- Another reason why you should always be skeptical of Russian predictions about how strong their military will be within X years.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16175/russia-rolls-out-new-tu-160m2-but-are-moscows-bomber-ambitions-realistic - Russia won’t start mass producing stealth fighters until 2027 at the earliest. (U.S. F-22s started rolling off the assembly line in 2005.)
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-su-57-stealth-fighter-s-500-air-defense-system-23383 - Contrary to what is widely believed (thanks to fiction like The Hunt for Red October), the USSR/Russia has always been far behind the U.S. in submarine technology, and the gap is widening.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/why-russias-new-stealth-submarines-have-big-problem-22941 - The Russians used a spy ship with submersible instruments and winches to raise or destroy their two fighter planes that crashed into the Mediterranean during Syrian support operations. They did this within five days of each crash to prevent American subs from snatching them from the seafloor and examining the technology.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16379/russia-scooped-up-wrecks-of-crashed-naval-fighters-off-sea-floor-near-syria - A tale of two military readiness levels (this has just a little bit to do with differences in how well-funded the two forces are).
First: http://www.janes.com/article/75790/over-half-of-bundeswehr-s-leopard-2-mbts-are-not-operationally-ready
Second: http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16366/portlands-142nd-fighter-wing-launches-13-f-15c-ds-eagles-in-rare-snap-readiness-drill - The Air Force is reusing WWII-era shells and 1950s-made barrels for some of their AC-130 gunship cannons. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16523/the-usaf-is-rebuilding-world-war-ii-era-40mm-shells-for-its-ac-130u-gunships - What happens when you try fixing something that ain’t broke:
http://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-still-hasnt-figured-out-how-to-make-a-decent-uniform/ - “Compounding the pain for the N.S.A. is the attackers’ regular online public taunts, written in ersatz broken English. Their posts are a peculiar mash-up of immaturity and sophistication, laced with profane jokes but also savvy cultural and political references. They suggest that their author — if not an American — knows the United States well.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html - “The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard’s Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/ - We were supposed to have power armor in 2007. http://www.zdnet.com/article/mit-to-make-tech-exoskeleton-for-army/
- “As it was, Task Force Rogue One met only five out of the ten performance measures that the U.S. Army uses to evaluate a successful raid.”
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/02/27/no-more-task-force-rogue-ones-a-tactical-analysis-of-the-raid-on-scarif/ - There’s no evidence that mandatory health checkups reduce the incidence or severity of diabetes, even when the checkups result in early warnings that patients are developing the disease.
https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-policy/preventive-care-worth-cost-evidence-mandatory-checkups - A handful of people are still in iron lungs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-apos-last-iron-lung-222200990.html - Big pharma is less profitable than you probably think, and its profit trajectory is grim.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/28/a-grim-future-here-are-the-numbers - A brain exercise has finally been scientifically proven to reduce the odds of getting dementia.
http://news.medicine.iu.edu/releases/2017/11/brain-exercise-dementia-prevention.shtml - Getting you genome sequenced now costs less than $2,000, but prices haven’t dropped in several years. It still isn’t worth the money for most people since we can’t make sense of what it means.
https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata/ - The genetic mutation inhibits the PAI-1 enzyme, extends lifespan by 10 years and sharply reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes. It doesn’t seem to carry any downsides.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/well/live/amish-mutation-protects-against-diabetes-and-may-extend-life.html - The ethical concerns about cloning are almost entirely baseless.
FYI, some mammal species are harder to clone than others because of their reproductive cycles and chromosome structures. Sheep and cats are easy, but apes and humans are very hard.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42066629 - “The Amara hype cycle is unfolding today with respect to machine learning.”
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law/ - Related:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/03/24/the-genomic-revolution-shows-up-late-but-shows-up - An excellent lecture. Deep learning is being overhyped, and by itself will never lead to artificial general intelligence. A.I. research probably needs ten times as much funding as it is getting, spread out across different labs approaching the problem from totally different directions.
https://youtu.be/7dnN3P2bCJo - Humans still reign supreme over machines in Starcraft 2. I couldn’t find videos of any of the matches, but I suspect most of the Norwegian AI’s astonishing-sounding 19,000 actions per minute (a world-class human player might do 200 actions per minute) were thanks to the machine ordering its units to do useless things like run around in random, constantly changing patterns.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609242/humans-are-still-better-than-ai-at-starcraftfor-now/ - ‘The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered.’
https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-capacities - Is a stressed-out human phone operator who is trained to suppress and fake their own emotions and to read from a script more “personable” than a machine? Will human advantages in jobs requiring emotional interaction and nurturing endure?
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/are-humans-actually-more-human-than-robots/545714/ - If you had a human friend who had elementary knowledge of 40 languages and could do basic translations between any two of them, would you be laughing in their face at their mistakes, or would you be in awe of their intelligence?
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-42066517/google-pixel-buds-language-translation-tested - Say what you will about Tulsa, Oklahoma, but they’ve enacted outstanding land use laws to minimize the occurrence and damage caused by flooding. Basically, no one can build houses in flood-prone areas, and the city instead builds things like public parks and soccer fields there. Higher sea levels and more frequent floods does not have to mean more deaths.
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/564317854/how-tulsa-became-a-model-for-preventing-floods - Human adaptation to biodiversity loss is also feasible: “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-species-extinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658-cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html - An environmentalist professor, Mark Jacobson, who published an absurd article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claiming that the U.S. could switch to 100% clean energy by 2050 is suing other professors that wrote a joint rebuttal article. His actions are not going over well in the scientific community.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/ - Plants are green because they don’t absorb the green-colored portion of the visible light spectrum. The pink-colored windows absorb the green light and turn it into electricity.
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-solar-greenhouses-electricity-crops.html - An interesting idea. And if Bitcoin goes extinct, you could rent your server to anyone who needed to do computation (for stuff like protein folding, processing computer game graphics, etc). Two problems though: 1) The economics of this idea are murky since the server would need to be replaced at significant expense every few years as its hardware became obsolete and 2) if everyone had a computer server space heater, then the global supply of server capacity for rent would wildly fluctuate with the seasons. Since most people live in temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, available server capacity would spike in the winter and shrivel away in the summer.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/11/08/bitcoin-mining-space-heater/ - The smartest type of smart home might have only a few smart, centralized components monitoring many dumb ones. Trying to make every appliance and feature in a house smart is actually dumb.
“The level of detail smart breakers look at is impressive. Mr Holmquist says that his can, for example, measure the revolutions-per-minute of the compressor in a refrigerator. Not only would this let an app monitor how hard the appliance is working, it could also give warning if that appliance was about to break down.”
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21731610-old-fuse-box-gets-new-lease-life-smart-circuit-breakers - Why having industry standards and two or three established big guys dominating a market is important:
https://qz.com/1132657/an-internet-of-things-flop-means-some-connected-lights-wont-work-anymore/ - It’s just as likely this discovery will end up as another flash in the (bed)pan that goes nowhere, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
http://www.janes.com/article/75947/arl-utilises-bodily-fluids-for-power-generation - Bird tracking devices weighing only a gram will exist soon, allowing smaller birds to be tagged. What happens someday when we have pellet-sized tracking implants that cost almost nothing, and robots that can do the work of implanting them in animals for free?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/where-the-birds-go/545945/ - Why speculate about creepy future surveillance when Facebook is doing it now?
https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691 - From my “Rules for good futurism”: A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle. “But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/ - He’s totally right that 1) most “news” content is garbage designed to be consumed instantly and forgotten within days, 2) reading news articles that are several months old is an invaluable tool for seeing just how much garbage is really garbage, and 3) it takes time and a trained mind to recognize garbage without the benefit of hindsight.
https://qz.com/1117962/advice-on-how-to-read-from-a-professor-whose-job-is-to-predict-the-future/ - Some rare, creative thinking. “Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.”
http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence - Telescope capabilities are about to vastly improve. The 2020s will be full of important new astronomy findings.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/11/by-2020-upgrades-to-gravity-wave-detectors-will-detect-one-to-two-neutron-star-collisions-per-month.html - A metaphor for China as a whole.
https://qz.com/1137026/chinas-first-all-electric-cargo-ship-is-going-to-be-used-to-transport-coal/ - 2018 could be the year Venezuela finally implodes. If they run out of foreign currency reserves and default on their loan payments, then that’s it.
https://qz.com/1128894/venezuela-has-finally-defaulted-on-its-debt-according-to-sp/ - I just figured out how robots are going to kill us all in the future. “A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year…The LD50 for it in humans is estimated at about 2 nanograms/kilo i.v., 10 nanograms/kilo by inhalation.”
