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

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

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

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.

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.

“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/

Interesting articles, June 2024

Israel’s army staged a daring rescue of four of their citizens who had been held hostage in Gaza since October 7. During the sudden and ferocious attack, one Israeli commando and over 200 Gazans (mostly civilians) were killed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-hostage-rescue-new-details-gaza-operation-nuseirat-rcna156273

The expensive military pier the U.S. built to supply Gaza with aid has been rebuilt.
https://www.twz.com/sea/gaza-pier-repaired-aid-to-flow-soon

Israel’s high court has ruled that military draft exemptions for Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men must end.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-politics-ruling-military-service-orthodox-e2a8359bcea1bd833f71845ee6af780d

A Ukrainian drone attack deep inside of Russia destroyed one of the latter’s prized Su-57 stealth fighters on the ground.
https://www.twz.com/air/su-57-felon-targeted-in-ukraine-strike-seen-in-new-higher-resolution-satellite-images

Russian defense missiles intercepted U.S.-made missiles that Ukraine fired at Crimea. The midair explosions from the two groups of missiles colliding hurled shrapnel down onto a packed beach, killing five Russian civilians and injuring more.

The Ukrainians almost certainly weren’t targeting civilians, and their missiles were probably headed for Russian warships or bases. Nevertheless, Russia has sworn revenge.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pppr719rlo

‘One year after Wagner uprising, Putin more powerful than ever’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-wagner-uprising-putin-more-063929686.html

Russia now has three captured M1 Abrams tanks. Each one is damaged in a different way. I bet their working parts could be combined to make one working tank.
https://youtu.be/yBhYcMb8Tng?si=kYf17lu3a_eyjV2e

The carousel autoloader found in Soviet and Russian tanks isn’t necessarily a fatal design flaw. If the Russians copied the gunpowder from the advanced ammunition they found in the captured German Leopard 2 tank, then their own tanks would become much less likely to blow up thanks to their own ammo cooking off.
https://youtu.be/6A4CqxGMBQw?si=DUc_wyPlbWI7QgHv

This is from 2008. Six years later, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7583810.stm

According to a new agreement, North Korea will supply Russia with weapons and guest workers in exchange for Russian technology and hard currency.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-north-korea-putin-kim-agreement-7221909867dbb999de8adb23604e3c79

The third variant of the British WWII Sten sub machine gun was one of the simplest and cheapest guns ever made. It’s interesting to see how those factors hurt its reliability and longevity, even compared to other Sten variants. The Mark III was truly a throwaway weapon.
https://youtu.be/W0qlOOE8G_k?si=LNbw1XOwYr5urr5A

The man who invented a small add-on device that turns any Glock into a full-auto weapon is a mechanical genius from Venezuela. He created the first device in the late 1980s while he was still a teenager and working at a gun shop. Only in recent years has the device started becoming common among criminals.
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/feel-terrified-inventor-glock-switch-090429902.html

A photo of the top secret U.S. “Manta Ray” submarine was captured by a private satellite.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13567175/Top-secret-aquatic-drone-weapon-Manta-Ray-spotted-Google-Maps.html

‘Russia develops its first chipmaking tool — outdated by 30 years from day one’
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/russia-develops-its-first-lithography-tool-outdated-by-30-years-from-day-one

Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company, with a market cap over $3.4 trillion. It was worth $418 billion just two years ago.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyrr40x0z2mo

Within days, Nvidia lost 16% of its stock value, resulting in a market cap loss of $500 billion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/business/dealbook/nvidia-stock-wipeout.html

Without using the term “singularity,” math whiz and high-ranking OpenAI staff member “Leopold Aschenbrenner” published a paper claiming that milestone is upon us. Radical changes thanks to AI will happen in just the next ten years.
https://situational-awareness.ai/

Here’s a counterpoint to his claims from Sabine Hossenfelder.
https://youtu.be/xm1B3Y3ypoE?si=FAZ30WLfCjA9i74T

Between 2026 and 2032, LLMs will gobble up all the written content humans have ever created.
https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-training-data-running-out-9676145bac0d30ecce1513c20561b87d

Apple has made a major deal with OpenAI to install ChatGPT on its iPhones.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nn5mejl89o

An internet writer describes how LLMs destroyed his workplace in 18 months and totally changed his own daily roles.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240612-the-people-making-ai-sound-more-human

Ah, memories…

‘In February, AI-based forgery reached a watershed moment–the OpenAI research company announced GPT-2, an AI generator of text so seemingly authentic that they deemed it too dangerous to release publicly for fears of misuse. Sample paragraphs generated by GPT-2 are a chilling facsimile of human- authored text. Unfortunately, even more powerful tools are sure to follow and be deployed by rogue actors.’
https://hbr.org/2019/03/how-will-we-prevent-ai-based-forgery

