Review: “Blade Runner”

Plot:

In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.

Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.

An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.

A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.

Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.

By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.

Analysis:

Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.

This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.

National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA

Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.

This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.

Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.

The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.

The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.

There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.

I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.

A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..

People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.

People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.

When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”

A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.

There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.

Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”

In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.

Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.

For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.

The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.

Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.

There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.

First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?

Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.

Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.

Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.

And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.

That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.

There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.

Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.

Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.

Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.

There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.

This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.

There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.

While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.

I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.

Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**

Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.

The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.

A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla

Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.

Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.

**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.

Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.

Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.

We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.

The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.

Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.

Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.

Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?

No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.

If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.

Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.

Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.

It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.

Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.

Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.

Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.

I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.

The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.

People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.

Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.

This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.

To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg

Deckard holding a photograph he found.

Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.

Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.

Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.

It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)

Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.

Deckard pointing his pistol.

And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.

Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.

It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.

Links:

  1. Why cars got curvy – https://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8762373/car-design-curves
  2. Famous Lancet retraction of Dr. Macchiarini’s papers – https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31484-3/fulltext
  3. A patient who got a cloned bladder – https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45470799
  4. Light pollution is bad and getting worse – https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-end-of-night-global-illumination-has-increased-worldwide/
  5. Swedish study that found CRT TVs almost never survive longer than 30 years, and CRT monitors die by 20 – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X1530101X
  6. Review of the Fujifilm X-T30 – https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless
  7. Vaping is not as bad for your health as smoking – https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/oct/21/vaping-safer-smoking/
  8. Three-person IVF done to overcome the mother’s mitochondrial genetic defects – https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47889387
  9. Barbra Streisand has two cloned dogs – https://variety.com/2018/film/news/barbra-streisand-oscars-sexism-in-hollywood-clone-dogs-1202710585/
  10. The ISS took 14 years to go from approval to space – https://www.issnationallab.org/about/iss-timeline/

Roundup of interesting articles, March 2019

Robotics company “Festo” has built a new, highly dexterous robot arm made of soft components, and trained it in 3D virtual environments on how to handle objects in the real world. For safety reasons, I predict house robots will need to be soft and as lightweight as possible to work around humans.
https://gizmodo.com/this-remarkably-agile-robot-hand-teaches-itself-how-to-1832960417

Uber has been found not criminally liable for last year’s accident where one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a homeless woman.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47468391

A British computer program can accurately predict when individual humans will die.
https://www.livescience.com/65087-ai-premature-death-prediction.html

The Apple Watch has led to about 500 people getting diagnosed with heart problems.
http://news.trust.org/item/20190316134851-5cktc/

After we build the first AGI, I guess the plan is to have it read “Cyc”: ‘Cyc is the world’s longest-lived artificial intelligence project, attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and “rules of thumb” about how the world works…’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

How much more efficient would the world be if it were full of intelligent machines that never forgot anything and had no biases?
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/03/04/institutional-memory

China’s state-run news agency unveiled a nearly lifelike, CGI TV news anchor named “Xin Xiaomeng.”
https://www.odditycentral.com/news/china-unveils-worlds-first-ai-female-news-anchor-and-she-looks-eerily-realistic.html

After Colorado made IUDs free in clinics for poor women, teen births dropped 20%.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25656

I bet the parents would have cloned their dead son if the technology existed. Using his sperm for IVF is the second-best option.
https://apnews.com/c1759a1b1fa04abbb591fe169f9d7ce8

Sheep sperm that was frozen for 50 years was just used to impregnate several female sheep. The birth rate was as high as that of sperm frozen for only one year. There’s no known “shelf life” for frozen mammalian sperm and eggs.
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-ram-sperm-frozen-years-successfully.html

China just cloned one of its finest police dogs.
‘A police officer [said] that preserving the police dog blood has always been a challenge for breeders, as traditional breeding methods would dilute the original, and the next generation’s genes will be largely beyond control.’
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1142709.shtml

The number of neurons in an animal’s cerebral cortex positively correlates with its intelligence. This is true across species and among humans.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/

The size of your brain positively correlates with your IQ. (Your hat size provides a rough approximation of your brain size.)
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-lee.pdf

Contrary to what some believe, standardized test scores like the SAT and GRE do positively correlate with IQ and career attainment.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/03/annals-of-psychometry-35-years-of.html

fMRI tests show how strongly subconscious thoughts can influence our effortful thinking and choices. How much “free will” do humans really have?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y

Long-term marital satisfaction is partly determined by your genes, in particular, by a gene that codes for your brain’s oxytocin receptors.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213083

Many people are mentally ill because the stresses and demands of postmodern life don’t mesh with human nature, which adapted to suit the hunter-gatherer lifestyles we had for the first 95% of our species’ existence.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/susceptibility-to-mental-illness-may-have-helped-humans-adapt-over-the-millennia/

The FDA has approved the use of ketamine to treat depression.
https://apnews.com/6bf8d3dbe4c2411894635f11418b74dc

This population analysis of the genomes of people living in Iberia is interesting, but also hits home that the region has been a melting pot of different ethnic groups for so long that there’s little value in trying to trace back anyone’s lineage.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47540792

A German study shows that wind turbines are not as cheap and don’t make as much electricity as thought only a few years ago. Many people forget that wind turbines (and solar panels) slowly wear out and lose efficiency until they have to be replaced.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211028

Now that China has banned imports of garbage, there’s no cheap solution to America’s recycling woes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/

Coastal marshes could turn into gigantic carbon sinks as the planet warms, offsetting the impact of climate change. There are so many things we don’t yet understand about how the planet’s climate works as a system.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47472602

Houseplants are orders of magnitude less efficient at filtering toxins from interior air than standard HVAC systems.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-plants-clean-air-best-none-them/584509/

The first broadcast TV quality videos were wirelessly transmitted from a research sub to the surface, using pulses of blue light to convey the signal.
https://apnews.com/fbdafe93e00c432a94b3a190a890ff21

A Star Trek fan used a machine learning program to digitally enhance clips from Deep Space Nine, effectively converting them into HD footage. I predict that techniques like this will be used to clean up footage of old films and TV shows, and it will become possible to enhance the audio as well. Eventually, there will be highly accurate colorizations of black-and-white footage.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/a-fan-made-attempt-to-create-hd-deep-space-nine-using-1833301127

A small community of “digital hoarders” have amassed enormous amounts of data on all kinds of eclectic things (what about preserving human DNA for future resurrection?). I’m sure the vast majority of these hoarders are men. Thanks to their obsessions with highly specific subjects, I wonder if it’s useful to think of these people as “specialized processors” that could someday be optimized for doing relevant types of work as part of something like a Matrix of minds.
https://gizmodo.com/delete-never-the-digital-hoarders-who-collect-tumblrs-1832900423

MySpace just lost 12 years’ worth of user music uploads.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47610936

One cost-effective way to upgrade tanks is to remove their old turrets and drop in new ones that have new systems and weapons that can be independent of the rest of the tank’s.
https://www.janes.com/article/87012/eos-elbit-systems-develop-fully-integrated-medium-calibre-turret

Ukraine developed a pretty extensive upgrade package for the T-54 lineage of Soviet tanks (and China’s “T-59” clone). T-54 mass production started in 1950!
http://www.army-guide.com/eng/product1907.html

Vietnam decided to pay a little extra and buy brand-new T-90 tanks from Russia instead of bothering to upgrade its T-59s and T-54s.
https://www.janes.com/article/87529/russia-completes-delivery-of-t-90s-sk-tanks-to-vietnam

The U.S. Army uses a special paint on its armored vehicles that reduces their thermal signature and makes it easier to spray off residues from biochemical weapons.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27088/army-tanks-and-other-vehicles-get-new-paint-jobs-to-help-hide-from-thermal-optics

Electric car engines don’t get nearly as hot as gas-powered engines, so electric tanks would probably have reduced thermal signatures (and be quieter).
https://www.quora.com/Do-the-motors-or-engines-of-fully-electric-cars-get-hot
https://www.quora.com/When-will-we-see-electric-powered-tanks

America’s dream of returning its WWII battleships to service is thwarted by miles of leaky pipes and hoses, and by countless crumbling seals and manifolds. Also, no one remembers how to operate their equipment, so training crews is very slow and expensive (but what if the Navy had intelligent machines that never forgot anything and that would work for free, replacing old pipes, hoses and seals?).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/i-served-battleship-these-are-all-reasons-they-wont-ever-make-comeback-49322

At last, ISIS has been defeated.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/23/middleeast/isis-caliphate-end-intl/index.html

Venezuela might be finally going full-blown “Planet of the Apes.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47522208

A CIA cargo plane briefly landed in Venezuela and then returned to the U.S.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26951/cia-linked-plane-makes-brief-trip-to-venezuela-as-american-diplomats-evacuate

The U.S. started sending spy planes to loiter off Venezuela’s coast.
https://www.janes.com/article/87205/usaf-begins-surveillance-flights-off-venezuela

Russia has sent troops to Venezuela to back the country’s unpopular socialist government.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/europe/russia-venezuela-military-personnel-intl/index.html

Part of why the U.S. military gobbles up so much money is that it is enormously wasteful and can’t keep track of its own assets.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/

The F-35s belonging to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have awful readiness levels.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27047/the-navys-operational-f-35c-is-fully-mission-capable-less-than-five-percent-of-time

The F-35 can dangle a baguette-sized device behind it on a long tether that emits signals to jam enemy radars or to simulate the radar signatures of U.S. planes, tricking missiles into colliding with them instead of the parent F-35.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27185/f-35s-most-sinister-capability-are-towed-decoys-that-unreel-from-inside-its-stealthy-skin

The U.S. military has retired the last of its EA-6B electronic warfare planes. The earliest versions of the plane entered U.S. service 56 years ago.
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/03/08/the-saltiest-warfighter-in-the-marine-corps-the-ea-6b-prowler-retires/

Britain’s RAF has retired the last of its Tornado fighter planes.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26961/the-royal-air-force-has-said-goodbye-to-the-tornado-after-an-amazing-40-year-career

The U.S. Air Force is phasing out the last of its revolvers, which are modifications of a Smith & Wesson design from 1899.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26810/the-usaf-is-finally-ditching-the-last-of-its-cold-war-revolvers-for-new-semi-auto-pistols