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/06/theres-toxicity-and-theres-toxicity - Stephen Hawking doesn’t think he’s the smartest person alive, and he thinks people who boast about their high IQs are “losers.”
https://youtu.be/4lwFK1ImzcA - Do a YouTube search for “how to set a mouse trap”. The earliest video I found was uploaded in 2006–only two years after YouTube was invented–and is perfectly clear. Since then, probably hundreds more instructional videos of this simple task have also been uploaded to the service, the most recent appearing a week ago. What’s the value-add to the videos made after 2006? How much of the ongoing “exponential growth in digital content” is totally redundant?
The Original: https://youtu.be/QBVOFY7SDOg
The (latest) Reboot: https://youtu.be/0xriqCJKgYM
Rules for good futurism
I’ve decided to make a detailed list of rules for judging the credibility of futurists and their predictions. You might notice it re-uses some content from past blog posts of mine. For obvious reasons, I think it’s better to have it all in one place.
From now on, I intend to follow these rules when making my own predictions or when judging those made by others. Having a strong process for this is important enough to me that, if I ever make changes to it, I will dedicate a new blog entry to it, and I’ll repost the entire list just to keep it at the forefront. Remember, I am a “Militant” futurist because I’m a stickler for rigor and process.
Never unquestioningly believe anyone else’s predictions, even if the person making them is famous, smart and seems to know what they’re talking about. Always be skeptical and do the following:
- Ensure that the person’s education and professional credentials are relevant to their predictions. A useful measure of a scientist’s area of and level of expertise is the quantity and quality of the peer-reviewed papers they have produced.
Example: A scientist with a Nobel prize for work in human biochemistry predicts a nuclear war will happen within ten years. His C.V. shows he lacks any training or accomplishments in fields relevant to the prediction, like foreign policy or nuclear proliferation. - Be suspicious when experts have conflicts of interest that may bias their opinions and predictions.
Example: A tech tycoon claims at an open shareholders meeting that his company’s electric car output will increase 500% over the next year. The tycoon owns most of his company’s stock and will profit if people believe his prediction and bid up the stock price. - Remember that experts whose theories fall far outside the scientific mainstream are usually (but not always) wrong.
Example: A well-credentialed government climatologist writes an academic journal paper predicting the Earth will soon start cooling down because his newly-developed climate model shows that a “negative feedback loop” is triggered once the Earth’s surface temperatures rise to a certain level. Debates within the scientific community about the accuracy of his model are too complex for non-experts to understand and judge for themselves. Only a small minority of his colleagues say it is accurate. - Be very suspicious of scientists and other experts who feel aggrieved or persecuted by the mainstream of their professions. If an expert with an outlier theory or prediction also believes there is a conspiracy against him or her, it should raise a red flag in your mind.
Example: An economist who became a multimillionaire through skillful investing and by starting his own financial companies claims on the internet that the banking system is about to collapse, that officials in the government and Wall Street are colluding to conceal the impeding disaster, and that some of his recent business setbacks are due to clandestine retaliation from the powerful men he’s been trying to expose. - Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data.
Example: A trained geneticist and retired head of the world’s biggest fertility clinic says that Gattaca-level human genetic engineering will exist in five years thanks to rapid growth in our knowledge of genetics and in the power of our gene editing tools. He provides no documentation that either is improving at the necessary rates (perhaps he claims to have seen secret, proprietary data). Other experts who are familiar with the germane scientific literature and technology say the prediction is far too optimistic, and that it’s implausible any private group could have secret research and technology so far beyond what is publicly available. - Be very skeptical of predictions that hinge on future discoveries that fundamentally change the laws of science.
Example: A visionary director makes a film set in the future where people have flying cars that float thanks to some kind of anti-gravity technology as opposed to helicopter rotors or some other device that blows air downward. During promotional interviews, he proudly says that he thinks his movie will prove accurate. When the film is released, all theories and observations about gravity and its mechanics suggest that it can’t be manipulated using any kind of technology, and that no anti-gravity force exists.
While you’re free to listen to and analyze predictions made by anyone, it’s a better use of time to focus on predictions made by people who have made accurate forecasts in the past. Having such a track record also helps satisfy the “[relevant] education and professional credentials” requirement mentioned earlier. However, determining how accurately a person has predicted the future can be a more complex task than it sounds, and I recommend keeping these pointers in mind:
- You can be right thanks to luck alone, and “a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
Example: An economist who has written several bestselling books about real estate investing correctly predicted in 2005 that the U.S. real estate market was about to peak in value and would then crash a year later. However, in earlier books, articles, and public comments, he made the same predictions for 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. He is now hailed by some as an “expert” in real estate market trends thanks to his correct 2005 prediction and is routinely interviewed on financial news shows. - A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle.
Example: In 1998, a futurist predicts that, by the year 2009, average people will commonly wear small computers and sensors that will be integrated into their jewelry, clothing, wallets, and other worn accessories, and that those devices will work together through LANs. 2009 comes to an end without this materializing, but not because the devices proved too expensive or technologically infeasible to build: Rather, consumers opted to buy single devices–smartphones–that performed all of the same functions. - Don’t penalize futurists for the disruptive effects of Black Swan events.
Example: A well-regarded historian and political scientist writes a book in the late 1990s predicting that the prosperity and global dominance America enjoyed that decade will last about another 20 years, when China will get strong enough to challenge it. Shortly after that, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a peculiarly inept U.S. administration plunge the U.S. into a series of costly military campaigns that hurt its economy, morale and global influence, and distract it from China.
Links
Roundup of interesting internet articles, October 2017 edition
- The U.S. could have beaten the U.S.S.R. into space.
https://www.popsci.com/interservice-rivalry-that-delayed-americas-first-satellite-launch?ePZmFpuivxk1tpDE.01 - Eisenhower bears part of the blame, since newly released documents show that U.S. intelligence had given him good estimates of when Sputnik would be launched, but he grossly underestimated its propaganda value. Could he have done more to speed up the launch of America’s first satellite?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/science/sputnik-launch-cia.html - Reading this makes me think that humans will never leave Earth in large numbers unless we have Star Trek levels of technology (if such a thing is even possible).
https://qz.com/1105031/should-humans-colonize-mars-or-the-moon-a-scientific-investigation/ - However, there’s nothing stopping us from getting off this berg in token numbers for, say, a Mars mission. But we’ll probably need to simulate gravity during the trip or else the astronauts will develop all kinds of health problems. (Would a mere 25% of Earth gravity do the trick?)
http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/astronaut-scott-kelly-on-the-devastating-effects-of-a-year-in-space-20170922-gyn9iw.html - Earth has five LaGrange Points, two of which would be useful parking places for satellites.
https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html#sthash.rNZf8a0K.gbpl - The LaGrange Points might also be good places to search for alien spy probes. That and other creative suggestions about how to find intelligent aliens are in the article.
http://nautil.us/blog/why-well-have-evidence-of-aliensif-they-existby-2035 - What would a planet that was MORE hospitable to organic life than Earth be like?
https://youtu.be/xrYjXOX9NLg - The War of 1812 dispelled the notion that citizen militias and civilian insta-generals were adequate for American self-defense (idealism was very strong in the early days). A professional, standing military was necessary. Had more pragmatic men been in charge in the years before 1812, Canada might be part of the U.S. today.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/5-times-the-us-navy-was-sunk-battle-22582 - Several countries are developing “Guided bullets” that have some ability to steer themselves to home in on targets. For now, the emphasis is on using them to destroy enemy land vehicles and drones at long ranges, but they’ll eventually find anti-personnel uses.
http://www.janes.com/article/75087/orbital-atk-progresses-new-medium-calibre-munition-development - Would Americans be willing to sacrifice Facebook access to save Taiwan?
