Category: military

Career chemist sees no reason why chemical synthesis can’t be automated with current levels of technology. This may or may not
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/30/automated-chemistry-a-vision

Alternate headline: “Humans can’t beat a simple computer program at predicting crimes.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/equivant-compas-algorithm/550646/

Microsoft’s CEO says that quantum computing will be an indispensable component of AI.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42797846

The “Nuro” is a Smart Car-sized, remote-piloted delivery vehicle. I think something like this will prove cheaper and more practical than flying drones for autonomous deliveries of cargo.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16936548/nuro-self-driving-delivery-last-mile-google

This is one of those future concepts that I think will 50% completely fail and 50% succeed–albeit taking a different form than the author imagines.
https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1

1997 NYT article: When a computer masters the game of Go, “it will be a sign that artificial intelligence is truly beginning to become as good as the real thing,” but don’t worry since “It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer.” [It happened in 2016.]
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/29/science/to-test-a-powerful-computer-play-an-ancient-game.html?pagewanted=all

In the 20 years since Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the Elo scores of the best human chess players have barely improved, whereas machines have gotten vastly better: today’s best player, Magnus Carlsen, has a score of 2834, and the best computer chess programs are in the 3400s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.html

‘Once developed, [killer robots] will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.’
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/killer-robots-weapons.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&referer

Just five years after Google’s neural network taught itself to recognize cat faces, the company thinks machines are ready to recognize 5,000 species of plants and animals. How many species could you correctly identify from photos?
https://qz.com/954530/five-years-ago-ai-was-struggling-to-identify-cats-now-its-trying-to-tackle-5000-species/

An article about how AIs will replace human workers slowly, and for the foreseeable future, will not destroy more human jobs than they create.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-augments-human-skills/

One of the clearer descriptions of what a blockchain is.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/blockchain-technology-concepts-explained.html

A fascinating description of how a blockchain-based replacement for Uber might work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html

Did someone say…”Predictions”?
https://qz.com/1171977/ten-2018-predictions-from-the-founder-of-the-blockchain-research-institute/

On the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, it’s worth looking back at the weapons of the Vietnam War, and considering the handful of them that are still not obsolete (most notably, the AK-47 rifle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_the_Vietnam_War

Forty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. is selling warships to its former enemy.
http://www.janes.com/article/76746/vietnam-s-ex-us-coast-guard-cutter-arrives-home

Iraq plans to slap on some upgrades to keep their junker T-55 and Type 69 tanks running. The Type 69 is a Chinese copy of the Soviet T-62, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-55, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-54. If countries like Iraq keep cheapskating their militaries, will we someday have robot crews driving around 100-year-old tanks?
http://warisboring.com/iraq-learned-tank-lessons-in-the-war-with-islamic-state/

This clunker was commissioned in 1970 and will probably stay in service until 2039.
https://www.stripes.com/news/navy-s-oldest-deployable-warship-comes-out-of-yokosuka-dry-dock-after-19-months-1.508005

The first Cash for Clunkers program
http://warisboring.com/49425-2/

Swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones will probably dominate future warfare. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” concept could make a comeback.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17698/chinas-is-hard-at-work-developing-swarms-of-small-drones-on-multiple-levels

BAE is building microwave weapons that can fry the electronics of enemy planes, ships, and drones at close range. It might be an effective defense against swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17796/bae-systems-wants-its-new-microwave-close-in-weapon-system-concept-on-us-navy-ships

India’s aircraft carriers are vanity projects that will have little use in any all-out war with the most likely enemy, Pakistan.
http://warisboring.com/indias-third-aircraft-carrier-is-most-likely-a-waste-of-money/

Nuclear depth charges were a thing: a 30 kiloton underwater detonation (this is a below-average yield tactical nuke) sank dummy subs out to a radius of 1 mile.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-to-nuke-a-submarine-2f0bd50f39e

“The rule of thumb is that vertical takeoff and landing means a 50% reduction in payload.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/us-navy-baby-carrier-deploys-to-pacific-intl/index.html

In spite of the recent saber-rattling and improvements to North Korea’s nuclear missiles, a second Korean War is highly unlikely.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/11/should-you-worry-about-a-u-s-war-with-north-korea-not-really/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/03/why-nuclear-war-with-north-korea-is-less-likely-than-you-think/

Bill Gates and Steven Pinker agree that the state of humankind is continuing to improve, but only seems to be getting worse thanks to information technology and to an increasing williness of long-marginalized people to speak out, making us hyper-aware of what problems remain.
https://Fmobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/business/mind-meld-bill-gates-steven-pinker.html

Another step towards fleets of cheap, autonomous ships for oceanic and climate monitoring. In time, they would have even more uses.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/141674.html

Someone has been photoshopping faces of female celebrities onto nude performers in porn videos. This is only the beginning: It’s only a matter of time before computers can easily make highly accurate, 3-D models of people just by looking at photos and video footage of them. As an intermediate step, the data could be used to find porn stars whose body types best matched each celebrity’s and to digitally graft the celebrity’s face onto each nude doppelganger, but ultimately, it will be possible to make fully lifelike, CGI porn movies starring any person.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley

“Average” is beautiful: “Facial averageness” is considered beautiful.
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/langloislab/face-perception/the-beauty-of-averageness/

Chinese geneticists have cloned monkeys, but the failure rate was extremely high: Out of 79 clone embryos they created and implanted into female monkeys, only two were born healthy. All the rest either spontaneously aborted or died shortly after being born. The technique or a slight modification of it could probably be used to clone humans.
http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30057-6

In the early 1800s, Iceland got its first non-white immigrant: a half black, half white man named “Hans Jonathan.” He had two kids with a white woman, and today, his DNA is found in 788 Icelanders. By sequencing the genomes of 182 of these descendants and cross-referencing them, geneticists were able to reconstruct 19% of Hans’ genome. The task was made easy by the fact that African DNA easily stood out, and by Iceland’s highly detailed genealogical records, but in principle, the same method could be used to reconstruct any ancestor’s DNA. With advanced enough technology, we could make “clones” of long-dead people.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0031-6

Genealogy is kind of meaningless since ultimately, we all share the same ancestors and are from the same place. Stopping your research at one point in the past is an arbitrary choice, and having an ancestor that was famous or royal doesn’t make you special.
http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-everybody-else
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-genealogy-is-bunk.html

