle is, along with the British SA80, one of the worst in its class. Some of its problems owe to manufacturing defects rather than design faults.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/indian-army-plans-to-upgrade-the-insas-rifle-part-1-history-44815417
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/indian-army-plans-to-upgrade-insas-rifle-part-2-my-experience-44815429

China is abandoning its “minimum deterrence” nuclear strategy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/us/politics/biden-nuclear-china-russia.html

The question isn’t whether the Germans COULD have won the Battle of Stalingrad (the answer is “no”), it’s whether they SHOULD have started the battle at all. They should have lurked west of the city in favorable open ground to destroy any Soviet forces that came out to fight them.

In reality, the symbolism of controlling the city bearing Josef Stalin’s name overrode military logic in Hitler’s mind, so he sent his army into a disaster.
https://youtu.be/zSah-7yvaE8?si=KEycNUPVyPM7er2r

Jacob Schiff was one of the richest men in America around the turn of the century, and a powerful advocate for Jews like himself. In the late 1800s, antisemitic violence within the Russian Empire started driving large numbers of Jews to leave. In 1903, Christian fanatics in Moldova murdered 49 Jews and raped many of their women. Schiff was outraged, and in response, he loaned Japan the equivalent of $5.3 billion in 2023 dollars–half of the country’s entire wartime military budget–to finance its war against Russia in 1905. Russia suffered a humiliating loss that resounds to this day, though Japan was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy by the end. Without Schiff, Russia might have won.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the social media messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France because some of the app’s users used it to commit crimes. This has major free speech implications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2x5yw8z7yo

‘Zuckerberg regrets bowing to Biden ‘pressure’ over Covid’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo

A new mod for the video game Cyberpunk 2077 has been released which upgrades it graphics into being nearly lifelike.
https://www.techeblog.com/cyberpunk-2077-dreampunk-2-graphics-mod/

Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis just gave an interview. Key points:

  • He freely uses the term “AGI,” which he used to be reluctant to utter.
  • He thinks AGI could be invented as early as 2030.
  • He also believes computers could invent cures for most or all diseases within 10 years, including individualized medicines.
  • In spite of that, he thinks the media is overhyping the short-term potential of the AI industry. Massive progress will happen, but slower than the media and self-interested startups imply.
    https://youtu.be/pZybROKrj2Q?si=4gHyTisaMR4SmKAb

Peter Thiel also gave an interview, and echoed Hassabis’ view that the AI industry is in a bubble. Specifically, he used the analogy that AI today is where the internet was in 1999: poised for a world-changing breakout but also in a huge bubble that will pop.
https://youtu.be/klRb0_BAX9g?si=GywdTwE3DVyw63VW

This analysis makes reasonable assumptions about growth in training data sets, data centers, electricity availability, and training efficiency, and concludes there’s no roadblock to building GPT-6 by 2030. However, a company the size of Microsoft would have to be willing to pay up to $100 billion to create it, and it would consume up to five gigawatts of electricity. (A gigawatt of electricity can power 300,000 – 750,000 homes, and an average nuclear reactor produces 1 gigawatt of electricity. [Note that one nuclear POWER PLANT can have multiple nuclear REACTORS in it.]) They could actually afford that and could even build their own power plants by the deadline.

As I wrote a few months ago, the near future of the AI industry hinges on how good GPT-5 is. If it’s a very impressive and instantly profitable product, then many big tech companies will find it worth the gamble to take the next step and build GPT-6 equivalents. If GPT-5 disappoints, then they won’t. I think GPT-5 will be released shortly after the U.S. election.

I don’t know if GPT-6 would be a “general intelligence,” but at a minimum, it would be able to replace large numbers of human jobs and to handle very complex tasks. People and organizations will get access to it through a subscription model, for example, you’ll pay $100 a month to have GPT-6 perform a job at your company that you’d have to pay a human $5,000 a month to do.
https://epochai.org/blog/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030

‘Our future AI overlord has determined that putting cold air inside a duct will raise the temperature of the outside of the duct above the ambient temperature of the attic.’
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/08/25/chatgpt-4o-tackles-the-challenge-of-ac-ducts-sweating-in-an-attic/

This ancient Egyptian wooden lock is so simple that only a genius could invent it.
https://youtu.be/3I25Te0qNEM?si=UN6AI-sQU4DGJDiP

A Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode that aired in 1995 has caught up with reality.
https://youtu.be/F4x_8miSN9k?si=tCVe50ArSrL5eXdQ
https://youtu.be/Ni8LvECFoiM?si=xC1lVPDNbt5X8BVf

Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin has said, “like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_identity

Eight years on, and China’s project to build an international power grid has gone nowhere.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/china-unveils-proposal-50-trillion-global-electricity-network-n548376

‘According to our baseline estimates (Table 1), over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of NPPs worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies. Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in NPP growth in these countries after Chernobyl.’
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/the-unseen-fallout-chernobyls-deadly-air-pollution-legacy.html

Geologists have found a place where it is possible to drill down into the Earth’s mantle.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientists-drilled-deep-center-earth-163300616.html

A large meteorite impact crater under Greenland’s ice sheet has been dated to 58 million years ago, squashing earlier claims that it was created 13,000 years ago and triggered the last Ice Age.
https://news.ku.dk/all_news/2022/03/giant-impact-crater-in-greenland-occurred-a-few-million-years-after-dinosaurs-went-extinct/

Published 20 years ago: ‘If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades. That is the bold prediction from a leading light at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California.’
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6189-et-first-contact-within-20-years/

The Pentagon’s former lead UFO hunter Luis Elizondo just published an autobiography that includes a lot of detail about his old job and what the government secretly knows about aliens.
‘He claims that his D.C.-area home was “invaded,” The Times reported, by green, glowing, basketball-sized orbs. They could pass through walls and appeared to be “under intelligent control…his wife, their two daughters and their neighbors witnessed the green orbs, which they called “our friends from out of town.”’
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-alien-hunter-luis-elizondo-glowing-green-ufos-invaded-my-home

Elizondo also sat down for a long interview about himself and his book. He’s surprisingly smart.
https://youtu.be/9gLPtRwXgCM?si=nK2GJ-OZ1nQbCpOf

Crazy ways to get into space: “Lofstrom loop, StarTram and Space Cannons”
https://youtu.be/gIYpDSs8vsM?si=Dc3Jfmkoc4_f0WVo

Mars probably has liquid water several miles underground, flowing through cracks in rocks. Microbial life could be there.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/12/science/mars-crust-water-reservoir-insight/index.html

It’s very rare to find a dog with the right attributes to serve with special forces units or elite bodyguards. For that reason, it would probably be cheaper to keep cloning the best dogs instead of relying on the genetic crapshoot.
https://gwern.net/clone

Ten years on, and there’s been very little follow-up about this suspended animation procedure. It’s actually the norm for a supposedly revolutionary breakthrough in medicine or some other technology to rock the news media for a few days only to be never heard from again.
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2014/09/04/the-big-sleep

‘US government report says fluoride at twice the recommended limit is linked to lower IQ in kids’
https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-water-brain-neurology-iq-0a671d2de3b386947e2bd5a661f437a5

You can change the color of your eyes through plastic surgery. The only problem is it might make you slowly go blind.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/22/health/permanent-eye-color-change-surgery/index.html

There was controversy at the Paris Summer Olympics when gold medals were awarded to to two female boxers with genetic abnormalities that gave them male physical characteristics and male XY chromosomes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlr8gp813ko

The FDA rejected an ecstasy-based drug that was touted as a treatment for PTSD because there wasn’t enough proof it worked.
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/fda-rejects-ecstasy-based-drug-cfc4b4b5

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Musings 7

I think something I call a “Fake AGI” will be created in the next ten years. By simply improving existing LLMs with more data, marginally better algorithms, and bigger data centers, and then “wrapping” several specialized LLMs and computer programs together into a multi-module unit, it will become possible to build a sort of “Frankenstein” machine that would possess general intelligence. Well…most of the time.

The Fake AGI will still spit out nonsensical responses and suffer from hallucinations on occasion, sharply reminding us humans that its “mind” is fundamentally different from ours and that its intelligence is brittle. Further upgrades by its owners will roll the problem back, but never eliminate it entirely because the machine will be fundamentally incapable of general intelligence. For example, its Turing Test results will gradually improve, with it passing 99% of the time except for the 1% when it makes a totally nonsensical response that no human would. In time, its results would improve to 99.9%, then 99.99% and so on…but they would never be perfect.