After quitting OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever has set up a company called “Safe Superintelligence Inc.,” whose goal it is to safely create an AI.
https://apnews.com/article/openai-sutskever-altman-artificial-intelligence-safety-c6b48a3675fb3fb459859dece2b45499

According to the 1999 movie The Thirteenth Floor, by June 21, 2024 we were supposed to have had AGI, full immersion virtual reality like The Matrix, lifelike digital worlds, and really cool-looking glass skyscrapers in L.A.
https://youtu.be/UCsR9iPvX0I?si=iLM31LuQMMcC5Q1u

This prediction was accurate:

“I think Joe Biden will run again in 2024 and I think he will run against someone with the last name ‘Trump.’ I do not know whether that is Trump or Trump Jr…”

Saagar said that in March 2021, when it was unclear whether Trump had a political future and whether Biden would want to stand for reelection.
https://youtu.be/grceJbuPUXI?si=JMZFlNQ-dRCHVMvc&t=5851

Engineering and logistics impose limits on how big wind turbines can get; physics does not.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-theoretical-maximum-size-of-a-wind-turbine

Corrugated steel sheets are a construction wondermaterial.
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2021/12/18/the-rise-and-rise-of-corrugated-iron

There’s a reason why the classic Spielberg movies have slightly “off” colors that make them look old fashioned in a subtle way: the film stock used back then had a limited color range. It would be interesting to use AI to reverse those distortions and create rereleases of those films that are true to the actual colors on set.
https://youtu.be/kQmIPWK8aXc?si=7L2nPuUZ9aaVU_EM

A lack of passive safety features doomed the Fukushima nuclear reactors.
https://youtu.be/YBNFvZ6Vr2U?si=sCm_zthCZHgm12g_

Some forest fires are actually caused by bacteria. Just like a human-made compost pile, underground peat deposits can get extremely hot due to the metabolisms of bacteria that inhabit and eat them. Furthermore, sudden jumps in surface temperature caused by heat waves can cause the bacteria to raise the peat temperature by even more. The result is spontaneous combustion.
https://theconversation.com/zombie-fires-in-the-arctic-smoulder-underground-and-refuse-to-die-whats-causing-them-221945

‘Breeders also value posture, hoof solidity, docility, maternal ability and beauty. Those eager to level up their livestock’s genetics pay around $250,000 for an opportunity to collect Viatina-19’s egg cells.

“She is the closest to perfection that has been attained so far,” Martins said. “She’s a complete cow, has all the characteristics that all the proprietors are looking for.”’
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-cow-cattle-breeding-zebu-nelore-amazon-deforestation-9d58844f3e695ce878da838c10280f0d

For the first time, more aquatic animals were farmed than were caught wild through fishing.
‘Experts say the milestone in human history had been expected, as the hauls from fisheries have largely stagnated over the last three decades — largely because of limits in nature.’
https://apnews.com/article/fisheries-aquaculture-fao-united-nations-84a92a43387a4bea79dcdb278da14a59

And there are other ways the Drake Equation could be tweaked to result in humans being the only intelligent species in the galaxy. ‘According to Stern and Gerya, it’s likely quite rare for planets to have both continents and oceans along with long-term plate tectonics, and this possibility needs to be factored into the Drake Equation.’
https://gizmodo.com/drake-equation-update-fermi-paradox-intelligent-life-1851503974

Here are three, technically feasible megaweapons that aliens could use to destroy Earth from light years away.
https://youtu.be/tybKnGZRwcU?si=CFzXWpxbCRDdRkfP

The fourth test of the SpaceX “Starship” rocket was fully successful.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/science/spacex-starship-launch-fourth-test-flight-scn/index.html

Elon Musk has revolutionized the space rocket industry.
https://youtu.be/effFp6AnCWo?si=Dy_tsekGVR-vQAzw

Boeing’s troubled “Starliner” space capsule has had serious problems during its maiden crewed flight. The two passengers could be stranded on the ISS for weeks until it is known whether the capsule can safely bring them back home.
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/astronauts-stranded-in-space-due-to-multiple-issues-with-boeings-starliner-and-the-window-for-a-return-flight-is-closing

An unmanned Chinese probe returned rocks to Earth from the dark side of the Moon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04447venm1o

The 1997 “Phoenix Lights” incident was one of the most credible mass UFO sightings ever.
https://youtu.be/GdAz93WL5To?si=Hl1di4ApIPBX5CTy

The FDA has rejected the first MDMA drug for treating PTSD because the medical studies supporting the drug were flawed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-panel-rejects-first-mdma-treatment-deep-concerns-flawed-trials-rcna155325