Identical twins also share the same epigenetics.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/not-just-genes-identical-twins-exhibit-supersimilarity

Using frozen human embryos for IVF is just as likely to succeed as using fresh embryos.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1705334

Baseline, subjective happiness level is also highly heritable, which raises the prospect of genetically engineering humans to be happier.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6
https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/classic-study-on-happiness-and-the-lottery.html

More on that: Brain damage and surgical removals of parts of the brain can improve people’s personalities. I wonder if it will be common for people in the future to get brain surgeries that make them happier or nicer.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180108-when-personality-changes-from-bad-to-good

Scientists have developed tiny needles that can inject drugs into the brain. Targeted injection sites can be as small as 1 sq mm.
http://news.mit.edu/2018/ultrathin-needle-can-deliver-drugs-directly-brain-0124

The amino acids and three-unit codons that form the basis of all genetics might be optimally evolved in form and function. Whenever we find organic alien life, its DNA will look and work almost identically to our own. There is, however, a small chance that a clean-sheet genome consisting of more types of amino acids and longer codons might be superior, but there’s no plausible way natural selection could bring it about (we have settled into a local optimum when the global optimum still lurks far off). Ultimately, optimizing biological life forms from the molecular level up is probably a task that only intelligent machines will be able to do in the distant future. All multicellular life forms are so finely-tuned to use the existing genetic alphabet that testing the hypothesis by changing things at the margins probably impossible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/expanding-the-genetic-alphabet/549620/

Is human wealth inequality just a manifestation of broad resource- and genetic-dominance inequality observed in any group of organisms?
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/114/50/13154.full.pdf

Reality check on a “revolutionary new cancer test” that the media massively overhyped. More health information isn’t always better thanks to the risk of false positives.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/22/a-hard-look-at-liquid-biopsies

Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime provide extraordinarily cheap entertainment. Never in human history has it been easier for people to occupy themselves.
http://efficiencyiseverything.com/entertainment-per-dollar/

More on that:
http://empathyeducates.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Costs-For-Americans.png

Fallout 3 is a very highly rated game, takes 23-130 hours to complete, and can be bought for only $5. That averages out to…basically free.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=3340
http://www.gamelengths.com/games/playtimes/Fallout+3/

Stephen Spielberg thinks “Ready Player One” is an accurate representation of the future…everyone is unemployed and spends their lives playing virtual reality games.
https://youtu.be/aWz6d1Z6bnU

Rollable TV screens will become mainstream once rigid screens get too big to fit through standard-sized entry doors. I think rollable, 8K resolution TVs that cover entire walls should become common in the 2030s.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/08/technology/lg-rollable-display-ces-2018/index.html

Google Glass may have failed, but I’ve always thought augmented reality (AR) glasses were a worthy tech concept that would return in an improved form. The “Vuzix Blade,” which reviewers have described as being an improved version of Google Glass that also makes use of the Alexa voice-activated AI assistant, could herald that return.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16869174/vuzix-blade-ar-glasses-augmented-reality-amazon-alexa-ai-ces-2018

I really like the prediction about the future “on-demand economy.” Someone puts out a gig announcement, and AIs instantly figure out which human can do the gig the best, and they notify the person. If robots are constantly telling you to do one gig after another, it will kind of add up to something like a job.
https://msblob.blob.core.windows.net/ncmedia/2018/01/The-Future-Computed.pdf

Related: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/filling-americas-6-million-job-vacancies/549752/

It’s been one month since the NYT front page article exposing the existence of a secret U.S. government program to study UFOs appeared, and the government has still made NO ATTEMPT to deny its claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

Guillermo del Toro saw a UFO: ‘The UFO, says del Toro, “Went from 1,000 meters away [to much closer] in less than a second — and it was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights [blinking]. It’s so sad: I wish I could reveal they’re not what you think they are. They are what you think they are. And the fear we felt was so primal. I have never been that scared in my life.’
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/guillermo-del-toro-seeing-a-ufo-hearing-ghosts-shaping-water-1068754

A critic breaks down all of the reasons why the Star Wars First Order’s space ships make no design sense. I agree that advanced space ships won’t really have “top” and “bottom” parts, but they could still be asymmetrical.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/news/a28088/star-wars-the-last-jedi-dreadnought-star-destroyer/

The $30 million XPrize award for the first company that landed a private rover on the Moon will go unclaimed.
https://lunar.xprize.org/news/blog/important-update-google-lunar-xprize

It’s possible the recent SpaceX rocket launch was actually successful, but the military satellite they put in orbit is so secret that they had to claim it crashed and the mission failed.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17612/the-secret-zuma-spacecraft-could-be-alive-and-well-doing-exactly-what-it-was-intended-to

Diesel car engines have been unfairly villified by the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42666596

If New York’s government can sue oil companies for making global warming worse, than can someone else sue New York’s government for shutting down its nuclear power plants, which also made global warming worse?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/new-york-suing-oil-companies-but-how-about-suing-new-york-for-shutting-nuclear-reactors.html

An argument against “geoengineering” turned on its head: Whale feces contains high levels of iron, iron dumped in seawater causes plankton blooms, and plankton blooms sequester CO2. Whale populations are about 70% lower now thanks to human predation than they were in pre-Industrial times. If we dumped iron powder in the oceans, we’d be restoring the natural carbon sequestration mechanism of the ocean rather than doing something unnatural.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/iron-fertilization-of-the-ocean-is-as-natural-as-whale-poop-and-it-can-save-the-planet.html

Transhumanists are overwhelmingly likely to be the oldest children in their families.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-psychologists-birth-order-effects-exist-and-are-very-strong/

The U.S. working-age population would be shrinking right now if not for immigrants and the children of immigrants. This will continue until at least 2035.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/

East Asia will have to import 275m people between the ages of 15 and 64 by 2030 to keep its working age population stable.
http://econ.st/2jT5FYx

But will demand for immigrant workers slacken once we have robot workers? Ben Goertzel thinks “toddler-level AGI” will be invented by 2030, followed by the Singularity.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

Skip the first 15 minutes. Greg Brockman believes deep learning isn’t close to hitting the limits of what it can do, and its capabilities will continue radically improving thanks to better, faster hardware. By the end of 2018, he thinks machines will be able to generate artificial audio and video (like imitations of human voices and totally fake video footage) that humans won’t be able to distinguish from reality. Within five years, he thinks a breakthrough will happen in robotics, making them much more capable and practical for use.
https://twimlai.com/twiml-talk-74-towards-artificial-general-intelligence-greg-brockman/