But no matter how smart the machine got, no matter how well it mimicked human speech and emotion, there would still be the occasional mistakes. The strange answers and other random behaviors would be forever cited by critics as proof the machine was not really an intelligent being. Even people rejecting that stance would still admit that there was something alien about how the machine’s mind worked that we could never understand.

A “Real AGI” will require a totally different mental architecture, and several breakthrough algorithms, and will have a vastly simpler and more elegant code. I believe it is still at least 25 years away. However, from the human end user perspective, nothing might seem to change on the day the Frankenstein Fake AGI that answers correctly 99.999% of the time is switched off and the first Real AGI is switched on. The entity that they communicate with for work or pleasure will still sound the same, and the mistakes will have already become so rare that most people will have wrongly assumed the machine had been “generally intelligent” for years up to that point.  

Every human being, and probably every life form with a brain, is inherently valuable. This is because our brain structures and past experiences uniquely shape the way we process data. One person’s subjective experience and perception of something is idiosyncratic to them. When they die, that bit of individuality is forever lost. Even the life of someone as lowly as a serial killer is valuable.

Brain scanning devices like BCIs will give us unparalleled insights into how the brains and minds of humans work. In the future, once the devices are cheap and common, they could be paired with personal assistant AIs to graph the exact mental strengths and weaknesses of each individual, allowing the machines to help them maximize their potential and to learn most effectively. The brain data could also be used, along with test data, observational data, and genetic information, to make highly accurate digital clones of people. The clones could persist even after their “originals” die.

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Interesting articles, July 2024

After a Hezbollah rocket attack that killed 12 Israeli civilians, Israel used airstrikes to kill senior leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas. The bold reprisal carried out the assassinations in Beirut and Tehran.
https://apnews.com/article/haniyeh-shukur-israel-lebanon-hamas-5d3ec9b048ef77b6b8196c6c08755dbd

Israel retaliated against Yemen for a drone attack that killed one person in Tel Aviv with an airstrike that practically crippled Yemen’s most important seaport. The distances are remarkable: southern Israel and the port are 1,200 miles apart.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/details-of-israels-long-range-strike-that-decimated-yemeni-port-emerge

The U.S. military dismantled its floating pier that was meant to deliver aid to Gaza. The failure makes me wonder how badly it would fare under the stress of warfare when it would be needed to deliver supplies to our troops after they secured a beachhead.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-floating-pier-off-gaza-wound-disappointment/story

In spite of a resurgence in U.S. military aid, Ukraine’s forces are slowly falling back at multiple parts of the front line.
https://www.politico.eu/article/kremlin-troops-push-kyivs-underequipped-soldiers-frontline-russia-ukraine-war-zelenskyy/

The Russian “MT-LB” armored tractor fleet has suffered so much attrition in the Ukraine War that it’s on track for extinction.
https://youtu.be/KSvawAjav1k?si=z8cdh4l7JEumq4D3

A U.S. company has developed an upgrade package for Ukraine’s kamikaze drones that lets them home in on their targets using cameras and image recognition. This makes them jam-proof against Russia’s current electronic weapons.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/07/10/destroying-russian-tanks-is-just-the-start-for-us-ai-drone-autopilot/

Defensive lasers that can be mounted on tanks and which can blind the sensors of enemy drones are “an untapped countermeasure.”
https://www.twz.com/land/laser-dazzlers-for-defending-tanks-against-marauding-drones-are-an-untapped-countermeasure

A U.S. soldier in 1944 holding a captured German “Panzerschreck” (left) and an American Bazooka (right). Both weapons were designed to penetrate the thick armor of tanks and to blow them up, but the larger Panzerschreck was more powerful. The Germans based the Panzerschreck on Bazookas they captured from U.S. POWs in 1942 in North Africa.

