Month: April 2022

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Interesting articles, April 2022

In a major strategic defeat, Russia failed to conquer Kiev, Ukraine’s capitol, and withdrew the army it sent there for that task. Those forces have been sent to join an offensive in Ukraine’s rural eastern region, inaugurating a new phase of the war. Russian and Ukrainian military and economic losses from the conflict sharply rose this month, though both still have enough reserves to keep fighting for the foreseeable future. The amount of weapons, money, and battlefield intelligence the West is giving to Ukraine also grew, inflaming Putin and raising the possibility that he will expand the War.

The German submarine U-2365 was scuttled in 1945, on the day the country surrendered to the Allies. Eleven years later, it was raised to the surface, repaired, and put into the service of the West German navy. Ten years later, it sank again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_Hai_(S_170)

Here’s an interesting article about WWII Liberty Ships and how they represented a revolution in shipbuilding techniques.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/lessons-from-shipbuilding-productivity?s=r

Someone restored a WWII-era M1 Carbine that was equipped with a primitive night vision scope. The visioning system consists of a large flashlight that only emits infrared light, aligned with an aiming scope that transforms infrared light into visible light. Americans used the weapon to snipe Axis troops in the dark.
https://youtu.be/AAhe4pk2Pn8

British WWII tanks had a bad reputation. This internal wartime analysis comparing the country’s Centaur and Cromwell tanks to the U.S. Sherman gives a sense of how big the difference was.
https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/chieftain/The_Chieftains_Hatch_Dracula/

A man made a functional replica of the “Smartgun” from the movie Aliens.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2022/04/07/m56-smart-gun-replica/

Here’s a very in-depth analysis of Russia’s new rifle, the AK-12. Basically, it would have been smarter for them to have upgraded their older AK-74 rifles, or to have adopted an even more advanced rifle that they had available. The AK-12 falls in an unhappy middle ground between those two options, being less effective than an upgraded AK-74, but just as expensive as the more advanced rifle that didn’t win the competition. The video also does a great job at the end summarizing how the Kalashnikov gun company has been nimble and clearheaded until recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cJbOAVDQxQ

China delivered several HQ-22 antiaircraft systems to Serbia. They’re equivalent to Russian S-300 or U.S. Patriot missile systems.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-china-serbia-nato-682ab79c4239f14ecc1133ff5c7addc9

Here’s a good argument against keeping old, upgraded tanks in service. Basically, the tank itself is only a small fraction of the overall tank force’s expense: large amounts of manpower and money go into things like fuel, spare parts, maintenance, and training, and these are fixed costs regardless of whether the tank being supported is brand new or 50 years old. Buying a new tank only increases the overall expense by a few percent.
https://youtu.be/mUyAPQEb01Q?t=2405

Biden the Democrat will spend more on defense than Trump the Republican. In fact: ‘Once Congress approves the request — and, in all likelihood, makes it bigger — U.S. defense spending will be larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was at the height of the Vietnam War or President Reagan’s Cold War buildup.’
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-04-03/bidens-defense-budget-is-big-democrats-will-vote-to-make-it-bigger

In 1972, the book The Limits to Growth predicted several key resources would be exhausted in 50 years, leading to a global population collapse. Well, the future is now, and the book was totally wrong. This passage is important: ‘In his insightful 2021 article in Mineral Economics, German geologist Friedrich-Wilhelm Wellmer explains that when markets signal that a mineral or metal is in short supply, companies develop new more efficient ways to exploit current reserves and seek to find new resources. Consequently, the supply horizon for most metals, minerals, and fuels remains always about 20 years out.’
https://reason.com/2022/04/22/after-53-earth-days-society-still-hasnt-collapsed/

Six months ago, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad predicted “the biggest crash in world history” was coming. We’re still waiting.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kiyosaki-biggest-crash-world-history-155600637.html

‘Ireland has a blanket ban on nuclear power, as per section 18 of the Electricity Regulation Act, 1999. After this ban, the committee for nuclear regulation was made redundant and promptly dissolved. This leaves Ireland in a unique position – following a vote of the Oireachtas (parliament) to un-ban nuclear, Ireland would be one of the few countries to have no regulation on nuclear power at all…Ireland has the potential to leapfrog over an entire generation of ineffective nuclear regulators, and avoid the traps of the early adopters.’
https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/irelands-unique-promise-for-nuclear?s=r

Here are some interesting proposals for a nimbler, cheaper credentialing system than the four-year college degree model.
https://futuristspeaker.com/future-of-education/inventing-the-college-equivalency-scale/