Google claims it can already convincingly fake human voices.
https://qz.com/1165775/googles-voice-generating-ai-is-now-indistinguishable-from-humans/

A timely counterpoint to bellicose declarations that “machines will never replace humans” and “human judgement will always be needed,” etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/washington-wreck-positive-train-control/548744/

Self-driving cars might offer people free taxi rides in the future, so long as passengers are willing to endure sales pitches from various corporate sponsors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/self-driving-cars-free-future/548945/

The typical American thinks his personal odds of losing work to machines are 30%, while everyone else’s odds average out to 49%.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/04/automation-in-everyday-life/#many-americans-expect-a-number-of-professions-to-be-dominated-by-machines-within-their-lifetimes-but-relatively-few-expect-their-own-jobs-or-professions-to-be-impacted

When asked individually, Americans say that they would not feel threatened by the discovery of non-intelligent aliens and it would not shake their religious beliefs, but they assume that would not be true for everyone else. ‘That may be because “most Americans tend to think, on any desirable trait or ability, that they’re better than the average person.”‘
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/04/how-will-humanity-react-to-alien-life-psychologists-have-some-predictions/

An article appeared on the front page of the NYT exposing a secret Pentagon program devoted to studying UFOs. It has evidence of UFOs doing impossible aerial maneuvers and anomalous physical materials recovered at UFO land/crash sites. As of the date of me writing this blog post, the Pentagon has not denied anything in the story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

Videos leaked from that UFO program’s trove, showing a 2004 encounter between U.S. fighter planes and a strange object off the coast of California. The pilots could see it with their eyes and it also showed up on their visioning sensors.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-delonge-takes-alien-research-215651746.html\

Humans are genetically programmed to believe bad news over good news, and are likelier to remember bad things. In opinion polls, this expresses itself as overestimation of metrics like the crime rate,  incidence of terrorism, and incidence of poor health.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42329014

Of course, sometimes the conventional wisdom that the world is getting worse is true: People with lower IQs and people who are overweight are breeding faster than everyone else.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21732803-it-does-however-no-longer-seem-favour-braininess-data-half-million

‘This may be the most powerful gene-manipulation toolkit that has yet been described, and you can expect to see a lot of work on it in the coming months as other groups give it a shakedown. ‘
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/08/crispr-the-latest-edition

The first two “gay genes” have been identified. By themselves, they don’t automatically make men gay, but they’re more common in gays.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2155810-what-do-the-new-gay-genes-tell-us-about-sexual-orientation/

The FDA will make it easier for companies to sell DNA testing kits directly to Americans.
https://gizmodo.com/the-fda-just-made-it-a-lot-easier-for-dna-health-tests-1820216695

The FDA has approved a new wearable medical device: The Kardiaband EKG, which can be attached to an Apple Watch to detect abnormal heart activity with high accuracy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5138101/FDA-approves-Apple-Watchs-medical-device-accessory.html

‘..So perhaps we’re finally heading for that era of personalized medicine that everyone keeps talking about…as sequencing gets relentlessly cheaper and more widespread.’
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/18/genetic-variation-gets-more-real-all-the-time

Woman, 26, gives birth to baby who spent 24 years as frozen embryo

Should society pay for uterus transplants so that infertile women can have “the experience of pregnancy”? The experience of raising a child seems to be what really counts, and it can be had much more cheaply and at lower risk through hiring a surrogate mother.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/05/568453168/first-baby-born-to-u-s-uterus-transplant-patient-raises-ethics-questions

‘Public Health England says there is a large amount of evidence that shows e-cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking – at least 95%.’
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42328236

Metformin is one of the best candidates for a human anti-aging pill.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42273362

Within your lifetime, the means to make yourself digitally immortal will probably be invented. Here is its nascent form.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/572068474/illinois-holocaust-museum-preserves-survivors-stories-as-holograms

What bad futurism looks like:
Article title: ‘2018 is when something finally gives on North Korea’
At the end of article: ‘It’s possible that a year from now not much will have changed: no war, no talks, no significant results from sanctions.’
https://qz.com/1157919/2018-is-when-something-finally-gives-on-north-korea/

‘“It is beyond me why we think an enemy [like North Korea] would waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon to experiment with a hypothetical EMP when they could destroy an actual city…EMP is a loony idea. Once an enemy uses a nuclear weapon — for any reason — it crosses the nuclear threshold and invites a nuclear response.”’
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/expert-emp-weapons-are-loony-idea-23695

The first atomic bomb–“Little Boy”–was surprisingly simple, and one man was able to build detailed blueprints for it using open source data. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/26/570806064/north-korea-designed-a-nuke-so-did-this-truck-driver

The first stealth aircraft, the F-117, is 40 years old. The U.S. built it thanks to insights gleaned from a Soviet paper on radar reflectivity, which was published 51 years ago.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/stealth-turns-40-looking-back-at-the-first-flight-of-have-blue/

Almost 20 years after the fall of Communism, most of NATO’s Eastern European members are still using Cold War-era weapons whose technology is not compatible with the West’s. A partial, affordable solution might be program to modify the Eastern European weapons.
http://www.janes.com/article/76473/kharkov-morozov-design-bureau-unveils-new-t-72-upgrade

Bulgaria has to send its fighter planes to Russia for maintenance, even though the country is in NATO and would have to use those same aircraft to fight Russia someday. The underfunding and failure to get rid of Soviet-era hardware could be a disaster in a war.
http://www.janes.com/article/76391/bulgaria-turns-to-russia-for-mig-29-logistics

In the U.S., we see problems from the opposite extreme, where the military is overfunded and has the luxury of falling for the siren song of advanced, unproven weapons tech that never get off the ground.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16695/the-navy-is-changing-its-plans-for-its-dumbed-down-zumwalts-and-their-ammoless-guns

Upgrading old clunkers like UH-1 helicopters with autonomous capabilities could keep them in service for decades to come.
http://www.janes.com/article/76439/usmc-onr-conduct-final-autonomously-operated-uh-1-demonstration

Flying drones that are indistinguishable from birds would have great reconnaissance value to militaries. ‘Robirds use flapping wing flight as a means of propulsion, with a flight performance comparable to real birds.’
https://youtu.be/-gc8kBmzOOI