Islamic fighters ambushed and killed dozens of Russian “Wagner” mercenaries in Mali.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dozens-wagner-fighters-killed-russian-192007431.html

Some of the Mexican army’s guns and armored vehicles are from WWII.
https://youtu.be/Q8R32wuYVe4?si=d6Y_qzuIwXlLxToD

Influential “effective altruists” mostly living in Silicon Valley are trying to get California and the U.S. federal government to impose restrictions on AI development out of fear it might destroy the human race.
https://reason.com/2024/07/05/the-authoritarian-side-of-effective-altruism-comes-for-ai/

Like any other technology, AI will stay largely ignored until its capability surpasses that of humans or some other common technology, whereupon it will be rapidly adopted.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/gradually-then-suddenly-upon-the

A math problem the DeepMind LLM solved

A DeepMind LLM secured a silver medal in the 2024 International Math Olympiad.
“The fact that the program can come up with a non-obvious construction like this is very impressive, and well beyond what I thought was state of the art.”
-Prof Sir Timothy Gowers, IMO gold medalist and Fields Medal winner
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/ai-solves-imo-problems-at-silver-medal-level/

LLMs are getting much more computationally efficient.
https://openai.com/index/gpt-4o-mini-advancing-cost-efficient-intelligence/

Maybe managers will be automated before line workers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c03lgz2zrg1o

After his shockingly bad debate against Donald Trump, President Joe Biden ended his 2024 reelection bid. At least two pundits predicted this:

  • “I predict the kingmaker who saved Biden’s campaign in the 2020 primary, South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, will this time be the king slayer. After Biden insists that he is running for re-election, Clyburn, a respected elder statesman with gravitas, will tell Biden his defeat of Trump in 2020 was enough, and now it’s time for another candidate, without Biden’s baggage, to lead the way. Biden, a stubborn man, will eventually agree. By spring 2023, more than 20 Democrats will enter the contest and the party in 2024 will emerge with a newer, younger leader.”
    -Ari Fleischer, May 2, 2022
    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/joe-biden-wont-run-in-2024-ari-fleischer
  • ‘Steve Forbes made a bold prediction Friday morning while sitting with Fox News’ Bill Hemmer and Jacqui Heinrich on “America’s Newsroom”: President Joe Biden will not be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, despite announcing his reelection campaign in April.’
    -May 26, 2023
    https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/joe-biden-not-democrats-2024-231657505.html

Presidential contender Donald Trump narrowly avoided assassination during a speech to supporters in Pennsylvania. Conservative news pundit Tucker Carlson predicted this last September.
‘Speaking with Adam Carolla on the comedian’s eponymous YouTube show, Carlson said: “They indicted him three times, and every single time his popularity rose. If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, then you go to indictment, and none of them work, what’s next? Graph it out, man! We’re speeding toward assassination, obviously.”‘
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12470861/Tucker-Carlson-breathlessly-says-speeding-Trump-assassination-liberal-establishment-running-options-stop-president-Russian-propagandist-says-ex-Fox-News-host-dead-man-walking.html

Here’s a list of science fiction works that were set in the future at the time they were published, but which now took place in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_future_now_in_the_past

“Redbox” has shut down, bringing down the curtain on the movie disc rental era. I remember when DVD vending machines were high tech.
https://www.ign.com/articles/redbox-officially-shutting-down

‘Europe’s first Ariane 6 flight achieved most of its goals, but ended prematurely’
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/europes-first-ariane-6-flight-achieved-most-of-its-goals-but-ended-prematurely/

Instead of crashing the ISS back to Earth, why not boost it to a higher orbit where it will stay for decades?
https://spacenews.com/transferring-the-international-space-station-into-the-future/

NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found evidence of extinct microbial life on Mars.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/26/science/nasa-perseverance-rover-cheyava-falls-rock/index.html

There is a fine line between genius and insanity.

‘Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’ hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony

…The Boring Co., a private tunneling venture founded by Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’ surface, two of the people said. Musk has told people that he bought the social platform X partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/thermonuclear-blasts-species-inside-elon-114134734.html

A new study finds evidence that the brain patterns involved in gender identity are distinct from the brain patterns that reveal biological sex at birth. The study used fMRI brain scans of children aged 9 and 10, along with survey questions meant to find how they viewed their gender. “These gender-associated brain networks were distinct from those associated with assigned sex at birth.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/brain-imaging-study-children-shows-sex-and-gender-operate-different-networks-brain

Another person has been cured of HIV thanks to a stem cell transplant.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13648387/German-man-seventh-person-HIV-cured.html

New genetics research shows that Americans with ADHD and anxiety/depression disorders have been reproducing the most, while people with high educational attainment have been reproducing the least.

