Month: October 2023

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Interesting articles, October 2023

Hamas, the organization that governs the Gaza Strip and is widely considered to be a terrorist group, conducted an unprecedented raid against several nearby towns in Israel. Teams of armed men, including some on paragliders, breached Israel’s border defenses at multiple points early on October 7 and spent the day killing as many Israelis as they could before being driven back. Over 1,400 Israelis were killed, and over 200 more were dragged back to Gaza as hostages.

The U.S. used airstrikes to retaliate against Iranian-backed militants after the latter tried attacking U.S. bases in the Middle East.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-strikes-iran-linked-sites-020822123.html

Ukraine used its new, U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles to devastate a Russian air base.
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/ukraines-growing-arsenal
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/destruction-from-ukraines-first-atacms-strike-now-apparent

The threat of Ukrainian missile, drone and commando attacks has forced Russia to move most of its warships out of Sevastopol.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/6/they-miscalculated-ukraine-turns-the-tables-on-russias-black-sea-fleet

Modern technology — such as surveillance drones with infrared and thermal imaging — means one side can more easily identify an ill-made decoy. An exposed tank without a heat signature is going to be a dead giveaway. A lack of tank tracks in the dirt is unusual, and it doesn’t matter how convincing a decoy howitzer is if it’s oddly sitting alone in a field rather than in a realistic firing position with at least basic defenses.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/decoy-arms-race-playing-ukraine-211638570.html

A September 6 missile strike on a market in Ukraine that killed 16 civilians was probably an errant Ukrainian missile, not a Russian one as Ukraine’s government claimed.
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-09-19/evidence-suggests-errant-ukrainian-missile-caused-market-deaths-new-york-times

Biden administration officials are far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit, a confidential U.S. strategy document obtained by POLITICO suggests.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/02/biden-admin-ukraine-strategy-corruption-00119237

Here’s a remarkable video of a Russian T-90M–one of the country’s best tanks–being instantly destroyed by an antitank missile. Stowage of ammunition inside the tank where the crew sits can lead to catastrophic explosions like this.
https://youtu.be/KjGFCNzXx20?si=2CTuKAi_lM1bh4IR

At the current loss rates, all of Russia’s old BMP armored vehicles will be destroyed within three years.
https://youtu.be/HuKVxgFBbYM?si=LvwTbGBuxwaDjUP6

About 100,000 Russian prisoners have fought in Ukraine so far.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/26/russia-prison-population-convicts-war/

Here’s a video about mine-clearing tactics and vehicles. Let me add that, instead of using old T-55s for combat in Ukraine, I think it would be smarter to turn them into mine clearing vehicles.
https://youtu.be/VGDUgxQyVWc?si=NNqLRUl5MJY7eXlj

The U.S. and Ukraine are building “Franken weapons” that combine elements of American and Soviet-made weapons systems. Right now, the effort is focused on surface-to-air missile systems.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/oct/28/desperate-for-air-defense-ukraine-pushes-us-for-fr/

A U.S. F-16 shot down an armed Turkish drone because it strayed too close to U.S. ground troops in Syria.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-f-16-fighter-jet-170834726.html

A Chinese fighter plane almost collided with a U.S. B-52 bomber over the South China Sea.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1208941174/a-chinese-fighter-jet-came-within-10-feet-of-a-b-52-bomber-u-s-military-says

A terrorist drone attack on a graduation ceremony at a Syrian military academy killed 89 people and wounded hundreds more. It’s only a matter of time before something like this happens in the U.S.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/middleeast/syria-military-college-ceremony-drone-strike-intl/index.html

Britain’s costly saga of buying U.S.-made Apache helicopters, modifying them to special British standards, and then de-modifying them back to a U.S. configuration teaches important lessons about economies of scale and the price of national pride.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lesson-britain-us-army-apache-161737080.html

Here’s a first-person tour of a B-24 bomber in flight.
https://youtu.be/fcZmiFMlR3g?si=Yx0vh-_5ETnsPEn-

China contributed to the Entente in WWI by sending 100,000 workers to toil in France’s domestic economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_during_World_War_I

‘Remember in 1871 Germany imposed a “harsh peace” (including an occupation) on a defeated France. When Russia, gripped by revolution pulled out in 1918 the Germans imposed a harsher penalty on Russia than Versailles—and Versailles was fairly lenient compared to what Germany had planned to impose had she won the war.’
https://www.quora.com/How-different-or-similar-was-the-Treaty-of-Versailles-from-other-treaties-signed-around-the-same-time-Were-the-terms-better-of-worse-than-those-imposed-on-or-by-Germany-in-previous-conflicts