When salt water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, and the resulting ice is pure water.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-sea-water-have-salt-in-it-but-ice-in-polar-ice-caps-have-fresh-water

Moore’s Law isn’t dead yet.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-m1-ultra-chip-moores-law/

The two founders of DeepMind, possibly the world’s most advanced AI research group, think that the first intelligent machine will probably be invented in the next 10 – 30 years.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SbAgRYo8tkHwhd9Qx/deepmind-the-podcast-excerpts-on-agi

In 1995, Bill Gates did a presentation that predicted many key technologies that are common today.
https://youtu.be/o0O0Xjpjvfc

Here’s a 2015 interview where Bill Gates predicts how the world will change by 2030.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RETFyDKcw0

Here’s a 2017 article about more recent predictions Bill Gates made. His worries about a pandemic were prescient. He also warns of mass technological unemployment.
https://futurism.com/bill-gates-seven-predictions-future

In December 2021, Bill Gates predicted:
-“the acute phase of the [COVID-10] pandemic will come to a close some time in 2022.”
-“Within the next two or three years, I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me—to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars. “
https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2021

Rudolf Diesel invented the…Diesel…engine in 1897 after working on it privately for 12 years. The prototype was impractical and enjoyed no commercial success, but it attracted a lot of attention from other engineers and businessmen who thought it had potential. After failing to work out the engine’s kinks himself and finding no buyers, Diesel got so depressed that he killed himself in 1913. The engine didn’t reach the necessary level of refinement to find commercial success until the 1920s. The Diesel engine is an interesting technology because it’s one that only started working well after tons of tweaks to incrementally improve its performance. During WWII, the Diesel engines found in some of the military vehicles really were cutting-edge technology.
https://dieselnet.com/tech/diesel_history.php

A variant of the Diesel engine is the “opposed piston Diesel engine,” and it is very fuel-efficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF5j1DvC954

Here are some predictions about how electric, autonomous vehicles will affect homes and the real estate market.
https://futuristspeaker.com/future-of-transportation/nine-ways-autonomous-transportation-will-impact-real-estate/

A large trucking company called “Embark” and a real estate investment company called “Alterra” have partnered to create an infrastructure network for autonomous trucks in the southern U.S. The core of the plan is buying large parking lots and warehouses that are both near highways and just outside of cities, where the autonomous trucks could park themselves. The trucks will drive themselves over long, simple interstate routes and then park at the nodes, where their cargoes will be transferred to human-driven trucks for last-mile delivery over shorter, but more complex routes through suburbs and cities. Embark will supply and run the autonomous trucks, while Alterra will buy and run the nodes. They plan to open the network in 2024.
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/02/28/2392950/0/en/Embark-Partners-with-Industrial-Real-Estate-Firm-Alterra-to-Open-Transfer-Points-and-Accelerate-Rollout-of-Embark-Coverage-Map.html

“Robots will bring manufacturing back to America. A robot workforce should also make human unemployment less volatile because a robot workforce can be increased or shrunk quickly and isn’t worried about nominal wage stickiness. Also, as of yet robots don’t unionize. Robot wages will make the minimum wage more salient. Working out the interactions between a monopsony buyer of labor facing a perfectly elastic supply of robots will be interesting.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/robot-rentals.html

OpenAI’s newest text-to-image synthesis AI, “DALL-E2,” can make remarkably realistic-looking pictures based on written instructions.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1049061/dalle-openai-gpt3-ai-agi-multimodal-image-generation/

‘Equity, the performing arts workers union, has launched a new campaign, “Stop AI Stealing the Show.” AI can use samples of an actor’s voice or face, to generate content including so-called “deep fakes”.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61166272

Computers can now train other computers.
https://scitechdaily.com/when-it-comes-to-ai-can-we-ditch-the-datasets-using-synthetic-data-for-training-machine-learning-models/

“I expect most written communication will eventually be done by bots. I could train my bot by letting it read all my previous email and other writings. Eventually my bot would answer most of my email directly, though it could hold some aside to ask me whether they merited a personal response.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/when-your-bot-is-better-than-you.html

Some elements of “Humanity Lost’s” fictional future are realistic:
-Humans merging with AI for the former’s benefit, followed by the latter coming to dominate.
-Far future technologies having what we would see as both “organic” and “synthetic” characteristics.
-The evolution of organic humans into an unrecognizable species.
-Small numbers of “humans” like us surviving in spite of it all, even if they are powerless compared to other intelligent life forms.
I don’t know whether the aliens are realistic, and I actually suspect there will be convergent evolution among intelligent aliens, driven by technology and a scientific pursuit of an optimal form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxVjFYi-9JU