Fleets of cheap, autonomous mini-subs could map the seafloor. Someday, every shipwreck will be known and every chest-o-pirate-gold recovered.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42335230

Google Maps has so comprehensively mapped the Earth’s surface that it’s moving on to cataloging the exact locations of exterior building doors and mailboxes.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

By the end of 2018, the U.S. might be a bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia or Russia. (U.S.-Canada fossil fuels production won’t peak until around 2030.)
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/us-crude-oil-production-could-be-more-than-saudi-arabia-in-january.html

The DoD’s experimental “safe” alternative to cluster bombs was basically a giant nail bomb. (It failed, and we’re just bringing back cluster bombs.)
http://www.janes.com/article/76101/pentagon-reverses-cluster-munition-ban

‘If you asked experts a few years ago when they expected this to happen, they’d have been likely to say in one or two decades. Earlier this year, some experts I polled had revised their forecast to within two to five years. But Martinis’s team at Google recently announced that they hope to achieve quantum supremacy by the end of this year.’
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/technology/2017/12/how-quantum-computing-will-change-world

Throwing cold water on AlphaGo Zero’s recent gaming milestones:
https://medium.com/@josecamachocollados/is-alphazero-really-a-scientific-breakthrough-in-ai-bf66ae1c84f2

Two years ago, Elon Musk said we’d have autonomous cars in two years.
https://electrek.co/2015/12/21/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-drops-prediction-full-autonomous-driving-from-3-years-to-2/

This year, Elon Musk said he’d build a massive battery farm in Australia within 100 days. He did it in 60.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42190358

“Space blindness”: The latest monkey wrench thrown into our big plans to go to Mars. “ The Mission has been “Only 20 or 30 years away” since I was a little kid.
At least our killer robots will get there someday.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/dec/02/space-blindness-must-be-solved-before-mission-to-m/