Russia’s sophisticated AN-94 rifle is a dud: It’s primary selling point–the “two-shot” feature that could allegedly put two bullets through the same hole, letting it “drill through” NATO bulletproof vests–fell flat in a recent gun range test.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/03/28/nikonov-an-94-assault-rifle-just-how-accurate-is-its-famed-hyper-burst/

The USS Wasp was a shunk-down version of the larger Yorktown-class WWII aircraft carriers, and it was built smaller to stay within gross warship tonnage limits America agreed to under the Washington Naval Treaty. The Wasp fared badly in the War.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/uss-wasp-worst-us-navy-aircraft-carrier-world-war-ii-49107

‘The irony is that while battlecruisers [of the World Wars] are gone, they are still with us today. Battlecruisers were eggshells armed with hammers, which exactly describes modern warships.’
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/battlecruiser-scam-why-these-warships-will-never-be-battleship-47877

The SpaceX “Dragon” capsule docked with the ISS and made a safe return to Earth. It could soon be ferrying astronauts in and out of space.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/08/homeward-bound-spacex-capsule-headed-splash-down-key-step-toward-human-spaceflight/

India shot down a target satellite, demonstrating the capability for the first time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-shoots-down-satellite-announces-itself-to-be-a-space-power/2019/03/27/a1e73426-5068-11e9-af35-1fb9615010d7_story.html

It’s possible that the “sonic attacks” on U.S. diplomats in Cuba were caused by loud crickets. It’s also possible there were no sonic attacks at all.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/25/704903613/doubts-rise-about-evidence-that-u-s-diplomats-in-cuba-were-attacked

Noisy machines like air conditioners and vacuum cleaners could be encased in special plastic housings that would eliminate almost all of the sounds they make. The casings would be shaped to reflect the sound wave back to their sources to cancel them out.
https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.024302

The bewildering array of different product brands and variations of all kinds of things found for sale on U.S. store shelves are driven by marketing and not by quality differences between them.
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/05/why-arent-all-dishwasher-detergents-the-same/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/dayquil-screed/383768/

While medicinal pills very slowly lose potency, most stay safe and effective for years past their expiration dates.
https://www.livescience.com/65052-why-do-medicines-have-expiration-dates.html

After years of delays and legal challenges, a company has gained FDA approval to sell genetically engineered salmon in the U.S. There’s no scientific evidence that genetically engineered foods are less safe for people to eat than “natural” foods.
https://apnews.com/1be7085378684f4990e240870e7c546c

CRISPR might allow us to control which sexes of farm animals are born, which could massively reduce the number of animals killed per year.
https://www.wired.com/story/crispr-gene-editing-humane-livestock/

Here’s a good breakdown of recent junk science stories that dominated the headlines thanks to their shock value:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/a-surge-in-pseudoscience/

The “Miracle on the Hudson” plane incident might have ended in disaster had it not been for the plane’s computer overriding some of the pilots commands.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-unsung-hero-left-out-of-sully

Richard Feynman’s “Imagination in a straitjacket” comment perfectly accords with my Rule for Good Futurism #6: “Be very skeptical of predictions that hinge on future discoveries that fundamentally change the laws of science.”
https://youtu.be/IFBtlZfwEwM

Though electric cars still have higher up-front costs than gas-powered cars, some electric car models have lower lifetime costs because electricity is cheaper than gas and they need less maintenance. (The purchase cost gap should vanish by 2026.)
https://qz.com/1571956/new-york-city-says-electric-cars-cheapest-option-for-its-fleet/

Roundup of interesting articles, November 2018

The HMS Pykrete

You get what you pay for: Canada only spends 1.2% of its GDP on defense (the U.S. spends 3.5%, and NATO requires all its members including Canada to spend at least 2.0%) and doesn’t have enough fighter pilots or aircraft mechanics, and is now thinking about buying beat-up F/A-18s from Australia.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25050/canadian-auditors-slam-surplus-aussie-hornet-buy-describe-fighter-force-in-collapse

You get what you pay for: The F-5 fighter is cheaper but is less capable overall than the F-16.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25075/how-f-5s-beat-out-f-16s-for-the-navys-latest-commercial-aggressor-contract

The U.S. will help Taiwan keep its F-5 fighters from falling apart.
https://www.janes.com/article/84260/us-seeks-to-sustain-taiwanese-f-5s-alongside-upgraded-f-16s

Taiwan is now using two, American-made frigates. Both were built in 1984, but have somehow been fixed up to last another 30 years (for some reason, this makes me think of Weekend at Bernie’s).
https://www.janes.com/article/84490/taiwanese-navy-commissions-two-cheng-kung-class-frigates

Just as Britain salutes its “Little Ships of Dunkirk” that saved its army during WWII, will China someday celebrate its “Little Ships of the South China Sea” that provided critical surveillance of the U.S. fleet during WWIII?
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/flash-war-74-nearly-forgotten-south-china-sea-showdown-36107

During WWII, the British considered building a massive aircraft carrier made of “pykrete,” a blend of sawdust and ice. It might have actually worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_Habakkuk

Brazil decommissions its sole aircraft carrier, capping a pitiful service record.
https://www.janes.com/article/84831/brazil-decommissions-the-aircraft-carrier-nae-s%E3o-paulo

The sad saga of Russia’s sole aircraft carriers continues.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/huge-floating-drydock-sank-and-nearly-took-russia%E2%80%99s-only-aircraft-carrier-it-35117

As does another sad saga…
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25156/russian-icebreaker-under-construction-bursts-into-flames-injuring-at-least-two

Russia seized three, small Ukrainian navy ships in the Black Sea, and as usual, it’s impossible to get the factual details thanks to the deceit of both sides.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-26/ukraine-s-talk-of-martial-law-raises-fears-over-elections-imf

With the launching of its first ballistic nuclear missile sub, India’s “nuclear triad” is complete.
https://www.janes.com/article/84287/india-declares-its-nuclear-triad-complete

Would “orbital kinetic weapons” be better than nuclear weapons?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/orbital-kinetic-bombardment-gets-close-to-nuclear-on-damage-and-cost.html

The latest iteration of the venerable “Sidewinder” missile can hit planes BEHIND the launching plane, and can home in on ground targets.
https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/aim-9x-block-ii-the-new-sidewinder-missile-011572/

The Russian T-14 tank is better than Israel’s Merkava tank in most areas, except “situational awareness,” where it badly lags. That might be the deciding factor in a fight between the two.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/tank-attack-russias-new-armata-t-14-vs-israels-merkava-who-wins-36067

The logical endpoint of various weapon trends is guided bullets. It’s hard to build them since the G-forces imparted on the projectile as it was fired are so strong they could crush the computers, sensors and steering fins inside of it. Note that guided bullets only give you an advantage if you know where your enemy is, and for many reasons, your enemy will by default try to hide from you. This means that even in the distant future, it will be useful to saturate areas of the battlezone with “dumb” projectiles like unguided bullets and bomb shrapnel to hit any bad guys that could be concealed there.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/army-wants-bullets-do-more-hit-target-34882

During the 1918 flu pandemic, there were regional differences in mortality rates partly because of racial differences in resistance to the disease.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181120-what-if-a-deadly-influenza-pandemic-broke-out-today

Immigrants to Western countries have different gut biomes, which might explain their highest incidence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Interestingly, foreign-born parents pass on some of their ethnicity-specific gut biomes to their children born in the West.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/health/immigration-gut-microbiome.html

Vegetarians and vegans have lower bone density than meat-eaters, and vegans are more prone to breaking bones.
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nutrit/nuy045/5146363

Wine is made exclusively of water, ethanol, and trace chemicals. In theory, there’s no reason why an exact replica of the world’s best wine couldn’t be synthesized in a lab from cheap, common chemicals. This means average schmoes in the future will be able to drink wines only available to the rich today, and to at long last understand that price has almost no bearing on quality.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/31/lab-made-whiskey-lab-made-wine

A $10 digital watch keeps more accurate time than a $10,000 Rolex.
https://gizmodo.com/5983427/why-a-10-casio-keeps-better-time-than-a-10000-rolex

‘The world of self-driving cars and global outsourcing doesn’t want or need [low-income Americans living in places were drug abuse and suicide are rife]. Someday it won’t want you either. ‘
https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Graphene, the “miracle material” with amazing properties, is finally making its way into consumer goods, such as jackets and shoes. This could turn out like aluminum, which was once rarer and more expensive than gold. The discovery of simple electrolysis process to separate aluminum from common bauxite rocks changed that, revolutionizing the world.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/miracle-material-graphene-reinvented-as-pixie-dust

People’s faces get more asymmetrical as they age.
https://sivtelegram.media/scientists-have-found-a-surprising-fact-about-people-2/60629/

GATTACA-style human genetic selection is grows closer each day.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/11/validation-of-simultaneous.html

A Chinese geneticist has claimed (without presenting proof) that he used IVF and CRISPR to create the first genetically engineered humans–twin girls with a genetically enhanced resistance to HIV. I agree with the criticism that human genetic engineering is unethical now because our gene editing techniques are so crude that the risk of accidentally damaging a zygote’s DNA during the attempt to enhance something is too high.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/organizers-gene-editing-meeting-blast-chinese-study-call-pathway-human-trials

‘The aim [of the Earth BioGenome Project] is to create an entirely new inventory of life on Planet Earth by reading the genetic code of every organism belonging to a vast group known as eukaryotes…’
Something like this will inevitably succeed, and there will be a database with the genomes of quadrillions of individual organisms, including billions of humans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46046494

Satellites can be used to count whale populations from space. If a global surveillance network is created, it might prove more efficient to watch things from the air and space than to put many sensors at ground level.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46046264

WiFi can be used to “see” through walls and doors.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612375/using-wi-fi-to-see-behind-closed-doors-is-easier-than-anyone-thought/

Facial recognition software is being used to identify men in Civil War photos. Imagine what else the technology could reveal if used on all vintage photos.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6399039/The-facial-recognition-software-identify-thousands-faces-Civil-War-photographs.html

“Digital night vision” cameras are extraordinary. Some even display color.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/11/15/digital-night-vision-is-it-worth-while/

Samsung plans to unveil a folding smartphone in 2019. I’ve long predicted such a device. It will render phablets and mini-tablets obsolete.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/07/samsungs-next-phone-folds-up-like-book/