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“Frontlines: Fuel of War” review

Plot:

It’s the summer of 2024, and the world is in crisis. Twenty years of rising international tensions and competition for dwindling oil have split the strongest countries into two blocs: the Euro-American “Coalition” and the Sino-Russo “Red Star Alliance.” You are the leader of an elite American special forces squad fighting under the banner of the Coalition, and over the course of the video game, you’ll lead your men from the oil fields of Turkmenistan all the way to the heart of Moscow as your side fights to capture the remaining oil reserves and end the Russian threat once and for all. In your missions, you use futuristic guns and drones, and command weapons of war like jeeps, tanks, and helicopters to destroy the enemy. Not even nuclear strikes can stop you. It’s victory…or nothing!

THAT is the awesomest recap of the 2008 first person shooter game Frontlines: Fuel of War that I can muster, and I hope it grabbed your attention because the game actually wasn’t so epic. Putting aside the scarily evocative storyline, it was a paint-by-the-numbers FPS game with generic weapons, the occasional combat vehicle for you to commandeer, and mediocre AI enemies. Anyone who played Halo 2, which was released four years before this, will recognize all the same game elements.

Frontline’s missions are not imaginative and you don’t need any real tactics to beat them: Rely on your ability to absorb inhuman amounts of lead and keep blasting until all the bad guys are dead. The game has Black Hawk Down / Iraq War vibes, which is understandable given the time when it was made. I don’t have a good memory for this, but the graphics were probably above average for 2008. 

Of course, I’m not reviewing Frontlines for its qualities as a video game; instead, I want to examine how well it predicted the future–which is now our present time–16 years ago. For better or worse, video games are a hugely popular medium that shapes global culture and how even our views of what the future will be like. The game is a work of science fiction since it’s set in the then-future and features technologies that didn’t exist yet, and like a typical work of this sort, it’s a time capsule that shows what the anxieties of its moment in history were.

The game was released in February 2008, near the height of an alarming, multi-year spike in the price of oil and only a year after the Iraq War–which some claimed was a secret oil grab perpetrated by U.S. leaders who had insider knowledge that Peak Oil was nigh–hit its bloody climax. Fears were widespread that oil would just keep getting more expensive and that the root cause was a global shortage. In fact, it proved to be a temporary problem caused by Saudi Arabia’s failure to pump more oil out of the ground to keep pace with rising global demand (particularly from China). This led to a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, which caused the 2004-08 global price spike. The U.S. occupation of Iraq also ended without the latter turning into an oil-producing colony of the former. 

It’s important to keep the failures of works like Frontlines: Fuel of War in mind when contemplating how today’s science fiction films, books, TV shows, and games depict the future. The common themes in such recent works are American decline and internal strife (Civil War, The Forever Purge), rise of a fascistic American dictatorship (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Creator), the masses suffering under the cruel yoke of megacorporations and the rich (Snowpiercer), and disastrous climate change (also Snowpiercer). If you take anything away from this essay, let it be a strong skepticism of whatever future doomsday movie or book makes the rounds next.

Analysis:

The world is nearly out of oil. In the game, the world hit “Peak Oil” shortly after 2008 and oil production collapsed over the next few years. By around 2020, oil had become so expensive due to its scarcity that even rich countries like the U.S. were afflicted with chronic electricity, food and water shortages. The in-game reporter character who accompanies the Coalition unit even says at one point that mass riots had become common in U.S. cities, and hundreds would die in the disorder in one night. By 2024, the only remaining oil wells on Earth are in Central Asia, and the world’s major powers are so desperate to control it that they start WWIII over it. Obviously, none of this happened. 

What saved us? Hydraulic fracking, an advanced method of recovering oil from underground deposits, which was pioneered in the U.S. It sharply increased the country’s oil output over the 2010s. By 2018, America was the world’s biggest oil producer, and it has held that title ever since. More than any other factor, the advent of fracking has kept oil cheap globally since 2008. The biggest pie in Frontline’s face is the fact that oil prices are actually much LOWER in 2024 than they were when the game was released, and that Peak Oil DEMAND could happen as early as 2030 thanks to the rise of electric cars and solar power.

