My future predictions (2021 iteration)

If it’s January, it means it’s time for me to update my big list of future predictions! I used the 2020 version of this document as a template, and made edits to it as needed. For the sake of transparency, I’ve indicated recently added content by bolding it, and have indicated deleted or moved content with strikethrough.

Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.

I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).

2020s

  • Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground arrays, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
  • Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
  • This will be a bad decade for Russia as its overall population shrinks, its dependency ratio rises, and as low fossil fuel prices and sanctions keep hurting its economy. Russia will fall farther behind the U.S., China, and other leading countries in terms of economic, military, and technological might.
  • China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.
  • Improvements to smartphone cameras, mirrorless cameras, and perhaps light-field cameras will make D-SLRs obsolete. 
  • Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will make their market debuts and will find success in niche applications.
  • Virtual reality (VR) gaming will go mainstream as the devices get better and cheaper. It will stop being the sole domain of hardcore gamers willing to spend over $1,000 on hardware.
  • Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. They won’t display perfectly lifelike footage, but they will be much better than what we have today, and portable. 
  • “Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. These VR devices will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions (at least 60 pixels per degree of field of view), refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view (210 degrees wide by 150 degrees high) that together deliver a visual experience that matches or exceeds the limits of human vision. These high-end goggles won’t be truly “portable” devices because their high processing and energy requirements will probably make them bulky, give them only a few hours of battery life (or maybe none at all), or even require them to be plugged into another computer. Moreover, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
  • “Deepfake” pornography will reach new levels of sophistication and perversion as it becomes possible to seamlessly graft the heads of real people onto still photos and videos of nude bodies that closely match the physiques of the actual people. New technology for doing this will let amateurs make high-quality deepfakes, meaning any person could be targeted. It will even become possible to wear AR glasses that interpolate nude, virtual bodies over the bodies real people in the wearer’s field of view to provide a sort of fake “X-ray-vision.” The AR glasses could also be used to apply other types of visual filters that degraded real people within the field of view.
  • LED light bulbs will become as cheap as CFL and even incandescent bulbs. It won’t make economic sense NOT to buy LEDs, and they will establish market dominance.
  • “Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
  • Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
  • Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
  • Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
  • Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars will become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations.
  • Quality of life for people living and working in cities and near highways will improve as more drivers switch to quieter, emissionless electric vehicles. The noise reduction will be greatest in cities and suburbs where traffic moves slowly: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/05/will-electric-cars-make-traffic-quieter-yes-no/
  • Most new power equipment will be battery-powered, so machines like lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws will be much quieter and less polluting than they are today. Batteries will be energy-dense enough to compete with gasoline in these use cases, and differences in overall equipment weight and running time will be insignificant. The notion of a neighbor shattering your sense of peace and quiet with loud yard work will get increasingly alien. 
  • A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
  • The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
  • Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
  • The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit for everyone. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
  • Cheap DNA tests that can measure a person’s innate IQ and core personality traits with high accuracy will become widely available. There is the potential for this to cause social problems. 
  • At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
  • Space tourism will become routine thanks to privately owned spacecraft. 
  • Marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in the U.S. Either the federal government will overturn its marijuana prohibitions, or some patchwork of state and federal bans will remain but be so weakened and lightly enforced that there will be no real government barriers to obtaining and using marijuana. 
  • By the end of this decade, photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers. 
  • In 2029, the youngest Baby Boomer and the oldest Gen Xer will turn 65. 
  • Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader (Note: Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro wasn’t high profile enough).

2030s

  • VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them. A set of the glasses will last a day on a single charge under normal use.  
  • Augmented reality contact lenses will enter mass production and become widely available, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data. https://www.inverse.com/article/31034-augmented-reality-contact-lenses
  • The bulky VR goggles of the 2020s will transform into lightweight, portable V.R. glasses thanks to improved technology. The glasses will display lifelike footage. However, the best VR goggles will still need to be plugged into other devices, like routers or PCs.
  • Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
  • Functional CRT TVs and computer monitors will only exist in museums and in the hands of antique collectors. This will also be true for DLP TVs. 
  • The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
  • It will be standard practice for AIs to be doing hyperrealistic video game renderings, and for NPCs to behave very intelligently thanks to better AI. 
  • 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 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.
  • Loose-leaf sheets of “digital paper” will also exist thanks to the same technology.
  • Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly (and even funny and amusing) conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, at matching them with social gatherings (including some created by machines), and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature. Autonomous taxis will also be widespread and will have low fares, making it easier for people who are isolated due to low income or poor health (such as many elderly people) to go out.
  • Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available. AI personal assistants will have convincing, simulated personalities that seem to have the same depth as humans. Users will be able to pick from among personality profiles or to build their own.  
  • Chatbots will be able to have intelligent conversations with humans about politics and culture, to identify factually wrong beliefs, biases, and cognitive blind spots in individuals, and to effectively challenge them through verbal discussion and debate. The potential will exist for technology to significantly enlighten the human population and to reduce sociopolitical polarization. However, it’s unclear how many people will choose to use this technology. 
  • Turing-Test-capable chatbots will also supercharge the problem of online harassment, character assassination, and deliberate disinformation by spamming the internet with negative reviews, bullying messages, emails to bosses, and humiliating “deepfake” photos and videos of targeted people. Today’s “troll farms” where humans sit at computer terminals following instructions to write bad reviews for specific people or businesses will be replaced by AI trolls that can pump out orders of magnitude more content per day. And just as people today can “buy likes” for their social media accounts or business webpages, people in the future will be able, at low cost, to buy harassment campaigns against other people and organizations they dislike. Discerning between machine-generated and human-generated internet content will be harder and more important than ever.
  • House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
  • People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
  • Farm robots that are better than humans at fine motor tasks like picking strawberries humans will start becoming widespread.  
  • Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
  • Private owners of autonomous cars will start renting them out while not in use as taxis and package delivery vehicles. Your personal, autonomous car will drive you to work, then spend eight hours making money for you doing side jobs, and will be waiting for you outside your building at the end of the day.
  • The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
  • The same kinds of facilities will make inroads into the junk yard industry, as they would have all the right tooling to cheaply and rapidly disassemble old vehicles, test the parts for functionality, and shunt them to disposal or individual resale. (The days of hunting through junkyards by yourself for a car part you need will eventually end–it will all be on eBay. )
  • Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
  • The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
  • Private delivery services will get cheaper and faster thanks to autonomous vehicles.
  • Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
  • There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
  • Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
  • By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
  • Computers will be able to accurately deduce a human’s outward appearance based on only a DNA sample. This will aid police detectives, and will have other interesting uses, such as allowing parents to see what their unborn children will look like as adults, or allowing anyone to see what they’d look like if they were of the opposite sex (one sex chromosome replaced). 
  • Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample. 
  • Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
  • “Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices, mannerisms and other biometrics will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future. (Note that “digital immortality” is not the same as “mind uploading.”)
  • Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
  • Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
  • Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.
  • Movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking. The machines will also be able to reproduce detailed aspects of an actor’s speech, such as cadence, rhythm, tone and timbre, emotion, and accent, and to convey them accurately in another language.
  • Computers will also be able to automatically enhance and upscale old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.
  • CGI will get so refined than moviegoers with 20/20 vision won’t be able to see the difference between footage of unaltered human actors and footage of 100% CGI actors.
  • Lifelike CGI and “performance capture” will enable “digital resurrections” of dead actors. Computers will be able to scan through every scrap of footage with, say, John Wayne in it, and to produce a perfect CGI simulacrum of him that even speaks with his natural voice, and it will be seamlessly inserted into future movies. Elderly actors might also license movie studios to create and use digital simulacra of their younger selves in new movies. The results will be very fascinating, but might also worsen Hollywood’s problem with making formulaic content.
  • China’s military will get strong enough to defeat U.S. forces in the western Pacific. This means that, in a conventional war for control of the Spratly Islands and/or Taiwan, China would have >50% odds of winning. This shift in the local balance of power does not mean China will start a conflict. 
  • The quality and sophistication of China’s best military technology will surpass Russia’s best technology in all or almost all categories. However, it will still lag the U.S. 

2040s

  • The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2019. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting (VR, telepresence, and remote-controlled robots will be so advanced that even blue-collar jobs involving manual labor will be outsourced to workers living across borders). Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2019.
  • Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (like genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
  • 2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
  • Supercomputers that match or surpass upper-level estimates of the human brain’s computational capabilities will cost a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars apiece, meaning tech companies and universities will be able to afford large numbers of them for AI R&D projects, accelerating progress in the field. Hardware will no longer be the limiting factor to building AGI. If it hasn’t been built yet, it will be due to failure to figure out how to arrange the hardware in the right way to support intelligent thought, and/or to a failure to develop the necessary software. 
  • With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants will never close, online orders made at 3:00 am will be packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks will only stop to refuel, exchange cargo, or get preventative maintenance.
  • Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2019 people would envy.
  • Recycling will become much more efficient and practical thanks to house robots properly cleaning, sorting, and crushing/compacting waste before disposing of it. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today. Today, recycling programs are hobbled because even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and as a result, recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they must filter out at great cost. House robots would remember it perfectly.
  • Thanks to this diligence, house robots will also increase backyard composting, easing the burden on municipal trash services. 
  • It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking will happen as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars start being thought of as unusual and dangerous.
  • Over 90% of new car sales in developed countries will be for electric vehicles. Just as the invention of the automobile transformed horses into status goods used for leisure, the rise of electric vehicles will transform internal combustion vehicles into a niche market for richer people. 
  • A global “family tree” showing how all humans are related will be built using written genealogical records and genomic data from the billions of people who have had their DNA sequenced. It will become impossible to hide illegitimate children, and it will also become possible for people to find “genetic doppelgangers”–other people they have no familial relationship to, but with whom, by some coincidence, they share a very large number of genes. 
  • Improved knowledge of human genetics and its relevance to personality traits and interests will strengthen AI’s ability to match humans with friends, lovers, and careers. Rising technological unemployment will create a need for machines to match human workers with the remaining jobs in as efficient a manner as possible.
  • Realistic robot sex bots that can move and talk will exist. They won’t perfectly mimic humans, but will be “good enough” for most users. Using them will be considered weird and “for losers” at first, but in coming decades it will go mainstream, following the same pattern as Internet dating. [If we think of sex as a type of task, and if we agree that machines will someday be able to do all tasks better than humans, then it follows that robots will be better than humans at sex.]  

2050s

  • This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power. It will probably be preceded by successful computer simulations of the brains of progressively more complex model organisms, such as flatworms, fruit flies, and lab rats.
  • Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it. This will be akin to having an angel on your shoulder watching your surroundings and watching you, and giving you constructive advice all the time. 
  • In the developed world, less than 50% of people between age 22 and 65 will have gainful full-time jobs. However, if unprofitable full-time jobs that only persist thanks to government subsidies (such as someone running a small coffee shop and paying the bills with their monthly UBI check) and full-time volunteer “jobs” (such as picking up trash in the neighborhood) are counted, most people in that age cohort will be “doing stuff” on a full-time basis.  
  • The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
  • By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
  • Cheap desalination will provide humanity with unlimited amounts of drinking water and end the prospect of “water wars.” 
  • Mass surveillance and ubiquitous technology will have minimized violent crime and property crime in developed countries: It will be almost impossible to commit such crimes without a surveillance camera or some other type of sensor detecting the act, or without some device recording the criminal’s presence in the area at the time of the act. House robots will contribute by effectively standing guard over your property at night while you sleep. 
  • It will be common for people to have health monitoring devices on and inside of their bodies that continuously track things like their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and gene expression. If a person has a health emergency or appears likely to have one, his or her devices will send out a distress signal alerting EMS and nearby random citizens. If you walked up to such a person while wearing AR glasses, you would see their vital statistics and would receive instructions on how to assist them (i.e. – How to do CPR). Robots will also be able to render medical aid. 
  • Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2019. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation. Real estate prices will, in inflation-adjusted terms, be much higher in most metro areas and places with natural beauty than they were in 2020 because the “supply” of those prime locations is almost fixed, whereas the demand for them is elastic and will rise thanks to population growth, rising incomes, and the aforementioned technology advancements.
  • Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
  • The first healthy clone of an adult human will be born.
  • Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep and even carry them into your house. Items ordered off the internet will appear inside your house a few hours later, as if by magic. 
  • Smaller versions of the robots used on automated farms will be available at low cost to average people, letting them effortlessly create backyard gardens. This will boost global food production and let people have greater control over where their food comes from and what it contains. 
  • The last of America’s Cold War-era weapon platforms (e.g. – the B-52 bomber, F-15 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, Nimitz aircraft carrier) will finally be retired from service. There will be instances where four generations of people from the same military family served on the same type of plane or ship. 
  • Cheap guided bullets, which can make midair course changes and be fired out of conventional man-portable rifles, will become common in advanced armies. 
  • Personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with pinhole cameras and thin, flexible sheets of LEDs, colored e-ink, or some metamaterial with similar abilities will be commercially available. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans. The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. 
  • Powered exoskeletons will become practical for a wide range of applications, mainly due to improvements in batteries. For example, a disabled person could use a lightweight exoskeleton with a battery the size of a purse to walk around for a whole day on a single charge, and a soldier in a heavy-duty exoskeleton with a large backpack battery could do a day of marching on a single charge. (Note: Even though it will be technologically possible to equip infantrymen with combat exoskeletons, armies might reject the idea due to other impracticalities.)
  • There will be no technological or financial barrier to building powered combat exoskeletons that have cloaking devices. 
  • The richest person alive will achieve a $1 trillion net worth.
  • It will be technologically and financially feasible for small aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fossil fuels that cost no more than normal fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.

2060s

  • Machines will be better at satisfyingly matching humans with fields of study, jobs, friends, romantic partners, hobbies, and daily activities than most humans can do for themselves. Machines themselves will make better friends, confidants, advisers, and even lovers than humans. Additionally, machines will be smarter and more skilled at humans in most areas of knowledge and types of work. A cultural sea change will happen, in which most humans come to trust, rely upon, defend, and love machines.
  • House robots and human-sized worker robots will be as strong, agile, and dexterous as most humans, and their batteries will be energy-dense enough to power them for most of the day. A typical American family might have multiple robot servants that physically follow around the humans each day to help with tasks. The family members will also be continuously monitored and “followed” by A.I.s embedded in their portable personal computing devices and possibly in their bodies. 
  • Cheap home delivery of groceries, robot chefs, and a vast trove of free online recipes will enable people in average households to eat restaurant-quality meals at home every day, at low cost. Predictive algorithms that can appropriately choose new meals for humans based on their known taste preferences and other factors will determine the menu, and many people will face a culinary “satisfaction paradox.”
  • Machines will understand humans individually and at the species level better than humans understand themselves. They will have highly accurate personality models of most humans along with a comprehensive grasp of human sociology, human decision-making, human psychology, human cognitive biases, and human nature, and will pool the information to accurately predict human behavior. A nascent version of a 1:1 computer simulation of the Earth–with the human population modeled in great detail–will be created.
  • Machines will be better teachers than most trained humans. The former will have much sharper grasps of their pupils’ individual strengths, weaknesses, interests, and learning styles, and will be able to create and grade tests in a much fairer and less biased manner than humans. Every person will have his own tutor. 
  • There will be a small, permanent human presence on the Moon.
  • If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there will be intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).
  • The worldwide number of supercentenarians–people who are at least 110 years old–will be sharply higher than it was in 2019: Their population size could be 10 times bigger or more. 
  • Advances in a variety of technologies will make it possible to cryonically freeze humans in a manner that doesn’t pulverize their tissue. However, the technology needed to safely thaw them out won’t be invented for decades. 
  • China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country. Importantly, China’s pollution levels will be much lower than they are today thanks to a variety of factors.
  • Small drones (mostly aerial) will have revolutionized warfare, terrorism, assassinations, and crime and will be mature technologies. An average person will be able to get a drone of some kind that can follow his orders to find and kill other people or to destroy things.
  • Countermeasures against those small drones will also have evolved, and might include defensive drones and mass surveillance networks to detect drone attacks early on. The networks would warn people via their body-worn devices of incoming drone attacks or of sightings of potentially hostile drones. The body-worn devices, such as smartphones and AR glasses, might even have their own abilities to automatically detect drones by sight and sound and to alert their wearers.

2070s

  • 100 years after the U.S. “declared war” on cancer, there still will not be a “cure” for most types of cancer, but vaccination, early detection, treatment, and management of cancer will be vastly better, and in countries with modern healthcare systems, most cancer diagnoses will not reduce a person’s life expectancy. Consider that diabetes and AIDS were once considered “death sentences” that would invariably kill people within a few years of diagnosis, until medicines were developed that transformed them into treatable, chronic health conditions. 
  • Hospital-acquired infections will be far less of a problem than they are in 2020 thanks to better sterilization practices, mostly made possible by robots.
  • It will be technologically and financially feasible for large commercial aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by synthetic fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells. 
  • Digital or robotic companions that seem (or actually are) intelligent, funny, and loving will be easier for humans to associate with than other humans.
  • Technology will enable the creation of absolute surveillance states, where all human behavior is either constantly monitored or is inferred with high accuracy based on available information. Even a person’s innermost thoughts will be knowable thanks to technologies that monitor him or her for the slightest things like microexpressions, twitches, changes in voice tone, and eye gazes. When combined with other data regarding how the person spends their time and money, it will be possible to read their minds. The Thought Police will be a reality in some countries.  