Lung cancer, once a death sentence, has become more treatable thanks to new drugs.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/lung-cancer-treatment-deaths-5cfeb6fd

Researchers have discovered a gene that causes obesity in some people. Genetic engineering and new medical interventions will end the global obesity problem in the future. The average person will be taller, thinner, stronger, and healthier.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/20/health/obesity-genetic-wellness/index.html

A woman endured eight years of excruciating leg surgeries to increase her height from 5′ 5″ to 6′.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/28700728/model-frankenstein-surgery-shows-off-results/

Musings 6

It won’t be long before you’ll be able to feed a computer a script or the text of a book, and it will be able to produce a professional-quality audiobook or film. It would be so fascinating to finally see the great, unmade movies (like Stanley Kubrick’s epic biopic about Napoleon) or to see movies that stayed true to their written source material so they could be compared with what was actually made. Jurassic Park comes to mind as a famous movie that diverged greatly from the book. Imagine the same, CGI-generated characters in the same island setting, with the same style of soundtrack and cinematography, but with different dialog and different plot points than happened in the film we all know.

Will RV living and houseboat living be the norm in the future? Think about it: If humans won’t have jobs in the future, then they won’t have enough money to buy houses, making RVs and boats the only affordable option. Even a bus-sized recreational vehicle is only 1/3 the price of a typical American home, and a houseboat with the same internal volume is 2/3 the price. Also, without jobs, humans would have much less of a reason to stay tethered to one location and could indulge in their wanderlust. Additionally, thanks to VR being more advanced, people won’t need large TVs or computer monitors, easing the need for spacious living rooms.

Humans talking about the need to control AGI to ensure our dominance is not threatened are like Homo erectus grunting to each other about the need to keep Homo sapiens down somehow. It’s understandable for a dominant species to want to preserve its status, but that doesn’t mean such a thing is in the best interests of civilization.

It’s still unclear whether LLMs will ever achieve general intelligence. A lot of hope rests on “scaffolded systems,” which are LLMs that also have more specialized computer apps at their disposal, which they’re smart enough to know to use to solve problems that the LLM alone can’t.

Part of me thinks of this as “cheating,” and that a scaffolded system would still not be a true general intelligence since, as we assigned it newer and broader tasks, it would inevitably run into new types of problems it couldn’t solve but humans could because it lacked the tool for doing so.

But another part of me thinks the human brain might also be nothing more than a scaffolded system that is comprised of many small, specialized minds that are only narrowly intelligent individually, but give rise to general intelligence as an emergent property when working together (Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind” describes this). Moreover, we consider the average human to be generally intelligent even though there are clearly mental tasks that they can’t do. For example, through no amount of study and hard work could an average IQ person get a Ph.D in particle physics from MIT, meaning they could never solve cutting-edge problems in that field. (This has disturbing implications for how we’ve defined “general intelligence” and implies that humans actually just inhabit one point in a “space of all possible intelligent minds.”) So if an entity’s fundamental inability to handle specific cognitive tasks proves they lack general intelligence, then humans are in trouble. We shouldn’t hold future scaffolded systems to intelligence standards we don’t hold ourselves to.

Moreover, it’s clear that humans spend many of their waking hours on “mental autopilot,” where they aren’t exercising “general intelligence” to navigate the world. An artificial mind that spent most of its time operating in simpler modes guided by narrow AI modules could therefore be just as productive and as “smart” as humans in performing routine and well-defined tasks.

Interesting articles, May 2024

Russia is slowly moving forward at multiple parts of the frontline.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-fortifications-8a72981dfdb755de6f8011b13f4d062e
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-takes-100-square-miles-140010022.html

Ukraine claims it foiled a Russian attempt to assassinate President Zelensky.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68968256

Russia’s odd “turtle tanks” are artefacts of the peculiar nature of the Ukraine War and don’t herald a permanent type of new vehicle.
https://youtu.be/PCrAve7ynhw?si=IQigNgfs1_rEFXVt

Russia has now lost 3,000 tanks and 1,300 lighter armored combat vehicles in the Ukraine War. Furthermore, thousands of their artillery pieces, trucks, and armored vehicles not meant for direct combat have also been lost.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html

In spite of these heavy losses, Russia has so many weapons left over from the Soviet era that it won’t run out of them, even at current loss rates, for two or three years. As the shortages near the critical threshold, I predict Russia will make up for it by starting to import old Soviet and Soviet-compatible weapons from friendly countries like North Korea.
https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/military-balance/2024/02/equipment-losses-in-russias-war-on-ukraine-mount/

The Moscow Victory Day Parade only had one Russian tank–a WWII-era T-34.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-again-had-only-one-173044546.html