But even if global oil production had peaked in 2008, output levels never would have fell as sharply as they did in the game: the collapse was so total that just 16 years later, Turkmenistan was the only country with oil left (in fact, it is actually not even one of the top 10 oil producers in the world today). In reality, the decline would have been much more gradual, and the world would have largely compensated by using more coal and natural gas (and in some countries, greater use of nuclear power). Instead of mass blackouts and nightly, murderous mayhem, America would be swept by mass complaining and people having to make do with slightly smaller houses and cars. Likewise, the world’s major nations wouldn’t be so desperate for energy that they’d be willing to start WWIII with each other to get it.

A pandemic happened in recent memory. Though only spoken of briefly in the game, an avian flu pandemic swept the world in 2009. The game’s narrator was a youth at that time, and he mentions that his parents withdrew him from school because they couldn’t get him a vaccine. This was partly accurate: the COVID-19 virus outbreak started in 2019 and, among its many ill effects, forced closures of schools across the world.

Hospital ward full of people sick with bird flu in 2009

Russia and China have formed a military alliance. The bad guys in the game are the “Red Star Alliance,” a military pact between Russia, China and a few smaller countries that border them. While Russia and China have closer relations than they did in 2008, it owes to shared hostility towards and exclusion by the West and not to any fondness of each other, and there is no mutual defense component to it. 

A Red Star Alliance soldier and the organization’s emblem

China views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a mistake and a potential flashpoint for a larger war that China would gain nothing from. As such, China has refused to sell Russia weapons for use in Ukraine, though it has provided large amounts of other goods (microchips, jet engines, etc.) that Russia used to build weapons of its own. Given the different temperaments and strategic priorities of the countries’ leaders, it is highly unlikely they will form a mutual defense arrangement unless there’s a major change to the global order. They don’t want to get dragged into the other’s wars: Russia doesn’t want to fight against Taiwan and China doesn’t want to fight against Ukraine. 

U.S. troops don’t use the M-16 series rifle anymore. The Coalition troops that we see all have American accents and use a smoothly contoured, plasticky rifle that resembles the aborted “XM-8.” This means the U.S. military has abandoned the M-16 series as its standard rifle. This hasn’t happened, and the XM-8 was canceled before entering service because, though it was slightly better than the M-16 series in some ways, the advantage was not so great that it justified the cost of replacing millions of the older rifles. 

An American soldier circa 2024, with futuristic rifle, holographic eyepiece, but strangely no e-cigarette.

There are now plans to replace the M-16 series with a heavier, more powerful rifle called the “XM-7,” but I’m skeptical the plan will be carried to completion and instead expect it will find a role as a specialist weapon. 

All infantrymen, including the Russians and Chinese, have holographic eyepieces. Every soldier seen in the game has a square, holographic eyepiece jutting down from the bottom of his helmet rim and over one eye. Coalition eyepieces glow blue while Red Star eyepieces glow red, presumably because the two sides have an agreement to differentiate themselves according to who is good or evil. It’s unclear what the eyepieces display over their wearers’ fields of vision, though a fair guess would be the overhead battlefield map with objectives and enemy positions highlighted that the player sees at the top of the screen.  

A U.S. Army unit testing Microsoft Hololens augmented reality goggles meant for soldiering tasks in late 2023
A Ukrainian drone operator, 2024

While augmented reality eyewear keeps making appearances at military trade shows across the world, and all modern militaries have some program dedicated to evaluating them, they are not in common field use. A notable exception to this is short-range drone pilots, many of whom wear virtual reality goggles to remotely fly their craft. However, they don’t wear those goggles when engaged in rifle combat with the enemy like in the game. 

View through a U.S. military-standard EO Tech red dot rifle scope

Rifle scopes are much more common and more advanced than they were in 2008, and duplicate one aspect of the game’s eyepieces: when looked through, the scopes show glowing reticles over the shooter’s field of view, indicating where their bullets will hit. This makes target acquisition faster and more accurate, and the scopes have become standard equipment in several major militaries. In that sense, “augmented” or “holographic” visioning devices are common on the battlefield in 2024.

There are hand-launched attack drones. In the game, you can launch handheld, hovering drones that you then remotely pilot to enemy targets whereupon you detonate them. They are small enough to fly through open windows and hallways and are best suited for attacking fortified positions like machine gun pillboxes. A drone’s explosive load is about the same a grenade. This is probably the game’s most important and prescient prediction about 2024.