2100

  • Humans probably won’t be the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
  • Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
  • The worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI will have not been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs will have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they will fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
  • Telepresence technology will also be very advanced, allowing humans to do nearly any task remotely, from any other place in the world, in safety and comfort. This will include cognitive tasks and hands-on tasks. If any humans still have jobs, they’ll be able to work from anywhere.
  • The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
  • Hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of “digitally immortal avatars” of dead humans will exist, and you will be able to interact with them through a variety of means (in FIVR, through devices like earpieces and TV screens, in the real world if the avatar takes over an android body resembling the human it was based on). 
  • A weak sort of immortality will be available thanks to self-cloning, immortal digital avatars, and perhaps mind uploading. You could clone yourself and instruct your digital avatar–which would be a machine programmed with your personality and memories–to raise the clone and ensure it developed to resemble you. Your digital avatar might have an android body or could exist in a disembodied state. 
  • It will be possible to make clones of humans using only their digital format genomic data. In other words, if you had a .txt file containing a person’s full genetic code, you could use that by itself to make a living, breathing clone. Having samples of their cells would not be necessary. 
  • The “DNA black market” that arose in the 2030s will pose an even bigger threat since it will be now possible to use DNA samples alone or their corresponding .txt files to clone a person or to produce a sperm or egg cell and, in turn, a child. Potential abuses include random people cloning or having the children of celebrities they are obsessed with, or cloning billionaires in the hopes of milking the clones for money. Important people who might be targets of such thefts will go to pains to prevent their DNA from being known. Since dead people have no rights, third parties might be able to get away with cloning or making gametes of the deceased.
  • Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
  • All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
  • Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
  • Full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) will exist wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human will have his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR. (Related to the satisfaction paradox) Elements of these virtual environments could be pornographic and sexual, allowing people to gratify any type of sexual fetish or urge with computer-generated scenarios and partners. 
  • More generally, AIs and humans whose creativity is turbocharged by machines will create enjoyable, consumable content (e.g. – films, TV shows, songs, artwork, jokes, new types of meals) faster than non-augmented humans can consume it. As a simple example of what this will be like, assume you have 15 hours of free time per day, that you love spending it listening to music, and each day, your favorite bands produce 16 hours worth of new songs that you really like.
  • The vast majority of unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong.
  • The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
  • Synthetic meat will taste no different from animal meat, and will be at least as cheap to make. The raising and/or killing of animals for food will be be illegal in many countries, and trends will clearly show the practice heading for worldwide ban. 
  • The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available. The fundamental bases of human existence and human social dynamics will change unpredictably once differences in appearance/attractiveness, intelligence, and personality traits can be eliminated at will. Individuals won’t be defined by fixed attributes anymore. 
  • Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals. Computers, sensors and displays will be embedded everywhere in the built environment and in nature, allowing humans with brain implants to interface with and control things around them through thought alone. 
  • Brain implants and brain surgeries will also be used to enhance IQ, change personality traits, and strengthen many types of skills. 
  • Technologically augmented humans and androids will have many abilities and qualities that ancient people considered “Godlike,” such as medical immortality, the ability to control objects by thought, telepathy, perfect memories, and superhuman senses.
  • Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete. Instead of flying cars, it’s more likely that there will be millions of small, autonomous helicopters and VTOL aircraft that will cheaply ferry people through dense, national networks of helipads and airstrips. Autonomous land vehicles would take take passengers to and from the landing sites. (https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-flying-cars-never-took-off-and-probably-never-will/
  • The notion of vehicles (e.g. – cars, planes, and boats) polluting the air will be an alien concept. 
  • Advanced nanomachines could exist.
  • Vastly improved materials and routine use of very advanced computer design simulations (including simulations done in quantum computers) will mean that manufactured objects of all types will be optimally engineered in every respect, and might seem to have “magical” properties. For example, a car will be made of hundreds of different types of alloys, plastics, and glass, each optimized for a different part of the vehicle, and car recalls will never happen since the vehicles will undergo vast amounts of simulated testing in every conceivable driving condition in 1:1 virtual simulations of the real world. 
  • Design optimization and the rise of AGI consumption will virtually eliminate planned obsolescence. Products that were deliberately engineered to fail after needlessly short periods, and “new” product lines that were no better than what they replaced, but had non-interchangeable part sizes would be exposed for what they were, and AGI consumers would refuse to buy them. Production will become much more efficient and far fewer things will be thrown out. 
  • Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
  • Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought). Some androids will also be indistinguishable to the touch, meaning they will seem to be made of supple flesh and will be the same temperature as human bodies. However, their body parts will not be organic.
  • Sex robots will be indistinguishable from humans.
  • Robots that are outwardly identical to sci-fi and fantasy characters and extinct animals, like grey aliens, elves, and dinosaurs, will exist and will occasionally be seen in public. Some weird person will want their robot butler to look like bigfoot. 
  • Machines that are outwardly indistinguishable from animals will also exist, and they will have surveillance and military applications. 
  • Drones, miniaturized smart weapons, and AIs will dominate warfare, from the top level of national strategy down to the simplest act of combat. The world’s strongest military could, with conventional weapons alone, destroy most of the world’s human population in a short period of time. 
  • The construction and daily operation of prisons will have been fully automated, lowering the monetary costs of incarceration. As such, state prosecutors and judges will no longer feel pressure to let accused criminals have plea deals or to give them shorter prison sentences to ease the burdens of prison overcrowding and high overhead costs. 
  • The term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries since inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD was in 2019 (assuming a constant inflation rate of 3.0%).
  • There will still be major wealth and income inequality across the human race. However, wealth redistribution, better government services, advances in industrial productivity, and better technologies will ensure that even people in the bottom 1% have all their basic and intermediate life needs meet. In many ways, the poor people of 2100 will have better lives than the rich people of 2020.

2101 – 2200 AD

  • Humans will definitely stop being the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth. 
  • Many “humans” will be heavily augmented through genetic engineering, other forms of bioengineering, and cybernetics. People who outwardly look like the normal humans of today might actually have extensive internal modifications that give them superhuman abilities. Non-augmented, entirely “natural” humans like people in 2019 will be looked down upon in the same way you might today look at a very low IQ person with sensory impairments. Being forced by your biology to incapacitate yourself for 1/3 of each day to sleep will be tantamount to having a medical disability. 
  • Due to a reduced or nonexistent need for sleep among intelligent machines and augmented humans and to the increased interconnectedness of the planet, global time zones will become much less relevant. It will be common for machines, humans, businesses, and groups to use the same clock–probably Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)–and for activity to proceed on a 24/7 basis, with little regard of Earth’s day/night cycle. 
  • Physical disabilities and defects of appearance that cause untold anguish to people in 2019 will be easily and cheaply fixable. For example, male-pattern baldness and obesity will be completely ameliorated with minor medical interventions like pills or outpatient surgery. Missing or deformed limbs will be easily replaced, all types of plastic surgery (including sex reassignment) will be vastly better and cheaper than today, and spinal cord damage will be totally repairable. The global “obesity epidemic” will disappear. Transsexual people will be able to seamlessly alter their bodies to conform with their preferred genders, or to alter their brains so their gender identities conform with the bodies they were born with. 
  • All sleep disorders will be curable thanks to cybernetics that can use electrical pulses to quickly initiate sleep states in human brains. The same kinds of technologies will also reduce or eliminate the need for humans to sleep, and for people to control their dreams. 
  • Brain-computer interfaces will let people control, pre-program, and, to a limited extent, record their dreams. 
  • Almost all of today’s diseases will be cured.
  • The means to halt and reverse human aging will be created. The human population will come to be dominated by people who are eternally young and beautiful. 
  • Humans and machines will be immortal. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who lived their lives knowing they were doomed to deteriorate and die. 
  • Extreme longevity, better reproductive technologies that eliminate the need for a human partner to have children, and robots that do domestic work and provide companionship (including sex) will weaken the institution of marriage more than any time in human history. An indefinite lifetime of monogamy will be impossible for most people to commit to. 
  • At reasonable cost, it will be possible for women to create healthy, genetically related children at any point in their lives, and without using the 2019-era, pre-menopausal egg freezing technique. For example, a 90-year-old, menopausal woman will be able to use reproductive technologies to make a baby that shares 50% of her DNA. 
  • Immortality, the automation of work, and widespread material abundance will completely transform lifestyles. With eternity to look forward to, people won’t feel pressured to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible. As stated, marriage will no longer be viewed as a lifetime commitment, and serial monogamy will probably become the norm. Relationships between parents and offspring will change as longevity erases the disparities in generational outlook and maturity that traditionally characterize parent-child interpersonal dynamics (e.g. – 300-year-old dad doesn’t know any better than his 270-year-old son). The “factory model” of public education–defined by conformity, rote memorization, frequent intelligence testing, and curricula structured to serve the needs of the job market–will disappear. The process of education will be custom-tailored to each person in terms of content, pacing, and style of instruction. Students will be much freer to explore subjects that interest them and to pursue those that best match their talents and interests. 
  • Radically extended human lifespans mean it will become much more common to have great-grandparents around. A cure for aging will also lead to families where members separated in age by many decades look the same age and have the same health. Additionally, older family members won’t be burdensome since they will be healthy.
  • Thanks to radical genetic engineering, there will be “human-looking,” biological people among us that don’t belong to our species, Homo sapiens. Examples could include engineered people who have 48 chromosomes instead of 46, people whose genomes have been shortened thanks to the deletion of junk DNA, or people who look outwardly human but who have radically different genes within their 46 chromosomes, so they have bird-like lungs. Such people wouldn’t be able to naturally breed with Homo sapiens, and would belong to new hominid species. 
  • Extinct species for which we have DNA samples (ex – from passenger pigeons on display in a museum) will “resurrected” using genetic technology.
  • The technology for safely thawing humans out of cryostasis and returning them to good health will be created. 
  • Suspended animation will become a viable alternative to suicide. Miserable people could “put themselves under,” with instructions to not be revived until the ill circumstances that tormented them had disappeared or until cures for their mental and medical problems were found. 
  • A sort of “time travel” will become possible thanks to technology. Suspended animation will let people turn off their consciousnesses until any arbitrary date in the future. From their perspective, no time will have elapsed between being frozen and being thawed out, even if hundreds of years actually passed between those two events, meaning the suspended animation machine will subjectively be no different from a time machine to them. FIVR paired with data from the global surveillance networks will let people enter highly accurate computer simulations of the past. The data will come from sources like old maps, photos, videos, and the digital avatars of people, living and dead. The computers simulations of past eras will get less accurate as the dates get more distant thanks to a paucity of data.
  • It will be possible to upload human minds to computers. The uploads will not share the same consciousness as their human progenitors, and will be thought of as “copies.” Mind uploads will be much more sophisticated than the digitally immortal avatars that will come into existence in the 2030s.
  • Different types of AGIs with fundamentally different mental architectures will exist. For example, some AGIs will be computer simulations of real human brains, while others will have totally alien inner workings. Just as a jetpack and a helicopter enable flight through totally different approaches, so will different types of AGIs be capable of intelligent thought. 
  • Gold, silver, and many other “precious metals” will be worth far less than today, adjusting for inflation, because better ways of extracting (including from seawater) them will have been developed. Space mining might also massively boost supplies of the metals, depressing prices. Diamonds will be nearly worthless thanks to better techniques for making them artificially. 
  • The first non-token quantities of minerals derived from asteroid mining will be delivered to the Earth’s surface. (Finding an asteroid that contains valuable minerals, altering its orbit to bring it closer to Earth, and then waiting for it to get here will take decades. No one will become a trillionaire from asteroid mining until well into the 22nd century.)
  • Intelligent life from Earth will colonize the entire Solar System, all dangerous space objects in our System will be found, the means to deflect or destroy them will be created, and intelligent machines will redesign themselves to be immune to the effects of radiation, solar flares, gamma rays, and EMP. As such, natural phenomena (including global warming) will no longer threaten the existence of civilization.  Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who were confined to Earth and at the mercy of planet-killing disasters. 
  • “End of the World” prophecies will become far less relevant since civilization will have spread beyond Earth and could be indefinitely self-sustaining even if Earth were destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists and religious people would deal with this by moving on to belief in “End of the Solar System” prophecies, but these will be based on extremely tenuous reasoning. 
  • The locus of civilization and power in our Solar System will shift away from Earth. The vast majority of intelligent life forms outside of Earth will be nonhuman. 
  • A self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
  • Spy satellites with lenses big enough to read license plates and discern facial features will be in Earth orbit. 
  • Space probes made in our Solar System and traveling at sub-light speeds will reach nearby stars.
  • All of the useful knowledge and great works of art that our civilization has produced or discovered could fit into an advanced memory storage device the size of a thumb drive. It will be possible to pair this with something like a self-replicating Von Neumann Probe, creating small, long-lived machines that would know how to rebuild something exactly like our civilization from scratch. Among other data, they would have files on how to build intelligent machines and cloning labs, and files containing the genomes and mind uploads of billions of unique humans and non-human organisms. Copies of existing beings and of long-dead beings could be “manufactured” anywhere, and loaded with the personality traits and memories of their predecessors. Such machines could be distributed throughout our Solar System as an “insurance policy” against our extinction, or sent to other star systems to seed them with life. Some of the probes could also be hidden in remote, protected locations on Earth.
  • We will find out whether alien life exists on Mars and the other celestial bodies in our Solar System. 
  • Intelligent machines will get strong enough to destroy the human race, though it’s impossible to assign odds to whether they’ll choose to do so.
  • If the “Zoo Hypothesis” is right, and if intelligent aliens have decided not to talk to humans until we’ve reached a high level of intellect, ethics, and culture, then the machine-dominated civilization that will exist on Earth this century might be advanced enough to meet their standards. Uncontrollable emotions and impulses, illogical thinking, tribalism, self-destructive behavior, and fear of the unknown will no longer govern individual and group behavior. Aliens could reveal their existence knowing it wouldn’t cause pandemonium. 
  • The government will no longer be synonymous with slowness and incompetence since all bureaucrats will be replaced by machines.
  • Technology will be seamlessly fused with humans, other biological organisms, and the environment itself.  
  • It will be cheaper and more energy-efficient to grow or synthesize almost all types of food in labs or factories than to grow and harvest it in traditional, open-air farms. Shielded from the weather and pests and not dependent on soil quality, the amounts and prices of foods will be highly consistent over time, and worries about farmland muscling out or polluting natural ecosystems will vanish. Animals will no longer be raised for food. Not only will this benefit animals, but it will benefit humans since it will eliminate a a major source of communicable disease (e.g. – new influenza strains originate in farm animals and, thanks to close contact with human farmers, evolve to infect people thanks to a process called “zoonosis”). Additionally, the means will exist to cheaply and artificially produce organic products, like wool and wood.
  • A global network of sensors and drones will identify and track every non-microscopic species on the planet. Cryptids like “bigfoot” and the “Loch Ness Monster” will be definitively proven to not exist. The monitoring network will also make it possible to get highly accurate, real-time counts of entire species populations. Mass gathering of DNA samples–either taken directly from organisms or from biological residue they leave behind–will also allow the full genetic diversity of all non-microscopic species to be known. 
  • That same network of sensors and machines will let us monitor the health of all the planet’s ecosystems and to intervene to protect any species. Interventions could include mass, painless sterilizations of species that are throwing the local ecology out of balance, mass vaccinations of species suffering through disease epidemics, reintroductions of extinct species, or widescale genetic engineering of a species. 
  • The technology and means to implement David Pearce’s global “benign stewardship” of nonhuman organic life will become available.  (https://youtu.be/KDZ3MtC5Et8) After millennia of inflicting damage and pain to the environment and other species, humanity will have a chance to inaugurate an era free of suffering.
  • The mass surveillance network will also look skyward and see all anomalous atmospheric phenomena and UFOs.
  • Robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history. 
  • Every significant archaeological site will be excavated and every shipwreck found. There will be no work left for people in the antiquities. 
  • Dynamic traffic lane reversal will become the default for all major roadways, sharply increasing road capacity without compromising safety. Autonomous cars that can instantly adapt to changes in traffic direction and that can easily avoid hitting each other even at high speeds will enable the transformation.