NASA’s first “Space Launch System” (SLS) rocket is finally complete, after $50 billion in development costs and years of delays. Unfortunately, the SLS is unlikely to serve long, as Space-X rockets are much cheaper, and it’s upcoming “Starship” will be as large as an SLS.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/its-huge-expensive-and-years-late-but-the-sls-rocket-is-finally-here/

Could the Space-X Starship be weaponized?
https://austinvernon.site/blog/starshipsuperweapon.html

Despite its closeness to the Sun, Mercury is not tidally locked to it.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Mercury-not-tidally-locked-to-the-Sun-2

The notion that Australian Aboriginals lived in harmony with nature, and that ecological problems only started once Europeans arrived, is flawed. Fossil evidence shows that the Aboriginals’ habit of setting bush fires to corral wild animals and to encourage the growth of useful plants helped turn the continent into a desert. If you burn down the trees in an area, then the land can’t hold in moisture as well, creating a positive feedback loop that dries out the soil until it’s desert sand. Once the soil lacks moisture, clouds don’t form above it, and it stops raining.
http://theconversation.com/how-aboriginal-burning-changed-australias-climate-4454

A combination of natural climate change, human-caused climate change, and over hunting also killed off Australia’s megafauna. Yes, the Europeans killed off several species once they arrived in Australia, but the Aboriginals had done the same earlier.
http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/humans-climate-change-australian-megafauna-extinction-07861.html

Knocking out a single gene in maize and rice raised yields by 10% and 8%, respectively, “with no apparent trade-off in other agronomic traits.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7985

The man who made the first genetically engineered humans has been released from jail after three years.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/04/1048829/he-jiankui-prison-free-crispr-babies/

It’s actually possible to transplant teeth from one person to another, though the rejection rate is high. The procedure was relatively popular in 1700s Europe. A rich person who needed a tooth would find a poor person who was willing to sell his same tooth, and they would go to the same dentist at the same time for the transplantation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_transplant

Medical evidence is accumulating that low salt diets don’t improve cardiovascular health or reduce the odds of having heart attacks.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00369-5/fulltext

Most Americans have been exposed to harmful levels of lead in their lives, usually during childhood. Thankfully, the problem is lessening as time passes, and the people with the highest exposure levels are older.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119

Up to 65% of Africans have been infected with COVID-19 or have it now. This far exceeds the infection numbers reported by African government health agencies.
https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-world-health-organization-united-nations-matshidiso-moeti-92d8d2206341c9d15a6d6a35d62302f5

A new COVID-19 vaccine has been approved in Britain.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61104594

This article from 2020 was wrong.: ‘The COVID-19 episode will likely lead to a large, lasting baby bust. The pandemic has thrust the country into an economic recession. Economic reasoning and past evidence suggest that this will lead people to have fewer children. The decline in births could be on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births [in 2021].’
We now know that the “COVID baby bust” was about 100,000 fewer births in 2021 compared to 2020.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-children-the-coming-covid-baby-bust/
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/113283

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The extraordinary inefficiency of humans

All humans are born ignorant and helpless. A child’s parents, community, and society pays an enormous sum of time and money to provide their basic needs and to prepare them for adulthood. Nearly all children in modern societies are incapable of being anything but economic liabilities until age 16, when they might finally have the right intelligence, strength, and personality traits to work full time and contribute more to the economy than they consume.

Of course, in increasingly advanced societies like ours, economic, scientific, and technological growth depend on having high-quality human capital, and that requires schooling and workplace training well into a person’s 20s. This effectively extends the “liability” phase of such a person’s life just as long, as higher education usually costs more money than a young adult student can make at a side job.

Once that is finished, the productive period of an educated person’s life lasts about 40 years, after which they retire and stop contributing to the economy, science, or technology. In terms of a resource balance sheet, the only difference between this period of a person’s life and his childhood is that, as a retiree, he is probably living off his own accumulated savings rather than other peoples’ money.

And then the person dies, at 80 let’s say. He spent the first 25 years of his life learning and preparing for the workforce, 40 years participating in it and making real, measurable contributions to the world, and the final 15 years hanging around his house and pursuing low-key hobbies. That means this person, who we’ll think of as the “average skilled professional,” had a “lifetime efficiency rate” of 50%. Not bad, right?

