Month: October 2024

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Interesting articles, October 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There have been recent advances in robotics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What would a robot submarine look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Virginia-class sub on the surface.

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

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

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

 

A boat tilting as it makes a sharp turn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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