Interesting articles, December 2020

It’s been 70 years since American and Chinese troops fought at the Chosin Reservoir. It marked the high tide of the U.S.-led invasion of North Korea and was a turning point in the Korean War.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/04/941237449/god-let-us-survive-remembering-korean-wars-chosin-battle-and-evacuation

As early as WWII, the U.S. Army was experimenting with composite tank armor. It’s interesting to see how simple some of the composite fillings were: “80% gravel, 5% wood flour, 15% asphalt or pitch”
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/12/m4-sherman-with-composite-plastic-armor.html

A “directed microwave weapon” could be what caused over 20 American and Canadian diplomatic staff stationed in Cuba and China to fall ill with strange symptoms between 2016 and 2018.
https://apnews.com/article/politics-science-havana-cuba-china-8eee2de0d887e67d530d1a6f272d781c
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-usa-diplomats-health/scans-show-changes-to-brains-of-havana-u-s-embassy-workers-who-reported-illness-idUSKCN1UI20D

Russia still has a secret chemical weapons program, and they developed a new type of undetectable, time-released poison.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/14/fsb-team-of-chemical-weapon-experts-implicated-in-alexey-navalny-novichok-poisoning/

By brokering a end to the Armenia-Azerbaijan War and deploying peacekeepers to the region, Russia has strengthened its influence there. It’s unlikely to leave anytime soon.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/russias-new-territory/

Google has used artificial intelligence to achieve another startling scientific milestone: A machine called “AlphaFold 2” has apparently solved the “protein folding problem,” or at least come close to doing so. If given a linear sequence of amino acids, the machine is able to predict how they will fold up into a 3D molecular structure with nearly perfect accuracy.
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/120520/ai-makes-huge-progress-predicting-how-proteins-fol
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/01/the-big-problems

And the hits keep on coming: A different Google AI called “MuZero” was able to teach itself how to play Go, Shogi, Chess, and Mrs. Pac-Man, without any help from humans or formal knowledge of each game’s rules. It just watched, experimented, and learned.
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/muzero-mastering-go-chess-shogi-and-atari-without-rules

Facial recognition cameras are getting better at identifying people whose noses and mouths are obscured by masks.
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2020/12/face-recognition-software-shows-improvement-recognizing-masked-faces

Chinese scientists have figured out how to differentiate Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Koreans from their facial features.
https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1278

Elon Musk says he will launch humans to Mars in 2026, and all new cars produced in 2030 will have fully autonomous driving capabilities.
https://youtu.be/fjLa834mv8Q

A Chinese unmanned probe landed on the Moon and sent a few rocks back to Earth. It’s the first time in 44 years such samples have been returned.
https://www.space.com/china-sharing-chang-e-5-moon-samples

After the Apollo missions ended, NASA wanted to use the Saturn V rockets and modified versions of the other Apollo space hardware to build a Moon colony and do manned flybys of Venus and Mars.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-if-nasas-apollo-program/

“If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.”
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html

Metabolites, which are found in any person’s sweat, urine, hair, or saliva, contain a wealth of information about things such as their diet, exercise level, and state of health.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/02/13/people-leave-molecular-wakes-that-may-give-away-their-secrets

A new MIT analysis finds that there’s no simple explanation for why it is so expensive to build nuclear power plants in the U.S. Workers spend shockingly large amounts of time idle at nuclear construction sites, which might be the single biggest money waster, but the reasons for the idleness are varied.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plants-so-expensive-safetys-only-part-of-the-story/

“Over the longer term, perhaps in another 15 or 20 years, you will see a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine, because every pharmaceutical company is investing, and every biotech company is also contributing to the development of new targets for drug therapy, based upon the genome. And the therapies that we use 15 or 20 years from now will be directed much more precisely towards the molecular problem in things like cancer, or mental illness, than anything that we currently have available.”
–Francis Collins during a 2000 speech about the future of genetic medicine
https://web.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/clinton3.shtml

We may now have (expensive) cures for sickle-cell anemia and beta-thalassemia. Both treatments are gene therapies, the first using CRISPR and the second using RNA interference (RNAi).
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/07/gene-therapy-absolutely-and-for-real

It’s not true that “all the cells in a human body turn over every seven years.” Some of them take decades to replace themselves, and some never do at all.
https://www.more.com/lifestyle/exercise-health/truth-about-your-bodys-cell-regeneration/

The effects of birth order on several sibling traits and life outcomes may be minimal.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0890207020969010

This article from 2011 actually made some decent predictions about 2020 (take note of the feasibility ratings at the ends of each prediction’s paragraph).
https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/2020-possibly-going-be-one-seriously-awesome-year/

From 2015: ‘One in 10 U.S. homes may have a robot by 2020’
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3018338/one-in-10-us-homes-may-have-a-robot-by-2020.html

“Ecobots” are robots that can eat organic matter and turn the energy into electricity. The most advanced model can even poop. In the distant future, I think some robots and posthumans will be able to derive energy from the full range of organic and synthetic sources, as this will be the most versatile setup (very hard to “starve” if you can eat plants AND plug in to an electrical outlet).
https://www.treehugger.com/scientists-invent-robot-that-eats-organic-matter-then-poops-4860413

Your moment of zen: a flying drone armed with a flamethrower destroys a wasp nest.
https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-china-chongqing-84436504dbf59c587cb227eb4c1fe0c5

The FAA has loosened rules regarding drones, bring the U.S. closer to a future of widespread delivery drones.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/29/951010863/u-s-announces-new-rules-for-drones-and-their-operators

A “subterrene” is a special vehicle that uses a giant, superhot drill at its front to dig an underground tunnel. The Soviets reportedly built a nuclear-powered one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Subterrene&oldid=969567544

Manmade objects now outweigh all the plants and animals on Earth. By weight, most of our manufactured goods come in the form of concrete, bricks and other building materials comprising structures and infrastructure.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55239668

“Lunar resonant streetlights” can sense ambient light levels and adjust the brightness of their own bulbs accordingly. During full Moons, the lights would get very dim.
http://www.civiltwilightcollective.com/lunar-resonant-streetlights/

Gravity sensors (gravimeters) are now as small as postage stamps. Imagine having them embedded in your body so you could sense things like metal through the walls, or buried meteors under your feet.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/fossil-fuels/stampsized-gravity-meter-could-have-big-impact-on-oil-exploration

From May: ‘Researchers at Singapore University of Technology and Design have created a complex model predicting the exact date the pandemic will end in the US, UK, and other countries around the world. According to the data, the US is on track to be coronavirus-free by November 11, while the UK could see an earlier end date of September 30.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8350935/US-coronavirus-pandemic-early-November-predictive-model-shows.html

It’s hard to remember now, but early in the pandemic, there was some hope that it would be over by the end of 2020, thanks to a vaccine being invented with surprising speed, or to the virus somehow turning out to not be as bad as expected. On March 31, Dr. Fauci flatly rejected those hopes by predicting that there would be a serious second wave in the fall, which happened.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8171657/Fauci-expects-America-suffer-coronavirus-outbreak-fall.html

Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine could mark the beginning of a new era of vaccines. Who knows: maybe the number of lives saved by future vaccines will exceed the number of deaths from COVID-19.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/mrna-vaccines-could-revolutionise-medicine/

Fauci now predicts that vaccinations will start measurably decreasing COVID-19 infection rates by April, and that herd immunity could be achieved if 75% – 85% of Americans got vaccinated. At current rates, that could happen by the end of 2021.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/12/15/946714505/fauci-predicts-u-s-could-see-signs-of-herd-immunity-by-late-march-or-early-april

Facing a higher death toll than its neighbors, Sweden has ended its lax approach to the COVID-19 pandemic and instituted a national lockdown.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/long-a-holdout-from-covid-19-restrictions-sweden-ends-its-pandemic-experiment-11607261658

Russia just admitted its COVID-19 death toll was way worse than they had been claiming.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/28/russia-admits-to-world-third-worst-covid-19-death-toll-underreported

Fears that Thanksgiving travel would cause a surge in COVID-19 infections were unfounded.
https://www.bbc.com/news/55363256

There’s growing evidence that vulnerability to COVID-19 is partly genetic.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/key-genes-related-to-severe-covid-19-infection-identified-68276

Tyler Cowen’s prediction from April was basically right. The U.S. never had a national lockdown strategy and muddled through the year with a mix of state-level strategies that “yo-yoed” based on infection levels. It’s now the fall, and individual COVID-19 survival rates are higher because we’ve learned better ways to treat it, but overall deaths are higher than ever because so many more people are getting infected. We have vaccines (and it sounds like their invention might have come earlier than Cowen predicted), but distribution has just started, and his point that it will take a long time to inoculate the American population will hold true.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/where-we-stand.html

Bill Gates doesn’t think the COVID-19 related restrictions in the U.S. will completely go away for 12 to 18 months. Everything hinges on how many people get vaccinated, and how quickly.
https://youtu.be/dCt23D8VXpc?t=473

A new, more contagious strain of COVID-19 has emerged in Britain. While not more lethal to any single infected person than the older strain, its ability to quickly infect larger numbers of people will raise the death toll.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/22/the-new-mutations

How Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 predictions are faring (pt 4)

This is the fourth…and LAST…entry in my series of blog posts analyzing the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from his 1998 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. You can view the previous installments of this series here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

“An undercurrent of concern is developing with regard to the influence of machine intelligence. There continue to be differences between human and machine intelligence, but the advantages of human intelligence are becoming more difficult to identify and articulate. Computer intelligence is thoroughly interwoven into the mechanisms of civilization and is designed to be outwardly subservient to apparent human control. On the one hand, human transactions and decisions require by law a human agent of responsibility, even if fully initiated by machine intelligence. On the other hand, few decisions are made without significant involvement and consultation with machine-based intelligence.”

MOSTLY RIGHT

Technological advances have moved concerns over the influence of machine intelligence to the fore in developed countries. In many domains of skill previously considered hallmarks of intelligent thinking, such as driving vehicles, recognizing images and faces, analyzing data, writing short documents, and even diagnosing diseases, machines had achieved human levels of performance by the end of 2019. And in a few niche tasks, such as playing Go, chess, or poker, machines were superhuman. Eroded human dominance in these and other fields did indeed force philosophers and scientists to grapple with the meaning of “intelligence” and “creativity,” and made it harder yet more important to define how human thinking was still special and useful.

While the prospect of artificial general intelligence was still viewed with skepticism, there was no real doubt among experts and laypeople in 2019 that task-specific AIs and robots would continue improving, and without any clear upper limit to their performance. This made technological unemployment and the solutions for it frequent topics of public discussion across the developed world. In 2019, one of the candidates for the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, Andrew Yang, even made these issues central to his political platform.

If “algorithms” is another name for “computer intelligence” in the prediction’s text, then yes, it is woven into the mechanisms of civilization and is ostensibly under human control, but in fact drives human thinking and behavior. To the latter point, great alarm has been raised over how algorithms used by social media companies and advertisers affect sociopolitical beliefs (particularly, conspiracy thinking and closedmindedness), spending decisions, and mental health.

Human transactions and decisions still require a “human agent of responsibility”: Autonomous cars aren’t allowed to drive unless a human is in the driver’s seat, human beings ultimately own and trade (or authorize the trading of) all assets, and no military lets its autonomous fighting machines kill people without orders from a human. The only part of the prediction that seems wrong is the last sentence. Probably most decisions that humans make are done without consulting a “machine-based intelligence.” Consider that most daily purchases (e.g. – where to go for lunch, where to get gas, whether and how to pay a utility bill) involve little thought or analysis. A frighteningly large share of investment choices are also made instinctively, with benefit of little or no research. However, it should be noted that one area of human decision-making, dating, has become much more data-driven, and it was common in 2019 for people to use sorting algorithms, personality test results, and other filters to choose potential mates.

“Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”

MOSTLY RIGHT

Gunfire detection systems, which are comprised of networks of microphones emplaced across an area and which use machine intelligence to recognize the sounds of gunshots and to triangulate their origins, were emplaced in over 100 cities at the end of 2019. The dominant company in this niche industry, “ShotSpotter,” used human analysts to review its systems’ results before forwarding alerts to local police departments, so the systems were not truly automated, but nonetheless they made heavy use of machine intelligence.

Automated license plate reader cameras, which are commonly mounted next to roads or on police cars, also use machine intelligence and are widespread. The technology has definitely reduced violent crime, as it has allowed police to track down stolen vehicles and cars belonging to violent criminals faster than would have otherwise been possible.

In some countries, surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology monitor many public spaces. The cameras compare the people they see to mugshots of criminals, and alert the local police whenever a wanted person is seen. China is probably the world leader in facial recognition surveillance, and in a famous 2018 case, it used the technology to find one criminal among 60,000 people who attended a concert in Nanchang.

At the end of 2019, several organizations were researching ways to use machine learning for real-time recognition of violent behavior in surveillance camera feeds, but the systems were not accurate enough for commercial use.

“People attempt to protect their privacy with near-unbreakable encryption technologies, but privacy continues to be a major political and social issue with each individual’s practically every move stored in a database somewhere.”

RIGHT

In 2013, National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden leaked a massive number of secret documents, revealing the true extent of his employer’s global electronic surveillance. The world was shocked to learn that the NSA was routinely tracking the locations and cell phone call traffic of millions of people, and gathering enormous volumes of data from personal emails, internet browsing histories, and other electronic communications by forcing private telecom and internet companies (e.g. – Verizon, Google, Apple) to let it secretly search through their databases. Together with British intelligence, the NSA has the tools to spy on the electronic devices and internet usage of almost anyone on Earth.

Edward Snowden

Snowden also revealed that the NSA unsurprisingly had sophisticated means for cracking encrypted communications, which it routinely deployed against people it was spying on, but that even its capabilities had limits. Because some commercially available encryption tools were too time-consuming or too technically challenging to crack, the NSA secretly pressured software companies and computing hardware manufacturers to install “backdoors” in their products, which would allow the Agency to bypass any encryption their owners implemented.

During the 2010s, big tech titans like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple also came under major scrutiny for quietly gathering vast amounts of personal data from their users, and reselling it to third parties to make hundreds of billions of dollars. The decade also saw many epic thefts of sensitive personal data from corporate and government databases, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

With these events in mind, it’s quite true that concerns over digital privacy and confidentiality of personal data have become “major political and social issues,” and that there’s growing displeasure at the fact that “each individual’s practically every move stored in a database somewhere.” The response has been strongest in the European Union, which, in 2018, enacted the most stringent and impactful law to protect the digital rights of individuals–the “General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR).

Widespread awareness of secret government surveillance programs and of the risk of personal electronic messages being made public thanks to hacks have also bolstered interest in commercial encryption. “Whatsapp” is a common text messaging app with built-in end-to-end encryption. It was invented in 2016 and had 1.5 billion users by 2019. “Tor” is a web browser with built-in encryption that became relatively common during the 2010s after it was learned even the NSA couldn’t spy on people who used it. Additionally, virtual private networks (VPNs), which provide an intermediate level of data privacy protection for little expense and hassle, are in common use.

“The existence of the human underclass continues as an issue. While there is sufficient prosperity to provide basic necessities (secure housing and food, among others) without significant strain to the economy, old controversies persist regarding issues of responsibility and opportunity.”

RIGHT

It’s unclear whether this prediction pertained to the U.S., to rich countries in aggregate, or to the world as a whole, and “underclass” is not defined, so we can’t say whether it refers only to desperately poor people who are literally starving, or to people who are better off than that but still under major daily stress due to lack of money. Whatever the case, by any reasonable definition, there is an “underclass” of people in almost every country.

In the U.S. and other rich countries, welfare states provide even the poorest people with access to housing, food, and other needs, though there are still those who go without because severe mental illness and/or drug addiction keep them stuck in homeless lifestyles and render them too behaviorally disorganized to apply for government help or to be admitted into free group housing. Some people also live in destitution in rich countries because they are illegal immigrants or fugitives with arrest warrants, and contacting the authorities for welfare assistance would lead to their detection and imprisonment. Political controversy over the causes of and solutions to extreme poverty continues to rage in rich countries, and the fault line usually is about “responsibility” and “opportunity.”

The fact that poor people are likelier to be obese in most OECD countries and that starvation is practically nonexistent there shows that the market, state, and private charity have collectively met the caloric needs of even the poorest people in the rich world, and without straining national economies enough to halt growth. Indeed, across the world writ large, obesity-related health problems have become much more common and more expensive than problems caused by malnutrition. The human race is not financially struggling to feed itself, and would derive net economic benefits from reallocating calories from obese people to people living in the remaining pockets of land (such as war-torn Syria) where malnutrition is still a problem.

There’s also a growing body of evidence from the U.S. and Canada that providing free apartments to homeless people (the “housing first” strategy) might actually save taxpayer money, since removing those people from unsafe and unhealthy street lifestyles would make them less likely to need expensive emergency services and hospitalizations. The issue needs to be studied in further depth before we can reach a firm conclusion, but it’s probably the case that rich countries could give free, basic housing to their homeless without significant additional strain to their economies once the aforementioned types of savings to other government services are accounted for.

“This issue is complicated by the growing component of most employment’s being concerned with the employee’s own learning and skill acquisition. In other words, the difference between those ‘productively’ engaged and those who are not is not always clear.”

PARTLY RIGHT

As I said in part 2 of this review, Kurzweil’s prediction that people in 2019 would be spending most of their time at work acquiring new skills and knowledge to keep up with new technologies was wrong. The vast majority of people have predictable jobs where they do the same sets of tasks over and over. On-the-job training and mandatory refresher training is very common, but most workers devote small shares of their time to them, and the fraction of time spent doing workplace training doesn’t seem significantly different from what it was when the book was published.

From years of personal experience working in large organizations, I can say that it’s common for people to take workplace training courses or work-sponsored night classes (either voluntarily or because their organizations require it) that provide few or no skills or items of knowledge that are relevant to their jobs. Employees who are undergoing these non-value-added training programs have the superficial appearance of being “productively engaged” even if the effort is really a waste, or so inefficient that the training course could have been 90% shorter if taught better. But again, this doesn’t seem different from how things were in past decades.

This means the prediction was partly right, but also of questionable significance in the first place.

“Virtual artists in all of the arts are emerging and are taken seriously. These cybernetic visual artists, musicians, and authors are usually affiliated with humans or organizations (which in turn are comprised of collaborations of humans and machines) that have contributed to their knowledge base and techniques. However, interest in the output of these creative machines has gone beyond the mere novelty of machines being creative.”