1. Another reason why you should always be skeptical of Russian predictions about how strong their military will be within X years.
   http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16175/russia-rolls-out-new-tu-160m2-but-are-moscows-bomber-ambitions-realistic
2. Russia won’t start mass producing stealth fighters until 2027 at the earliest. (U.S. F-22s started rolling off the assembly line in 2005.)
   http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-su-57-stealth-fighter-s-500-air-defense-system-23383
3. Contrary to what is widely believed (thanks to fiction like The Hunt for Red October), the USSR/Russia has always been far behind the U.S. in submarine technology, and the gap is widening.
   http://nationalinterest.org/blog/why-russias-new-stealth-submarines-have-big-problem-22941
4. The Russians used a spy ship with submersible instruments and winches to raise or destroy their two fighter planes that crashed into the Mediterranean during Syrian support operations. They did this within five days of each crash to prevent American subs from snatching them from the seafloor and examining the technology.
   http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16379/russia-scooped-up-wrecks-of-crashed-naval-fighters-off-sea-floor-near-syria
5. A tale of two military readiness levels (this has just a little bit to do with differences in how well-funded the two forces are).
   First: http://www.janes.com/article/75790/over-half-of-bundeswehr-s-leopard-2-mbts-are-not-operationally-ready
   Second: http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16366/portlands-142nd-fighter-wing-launches-13-f-15c-ds-eagles-in-rare-snap-readiness-drill
6. The Air Force is reusing WWII-era shells and 1950s-made barrels for some of their AC-130 gunship cannons. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
   http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16523/the-usaf-is-rebuilding-world-war-ii-era-40mm-shells-for-its-ac-130u-gunships
7. What happens when you try fixing something that ain’t broke:
   http://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-still-hasnt-figured-out-how-to-make-a-decent-uniform/
8. “Compounding the pain for the N.S.A. is the attackers’ regular online public taunts, written in ersatz broken English. Their posts are a peculiar mash-up of immaturity and sophistication, laced with profane jokes but also savvy cultural and political references. They suggest that their author — if not an American — knows the United States well.”
   https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html
9. “The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard’s Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.”
   https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/
10. We were supposed to have power armor in 2007. http://www.zdnet.com/article/mit-to-make-tech-exoskeleton-for-army/
11. “As it was, Task Force Rogue One met only five out of the ten performance measures that the U.S. Army uses to evaluate a successful raid.”
    https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/02/27/no-more-task-force-rogue-ones-a-tactical-analysis-of-the-raid-on-scarif/
12. There’s no evidence that mandatory health checkups reduce the incidence or severity of diabetes, even when the checkups result in early warnings that patients are developing the disease.
    https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-policy/preventive-care-worth-cost-evidence-mandatory-checkups
13. A handful of people are still in iron lungs.
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-apos-last-iron-lung-222200990.html
14. Big pharma is less profitable than you probably think, and its profit trajectory is grim.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/28/a-grim-future-here-are-the-numbers
15. A brain exercise has finally been scientifically proven to reduce the odds of getting dementia.
    http://news.medicine.iu.edu/releases/2017/11/brain-exercise-dementia-prevention.shtml
16. Getting you genome sequenced now costs less than $2,000, but prices haven’t dropped in several years. It still isn’t worth the money for most people since we can’t make sense of what it means.
    https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata/
17. The genetic mutation inhibits the PAI-1 enzyme, extends lifespan by 10 years and sharply reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes. It doesn’t seem to carry any downsides.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/well/live/amish-mutation-protects-against-diabetes-and-may-extend-life.html
18. The ethical concerns about cloning are almost entirely baseless.
    FYI, some mammal species are harder to clone than others because of their reproductive cycles and chromosome structures. Sheep and cats are easy, but apes and humans are very hard.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42066629
19. “The Amara hype cycle is unfolding today with respect to machine learning.”
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law/
20. Related:
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/03/24/the-genomic-revolution-shows-up-late-but-shows-up
21. An excellent lecture. Deep learning is being overhyped, and by itself will never lead to artificial general intelligence. A.I. research probably needs ten times as much funding as it is getting, spread out across different labs approaching the problem from totally different directions.
    https://youtu.be/7dnN3P2bCJo
22. Humans still reign supreme over machines in Starcraft 2. I couldn’t find videos of any of the matches, but I suspect most of the Norwegian AI’s astonishing-sounding 19,000 actions per minute (a world-class human player might do 200 actions per minute) were thanks to the machine ordering its units to do useless things like run around in random, constantly changing patterns.
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609242/humans-are-still-better-than-ai-at-starcraftfor-now/
23. ‘The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered.’
    https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-capacities
24. Is a stressed-out human phone operator who is trained to suppress and fake their own emotions and to read from a script more “personable” than a machine? Will human advantages in jobs requiring emotional interaction and nurturing endure?
    https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/are-humans-actually-more-human-than-robots/545714/
25. If you had a human friend who had elementary knowledge of 40 languages and could do basic translations between any two of them, would you be laughing in their face at their mistakes, or would you be in awe of their intelligence?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-42066517/google-pixel-buds-language-translation-tested
26. Say what you will about Tulsa, Oklahoma, but they’ve enacted outstanding land use laws to minimize the occurrence and damage caused by flooding. Basically, no one can build houses in flood-prone areas, and the city instead builds things like public parks and soccer fields there. Higher sea levels and more frequent floods does not have to mean more deaths.
    https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/564317854/how-tulsa-became-a-model-for-preventing-floods
27. Human adaptation to biodiversity loss is also feasible: “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-species-extinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658-cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html
28. An environmentalist professor, Mark Jacobson, who published an absurd article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claiming that the U.S. could switch to 100% clean energy by 2050 is suing other professors that wrote a joint rebuttal article. His actions are not going over well in the scientific community.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/
29. Plants are green because they don’t absorb the green-colored portion of the visible light spectrum. The pink-colored windows absorb the green light and turn it into electricity.
    https://phys.org/news/2017-11-solar-greenhouses-electricity-crops.html
30. An interesting idea. And if Bitcoin goes extinct, you could rent your server to anyone who needed to do computation (for stuff like protein folding, processing computer game graphics, etc). Two problems though: 1) The economics of this idea are murky since the server would need to be replaced at significant expense every few years as its hardware became obsolete and 2) if everyone had a computer server space heater, then the global supply of server capacity for rent would wildly fluctuate with the seasons. Since most people live in temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, available server capacity would spike in the winter and shrivel away in the summer.
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/11/08/bitcoin-mining-space-heater/
31. The smartest type of smart home might have only a few smart, centralized components monitoring many dumb ones. Trying to make every appliance and feature in a house smart is actually dumb.
    “The level of detail smart breakers look at is impressive. Mr Holmquist says that his can, for example, measure the revolutions-per-minute of the compressor in a refrigerator. Not only would this let an app monitor how hard the appliance is working, it could also give warning if that appliance was about to break down.”
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21731610-old-fuse-box-gets-new-lease-life-smart-circuit-breakers
32. Why having industry standards and two or three established big guys dominating a market is important:
    https://qz.com/1132657/an-internet-of-things-flop-means-some-connected-lights-wont-work-anymore/
33. It’s just as likely this discovery will end up as another flash in the (bed)pan that goes nowhere, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
    http://www.janes.com/article/75947/arl-utilises-bodily-fluids-for-power-generation
34. Bird tracking devices weighing only a gram will exist soon, allowing smaller birds to be tagged. What happens someday when we have pellet-sized tracking implants that cost almost nothing, and robots that can do the work of implanting them in animals for free?
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/where-the-birds-go/545945/
35. Why speculate about creepy future surveillance when Facebook is doing it now?
    https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691
36. From my “Rules for good futurism”: A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle. “But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead.”
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/
37. He’s totally right that 1) most “news” content is garbage designed to be consumed instantly and forgotten within days, 2) reading news articles that are several months old is an invaluable tool for seeing just how much garbage is really garbage, and 3) it takes time and a trained mind to recognize garbage without the benefit of hindsight.
    https://qz.com/1117962/advice-on-how-to-read-from-a-professor-whose-job-is-to-predict-the-future/
38.  Some rare, creative thinking. “Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.”
    http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence
39. Telescope capabilities are about to vastly improve. The 2020s will be full of important new astronomy findings.
    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/11/by-2020-upgrades-to-gravity-wave-detectors-will-detect-one-to-two-neutron-star-collisions-per-month.html
40. A metaphor for China as a whole.
    https://qz.com/1137026/chinas-first-all-electric-cargo-ship-is-going-to-be-used-to-transport-coal/
41. 2018 could be the year Venezuela finally implodes. If they run out of foreign currency reserves and default on their loan payments, then that’s it.
    https://qz.com/1128894/venezuela-has-finally-defaulted-on-its-debt-according-to-sp/
42. I just figured out how robots are going to kill us all in the future. “A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year…The LD50 for it in humans is estimated at about 2 nanograms/kilo i.v., 10 nanograms/kilo by inhalation.”
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/06/theres-toxicity-and-theres-toxicity
43. Stephen Hawking doesn’t think he’s the smartest person alive, and he thinks people who boast about their high IQs are “losers.”
    https://youtu.be/4lwFK1ImzcA
44. Do a YouTube search for “how to set a mouse trap”. The earliest video I found was uploaded in 2006–only two years after YouTube was invented–and is perfectly clear. Since then, probably hundreds more instructional videos of this simple task have also been uploaded to the service, the most recent appearing a week ago. What’s the value-add to the videos made after 2006? How much of the ongoing “exponential growth in digital content” is totally redundant?
    The Original: https://youtu.be/QBVOFY7SDOg
    The (latest) Reboot: https://youtu.be/0xriqCJKgYM