‘During World War II, 80% of targets engaged by the M4 Sherman tank were soft targets such as infantry, anti-tank guns, and bunkers.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tanks-big-guns-attention-russias-220902112.html

The 1930s were more geopolitically volatile than most people realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stresa_Front

In warfare, jamming the enemy’s radar and dealing with him trying to overcome your jam involves switching radio frequencies. The back-and-forth reminds me of Enterprise rotating the modulations of its shields and phasers to fight the Borg.

Constantly alternating the frequency that the radar operates on (frequency agility) over a spread-spectrum will limit the effectiveness of most jamming, making it easier to read through it. Modern jammers can track a predictable frequency change, so the more random the frequency change, the more likely it is to counter the jammer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception

It has been 30 years since the ill-fated U.S. commando raid in Somalia that was depicted in the famous movie Black Hawk Down.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2/james-webb-telescope-finding-jupiter-sized-objects-in-orion-nebula-baffles-scientists

It has been 40 years since the truck bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
‘The subsequent explosion — immortalized on a clock in the building’s basement at 6:21.26 a.m. — proved to be the largest nonnuclear explosion on record, one that equaled as much as 20,000 pounds of TNT. ‘
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/jack-carrs-take-1983-beirut-marine-barracks-terror-40-years-salvo-war

While it’s true that gunpowder made forts obsolete, the process took hundreds of years thanks to improvements to forts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion_fort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_fort

Animals that have magnreception include red foxes, cows, deer, butterlfies, fruit flies, some birds, lobsters and sea turtles.

For animals like the red fox, researchers believe that foxes can “see” Earth’s magnetic field. This appears as a patch in their vision. They use magnetoreception to help catch prey hidden beneath snow or grass by lining up their pounces with Earth’s magnetic field.

If you look at a herd of cows or deer, you’ll notice them (almost always) facing the same way — toward Earth’s magnetic poles. Whether for grazing or resting, it’s a north-south magnetic alignment. Experts believe it helps them map and familiarize themselves with their surroundings.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-5-senses-animals-have-that-humans-dont

Places like Okinawa that are “hotspots” where abnormally large shares of people live past 100 might only have those reputations due to inaccurate birth certificate recordkeeping and old people lying about their ages.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/09/28/places-claiming-to-be-centenarian-hotspots-may-just-have-bad-data

The lifespan gap between educated and uneducated Americans is heavily skewed by high school dropouts, who die quite early. If the analysis is restricted to high school graduates and people with four-year degrees, the gap almost disappears.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23895909/angus-deaton-anne-case-life-expectancy-united-states-college-graduates-inequality-heart-disease

Hackers stole a trove of data on the identities and genetics of 23andMe users and are leaking it onto the internet.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/hacker-leaks-millions-more-23andme-user-records-on-cybercrime-forum/

This device transfers waste heat from a computer server into a water heater. It’s a type of “data furnace.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/18/1077548/computer-waste-heat/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_furnace

It will become more feasible to put data centers in cold places once robot workers exist. Robots won’t care about living in northern Russia, but humans do.
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-they-put-data-centers-in-really-cold-places-so-they-can-just-open-the-windows-to-cool-the-data-centers

All jet engines are gas turbines, but not all gas turbines are jet engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine

An English engineer named “John Barber” envisioned the first gas turbine engine and patented it in 1791. However, it was impossible to build due to the technological limitations of the era, and remained merely an idea and a sketch until 1903, when the first one was built. In 1972, a German company built a real-life version of Barber’s turbine engine, and it worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barber_(engineer)

A ram jet is an athodyd.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/athodyd

The men who invented quantum dots won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67005670

The downside of ethnic diversity is it worsens social trust.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708

Best Buy plans to stop selling DVDs and Blu Ray discs within a few months.
https://apnews.com/article/best-buy-physical-movie-discs-dvds-ae13cf255c90de60eecc632357a0a22e

Language translation technology continues to improve.
https://youtu.be/fZY-Cv1Q8NY?si=GvB-Fg1HY0iOY8Cx

‘Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8

I independently came up with the same idea that David Chalmers did, but 10 years after he did.