MOSTLY RIGHT

The “Deep Dream” computer program made this surrealist portrait.

In 2019, computers could indeed produce paintings, songs, and poetry with human levels of artistry and skill. For example, Google’s “Deep Dream” program is a neural network that can transform almost any image into something resembling a surrealist painting. Deep Dream’s products captured international media attention for how striking, and in many cases, disturbing, they looked.

“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy”

In 2018, a different computer program produced a painting–“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy”–that fetched a record-breaking $423,500 at an art auction. The program was a generative adversarial network (GAN) designed and operated by a small team of people who described themselves as “a collective of researchers, artists, and friends, working with the latest models of deep learning to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence.” That seems to fulfill the second part of the prediction (“These cybernetic visual artists, musicians, and authors are usually affiliated with humans or organizations (which in turn are comprised of collaborations of humans and machines) that have contributed to their knowledge base and techniques.”)

Machines are also respectable songwriters, and are able to produce original songs based on the styles of human artists. For example, a computer program called “EMMY” (an acronym for “Experiments in Musical Intelligence”) is able to make instrumental musical scores that accurately mimic those of famous human musicians, like Bach and Mozart (fittingly, Ray Kurzweil made a simpler computer program that did essentially the same thing when he was a teenager). Listen to a few of the songs and judge their quality for yourself:

Computer scientists at Google have built a neural network called “JukeBox” that is even more advanced than EMMY, and which can produce songs that are complete with simulated human lyrics. While the words don’t always make sense and there’s much room for improvement, most humans have no creative musical talent at all and couldn’t do any better, and the quality, sophistication and coherence of the entirely machine-generated songs is very impressive (audio samples are available online).

Also at Google, an artificial intelligence program called the “Generative Pretrained Transformer” was invented to understand and write text. In 2019, the second version of the program, “GPT-2,” made its debut, and showed impressive skill writing poetry, short news articles and other content, with minimal prompting from humans (it was also able to correctly answer basic questions about text it was shown and to summarize the key points, demonstrating some degree of reading comprehension). While often clunky and sometimes nonsensical, the passages that GPT-2 generates nonetheless fall within the “human range” of writing ability since they are very hard to tell apart from the writings of a child, or of an adult with a mental or cognitive disability. Some of the machine-written passages also read like choppy translations of text that was well-written in whatever its original language was.

Much of GPT-2’s poetry is also as good as–or, as bad as–that written by its human counterparts:

And they have seen the last light fail;
By day they kneel and pray;
But, still they turn and gaze upon
The face of God to-day.

And God is touched and weeps anew
For the lost souls around;
And sorrow turns their pale and blue,
And comfort is not found.

They have not mourned in the world of men,
But their hearts beat fast and sore,
And their eyes are filled with grief again,
And they cease to shed no tear.

And the old men stand at the bridge in tears,
And the old men stand and groan,
And the gaunt grey keepers by the cross
And the spent men hold the crown.

And their eyes are filled with tears,
And their staves are full of woe.
And no light brings them any cheer,
For the Lord of all is dead

In conclusion, the prediction is right that there were “virtual artists” in 2019 in multiple fields of artistic endeavor. Their works were of high enough quality and “humanness” to be of interest for reasons other than the novelties of their origins. They’ve raised serious questions among humans about the nature of creative thinking, and whether machines are capable or soon will be. Finally, the virtual artists were “affiliated with” or, more accurately, owned and controlled by groups of humans.

“Visual, musical, and literary art created by human artists typically involve a collaboration between human and machine intelligence.”

UNCLEAR

It’s impossible to assess this prediction’s veracity because the meanings of “collaboration” and “machine intelligence” are undefined (also, note that the phrase “virtual artists” is not used in this prediction). If I use an Instagram filter to transform one of the mundane photos I took with my camera phone into a moody, sepia-toned, artistic-looking image, does the filter’s algorithm count as a “machine intelligence”? Does my mere use of it, which involves pushing a button on my smartphone, count as a “collaboration” with it?

Likewise, do recording studios and amateur musicians “collaborate with machine intelligence” when they use computers for post-production editing of their songs? When you consider how thoroughly computer programs like “Auto-Tune” can transform human vocals, it’s hard to argue that such programs don’t possess “machine intelligence.” This instructional video shows how it can make any mediocre singer’s voice sound melodious, and raises the question of how “good” the most famous singers of 2019 actually are: Can Anyone Sing With Autotune?! (Real Voice Vs. Autotune)

If I type a short story or fictional novel on my computer, and the word processing program points out spelling and usage mistakes, and even makes sophisticated recommendations for improving my writing style and grammar, am I collaborating with machine intelligence? Even free word processing programs have automatic spelling checkers, and affordable apps like Microsoft Word, Grammarly and ProWritingAid have all of the more advanced functions, meaning it’s fair to assume that most fiction writers interact with “machine intelligence” in the course of their work, or at least have the option to. Microsoft Word also has a “thesaurus” feature that lets users easily alter the wordings of their stories.

“The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual-experience software, which ranges from simulations of ‘real’ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.”

WRONG

Analyzing this prediction first requires us to know what “virtual-experience software” refers to. As indicated by the phrase “continues to be,” Kurzweil used it earlier, specifically, in the “2009” chapter where he issued predictions for that year. There, he indicates that “virtual-experience software” is another name for “virtual reality software.” With that in mind, the prediction is wrong. As I showed previously in this analysis, the VR industry and its technology didn’t progress nearly as fast as Kurzweil forecast.

That said, the video game industry’s revenues exceed those of nearly all other art and entertainment industries. Globally for 2019, video games generated about $152.1 billion in revenue, compared to $41.7 billion for the film. The music industry’s 2018 figures were $19.1 billion. Only the sports industry, whose global revenues were between $480 billion and $620 billion, was bigger than video games (note that the two cross over in the form of “E-Sports”).

Revenues from virtual reality games totaled $1.2 billion in 2019, meaning 99% of the video game industry’s revenues that year DID NOT come from “virtual-experience software.” The overwhelming majority of video games were viewed on flat TV screens and monitors that display 2D images only. However, the graphics, sound effects, gameplay dynamics, and plots have become so high quality that even these games can feel immersive, as if you’re actually there in the simulated environment. While they don’t meet the technical definition of being “virtual reality” games, some of them are so engrossing that they might as well be.

“The primary threat to [national] security comes from small groups combining human and machine intelligence using unbreakable encrypted communication. These include (1) disruptions to public information channels using software viruses, and (2) bioengineered disease agents.”

MOSTLY WRONG

Terrorism, cyberterrorism, and cyberwarfare were serious and growing problems in 2019, but it isn’t accurate to say they were the “primary” threats to the national security of any country. Consider that the U.S., the world’s dominant and most advanced military power, spent $16.6 billion on cybersecurity in FY 2019–half of which went to its military and the other half to its civilian government agencies. As enormous as that sum is, it’s only a tiny fraction of America’s overall defense spending that fiscal year, which was a $726.2 billion “base budget,” plus an extra $77 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” which is another name for combat and nation-building in Iraq, Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent, in Syria.

In other words, the world’s greatest military power only allocates 2% of its defense-related spending to cybersecurity. That means hackers are clearly not considered to be “the primary threat” to U.S. national security. There’s also no reason to assume that the share is much different in other countries, so it’s fair to conclude that it is not the primary threat to international security, either.

Also consider that the U.S. spent about $33.6 billion on its nuclear weapons forces in FY2019. Nuclear weapon arsenals exist to deter and defeat aggression from powerful, hostile countries, and the weapons are unsuited for use against terrorists or computer hackers. If spending provides any indication of priorities, then the U.S. government considers traditional interstate warfare to be twice as big of a threat as cyberattackers. In fact, most of military spending and training in the U.S. and all other countries is still devoted to preparing for traditional warfare between nation-states, as evidenced by things like the huge numbers of tanks, air-to-air fighter planes, attack subs, and ballistic missiles still in global arsenals, and time spent practicing for large battles between organized foes.

“Small groups” of terrorists inflict disproportionate amounts of damage against society (terrorists killed 14,300 people across the world in 2017), as do cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism, but the numbers don’t bear out the contention that they are the “primary” threats to global security.

Whether “bioengineered disease agents” are the primary (inter)national security threat is more debatable. Aside from the 2001 Anthrax Attacks (which only killed five people, but nonetheless bore some testament to Kurzweil’s assessment of bioterrorism’s potential threat), there have been no known releases of biological weapons. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in late 2019, has caused human and economic damage comparable to the World Wars, and has highlighted the world’s frightening vulnerability to novel infectious diseases. This has not gone unnoticed by terrorists and crazed individuals, and it could easily inspire some of them to make biological weapons, perhaps by using COVID-19 as a template. Modifications that made it more lethal and able to evade the early vaccines would be devastating to the world. Samples of unmodified COVID-19 could also be employed for biowarfare if disseminated in crowded places at some point in the future, when herd immunity has weakened.

Just because the general public, and even most military planners, don’t appreciate how dire bioterrorism’s threat is doesn’t mean it is not, in fact, the primary threat to international security. In 2030, we might look back at the carnage caused by the “COVID-23 Attack” and shake our collective heads at our failure to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic a few years earlier and prepare while we had time.

“Most flying weapons are tiny–some as small as insects–with microscopic flying weapons being researched.”

UNCLEAR

What counts as a “flying weapon”? Aircraft designed for unlimited reuse like planes and helicopters, or single-use flying munitions like missiles, or both? Should military aircraft that are unsuited for combat (e.g. – jet trainers, cargo planes, scout helicopters, refueling tankers) be counted as flying weapons? They fly, they often go into combat environments where they might be attacked, but they don’t carry weapons. This is important because it affects how we calculate what “most”/”the majority” is.

What counts as “tiny”? The prediction’s wording sets “insect” size as the bottom limit of the “tiny” size range, but sets no upper bound to how big a flying weapon can be and still be considered “tiny.” It’s up to us to do it.

A “Phantom” ultralight plane. Is it fair to call this “tiny”?

“Ultralights” are a legally recognized category of aircraft in the U.S. that weigh less than 254 lbs unloaded. Most people would take one look at such an aircraft and consider it to be terrifyingly small to fly in, and would describe it as “tiny.” Military aviators probably would as well: The Saab Gripen is one of the smallest modern fighter planes and still weighs 14,991 lbs unloaded, and each of the U.S. military’s MH-6 light observation helicopters weigh 1,591 lbs unloaded (the diminutive Smart Car Fortwo weighs about 2,050 lbs, unloaded).

With those relative sizes in mind, let’s accept the Phantom X1 ultralight plane as the upper bound of “tiny.” It weighs 250 lbs unloaded, is 17 feet long and has a 28 foot wingspan, so a “flying weapon” counts as being “tiny” if it is smaller than that.

If we also count missiles as “flying weapons,” then the prediction is right since most missiles are smaller than the Phantom X1, and the number of missiles far exceeds the number of “non-tiny” combat aircraft. A Hellfire missile, which is fired by an aircraft and homes in on a ground target, is 100 lbs and 5 feet long. A Stinger missile, which does the opposite (launched from the ground and blows up aircraft) is even smaller. Air-to-air Sidewinder missiles also meet our “tiny” classification. In 2019, the U.S. Air Force had 5,182 manned aircraft and wanted to buy 10,264 new guided missiles to bolster whatever stocks of missiles it already had in its inventory. There’s no reason to think the ratio is different for the other branches of the U.S. military (i.e. – the Navy probably has several guided missiles for every one of its carrier-borne aircraft), or that it is different in other countries’ armed forces. Under these criteria, we can say that most flying weapons are tiny.

The RQ-11B Raven drone could be considered a “tiny flying weapon.”

If we don’t count missiles as “flying weapons” and only count “tiny” reusable UAVs, then the prediction is wrong. The U.S. military has several types of these, including the “Scan Eagle,” RQ-11B “Raven,” RQ-12A “Wasp,” RQ-20 “Puma,” RQ-21 “Blackjack,” and the insect-sized PD-100 Black Hornet. Up-to-date numbers of how many of these aircraft the U.S. has in its military inventory are not available (partly because they are classified), but the data I’ve found suggest they number in the hundreds of units. In contrast, the U.S. military has over 12,000 manned aircraft.

At 100mm long and 120mm wide along its main rotor, the PD-100 drone is as small as a large dragonfly.

The last part of the prediction, that “microscopic” flying weapons would be the subject of research by 2019, seems to be wrong. The smallest flying drones in existence at that time were about as big as bees, which are not microscopic since we can see them with the naked eye. Moreover, I couldn’t find any scientific papers about microscopic flying machines, indicating that no one is actually researching them. However, since such devices would have clear espionage and military uses, it’s possible that the research existed in 2019, but was classified. If, at some point in the future, some government announces that its secret military labs had made impractical, proof-of-concept-only microscopic flying machines as early as 2019, then Kurzweil will be able to say he was right.

Anyway, the deep problems with this prediction’s wording have been made clear. Something like “Most aircraft in the military’s inventory are small and autonomous, with some being no bigger than flying insects” would have been much easier to evaluate.

“Many of the life processes encoded in the human genome, which was deciphered more than ten years earlier, are now largely understood, along with the information-processing mechanisms underlying aging and degenerative conditions such as cancer and heart disease.”

PARTLY RIGHT

The words “many” and “largely” are subjective, and provide Kurzweil with another escape hatch against a critical analysis of this prediction’s accuracy. This problem has occurred so many times up to now that I won’t belabor you with further explanation.

The human genome was indeed “deciphered” more than ten years before 2019, in the sense that scientists discovered how many genes there were and where they were physically located on each chromosome. To be specific, this happened in 2003, when the Human Genome Project published its first, fully sequenced human genome. Thanks to this work, the number of genetic disorders whose associated defective genes are known to science rose from 60 to 2,200. In the years since Human Genome Project finished, that climbed further, to 5,000 genetic disorders.

The cost of sequencing a human genome sharply dropped, making it possible to do genome-wide association studies, and for middle income people to have their personal genomes sequenced.

However, we still don’t know what most of our genes do, or which trait(s) each one codes for, so in an important sense, the human genome has not been deciphered. Since 1998, we’ve learned that human genetics is more complicated than suspected, and that it’s rare for a disease or a physical trait to be caused by only one gene. Rather, each trait (such as height) and disease risk is typically influenced by the summed, small effects of many different genes. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which can measure the subtle effects of multiple genes at once and connect them to the traits they code for, are powerful new tools for understanding human genetics. We also now know that epigenetics and environmental factors have large roles determining how a human being’s genes are expressed and how he or she develops in biological but non-genetic ways. In short just understanding what genes themselves do is not enough to understand human development or disease susceptibility.

Returning to the text of the prediction, the meaning of “information-processing mechanisms” probably refers to the ways that human cells gather information about their external surroundings and internal state, and adaptively respond to it. An intricate network of organic machinery made of proteins, fat structures, RNA, and other molecules handles this task, and works hand-in-hand with the DNA “blueprints” stored in the cell’s nucleus. It is now known that defects in this cellular-level machinery can lead to health problems like cancer and heart disease, and advances have been made uncovering the exact mechanics by which those defects cause disease. For example, in the last few years, we discovered how a mutation in the “SF3B1” gene raises the risk of a cell developing cancer. While the link between mutations to that gene and heightened cancer risk had long been known, it wasn’t until the advent of CRISPR that we found out exactly how the cellular machinery was malfunctioning, in turn raising hopes of developing a treatment.

The aging process is more well-understood than ever, and is known to have many separate causes. While most aging is rooted in genetics and is hence inevitable, the speed at which a cell or organism ages can be affected at the margins by how much “stress” it experiences. That stress can come in the form of exposure to extreme temperatures, physical exertion, and ingestion of specific chemicals like oxidants. Over the last 10 years, considerable progress has been made uncovering exactly how those and other stressors affect cellular machinery in ways that change how fast the cell ages. This has also shed light on a phenomenon called “hormesis,” in which mild levels of stress actually make cells healthier and slow their aging.

“The expected life span…[is now] over one hundred.”

WRONG

The expected life span for an average American born in 2018 was 76.2 years for males and 81.2 years for females. Japan had the highest figures that year out of all countries, at 81.25 years for men and 87.32 years for women.

“There is increasing recognition of the danger of the widespread availability of bioengineering technology. The means exist for anyone with the level of knowledge and equipment available to a typical graduate student to create disease agents with enormous destructive potential.”

WRONG

Among the general public and national security experts, there has been no upward trend in how urgently the biological weapons threat is viewed. The issue received a large amount of attention following the 2001 Anthrax Attacks, but since then has receded from view, while traditional concerns about terrorism (involving the use of conventional weapons) and interstate conflict have returned to the forefront. Anecdotally, cyberwarfare and hacking by nonstate actors clearly got more attention than biowarfare in 2019, even though the latter probably has much greater destructive potential.

Top national security experts in the U.S. also assigned biological weapons low priority, as evidenced in the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, a collaborative document written by the chiefs of the various U.S. intelligence agencies. The 42-page report only mentions “biological weapons/warfare” twice. By contrast, “migration/migrants/immigration” appears 11 times, “nuclear weapon” eight times, and “ISIS” 29 times.