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/18/the-next-war-at-sea-will-actually-be-entirely-under-the-sea/ - While the U.S. military has practically become a byword for waste and bureaucracy, and the Ford-class aircraft carrier project has been singled out for cost and timeline overruns, one analysis claims the ships actually represent an optimal balance of size, capability, survivability, and cost.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/study-bigger-aircraft-carriers-are-better-22756 - The U.S. Army has finally bought Israel’s battle-proven “TROPHY” active protection system for installation on its tanks. This should have been done years ago, but was held up by the Pentagon’s insistence on developing an American-made system that has gotten stuck in the classic rut of spiraling costs and overly ambitious capabilities requirements.
http://www.janes.com/article/74744/ausa-2017-us-army-buys-trophy-active-protection-system-for-abrams-tank-brigade - The Humvee might be more survivable than its (Bentley-priced) replacement because it has fewer electronic components, making it less vulnerable to EMP weapons.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/humvee-has-no-electronics-for-emp-to-damage.html - An improved typhoid vaccine has been created
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41724996 - An improved shingles vaccine has received a CDC recommendation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/health/cdc-shingles-vaccine.html - The FDA approved two gene therapies, one to treat blindness (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/12/557183740/fda-panel-endorses-gene-therapy-for-a-form-of-childhood-blindness) and the other to treat blood cancer. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/health/immunotherapy-cancer-kite.html)
- Contaminated cell lines might have corrupted data in tens of thousands of medical studies. Most futurists like to speculate about AI scientists discovering new things, but I think there would be tremendous value to having them re-examine and in many cases redo experiments their human counterparts did long ago.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/20/bad-cells-so-many-bad-cells - Chinese scientists have used CRISPR to make genetically engineered pigs that have less fat. This could actually reduce animal suffering and save farmers money since pigs that have less fat are, ironically, less likely to freeze to death in cold weather. FDA approval for sale in the U.S. is unlikely because Americans watch too many horror movies about mutant animals.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/10/23/559060166/crispr-bacon-chinese-scientists-create-genetically-modified-low-fat-pigs - Organic farming has very few, if any, environmental advantages over conventional farming.
https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for-the-environment - The Placebo Effect and the related Nocebo Effect are both stronger when test subjects are made to believe the sham substances they’re being exposed to cost a lot of money.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/06/expensive-shams-are-the-way-to-go-apparently - California leads the nation! Flame retardant chemicals that the California state government effectively made mandatory for the whole U.S. in 1975 cause a slew of health problems.
https://qz.com/1098161/the-us-government-is-finally-acknowledging-the-flame-retardants-in-your-furniture-and-baby-products-are-not-just-ineffective-but-also-dangerous/ - To stop accidental hot car deaths, Congress might require carmakers to build features into their vehicles that warn drivers if they’ve left their kids inside. This blog post and its links describe three possible engineering solutions, the simplest of which is an algorithm that monitors door opening and closing sequence.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/26/congress-considering-ordering-cars-to-add-about-1-iq-point-my-2003-idea/ - 350 kw charging stations that can recharge electric cars in 10-15 minutes are coming.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/automobiles/wheels/electric-cars-charging.html - Cars windshields and roofs might also someday be made of single pieces of Gorilla Glass, giving people in the front seats completely unobstructed views. More generally speaking, all kinds of objects in the future will look unchanged from today, but will have seemingly magic properties thanks to advanced materials and to sensors and computers being embedded in them.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21730128-soon-gorilla-glass-and-its-descendants-will-be-everywhere-one-worlds - A small hint of the coming advances in materials science.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/11/darn-near-flatland - Engineering improvements are in the cards as well. A supercomputer tasked with optimizing the designs of airplane wings created wings with organic-looking arrangements of beams and supports. What kinds of redesigns will machines make to everyday objects, and what kinds of obvious opportunities for improved design efficiency have we missed so far?
http://www.nature.com/news/supercomputer-redesign-of-aeroplane-wing-mirrors-bird-anatomy-1.22759 - Truck tailgating improves the fuel efficiency of the following vehicle AND the lead vehicle. When autonomous trucks become common, I’m sure they’ll use “platooning” all the time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/are-those-80000-pound-trucks-tailgating-each-other-soon-it-may-be-perfectly-normal–and-safe/2017/10/22/fbbbb0fa-a2de-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html - ‘At very small scales, fixed-wing and multirotor designs become less efficient, and insect-like drones with flapping wings may make more sense. Tiny drones could be used for virtual tourism, letting remote users “fly” around with the aid of virtual-reality goggles. In short, today’s drone designs barely scratch the surface.’
https://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21723004-pioneer-evolutionary-robotics-borrows-drone-designs-nature-dario-floreano - The “Wave Glider” unmanned drone ship harnesses solar energy and wave power to generate electricity for itself, and could stay at sea indefinitely. (I’m sure mechanical breakdowns impose a limit on endurance.) http://warisboring.com/this-weird-drone-feeds-on-hurricanes/
- If everyone will have a robot butler in the future, and if the butlers will be able to download any knowledge or skill, then does that mean they’ll be able to fix anything you own? Wouldn’t they also know how to do preventative maintenance and inspections on all your stuff? Are we headed for a future where things almost never break?
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-fixit-20171021-story.html - A new AI “was able to solve reCAPTCHAs at an accuracy rate of 66.6% …, BotDetect at 64.4%, Yahoo at 57.4% and PayPal at 57.1%.” That’s not as good as the 81%+ pass rate typical of humans, but it’s still high enough to render CAPTCHAs obsolete as a means of differentiating between humans and machines. I bet the AIs have entered the “human range” of skill in this narrow task, and can solve CAPTCHAs as well as human children, humans with poor eyesight, and humans with low intelligence.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/26/560082659/ai-model-fundamentally-cracks-captchas-scientists-say - …And here’s a domain where AIs have achieved super-superhuman levels of performance: AlphaGo defeated all the world’s best human Go players last year, and AlphaGo Zero just defeated AlphaGo in a 100-game tournament, with no losses.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609141/alphago-zero-shows-machines-can-become-superhuman-without-any-help/ - Stephen Wolfram gives an impressive talk about the future of AI (you can just feel the genius oozing out of him). It gets really interesting towards the end when he talks about how most “work” we do in rich countries today would seem like the equivalent of playing video games to people from antiquity. Will “work” in the future look like video gaming today?
https://www.level9news.com/wolfram-discussing-ai-singularity/ - A great roundup of quotes from very smart people (including Thomas Edison!) who didn’t think airplanes would work. Makes you wonder about today’s experts who “confidently” predict that machines will never achieve human intelligence, or will only do so hundreds of years from now.
https://www.xaprb.com/blog/flight-is-impossible/ - More on that.
https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ - And a good counterpoint that throws cold water on the AI hype.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609048/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-ai-predictions/ - I never thought of this, but yes, magic tricks won’t impress robots since they’ll be able to use their advanced visioning sensors to see what’s actually happening.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/04/beat-three-card-monte-with-google-glass-and-remotely-located-human-or-artificial-expert/ - The Quantified Earth
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/news/a28708/earthquakes-fiber-optic-cables/ - Long gone are the days when a brilliant person could make a profound scientific discovery working alone in his lab. Science isn’t “over,” but we’ve certainly picked all the low-hanging fruits, and new discoveries can only be made through massive investments of human talent and money. Makes you wonder whether how well Einstein could distinguish himself today.
https://qz.com/1106745/were-running-out-of-big-ideas/ - Blade Runner 2049‘s CGI Rachael looked vastly better than Rogue One‘s CGI Tarkin and Leia, possibly because the special effects team spent a whole year working on Rachael.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-secrets-behind-blade-runner-2049s-most-surprising-s-1819675592 - Fascinating questions to ponder: How many stable chemicals are possible, how many of those can useful things for us, and what percentage of the useful chemicals have we already discovered?
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/10/how-many-natural-products-are-being-found-and-how-many-are-there - Japan’s population has been shrinking since 2010, and the trend won’t stop for the foreseeable future. The good news? More space per person.
https://qz.com/1112368/abandoned-land-in-japan-will-be-the-size-of-austria-by-2040/
Review: “Prometheus”
I thought the movie Prometheus was awful, and rather than waste my time ranting about all the things I hated, I’ll just say I agree with the critics who collectively bashed the confused and scientifically flawed storyline, shallow and unlikable characters, and inexplicable/unrealistically stupid behavior of the characters. I love the first three Alien films, but everything since has been disastrous. Enough said.
Instead of spending any time writing about the flawed plot (IMDB has a summary here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/synopsis) , I’ll jump straight to an analysis of the vision of the future depicted in the film, which is set in 2093.
We will have proof that humans evolved from or were engineered by aliens. Prometheus is premised on the notion that ancient aliens seeded the Earth with life and repeatedly returned to direct the genetic and cultural evolution of humans. The theory that intelligent aliens influenced the rise of the human species is debunked by the fossil record, by comparative DNA analyses of humans and other hominids, and by human biochemistry. Together they prove we are indigenous to Earth and that we slowly evolved from simpler species. By 2093, we will not have “new evidence” that contradicts this story of our origins, though there will probably still be many uneducated and/or mentally ill people who believe in this and other conspiracy theories. It is at least slightly plausible that life began on Earth billions of years ago thanks to panspermia (i.e. – an asteroid containing simple organic matter fell to Earth), but I don’t see how we could ever prove the hypothesis since time has destroyed any evidence that may have existed.
Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. One of the main characters is “David,” an artificially intelligent robot who looks and acts like a human. Since David is modeled after humans, he is a special type of robot called an “android,” and note the literal translation of the word from Greek is “man-like” (andro-oid). I think androids like David will exist by 2093, and they will be capable of an impressive range of behaviors and functions that will make them seem very human-like. In fact, they’ll be so refined that we might not be able to tell them apart from humans at all, or only be able to do so on rare occasions (ex – some of their responses to questions might not make sense). Whether they will be truly conscious and creative like humans is a different matter.
Right: David the android.
The hyper-realistic sculptures made by artists like Ron Mueck, and advanced animatronics like the Garner Holt Productions Abraham Lincoln convince me that we could build robot bodies today that look 95% the same as real humans. Eeking out that last 5% to cross the Uncanny Valley should be easy to accomplish long before 2093. The much harder part is going to be endowing the machines with intelligence, with the ability to walk and stay balanced on two feet, and with other forms of physical deftness and coordination that will allow them to safely and efficiently work alongside humans and to do so without appearing “mechanical” in their movements.
Machines will do surgery on people, unassisted. There’s a gruesome and silly scene in Prometheus where the female main character realizes she is pregnant with a rapidly growing alien-human hybrid. She runs into the space ship’s infirmary, lies down in a coffin-sized surgery pod, and orders the machine to surgically remove the fetus. Several robotic arms bearing laser scalpels and claws do it in about a minute. I think surgery will be completely automated by 2093, along with all or almost all other types of jobs. Replacing high-paid human doctors with robot doctors that work for free will make healthcare dramatically cheaper and easier to access (with positive effects on human life expectancy and quality of life), though mass unemployment will also reduce the amount of money people have to pay for things like healthcare.
There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The Prometheus space ship is capable of faster than light space travel, and the movie’s events take place in a different star system. Our current understanding of physics informs us that there is no way to exceed the speed of light, and propelling something as big as the Prometheus to just 10% of that speed would require impractically large amounts of energy. While mass figures for the fictional ship are unavailable, let’s assume it weighed about as much as the Space Shuttle, which was 2,000,000 kg. This kinetic energy calculator indicates it would require 9 x 10^20 Joules of energy to accelerate it to 10% of the light speed (30,000,000 meters/second). That’s as much energy as the entire United States generates in nine years.
While science is by nature always open to revision, I think it’s a bad idea to base one’s vision of the future on assumptions that well-tested pillars of science like the Theory of Relativity will just go away. That said, I don’t think faster than light space travel is likely to exist in 2093–or perhaps ever–so we’ll still be confined to our solar system then.
FWIW, the space ships flying around our solar system by that year will be considerably larger and more advanced than what we have now, and it’s likely that space ships of similar size and technology (sans light speed drives) as the Prometheus will be plying interplanetary space.
There will be instantaneous gene-sequencing machines. In Prometheus, the humans find a severed alien head inside a wrecked alien structure, and they bring it back to their space ship for examination. The alien belongs to an advanced species nicknamed “The Engineers,” and the head’s features are very human-like. As part of the examination, the humans take a DNA sample from the head and put it in a gene sequencing machine, which determines it shares 99% of its genome with humans. The cost of sequencing a full human genome has plummeted at a rate exceeding Moore’s Law, and well before 2093, the service will become trivially cheap (e.g. – the same price as routine blood tests or vaccinations) and will take a few hours.
FYI, today it costs less than $5,000 to sequence a human genome, and the machines can do the work in about 24 hours. But since we can only decipher a minuscule fraction of the genetic information, it’s still not worth it for healthy people to get their genomes sequenced. Within 20 years, the price will get low enough and the medical utility will get high enough to change that.
Paper-thin, ultra-high-res display screens will be in common use. Computer monitors and TV’s with these qualities are shown throughout the film. Many of them are also integrated into translucent glass, so clear windows can also serve as touchscreens. This will be a very old, mature technology by 2093.
Wall-sized display monitors will be common. Early in Prometheus, there’s a scene where David is watching a film on a TV screen that covers an entire wall of a room in the space ship. This should be very old technology by 2093, and given current trends, floor-to-ceiling TVs will become available to average-income Americans in the 2030s. Since standard-sized doorways are too small to fit enormous TVs through them, the TVs will also need to be paper-thin and rollable into tubes, or capable of being assembled from a grid of many smaller pieces.
Suspended animation pods will exist. During the multi-year space journey from Earth to the alien planet where the film’s events happen, the human crew members are kept in a state of suspended animation in coffin-sized pods. The mechanism through which their physiological functions are suspended (i.e. – Deep cold? Preservative fluids injected into their bodies? Something else?) is never made clear, but one crew member is shown to be dreaming in her pod, indicating that her brain is still active, and by necessity, her metabolism (even if it is dramatically slowed). That being the case, the “hypersleep” depicted in Prometheus is fundamentally different from today’s human preservation methods, which involve freezing dead people whose biochemical and brain activity have ceased in liquid nitrogen.
Frankly, I can’t say whether suspended animation will exist in 2093 because there isn’t any trendline for the technology like Moore’s Law that I can put on a graph and extrapolate. The best I can do is to note that our ability to preserve human organs meant for transplantation is improving as time passes, we do not appear to be close to the limit of what is scientifically possible, credible scientists have proposed ways to improve the relevant technologies, and whole-body human cryopreservation and revival is theoretically possible.
Machines will be able to read human thoughts and create digital representations of those thoughts that other people can watch. At the start of the movie, the Prometheus is still en route to the alien planet, all of the humans are in cryosleep pods, and David the android is the only crew member awake. During the montage that shows how he spends his time as the ship’s custodian, he takes a moment to check on the status of a female member of the crew. David puts a virtual reality visioning device on his face, and through it he is able to see a dream that the person is having at that moment, as if he were watching live-action film footage. I think this technology will exist by 2093, but its capabilities will be more limited than shown in the film.
Human thought is not a magical phenomenon; it happens thanks to biochemical and bioelectric events happening inside of our brains. Currently, we don’t understand the linkages between specific patterns of brain activity and specific thoughts, and our technologies for monitoring brain activity are coarse, but there’s no reason to assume both won’t improve until we have machines that can decipher thoughts from brain activity. To quote Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen, “An adult brain is a finite thing, so its basic workings can ultimately be known through sustained human effort.”
Unlike faster than light space travel, mind reading machines don’t violate any laws of physics, nor is there reason to believe the machines would require impractically large amounts of energy. In fact, crude versions of the technology have already been built in labs using fMRI machines and brain implants. In all cases, the machines first recorded the participants’ brain activity during training sessions where the humans were made to do scripted physical or mental tasks. The machines learned which patterns of brain activity correlated with which human thoughts or physical actions, enabling them to do things like decipher simple sentences the humans were thinking of with high accuracy. In other lab experiments of this nature, physically disabled people were able to command robot arms to move around and grab things by thought alone.
However, I think the accuracy of mind reading machines will be hampered by the fundamentally messy, plastic nature of the human mind. Scientists commonly refer to the human brain as an example of “wetware” due to its fusion of its hardware and software, and to its ever-shifting network of internal connections. As a result, if I close my eyes and try to envision an apple, there will be a discrete pattern of brain activity. If I do this again in a few minutes, the activity pattern will be slightly different. Contrast this with a computer, where the image of an apple exists as a discrete software file that never changes. Because of this, even if a brain scanning machine had perfect, real-time information about all brain activity, its interpretation of what the activity meant would always have some margin of error.
Returning to the movie’s specific depiction of mind reading technology, let me add that if we could see the same mental images that a person sees while dreaming, I doubt they would look sharp or well-detailed, or that the sequence of events would follow a logical order for more than a few seconds before the dream transformed into something different. It would be like watching a fuzzy, low-resolution art film comprised of disjointed images and sounds, occasionally peaking in intensity and coherence enough for you to discern something of meaning, before dissolving into the equivalent of human brain “static.” So while it’s plausible that, in 2093, you could use machines to read someone else’s thoughts, I think the output you would see would be much less accurate and less detailed than it was in Prometheus.