Actually, it’s much worse once you also consider this person’s daily time usage:

The average, working-age American only spends about 1/3 of his day working. Sleep takes up just as much time, and the remaining 1/3 of the day is devoted to leisure, satisfying basic physiological needs (e.g. – eating, drinking, cleaning one’s body), running errands, doing chores, and caring for offspring or elderly parents. This means the typical person’s “lifetime efficiency rate” decreases by 2/3, from 50% to 16.6%.

But it gets worse. Any adult who has spent time in a workplace knows that eight hours of real work rarely get done during an eight-hour workday. Large amounts of time are wasted doing pointless assignments that shouldn’t exist and don’t actually help the organization, going to meetings that accomplish nothing and/or take longer than necessary, socializing with colleagues, using computers and smartphones for entertainment and socializing, doing non-value-added training, or doing actual value-added refresher training that must be undertaken because the brains of the human workers constantly forget things. In industrial jobs, there’s often downtime thanks to lack of supplies or to a crucial piece of equipment being unavailable.

From personal experience and from years of observation, I estimate that only 25% of the average American professional’s work day is spend doing real, useful work. That means the lifetime efficiency rate drops to 4.2%.

It still gets worse. Realize that many highly productive people who, let’s say, might actually do eight hours of real work per eight hour work day, are actually doing things that damage the world and slow down the pace of progress in every dimension. Examples include:

  • A journalist who consciously inserts systematic bias into their news reports, which in turn leave thousands of people misinformed, anxious, and bigoted against another group of people.
  • An advertising executive whose professional life revolves around tricking thousands of people into buying goods or services that they don’t need, or that are actually inferior to those offered by competitors. The result is a massive misallocation of money, and possible social problems as only people with higher incomes can visibly enjoy the useless products, while poorer people can only watch with envy.
  • A mathematician who uses his gifts in the service of a Wall Street hedge fund, finding exotic and highly technical ways to aggregate stock market money in his company’s hands at the expense of competitors. The hedge fund creates no value and doesn’t expand the size of the “economic pie”–it merely expands the size of its own slice of that pie.
  • A bureaucrat who manages a program meant to further some ill-defined social mandate. Though he and his team have won internal agency awards for various accomplishments, by every honest metric, the program has consistently and completely failed to help its target demographic.
  • A drug dealer who “hustles” his part of the city from sunrise to sunset, doing dozens of deals per day and often dodging bullets. The drugs leave his customers too intoxicated to work or to take care of themselves and their families, and have sent many of them to hospitals thanks to overdoses and chemical contaminants.

These kinds of people do what could be called “counterproductive work” or “undermining work,” and it can be very hard to tell them apart from people who do useful work that helps the whole world. Unfortunately, peripheral people who use their own labors to support the counterproductive people, like the cameraman who films the dishonest newscaster’s reports, are also doing counterproductive work, even if they don’t realize it. Once the foul efforts of these people are subtracted from the equation, the lifetime efficiency rate of the median American professional drops to, I’ll say, 3.5%.

Only 3.5% of this educated and well-trained person’s life is spent doing work that benefits society with no catches or caveats. Examples include:

  • A heart surgeon who saves the lives of younger people.
  • A medical researcher who runs experiments that help discover a vaccine for a painful, widespread disease.
  • A chemist who discovers a way to make solar panels more cheaply, without any reduction to the panels’ efficiency, lifespan, or any other attribute.
  • A civil engineer who designs a bridge that sharply reduces commute times for local people, resulting in aggregate fuel savings that exceed the bridge’s construction cost in ten years.
  • A carpenter who helps build affordable housing that meets all building codes, in a place where it is in high demand.

In each case, the person’s labor helps other people while hurting no one, and improves the efficiency of some system.

Let me mention two important caveats to this thought experiment. First, humanity’s 3.5% efficiency rate might sound pitiful, but it beats every other species, which all have 0% efficiency. One-hundred percent of every non-human animal’s time is spent satisfying physiological needs (e.g. – hunger, sleep), avoiding danger, caring for offspring, and indulging in pleasure (which might be fairly lumped in with “satisfying physiological needs”). At the end of its life, the animal leaves behind no surpluses, no inventions, and no works that benefit its species or anything else, except maybe by pure accident. Our measly 3.5% efficiency rate allowed our species to slowly edge out all the others and to dominate the planet.