Given this scenario, we can construct a series of cases intermediate between me and Robot such that there is only a very small change at each step and such that functional organization is preserved throughout. We can imagine, for instance, replacing a certain number of my neurons by silicon chips. In the first such case, only a single neuron is replaced. Its replacement is a silicon chip that performs precisely the same local function as the neuron. We can imagine that it is equipped with tiny transducers that take in electrical signals and chemical ions and transforms these into a digital signal upon which the chip computes, with the result converted into the appropriate electrical and chemical outputs. As long as the chip has the right input/output function, the replacement will make no difference to the functional organization of the system.
https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

“Open source AI models will soon become unbeatable. Period.” – Yann LeCun
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1713304307519369704

The CEO of the tech company “SoftBank” predicts that AGI will be invented within 10 years. He also believes in the Singularity.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/04/tech/japan-softbank-ai-hnk-intl/index.html

AI scientist and DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg predicts there’s a 50% chance AGI will be created by the end of 2028. He says the path between now and then merely involves iteratively improving the narrow AI algorithms we already have and the hardware they’re running on, and feeding them more training data.
https://youtu.be/Kc1atfJkiJU?si=ldjTxLl-Rs9JICIG

Geoffrey Hinton gave an interview to 60 Minutes where he again warned about the risks of AI. Unfortunately, his comments were blown out of proportion by several news outlets. Hinton said that machines MIGHT be able to “reason better” than humans in five years. That doesn’t mean AGI will exist by then or anything bad will be happening.

He also predicted AI will be used in warfare and online disinformation, and that it will put large numbers of humans out of work for good, but he didn’t give dates, and the concerns are old ones shared by many thinkers on the subject.
https://youtu.be/qrvK_KuIeJk?si=Nz2o9xnzlW_Zs4W9

“Geoguessr” is an e-sport where players are shown a series of Google Street View images of an unknown place and have to guess where it is by marking a spot on a world map. The player who guesses the shortest distance from the actual location wins. Some people are shockingly good at it. Some tournaments offer $50,000 to the winner.

Anyway, some guys built a machine that can beat the best human at it.
https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV–cU?si=opJy1bHLCTVSQtjx

Pedophiles are using advanced image manipulation tools to transform photos of adults into what they would look like as nude children.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67172231

‘Google Pixel’s face-altering photo tool sparks AI manipulation debate’
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67170014

Here’s a critical review of the new movie The Creator, which is about humans oppressing intelligent robots and cyborgs.
https://youtu.be/4Hll494p9Qc?si=cCE-aLC-lzXyFAPI

The “chip shortage” is over.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67226385

Carbon-14 dating of human footprints found just two years ago proves that humans were present in North America 21,000 – 23,000 years ago. For decades, the scientific consensus had been that humans didn’t cross the Bering Strait Land Bridge until 16,000 to 13,000 years ago.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5007

Actress Goldie Hawn says she saw an alien when she was in her 20s and it actually touched her face with its finger.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12675815/Goldie-Hawn-claims-ALIEN-touched-face.html

A recently released Pentagon video of a spherical UFO speeding over an unidentified Middle Eastern country has been geolocated to Syria. A new analysis also concludes it could have just been a silvery party balloon, probably released into the air during a holiday celebration.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/10/24/isnt-that-a-balloon-deflating-a-dod-ufo-video/

THE Asteroid Belt is well-known and located between Mars and Jupiter, but it is actually not THE ONLY asteroid belt in our Solar System.

‘The total number of Jupiter trojans larger than 1 km in diameter is believed to be about 1 million,[1] approximately equal to the number of asteroids larger than 1 km in the asteroid belt.

…The total mass of the Jupiter trojans is estimated at 0.0001 of the mass of Earth or one-fifth of the mass of the asteroid belt.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted rogue, Jupiter-sized planets in the Orion nebula. According to our models of how nebulas work, they shouldn’t exist.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2/james-webb-telescope-finding-jupiter-sized-objects-in-orion-nebula-baffles-scientists

The movie Dreamcatcher was really bad, but the aliens were creatively done.
https://youtu.be/vIAjheaZSms?si=oK6uyg0MjI50j2J1

‘Forever Chemical’ Bans Face Hard Truth: Many Can’t Be Replaced
https://www.yahoo.com/news/forever-chemical-bans-face-hard-100002502.html