There will be small, flying drones that can do many things autonomously, like mapping places and finding organic life. After landing on the alien planet, the crew of the Prometheus travels overland to a mysterious alien structure and goes inside. The interior is a long series of dark, twisting corridors and strange rooms. To speed up their exploration, one crewman releases two volleyball-sized flying drones, which zip down the corridors while beaming red, contorting lasers at everything. As they float along, the drones transmit live data back to the Prometheus that is compiled to build a 3D volumetric map of the alien structure’s interior spaces.
Simpler examples of this technology already exist and are used for mapping, farming and forestry (one of many commercial examples is “Drone Deploy” https://youtu.be/SATijfXnshg; another is “Elios,” which is enmeshed in a spherical cage as protection against collisions in tight spaces). Sensor miniaturization, better motors and batteries, better AI, and cost reductions to every type of technology will allow us to build scanning drones that are almost identical to those in the movie decades before 2093. The only parts of the movie’s depiction I disagree with are 1) the use of red lasers for sensing (passive sensors and LIDAR beams that are invisible to human eyes are likelier) and 2) the use of some type of magical antigravity technology to fly (recognizable means of propulsion like spinning rotors and directed jets of exhaust will probably still be in use, though they will be smaller but more powerful thanks to improved technology). Small, cheap, highly versatile flying drones will have enormous implications for mass surveillance, espionage, environmental monitoring, and warfare.
There will be 3D volumetric displays. The bridge of the Prometheus has a large table that can project detailed, 3D volumetric images above it. The crew uses it to view an architectural diagram of the alien structure they find on the planet. Crude versions of this technology already exist, and can make simple images that float in midair by focusing laser beams on discrete points in space called “voxels” (volumetric pixels) heating them to such high temperatures that they turn the air into glowing plasma. If enough voxels are simultaneously illuminated, 3D objects can be constructed in the same way that pixels on a digital watch face can arrange into numbers if lit up in the right sequence.
Today’s volumetric displays produce ozone gas and excessive noise thanks to air ionization, but it’s plausible the problems could be solved or at least greatly reduced by 2093. For certain applications, the displays would be very useful, though I think holographic displays (i.e. – a flat screen TV doesn’t make voxels but uses other techniques to fool your eye into thinking its images are popping out of the screen) and virtual reality glasses will fulfill the same niche, possibly at lower cost. Intelligent machines might also be so advanced that they won’t need to look at volumetric displays to grasp spatial relationships as humans have to.
Some disabled people and old people will use powered exoskeletons instead of wheelchairs. The space mission depicted in the film is funded by an elderly tech tycoon named “Peter Weyland.” Unbeknownst to most of the crew, he secretly embarked with them from Earth, and is sleeping in a suspended animation pod in a locked room while the first 3/4 of the film’s events unfold. At that point, David awakens him, and it is revealed to the surviving crewmen that Weyland supported the mission in the hopes that the aliens would give him a cure for his own mortality. They get into their space suits for a final trip to the alien structure, and Weyland’s outfit includes a light, powered exoskeleton for his lower body, which allows him to walk much faster than he normally could given his age.
Exoskeletons for the disabled and the elderly already exist, a recent example being the “Phoenix” unit made by the “suitX” company. Unfortunately, Phoenix is $40,000 (a typical electric wheelchair is only $2,000) and requires a somewhat heavy battery backpack. I suspect that Phoenix’ high cost is due to patents and R&D costs being amortized over a small production run, and that the physical materials the suits are made of are not expensive or exotic. Prices for Phoenix-like exoskeletons will only decline as relevant patents expire, copycats arise, and batteries get lighter and cheaper. It’s hard to see how these kinds of exoskeletons won’t be ubiquitous among mobility-impaired people by 2093 (as electric wheelchairs are today), if not decades before.
That being said, I don’t think they’ll make electric wheelchairs completely obsolete because some disabled and old people will find it too physically taxing to stand upright, even if supported by a prosthesis. Some users might also find it too time-consuming to put on and take off exoskeletons each day (note the large number of straps in the photo below).
There will be lots of 100+ year old people. Piggybacking off the last point, Mr. Weyland is 103 years old, though since he spent the space journey in suspended animation, his aging process was probably slowed down, making his “biological age” slightly lower than his chronological age. Though living 100 years has a kind of mythic aura, it’s actually only a little higher than the current life expectancy in rich countries, and, making conservative assumptions about future improvements to healthcare, living to 100 will probably be common in 2093 (doing the math, you could someday be in this group).
Today, a wealthy white male who is diligent about his diet and exercise (as Weyland probably had been throughout his life) can expect to live to about 90. In fact, that’s a low estimate since it assumes the state of medical technology will stay fixed at 2017 levels for his entire life. In reality, we’re certain to develop new medicines, prostheses, and therapies that extend lifespan farther between now and 2093. A 10 year bump to average life expectancy in the next 76 years–which would put Weyland over the century mark–is entirely possible, and note that U.S. life expectancy actually grew more than that in the 76 years preceding 2017, so there’s recent historical precedent for lifespan increases of this magnitude.
In 2093, “100 will be the new 80,” and indefinite extensions to human lifespan might even be on the horizon.
What was missing from the movie’s depiction of 2093:
- The fusion of man and machine. Where were the Google glasses? Google contact lenses? Google eye implants? Google brain implants? Go-Go Gadget Legs? (Bionic limbs) By 2093, it will be common for humans to have wearable and body-implanted advanced technologies.
- Not enough automation and robots on the space ship. Computers and machines will doing way more of the work, reducing the need for resource-hogging humans.
Links
- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/health/new-way-to-ensure-accuracy-of-dna-tests-us-announces.html
- Holovect volumetric display: https://youtu.be/kPW7ffUr81g
- Fairy Light volumetric display: https://youtu.be/AoWi10YVmfE
- https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-predicts-what-youre-thinking/
- http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/01/health/freezing-organ-donation-nanoparticle-warming-study/index.html
- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546276/this-40000-robotic-exoskeleton-lets-the-paralyzed-walk/
- http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/25/health/centenarians-increase/index.html
Roundup of interesting internet articles, September 2017 edition
Sorry about my long absence, but I promise more blog entries are coming. In the meantime…
- High-tech solutions to global poverty still aren’t substitutes for basic infrastructure, good government, property rights, and cultures of trust. Here’s one recent article about it and two older ones:
https://qz.com/1090693/zipline-drones-in-africa-like-rwanda-and-tanzania-have-an-opportunity-cost/
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-08-30/debunking-microenergy
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/08/bot-we-trust - GE is working on robots the sizes of small animals and insects that can crawl around inside jet turbines for inspections, and maybe for repairs as well in the future. Are we headed for a future where things never break down?
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21729737-robotic-mechanics-can-go-anywhere-tiny-robots-will-inspect-and-fix-jet-engines - ‘Professor Simon Blackmore, head of engineering, argues that an even bigger benefit could be in providing fleets of small, light robots, perhaps aided by drones, to replace vast and heavy tractors that plough the land mainly to undo the damage done by soil compaction caused by . . . vast and heavy tractors. Robot tractors could be smaller mainly because they don’t have to justify the wages of a driver, and they could work all night, and in co-ordinated platoons.’
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/robot-farm-machinery/ - If machines take all of our jobs and do them better and faster than we can, then it could portend a world where billions of unemployed humans spend their days in hyperrealistic virtual reality games engineered by machines.
https://youtu.be/jOOB9Q1Nj8Y
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/03/economist-explains-24 - Many of the action scenes in the superhero movie Logan were done using incredibly lifelike CGI simulacra of the actors. Will actors someday make money by licensing the use of their digital likenesses in movies instead of physically starring in them?
https://youtu.be/TxWu5Brx_As - I definitely agree with this. I think Elon Musk’s statements about AI and other things are part of a deliberate strategy to keep the public’s attention focused on him. As a businessman dependent upon the faith of his investors to keep his enterprises afloat, he needs to constantly stay in the spotlight and to project an image of being smarter than everyone else to keep the dollars flowing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/google-s-ai-boss-blasts-musk-s-scare-tactics-on-machine-takeover - Per my previous blog entry, being able to quickly replace 100,000 cars destroyed by a hurricane is a respectable feat, but it would be better to find a way to keep the 100,000 cars from being destroyed at all.
http://www.npr.org/2017/09/25/553475557/rental-firms-disaster-readiness-may-help-usher-the-age-of-self-driving-cars - Computers make weird mistakes in some object recognition tasks, but so do humans.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/human-vs-deep-neural-network-performance-in-object-recognition - ‘Distributed ledgers are useful technology, just like banks. As they become a larger part of finance, the temptation to abuse them will be just as great. History instructs that no governance is perfect, and humans are reliably awful.’