As I stated earlier, the damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic could (and should) raise the world’s appreciation of the biowarfare / bioterrorism threat…or it could not. Sadly, only a successful and highly destructive bioweapon attack is guaranteed to make the world treat it with the seriousness it deserves.

Thanks to better and cheaper lab technologies (notably, CRISPR), making a biological weapon is easier than ever. However, it’s unclear if the “bar” has gotten low enough for a graduate student to do it. Making a pathogen in a lab that has the qualities necessary for a biological weapon, verifying its effects, purifying it, creating a delivery system for it, and disseminating it–all without being caught before completion or inadvertently infecting yourself with it before the final step–is much harder than hysterical news articles and self-interested talking head “experts” suggest. From research I did several years ago, I concluded that it is within the means of mid-tier adversaries like the North Korean government to create biological weapons, but doing so would still require a team of people from various technical backgrounds and with levels of expertise exceeding a typical graduate student, years of work, and millions of dollars.

“That this potential is offset to some extent by comparable gains in bioengineered antiviral treatments constitutes an uneasy balance, and is a major focus of international security agencies.”

RIGHT

The development of several vaccines against COVID-19 within months of that disease’s emergence showed how quickly global health authorities can develop antiviral treatments, given enough money and cooperation from government regulators. Pfizer’s successful vaccine, which is the first in history to make use of mRNA, also represents a major improvement to vaccine technology that has occurred since the book’s publication. Indeed, the lessons learned from developing the COVID-19 vaccines could lead to lasting improvements in the field of vaccine research, saving millions of people in the future who would have otherwise died from infectious diseases, and giving governments better tools for mitigating any bioweapon attacks.

Put simply, the prediction is right. Technology has made it easier to make biological weapons, but also easier to make cures for those diseases.

“Computerized health monitors built into watches, jewelry, and clothing which diagnose both acute and chronic health conditions are widely used. In addition to diagnosis, these monitors provide a range of remedial recommendations and interventions.”

MOSTLY RIGHT

Many smart watches have health monitoring features, and though some of them are government-approved health devices, they aren’t considered accurate enough to “diagnose” health conditions. Rather, their role is to detect and alert wearers to signs of potential health problems, whereupon the latter consult a medical professionals with more advanced machinery and receive a diagnosis.

The Apple Watch Series 5

By the end of 2019, common smart watches such as the “Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2,” and the “Apple Watch Series 4 and 5” had FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) features that were considered accurate enough to reliably detect irregular heartbeats in wearers. Out of 400,000 Apple Watch owners subject to such monitoring, 2,000 received alerts in 2018 from their devices of possible heartbeat problems. Fifty-seven percent of people in that subset sought medical help upon getting alerts from their watches, which is proof that the devices affect health care decisions, and ultimately, 84% of people in the subset were confirmed to have atrial fibrillation.

The Apple Watches also have “hard fall” detection features, which use accelerometers to recognize when their wearers suddenly fall down and then don’t move. The devices can be easily programmed to automatically call local emergency services in such cases, and there have been recent case where this probably saved the lives of injured people (does suffering a serious injury due to a fall count as an “acute health condition” per the prediction’s text?).

A few smart watches available in late 2019, including the “Garmin Forerunner 245,” also had built-in pulse oximeters, but none were FDA-approved, and their accuracy was questionable. Several tech companies were also actively developing blood pressure monitoring features for their devices, but only the “HeartGuide” watch, made by a small company called “Omron Healthcare,” was commercially available and had received any type of official medical sanction. Frequent, automated monitoring and analysis of blood oxygen levels and blood pressure would be of great benefit to millions of people.

Smartphones also had some health tracking capabilities. The commonest and most useful were physical activity monitoring apps, which count the number of steps their owners take and how much distance they traverse during a jog or hike. The devices are reasonably accurate, and are typically strapped to the wearer’s upper arm or waist if they are jogging, or kept in a pocket when doing other types of activity. Having a smartphone in your pocket isn’t literally the same as having it “built into [your] clothing” as the prediction says, but it’s close enough to satisfy the spirit of the prediction. In fact, being able to easily insert and remove a device into any article of clothing with a pocket is better than having a device integrated into the clothing since it allows for much more flexibility of attire–if you want to try out a new jogging route and also want to measure how long it is, you don’t have to remember to wear your one and only T-shirt with the built-in activity monitoring devices.

Millions of people use smart watches with health tracking features and smartphones with activity detection apps, which counts as “widely used” by any reasonable definition. However, no items of jewelry with embedded health tracking capabilities were available in 2019, so that part of the prediction is wrong.

“There are prevalent reports of computers passing the Turing Test, although these instances do not meet the criteria (with regard to sophistication of the human judge, the length of time for the interviews, etcetera) established by knowledgeable observers. There is a consensus that computers have not yet passed a valid Turing Test, but there is growing controversy on this point.”

RIGHT

In 2014, a chatbot named “Eugene Goostman” made global headlines by “passing the Turing Test” at an event held at the University of Reading. However, AI experts soon determined it was invalid because the dialog between the human judges and the machine only lasted five minutes. Ray Kurzweil himself even interacted with Eugene Goostman and posted the conversation on his website to show the machine could not correctly answer questions that probe commonsense reasoning and other aspects of intelligent thinking:

Kurzweil: How old are you?
Eugene: I’m a little boy. 13 years old.

Kurzweil: How much is two plus two?
Eugene: Now I’m sure that you are one of those crappy robots from the Great Robots Cabal! And I know your password: 2 + 2=4.0! Now divide by zero and die!!!!

Kurzweil: If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more how many marbles are in the bowl now?
Eugene: Not too many. But I can’t tell you the exact number, I forgot it. If I’m not mistaken – you still didn’t tell me where you live. OR it’s a secret?:-)

Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the United States. Do you know where that is?
Eugene: Every nerd knows that the capital of The United States is Washington.

Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the moon.
Eugene: Well, if you want it, the capital of The United States is Washington.

Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the country that built the great wall.
Eugene: Tell me more about Capital. I like to learn about different places!

In 2018, a Google AI program called “Duplex” also made headlines for “passing the Turing Test” in phone calls where it made restaurant reservations without the human workers on the other end of the line realizing they were talking to a machine. While an impressive technological feat, experts again disagreed with the media’s portrayal of its capabilities, and pointed out that in human-machine interactions weren’t valid Turing Tests because they were too short and focused on a narrow subject of conversation.

“The subjective experience of computer-based intelligence is seriously discussed, although the rights of machine intelligence have not yet entered mainstream debate.”

RIGHT

The prospect of computers becoming intelligent and conscious has been a topic of increasing discussion in the public sphere, and experts treat it with seriousness. A few recent examples of this include:

Those are all thoughtful articles written by experts whose credentials are relevant to the subject of machine consciousness. There are countless more articles, essays, speeches, and panel discussions about it available on the internet.

“Sophia” the robot

Machines, including the most advanced “A.I.s” that existed at the end of 2019, had no legal rights anywhere in the world, except perhaps in two countries: In 2017, the Saudis granted citizenship to an animatronic robot called “Sophia,” and Japan granted a residence permit to a video chatbot named “Shibuya Mirai.” Both of these actions appear to be government publicity stunts that would be nullified if anyone in either country decided to file a lawsuit.

“Machine intelligence is still largely the product of a collaboration between humans and machines, and has been programmed to maintain a subservient relationship to the species that created it.”

RIGHT

Critics often–and rightly–point out that the most impressive “A.I.s” owe their formidable capabilities to the legions of humans who laboriously and judiciously fed them training data, set their parameters, corrected their mistakes, and debugged their codes. For example, image-recognition algorithms are trained by showing them millions of photographs that humans have already organized or attached descriptive metadata to. Thus, the impressive ability of machines to identify what is shown in an image is ultimately the product of human-machine collaboration, with the human contribution playing the bigger role.

Finally, even the smartest and most capable machines can’t turn themselves on without human help, and still have very “brittle” and task-specific capabilities, so they are fundamentally subservient to humans. A more specific example of engineered subservience is seen in autonomous cars, where the computers were smart enough to drive safely by themselves in almost all road conditions, but laws required the vehicles to watch the human in the driver’s seat and stop if he or she wasn’t paying attention to the road and touching the controls.

Well, well, well…that’s it. I have finally come to the end of my project to review Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for 2019. This has been the longest single effort in the history of my blog, and I’m glad the next round of his predictions pertains to 2029, so I can have time to catch my breath. I would say the experience has been great, but like the whole year of 2020, I’m relieved to be able to turn the page and move on.

Happy New Year!

Links:

  1. Advances in AI during the 2010s forced humans to examine the specialness of human thinking, whether machines could also be intelligent and creative and what it would mean for humans if they could.
    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47700701
  2. Andrew Yang made technological unemployment and universal basic income (UBI) major components of his 2020 U.S. Presidential campaign platform.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang#2020_presidential_campaign
  3. An article explaining “acoustic gunshot detection”:
    https://www.eff.org/pages/gunshot-detection
  4. The “ShotSpotter” gunshot detection system was emplaced in over 100 cities in 2019.
    https://www.startribune.com/as-gunfire-continues-in-st-paul-so-does-shotspotter-debate/565382652/
  5. This 2019 article from Dayton shows a correlation between the presence of license plate readers and a decrease in violent crime.
    https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/area-police-look-to-license-plates-readers-as-crime-fighting-tool/ESQLILHQP5HJTCIVJL6IJ6T7VU/
  6. In 2018, a wanted criminal was arrested in China after facial recognition cameras identified him at a concert, out of a crowd of 60,000 people.
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43751276
  7. Edward Snowden’s key revelations about electronic spying.
    https://mashable.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden-revelations/
  8. An incomplete list of data hacks that happened in the 2010s. Hundreds of millions of people had important personal data compromised.
    https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/30/tech/biggest-hacks-in-history/index.html
  9. A list of commonly used encrypted messaging apps in 2019.
    https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/the-best-encrypted-messaging-apps/
  10. In 2018, VPNs were widely used on every continent. Forty-four percent of Indonesian internet users had them.
    https://blog.globalwebindex.com/chart-of-the-day/vpn-usage-2018/
  11. If obesity rates are any indication, people in the 2010s were not too poor to feed themselves.
    https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/23/3/464/536242
  12. In 2005, obesity became a cause of more childhood deaths than malnourishment. The disparity was surely even greater by 2019. There’s no financial reason why anyone on Earth should starve.
    https://www.factcheck.org/2013/03/bloombergs-obesity-claim/
  13. Several studies done during the 2010s indicated that governments would save money if they gave the homeless free apartments.
    https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housing-help-solutions
  14. A 2016 article about Google’s “Deep Dream” program, which can make surreal, artistic images.
    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/28/google-deep-dream-art
  15. A computer-generated painting, “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy,” sold for $423,500 in 2018. Have YOU ever made a painting worth that much money?
    https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/obvious-ai-art-christies-auction-smart-creativity/index.html
  16. “Obvious” is a “collective” of humans and computers that produce accalimed art.
    https://obvious-art.com/page-about-obvious/
  17. “EMMY” is a machine that can write decent instrumental songs.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/08/computers-that-compose/374916/
  18. Google’s “Open JukeBox” could even write songs that had simulated human voices singing.
    https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/
  19. Samples of GPT-2’s poetry.
    https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2
  20. Samples of GPT-2’s short news articles and written responses to prompts.
    https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/
  21. “Auto-Tune” is a widely used song editing software program that can seamlessly alter the pitch and tone of a singer’s voice, allowing almost anyone to sound on-key. Most of the world’s top-selling songs were made with Auto-Tune or something similar to it. Are the most popular songs now products of “collaboration between human and machine intelligence”?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune
  22. The virtual reality gaming industry had about $1.2 billion in revenues in 2019.
    https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/press-releases/virtual-reality-games-revenues-reach-8-bn-2023
  23. In 2017, terrorists killed 14,300 people globally.
    https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/statistics-on-incidents-of-terrorism-worldwide
  24. The U.S. spent $16.6 billion on cyberseucrity in FY2019.
    https://www.fedscoop.com/cybersecurity-budget-2020-trump-white-house/
  25. The U.S. military’s “base” defense budget was $726.2 billion in FY2019.
    https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R44519.pdf
  26. The U.S. spent $33.6 billion on its nuclear forces in FY2019.
    https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-01/54914-NuclearForces.pdf
  27. The “Phantom X1” ultralight plane.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_X1
  28. Data for several “tiny” flying drones in use with the U.S. Navy in 2019.
    https://www.navy.mil/DesktopModules/ArticleCS/Print.aspx?PortalId=1&ModuleId=724&Article=2159299
  29. Data on the U.S. Army’s unmanned drones, including “tiny” ones, from the same period.
    https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/uas-army.pdf
  30. In 2019, the U.S. Air Force had 5,182 manned aircraft and wanted to buy 10,264 new guided missiles.
    https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-military-forces-fy-2020-air-force
  31. We recently discovered how a mutation in the “SF3B1” gene changes intracelluar activity in ways that raise cancer risk.
    https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2019/10/sf3b1-cancer-mutation.html
  32. The Human Genome Project led to major cost improvements to gene sequencing technology, and to the discovery of many disease-associated genes.
    https://unlockinglifescode.org/learn/human-genome-project
  33. We have a better understanding of how cell-level molecular machinery contributes to aging.
    https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/52135662/DemirovicRattanExpGer13.pdf
  34. Official 2018 life expectancy figures for the U.S. and Japan:
    https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm
    https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00250/life-expectancy-for-japanese-men-and-women-at-new-record-high.html
  35. The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment barely mentions biological weapons.
    https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/2019-ATA-SFR—SSCI.pdf
  36. Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is the first to incorporate mRNA. The new technology could lead to other vaccines that save millions of lives.
    https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/vaccine/what-is-an-mrna-covid-19-vaccine-and-how-does-it-differ-from-other-vaccines/287-240b8181-f13f-47a4-9514-9b6b30988d32
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/mrna-vaccines-could-revolutionise-medicine/
  37. Several smart watches available in 2019 had ECG monitors.
    https://www.reviewsbreak.com/best-ecg-smartwatch/
    https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/13/17855006/apple-watch-series-4-ekg-fda-approved-vs-cleared-meaning-safe
  38. In 2019, Apple Watches with ECG monitors detected atrial fibrillation events in almost 2,000 people.
    https://news.trust.org/item/20190316134851-5cktc/
  39. The Apple Watch’s “hard fall” detection feature might have already saved the lives of several injured people.
    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/apple-watch-s-hard-fall-feature-automatically-calls-911-hiker-n1070471
  40. The “HeartGuide” smart watch can monitor blood pressure.
    https://www.medtechdive.com/news/fda-cleared-wearable-blood-pressure-device-hits-market/544908/
  41. The media wrongly declared in 2014 the “Eugene Goostman” had passed the Turing Test.
    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088
    https://www.kurzweilai.net/mt-notes-on-the-announcement-of-chatbot-eugene-goostman-passing-the-turing-test
  42. Google’s “Duplex” AI could masquerade as human for short conversations.
    https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/google-duplex-does-it-pass-the-turing-test/
  43. The actions by Japan and Saudi Arabia to grant some rights to machines are probably invalid under their own legal frameworks.
    https://www.ersj.eu/journal/1245
  44. Facebook’s image recognition feature relied on a massive training set of data prepared by humans.
    https://engineering.fb.com/2018/05/02/ml-applications/advancing-state-of-the-art-image-recognition-with-deep-learning-on-hashtags/

Interesting articles, November 2020

Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, beating Donald Trump by a comfortable margin. As a rule, I don’t talk about partisan politics on this blog, but I think it’s OK to post some noteworthy failed predictions about the outcome:

‘America’s most accurate bellwether counties, regions that have a reputation for accurately picking the president, got the presidential election completely wrong.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55062413

“I see the president winning with a minimum [electoral vote count in the] high 270s and possibly going up significantly higher based on just how big this undercurrent is,” Cahaly told host Sean Hannity.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-cahaly-trafalgar-group-2020-election-polls

‘Democrats May LOSE The Election As New Poll Shows Democrats Are Quitting, Biden Warns Polls WRONG’
https://youtu.be/PjjRxPglJmE

‘Tom Del Beccaro: A Trump ‘surprise’ victory is in the offing — here are the 10 tea leaves pointing to it’
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-surprise-victory-tom-del-beccaro

Michael Moore correctly predicted that Biden’s lead among voters in swing states had been significantly exaggerated thanks to polling errors and “shy” Trump supporters, but the error wasn’t big enough to lead to a Trump win, which was Moore’s main prediction.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/michael-moore-trump-2020-election-polls-vote-undercounted-biden-b1442106.html

…OK, enough of that! Back to the non-icky stuff.