This website is an extraordinary compendium of articles, analyses and drawings of future spacecraft designs that are bound by the known laws of physics. For some reason, they’re all oblong (no “Borg cubes”), and if there are any major protrusions perpendicular to the nose-rocket cone axis, they are for heat radiators or rotating human habitat modules.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

Impressive footage of the recent explosion of the Russian Soyuz space rocket.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/dramatic-footage-of-soyuz-accident-shows-rocket-booster-collision/

‘[The notion of sending rockets into space is] utter bilge. I don’t think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing.’
–Richard van der Riet Woolley, Britain’s leading astronomer, 1956
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/12/26/arthur-c-clarke-about-predicting-technology/

“The odds on a Trump impeachment or a Nixon-style resignation are now quite high…It would likely come by the spring of 2018, or whenever Republicans come to believe that Trump is jeopardizing their re-elections in 2018.”
–Dr. Allan Lichtman, 11/1/2017. He became briefly famous when his computer model correctly predicted Donald Trump’s victory when all major pollsters predicted the opposite.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/politics/656473/donald-trump-impeachment-odds-president-allan-lichtman-russia-investigation

Will robots have senses of humor someday? How much better would our lives be if we had companions that constantly cracked jokes tailored to each person’s sense of humor? How many stressful or hostile daily situations would be defused?
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/a-robot-walks-into-a-bar

Greg Brockman thinks it’s possible an AGI could be built “in the near-term.”
https://youtu.be/YHCSNsLKHfM

Our brains are in our heads thanks to genetic path dependence and the slowness of information transmission through organic nerves. If you weren’t bound by those constraints and wanted to make a human-sized robot that could deal with its physical environment as well as humans, the best body layout might be a headless humanoid with its computer brain located inside its torso. Distributing the mental functions among separate, redundant computers throughout the robot’s body might be even better.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qxljr/why_is_our_brain_in_our_head_and_not_our_chest/

‘The average life expectancy of a dam is 50 years, and 25% of the dams in the Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams are now more than 50 years old. This number is projected to increase to 85% by the year 2020. ‘
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2012/finalwebsite/problem/dams.shtml

England is thinking of converting its natural gas (methane) pipes to carry hydrogen gas. H2 gas can (currently at great cost) be made without releasing emissions and is clean-burning. I wonder if it would be better to just get rid of gas pipes altogether and to switch everyone to electric appliances that got energy from clean sources like nuclear or solar.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/natural-gas-distributors-outline-proposal-to-convert-home-heating-to-hydrogen/

Chevrolet will discontinue three sedan models, including the Volt hybrid car (I remember it being launched a few years ago to great fanfare), thanks to poor sales, and the company will focus on building more SUVs and pickup trucks.
https://qz.com/1474677/gm-kills-the-chevrolet-volt-as-plug-in-hybrids-lose-market-share/

“5D” etched quartz glass could be used as a data storage medium that would not degrade for billions of years. I think the “window of vulnerability” to civilization collapse and/or the loss of most knowledge will close sometime in the next century when machines have created a self-sustaining space infrastructure. Von Neumann probes loaded with all known, useful knowledge will be sent to other star systems and dispersed throughout our own Solar System for the purpose of rebuilding things as they were should civilization be wiped out.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-time-capsules-that-will-outlast-the-apocalypse-1830653288 

Roundup of interesting articles, October 2018

In spite of what Hollywood would have you believe, submarines almost never fight each other.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/showdown-story-only-submarine-vs-submarine-battle-34652

Should we replace our aircraft carriers with cargo ships full of containerized missiles and drones?
https://taskandpurpose.com/maritime-airpower-aircraft-carrier/

The U.S. Navy will buy more of its venerable Arleigh-Burke destroyers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-getting-10-new-flight-iii-destroyers-and-it-could-be-game-changer-32427

The U.S. Army tested an experimental conversion kit that allowed a computer to fly a helicopter designed for a human pilot.
https://www.janes.com/article/84156/us-army-flies-automated-sara-helicopter

The USAF has selected the Boeing “T-X” to be its new training jet. It will replace the T-38, which first flew in 1959. Given the longevity of modern warplanes, the T-X should stay in service until at least the 2060s, by which time fighter and bomber planes might be automated, rendering human pilots obsolete. Thus, the T-X could be the last, or at best the second-to-last, trainer aircraft that the USAF ever makes. AIs won’t need to spend time in a simplified practice plane to learn how to fly. They will just be created in software labs and uploaded directly into frontline combat planes. Someday, the very notion of a “trainer aircraft” will be obsolete.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23889/boeing-wins-big-again-and-claims-the-usafs-huge-t-x-jet-trainer-deal

The T-38 pilot training jet could be converted into a fighter plane, but it would be crappy at its new job, and it would be a poor use of money considering what you’d get in return. Once the U.S. adopts the T-X, we’ll probably transfer our surplus T-38s to poorer allied countries or to aviation museums.
https://www.quora.com/Can-an-aircraft-such-as-a-T-38-be-weaponised-in-a-war-time-situation

Even if a stealth plane is invisible to radar, it will be hotter than the air around it thanks to its jet engine and to air friction against its wings, so you will still be able to see the plane using a thermal camera (e.g. – “Predator” heat vision).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/rip-stealth-russian-su-35-reportedly-took-picture-f-22-why-might-be-problem-34267

The U2 spy plane’s camera still uses analog film.
https://petapixel.com/2018/06/08/film-photography-at-70000-feet-in-the-u-2-spy-plane/

The U.S. just withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because Russia had been cheating for years, and the U.S. needs medium-range missiles to deter China in the Pacific.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/23/how-china-plays-into-trumps-decision-pull-out-inf-treaty-with-russia/

The U.S. might start mass producing copies of Russian guns for foreign military assistance. Ukraine and Bulgaria already have factories for making these guns, but apparently they can’t keep up with demand.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24283/russia-rages-at-pentagon-plans-to-build-u-s-made-derivatives-of-soviet-era-small-arms

The USSR planned to quickly nuke Austria if WW3 ever broke out even though Austria wasn’t in NATO and has enshrined neutrality in its constitution.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html

A police helicopter was used to break up a rowdy college party by flying low over them. The downdraft blew away their tents and lawn furniture. This is one, overlooked reason why flying cars were never built.
https://youtu.be/j4Au-yCQur0

Science is coming around to buttressing what has been common sense forever: Sunlight exposure raises your mood. This finding is particularly interesting since it establishes a biochemical pathway linking skin cells to brain cells.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/12/sunlight-and-the-brain

Another astounding discovery: cardiovascular exercise decreases your risk of death! Of note is that fact that there was no observed ceiling to the benefit.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428

Mushrooms and plants that contain hallucinogenic compounds evolved them as protection against insects. The fact that the chemicals also have effects on human brains is entirely coincidental.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/magic-mushroom-drug-evolved-to-mess-with-insect-brains/

Another medical study has found the drug Ecstasy can treat PTSD.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/29/another-ptsd-study-finds-dramatic-improv

Taller people might be at higher cancer risk because they have more cells in their bodies.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/24/tall-people-at-greater-risk-of-cancer-because-they-have-more-cells

Gene editing in utero might soon be tried in humans that have congenital diseases caused by single-point mutations.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/09/gene-editing-freely-you-have-received-freely-give

‘In technical papers my research group anticipated years ago that even very complex traits would be predictable once a [human genome] data threshold was crossed. The phenomenon is related to what physicists refer to as a phase transition in algorithm performance. The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html

Rapid progress is being made identifying the genes linked to many human traits, including intelligence.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/advances-in-genomic-prediction.html

‘[The] fact that intelligence or personality are caused by many thousands of genes, each of minuscule effect, means that it will be impossibly difficult to create a super-intelligent designer baby.’
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-genes-of-human-behaviour/

‘Universal Family Tree — Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. ‘   –Kevin Kelly, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dna-genealogy-privacy-20181012-story.html

Over 100,000 varieties of rice are being held at a global rice “gene bank” in the Philippines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45828150

The “dbSNP” is an open database of all recorded human alleles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/

Will cryonically preserved humans ever be revived? The consensus among the disinterested interviewees (e.g. – the people who aren’t running human cryonics companies and who haven’t written anti-cryonics books) is “No”, unless we get Star Trek-level technology. The freezing process damages the brain at the cellular level, and reversing it would require nanomachines.
https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-frozen-people-ever-be-revived-1829905516

Increased use of keyboards and smartphone screens and the decline of handwriting are eroding fine motor control across the population, with particularly harmful impact on prospective surgeons.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429

A new device called the “Everlast” notebook saves writings and drawings as data files. What kills it is the fact that you have to take photos of what you’ve written on the pages to save them digitally. The pages themselves should be able to detect what the user has written on them, and to upload it to their remote storage drive.

Prediction: Within 20 years, books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would then be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/642311833/everlast

In 1911, Thomas Edison erroneously predicted that most household furnishings and appliances would someday be made of steel.
https://www.inverse.com/article/19331-thomas-edison-alternate-futures-steel-home-design

Winston Churchill predicted that humans would someday eat lab-grown meats.
https://qz.com/1383643/seven-weird-food-predictions-from-the-past-including-churchills-lab-grown-chicken-wings/

Ben Goertzel 2008: ‘My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years.’
https://opencog.wordpress.com/2008/07/

Ben Goertzel 2017: ‘I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually.’
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and research director at OpenAI, predicts that the possibility of AGI be created in as little as five years “can no longer be discounted.” Skip to the 27:00 mark in his speech:
https://youtu.be/w3ues-NayAs

Stephen Hsu, physicist and all-around smart dude: ‘So a timescale > 30-50 years for AGI, even in highly optimistic scenarios, seems quite possible to me.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/intuition-and-two-brains-revisited.html

In 2013, some guy built a perfect Tetris-playing AI. It clears lines from the screen just as fast as new pieces fall from the sky. As far as anyone can tell, it could play forever.
https://codemyroad.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/tetris-ai-the-near-perfect-player/

The hype about self-driving cars is dying down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/18/shaken-by-hype-self-driving-leaders-adopt-new-strategy-shutting-up/

The Tesla Model 3 is, by some measures, the safest car ever tested by the NHTSA.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-3-lowest-probability-injury-any-vehicle-ever-tested-nhtsa

A teardown of a Tesla Model 3 reveals it’s an extraordinary piece of technology, but its process of manufacture could be sharply simplified.
https://youtu.be/Lj1a8rdX6DU

ReThink Robotics, the company that made the “Baxter” general-purpose robot, went bankrupt due to low sales and sold itself to a German company.
https://www.therobotreport.com/hahn-group-acquires-rethink-robotics-ip/

We don’t know if there’s enough CO2 sequestered in Mars’ soil to create an atmosphere via terraforming machines. I think that, by the time we have the ability to send large numbers of people to Mars, intelligent machines will probably dominate Earth and cancel any senseless plans to send more than token numbers of resource-hogging meatbags like us there. Multi trillion dollar plans to terraform Mars will also be considered too wasteful to proceed.
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/so-can-we-terraform-mars-or-not

A simple explanation of how the Asteroid Belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are different.
http://ryanmarciniak.com/archives/390

‘The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be between 2.8×10^21 and 3.2×10^21 kilograms, which is just 4% of the mass of the Moon.’