1. The U.S. could have beaten the U.S.S.R. into space.
   https://www.popsci.com/interservice-rivalry-that-delayed-americas-first-satellite-launch?ePZmFpuivxk1tpDE.01
2. Eisenhower bears part of the blame, since newly released documents show that U.S. intelligence had given him good estimates of when Sputnik would be launched, but he grossly underestimated its propaganda value. Could he have done more to speed up the launch of America’s first satellite?
   https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/science/sputnik-launch-cia.html
3. Reading this makes me think that humans will never leave Earth in large numbers unless we have Star Trek levels of technology (if such a thing is even possible).
   https://qz.com/1105031/should-humans-colonize-mars-or-the-moon-a-scientific-investigation/
4. However, there’s nothing stopping us from getting off this berg in token numbers for, say, a Mars mission. But we’ll probably need to simulate gravity during the trip or else the astronauts will develop all kinds of health problems. (Would a mere 25% of Earth gravity do the trick?)
   http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/astronaut-scott-kelly-on-the-devastating-effects-of-a-year-in-space-20170922-gyn9iw.html
5. Earth has five LaGrange Points, two of which would be useful parking places for satellites.
   https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html#sthash.rNZf8a0K.gbpl
6. The LaGrange Points might also be good places to search for alien spy probes. That and other creative suggestions about how to find intelligent aliens are in the article.
   http://nautil.us/blog/why-well-have-evidence-of-aliensif-they-existby-2035
7. What would a planet that was MORE hospitable to organic life than Earth be like?
   https://youtu.be/xrYjXOX9NLg
8. The War of 1812 dispelled the notion that citizen militias and civilian insta-generals were adequate for American self-defense (idealism was very strong in the early days). A professional, standing military was necessary. Had more pragmatic men been in charge in the years before 1812, Canada might be part of the U.S. today.
   http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/5-times-the-us-navy-was-sunk-battle-22582
9. Several countries are developing “Guided bullets” that have some ability to steer themselves to home in on targets. For now, the emphasis is on using them to destroy enemy land vehicles and drones at long ranges, but they’ll eventually find anti-personnel uses.
   http://www.janes.com/article/75087/orbital-atk-progresses-new-medium-calibre-munition-development
10. Would Americans be willing to sacrifice Facebook access to save Taiwan?
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/18/the-next-war-at-sea-will-actually-be-entirely-under-the-sea/
11. While the U.S. military has practically become a byword for waste and bureaucracy, and the Ford-class aircraft carrier project has been singled out for cost and timeline overruns, one analysis claims the ships actually represent an optimal balance of size, capability, survivability, and cost.
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/study-bigger-aircraft-carriers-are-better-22756
12. The U.S. Army has finally bought Israel’s battle-proven “TROPHY” active protection system for installation on its tanks. This should have been done years ago, but was held up by the Pentagon’s insistence on developing an American-made system that has gotten stuck in the classic rut of spiraling costs and overly ambitious capabilities requirements.
    http://www.janes.com/article/74744/ausa-2017-us-army-buys-trophy-active-protection-system-for-abrams-tank-brigade
13. The Humvee might be more survivable than its (Bentley-priced) replacement because it has fewer electronic components, making it less vulnerable to EMP weapons.
    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/humvee-has-no-electronics-for-emp-to-damage.html
14. An improved typhoid vaccine has been created
    http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41724996
15. An improved shingles vaccine has received a CDC recommendation.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/health/cdc-shingles-vaccine.html
16. The FDA approved two gene therapies, one to treat blindness (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/12/557183740/fda-panel-endorses-gene-therapy-for-a-form-of-childhood-blindness) and the other to treat blood cancer. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/health/immunotherapy-cancer-kite.html)
17. Contaminated cell lines might have corrupted data in tens of thousands of medical studies. Most futurists like to speculate about AI scientists discovering new things, but I think there would be tremendous value to having them re-examine and in many cases redo experiments their human counterparts did long ago.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/20/bad-cells-so-many-bad-cells
18. Chinese scientists have used CRISPR to make genetically engineered pigs that have less fat. This could actually reduce animal suffering and save farmers money since pigs that have less fat are, ironically, less likely to freeze to death in cold weather. FDA approval for sale in the U.S. is unlikely because Americans watch too many horror movies about mutant animals.
    http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/10/23/559060166/crispr-bacon-chinese-scientists-create-genetically-modified-low-fat-pigs 
19. Organic farming has very few, if any, environmental advantages over conventional farming.
    https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for-the-environment
20. The Placebo Effect and the related Nocebo Effect are both stronger when test subjects are made to believe the sham substances they’re being exposed to cost a lot of money.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/06/expensive-shams-are-the-way-to-go-apparently
21. California leads the nation! Flame retardant chemicals that the California state government effectively made mandatory for the whole U.S. in 1975 cause a slew of health problems.
    https://qz.com/1098161/the-us-government-is-finally-acknowledging-the-flame-retardants-in-your-furniture-and-baby-products-are-not-just-ineffective-but-also-dangerous/
22. To stop accidental hot car deaths, Congress might require carmakers to build features into their vehicles that warn drivers if they’ve left their kids inside. This blog post and its links describe three possible engineering solutions, the simplest of which is an algorithm that monitors door opening and closing sequence.
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/26/congress-considering-ordering-cars-to-add-about-1-iq-point-my-2003-idea/