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/09/not-so-novel - Our cells are full of organic nanomachines which support our most basic life functions, and since Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture on the subject, it has been recognized that this was proof of concept that fully synthetic nanomachines were also feasible. Yet only recently have scientists managed to build crude but functional nanomachines in labs.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/25/building-our-own-molecular-machines - Don’t get your hopes up about Amazon flying drone package delivery: there are legal liability issues with packages accidentally dropping on people’s heads, and major noise issues. Flying cars would be handicapped by the same problems. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of room for improving the efficiency of ground transit with technology.
https://qz.com/1085214/google-moonshot-lab-cofounder-sebastian-thrun-talks-flying-cars-automated-teaching-and-an-ai-arms-race-with-china/ - A useful quote to remember when contemplating flying cars: ‘Flying machines are inherently more complicated to operate than ground vehicles, and the consequences of error or malfunction are much greater—because of gravity.’
https://warisboring.com/u-s-marines-portable-helicopters-were-too-crazy-to-survive/ - And in typical form, McKinsey beats this issue to death: ‘Drones require good weather and are now limited to loads of 7.5 kilograms or less and a route of 15 to 20 kilometers. Infrastructure that will support commercial delivery is lacking, and concerns about theft, hacking, crashes, and privacy worry consumers. Finally, drones need a minimum of about two square meters to land, more than many urban households can offer.’
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability-and-resource-productivity/our-insights/urban-commercial-transport-and-the-future-of-mobility - Would aliens 10,000 more advanced than humans have electric motors that are any better than ours? Would they have better mousetraps as well?
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21728888-better-motors-go-better-batteries-electric-motors-improve-more-things - Seeing as how so many people vote on the basis of falsehoods, prejudice, or party affiliation and commonly vote against their own self-interests without realizing it, might democracy benefit if machines tried to reason with voters one-on-one before elections?
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40860937 - Disreputable peer-reviewed scientific journals are an even bigger problem than thought. Some of the junk papers are written by NIH-funded scientists and by scientists working at prestigious universities like Harvard.
http://www.nature.com/news/stop-this-waste-of-people-animals-and-money-1.22554 - Anytime you’re down on the U.S. Big Pharma industry, consider the massive fraud that exists within China’s equivalent. (Russia is just as bad.)
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-fakes-09272016141438.html - Your month of birth determines a surprising amount about your academic performance, all the way to college.
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/oldest-kids-class-do-better-even-university-u-t-study - Birth month also affects your odds of becoming an athlete, thanks to the same cutoff date effect.
http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/18891749 - An important counterpoint to the growing anti-Vaxx movement is this: Teen vaccination rates for HPV are now over 50% and rising. The vaccine actually prevents several types of cancer.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/health/hpv-vaccine-teenagers.html - Chinese scientists have edited the genomes of human embryos to fix single-point DNA mutations (yes, this appeared in a peer-reviewed journal).
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41386849 - One more experiment finished showing that humans could bear the psychological stresses of a years-long Mars mission. Now about that space radiation problem…
https://www.space.com/38180-hi-seas-8-month-mars-simulation-ends.html - Two years ago, Russia and Turkey were at each other’s throats over the latter’s shootdown of the former’s attack plane, and there was talk of all NATO being dragged into war over it. Recently, Turkey turned it back on the the alliance to buy an advanced antiaircraft system from Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/europe/turkey-russia-missile-deal.html - The U.S. Army’s first upgraded Stryker rolled off the assembly line.
http://www.janes.com/article/74356/first-us-army-upgraded-stryker-dvh-rolls-through-production
Hurricane Harvey and Asimov’s Laws of Robotics
Texas is still tallying up the damage Hurricane Harvey inflicted on it, but it’s already clear that hundreds of thousands of vehicles were destroyed–overwhelmingly by flooding.
‘”We do know that approximately 100,000 claims have come in” as of Thursday, said Matt Stillwell, manager of governmental and regulatory communications at the Insurance Council of Texas, a trade association. He said the number was expected to climb as high as 500,000.
“It is looking to be a huge impact on the auto insurance market,” he said.
While homeowners’ insurance policies almost always exclude flood damage, comprehensive auto policies do cover flooding. The typical household in Houston has two cars, and Mayor Sylvester Turner urged residents to “hunker down” as Hurricane Harvey made landfall, hoping to avoid a replay of the tie-ups and crashes that killed about 100 people fleeing Hurricane Rita in 2005.
That means few people moved their cars out of harm’s way before the flooding started. Texas drivers are not required to have comprehensive auto insurance — the type that covers flood and other types of damage. People holding only the legally required insurance — liability coverage for damage done to other people’s cars — will not have valid claims, Mr. Stillwell said.’ SOURCE
(FYI, floodwaters are bad for cars because they destroy their computers and wiring and fill their cabins with mold. In general, once the water level rises halfway to a car’s roof, it’s totaled.)
This loss is going to cost car insurance companies billions of dollars in payouts, and since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, it will be paid for by raising everyone’s insurance premiums. Alternatively, it’s also possible that the costs of periodic disasters like Harvey are already baked into car insurance rates, so we’ve already paid for it. Either way, the destruction of so many vehicles hurts millions of people who carry car insurance.
I imagine that most of the owners of Harvey-flooded cars just didn’t realize that their vehicles were parked in places that would flood (you never know until it happens). By the time they saw what was happening, the water level might have been too high to safely walk out to the car and move it to higher ground. Surely there were also cases where owners had parked their cars out of view of their homes, leaving them completely unaware that their cars were flooding. Some people probably didn’t realize flooding could destroy their cars at all.
All that being the case, it occurred to me that autonomous cars programmed with something like “Asimov’s Third Law of Robotics” could have mitigated much of the economic loss.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Put simply, an autonomous car could protect its own existence from floods by moving to higher ground, such as a hill or multi-level parking garage. Maybe FEMA would broadcast a signal to all cars in an area about to get hit by a hurricane to avoid low-lying areas, or maybe the cars would constantly watch their surroundings even when parked and vacant, and be able to recognize rising floodwaters and move (or to recognize other threats like vandals and burglars).
That sounds great until you think about how many humans would be abruptly deprived of personal transportation during a life-threatening natural disaster. Even if this didn’t lead to any loss of life (e.g. – everyone just waits in their living rooms until the waters recede and the cars come back), I think the feeling of helplessness and anxiety it would engender would be unacceptable. Moreover, according to Asimov’s Second Law, if an autonomous car’s owner has parked it in his driveway and left, doesn’t that count as a standing order from a human to stay in that location until told otherwise?
The solution is for autonomous cars to notify their owners of the impending flood risk and to ask for permission to move to safe ground. A tidy solution, right? I think it’s superior to our current way of doing things, but it opens another can of worms for any person who answers “No.” If you do that, force your car to stay parked in your driveway, and a flood destroys it, will your insurance company hold you liable? Should you be?
Let me pose another answer: Car insurance companies should investigate every such case the same way they investigate accident claims today. A representative would go to the scene to interview the car owner, to hear their side of the story, and to gather evidence. If it became clear that the owner’s poor judgement contributed to the loss of the vehicle, they would be held responsible. Claims adjusters would probably have a lot of time for this sort of thing since autonomous cars would make routine car accidents so much rarer.
Finishing up, how do we deal with Asimov’s First Law during natural disasters? Let’s assume a scenario even more distant in the future, where the average person not only has an autonomous car, but a personal assistant AI, robot butler, and other technologies that together constantly keep track of his location and what’s going on around him, and that are smart enough to talk to him. The machines would serve as the untiring voice of reason, and I think they’d persuade a greater percentage of people to leave town before something like a Hurricane Harvey hit (autonomous cars also won’t get in traffic jams, which will facilitate mass evacuations), and they’d coach the people who chose to remain into preparing better and not taking dangerous risks as the disaster unfolded.
The imperative to protect human life poses interesting questions when we consider situations where the humans refuse to listen to reason and endanger themselves. Consider the stubborn old man with mild dementia who ignores the mandatory evacuation order. Will his machines report him to the police to protect him even if it means possible imprisonment? What if there’s no mandatory evacuation order, but the old man’s poor health and the low-lying location of his house combine to create a high likelihood of death? After so many hours of arguing, will his mechanical butler just hog-tie him, toss him in the autonomous car and send him off for a little vacation? Or will the arguing just continue up until the moment the old man’s mouth is gurgling with floodwater and he goes under? I guess at least the butler would have a record of it all to show he did the best job he could.