That sounds small until you think about this: A Ford-class aircraft carrier is 9.1 million (9.1×10^6) kilograms. A space warship ten times that size–which is in the same ballpark as a Star Destroyer–would thus be 9.1×10^7 kg. If we had space factories and converted just ONE PERCENT of the asteroid belt’s mass (I used the lower of the two estimates) into space warships, we could build 30.7 QUADRILLION ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt

In theory, a particle accelerator wider than our Solar System could unlock all the mysteries of physics and cosmology.
https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595

A Russian Soyuz space rocket exploded after takeoff, but miraculously, the two astronauts it was carrying safely ejected.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/656473889/rocket-launch-failure-forces-astronaut-and-cosmonaut-to-make-ballistic-landing

NASA’s “Space Launch System” (SLS) heavy rocket is in even worse shape than thought.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/10/program-build-nasas-moon-rocket-could-double-price-billion-ig-says/

Yes, we still have the blueprints to build Saturn V rockets, but no, it wouldn’t make sense to make more of them for many reasons.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again

In the 1990s, the “DC-X” experimental rocket did test flights that proved rockets could vertically land and be 100% reusable. However, the technology wasn’t commercialized for over 20 years.
https://youtu.be/39cjZTCay24

The “To the Stars Academy,” which was co-founded by the former lead singer of Blink-182 and which publicized last year’s big UFO report, says it has very few assets and huge debts.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420418050766/tv503167_1sa.htm

Scientists have created cheap, artificial wood that is better than real wood.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-create-artificial-wood-that-is-water-and-fire-resistant/

There have been recent technological breakthroughs in our ability to view the three-dimensional structures of small molecules.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/18/small-molecule-structures-a-new-world

Lowered plane travel costs and the growth of the global middle class have caused the number of tourists to explode. The trends will only continue, and I fear someday all the best places in the world will be overrun.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/overtourism-solutions/index.html

I predict that “Choose-your-own-endings” like this will become a common form of entertainment in the future. To appease different factions of fans, the same TV series will exist as “parallel universes” where the plots diverged at critical junctures. A mix of viewer focus groups and instant surveys will guide each divergence, and fanfiction crowdsourcing and AI will pick up the slack writing the multiple scripts. The logical endpoint of this is entertainment custom-tailored to individual people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/netflix-is-said-to-plan-choose-your-own-adventure-black-mirror

What would a robot tank look like?

Bigger tanks may be scarier, but they are also bigger targets. Less is more.

Lately, I’ve read about some interesting experiments to jury-rig helicopters and tanks to be autonomously controlled:

I’m unsure if any of these projects will get past the prototype stage, but they’re fascinating nonetheless since, if adopted, they could extend the useful lives of many old pieces of military hardware by enhancing them with machine intelligence and, maybe in some cases, with robot crews. As with all types of jobs, those in the military will inevitably be taken over by machines of some sort, and drop-in-kits installed into the cockpits of old helicopters could be the “bridge” in that transition.

However, in the longer run, planes, tanks, ships, and other pieces of military hardware will be redesigned around the needs of machines instead of humans. Returning to the helicopter example, a clean-sheet design meant to be flown by a computer wouldn’t have a cockpit at all: its shoebox-sized computer “pilot” would just need a small, armored compartment in the fuselage, which could be accessed through a little door. Deleting the chairs, controls, displays, and windows that a human pilot/co-pilot duo would have needed would make the autonomous helicopter lighter, sleeker, faster, and cheaper to make. In a fight between the old helicopter jury-rigged with a drop-in computer and the new helicopter designed specifically around a computer pilot, the latter would win.

This makes me wonder what a “robot tank” that was as good as the best modern tanks would look like. A tank’s quality is determined in aggregate by its 1) firepower, 2) speed, and 3) armor, so the theoretical robot tank will need to equal or surpass the U.S. M1 Abrams or Russian T-14 Armata. For this exercise, I think the best place to start is with the first criterion, “firepower.”

The Abrams tank has a 120mm diameter main cannon and the Armata has a 125mm cannon. Their capabilities are about the same. Our robot tank would thus need one or other. Now, a tank’s cannon sets a minimum diameter for the tank’s “turret ring,” which is the big hole in the top of the tank’s hull that the turret is dropped into in the factory. As a general rule, bigger cannons need wider turret rings. And for obvious reasons, the width of the turret ring in turn sets a minimum width for the tank’s hull.

At this WWII American tank factory, the tanks in the foreground have not had their turrets installed, so their turret rings are visible. Fully assembled tanks are visible farther in the background.

A U.S. Sherman tank that was destroyed by a large land mine in Okinawa. Note how the turret has fallen off of the hull.

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army built an experimental version of the M1 Abrams tank that had an unmanned, 120mm turret. They dryly named this vehicle the “Tank Test Bed” (TTB). It was never put into mass production, but its weapon reportedly worked very well. I couldn’t find figures on the internet, but eyeballing the photo below, it looks like the diameter of the TTB’s turret ring is about 80% of the tank hull’s diameter. The M1 is known to be 12 feet wide, so I’ll estimate the turret ring is 9.6 feet in diameter. To add the necessary structural support for the turret ring and space for side armor, let’s make our robot tank’s hull 11 feet wide.

M1 Abrams “Tank Test Bed”

Take note that the Russian T-14 Armata has a 125mm, unmanned turret, and the vehicle’s overall width is 11.5 feet (3.5 meters), which suggests my estimate is credible, and that the Russians might have made a robotic tank gun that is as compact as physically allowable. Note that the T-14 Armata has a three-man crew, and they are seated in a row inside the hull, so it’s possible the tank’s width was determined by human considerations rather than mechanical ones. That said, I’ll stick with my assumption that a robot tank could be a slightly thinner 11 feet wide thanks to the deletion of space-consuming humans with their huge shoulder widths.

Diagram of the T-14 Armata tank. The three-man crew sits shoulder-to-shoulder in the hull.

As this very long, very awesome RAND report says, the optimal ratio between a tank’s width and length is 1 : 1.5 (ignoring the length of the cannon). Our hypothetical robot tank’s length should thus be 16.5 feet (198 inches). Looking at modern tanks, however, I see the ratio ends up more like 1 : 2.16 (M1 Abrams), 1 : 2.49 (T-14 Armata), 1 : 2.08 (Leopard 2), and 1 : 1.8 (T-90), which suggests to me that there’s some other design constraint forcing tank engineers to make their vehicles longer than they should ideally be. And you guessed it, I think the extra length owes (mostly or wholly) to the need for interior crew compartment(s) for the humans. Look at this diagram of a T-90, to which I added a Little Green Man to indicate where the driver sits.

T-90 diagram with driver highlighted

Sitting down, the driver adds about 3 feet to the tank’s overall length. Subtract that, and the T-90 ends up being 19 feet 6 inches long, giving it a width : length ratio of 1 : 1.56, which is very close to optimal. Additionally, shortening it by that amount might allow for the elimination of one set of road wheels (down from six to five), cutting weight and cost, though I think there’s also a risk that could make the tank unbalanced and back-heavy.

Since I don’t know what all the different design constraints are, I’ll give a range of possible lengths rather than a hard number: The hypothetical robot tank could have a width : length ratio of anywhere from 1 : 1.5 to 1 : 1.7 (slightly less than the T-90), which means its length would be 16 feet 6 inches up to 18 feet 8 inches.

Estimating the robot tank’s weight is harder still, but I’ll give it a shot. The RAND report has weight figures for three types of tanks: the four-man M1 Abrams (66 short tons), a hypothetical three-man tank (61 short tons), and a hypothetical two-man tank (55 short tons). Graphing those on a simple line chart yields the following:

As you can see, the elimination of each human crewman allows a roughly five ton weight reduction, and extending the trend to zero crewmen, our robot tank should weigh 44 short tons.  It’s fair to scoff at this straight-line extrapolation as overly simplistic, but consider this: the T-90 is longer (22 feet 6 inches) and wider (12 feet 5 inches) than our hypothetical robot tank (16 feet 6 inches up to 18 feet 8 inches long and 11 feet wide). The T-90 weighs 51 short tons, and trimming length and width to make something the size of our robot tank could absolutely result in a new weight of 44 short tons. A real-life datapoint supports my back-of-the-envelope line graph extrapolation.

In terms of height, the robot tank couldn’t be much lower than the T-90, which is 7.3 feet tall (not counting the machine gun and any sensors mounted on the top of the turret). Returning to the T-90 diagram, this time with a Little Green Man drawn to represent the commander, we can see that the turret might be a little taller than is mechanically necessary because it must accommodate a human. However, the height of the hull can’t be decreased since it is constrained by the height of the engine (outlined in red). The T-90 also can’t have its suspension lowered without sacrificing ground clearance and damaging its cross-country performance.

T-90 with commander’s position and engine highlighted

Aside from flattening its roof, there doesn’t seem to be any good way to make the T-90’s turret lower. The diameter of the cannon and the height of its breech establish a hard limit on how low the turret can be. Additionally, the turret’s ammunition carousel (shown in the diagram below) stacks the shells and propellant horizontally, which already minimizes the overall height of the carousel. There doesn’t seem to be any way to shrink it further.

The “carousel” of a T-90 tank, which stores ammunition for the cannon.

I estimate that getting rid of the bulge at the top of the turret would reduce the T-90’s height from 7.3 feet to 6.5 feet. The hypothetical robot tank would use the same type of autoloading turret and hence would be the same height.