The Ukraine War has seen mass use of drones by both sides. This includes countless, small quadcopter drones that closely resemble those in the game. Some are kamikazes that are sacrificed upon use while others are reusable and drop mini-bombs. They’re so effective and cheap that they’re commonly used to hunt down lone infantrymen and don’t have to be reserved just for valuable targets like tanks. If anything, the game UNDERestimated how pervasive and transformative aerial drones would be on the 2024 battlefield.

There are small ground drones. However, the game’s prediction that small ground drones would be in common use has failed for several reasons. First, small vehicles with little wheels and low ground clearances can’t negotiate the uneven terrain found on typical battlefields: a barbed wire fence, log, or pile of rubble that a human could easily step over could be an impassable barrier to mini-tank the size of a coffee table. Sizing them up to overcome these issues results in them no longer being small enough for infantrymen to carry into the field. Second, since ground vehicles move slowly and basically in just two dimensions, they’re easy targets for enemy troops (contrast this with aerial drones, which can move fast and in three dimensions). This means they’re less survivable and might need some kind of armor, adding to their cost and bulk. Third, small ground drones are expensive because they require more material for their manufacture than flying drones. Above a certain unit price point, it doesn’t make sense to use them sacrificially like you can with aerial drones.

There’s a particularly unrealistic moment in the game where you use a skateboard-sized, remote controlled suicide drone to drive under an enemy tank and blow it up. Again, this would only work if the route to the tank were over flat, hard ground with no debris in the way, which you would never count on being the case in combat. The real 2024 solution would be to use a shoulder-launched missile or a small aerial kamikaze drone loaded with a shaped charge explosive. Those missiles and drones can also target the thin armor on the top sides of tanks, which is almost as vulnerable as the belly armor that a skateboard drone’s explosion would tear into.

A legged robot with the same speed, agility, size, and balance as a dog could be a potent weapon of war

That said, future advances in robotics will eventually fix the problem: small ground robots with legs instead of wheels would be able to quickly negotiate difficult terrain and attack other ground targets. This draws inspiration from history: during WWII, both sides experimented with bomb-laden dogs that were trained to run across the battlefield, dive under enemy tanks and then explode. While the dogs were fast and nimble enough to do it, problems like the animals being spooked by gunfire foiled its viability. It will surely take decades, but dog-like robots will become a reality, and I’m sure they’ll have combat niches, but can’t say whether they will be preferred to other kinds of futuristic weapons for specific tasks like destroying tanks.

Russian troops are bad at fighting. From the start of the game, in every mission where you fight Russia, you do nothing but drive them back. For a country with such a fearsome reputation, this seems paradoxical, but it actually isn’t: The ongoing Ukraine War, the first Chechen War, the first year of WWII, and the Russo-Finnish War bear out the fact that the Red Army fights poorly (sometimes disastrously so) when the stars align in the wrong way. Though Russians are more courageous and brutal than average on the battlefield and have great skill improvising, poor training, bad leadership, and supply shortages perennially undermine their overall performance. The problem gets worse when the war involves a place and an objective that average Russians don’t care about. 

Russian POWs in Ukraine, 2022

Russia’s military reputation has taken a major hit due to its poor performance in Ukraine since 2022: appalling losses have forced it to fall back on antiquated weapons drawn from Soviet stockpiles and on convict troops and paid foreign mercenaries. The Russians have made strategic blunders, and on the battlefield rely on uncreative tactics (mostly wearing down the Ukrainians with mass artillery strikes and frontal attacks with infantry). Aside from their tenacity, there’s little to be impressed with, and in a direct conventional war with U.S. troops like the “Coalition” team you lead in the game, the Russians would badly lose in peripheral places like Central Asia. However, they would fight much harder inside Russia itself, as it is their sacred homeland. 