It’s clear that more intelligent technologies at least have the potential to save human lives, to empower people, and to mitigate property damage and all forms of waste, but human stupidity and our desire for autonomy will remain powerful countervailing forces for the foreseeable future. One step at a time.
Roundup of interesting internet articles, August 2017 edition
- In a parallel universe, it’s still the 1990s and there was a Moore’s Law for the number of random pipes and hoses strewn across the landscape.
http://www.boredpanda.com/scifi-girl-robot-traveling-artbook-simon-stalenhag/ - China has rolled out (pun intended) a copy of the U.S. Stryker armored vehicle
http://www.janes.com/article/73292/norinco-rolls-out-vp10-8×8-vehicle-variants - Here’s a needlessly long-winded piece about the long, long history of Christian theologians, cult leaders and even Popes wrongly predicting Biblical Doomsday.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/25/yearning-for-the-end-of-the-world - A survey of 150 people shows about 1/3 of them could hand-draw common corporate logos (for companies like Burger King and Starbucks) from memory, with disturbing accuracy. (I estimate it takes 100 – 200 repetitions of the same commercial before I become cognizant of whatever is being advertised).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4813514/Only-16-people-correctly-recall-famous-logos.html - Britain is repainting its Challenger tanks with a camouflage scheme similar to what it had for its West Berlin-based tank unit in 1982. What’s old is new, and visual concealment methods don’t seem to have improved in 35 years.
https://warisboring.com/new-urban-camo-wont-save-british-tanks/ - Medical micromachines were successfully used on lab rats to deliver antibiotic loads. I don’t understand why medical nanomachines get all the attention and hype when micromachines are more technically plausible and could do many of the same things.
http://bigthink.com/design-for-good/for-the-first-time-tiny-robots-treat-infection-in-a-living-organism - An analysis of the accuracy of Gartner Hype Cycles from 2000 to 2016 is an informative catalog of failures.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-cycles-michael-mullany - Here’s an outstanding rebuttal to Kevin Kelly’s recent “Myth of a Superhuman AI” article. I’ve never heard of the author before, his blog only has three entries, but he’s written a very thorough and convincing treatise, all the more impressive since he didn’t write it in his native language (he’s Finnish).
https://hypermagicalultraomnipotence.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/there-are-no-free-lunches-but-organic-lunches-are-super-expensive-why-the-tradeoffs-constraining-human-cognition-do-not-limit-artificial-superintelligences/ - Geneticists have uncovered the chemical steps through which magic mushrooms produce their hallucinogenic agent, psilocybin. Large scale industrial production of it could be possible, because the world badly needs more drugs.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/web/2017/08/Magic-mushroomenzyme-mystery-solved.html - A reality check for lab grown meat.
http://gizmodo.com/behind-the-hype-of-lab-grown-meat-1797383294 - A video that clearly and simply describes the operation of Mazda’s new, high-efficiency gas engine, which operates like a diesel part of the time.
https://youtu.be/9KhzMGbQXmY - Scientists and inventors are dispensable, but great artists, writers and musicians are not. (A somewhat humbling thing to remember when debating the usefulness of a STEM vs. humanities education.)
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/tim-harford-review/#.WX-QCkibyHc.facebook
Dr. George Wald shows that having a Nobel Prize doesn’t mean you know everything
This little gem comes from the 1979 Biblical Doomsday “documentary” The Late, Great Planet Earth:
‘I am one of those scientists who finds it hard to see how the human race is to bring itself and bring the human enterprise much past the year 2000.’
That dire prediction was made by famed scientist Dr. George Wald, who was by all accounts a brilliant man who won a Nobel Prize for his work.
The phrase “much past” makes Wald’s dooms-date ambiguous, though I consider it a failed prediction at this point, since we’re 17 years into new century without civilization collapsing, and without any evidence it’s about to. To the contrary, since Wald’s quoted statement, we’ve managed to add three billion more humans to the planet while also sharply reducing global rates of malnourishment and absolute poverty. Across a wide variety of metrics, the human race has grown larger, healthier, richer, and less violent, and there are no signs the trends will abate anytime soon.
Making accurate future predictions is always fraught with uncertainty, but it becomes especially conjectural when people start making predictions about things outside of their areas of expertise. Wald’s mastery of biochemistry left him with no better a grasp of the human race’s trajectory than an average person, and his inclusion in this religious doomsday documentary is an example of the “Appeal to Authority” logical fallacy, in which a person’s credentials are erroneously substituted for reasoned and fact-based argumentation.
In my recent blog entry about Richard Branson, I pointed out that predictions should not be trusted if the person making them stands to tangibly benefit if other people believe them, and to that I’ll add that predictions should not be trusted if the person making them doesn’t have relevant expertise. Moreover, name-dropping and credential-dropping should never substitute for independently verifiable facts and transparent methodologies.
UPDATE: (8/28/2017) Coincidentally, I just came across the article, “A Nobel Doesn’t Make You an Expert: Lessons in Science and Spin.” The author (a former New York Times science editor) uses the example of James Watson, who won a Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, to show that the opinions and predictions of “experts” are often of little value when they pertain to subjects outside their areas of expertise. In 1998, Dr. Watson erroneously predicted that cancer would be cured within two years. The author also sets forth a few tips for evaluating predictions from “experts,” which partly overlap with my own and which I’ll summarize here:
- Ensure that the person’s education and professional credentials are relevant. A useful measure of a scientist’s level of expertise is the quantity and quality of the peer-reviewed papers they have produced.
- Be suspicious when experts have conflicts of interest that may bias their opinions and predictions.
- Remember that experts whose theories fall far outside the scientific mainstream are usually (but not always) wrong.
- Be very suspicious of scientists and other experts who feel aggrieved or persecuted by the mainstream of their professions. If an expert with an outlier theory also believes there is a conspiracy against him or her, it should raise a red flag in your mind.
Links:
https://undark.org/article/cornelia-dean-making-sense-of-science/
Richard Branson still isn’t in space
From December 2013:
Sometime in 2014, entrepreneur Richard Branson and his two children aim to be on the first commercial flight of SpaceShip Two, Virgin Galatic’s rocket for propelling eight people 100 kilometers above the Earth. (SOURCE)
Sadly, SpaceShip Two broke up during a test flight in October 2014, killing one of its pilots. A replacement was constructed, and as of August 2017, it is undergoing sub-orbital test flights, but Branson and his children haven’t used it or any other craft to go into space (in fact, Virgin Galactic has only had three manned spaceflights in its history, all taking place in 2004). Yet hope springs eternal, and there’s a new deadline:
One area Branson has been less keen on speaking out on recently has been his project to take people into space. Virgin Galactic, as the fledgling business is known, has been beset by technical and other difficulties, not least the fatal crash of its SpaceShipTwo in California’s Mojave Desert in October 2014.
Despite the idea proving popular with future travellers – some 500 potential customers have spent $250,000 on reserving their spot on one of its trips– it is perhaps the one business he has found the hardest to get off the ground.
After the crash, Branson said his dream of space travel may have ended. But Galactic, under boss and former NASA chief of staff George Whitesides, has regrouped, redoubled its focus on safety, and appears to be making progress.
…“The test programme is going really well, and as long as we’ve got our brave test pilots pushing it to the limit we think that after whatever it is, 12 years of hard work, we’re nearly there.”
When exactly will he be nearly there? After all, Branson himself – and some of his family – have committed to being on the first flight.
“Well we stopped giving dates,” he confesses. “But I think I’d be very disappointed if we’re not into space with a test flight by the end of the year [2017] and I’m not into space myself next year [2018] and the progamme isn’t well underway by the end of next year.” (SOURCE)
This underscores the need to always be skeptical of future predictions, even if they come from people who have been enjoying a lot of recent success and who appear to know what they’re talking about. Skepticism is doubly warranted when the predictions are self-serving and possibly designed to boost interest and investment in the person’s business ventures (i.e. – inflate the stock price of the predictor’s company, of which he is the majority shareholder). On that note, I’m a fan of Elon Musk, but I fear he might be dangerously over-reliant on self-generated hype to keep his portfolio of businesses going. At some point, his investors will lose faith in him without bona fide profits.
Links
https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/21/5830526/spaceshipone-commercial-space-flight-ten-year-anniversary
Review: “Killzone” (the PS2 game)
[Below is a review of the video game “Killzone,” which I wrote while in college, over ten years ago. While I admit it’s a little silly to hold a video game to such scrutiny, my conclusions are still valid, and this piece is significant because it was my first attempt to put part of my own future vision in writing, even if it is a critique of someone else’s vision.