23. 350 kw charging stations that can recharge electric cars in 10-15 minutes are coming.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/automobiles/wheels/electric-cars-charging.html
24. Cars windshields and roofs might also someday be made of single pieces of Gorilla Glass, giving people in the front seats completely unobstructed views. More generally speaking, all kinds of objects in the future will look unchanged from today, but will have seemingly magic properties thanks to advanced materials and to sensors and computers being embedded in them.
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21730128-soon-gorilla-glass-and-its-descendants-will-be-everywhere-one-worlds
25. A small hint of the coming advances in materials science.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/11/darn-near-flatland
26. Engineering improvements are in the cards as well. A supercomputer tasked with optimizing the designs of airplane wings created wings with organic-looking arrangements of beams and supports. What kinds of redesigns will machines make to everyday objects, and what kinds of obvious opportunities for improved design efficiency have we missed so far?
    http://www.nature.com/news/supercomputer-redesign-of-aeroplane-wing-mirrors-bird-anatomy-1.22759
27. Truck tailgating improves the fuel efficiency of the following vehicle AND the lead vehicle. When autonomous trucks become common, I’m sure they’ll use “platooning” all the time.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/are-those-80000-pound-trucks-tailgating-each-other-soon-it-may-be-perfectly-normal–and-safe/2017/10/22/fbbbb0fa-a2de-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html
28. ‘At very small scales, fixed-wing and multirotor designs become less efficient, and insect-like drones with flapping wings may make more sense. Tiny drones could be used for virtual tourism, letting remote users “fly” around with the aid of virtual-reality goggles. In short, today’s drone designs barely scratch the surface.’
    https://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21723004-pioneer-evolutionary-robotics-borrows-drone-designs-nature-dario-floreano
29. The “Wave Glider” unmanned drone ship harnesses solar energy and wave power to generate electricity for itself, and could stay at sea indefinitely. (I’m sure mechanical breakdowns impose a limit on endurance.) http://warisboring.com/this-weird-drone-feeds-on-hurricanes/
30. If everyone will have a robot butler in the future, and if the butlers will be able to download any knowledge or skill, then does that mean they’ll be able to fix anything you own? Wouldn’t they also know how to do preventative maintenance and inspections on all your stuff? Are we headed for a future where things almost never break?
    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-fixit-20171021-story.html
31. A new AI “was able to solve reCAPTCHAs at an accuracy rate of 66.6% …, BotDetect at 64.4%, Yahoo at 57.4% and PayPal at 57.1%.” That’s not as good as the 81%+ pass rate typical of humans, but it’s still high enough to render CAPTCHAs obsolete as a means of differentiating between humans and machines. I bet the AIs have entered the “human range” of skill in this narrow task, and can solve CAPTCHAs as well as human children, humans with poor eyesight, and humans with low intelligence.
    http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/26/560082659/ai-model-fundamentally-cracks-captchas-scientists-say
32. …And here’s a domain where AIs have achieved super-superhuman levels of performance: AlphaGo defeated all the world’s best human Go players last year, and AlphaGo Zero just defeated AlphaGo in a 100-game tournament, with no losses.
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609141/alphago-zero-shows-machines-can-become-superhuman-without-any-help/
33. Stephen Wolfram gives an impressive talk about the future of AI (you can just feel the genius oozing out of him). It gets really interesting towards the end when he talks about how most “work” we do in rich countries today would seem like the equivalent of playing video games to people from antiquity. Will “work” in the future look like video gaming today?
    https://www.level9news.com/wolfram-discussing-ai-singularity/
34. A great roundup of quotes from very smart people (including Thomas Edison!) who didn’t think airplanes would work. Makes you wonder about today’s experts who “confidently” predict that machines will never achieve human intelligence, or will only do so hundreds of years from now.
    https://www.xaprb.com/blog/flight-is-impossible/
35. More on that.
    https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
36. And a good counterpoint that throws cold water on the AI hype.
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609048/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-ai-predictions/
37. I never thought of this, but yes, magic tricks won’t impress robots since they’ll be able to use their advanced visioning sensors to see what’s actually happening.
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/04/beat-three-card-monte-with-google-glass-and-remotely-located-human-or-artificial-expert/
38. The Quantified Earth
    http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/news/a28708/earthquakes-fiber-optic-cables/
39. Long gone are the days when a brilliant person could make a profound scientific discovery working alone in his lab. Science isn’t “over,” but we’ve certainly picked all the low-hanging fruits, and new discoveries can only be made through massive investments of human talent and money. Makes you wonder whether how well Einstein could distinguish himself today.
    https://qz.com/1106745/were-running-out-of-big-ideas/
40. Blade Runner 2049‘s CGI Rachael looked vastly better than Rogue One‘s CGI Tarkin and Leia, possibly because the special effects team spent a whole year working on Rachael.
    https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-secrets-behind-blade-runner-2049s-most-surprising-s-1819675592
41. Fascinating questions to ponder: How many stable chemicals are possible, how many of those can useful things for us, and what percentage of the useful chemicals have we already discovered?
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/10/how-many-natural-products-are-being-found-and-how-many-are-there
42. Japan’s population has been shrinking since 2010, and the trend won’t stop for the foreseeable future. The good news? More space per person.
    https://qz.com/1112368/abandoned-land-in-japan-will-be-the-size-of-austria-by-2040/