So there we have it. I estimate that an autonomous tank equivalent to today’s best manned tanks in terms of firepower, speed and armor would have the following specifications:

Length16 ft 6 in (min) to 18 ft 8 in (max)
Width11 ft
Height6 ft 6 in
Weight44 short tons
Armament120mm or 125mm cannon with autoloader
Armor and mobilityComparable to T-90 or M1 Abrams

This is close to the Chinese Type 59G tank (a modified version of which is used by Pakistan):

Length19 ft 10 in
Width10 ft 8 in
Height8 ft 6 in
Weight40 short tons
Armament125mm cannon
Armor and mobilityInferior to T-90 or M1 Abrams

Pakistan’s “Al Zarrar” tank, which is an upgraded version of the Chinese T-59G tank.

The fact that tank with similar dimensions and firepower to my hypothetical robot tank already exists shows that there aren’t any engineering or practicality barriers to building the robot tank per my specifications. The Type 59G proves that a 125mm cannon can be mounted in a relatively small, lightweight hull and fired without tearing the vehicle apart. I don’t have the software or artistic talent to make a computer rendering of the robot tank, but combining the hull of a Type 59G with the lower-profile turret of a T-90 or the narrow, “naked turret” of the M1 Abrams TTB would give a fair approximation of its appearance.

Since the robot tank would be much smaller and lighter than an equivalent tank built around a human crew, it would be cheaper to manufacture, harder to hit since it would be a smaller target, and more easily transportable. A computer would take the place of a human commander, gunner, and driver, allowing for a significant reduction in internal volume and overall tank size. A space-efficient autoloader already found in the T-90 would be incorporated into the robot tank. Additionally, to perform maintenance and repairs in the field, the robot tanks would need to internally carry two smaller, human-sized (but not necessarily humanoid) robots, but they could be stored much more compactly than human crewmen during transit. They might be able to curl up into fetal positions and fit into small lockers in the back or sides of the vehicle, or in a bustle at the back of the turret.

Even outside of combat, tanks require frequent maintenance and repair. A robotic tank would still probably carry smaller, human-sized robots in it that would go exit the vehicle to do the work.

Finally, I think the robot tank would carry a small UAV that it could launch to provide aerial reconnaissance footage, vastly improving the tank’s situational awareness. Something as simple as a 25-pound quadcopter could do.

Links

  1. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R3837.pdf
  2. https://tankandafvnews.com/2016/03/15/from-the-vault-ammo-loading-systems-for-future-tanks/ 
  3. https://youtu.be/cWw5SRa4vu8

Roundup of interesting articles, September 2018

Foldable iPhones are coming soon

During a test, a U.S. MQ-9 drone conducted the world’s first air-to-air shootdown of another drone.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/09/19/mq-9-gets-first-air-air-kill-training-exercise-air-force-official-says.html

First American F-35 does a combat strike.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-f-35-fighters-fly-first-ever-combat-164551915.html

First American F-35 crashes and burns.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23912/marine-corps-f-35b-has-crashed-near-mcas-beaufort-in-south-carolina

I’m surprised the UH-60 didn’t win.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23803/dark-horse-contender-boeing-snags-air-force-deal-to-replace-aging-uh-1n-hueys-with-mh-139

Another Russian superweapon (a nuclear-reactor-powered cruise missile) that was announced with trumpets has failed in secret, which is just par for the course. This one’s a bigger doozy than usual since it involves radioactive contamination.
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/649646815/russias-nuclear-cruise-missile-is-struggling-to-take-off-imagery-suggests

South Korea’s “K2” tank is quite good, and since it is indigenously made (unlike Korea’s older, K1 tank), it is free from U.S. end user export rules.
https://www.janes.com/article/82977/dx-korea-2018-hyundai-rotem-readies-k2-mbt-for-middle-east-opportunities

America’s troubled Zumwalt-class “stealth destroyers” are not very stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23544/navys-revamped-stealth-destroyer-looks-less-stealthy-as-it-leaves-san-diego-for-trials

“[Thanks to our low birth rates,] Twenty years from now, unless [Japan] can replace a considerable number of people with robots, it’ll be hard to maintain the current level of war capability.”
https://japantoday.com/category/national/SDF-recruiters-struggle-as-applicant-pool-dries-up

The U.S. and Britain only became allies around 1900, when Germany’s rise forced Britain to nearly withdraw from the Americas to secure its rear flank and shuffle its limited military resources to Europe.  The U.S. also correctly calculated that it could pressure Britain to the bargaining table if it built its own navy up enough to give it regional superiority to the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. Similarly, if the Chinese achieve regional superiority over the Americans in the South China Sea, it could make U.S. forces peacefully (but begrudgingly) cede control.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-america-beat-queen-victoria%E2%80%99s-britain-without-fighting-30797

For some reason, the Chinese press isn’t reporting on all of its country’s warship launchings. This might lead average Chinese people to underestimate the size of their own navy, but of course every respectable spy agency is seeing everything.
https://www.janes.com/article/83269/china-quietly-increasing-warship-numbers

China’s hospital ship docks in Venezuela to render humanitarian aid and remind the government that socialism doesn’t actually work.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45616736

China’s second and only remaining space station will crash back to Earth in July 2019. It’s first station crashed earlier this year. China says it will get back in the game by launching a third in a few years.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/asia/china-tiangong-2-space-lab-intl/index.html

A Japanese space probe has sent back the first images ever from the surface of an asteroid.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45598156

Rumors of China’s coal industry demise have been greatly exaggerated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706

Roads “paved” with solar panels have proven to be as bad as everyone expected. Interesting tidbit: ‘shade over just 5% of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50%.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6195123/Roadways-lined-solar-panels-not-promising-hoped-studies-show.html

Mirrorless cameras are improving, and will make DSL-R cameras obsolete within a few years. I predict it won’t make sense for anyone to buy a DSL-R by 2030, though there may still be a market for them among uninformed consumers and people interested in their nostalgia value.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45627055

Following the recent release of the “iPhone XS Max” impelled this tongue-in-cheek analysis, which projects that iPhones will be as big as small tablet computers by 2025, which is comical. However, I predict the growth trend will continue as predicted, but the iPhones will stay pocket-sized thanks to foldable screens.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/09/13/how-big-will-the-iphone-get

Fields medalist Alain Connes praises the defunct Soviet math academies, and of the general merits of allowing smart people to pursue pure knowledge instead of being pressured to use their talents to make money. If machines make human labor obsolete and everyone is put on welfare–er, a UBI–will people follow their passions and cultivate useful, inborn talents? Or at that point in the future, will human math geniuses just run into more frustration since machines would also be superior at pure math?
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-french-way-alain-connes-interview.html

Autonomous cars would make traffic lights obsolete since the vehicles would wirelessly coordinate with each other to avoid collisions. Perpendicular streams of car traffic could flow through each other’s gaps at road intersections with the precision of Blue Angels stunt pilots. Eliminating stop lights would improve the flow and rhythm of traffic,  reducing jams. I also predict that this ability to coordinate as a swarm will allow for dynamic lane reversals according to acute changes in traffic flow. For example, imagine there’s a city where everyone works, a suburb where everyone lives, and an eight-lane highway connecting the two. Every morning, the four lanes leading into the city are clogged with cars because all the people are trying to get in to their workplaces and the four lanes leading out of the city are empty, and every evening the reverse is true. If all the people have autonomous cars, only a four-lane, one-way highway would be needed since the cars would all switch directions without danger of head-on collisions twice a day to match the changing needs of the flow of people.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/infrastructure/how-vehicletovehicle-communication-could-replace-traffic-lights-and-shorten-commutes

The more interesting and much more plausible future technology the article touches on is automated inventories of all items in your home. Once you have enough cameras in your home, and perhaps a robot butler, they’d set about identifying every object in every room to create a list. (Monitoring of refrigerator contents and automated ordering of replacement foods to replace those verging on exhaustion or spoilage will be another aspect of this.) The frequency with which you used the objects would also be observed, and your machines would encourage you to get rid of things you never used, like your old set of skis. They’ll make it easy by putting ads on eBay and scheduling times for buyers to pick them up. You’ll just have to push the “OK” button. Physical goods will be allocated across the population more efficiently as a result, and prices for things will go down once billions of objects collecting dust in garages and attics enter the market.

Automated personal inventories will also show us how infrequently we use possessions we consider “essential,” like tools (e.g. – you only use your rake two days per year, each autumn), which will probably give rise to “libraries of things” instead of personal ownership. (This is simply an extension of the same logic supporting the idea that Uber-style ridesharing will replace personal car ownership.) When you think about it, it really is kind of crazy to spend money on something that sits idle in your house 99.99% of the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/style/robot-furniture-beep-beep-boop.html

…And then this article about a “wardrobe rental service” highlights the limitations of the sharing vs. private ownership model. It would probably take more time and energy to move clothes around between people, and the apparent cost savings would be a false efficiency.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45630395

The medical promise of stem cell therapies mostly failed to pan out. Success might still be had if we pumped several billion more dollars into research.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/28/fighting-it-out-over-stem-cells

In spite of new records being set in nearly every sport, every year, scientist David Epstein thinks it’s not being caused by human genetic evolution, and in fact, much of the improvement is illusory.
https://youtu.be/8COaMKbNrX0

The 16% of human genes that were known to scientists in 1991 accounted for half of all genetics studies in 2015. 27% of human genes have never been the focus of a science paper. Is this imbalance due to some kind of human bias, or have we rightly focused on studying the genes that are the most important?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/the-popularity-contest-of-human-genes/570586/

The FDA has approved an AI that can diagnose diabetes-induced vision problems by looking at scans of human eyes.
https://qz.com/1371580/can-ai-deliver-on-its-promise-to-close-the-gap-between-rural-and-urban-health-care/

The total number of potential, stable molecules is probably between 1×10^20 and 1×10^30. Put in perspective, the Earth weighs 6×10^30 mg.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/06/virtual-compound-screening-the-state-of-the-art

Aerial drones with electric engines and solar panels could be recharged by with ground-based lasers.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a22677285/darpa-drones-recharged-laser-silent-falcon/

In a first, a surfboard-sized autonomous boat with a small solar panel and wind sail crossed the Atlantic by itself.
https://www.apnews.com/f6d0e2a099684468873ab48966590ada/Robot-boat-sails-into-history-by-finishing-Atlantic-crossing 