This repost will be the first in a recurring series of film and video game “Reviews” that I’ll be doing to assess the feasibility of whatever futuristic elements they depict.
I’ve edited this Killzone review a little for clarity and brevity. ]
A couple days ago I finally finished the game “Killzone” for PS2, and I have some thoughts about it. First, a bit of background: “Killzone” takes place at some unspecified point in the distant future when mankind has mastered interstellar space travel and colonized two new planets, Vekta and Helghan. Vekta looks identical to Earth, while Helghan is barren and polluted.
Over the generations, the humans of Helghan–known as the Helghast–were genetically mutated by their harsh environment to the point of being barely-human freaks. The Helghast are also warlike and have a tradition of military leadership. At the start of the game, the cool Intro video shows the Helghast army invade Vekta by surprise. While the motivations for this aren’t clearly stated, after reading the “Killzone” booklet I believe it was probably done to obtain resources that Helghan lacks.
This is where you, the player, come in. You play a soldier named “Templar,” serving in Vekta’s ground forces (called the “ISA”). As the game progresses, three other character join your team: Luger is the woman, Rico is the heavy weapons guy and Hakha is the Helghast/human “hybrid.” Among them, Templar is the natural leader and all-around balanced fighter while the other three have specific combat specialties. By the midpoint of the game, you have the option of playing as any character you wish at each level. I thought this was a pretty cool touch because each character has unique abilities and weapons that make the levels a different experience depending on whom you choose. Anyway, you blow away a bunch of Helghast and save the planet–from the first invasion wave.
Along with the the selectable player option, I also liked how “Killzone” was neither too short (“Max Payne 2”) nor too long (“Halo 2”). However, there were some areas needing serious improvement. The gameplay could be awkward: You can’t jump period, making it impossible for your big, soldier self to clear small obstacles like a Jersey Wall; grenades are almost impossible to aim and take about 10 seconds to throw and detonate; climbing ladders is an ordeal; and aiming the sniper rifle gives new definition to the word “tedious.” While the A.I. is an O.K. challenge, the enemies aren’t varied enough and there are only like three different types of Helghast soldiers. Your fellow A.I. squad mates are of inconsistent help during gameplay. The game’s story was also pretty boring. Overall, “Killzone” is playable but falls short of what it could have been.
I also noticed some crude demographic stereotypes in the game. On your team, for instance, the leader is Templar: the handsome younger white guy. Luger, being a woman, is weaker in terms of health and physical strength and has to rely on her sniper pistol and sneaking skills as she runs around in her skin tight black jumpsuit killing bad guys. Rico, being the only “colored” person on the team (he looks Latino), is big, tough, dumb, vulgar, and slow, and fittingly starts each mission with a big machinegun/rocket launcher while his teammates have smaller, more precise weapons. Hakha’s bald head and pale skin cast him as the stereotypical older white man, and he predictably uses received pronunciation, quotes passages from literature to the rest of the team, and knows the most about computer and electronics systems.
“Killzone” also presents an extremely incongruous vision of the future. Let’s begin: We are told at the beginning of the game that humans have inhabited Helghan and Vekta for several generations, which I’ll very conservatively assume means “50 years.” Thus, 50 years before the start of “Killzone,” mankind had already 1) mastered faster than light space travel and 2) built spacecraft cheaply enough to allow mass numbers of people to be transported to Vekta and Helghan. The requisite scientific breakthroughs for these two technological advancements will almost certainly not arrive before the middle of the 21st century, and in fact may prove totally elusive. Considering the facts and estimates in this paragraph, we are left to conclude that “Killzone,” at the very earliest, takes place 100 years in the future–2106 A.D.
Problematically, the world of “Killzone” ignores all of the other scientific breakthroughs and new technologies that will also be made by 2106. For instance, all of the weapons used in the game are simply 20th-century firearms, but with cool-looking exteriors that make them look advanced when in fact they’re not. By 100 years from now, small arms will certainly be much more advanced. I wouldn’t be surprised if directed energy weapons or EMP-powered railguns had totally superseded firearms. I also expect small arms to come with built-in sensors, computers and actuators that allow the guns to sense which target their shooter wanted to hit, and to automatically aim themselves at it. All you would have to do is aim at someone’s body, pull the trigger, and the gun would make sure the bullet went directly through the person’s brain or heart. Not just that, but through the part of the organ that caused the most damage and the most immediate incapacitation. The gun’s computer would also automatically shuffle between different types of ammunition to inflict maximum damage on the target and could also automatically adjust the velocity of the projectile. As a result, the small arms of 2106 will require almost no training to be used effectively. And if they incorporated nanotechnology, future guns might be able to make their own bullets and conduct self-repairs and maintenance, meaning the weapons would be self-cleaning and would last almost forever.
But the more fundamental problem with “Killzone” is that humans will be obsolete on the battlefield by 2106. Think about it. Even the most hardcore, well-armed, futuristic supersoldier still needs hours a day to eat, sleep and take care of other personal needs. He or she still feels pain, questions orders, makes mistakes, and is subject to irrational and unpredictable emotions. A machine, on the other hand, would suffer from none of these faults. Machines are also expendable whereas humans are not, meaning that it would be easier politically to wage a war if a nation’s casualties were solely machines. A human still needs at least 16 years of growth and development to be physically and mentally able to handle the demands of combat, followed by months or even years of specialized military training. A combat machine could be built in an afternoon and then programmed with its military training in a few minutes. Clearly the future of warfare belongs to machines. By 2106, fighting machines will make war a cruelly unfair environment for human beings, where only the most desperate or foolhardy members of our species will dare set foot. Without direct human participation, the battlefield will become totally devoid of all the camaraderie, honor and bravery that stand today as the few positive attributes of war, and warfare will complete its evolution towards becoming a totally cold and anonymous endeavor.
It probably looks petty for me to spend so much effort lambasting “Killzone” because it’s just a video game. That is certainly true, but the fact remains that games like “Killzone” embody and reinforce the ill-informed visions of the future held by most people, and I believe that critiquing the game is the most immediate way I can help people examine their own ideas. I think few people realize how unrealistically our future is portrayed in popular culture. Things like “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and “Halo 1 & 2” have created the preposterous misconception that the universe is filled with humanoid, alien intelligent life forms that are all +/- 50 years our same level of technology. Considering 1) the age of the Universe (13.5 billion years old), 2) the fact that the planets are oldest at its center of the Universe and youngest at its fringes thanks to the Big Bang, 3) the fact that 3.5 billion years separated the appearance of the first primitive bacteria to the evolution of intelligent life on Earth, and 4) that chance that cosmic events have seriously altered the pace of Earthly evolution, we can conclude that the Universe is certainly populated with intelligent species of vastly different levels of technology.
To have human space explorers discover an intelligent alien species close to our level of technology is akin to having you randomly pick a name out of a three-inch thick phone directory and finding out that that person shares your same year, date, hour, minute, and second of birth. It is overwhelmingly likely that you will instead randomly pick someone who is different from you, and similarly, it is overwhelmingly likely that alien civilizations we encounter will be vastly older or younger than we are and thus either vastly stronger or weaker than we. So this recurring sci-fi trope where humans are fighting future space wars with aliens is ludicrous: any war with an alien species is certain to be very lopsided in favor of one side, and hence very short. This is actually where “Killzone” gets a bit of credit, since the plot has humans from different planets fighting one another. Sadly, I can see that as realistic even in 2106.
I also take issue with “Killzone” and most other sci-fi portraying the racial makeup of our descendants as being essentially the same as it is in contemporary America: The majority are white people, with smaller, roughly equally sized minorities of blacks, Asians and Hispanics. NO. Eighty percent of the current world population is nonwhite, and in the future, once Third World areas have closed the economic and technology gap with the West, we will see the world’s true racial character more vividly in everyday life. Multiracial people will also be much more common.
Another demographic shift very rarely portrayed in future sci-fi is the graying of the population. Average human lifespans have been increasing steadily for more than 100 years, and there is no reason to expect this trend to abate. By 2106, expect average people to be living to 120, if not indefinitely. Moreover, they will be stay active much longer thanks to better medical technologies. The means to slow, halt and reverse the effects of age will probably be achieved. “Killzone,” like all other Sci-Fi depictions of the future, fails to recognize the societal implications of these new technologies. Older people will look and feel DECADES younger than they are chronologically.