A man who received a transplant of a genetically engineered pig heart was healthy enough to leave the hospital, but then died after his body rejected the organ. He survived with it for six weeks.
https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2023/in-memoriam-lawrence-faucette.html

Chinese doctors have used gene therapy to practically cure a type of deafness caused by inadequate levels of a protein called “otoferlin.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/27/1082551/gene-treatment-deaf-children-hearing-china/

From five years ago:

‘The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html

The case for an emergency effort to vaccinate African children against malaria.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/10/what-is-an-emergency-the-case-of-rapid-malaria-vaccination.html

The two lead scientists who invented the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine won Nobel Prizes.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/02/1202941256/nobel-prize-goes-to-scientists-who-made-mrna-covid-vaccines-possible

COVID vaccine hesitancy cost a lot of Republicans their lives.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis

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Escape to nowhere – Why new jobs might not save us from machine workers

This is a companion piece to my 2020 essay “Creative” jobs won’t save human workers from machines or themselves, so I recommend rereading it now. In the three years since, machines have gotten sharply better at “creative” and “artistic” tasks like generating images and even short stories from simple prompts. Video synthesis is the next domino poised to fall. These advancements don’t even represent the pinnacle of what machines could theoretically achieve, and as such they’ve called into question the viability of many types of human jobs. Contrary to what the vast majority of futurists and average people predicted, jobs involving artistry and creativity seem more ripe for automation than those centered around manual labor. Myth busted. 

Another myth I’d like to address is that machines will never render human workers obsolete since “new jobs that only humans can do will keep being created.” This claim is usually raised during discussions about technological unemployment, and its proponents point out that it has reliably held true for centuries now, and each scare over a new type of machine rendering humans permanently jobless has evaporated. For example, the invention of the automobile didn’t put farriers out of work forever, it just moved them to working in car tire shops. 

The first problem with the claim that we’ll keep escaping machines by moving up the skill ladder to future jobs is that, like any other observed trend, there’s no reason to assume it will continue forever. In any type of system, whether we’re talking about an ecosystem or a stock market, it’s common for trends to hold steady for long periods before suddenly changing, perhaps due to some unforeseen factor. Past performance isn’t always an indicator of future performance.

The second problem with the claim is that, even if the trend continues, people might not want to do the jobs that become available to them in the future. Let me use a game as an analogy.

“Geoguessr” is an e-sport where players are shown a series of Google Street View images of an unknown place and have to guess where it is by marking a spot on a world map. The player who guesses the shortest distance from the actual location wins. Some people are shockingly good at it. Some tournaments offer $50,000 to the winner.

Anyway, some guys built a machine that can beat the best human at it.

This is a good model of how technological unemployment could play out in the future. Geoguessr, which could be thought of as a new job that was made possible by advances in technology (e.g. – Google Street View, widespread internet access) was created in 2013. Humans reigned supreme at it for 10 years until a machine was invented that could do it better. In other words, this occupation blinked in and out of existence in the space of 10 years.

That’s enough time for an average person to get trained and to perform it well enough to become an expert and net a steady income. However, as computers improve, they’ll be able to learn new tasks faster. The humans who played Geoguessr full-time will jump to some new kind of invented job made possible by a newer technology like VR. There, humans will reign supreme for, say, eight years before machines can do it better.

The third type of invented job will exist thanks to another future technology like wearable brain scanners. The human cohort will then switch to doing that for a living, but machines will learn to do it better after only six years.

Eventually, the intervals between the creation and obsolescence of jobs will get so short that it won’t be worth it for humans to even try anymore. By the time they’re finished training for it, they might have a handful of years of employment ahead of them before being replaced by another machine. The velocity of this process will make people drop out of the labor market in steadily growing numbers through a combination of hopelessness and rational economic calculation (especially if they can just get on welfare permanently). I call this phenomenon “automation escape velocity,” whereby machines get faster at learning new work tasks than humans, or so fast that humans have too small an advantage to really capitalize on.

This is a scenario shows how the belief that “Machines will never take away all human jobs because new jobs that only humans can do will keep being created” could hold true, but at the same time fail to prevent mass unemployment. Yes, humans will technically remain able to climb the skill ladder to newly created jobs that machines can’t do yet, but the speed at which humans will need to keep climbing to stay above the machines below them will get so fast that most humans will fall off. A minority of gifted people who excel at learning new things and enjoy challenges will have careers, but the vast majority of humans aren’t like that.