The Russian public’s support for the Ukraine War remains steady. Predictions that the economy would collapse and Putin would be overthrown aren’t close to coming true.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russians-coming-terms-putin-war-000029755.html

‘Several Russian financial, economic, and military indicators suggest that Russia is preparing for a large-scale conventional conflict with NATO, not imminently but likely on a shorter timeline than what some Western analysts have initially posited.’
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-20-2024

Glimpse the future: A Russian kamikaze drone attacks a Ukrainian drone ship in the Black Sea.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/russian-fpv-drone-seen-attacking-ukrainian-uncrewed-surface-vessel-for-the-first-time

‘ATACMS Obliterates Russian Air Defense System As It Desperately Tries To Defend Itself’
https://www.twz.com/news-features/atacms-obliterates-russian-air-defense-system-as-it-desperately-tries-to-defend-itself

Russian troops can consistently jam U.S.-made Excalibur guided howitzer shells.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-gave-sending-ukraine-excalibur-130324037.html

Ukraine destroyed two, expensive MiG-31 interceptors on the ground at a Russian air base in Crimea.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/mig-31-foxhounds-confirmed-destroyed-in-new-imagery-of-belbek-air-base

Missiles and artillery fired from within Russia have been hitting targets inside of Ukraine. The Ukrainians have Western-made weapons with the ranges to destroy those Russian sites, but donors like the U.S. refuse to let Ukraine use them against Russian territory for fear it will lead to an expansion of the fighting. There’s a growing consensus among Western leaders that they should ease the rule and let Ukraine use their weapons to attack Russian soil. Putin is warning that this would lead to “serious consequences.” 

Is it another bluff? Maybe. Regardless, we’re entering unknown territory. 
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/05/28/putin-says-western-weapons-striking-russia-would-have-serious-consequences-a85248

‘Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons’
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/biden-ukraine-weapons-strike-russia-00160731

In spite of the colossal damage it has suffered, Hamas still exists and its troops are killing Israeli troops. Eradicating the organization may be impossible.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-end-insurgency-0fcb4e20821ba8c0e49edf6571486d3b

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court requested arrest warrants for several leaders in Hamas and Israel’s government, including Benjamin Netanyahu, for their roles orchestrating violence against civilians. Both sides are outraged at being equated with the criminals on the other side.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/politics/biden-denounce-icc-warrant-israel-hamas/index.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gazans-hamas-see-false-equivalence-icc-charges-2024-05-20/

President Biden has said he will withhold some military aid to Israel if it sends ground troops into the last Palestinian-controlled city in Gaza, Rafah. There are widely held fears that such an operation would kill large numbers of civilians.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/08/politics/joe-biden-interview-cnntv/index.html

An Israeli bombing raid killed 45 people and severely burned many more in a crowded Gaza refugee camp, drawing international condemnation. The bomb was made in the U.S.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/29/rafah-strike-us-munition-israel/

The $300 million pier the U.S. military built in Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid broke apart during a storm. It only operated for a few weeks.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/politics/us-gaza-pier-broken-apart/index.html

Israeli troops seized control of Gaza’s land border with Egypt. They claimed it was necessary to shut down secret tunnels that were being used to smuggle things across the border.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1994g22ve9o

Russia has successfully convinced Niger to kick out American and French troops and to lets its own troops take over their bases.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/10/pentagon-orders-all-us-combat-troops-to-withdraw-from-niger-00157329

A group of American civilians were arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for supporting a failed coup.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13437171/congo-malanga-drc-coup-cia-utah-tiktok.html

Iran’s President and foreign minister died in an accidental helicopter crash. It will have no real effect on their government in the long run.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-president-ebrahim-raisi-426c6f4ae2dd1f0801c73875bb696f48

Right after Taiwan swore in a pro-independence candidate that Beijing hates, the Chinese Navy and Air Force staged massive military drills that encircled the island.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/asia/china-military-drills-taiwan-punishment-intl-hnk/index.html

Peter Zeihan’s dour 2019 predictions about the future of China’s economy have proven accurate:

“So I would argue that fixing this [by] deflating the bubble, I think that I think that ship sailed 20 years ago, and so the question becomes ‘is this triggering going to be internal or external?’ Let’s start with internal. Demographically, we are going to be seeing a contraction in Chinese domestic economic activity simply because of demographics within the next five years.”

An economic “contraction” doesn’t necessarily mean negative growth; it can mean a sharp decrease in the positive growth rate. For example, if my personal income rises by $5,000 per year, but then one year the growth rate shifts down to only a $1,000 increase each year, in economic terms I’ve experienced a contraction. China’s GDP growth rate and domestic spending growth rate are both way down from where they were in 2019 when Zeihan made his prediction.   