Russia used nuclear weapons to defend itself from land invasion. After beating up the Russians in Central Asia, the Coalition decides to keep going with a land invasion across the Kazakhstan border into Russia itself, with the objective of conquering the latter. This makes little sense since the Coalition had already accomplished its goal of capturing the last remaining oil well in the world, and since an organization composed of democratic Western governments would never behave so recklessly. The response is predictable: Russia launches nuclear missiles against the Coalition armored force, causing major damage to it. (That mission is the most stunning in the game as it involves you fighting a tank battle punctuated by nearby nuclear explosions)

Thankfully, no one has tried invading Russia since 1941, so it has never used nuclear weapons in self-defense. And let there be no doubt they would: Russia clearly states in its defense doctrine that it will use nuclear weapons if its territory is threatened. The game’s depiction of how this would play out is accurate: Instead of launching an all-out nuclear attack against all Coalition’s cities, Russia started by only using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons against the Coalition’s military forces that were crossing the border, and in a remote area with few or no civilians. This wasn’t mentioned in the game, but it would surely be preceded by top-level warnings from Russia to the Coalition governments about what was coming. 

I think Russia, the U.S., and China are the world’s three “unconquerable countries” because of their sheer size and nuclear arsenals. The armies of other countries might be able to defeat them on foreign soil, but it would be hopeless to invade any of the three in an attempt to take them over since too many troops would be needed and they have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate any attacker. The final mission of the game is the storming of downtown Moscow, and in it, mushroom clouds are visible in the distance, meaning Russia has been using nuclear weapons against Coalition troop concentrations during their travels through its territory. I can’t fathom how any army could survive repeated nuclear attacks like that, nor do I see how the home fronts in the Coalition countries would avoid falling into chaos over widespread panic that Russia would nuke them at any moment as well.

Big tank battles are happening in Europe. As mentioned, the Coalition invasion of Russia is spearheaded by a large number of tanks. In the first invasion mission and subsequent ones set deeper in Russia, there are instances where your character must command a tank and fight with Russian tanks. To the surprise of people in 2008, this turned out to be accurate. 

The Ukraine War has seen many tank battles since 2022, with a series of particularly large ones happening in early 2024 for control of the town of Avdiivka. Up to this point in the War, 17,168 of Russia’s armored vehicles have been destroyed and 2,925 captured by Ukraine.

China has conquered Taiwan. The game focuses on the European theater of the war, so almost all of the combat is against Russian troops. Midway through the game, it is mentioned that China invaded and quickly took over Taiwan. Thankfully, this didn’t happen, so Frontlines: Fuel of War can be added to the enormous trash heap of sources that have wrongly predicted such an invasion since at least the 1980s. Additionally, the insinuation that Chinese ground troops could easily take over the island is almost certainly wrong: while China’s army is massive, its amphibious forces are small, which creates a major bottleneck for getting its troops across the Taiwan Strait and providing them with supplies.

U.S. attack subs lurking underwater and long-range antiship missiles fired from Taiwan and by U.S. warplanes might fatally damage a Chinese landing fleet before it reached the beaches. More generally, marshalling a naval fleet for a D-Day scale invasion is sure to be an extremely risky and high-casualty endeavor in today’s age of 24/7 spy satellite surveillance and long-range precision missiles. While the world has been primed to expect a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be an inevitable and unstoppable juggernaut, it could actually be the most legendary naval defeat since the loss of the Spanish Armada.

Links:

  1. Fracking sharply boosted U.S. oil production starting in the 2000s.
    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25372
  2. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. has been the world’s biggest oil producer since 2018.
    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37053
  3. Peak Oil Demand could come as early as 2030.
    https://www.iea.org/news/slowing-demand-growth-and-surging-supply-put-global-oil-markets-on-course-for-major-surplus-this-decade
  4. In WWII, both sides experimented with using bomb-laden dogs to blow up enemy tanks.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
  5. In the Ukraine War, ground drones have proven far less effective than flying drones.
    https://www.rferl.org/a/ground-drones-war-russia-invasion-ukraine/32911118.html
  6. The U.S. Army is experimenting with battlefield applications of augmented reality goggles, but the devices aren’t close to being approved for common use.
    https://www.gizchina.com/2023/09/14/us-army-orders-more-microsoft-ar-glasses-as-new-version-works-well/
  7. ‘In One Brutal Tank Battle Outside Avdiivka, The Russians Lost As Many As 21 Tanks. The Ukrainians Lost Two.’
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/12/28/in-one-massive-tank-battle-outside-avdiivka-the-russians-lost-as-many-as-21-tanks-the-ukrainians-lost-two/