Someday, robots will be able to see you around corners.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-around-corners-20180830/

Roundup of interesting articles, August 2018

Someone finally noticed that jet black isn’t a naturally occurring color, and that soldiers would be better camouflaged if their guns had the same earth tones as their uniforms.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/07/british-army-to-cerakote-entire-infantry-weapon-fleet/

The U.S. Army’s XM-25 rifle grenade launcher is finally kaput after years of failure and cost overruns. Consider this: getting the per-unit ammo cost down to ONLY $1,000 was hailed as a major accomplishment.
https://www.stripes.com/news/army-s-xm25-program-officially-goes-kaput-1.541971#.W22yKxFpNuU.twitter

China has launched a new spy satellite whose resolution is only slightly below that of U.S. satellites.
https://www.janes.com/article/82366/china-closing-the-satellite-imagery-capability-gap

China’s first indigenously made aircraft carrier and first Type 055 destroyer just started sea trials. After this, they will be commissioned into the Chinese navy and put into regular use. Both vessels represent major improvements to China’s naval capabilities are put them ahead of Russia.
https://www.janes.com/article/82621/china-s-second-aircraft-carrier-first-type-055-destroyer-embark-on-sea-trials

New photos of China’s J-20 stealth fighter show it is an impressive machine not to be underestimated. Russia’s stealth fighter program, by contrast, has been basically cancelled.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new-capability-insights

Epic surprise: Russia can’t afford to buy more than 100 of its new T-14 tanks and instead will do cheaper upgrades to its hodgepodge of Cold War-era clunkers.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-afford-its-new-t-14-armata-tanks-turns-to-updated-older-designs-instead

America could theoretically return its WWII battleships to active duty, but it would be cheaper to buy new destroyers, and the battleships would be vulnerable to anti-ship missiles that dive down into their lightly armored top decks.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-armor-in-an-Iowa-class-battleship-protect-against-Harpoon-and-anti-ship-missiles

This is the future: F/A-18 fighter planes dropped micro-UAVs as part of an experiment. The UAVs formed into swarms and completed missions. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” will make a comeback courtesy of this kind of tech.
https://youtu.be/ndFKUKHfuM0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

An unmanned surveillance/communication drone called “Zephyr” just spent 25 days aloft continuously. It has an electric engine powered by solar panels on its wings. At its 70,000-foot cruise altitude, it would look like a tiny speck to people on the ground, and I bet with simple active camouflage that would turn its underside the same shade of blue as the sky, it would be invisible. Mass surveillance and ubiquitous internet are probably inevitable.
https://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/

A head-worn device that uses mild electric current to stimulate the wearer’s brain might improve multitasking abilities by 10% (the lab study could have been better).
https://www.janes.com/article/82580/afrl-finds-brain-stimulation-technology-boosts-multi-tasking-performance

Someone built a demonic machine that can find Waldo. Is nothing sacred? Has technology gone too far?
https://youtu.be/-i7HMPpxB-Y

A machine built by OpenAI trounced a team of five leading Dota 2 human players early this month, but then narrowly lost to a different human team later at the world championship. I predict the machine will win at the 2019 championship.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/06/openais-bot-handily-beat-a-team-of-professional-dota-players/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/24/openai_bots_eliminated_dota_2/

An AI can automatically edit video footage to seamlessly alter human mouth movements, meaning we’ll be able to pair it with other technologies (such as machine translation and machine voice imitation) to perfectly dub videos and movies from one language to another.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-08-ai-dodgy-lip-sync-dubbing.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-ai-tech-can-mimic-any-voice/

Machines can now even alter footage of entire human bodies to simulate entirely fake body movements.
https://youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris

The stunning advances in AI over the last few years have come at a cost: the amount of computer power required to make each happen has been exponentially rising. It might get too expensive to continue in as little as 3.5 years, after which, the pace of performance improvement will slow.
https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/

Computers can now predict earthquake aftershocks better than human seismologists.
http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06091-z

As late as 1961, NASA wanted the Apollo missions to use a single space vehicle that would serve as the command module and lunar lander. It would have been heavier and more expensive than the two-piece vehicle they chose instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lunar_orbit_rendezvous&oldid=851267134

A robot called “RangerBot” has entered use, and will patrol the Great Barrier Reef for invasive starfish species and kill them with poison injections. As I wrote in today’s other blog entry, autonomous machines will someday do multitudes of tasks that the human labor force can’t, yielding radical and unexpected benefits.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/rangerbot-programmed-to-kill/

If you’re internally debating whether to change jobs, end a relationship, or relocate, then you should probably do it. People are inherently resistant to making lifestyle changes out of laziness and fear, and will concoct all manner of justifications to continue business as usual until they hit the breaking point.
https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/

One step forward for therapeutic cloning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45046674

Forty years since the birth of the first Test Tube Baby, only 1-2% of annual U.S. births are done through IVF. I think human genetic engineering will follow approximately the same pattern. The first Designer Baby could be born within ten years, but it will be decades longer before even 5% of babies born each year are engineered.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/fertility-blog/2018/march/ivf-by-the-numbers

Chinese geneticists used CRISPR to replace disease-causing alleles in human zygotes, without side effects to other parts of the genomes. The zygotes could have been implanted in women through IVF, and if carried to term, the resulting children would have been the first genetically engineered humans in history. I predict the milestone will happen by 2039, and perhaps as soon as 2028.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-tweak-dna-viable-human-embryos

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that his muscled physique elicited polarized reactions from women (half thought it was hot, half thought it was repulsive) have implications for human genetic engineering. People would use it to make kids that were leaner and stronger, but due to aesthetic concerns, few would push it to the very extreme of what is possible.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/08/arnold-will-to-power.html

Anyone interested in engineering their kid to have a specific eye color should note that there are such things as surgically implanted fake irises that do the same thing. I note that most of the YouTube videos about this (the “Bright Ocular” implant) have titles like “bright ocular removal,” “never get bright ocular” or “bright ocular made me blind.” Maybe iris implants will be better by the time human genetic engineering is widespread.
https://youtu.be/WB0RThNrYHw

The FDA has approved the first RNAi drug. If you want a laugh, research Ray Kurzweil’s past predictions about this class of medicine.
https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2018/08/fda-approves-first-drug-to-use-rna-interference-based-on-discoveries-made-at-umass-medical-school/

Your Instagram photo uploads are not original. Right now, the photo matching is being done by humans, but soon machines will do it. As AI and mass surveillance get more pervasive with time, machines will make it clear to us the full, scary scope of how derivative our art is, how much time we waste unwittingly reinventing the wheel, and how many “new” things are really just copies of old things we’ve forgotten about.
https://qz.com/quartzy/1349585/you-are-not-original-or-creative-on-instagram/

Consumerism is a big lie. Your expensive “distressed jeans” are made of normal denim that has been shot with a laser gun.
https://youtu.be/F0ZrZ4h2xGQ

Walmart is making a virtual reality store that will let you browse its wares without having to mingle with the unwashed masses.
https://qz.com/1362577/walmart-wants-to-take-on-amazon-with-virtual-reality-shopping/

How would we detect aliens whose lives were lived in microseconds or geologic timescales? Are rocks alive?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/maximum-alienness/

“Even at their tremendous distances, worlds like Triton, Eris, and Pluto will receive more than four times the energy at their surface that Earth receives today [once the Sun becomes a red giant].”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/23/which-worlds-will-survive-when-the-sun-dies/

Roundup of interesting articles, July 2018

Side-scanning sonar can detect objects as small as human scuba divers

The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) still uses thousands of fax machines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44805849

The first “color x-ray machine” has been built.
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-first-ever-colour-x-ray-human.html

The latest Ebola outbreak in Africa is over and only killed 33 people, largely thanks to mass distributions of a vaccine developed in late 2016 by U.S. pharmaceuticals company Merck. By contrast, the 2013-16 African Ebola epidemic killed over 10,000.
https://www.apnews.com/302d5b99ae6b4a2b930dc6c9d8911ed3/Congo-confirms-end-of-latest-deadly-Ebola-outbreak

An American company has invented a new, pill-based cure for smallpox.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/second-opinion-smallpox-drug-tpoxx-1.4756087

Louise Brown, the world’s first IVF baby just turned 40, to momentary fanfare. Ironically, her conception came as a shock to the public, and IVF was temporarily banned in Britain in reactionary panic. Now, it’s accepted as normal. I predict the pattern will repeat when the first human clone and first genetically engineered human are made.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-44940929 

Automated chemical discovery is improving. Full automation is ultimately possible.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/07/23/automated-reaction-discovery-gets-smarter

Half of all known organic molecules are based on a handful of carbon backbone chemical structures. Is this because those molecular structures are optimal, or because synthetic chemists like to make new molecules by modding known molecules because it’s easy instead of making new ones from scratch? What lurks in the uncharted realms of chemical space?
https://www.wired.com/2009/02/st-infoporn-4/

If you think cost inflation in the U.S. healthcare and education systems is bad, realize it’s even worse in the military.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/us-navy-cost-increases-are-worse-than-the-us-healthcare-system.html

The U.S. Navy might replace its Ticonderoga-class cruisers (567 feet long) and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (505 feet long) with a single type of ship.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22138/the-navy-may-use-one-hull-design-to-replace-its-cruisers-and-some-destroyers

During the 1970s, the U.S. Air Force experimented with nuclear ICBMs that could be carried in large cargo planes and launched by opening the rear cargo door and shoving them out. During freefall, the missiles’ engines would activate.
https://youtu.be/H8d21iOowjo

While President, Jimmy Carter floated the idea of building a colossal ICBM network in the southwestern U.S. A gigantic railroad network would use armored rail cars to randomly move ICBMs from one bunker to another in a sort of “shell game.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/07/26/complicated-race-track-scheme-favored-for-basing-new-mx-missile/482bb0ae-0c60-4806-b97d-c0b458aa357d/

Maybe the best way to counter small enemy drones on the battlefield is to send your own small drones after them.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22223/army-buys-small-suicide-drones-to-break-up-hostile-swarms-and-potentially-more