The “Madsen M50” was simple as a WWII submachine gun, but better, and it was made by Denmark of all countries.
https://youtu.be/95YPVQR_7yw?si=rkwiFMCd_6rUx_Ks

Anglo-American troops raped thousands of women during the liberation of France. Tens of thousands of French civilians were also accidentally killed by Allied bombers and artillery strikes during the War.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/taboo-french-women-speak-rapes-143322935.html

Several major U.S. military laser weapon programs have been recently canceled.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-military-laser-weapon-programs-are-facing-a-reality-check

The U.S. Navy has failed to learn from its past procurement mistakes.
https://www.twz.com/sea/navys-new-constellation-class-frigate-is-a-mess

‘Report: 14,000+ Google Search Ranking Features Leaked’
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-data-leak-37462.html

‘Nvidia’s profits soar as AI boom shows no sign of slowing down’
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/5/23/chk-nvidias-profits-soar-as-ai-boom-shows-no-sign-of-slowing-down

OpenAI unveiled it’s latest and most advanced LLM, “GPT-4o”. At the demo, the machine was able to carry on a conversation with a human presenter in a totally natural and intelligent manner.
https://www.youtube.com/live/DQacCB9tDaw?si=GPXXv9mHoh5NcA1d

Actress Scarlett Johansson claimed OpenAI had cloned her voice without her permission to synthesize GPT-4o’s voice, and quickly sued the company. Though they say they didn’t break the law and used a different human to create the voice, OpenAI nonetheless disabled the voice feature indefinitely. Scarlett Johansson famously voiced “Samantha,” a sentient AI character in the 2013 movie Her.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/entertainment/openai-accused-mimicking-scarlett-johansson-tech-company-pauses-chatgpt-voice

GPT-4 has passed the five-minute Turing Test.
“GPT-4 was judged to be a human 54% of the time, outperforming ELIZA (22%) but lagging behind actual humans (67%).”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007

ChatGPT is one of the fastest-growing digital services in history. In less than a year, it accumulated 100 million weekly users.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23948386/chatgpt-active-user-count-openai-developer-conference

That said, only 2% of British people use LLMs on a daily basis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

A large number of AI safety staff quit OpenAI nearly at once. While NDA’s prevent most of them from talking about it, people in the know say they were unhappy with Sam Altman’s dishonesty and lack of commitment to their mission.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASzyQrpGQsj7Moijk/openai-exodus

The founder of the dating app Bumble predicts that personal AIs will match humans with romantic partners in the future.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13407769/Bumble-founder-future-dating-AI-interview.html

Someday, machines will be better than humans at everything, including creating entertainment products.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68897555

‘AI might wreak havoc on traditional studio moviemaking, with its massive budgets and complex technical requirements. But in the process, it is likely to make high-quality filmmaking much less expensive and logistically arduous, empowering smaller, nimbler, and less conventional productions made by outsiders with few or no connections to the studio system.’
https://reason.com/2024/05/25/ai-is-coming-for-hollywoods-jobs/

An important lesson from the last few years is that job automation will sweep across the workforce in unexpected ways. For example, no one believed jobs involving artistry would be automated before jobs involving simple physical labor, like flipping burgers. It might prove more profitable for companies to replace their leaders with AIs sooner than they replace their assembly line workers.

Regardless, keep in mind there’s probably no limit to how far job automation can go. In 50 years, if you’re part of that lucky 1% of the adult human population that still has a “real job,” don’t gloat at the unemployed masses because it will only be a few years before your position is also taken by a machine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/technology/ai-chief-executives.html

A roundup of famous American economists’ future predictions from 1980 is full of huge misses.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/05/economists-predictions-from-1980.html

Here’s a gem from 2010: “‘CIBC’s former chief economist Jeff Rubin has touted peak oil for years, and his price estimates have been dead on. Lately, he predicted $225 oil by 2012 and rising.’
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-rudin-i-know-a-place-where-demand-for-oil-grows-even-faster-than-china-2010-2

Here’s a very fascinating case study of a young Mexican man who was born deaf and whose parents never taught him sign language. As a result, he never developed any kind of linguistic ability and had a totally different way of thinking (he lacked “symbolic thinking” and couldn’t conceive of attaching names to objects) and dealing with people. After illegally immigrating to the U.S., a linguist stumbled upon him and slowly taught him sign language.