Sorry about my long absence, but I promise more blog entries are coming. In the meantime…

1. High-tech solutions to global poverty still aren’t substitutes for basic infrastructure, good government, property rights, and cultures of trust. Here’s one recent article about it and two older ones:
   https://qz.com/1090693/zipline-drones-in-africa-like-rwanda-and-tanzania-have-an-opportunity-cost/
   https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-08-30/debunking-microenergy
   https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/08/bot-we-trust
2. GE is working on robots the sizes of small animals and insects that can crawl around inside jet turbines for inspections, and maybe for repairs as well in the future. Are we headed for a future where things never break down?
   https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21729737-robotic-mechanics-can-go-anywhere-tiny-robots-will-inspect-and-fix-jet-engines
3. ‘Professor Simon Blackmore, head of engineering, argues that an even bigger benefit could be in providing fleets of small, light robots, perhaps aided by drones, to replace vast and heavy tractors that plough the land mainly to undo the damage done by soil compaction caused by . . . vast and heavy tractors. Robot tractors could be smaller mainly because they don’t have to justify the wages of a driver, and they could work all night, and in co-ordinated platoons.’
   http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/robot-farm-machinery/
4. If machines take all of our jobs and do them better and faster than we can, then it could portend a world where billions of unemployed humans spend their days in hyperrealistic virtual reality games engineered by machines.
   https://youtu.be/jOOB9Q1Nj8Y
   https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/03/economist-explains-24
5. Many of the action scenes in the superhero movie Logan were done using incredibly lifelike CGI simulacra of the actors. Will actors someday make money by licensing the use of their digital likenesses in movies instead of physically starring in them?
   https://youtu.be/TxWu5Brx_As
6. I definitely agree with this. I think Elon Musk’s statements about AI and other things are part of a deliberate strategy to keep the public’s attention focused on him. As a businessman dependent upon the faith of his investors to keep his enterprises afloat, he needs to constantly stay in the spotlight and to project an image of being smarter than everyone else to keep the dollars flowing.
   https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/google-s-ai-boss-blasts-musk-s-scare-tactics-on-machine-takeover
7. Per my previous blog entry, being able to quickly replace 100,000 cars destroyed by a hurricane is a respectable feat, but it would be better to find a way to keep the 100,000 cars from being destroyed at all.
   http://www.npr.org/2017/09/25/553475557/rental-firms-disaster-readiness-may-help-usher-the-age-of-self-driving-cars
8. Computers make weird mistakes in some object recognition tasks, but so do humans.
   http://www.kurzweilai.net/human-vs-deep-neural-network-performance-in-object-recognition
9. ‘Distributed ledgers are useful technology, just like banks. As they become a larger part of finance, the temptation to abuse them will be just as great. History instructs that no governance is perfect, and humans are reliably awful.’
   https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/09/not-so-novel
10. Our cells are full of organic nanomachines which support our most basic life functions, and since Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture on the subject, it has been recognized that this was proof of concept that fully synthetic nanomachines were also feasible. Yet only recently have scientists managed to build crude but functional nanomachines in labs.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/25/building-our-own-molecular-machines
11. Don’t get your hopes up about Amazon flying drone package delivery: there are legal liability issues with packages accidentally dropping on people’s heads, and major noise issues. Flying cars would be handicapped by the same problems. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of room for improving the efficiency of ground transit with technology.
    https://qz.com/1085214/google-moonshot-lab-cofounder-sebastian-thrun-talks-flying-cars-automated-teaching-and-an-ai-arms-race-with-china/
12. A useful quote to remember when contemplating flying cars: ‘Flying machines are inherently more complicated to operate than ground vehicles, and the consequences of error or malfunction are much greater—because of gravity.’
    https://warisboring.com/u-s-marines-portable-helicopters-were-too-crazy-to-survive/
13. And in typical form, McKinsey beats this issue to death: ‘Drones require good weather and are now limited to loads of 7.5 kilograms or less and a route of 15 to 20 kilometers. Infrastructure that will support commercial delivery is lacking, and concerns about theft, hacking, crashes, and privacy worry consumers. Finally, drones need a minimum of about two square meters to land, more than many urban households can offer.’
    https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability-and-resource-productivity/our-insights/urban-commercial-transport-and-the-future-of-mobility
14. Would aliens 10,000 more advanced than humans have electric motors that are any better than ours? Would they have better mousetraps as well?
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21728888-better-motors-go-better-batteries-electric-motors-improve-more-things
15. Seeing as how so many people vote on the basis of falsehoods, prejudice, or party affiliation and commonly vote against their own self-interests without realizing it, might democracy benefit if machines tried to reason with voters one-on-one before elections?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40860937
16. Disreputable peer-reviewed scientific journals are an even bigger problem than thought. Some of the junk papers are written by NIH-funded scientists and by scientists working at prestigious universities like Harvard.
    http://www.nature.com/news/stop-this-waste-of-people-animals-and-money-1.22554
17. Anytime you’re down on the U.S. Big Pharma industry, consider the massive fraud that exists within China’s equivalent. (Russia is just as bad.)
    http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-fakes-09272016141438.html
18. Your month of birth determines a surprising amount about your academic performance, all the way to college.
    https://www.utoronto.ca/news/oldest-kids-class-do-better-even-university-u-t-study
19. Birth month also affects your odds of becoming an athlete, thanks to the same cutoff date effect.
    http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/18891749
20. An important counterpoint to the growing anti-Vaxx movement is this: Teen vaccination rates for HPV are now over 50% and rising. The vaccine actually prevents several types of cancer.
    https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/health/hpv-vaccine-teenagers.html
21. Chinese scientists have edited the genomes of human embryos to fix single-point DNA mutations (yes, this appeared in a peer-reviewed journal).
    http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41386849
22. One more experiment finished showing that humans could bear the psychological stresses of a years-long Mars mission. Now about that space radiation problem…
    https://www.space.com/38180-hi-seas-8-month-mars-simulation-ends.html
23. Two years ago, Russia and Turkey were at each other’s throats over the latter’s shootdown of the former’s attack plane, and there was talk of all NATO being dragged into war over it. Recently, Turkey turned it back on the the alliance to buy an advanced antiaircraft system from Russia.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/europe/turkey-russia-missile-deal.html
24. The U.S. Army’s first upgraded Stryker rolled off the assembly line.
    http://www.janes.com/article/74356/first-us-army-upgraded-stryker-dvh-rolls-through-production

1. In a parallel universe, it’s still the 1990s and there was a Moore’s Law for the number of random pipes and hoses strewn across the landscape.
   http://www.boredpanda.com/scifi-girl-robot-traveling-artbook-simon-stalenhag/
2. China has rolled out (pun intended) a copy of the U.S. Stryker armored vehicle
   http://www.janes.com/article/73292/norinco-rolls-out-vp10-8×8-vehicle-variants
3. Here’s a needlessly long-winded piece about the long, long history of Christian theologians, cult leaders and even Popes wrongly predicting Biblical Doomsday.
   https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/25/yearning-for-the-end-of-the-world
4. A survey of 150 people shows about 1/3 of them could hand-draw common corporate logos (for companies like Burger King and Starbucks) from memory, with disturbing accuracy. (I estimate it takes 100 – 200 repetitions of the same commercial before I become cognizant of whatever is being advertised).
   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4813514/Only-16-people-correctly-recall-famous-logos.html 
5. Britain is repainting its Challenger tanks with a camouflage scheme similar to what it had for its West Berlin-based tank unit in 1982. What’s old is new, and visual concealment methods don’t seem to have improved in 35 years.
   https://warisboring.com/new-urban-camo-wont-save-british-tanks/
6. Medical micromachines were successfully used on lab rats to deliver antibiotic loads. I don’t understand why medical nanomachines get all the attention and hype when micromachines are more technically plausible and could do many of the same things.
   http://bigthink.com/design-for-good/for-the-first-time-tiny-robots-treat-infection-in-a-living-organism
7. An analysis of the accuracy of Gartner Hype Cycles from 2000 to 2016 is an informative catalog of failures.
   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-cycles-michael-mullany
8. Here’s an outstanding rebuttal to Kevin Kelly’s recent “Myth of a Superhuman AI” article. I’ve never heard of the author before, his blog only has three entries, but he’s written a very thorough and convincing treatise, all the more impressive since he didn’t write it in his native language (he’s Finnish).
   https://hypermagicalultraomnipotence.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/there-are-no-free-lunches-but-organic-lunches-are-super-expensive-why-the-tradeoffs-constraining-human-cognition-do-not-limit-artificial-superintelligences/
9. Geneticists have uncovered the chemical steps through which magic mushrooms produce their hallucinogenic agent, psilocybin. Large scale industrial production of it could be possible, because the world badly needs more drugs.
   http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/web/2017/08/Magic-mushroomenzyme-mystery-solved.html
10. A reality check for lab grown meat.
    http://gizmodo.com/behind-the-hype-of-lab-grown-meat-1797383294
11. A video that clearly and simply describes the operation of Mazda’s new, high-efficiency gas engine, which operates like a diesel part of the time.
    https://youtu.be/9KhzMGbQXmY
12. Scientists and inventors are dispensable, but great artists, writers and musicians are not. (A somewhat humbling thing to remember when debating the usefulness of a STEM vs. humanities education.)
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/tim-harford-review/#.WX-QCkibyHc.facebook