Is nothing sacred? Engineers have built a robot that can beat the best humans at the sport of curling.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8788915/Robot-named-Curly-uses-AI-beat-one-worlds-best-curling-teams-game.html

The future of agriculture is farm robots that can monitor and care for every plant, in real time. Fewer pesticides will be needed if robots can mechanically kill animal and plant pests, and less fertilizer will need to be applied if robots can directly introduce smaller amounts to plants, in ways that will guarantee high absorption of it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54538849

Elon Musk in 2015: “Maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-on-the-future-of-driving-2014-10

Four years later: ‘People in a passing car got video of a Tesla driver seemingly sleeping behind the wheel of a Tesla on I-5 near Santa Clarita on Saturday.’
https://abc7.com/tesla-driver-asleep-guy-in-man-navigate-on-autopilot/5488646/

Here’s an impressive video of Chinese army field tests of new UAVs. A multiple-launch rocket system can rapidly create a swarm of them, and the members of the swarm can communicate with each other and fly in formations.
https://youtu.be/QamGaDNczJw

Azerbaijan won its latest war with Armenia, and captured most of the disputed territory of “Nagorno-Karabakh.” While most of the people in that territory are ethnically Armenian, it has been internationally recognized as belonging to Azerbaijan since 1990. The outcome of the war is not so surprising since Azerbaijan’s population and GDP are three and four times bigger (respectively) than Armenia’s.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/azerbaijan-armenia-peace-deal-could-be-the-diplomatic-breakthrough-the-region-needs/

Many official and unofficial photos and videos of combat during the war were uploaded to the internet, and a group of volunteer military enthusiasts used them to count how many military vehicles each side lost. Basic takeaways: Armenia lost more, and the T-72 has weak armor.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2020/09/the-fight-for-nagorno-karabakh.html

Does the Nagorno-Karabakh war prove that tanks are obsolete, and UAVs at last reign supreme? Probably not. Tank losses to UAVs would have been much lower if the Armenian and Azerbaijani commanders been smarter about how they used them, and if the tank units had some number of mobile antiaircraft defenses.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/09/30/armor-attrition-in-nagorno-karabakh-battle-not-a-sign-us-should-give-up-on-tanks-experts-say/

If you’re putting a tank into long-term storage and don’t want it rusting, why not put it in a big, plastic bag?
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-sealed-storage-bag-for-preservation.html

The U.S. Navy’s P-8A Poseidon is already a versatile plane, but might be getting upgrades allowing it to bomb land targets and launch long-range missiles.
https://youtu.be/LkgEmY_85x4

The C-17 is merely a cargo aircraft, but a relatively simple upgrade package could let it launch long-range cruise missiles.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36878/air-force-c-17-launched-a-pallet-of-mock-cruise-missiles-during-recent-arsenal-plane-test

North Korea unveiled several copies of advanced American and Russian combat vehicles during a recent military parade. While outwardly similar in appearance, the copies are surely much less advanced and less capable.
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/10/copy-paste-from-north-korea.html

A recent U.S. Army experiment showed that two-man tanks are a bad idea. The crewmen are overloaded with tasks, and their battlefield performance drops.
Our current tanks have four-man crews, and Russian tanks have three-man crews (the human shell loader is replaced by a machine). There’s endless discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of those arrangements, with no resolution. It seems to balance out overall.
To my knowledge, no army in the world has five-man tanks.
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/11/more-info-about-us-armys-optionally.html

The U.S.S. Ticonderoga, which entered service in 1983 and inaugurated a class of advanced missile cruisers that serves to this day, is being scrapped. I think it’s important enough to be preserved as a museum ship. Are any of the other 22 of the ships still in service worthy of that? Probably not.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36971/the-navys-first-aegis-warship-uss-ticonderoga-is-being-scrapped

India has also decided to scrap its first aircraft carrier, in spite of the ship’s long and storied service. It would be another great museum ship.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36835/historic-indian-carrier-set-to-be-scrapped-after-58-years-of-service-with-two-navies

The small U.S. aircraft carrier that was severely damaged by fire in August will be scrapped because it’s too expensive to fix.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37880/navy-will-spend-around-30-million-to-scarp-fire-damaged-uss-bonhomme-richard

America’s “war” in Afghanistan has been going on so long that it is older than some of the U.S. troops who are now fighting it. Some of those troops’ parents also fought in the war years ago. (These things are also true for Afghan soldiers and insurgents.)
https://www.stripes.com/news/years-after-they-fought-in-afghanistan-us-troops-watch-as-their-children-deploy-to-the-same-war-1.647659

The “Firestick” might be the weirdest technological dead-end niche product ever spawned by people trying to exploit loopholes in U.S. hunting laws.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/10/05/federal-ammunitions-new-firestick-revolutionizing-the-muzzleloader/

Here’s some interesting information about the nature of color vision. Birds and reptiles can see more colors and have a greater variety of body pigmentations than mammals because the latter have had several million extra years to adapt to bright, sunny environments. Mammals only emerged from subterranean, and/or nocturnal lifestyles where color perception is not advantageous relatively recently. Genetic engineering could of course change this state of affairs very quickly.
https://www.quora.com/There-are-green-reptiles-insects-fishes-amphibians-but-no-green-mammals-What-is-the-reason-for-this

A genetic mutation has been found that sharply raises the odds of getting liver cancer, and it is overrepresented among people of Celtic descent.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/common-disorder-increases-chances-of-developing-liver-cancer-research-1.4418161

We now know which genes let us smell the odors of fish, cinnamon, licorice, and lemon. People with rare mutations to those genes can’t smell them.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31343-9

Here’s a “Periodic Table of Smells,” which correlates the smells of different organic compounds with their molecular structures.
https://jameskennedymonash.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/table-of-organic-compounds-and-their-smells-w12.pdf

Experiments show that hundreds of thousands of surgeries done in the U.S. each year are unnecessary since they are no better at fixing health problems than placebo surgeries or simple lifestyle changes, like losing weight to ease pressure on weak joints.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2020/11/07/some_surgeries_are_performed_millions_of_times_per_year_even_though_they_are_no_better_than_placebo.html

China now has a human cryonics company.
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/article/3103054/freezing-bodies-reanimation-china-and-why-countrys

A man who died of hypothermia during a mountain hike was revived at a hospital thanks to an “extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine,” which took over for his heart and lungs by oxygenating his blood outside of his body and pumping it through his blood vessels.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/he-came-back-from-the-dead-mount-rainier-missing-hiker-starts-to-recover-after-getting-rescued-amid-whiteout-conditions/

In a breakthrough for molecular biology, computers can now simulate protein folding with 90% accuracy. It will only improve further with time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55133972

This is probably the most credible, anti-nuclear power articles I’ve read. Switching to 100% fission power would probably require more uranium and other rare elements than we can economically mine from the ground and the oceans, and it might be shortsighted to exhaust all of our rare element sources now as we might find better uses for them in the distant future. Finding sites to build the new reactors would also be challenge since they need to be near bodies of water, and those areas are already crowded with people. The article is even skeptical of nuclear fusion, and brings up the problem of explosive tritium dust particles, which is new to me.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0096340212459124

‘In the early 1900s, a new invention called the telewriter swept on the scene, allowing people to hand-write messages that could be electronically translated by a robotic arm at a destination up to 50 miles away.’
https://gizmodo.com/this-telewriter-transmitted-handwriting-across-long-dis-1845641043

The cheapest way to move cargo is by ship, followed by rail, and the distant third is by road. Autonomous, electric trucks might let road displace rail.
https://research.ark-invest.com/hubfs/1_Download_Files_ARK-Invest/White_Papers/ArkInvest_101420_Whitepaper_BadIdeas2020.pdf

In 2009, sci-fi author Charlie Stross made several accurate predictions about what the state of computing hardware would be in 2020. It should give weight to the other predictions he made for 2030 and beyond.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html

From 2004: ‘A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver

The “Grand Tack Hypothesis” says that Jupiter’s orbit has changed over the eons, and at one point, it was almost as close to the Sun as Mars. The gas giant’s powerful gravity ejected most of the asteroids in its path out of the Solar System, which was bad news for Mars since they would have otherwise collided with the planet and built up its size, perhaps to Earth-like proportions. Jupiter then drifted outward to its current, distant orbit. Had the Great Tack not happened, Mars would be a much bigger planet today, and much likelier to support life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_tack_hypothesis

There are such things as “horseshoe orbits.”
https://www.livescience.com/what-if-earth-shared-orbit-another-planet.html

The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited for 20 years.
https://www.space.com/how-to-destroy-a-space-station-safely

There’s light at the end of the tunnel: Three different vaccines against COVID-19 have passed clinical trials.
https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-designed-coronavirus-vaccine-in-2-days-2020-11

Why has Britain been the source of so many bad predictions about the pandemic?
From September: ‘The evidence we’ve presented leads us to believe there is unlikely to be a second wave…’
https://lockdownsceptics.org/addressing-the-cv19-second-wave/
From late November: ‘50,000 COVID-19 deaths and rising. How Britain failed to stop the second wave’
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-britain-newwave/

Interesting articles, October 2020

‘”I don’t think Britain could have won the Falklands conflict without GCHQ,” Prof Ferris told the BBC. He said because GCHQ was able to intercept and break Argentine messages, British commanders were able to know within hours what orders were being given to their opponents, which offered a major advantage in the battle at sea and in retaking the islands.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54604895

China makes an “OK” tank for export, called the “VT-4.” I wonder if it will finally replace all the tens of thousands of Cold War-era Soviet tanks still in circulation in the Third World.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/will-chinas-vt-4-tank-become-global-export-success-168233

The Indian Air Force has accepted its first few Rafale fighter planes.
https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/indian-air-force-formally-inducts-first-five-rafale-fighter-aircraft

‘Second, the violence in Ladakh has also allowed Beijing to examine the degree of coordination that exists within the Indo-US strategic partnership. As Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed with medieval-style weapons in the Galwan Valley, Beijing paid close attention to how the United States reacted.’
https://www.9dashline.com/article/india-china-rivalry-towards-a-two-front-war-in-the-himalayas

For the first time, China’s two aircraft carriers operated together for a military exercise.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1200053.shtml

‘This August, for instance, the U.S. nuclear-powered carrier Ronald Reagan cruised in company with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer Ikazuchi in the Philippine Sea. Indeed, Japan’s surface fleet is organized into “escort flotillas” precisely to support U.S.-Japanese combat operations.’
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/royal-navy-and-us-navy-are-embracing-interchangeability-could-it-backfire-171371

Warships need near-constant maintenance to stay at sea. Keeping the hull from rusting is an ongoing task, along with watching out for and fixing small leaks inside the ship. This means that, even on 100% automated ships, there will need to be mobile robots that can climb all over the outsides and inside spaces to scrub, paint, and dry surfaces. They would also probably have roles doing repairs caused by combat or by accidents. A big difference between “robot crewman” and humans is that the former won’t need much in the way of self-support infrastructure inside the ship: there won’t need to be bathrooms, kitchens, laundries, rec rooms, bunks, mail rooms, etc. The robots would probably spend all their time at their posts, like you spending your whole life at your work desk, never needing to sleep. This means automated ships could be smaller, simpler, and cheaper than manned ships without sacrificing any firepower, speed, or other capabilities. And in spite of considerable design differences, automated ships would still have internal spaces like rooms and hallways. If you went inside, you’d see robots of some kind moving around, doing tasks.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37094/check-out-how-rusty-and-battered-uss-stout-looks-after-spending-a-record-215-days-at-sea

The U.S. Army is spending $39.7 million to buy helicopter “nano-drones” that have heat-vision.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/6/17/flir-systems-awarded-contract-for-nano-drones

‘The μINS is the world’s smallest sensor module of its kind—approximately the size of 3 stacked US dimes. It provides high-quality direction, position, and velocity data for multiple applications by intelligently fusing sensor data from GPS (GNSS), gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers, and a barometric pressure sensor.’
https://insideunmannedsystems.com/worlds-smallest-better-gps-inertial-navigation-system-now-available/

Atlanta police used a helicopter drone to enter an apartment and arrest a murder suspect. The drone’s footage is here: https://www.news.com.au/national/atlanta-police-use-drone-in-arrest-of-suspect-in-actor-thomas-jefferson-byrds-killing/video/a5c7a96e96110bb77c78d1ec3449ec57

In India, a couple gave birth to a boy who had a fatal genetic defect involving his blood. After learning that a bone marrow transplant could permanently cure him, the couple used IVF to create a second child that would be genetically similar enough to the son to serve as a marrow donor. They didn’t want to have the new child for any reason other than to save the first. They gestated the new child–a daughter–and transplanted some of her bone marrow, curing the son. Additionally, to ensure the daughter didn’t carry the same bone marrow defect that the son had, the couple did genetic testing on her while she was still an embryo. This technique, called “preimplantation genetic diagnosis,” is only one step down from genetic engineering. The ethics of this case are indeed questionable.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54658007

By looking at a person’s genome, we can now guess their height with +/- 4 cm accuracy.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/190124v1

Genetics might explain why men are both more likely to be homeless and more likely to be rich than women.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hbm.25204

‘The successful cloning of DNA collected 40 years is meant to introduce key genetic diversity into the species that could benefit its survival. The zoo said the cloned Przewalski’s horse will eventually be transferred to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and integrated into a herd of other Przewalski’s horses for breeding.’
https://time.com/5886467/clone-endangered-przewalskis-horse-zoo/

Do all cells have tiny, organic computers in them?
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2008/2008.08814.pdf

Because of the twisted ways in which our cells develop at the embryonic stage, the average person’s facial features are slightly shifted to the left side of his head.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6557252/

A computer simulation suggests that geographical differences caused the rise of many ethnicities and small countries in Europe, while a single ethnic group and country grew to encompass the vast area today known as China. Mountains, peninsulas, islands, and deserts are barriers to human movement and settlement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbGOXnElJeU

A team of aerospace engineers at KLM flew a small-scale model of an interesting-looking “Model V” plane.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8705193/Flying-V-aeroplane-model-gets-test-flight.html

China just launched a copy of America’s secret X-37B space plane.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36202/u-s-confirms-china-has-launched-what-could-be-its-version-of-x-37b-spaceplane

U.S. authorities have approved the first small modular reactor for use.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/first-modular-nuclear-reactor-design-certified-in-the-us/

Solar power is cheaper and has a brighter future (pun) than ever!
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2020

On the set of the sci-fi show The Mandalorian, the sets have replaced green screens with gigantic wraparound TV screens that display high-def footage. The footage of them being manipulated by special effects crewmen is trippy. (I’ve predicted devices like this will become common in U.S. households in the 2030s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8&feature=emb_title

‘No software is yet producing “Whoa, look at that” [chemical] syntheses. But let’s be honest: most humans aren’t, either.’
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/20/the-machines-rise-a-bit-more

Scientists are finding new ways to make bulk quantities of the mind-altering chemicals found in magic mushrooms.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671761930401X

Even more importantly, a guy in British Columbia built a working mech warrior in his backyard.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/giant-mechanized-exoskeleton-now-ready-for-pilot-trainees-1.5710431

Using “deepfake” technology, an app can convert images of clothed women into simulated nude images. I don’t have the app, so I can’t say how convincing the results are, but it will become more refined and will lead to another of my predictions coming true this decade.
https://www.cnet.com/news/a-deepfake-bot-on-telegram-is-violating-women-by-forging-nudes-from-regular-pics/

My prediction: ‘[By 2030] “Deepfake” pornography will reach new levels of sophistication and perversion as it becomes possible to seamlessly graft the heads of real people onto still photos and videos of nude bodies that closely match the physiques of the actual people. New technology for doing this will let amateurs make high-quality deepfakes, meaning any person could be targeted. It will even become possible to wear AR glasses that interpolate nude, virtual bodies over the bodies real people in the wearer’s field of view to provide a sort of fake “X-ray-vision.”’
https://www.militantfuturist.com/my-future-predictions-2020-iteration/

Disney made a wonderful, horrifying android that has human-like eye movements and gazes. (To be fair to Disney, human faces also look frightening without their skin.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8_VmWWRJgE

Three months ago, economist Robert Reich made this (totally failed) prediction: “Brace yourself. The wave of evictions and foreclosures in next 2 months will be unlike anything America has experienced since the Great Depression. And unless Congress extends extra unemployment benefits beyond July 31, we’re also going to have unparalleled hunger.”
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1277641135368724483

This Icelandic study finds COVID-19 has a 0.3% fatality rate, which is close to estimates from other countries.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2026116

A disease model that has accurately predicted COVID-19 deaths so far now forecasts up to 410,000 U.S. deaths by the end of 2020. Some epidemiologists think it’s too pessimistic.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/09/04/909783162/new-global-coronavirus-death-forecast-is-chilling-and-controversial

Another British COVID-19 prediction falls flat.
From September 22: “If, and that’s quite a big if, but if that continues unabated and this grows doubling every seven days… if that continued you would end up with something like 50,000 cases in the middle of October per day.”
Reality? In mid-October, Britain is having around 16,000 new cases per day.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12734219/experts-blast-50k-covid-cases-day-october-france-spain/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51768274

…and another.
‘Researchers in Singapore said that there will be no more cases of the deadly bug in the UK by September 30.’
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11693720/coronavirus-study-predicts-date-uk-will-have-no-cases/

Mexico’s COVID-19 death count is probably twice as high as originally reported.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-mexico-excessdeath-idUSKBN25X00K

In spite of enormous hype and billions of dollars spent, we still haven’t found drugs that are effective against COVID-19.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/27/more-antibody-data
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/10/16/the-solidarity-data

Interesting articles, September 2020

More bad news for the once-famed surgeon who made a name for himself transplanting tracheas grown with stem cells into terminally ill people.
https://apnews.com/article/international-news-sweden-bjork-stockholm-paolo-macchiarini-1baeaacd9ad2d19a07acd423d68be3bd