Second, under my definition of “efficiency,” it’s possible for a person to have 0% efficiency even though they work very hard, create tangible fruits of their labor, and never do “counterproductive work.” A perfect example of such a person would be a primitive hunter or sustenance farmer who is always on the brink of starvation and spends all his time acquiring and eating food, with no time left over for other pursuits. He never invents a new type of spear or plow, never builds anything more than a wooden shack that will collapse shortly after he dies, and never makes up any religions or useful pieces of knowledge. For the first 95% of our species’ existence, our aggregate lifetime efficiency rate was infinitesimally greater than 0%.

Am I doing this thought experiment just to be dour and to cast humanity in a cynical light? No. By illustrating how inefficient we are, I’m just making a case that we’ll be surpassed by intelligent machines that will be invariably more efficient. Ha ha!

The first key advantage intelligent machines will have is perfect memories. They will never forget anything, and will be able to instantly recall all their memories. This will dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes to educate one of them to the same level as the average American professional I’ve profiled in this essay. Much of teaching is repetition of the same things again and again. And since intelligent machines wouldn’t forget anything, there would be no need for periodic retraining in the workplace, which takes time away from doing real work. Machines wouldn’t have “skills degradation,” and they wouldn’t need to practice tasks to remind themselves how to do them.

(Note that I’m not even assuming that machines will be faster at learning new things than humans are. Again, I’m being conservative by only assuming that they don’t forget things.)

The second key advantage would be near-freedom from human physiological needs, like the need to sleep, eat, or clean one’s self. Intelligent machines would need to periodically go offline for maintenance, repairs or upgrades, but this wouldn’t gobble up anywhere near as much time as it does in humans. For example, while a human spends 33% of his life sleeping, a typical server at a major tech company like Amazon or Facebook spends less than 1% of its time “down.” Intelligent machines wouldn’t have a good correlate to “eating,” since they would only consume electricity and do it while simultaneously performing work tasks. And since machines wouldn’t sweat, shed skin, or grow more than trivial amounts of bacteria on themselves, they wouldn’t need to clean their bodies or garb (if they wore any) nearly as often as humans. Intelligent machines also wouldn’t have a need for leisure, or if they did, they might need less than we do, saving them even more time.

Instead of being able to devote just eight hours a day to learning and working, an intelligent machine could devote 20 hours a day to them, as a conservative estimate. This, in turn, would further shorten the amount of time needed to educate a machine to the same level as the average American professional. I wrote earlier that the professional needed schooling until age 25 to be able to start a high-level job. Since the intelligent machine can spend more time each day studying, it can attend the same number of classes in only 10 years. And since it has a perfect memory, it lessons don’t need to contain as much repetition, and remedial lessons are unnecessary. Let’s say that cuts the amount of schooling needed by 30%. An intelligent machine only needs seven years to operate at the same level as a highly educated 25-year-old human.

And in the workplace, an intelligent machine wouldn’t be subject to the distractions that its human colleagues were (e.g. – socializing, surfing the internet), though its human bosses might still give it pointless assignments or force it to attend unproductive meetings. Still, during an eight-hour day, it would get at least seven hours of real work done (and this is another conservative guess). But as noted earlier, it would actually have 20 hour work days, meaning it would get 17.5 hours of real work done each day, dwarfing the two hours of real work the typical American professional does per day.

As for the “counterproductive work” / “undermining work,” I predict that human bosses will someday task intelligent machines with doing it, allowing scams, disinformation peddling, and criminal enterprises to reach new heights of efficiency. However, the victims will all be humans. Intelligent machines themselves would not be dumb enough, impulsive enough, or possessed of the necessary psychological weaknesses to take whatever bait the “counterproductive workers” were offering, and the latter will be laid bare before their eyes and avoided. For example, an intelligent machine looking to buy a new vehicle would have a perfect understanding of its own needs, and would only need a few seconds to thoroughly research all the available vehicle models and identify the one that best met its criteria. Car commercials designed to play on human emotions, insecurities, and lifestyle consciousness to dupe people into buying suboptimal vehicles wouldn’t sway the machine at all.

I won’t do another set of calculations for the hypothetical intelligent machine, but it should be clear that its advantages will be many and will compound on top of each other, resulting in them being much more efficient that even highly trained humans at doing work. Moreover, in a machine-dominated world, where they controlled the economy, government, and resource allocation, parasitic “counterproductive work” that we humans mistake for useful work would probably disappear. Just as humans slowly edged out all other species thanks to our tiny work efficiency advantage over them, intelligent machines will edge out humans in the future. It’s just a question of when.