A reminder that everything eventually wears out: Lebanon’s AMX-13 tanks are so obsolete (production stopped 54 years ago) that they’re only good for making coral reefs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6002111/Fish-tanks-Lebanon-dumps-armoured-vehicles-Mediterranean-bid-boost-marine-life.html

Side-scanning sonar is sensitive enough to detect objects as small as submerged humans. What kinds of things will we find once the entire seafloor is mapped?
http://kleinmarinesystems.com/products/side-scan-sonar/system-3900/#prettyPhoto

Likewise, some radars can produce clear images of human skydivers and parachutes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3044147/Geronimo-Incredible-radar-image-shows-French-paratroopers-dropping-enemy-territory-night-time-anti-terror-operation-Libya-Niger-border.html

Radar image of French paratroopers over Africa

At last, the Syrian civil war appears to be nearing its end. The Assad regime has retaken control of most of the country’s land area and population, and raised its flag over Daraa–the city where the civil war started. The “White Helmets” group also fled the country.
https://www.apnews.com/119b758e3e224491a9ecf7e3bf26692b/Syrian-government-raises-its-flag-over-cradle-of-2011-revolt
https://www.apnews.com/603bec618f5444d59673ecf192183b93/Syria-blasts-evacuation-of-White-Helmets-as-‘criminal’

A photo collection of ISIS vehicle-borne-improvised-explosive-devices (VBIEDs). They’re normal civilian vehicles, but with large bombs inside, and they are driven into an enemy position and detonated. Note how homemade armor has been added to their fronts to protect them from disabling enemy fire, but not to their sides or backs. Similarly, tanks have the thickest armor in the front.
https://imgur.com/a/Ra8G2YM

Here’s a Swedish public service commercial that shows why hand grenades are bad (I guess they really know how to party), particularly if they explode two feet in front of your face. Note the lack of an orange fireball erupting out of the house’s windows, which is how the explosions are depicted in film and TV.
https://youtu.be/4vojUoFX15E

Another Indian Air Force plane–a MiG-21 fighter (production ended in 1985)–crashed.
http://www.janes.com/article/81862/iaf-pilot-killed-in-mig-21-crash

During the Vietnam War, some U.S. commandos were issued captured AK-47s and “sanitized,” American-made 7.62x39mm bullets for secret missions throughout Southeast Asia.
http://warisboring.com/u-s-commandos-had-a-love-affair-with-captured-ak-47s/

Russia is much weaker than the Soviet Union was, but Putin plays a weak hand masterfully. ‘Applying the right amount of pressure, as any veteran KGB agent would do, is an art. Moscow looks to bring just enough force to splinter its opponents, without so much aggression that it triggers a backlash.’
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/russia-strength-in-weakness/565787/

The U.S.-built “IceCube” detector in Antarctica picked up a neutrino emission from a black hole 3.7 billion light years away. It is landmark finding in the history of astronomy and will let humans peer deeper into space than they can with traditional telescopes that see light.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/12/in-a-cosmic-first-scientists-detect-ghostly-neutrinos-from-a-distant-galaxy/

‘Those stars over your head are a mosaic in time – the light is all hitting your retina at the same time, but (in the summer sky) you’re seeing how Altair looked in 2001, how Vega looked in 1983, how Antares looked in the year 1398, and how Deneb looked in about 600 BC. Let’s not even get into the deep-sky objects – if you stay up a bit later and can see the naked-eye fuzzball of the Andromeda galaxy, that light is from around the time that the australopithecines were learning how to spend more of their time walking on two legs.’
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/07/19/a-close-look-at-a-cancer-genome

Microfilm supposedly takes 500 years to degrade. I think the risk of a catastrophic loss of human records due to EMP weapons or solar flares is exaggerated, and the actual window of vulnerability will close in the future once humans or AIs become more diligent about protecting digital data and archiving data to ensure its longevity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/microfilm-lasts-half-a-millennium/565643/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Fixity

OpenAI, a company founded by top tech people to do “fundamental, long-term research toward the creation of safe AGI [artificial general intelligence],” has developed a narrow AI that can supposedly beat humans in the real-time strategy game “Dota 2.” On August 5, the machine will publicly battle a team of the five best human players.
https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark/

The OpenAI guys also made a robot hand that can clumsily manipulate a small cube. This might be the most dexterous robot hand ever made.
https://blog.openai.com/learning-dexterity/

For the first time, a complete fruit fly brain has been imaged at the level of individual neurons.
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-brain-imaged-nanoscale-resolution.html

In 2013, Marvin Minsky said that the best route to AGI would be to first map a fruit fly brain at probably the same level of detail as was just done, and to develop a comprehensive algorithmic/schematic understanding of how it operates. Once we have “fruit fly level AGIs” we can apply the fundamental lessons learned to making the next most complex type of animal AGI, and so on, until we’re ready to make human-level AI.
https://youtu.be/3PdxQbOvAlI?t=27m23s

Also in 2013 (July 16 to be exact), Eric Schmidt said the Turing Test would be passed in five years.
https://youtu.be/3Ox4EMFMy48?t=33m35s

Tesla’s batteries aren’t more energy dense than those made by rival companies–instead, Tesla wins on price, which is mostly thanks to superior economies of scale.
https://qz.com/1325206/tesla-owners-battery-data-show-it-wont-win-through-chemistry-only-a-better-factory/

China continues to be a trailblazer in high-tech surveillance of its citizens, with its police now routinely monitoring sewer systems for chemical evidence of narcotics production.
https://qz.com/1331592/china-is-trying-to-fight-illegal-drug-use-by-looking-for-traces-of-meth-and-ketamine-in-wastewater/

Dumping powdered iron into the oceans could cheaply slow down global warming by sequestering atmospheric CO2 into the sea. Unfortunately, even small, carefully monitored experiments have been blocked by environmentalists, even though there’s no plausible way the experiments could cause significant damage. Consider that the Earth thrives in spite of volcanic eruptions that spew orders of magnitude more iron into the oceans at completely random intervals, in random locations.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/restore-the-oceans-and-get-up-to-50-times-the-fish-and-store-a-trillion-tons-of-co2.html

The total number of wildfires in the U.S. has slightly decreased since 1985, but the size of the average wildfire has quadrupled. While human-induced climate change could be a contributing factor, the trend might owe more to newer fire management practices, in which fires are allowed to grow bigger and burn themselves out to eliminate dead wood.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wildfires-in-the-u-s-are-getting-bigger/

Dr. Mark Jacobson, the author of a scientific paper claiming the U.S. could affordably switch to 100% green energy by 2050, has withdrawn his universally-criticized defamation lawsuit against a group of peers who wrote a scathing rebuttal.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-jacobson-lawsuit-20180223-story.html

Cities are more productive per capita because the higher population density increases the number and velocity of interactions between humans. However, it’s possible that the superlinear scaling effect stops once cities reach certain sizes.
http://news.mit.edu/2013/why-innovation-thrives-in-cities-0604

Could China convert this mega mall into an arcology?
https://youtu.be/tn9hoo6cZFc

Studies of identical twins show that sleeping on your belly, with one side of your face pressed into the pillow, can slowly bend your nose, making your face asymmetrical and putting you at risk for chronic headaches.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25357025

Computers can tell apart identical twins by detecting the faint differences in their facial expressions.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929266-200-lines-on-the-face-help-pick-out-the-twin-who-dunnit/

After another successful test flight, Richard Branson hopes to fly on the inaugural launch of his SpaceShipTwo space plane by the end of 2018.
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632945197/virgin-galactic-space-plane-reaches-new-heights-in-test-flight

Small aerial drones: The future of terrorism and crime?

Over the last three weeks, arsonists ignited calamitous wildfires in California and Greece, and the U.S. government granted permission for a company called “Defense Distributed” to sell electronic blueprints over the internet that people can use to make 3D-printed, untraceable guns. While each of those developments is disconcerting on its own, together they point to something even more disturbing on the horizon–the advent of 3D-printed, untraceable,  aerial attack drones.

If it can carry a cardboard box, it can carry a bomb of equal weight.

This future weapon concept is simple (and for that reason, inevitable): Imagine a quadrotor Amazon package-carrying drone, but made entirely from 3D-printed components and generic circuit boards, assembled in a garage by following YouTube tutorial videos, carrying a small weapons payload like an incendiary bomb or nail bomb instead of an Amazon cardboard box, and loaded with better sensors and AI than we have today, allowing it to follow complex instructions and execute multi-step attack missions. Such a weapon could be made today with difficulty and at high cost, but could be made in about ten years easily and cheaply enough to put it within reach of terrorists and lone criminals. Thanks to better AI and sensors, the drones of the near future would be able to fly below radar, to take circuitous attack routes that avoided places were humans would see or hear them, and to drop their firebombs at night. One person with a nondescript van could drive around a large area (like all of northern California, or the eastern half of Greece), launch his drone every night on a carefully designed “bombing run,” recover it after a few hours, and then drive to a new location. Targets could be easily identified by looking at publicly available  wildfire risk maps.

And if the drone failed to return, it would be of little consequence to the criminal who launched it because he could cheaply make a replacement, and because the lost drone would lack any identifying features that the police could use to trace its origins. The police would only find that the drone was based on a freely available internet file that millions of people had downloaded. Additionally, the criminal could program his drone to “commit suicide” during a mission if capture were imminent, maybe by flying into a nearby body of water or activating a simple self-destruct device. Any data in its computer chips would be destroyed, leaving nothing for computer forensicists.

These weaponized aerial drones could also drop small explosives instead of incendiaries, which they’d use to damage structures, vehicles or infrastructure, or to kill people at crowded events. Less dramatically, the drones could be used for vandalism and mischief, like dropping a brick onto the windshield of the neighborhood grouch’s car late at night. The military applications are obvious.

The barriers to making attack drones will only lower as time passes. Ten years from now, a malevolent person would still need to expend significant time and effort on such a project. Eventually, it might be as simple as vocalizing to your robot butler that you want him to build a drone. “Go use my Bitcoins to anonymously order whatever parts you need and then put the parts together.” It’s frightening to think about what might happen when anyone can commit destructive crimes remotely, and the financial and psychological costs of bad behavior get trivially low.

Frankly, I don’t see how homemade attack drones like these could be effectively banned. The relevant tech trends conspire to make the drones an inevitable development, and it won’t be long before they have super-empowered people who have terroristic or criminal intent. We’ll probably know when this dangerous new era has arrived when a drone is used in an attempted or successful assassination of an important person, like a world leader or member of the “1%.”