‘As part of her discussion of the human rights of the deaf, Schaller makes the argument, familiar also from Benjamin Whorf (and also brought up in the commentary on Henrich’s WEIRD article) that language diversity itself is an insight into human cognitive diversity: ‘Every language is an outcome of how the human brain works. We don’t know how much we can do with our one brain, even, and each language has used the brain in a slightly different way.’ However, there’s an even deeper and more profound cognitive diversity in her discussion of Ildefonso: the possibility of language-less human thought, something that theorists like Merlin Donald have attempted to discuss.’
https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/

Tesla has abandoned its effort to make cars through a “gigacasting” process because it was too expensive and they weren’t able to master it.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-retreats-next-generation-gigacasting-manufacturing-process-2024-05-01

Something that makes no sense in Star Wars and many other space movies is the inability of spacecraft to quickly point in any direction to bring their guns to bear on the enemy. Usually there’s a good guy fighter plane being pursued by a bad guy fighter plane, and the good guy yells out “I can’t see him because he’s behind me! Help!”

In reality, since there’s no air resistance to deal with in space, the good guy could instantly flip his fighter plane around and shoot the bad guy. You see two examples of that in the movie “Oblivion.”
https://youtu.be/zRvXcyznOsQ?si=86sSlxUQHrvnw4Nc

Blue Origins launched six tourists into space.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/19/world/blue-origin-rocket-ns-25-mission-scn/index.html

In 1999, the Space Shuttle Columbia nearly suffered a catastrophe that would have forced it to attempt an emergency landing back on Earth right after it lifted off.
https://youtu.be/qiJMdfj9NmI?si=g-PHc0zHoyTXtF0M

One cubic millimeter of human brain tissue contains 1,400 terabytes of data about the neurons, supporting cells, and connections between them.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/15/world/human-brain-map-harvard-google-scn/index.html

‘AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules’
https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-deepmind-isomorphic-alphafold-3-ai-model/

‘Overall, this is very impressive performance, although I should note that it is not up to the various headlines of “AlphaFold 3 Predicts All The Molecules of Life!” and so on. In almost every area it’s a significant improvement over anything that we’ve had before – including previous AlphaFold versions – and in some of them (protein-antibody and protein-RNA) it appears to be (for now!) the only game in town, even though it’s not an infallible oracle in those cases by any means.’
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alphafold-3-debuts

Most of the new drugs “discovered by AI” actually weren’t, and they’re not likelier to work than drugs discovered by humans.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-drugs-so-far

‘These results strongly suggest Neanderthal-derived DNA is playing a significant role in autism susceptibility across major populations in the United States.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02593-7

Alzheimer’s is partly genetic. Though this bit of information helps, the amount we still DON’T know about the disease or how to treat it is shocking.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/health/alzheimers-apoe4-gene-risk/index.html

Even more evidence has arisen that Ozempic treats serious health problems aside from obesity.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/24/health/ozempic-benefits-diabetic-kidney-disease/index.html

1/8 of American adults have taken the weight-loss drug Ozempic or one that is similar.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/health/ozempic-glp-1-survey-kff/index.html

1/3 of American adults are obese.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-rates-worldwide/

The recipient of a genetically engineered pig kidney died after two months. It’s still unclear whether his death was due to a problem with the organ.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/12/pig-kidney-xenotransplant-patient-dies-two-months-later

There are many types of mental disability and they have many different causes. Among them are mutations to single genes. A new gene that causes it, RNU4-2, has just been discovered. 0.41% of mentally disabled people have the condition due to it. 

Better knowledge of the human genome and cheaper prenatal DNA screening will let us reduce the population prevalence of mental and physical disorders in the future. 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38645094/

Sony has created a tiny robot that can do precise microsurgeries. In this video, it makes an incision in a corn kernel and then stitches it up.
https://youtu.be/bgRAkBNFMHk?si=LmjjLDkwgHp4zbgp

A future where nothing breaks

My last blog entry, “What my broken down car taught me about the future,” has compelled me to write a new essay that shows how some of its insights will apply more generally in the future, and not just to cars and related industries. Due to several factors, manufactured objects will generally last much longer in the future, and sudden catastrophic failures of things will be much less common.

Things will be made of better materials

Better computers that can more accurately mimic the atomic forces and chemical reactions will be able to run simulations that lead to the discovery of new types of alloys and molecules. Those same computers will, perhaps with the aid of industrial and lab robots, also find the best ways to synthesize the new materials. Finally, the use of machine labor at every step of this process will basically eliminate labor costs, allowing the materials to be produced at lower cost than they could be with human workers today.

This means in the future we will have new kinds of metal alloys, polymers and crystals that have physical properties superior to whatever counterparts we have today. Think of a bulletproof vest that is more flexible and only half as heavy as Kevlar, or a wrench that is lighter than a common steel wrench but just as tough. And since machines will make all of these materials at lower cost, more people will be able to afford them and they will be more common. For example, if carbon fiber were cheaper, more cars would incorporate them into their bodies, lowering their weight.