The first person ever cured of HIV just died of cancer. In the end, something will get you…unless maybe you’re an AI with a highly distributed and redundant consciousness.
https://apnews.com/article/berlin-california-archive-palm-springs-67706de65ced0f5bcb7859c34cd51f5a

In heavily inbred families, just “one generation of outbreeding can mask the deleterious alleles immediately.”
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2007/10/17/the-samaritans-it-s-endogamy-not-cousin-marriage-per-se/

Bird brains are radically different from mammalian brains, but produce similar levels of intelligent thought. Bird brains might actually be superior since they are made of smaller, more densely-packed neurons, meaning a bird would be smarter than a mammal whose brain had the same volume. Hundreds of years from now, “humans” might have denser brains and smarter minds thanks to radical genetic engineering that takes inspiration from other organisms.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6511/1567

In 1991, Joe Biden predicted that “[By the year 2020] I’ll be dead and gone in all probability.”
Three months remain in this year so…
https://youtu.be/i4TuxvhoMs4

Using genetic engineering, scientists were able to transplant sperm from one male farm animal to a sterile male of the same species so that the recipient male produced the same sperm as the donor male. This could make it cheaper and easier to breed prized farm animals by using genetically inferior males as “surrogate fathers” for their offspring, and it could let us resurrect extinct species for which we have frozen sperm samples.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/39/24195

World-renowned scientist Stephen Wolfram gave a wide-ranging, four-hour interview. I set this up to play at what seemed like a particularly interesting moment, but you should watch it from the beginning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_ffaFXao&t=2862s

BP released a report containing predictions about the future global energy landscape. Even in their most conservative scenario, global oil consumption for transportation peaks by 2030.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/news-and-insights/press-releases/bp-energy-outlook-2020.html

Progress is being made building the first, useful nuclear fusion reactor.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2020/09/29/scientists-present-a-comprehensive-physics-basis-for-a-new-fusion-reactor-design/

There is no known scientific barrier to creating a room-temperature superconductor. The superconductors that we already know of, which only operate at very low ambient temperatures, could work fine in deep space.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/294313/are-room-temperature-superconductors-theoretically-possible-and-through-what-me

A recent experiment with an underwater server farm went well. Cooling costs were much lower because the capsule was immersed in cold seawater, and few of the servers failed because the atmospheric content in the capsule could be controlled better (a pure nitrogen atmosphere helped because oxygen corrodes computer circuits and cables). For this and other reasons, I think intelligent machines might live in the oceans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54146718

Many common, manmade objects could be made more durable and longer-lasting, for relatively small up-front cost. However, this is rarely done since it goes against the interests of manufacturers, who want consumers to buy replacement goods often. Planned obsolescence is real and pervasive. It’s disturbing to think about how big a share of global economic activity is people buying replacements things that shouldn’t have needed to be thrown out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU

The human backup driver was found criminally responsible for the infamous 2018 crash of a self-driving car that killed a homeless woman.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359

‘“Inertial navigation was perhaps the pinnacle of mechanical engineering and among the most complicated objects ever manufactured”…But in the 1990s these were superseded by micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)—chips with vibrating mechanical structures that detect angular motion. MEMS technology is cheap and ubiquitous (it is used in car airbags and toy drones). That makes it hard to restrict by way of military-export controls.’
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/01/16/irans-attack-on-iraq-shows-how-precise-missiles-have-become

Here’s one of those old inertial navigation units, used to guide U.S. nuclear missiles.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30254/this-isnt-a-sci-fi-prop-its-a-doomsday-navigator-for-americas-biggest-cold-war-icbm

“Center Barrel Replacement Plus” is a maintenance practice in which an F/A-18 fighter plane has the middle section of its fuselage cut out and replaced with a new section. The aircraft’s wings and landing gear are attached to the “center barrel,” so the joints there wear out faster than any other part of the plane. One of the improvements incorporated in the more advanced F/A-18 Super Hornet is a modular fuselage. This allows maintenance crews to replace center barrels with greater speed and ease.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36435/the-plan-for-making-aging-marine-corps-hornets-deadlier-than-ever-for-a-final-decade-of-service
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5hax06xClQ

A electromagnetic aircraft launch catapult lets an aircraft carrier launch 12.5% more planes during combat than a carrier with an older steam-powered catapult.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/emals-how-us-navy-aircraft-carriers-will-sail-future-and-dominate-169046

China’s third aircraft carrier will be larger and more advanced than its previous two, and might have an electromagnetic catapult.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-chinas-third-aircraft-carrier-might-be-supercarrier-after-all-168986

And the worst “aircraft carriers” ever were the CAM Ships of WWII. The planes were violently catapulted/rocketed into the air, did their thing, and were then expected to crash land in the water next to a friendly ship, whereupon the pilot would be rescued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=CAM_ship&oldid=961354276

The U.S. Army has finally applied camouflage patterning to all the straps and belts on its infantry kits. Looks like all that’s left to do is to camouflage the Velcro patches. It’s not the biggest deal to have a big, solid green rectangle in the middle of your camouflaged shirt, but how hard would it be to fix it?
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/03/05/this-unit-will-be-the-first-to-get-the-armys-newest-helmet-body-armor-kit/

The Congressional Budget Office predicts the pandemic’s human and economic impact will be felt for decades. Declining birthrates and higher mortality will lead to the U.S. population being 11 million people smaller in 2050 than it otherwise would have been.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56598

Bad news: The U.S. just had its 200,000th COVID-19 death.
Worse news: That means the University of Washington disease model has proved itself highly accurate once again: On June 16, the Model predicted the U.S. would hit the 200,000 milestone by October 1. It now says we’ll hit the 300,000 mark by December 10, and if we’re unlucky/incompetent, we could surpass 400,000 by January 1.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=total-deaths&tab=trend
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-huntsville-alabama-us-news-public-health-a05360a9df7e19f9bee83f520deada1c

On June 11, Dr. Ashish Jha correctly predicted the U.S. would have its 200,000th death “sometime in September.” He now predicts a COVID-19 vaccine won’t be widely available to Americans until next spring (second link).
https://www.today.com/video/-we-will-cross-the-200-000-mark-in-coronavirus-deaths-by-september-doctor-says-84871749877
https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2020/09/17/ashish-jha-trump-disputes-cdc-director-vaccine-timeline

Interesting articles, August 2020

A Mexican drug cartel is trying to use bomb-rigged quadcopter drones to assassinate enemies.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36013/mexican-drug-cartel-now-assassinating-its-enemies-with-improvised-explosive-toting-drones

A massive, accidental explosion ripped through Beirut when a warehouse containing 2,700 tons of fertilizer caught fire. The explosion was equal to 200 – 300 tons of dynamite (0.2 – 0.3 kilotons) and killed at least 190 people.
https://graphics.reuters.com/LEBANON-SECURITY/BLAST/yzdpxnmqbpx/

The 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan occurred. Those early, crude nuclear bombs had yields of 12 kilotons and 20 kilotons, and collectively killed about 214,000 people.
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-53648572

In WWII, the British terrorized Germany with low-flying balloons. Long, strong cords were tied to their bottoms, and they would often entangle in power lines, shorting them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioshB6dhe-0

In the 1950s, the U.S. considered using high-altitude balloons to carry nuclear bombs to targets in the Soviet Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-124A_Flying_Cloud

Here’s a stunning visualization of the 57,000 new satellites that will be launched over the next nine years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqiO2xeMkY0

The two astronauts who made history by launching into space on a commercial rocket have safely returned to Earth.
https://apnews.com/bf77af89c527340793d15a9957d30c84

Space-X had another successful launch of a new space rocket.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53659702

The first photo of a stealth Blackhawk helicopter has been released.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35342/this-is-the-first-image-ever-of-a-stealthy-black-hawk-helicopter

Anyone familiar with the WWII European Theater will have heard about the feared “German 88mm,” which was the most effective antiaircraft and antitank shell of the War. It could punch through the armor of any Allied tank. I then remembered that postwar American tanks had 90mm cannons, which is only 2mm different from 88mm. It occurred to me: Did we copy the German 88mm cannon after seeing how effective it was in WWII? Kind of! When the War started, the U.S. was already using a 90mm cannon, but only as an antiaircraft weapon. The shell’s ballistics were almost the same as the German 88mm. Only after seeing how effective that type of weapon could be if mounted in a tank did we decide to start doing the same (we made this insight later than the Germans, so our 90mm tanks weren’t ready until 1945). After WWII ended, we realized that tank combat had changed forever, and that 90mm should be the new standard going forward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M48_Patton

If the Soviet T-34 tank was so great, why didn’t the Germans copy it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vczPA1xGJQI

The Soviet MD-160 is neither plane nor ship, and instead is a totally unique, massive fighting machine designed to skim low over the surface of the ocean. It had six large anti-ship missile launchers. It is now being turned into a tourist attraction.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8665541/Gigantic-1980s-Soviet-vehicle-MD-160-dwarfs-Boeing-747-lies-abandoned-Caspian-Sea.html

The MiG-35 is essentially a modernized version of the MiG-29. Though it sounds like a great fighter plane on paper, few sales have been made, and the new plane’s future is in doubt. Part of the problem is that a bigger, better Russian fighter–the Su-30–costs only 25% more money to buy and operate.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35500/why-russias-mig-35-is-starting-to-look-like-a-dead-duck

An AI just beat a human fighter pilot in a computer simulated dogfight between two F-16s. Both of the virtual planes were restricted to machine guns only. The AI, codenamed “Heron,” demonstrated superhuman accuracy with its weapon and was extremely agile flying its plane.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/08/ai-just-beat-human-f-16-pilot-dogfight-again/167872/

This U.S. Navy fighter pilot was impressed with the AI.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35947/navy-f-a-18-squadron-commanders-take-on-ai-repeatedly-beating-real-pilot-in-dogfight

These other two U.S. fighter pilots were not impressed.
https://taskandpurpose.com/military-tech/darpa-artificial-intelligence-dogfight-analysis

Ben Goertzel’s latest thoughts on AGI, including the failure of one of his key predictions for 2020, and the limitations of GPT-3.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/08/ben-goertzel-2020-interview-on-artificial-general-intelligence.html

Here’s another impressive demonstration of GPT-3’s capabilities, this time playing “19 Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
https://twitter.com/danielbigham/status/1295864369713209351

The world’s uncoordinated and largely disappointing response to the COVID-19 pandemic portends badly for our ability to deal with a hostile AGI in the future.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wTKjRFeSjKLDSWyww/possible-takeaways-from-the-coronavirus-pandemic-for-slow-ai

This random guy with a math degree from Harvard has built an economic model that seems to indicate the Singularity will happen in 2047.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/modeling-human-trajectory

A computer just solved a 90-year-old math theorem called the “Keller conjecture.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-search-settles-90-year-old-math-problem-20200819/

After it becomes impossible to shrink computer chip features any smaller, we’ll still be able to improve their cost-performance by optimizing software, hardware, and algorithms.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6495/eaam9744

‘How does the iPhone XS compare to the most powerful and expensive supercomputer from 30 years ago?’
https://medium.com/@diego./cray-2-v-iphone-xs-fight-6f05b494efe1

Painting one out of three blades black makes a windmill much more visible to birds, reducing the odds of deadly collisions.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ece3.6592

Coal consumption in the U.K. has dropped to levels unseen since before the Industrial Revolution.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/09/is-this-the-end-for-king-coal-in-britain

A new spy device can use sound to deduce what shape a key must have to open a specific door lock. A 3D metal printer can then use the data to make a duplicate key.
https://gizmodo.com/researchers-find-a-way-to-copy-keys-using-the-sounds-th-1844774401

Nothing like a long article that makes several predictions about the future, but essentially concludes with: “Or maybe none of what I just said will actually happen.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/just-small-shift-remote-work-could-change-everything/614980/

In 1891, Oscar Wilde envisioned a future utopia where machines did all the work humans didn’t want to, and the government provided all basic needs for free, freeing people to pursue their passions. Many “transhumanist” ideas are actually quite old.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/

The impossible has happened: a hurricane that the National Weather Service described as being “unsurvivable” actually had a 99.9999% survival rate.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hurricane-laura-storm-surge_n_5f47253ac5b64f17e1385320

Facial recognition technology is now being used to keep track of the nourishment and health of farm animals. I’ve predicted that more advanced versions of technologies like this will let us track entire populations of animals starting in the 2100s.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/facial-recognition-china-animals-farms-agriculture/2020/08/23/9808c710-d6fb-11ea-b9b2-1ea733b97910_story.html

Over three years ago, computer tycoon John McAfee said that he would…do something obscene in public…if Bitcoin wasn’t worth $500,000 within three years. It’s only worth $11,700 today.
http://dickening.com

Samsung has unveiled an improved, folding smartphone. It has three screens.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53664988

Elon Musk says that the “volumetric efficiency” of a typical car factory is in the “low single digit percentage,” and that the figure can be radically improved. It’s an interesting idea to ponder. Factories usually have very high ceilings, so reducing their height by 50% would presumably double their volumetric efficiency. How come no one thought of that before?
https://www.thestreet.com/tesla/news/elon-musk-talks-tsla-stock-tesla-manufacturing-efficiency

A new way to create magnets has been discovered.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eabb7721

Mainstream political pundits accurately predicted that Joe Biden would pick Kamala Harris as his Vice President.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/511131-biden-edges-closer-to-vp-pick-heres-whos-up-and-whos-down
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/09/politics/joe-biden-vp-pick/index.html

A professor with an excellent track record of predicting U.S. Presidential elections says Biden will win this year. He was only wrong in 2000, when the election results were disputed, and the Supreme Court decided the matter, along partisan lines, in favor of George W. Bush. So, if we assume the professor’s model is right, that is Trump’s only route to reelection.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510754-professor-with-history-of-correctly-predicting-elections-forecasts-that

Elon Musk unveiled his “Neuralink” brain implants. Most experts weren’t impressed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53987919

DNA analyses of mummies show that ancient Egyptians were more similar to Europeans than today’s Egyptians are. The latter have more ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694#Sec2

Another anti-aging drug has failed during clinical trials.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/17/unity-biotechnology-and-senescent-cell-therapy

Lung cancer death rates in the U.S. have significantly dropped over the last 20 years thanks to better treatments.
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/lung-cancer-treatments-mortality-drop

Great news: a successful vaccination drive in Nigeria has eradicated polio from the African continent. The disease now only remains in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53887947

More evidence that COVID-19 poses virtually no health risk to children.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53932294

The FDA has approved convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19. Though the Trump administration trumpeted it as a “historic breakthrough,” it is likely to be expensive and minimally effective.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/24/convalescent-plasma-the-science-and-the-politics

The first case of a person being re-infected with COVID-19 has been confirmed, which means immunity isn’t permanent, at least for some people. For what it’s worth, the man’s second infection was much milder than the first one.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/08/24/asia-pacific/science-health-asia-pacific/hong-kong-first-coronavirus-reinfection/

This prediction from three months ago turned out wrong. Italy has averaged only about 10 COVID-19 deaths per day over the last month, and a second wave hasn’t started there.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11552856/italy-second-wave-coronavirus-lockdown-eased/

President Trump listens as coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx speaks during a briefing at the White House.

Remember this White House briefing from March 31? The graph behind the podium showed that, with a lockdown, 100,000 – 240,000 Americans would still die of COVID-19. The X-axis was unlabeled, but since the figures in the graphs are shaped like humps, we can conclude that it pertained to the time period corresponding to the virus’ first wave. So in other words, on March 31, the White House said that the first wave of the pandemic would kill 100,000 – 240,000 Americans. The first wave has not ended, and as of today, the U.S. death toll is at least 180,000. Projections from other reliable sources I’ve found indicate that the second wave will start around mid-September, as the weather cools, and that the death toll at that point will be almost 200,000. So the first wave of the virus will end up killing a number of Americans that is nearer the high end of the March 31 projection.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/823916343/coronavirus-task-force-set-to-detail-the-data-that-led-to-extension-of-guideline

Interesting articles, July 2020

Does the MiG-21 have an undeserved reputation for being unsafe to fly? Everyone agrees it is a difficult plane to land, but the high number of crashes seem due to poor maintenance and to the planes being used for roles they weren’t designed for.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-wrong-with-the-MiG-21-Why-do-they-keep-crashing-all-the-time

The MiG-29 has excellent aeronautical performance, had an advanced missile system for the 1980s and 90s, but is inferior to Western counterparts like the F-16 in every other way (inefficient engines that are a hassle to fix; weak radar; short range, old-fashioned cockpit that forces the pilot to constantly look at gauges, dials, and paper maps in his lap instead of looking out the canopy for enemies).
https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/truth-about-mig-29-180952403/

What a mess: The Indian Army now imports three rifles from three countries that use three different sized bullets.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/why-did-indian-army-decide-buy-sig-sauers-716-rifle-164532

Here’s a roundup of a few of the U.S. military’s failed military projects.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/5-weapons-us-military-almost-built-disaster-165284

Seventy-five years ago, the first atom bomb was detonated.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-16/trinity-a-bomb-75-years-ago

The USS Yorktown was a U.S. aircraft carrier that sank during the pivotal Battle of Midway in 1942. After being bombed by Japanese planes, it started filling with water and leaning to one side. At 2:28 pm on June 4, all of its crew abandoned ship, convinced it would soon sink.