The only effective defense against small, weaponized drones would be a greatly expanded government surveillance apparatus (perhaps including its own fleet of drones for putting out wildfires or attacking bad guy drones), which is arguably a worse fate. Regardless, the threat will only be mitigated by more machines and more technology, which is in line with the broader trend for humans to become increasingly dependent upon technology for survival. At some point in the distant future, non-augmented humans like us will be outnumbered and will be the weak link in the chain.

Links

  1. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/26/632730654/arson-arrest-made-in-fast-moving-southern-california-fire
  2. https://abcnews.go.com/US/death-toll-fires-greece-climb-91-investigation-points/story?id=56902068
  3. https://www.wired.com/story/a-landmark-legal-shift-opens-pandoras-box-for-diy-guns/

Roundup of interesting articles, June 2018

The Sun never sets on the U.S. military empire.

The U.S. Army will buy up to 473 new “Bradley fighting vehicles,” but they’re so different from older variants that they probably shouldn’t be called “Bradleys” anymore.
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/06/27/army-makes-massive-bradley-buy-up-to-473-vehicles-to-prep-for-major-power-war.html
Upgrade details: https://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/rebuilding-the-m2-bradley/

A Pentagon OIG report says that old Soviet Mi-17 Hip helicopters are better-suited to service in Afghanistan the newer American UH-60s. In a saner world, this would put the brakes on our plans to sell UH-60s to them, but the DoD operates in a world of its own.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21558/pentagon-admits-afghanistans-new-black-hawks-cant-match-its-older-russian-choppers

At the White Sands Missile Range, there’s a facility where antiaircraft weapons are tested on helicopters, which are strung up on a long cable stretched between two mountaintops.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21834/theres-a-place-where-helicopters-fly-on-high-wires-and-get-pummeled-by-missiles

Weirdly, the Ukrainian military is buying RPG-7 rocket launchers that are made in America, even though Ukraine has its own factory for making them.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/05/21/national-guard-of-ukraine-purchases-american-made-rpgs/

The Sun never sets on the U.S. military empire.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321

It turns out the widely mocked 1950s “Duck and Cover” slogan and accompanying cartoons were actually sage advice. Nuclear war is survivable.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/11/would-you-know-what-to-do-during-a-nuclear-attack-218675

[North Korea said] “[The] imperialist yankees can sometimes be helpful.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Hong_Dan_incident

According to virtual wind tunnel simulations, the fighter craft from Star Wars have poor aerodynamics. Yes, it doesn’t matter when they’re flying through the vacuum of space, but what about all the times they’ve been shown flying in a planet’s atmosphere?
https://youtu.be/PilQTjw1Qis

I think nuclear missiles will be common space weapons. Newton’s Third Law would also make it hard to shoot projectile weapons since it would nudge your ship in the opposite direction. There would also probably be “effective speed limits” on how fast the space ship would travel, since burning up 51% of your fuel to charge headlong at the enemy will mean certain death for you if you are pointed towards the depths of space.
https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-realistic-space-battleship-look-like

Facebook has abandoned its project to use high-endurance flying drones to broadcast internet to poor parts of the world. However, Google’s counterpart, which uses high-altitude balloons, is still going strong.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44624702

Just think: In only about five years, there will be A.I.s that can debate politics with humans on Facebook, never tiring, never taking offense, and replying instantly to anything you write.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132

The criminal who just committed a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper was hard to fingerprint at the police station and he refused to give his name, so the police took a photo of him and quickly identified him by uploading it to the Maryland Image Repository System (or MIRS), “which includes over ten million photos drawn from known offenders and the state’s entire driver’s license database.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/29/17518364/facial-recognition-police-identify-capital-gazette-shooter

Since it was announced that a DNA genealogy website had been used to catch the Golden State Killer in April, four other cold case murders have been solved using the same technique.
https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611548/a-dna-detective-has-used-genealogy-to-point-police-to-three-more-suspected/

Pigs that are genetically engineered for disease resistance have been created and might be destined for widescale use.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44388038

If you want an idea of how radically we could improve humans through genetic engineering, read articles like this and then consider that IQ is at least 50% genetic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44668452

Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, but as a child scored a mere 124 on an IQ test (smarter than average, but not genius-level). It’s possible that the disappointing score simply owed to the fact that there was too low a ceiling to the difficulty of the math questions.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html

Between 2000 and 2015, pneumonia and meningitis vaccine drives in poor countries saved the lives of almost 1.5 million children under age 5.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-million-children-hib-pneumococcal-vaccines.html

The FDA just approved a cannabis-based drug to treat people with seizures.
https://apnews.com/16829deb1ce0489aa7e0bd1afa02eb73/Medical-milestone:-US-OKs-marijuana-based-drug-for-seizures

A new study suggests that 70,000 American women with breast cancer make needless use of chemotherapy. For them, chemo doesn’t improve survival rates more than using other treatments with milder side effects.
https://apnews.com/9f30770a3a3d42538cd3f14672cd6529/Many-breast-cancer-patients-can-skip-chemo,-big-study-finds

Gerontologists in Italy have found that the mortality rate hits 50% once a person turns 105, and stays at that level indefinitely, suggesting that the ultimate limit on human lifespan is unknown.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3

In the distant future, there will be a single database with the genomes of quadrillions of different organisms, including DNA from all humans. If paired with something like a cloning lab, it could create any organism in the database from scratch. It reminds me of a combination of the “Universal Constructor” from the Deus Ex video game and the use of organic “blanks” in The 6th Day movie to rapidly make human clones.
https://qz.com/1315829/the-dna-of-all-the-animals-on-earth-will-be-recorded-in-an-enormous-new-genetics-project/

The Straight Dope, one of the best sources of mythbusting and digestible anecdotes about the oddities of history and science, may be shutting down for good.
https://www.straightdope.com/a-note-from-cecil-adams-about-the-straight-dope/

Old photos that have turned black with age can be restored using an x-ray scanner. Someday, we’ll be able to use more advanced techniques to restore/upgrade old film footage and photos to perfect clarity. They’ll do highly accurate and natural-looking colorizations of black and white photos.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/new-technique-brings-secrets-out-of-old-daguerreotypes/

“If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.”
This same thought occurred to me a few years ago. Communists shouldn’t get too excited though, since the same AI-powered mass surveillance system would also keenly understand the abilities of each human and could track whether they put in an honest day’s work or not, which would in turn affect the AI’s decisions about how “fair shares” of the day’s wealth should be allocated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/05/03/end-of-capitalism/

If you’re only counting animals that might have consciousness and can probably feel pain, daily births are in the billions per day. Since those species’ populations are mostly steady-state (neither growing nor declining overall), then the same number of deaths must happen each day. Many of those deaths are agonizing because they owe to untreated injuries, disease, or slaughter at the hands of unskilled humans. There’s a fringe coalition of transhumanists, altruists, and animal rights advocates who think it is humanity’s ultimate mission to use technology to end this cycle of suffering, possibly by capturing all wild animals and putting them in something like The Matrix. All humans would also go vegetarian or switch to lab-grown meats.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44412495

‘The Summit’s theoretical peak speed is 200 petaflops, or 200,000 teraflops. To put that in human terms, approximately 6.3 billion people would all have to make a calculation at the same time, every second, for an entire year, to match what Summit can do in just one second. ‘
That is probably not true. We don’t know how much computation the human brain does, but the best guesses converge on the “tens of petaflops” realm, plus or minus one order of magnitude. So what this milestone really means is that, for $400-600 million, we can now build a supercomputer with the same raw processing power as 1-10 human brains. That sounds pretty snicker-worthy until you remember the cost-performance of supercomputers improves by an order of magnitude every 5-7 years. So using a conservative extrapolation, a supercomputer with the same power as 1-10 human brains should cost single-digit millions of dollars by 2033, putting them within reach of midsized businesses and second-tier college Computer Science departments. Big entities like militaries, spy agencies and Google will collectively have tens or hundreds of thousands of them. If we haven’t built an artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2040, it won’t be thanks to deficient or costly computer hardware. It will be because we don’t know how to properly arrange the hardware to support intelligent thought and because of a failure to develop the software of intelligence.
https://qz.com/1301510/the-us-has-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-again-the-200-petaflop-summit/
https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-the-cost-of-computing/

Mathematicians proved that the maximum number of moves needed to solve a Rubik’s Cube of any configuration is 26. A deep-learning machine with no knowledge of how the Cubes worked managed to teach itself how to solve them 100% of the time in 30 moves, on average.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611281/a-machine-has-figured-out-rubiks-cube-all-by-itself/

Streaming is the future of video games. Someday soon, no one will need a console device like a Playstation or Xbox or games saved on physical media discs to play their video games.
https://gizmodo.com/if-streaming-is-the-future-of-console-gaming-it-might-1827056790

The TCL television is 55″ and 4K, but it only costs $600. The tests showed it was only slightly worse than the equivalent $1,300 Samsung TV.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/08/this-tv-youve-never-heard-of-is-the-best-tv-deal-weve-ever-seen/

Assuming a constant 3% inflation rate, $1 million in the year 2120 will only be worth $50,000 in today’s money. Being a “millionaire” in the future will be meaningless, and the title will probably fall out of use. (Similarly, it wasn’t long ago that having a $100,000 income was a huge deal.) But given that central banks support price inflation because it’s a sneaky way of cutting wages without making human workers mad, will inflation stop once machines take over the economy?
https://www.officialdata.org/2018-dollars-in-2120?amount=50000&future_pct=0.03

Here’s an old episode of the Joe Rogan show where he debates a very skilled tech skeptic named “Bruce Damer” who pours a lot of cold water on his optimism. Start watching about halfway through.
https://youtu.be/SSf2bVpibmw

My idea for “solar Venetian blinds” was commercialized by a company called “SolarGaps” a few months before I wrote my blog entry. Dang it! An overlooked advantage of having an all-knowing AI is that it would warn you up front if your big idea had already been thought of by someone else. Humanity could use its energies much more efficiently without wasting time reinventing the wheel.
https://youtu.be/whrroUUWCYo

China’s effort to corner the global market in rare earth metals failed because they’re not actually that rare, and other countries have large deposits of them.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246444/rare-earth-metals-discovery-japan-china-monopoly