Things will be designed better

In my review of the movie Starship Troopers, I discussed why the fearsome assault rifle used by the human soldiers was flawed, and why it would never come into existence in the future:

It wouldn’t make sense for people in the future to abandon the principles of good engineering by making highly inefficient guns like the Morita. To the contrary, future guns will, just like every other type of manufactured object, be even more highly optimized for their functions thanks to AI: Just create a computer simulation that exactly duplicates conditions in the real world (e.g. – gravity, all laws of physics, air pressure, physical characteristics of all metals and plastics the device could be built from), let “AI engineers” experiment with all possible designs, and then see which ones come out on top after a few billion simulation cycles. I strongly suspect the winners will be very similar to guns we’ve already built, but sleeker and lighter thanks to the deletion of unnecessary mass and to the use of materials with better strength-to-weight ratios.

That same computer simulation process will be used to design all other types of manufactured objects in the future. Again, as computation gets cheaper, companies will be able to run simulations to find the optimal designs for every kind of object. Someday, even cheap, common objects like doorknobs will be the products of billions of computer simulations that stumbled on the optimal size and arrangement of components through trial-and-error experiments with slightly different combinations.

As a result, manufactured objects will be more efficient and robust than today, but most won’t look different enough for humans to tell they’re different from today’s versions of them. The difference will probably be more apparent in complex machines like cars.

Things will be made better

Even if a piece of technology is well-designed and made of quality materials, it can still be unreliable if its parts are not manufactured properly or if its parts aren’t put together the right way. Human factory workers cause these problems because of poor training, tiredness, intoxication, incompetence, or deliberate sabotage. It goes without saying that advanced robots will greatly improve the quality and consistency of factory-produced goods, as they will never be affected by fatigue or bad moods, and will follow their instructions with perfect accuracy and precision. As factories become more automated, defective products will become less common.

Things will be used more carefully

As I noted in the essay about cars, most cars have their lifespans cut prematurely short by the carelessness of their owners. Gunning the engine will wear it out sooner, speeding over potholes will destroy shocks, and generally reckless driving will raise the odds of a car accident that is so bad it totals the vehicle.

Every type of manufactured object has engineering limits beyond which it can’t be pushed without risking damage. Humans lack the patience and intelligence to learn what those limits are for every piece of technology we interact with, and we lack the fine senses to always stay below those limits. While trying to unscrew the rusted bolt, you WILL put so much torque on the wrench that you snap it.

On the other hand, machines will have the cognitive capacity to quickly learn what the engineering limits are for every object they encounter, the patience to use them without exceeding those limits, and the sensors (tactile, visual, auditory) to watch what it’s doing and how much force it is applying. No autonomous car will ever overstress its own engine or drive over a pothole so fast it breaks part of the suspension system, and no robot mechanic will ever snap its own wrench trying to unscrew a stuck bolt. As a consequence, the longevity of every type of manufactured object will increase, in some cases astonishingly. The average lifespan of a passenger vehicle could exceed 30 years, and a simple object like a knife might stay in use for 100 years (until it had been worn down by so many resharpenings that it was too thin to withstand any more use).

Things will be maintained better

Even if you have a piece of quality technology and use it carefully, it will still need periodic maintenance. A Mercedes-Benz 300 D, perhaps the most reliable car ever made, still needs oil changes. Your refrigerator’s coils need to be brushed clean of debris periodically. You hand tools need to be checked for rust and hairline cracks and sprayed down with some kind of moisture protectant. All of your smoke alarms must be tested for function once a month. It goes on and on. If you own even a small number of possessions, it’s amazing to learn how many different tasks you SHOULD be undertaking regularly to keep them maintained.

Needless to say, few people take proper care of their things. Usually they didn’t read the user manual, memorize the section on maintenance, set automatic digital reminders to themselves to perform the tasks, and then rigidly follow them for the rest of their lives. So sue them, they’re only humans with imperfect memories, limited personal time, and limited self-discipline.

Once advanced robots are ubiquitous, these human-specific factors will disappear. Your robot butler actually WOULD know what kind of upkeep every item in your house needed, and it would do it according to schedule. Operating around the clock (they won’t need to sleep and could plug themselves into wall outlets with extension cords for indefinite duration power), a robot butler could do an enormous amount of maintenance work for you and could devote itself to truly minuscule tasks like hunting down and finding tiny problems you never would have known existed.

I’m reminded of the time I noticed a strange sound in the bathroom of my house that I seldom use. It was the toilet, and the water was flowing through it continuously, making a loud trickling sound. After removing the lid, I immediately saw the problem existed because the flush lever–which was made of plastic–had snapped in half, causing the flapper to jam in the open position.

The inside of a toilet tank

Upon close inspection I noticed something else wrong: The two, metal bolts that held the toilet tank to the bowl were so badly rusted that they had practically disintegrated! In fact, after merely scraping the left bolt with my fingernail, it fell apart into an inky cloud of rust that spread through the water. It was a small miracle that the heavy tank hadn’t slid off already and fallen to the floor (this would have flooded the house if it had happened when I wasn’t home).

I went to the store, bought new bolts, a new flapper, and a new flush lever, and installed them. The toilet works like new, and its two halves are tightly joined again as they should be. Inspecting the inside of your toilet tank is another one of those things every homeowner should probably be doing once every X years, but of course no one does, and as a result, some number of tragic people suffer the disaster I described above. However, thanks to house robots, it will stop. And of course the superior maintenance practices will not be confined to households. All kinds of businesses and buildings will have robots that do the same work for them.

People also commonly skip maintenance because they lack the money for it. As I wrote in my essay about cars and the car industry, this will be less of an issue in the future thanks to robots doing work for free. Without human labor to pay for, the costs of all types of services, including maintenance, will drop.

Problems will be found earlier

A beneficial side effect of more frequent preventative maintenance will be the discovery of problems earlier. Putting aside jokes about scams, consider how common it is for mechanics to find unrelated problems in cars while doing an oil change or some other routine procedure. Because components often gracefully, rather than abruptly, fail, machines like cars can keep working even with a part that is wearing out (e.g. – cracked, leaking, bent). The machine’s performance might not even seem different to the operator. That’s why the only way to find many problems with manufactured objects is to go out of your way to look for them, even if nothing seems wrong. 

Again, once robots are ubiquitous and put in charge of common tasks, they’ll do things humans lack the time, discipline, and training to do, like inspecting objects for faults. Once they are doing that, problems will be found and fixed earlier, making sudden, catastrophic failures like your car breaking down on the highway at night less frequent.  

Repairs will be better

Just because you find a problem before it becomes critical and fix it doesn’t mean the story is over. Some catastrophic failures of machines happen because they are not repaired properly. As robots take over such tasks, the quality and consistency of this type of work will improve, meaning a repair job will be likelier to solve a problem for good. 

Machines will be better-informed consumers, which will drive out bad products

My previous blog essay was about my quest to find a replacement for my old car, which had broken down. It was a 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt, which I got new that same year as a birthday present. Though I’d come to love that car over the next 19 years, I had to admit it wasn’t the best in its class. I drove it off the lot without realizing the air conditioner was broken and had to return a few days later to have it fixed. After a handful of years, one of the wheel bearings failed, which was unusually early and thankfully covered by the warranty. My Cobalt was recalled several times to fix different problems, most notoriously the ignition switch, which could twist itself to the “Off” position while the car was driving, suddenly locking the steering wheel in one position and leaving the driver unaware of why it happened (this caused 13 deaths and cost GM a $900 million class-action lawsuit, plus much more to fix millions of defective cars). Whenever I rented cars during vacations, I almost always found their steering and suspension systems to be more crisp and comfortable than my Cobalt, which felt “mushy” by comparison. 

The 2005 Honda Civic was a direct competitor to my Cobalt, and was simply superior: the Civic had better fuel economy, a higher safety rating, better build quality, and the same amount of internal space. Since the Civics broke down less and used less gas, they were cheaper to own than Cobalts. When new, the Civic was actually cheaper, but today, used 2005 Civics actually sell for MORE than 2005 Cobalts! With all that in mind, why were any Chevy Cobalts bought at all? I think the answers include brand loyalty, the bogus economics of trading an old car for a new one, aesthetics (some people liked the look of the Cobalt more), but most of all, a failure to do adequate research. Figuring out what your actual vehicle needs are and then finding the best model of that type of vehicle requires a lot of thought and time spent reading and taking notes. Most people lack the time and skills for that, and consequently buy suboptimal cars. 

Once again, intelligent machines won’t be bound by these limitations. Emotional factors like brand loyalty, aesthetics and the personal qualities of the salesperson will be irrelevant, and they will be unswayed by trade-in deals offered by dealerships. They will have sharp, honest grasps of what their transportation needs are, and will be able to do enormous amounts of product research in a second. Hyper-informed consumers like that will swiftly drive inferior products and firms out of the market, meaning cars like my beloved Chevy would go unsold and GM would either shape up fast or go bankrupt fast (which they actually did a few years after I got my car). 

If companies only manufactured high-quality, optimized products, then the odds of anything breaking down would decrease yet more. Everything would be well-made.

In conclusion, thanks to all of these factors, sudden failures of manufactured objects of all kinds will become rarer, and their useful lives will be much longer in the future than now. This will mean less waste, fewer accidents, and fewer crises happening at the worst possible time.

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