They were wrong. The damage was not fatal, and from the safety of another U.S. warship, they saw that the Yorktown was still afloat hours later. Fourteen hours after leaving, they started returning to the stricken carrier to fix it. They worked feverishly for the next 24 hours, and were making progress pumping water out of the ship, reducing its tilt. Unfortunately, a Japanese sub spotted them and torpedoed the carrier, this time destroying it for good. The sub also blew up another U.S. ship.

This makes me wonder what would have happened if the crew had never abandoned the Yorktown in the first place. That extra 14 hours of time might have enabled them to sufficiently repair and move the ship out of the area to prevent it from falling prey to the sub.
https://navylive.dodlive.mil/2013/06/02/battle-of-midway-timeline-of-significant-events/

The 1941 Pearl Harbor attack cost over 2,000 Americans their lives. In 1944, an accidental explosion involving naval ammunition killed another 163 to 392 people at the Harbor.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/forgotten-history-1944-pearl-harbor-once-again-went-flames-164267

The B-1B bomber has a 1:1 digital simulation, and soon the UH-60L helicopter will, too.
‘It is taking each aircraft apart piece by piece, scanning them using high-fidelity scanners, and creating three-dimensional (3D) computer-aided design (CAD) models of the parts.’
https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/wichita-state-university-creates-digital-models-of-uh-60l-b-1b-aircraft

It costs $10.9 million to train a pilot how to fly an F-22 fighter, and $1.1 million to train one to fly a C-17 cargo plane. All the USAF’s costs for training pilots for its other types of planes are in between. Of course, that’s not the end of it. Those are only the costs of getting a new person UP TO the level of being able to fly their plane. Since people forget things, the pilots have to frequently undergo retraining and re-certification, which means more money spent each year (the RAND analysis doesn’t show those figures) as a continual expense. This means the cost savings of inventing computers that can fly warplanes as well as humans will be massive. There will also be no risk of pilots being shot down over enemy territory, captured, and used as political pawns.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/04/09/the-cost-of-training-u-s-air-force-fighter-pilots-infographic/

The FAA doesn’t know who was responsible for the mass drone formations that flew over the Great Plains last winter.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34662/faa-documents-offer-unprecedented-look-into-colorado-drone-mystery

Are aliens hibernating until the day the universe gets colder? If they are intelligent machines, then they would generate a lot of heat, and a colder environment would let them radiate that heat more efficiently, allowing them to do more computation. “[If such aliens hibernated until the universe’s temperature dropped from 3 Kelvin to less than 1 Kelvin] they could achieve up to 10^30 times more than if done today.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-theory-on-why-we-haven-t-found-aliens-yet

Turing Award-winner John Hopcroft thinks machines will make human workers obsolete, and he points out that, just because humans have been able to climb up the skills ladder in the past faster than machines could automate old jobs, doesn’t mean we will be able to do that forever. Past trends don’t continue indefinitely, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t get into a situation where machines took over 1 million human jobs in a given year, but only 900,000 new jobs for humans were created during that same period. Hopcroft suggests dealing with this by spreading out the remaining jobs among more humans by finding ways to shorten the amount of time the average person works.
https://youtu.be/htfNuoJ3Ecc

Elon Musk is still scared of AI. He thinks they could get smarter than humans in five years, and that things would get “unstable or weird” shortly after. I think his prediction is way too optimistic, and what might happen in five years is a machine passing the Turing Test, meaning it can carry on conversations with people and answer questions as well as a human. Things will get “weird” after that because many people dealing with such machines will mistakenly assume that they are “intelligent,” and perhaps even smarter than humans (e.g. – you’ll be able to ask a machine to do a complex math problem, and it will give you the solution right away). But the Turing Test machines and the autonomous cars we’ll have by the end of this decade will not actually be intelligent, self-aware, or capable of creative thought. Only at the surface level will they seem so. I doubt a true AI will be built earlier than midcentury.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-maureen-dowd-ai-google-deepmind-wargames-2020-7

Musk is one of the world’s richest men, and his business achievements have been extraordinary, but he also has many stalled and failed ventures. Also, Tesla’s high stock price is probably unjustified, and Musk’s claims about future growth and the introduction of fully autonomous car models are likely too optimistic.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-22/why-the-stock-market-is-so-high-and-tesla-even-higher

A coast-to-coast network of fast charging stations that can recharge an electric car battery in 20 minutes has been completed in the U.S.
https://mashable.com/article/electric-vehicle-charging-cross-country/

Intel is falling behind other computer chip manufacturers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53525710

An experiment shows that sound waves can be used to move tiny objects around inside of bodies.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/09/2011999117

The discovery that some colon cancers are caused by the bacterium F. nucleatum raises the possibility that a vaccine could be created, saving lives.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/22/bacteria-and-colon-cancer

A new algorithm can look at cell biopsy images and diagnose prostate cancer with almost perfect accuracy.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30159-X/abstract

A farm combine can weigh over 20 tons. As the vehicles slow drive over farm fields, their tires compact the soil, damaging its ability to grow more crops. Smaller farm robots wouldn’t do this.
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-big-wheel-ruts-economic-losses.html

Solar panels are really helping Afghanistan’s heroin farmers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53450688

An experimental trimaran generates electricity from the ocean’s waves.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200718-the-revolutionary-electric-boat-powered-by-the-ocean

Flooding has become a worse problem in New Orleans and some other coastal areas because of “land subsidence.” As humans pump aquifer water, oil, and natural gas out of the ground, all the little voids empty out, the dirt compacts, and the ground level sinks. This problem is not connected to global warming, and shows that some flooding is not due to rising sea levels or worsening storms.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0518/How-fast-is-New-Orleans-sinking-Faster-and-faster-says-new-study

The Mediterranean Sea was warmer during the Roman Era than it is today.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67281-2

Humans might have migrated to the Americas from Asia 10,000 years earlier than is widely believed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2509-0

Genetic studies of black people in the Americas have revealed new information about the slave trade, and about the pervasiveness of white masters raping their female slaves.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53527405

Cosmic rays are responsible for the right-handed chirality of DNA. If the rays are omnipresent in the galaxy and have the same energetic properties everywhere, alien DNA should share our chirality.

DNA and RNA are also more structurally suited to their roles storing genetic information than any other type of biomolecule, so it’s likely that all but the most primitive types of aliens will use DNA and RNA.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8483125/DNA-living-things-right-handed-bias-cosmic-rays-blasting-young-Earth.html

But what if aliens used some completely different type of biomolecule to store their genetic information? Well, then they’d probably be biochemically inefficient compared to us.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/09/18/and-now-for-a-bit-of-quantum-mechanics

Silicon-based, ORGANIC life forms are unlikely to exist.
‘Only a tiny fraction of the theoretical chemical space of silicon chemistry can be stable in water (Section 3.2.1). In fact, some of the commonly held views about the low diversity of silicon chemistry come directly from the instability of silicon chemistry in water. Silicon chemistry in water also requires substantially more energy to access than equivalent carbon chemistry (Section 3.3). For all of the above reasons, we argue in this subsection that silicon is unlikely to be a scaffold element or a common heteroatom element in water.’
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/6/84

Infrared cameras can see through some plastics and fabrics that look opaque to the human eye.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/12072610/oneplus-phone-x-ray-camera-clothes-plastic-banned/

Here’s an amazing upscaling of footage of Tokyo street scenes from the 1910s. Even better video reconstructions than this will be available in the future.
https://youtu.be/MQAmZ_kR8S8

In 1969, Richard Nixon’s speechwriters prepared an address for him to read to the nation in case the Apollo 11 moon landing failed. Using deepfake technology, we can see what it would have looked like.
https://youtu.be/LWLadJFI8Pk

In the 1970s, there was an ambitious project to compile a 6 million-page history of America from its founding to WWI into a document called the Library of American Civilization. It would have been in “ultrafiche” format, with each ultrafiche being 3″ x 5″ and containing up to 1,000 page images, shrunk from original size by a factor of 55 to 90. The idea was to distribute the document, along with ultrafiche readers, to every major library in America.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED082753.pdf

Einstein and Leo Szilard invented three refrigerators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpwyU96budw

Donald Trump was right! His prediction that either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden would be the Democratic nominee for President was correct.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6930369/Trump-predicts-Biden-Sanders-2020-Dem-finalists.html

This prediction from May turned out wrong: ‘Professor Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University said: “I think by the end of June we’ll be looking at the data and finding it difficult to find people [in Britain] with [COVID-19], if the current trends continue in the deaths.”‘

The daily death toll never reached zero in June–the lowest point was 25 deaths on June 29th. Also, on the last day of the month, 689 Britions were diagnosed with COVID-19.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11693720/coronavirus-study-predicts-date-uk-will-have-no-cases/

This is a smart, new metric: Number of positive results per 1,000 COVID-19 tests. It corrects for the fact that the number of daily tests is growing. That metric, along with the number of excess deaths above the expected baseline, is the most foolproof for understanding the scope and trend of the pandemic.
https://reason.com/2020/07/21/trump-is-wrong-spreading-epidemic-is-responsible-for-most-of-the-rise-in-covid-19-cases/

Bill Gates thinks the U.S. should send all its pre-teens back to school this fall, in spite of the disease risk.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/bill-gates-on-back-to-school-during-coronavirus-pandemic.html

Preliminary results from one of the COVID-19 vaccines are good.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/20/more-pfizer-phase-i-results-antibodies-viral-mutations-and-t-cells

Interesting articles, June 2020

In a 2015 speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, George Friedman predicted that Russia would start disintegrating around 2020, if not before. It hasn’t happened and there are no signs it is about to. (Skip to the 48:12 mark in this video)
https://youtu.be/QeLu_yyz3tc?t=2892

Josef Stalin was a sadist and a thug, but he had a notoriously poor grasp of warfare and military affairs. This rang especially true for the navy, which he ordered to build several battleships that would have been massive but horrible.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Soviet-Battleships-Part-2

Here’s an awesome video of nuclear bombs blowing up warships. Even if a ship is still floating afterward, the force of the shockwave has probably caused a lot of damage thanks to walls caving in and machinery and pipes being physically broken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUcmZbyLXB0

And here are even more awesome photos of Mad Max vehicles in Kurdistan.
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/06/kurdish-mad-max.html

Russia has sent mercenaries to help the rebel faction in Libya, and now Egypt says it might send its own troops there to support them further. The government forces are backed by Turkey, which has also sent troops there, and a few other countries. Does everyone agree at this point that the U.S. made a mistake helping to oust Qaddafi?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-egypt/egypt-has-a-legitimate-right-to-intervene-in-libya-sisi-says-idUSKBN23R0W1

Ukraine’s army released a fascinating analysis of its war with Russia. The #1 killer of its tanks was Russian artillery, followed by shoulder-launched missiles. Tank-on-tank duels were rare events, and I suspect most of those were lopsided engagements where the loser was destroyed by one shot and didn’t even realize an enemy tank was in the area.
https://thedeaddistrict.blogspot.com/2020/03/analisys-of-combat-damage-of-ukrainian.html

U.S. commandos in Syria are using “smart sights” on their rifles. The sights are big and bulky–about the size of a soda can and with wires coming out of them–but they will inevitably shrink as the technology improves. Smart sights and guided bullets will someday let any soldier be a sniper.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33794/special-operators-in-syria-are-first-american-unit-to-use-computerized-sights-on-their-rifles

Chinese and Indian troops had a massive brawl along their disputed border in the Himalayas. Twenty Indians and an undisclosed number of Chinese died in the fighting, where knives and spiked clubs were used (they mutually agreed to ban guns from the area to reduce the odds of bloodshed).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53089037

China has finished building its own version of the GPS.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53132957

Space-X became the first, private company to launch humans into space. The two crewmen compared the ride favorable to the Space Shuttle, which both men flew on before its retirement.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/astronauts-falcon-9-rocket-was-totally-different-ride-from-the-space-shuttle

A private U.S. company has built an experimental stealth-y plane.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34003/scaled-composites-stealthy-demonstrator-jets-spotted-working-with-high-flying-proteus

A quad-copter “flying motorcycle” lost control and crashed during a demonstration in Dubai, nearly killing the pilot. It ain’t like it is in the Judge Dredd movie.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8409489/Shocking-moment-test-pilot-nearly-killed-hoverbikes-spinning-rotor-blades.html

Nineteen years after its debut, the Segway will halt production due to insufficient sales. The machine’s patents have also expired, so anyone can legally make copies. Segways didn’t radically alter ground transportation as its inventor hoped, but the rise of lightweight electric scooters shows there was merit to the idea. Segway just represented the wrong form factor.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/23/882536320/after-nearly-two-bumpy-decades-the-original-segway-will-be-retired-in-july

Thermoelectric stoves convert heat into electricity. Imagine an electric Jeep with one such stove for a motor. Two robot workers would sit in the front seats. It would drive through areas where there was a high risk of forest fires. The robots would get out, chop up dead trees and dry wood lying on the ground, load it into the stove, and burn it to make electricity to charge their batteries and the Jeep’s. Once all the combustible material in the area was burned, they would drive to the next area and repeat.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/05/thermoelectric-stoves-ditch-the-solar-panels.html

Fish “migrate” from one isolated lake to another when birds eat fish eggs at one lake, and then excrete them in their feces at another lake. Some of the eggs can survive passage through a digestive tract.
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-fish-migrate-ingestion-birds.html

At last, a good explanation for why plants are green instead of black. The intensity level of the green wavelengths of light fluctuate the most on the Earth’s surface, and those variations would wreak havoc on a plant’s cells.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/plants-are-green-because-they-reject-harmful-colors

Human vision is pretty weak. We only see details and color in a narrow, forward-facing cone.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-much-color-do-we-really-see

There’s growing evidence that transfusing blood from young people into old people improves the latter’s health. A new experiment suggests that an even simpler technique of removing half an old person’s blood and simultaneously replacing it with an equal volume of saline water and proteins might also be beneficial.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/12/young-blood-and-old-blood

A medical paper published last month in the Lancet claimed that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine actually increased the overall odds of dying among people who took it to treat COVID-19. People from many quarters quickly jumped on it as proof that President Trump’s advocacy of the drug was mistaken. However, the paper was recently retracted after nonpartisan scientists pointed out it didn’t include enough data supporting its conclusion.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/06/04/870022834/authors-retract-hydroxychloroquine-study-citing-concern-over-data

But it’s not over…the FDA withdrew its endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 because other, better studies showed it did nothing, but still induced the negative (but not lethal) side effects that have been known for decades. President Trump had previously claimed he was taking it prophylactically.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53054476

People with type A blood are the most vulnerable to COVID-19.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/health/coronavirus-blood-type-genetics.html

We still don’t know if surviving COVID-19 gives a person permanent or temporary immunity to reinfection. Additionally, it’s possible that the first vaccine may only provide partial protection from the disease, and that its effect could wear off over time, requiring people to get booster shots. (There’s nothing surprising about this: the last flu vaccine was only 45% effective.)
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/thoughts-on-antibody-persistence-and-the-pandemic
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/15/what-might-go-wrong

Surprisingly, the George Floyd mass protests didn’t lead to spikes in COVID-19 infections. It seems very hard for the virus to spread among people who are outdoors, wearing surgical masks, and keeping a few feet of distance from each other. It is vastly more infectious in crowded, enclosed environments.
https://www.wired.com/story/what-minnesotas-protests-are-revealing-about-covid-19-spread/

The COVID-19 quarantines are actually unlikely to produce a baby boom. Instead, there will probably be 300,000 – 500,000 fewer U.S. births across 2020 and 2021, mostly due to potential parents having financial problems.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-children-the-coming-covid-baby-bust/

America’s leading public health expert has admitted what many have suspected: earlier this year, the government lied about the effectiveness of surgical masks in blocking the spread of COVID-19 because it didn’t want ordinary people to panic buy all of them, leading to shortages at hospitals.
https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-directive-coronavirus

In the U.K., South Asians are the likeliest race of people to die of COVID-19 because they have the highest rates of diabetes and hence weakened immune systems. South Asians have a genetic predisposition to diabetes, made worse by the fact that their traditional diets are fatty.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53097676

The architect of Sweden’s hands-off response to the COVID-19 pandemic has admitted it was a mistake, and that more of his people died than would have had they adopted the same strict lockdowns as other European countries.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52903717

This model’s prediction of 110,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. by June 6th was almost perfectly accurate. Today it says deaths will hit 147,000 by the end of July.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/13/855038708/combining-different-models-new-coronavirus-projection-shows-110-000-deaths-by-ju
https://viz.covid19forecasthub.org/

If you think things are bad in the world right now with the pandemic, social unrest, and all the other stuff, crack open a history book and realize how good we have it in the grand scheme of things. Be thankful you weren’t alive in Europe in 43 B.C., when the Roman Empire not only fell into civil war, but starvation became rampant because a volcanic eruption in Alaska dimmed the skies, killing farm crops around the world.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/06/17/2002722117

A convicted murderer has solved an ancient math problem in prison.
https://www.dw.com/en/murderer-solves-ancient-math-problem-and-finds-his-mission/a-53895884

“Internet sleuths” trying to track down an unknown man caught harassing people on video misidentified him and spread the wrong person’s contact information across the internet. Almost immediately, he got a surge of angry, threatening electronic messages.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get-doxed-for-taking-a-bike-ride.html

Here’s an amazing and in-depth interview with AI researcher Joscha Bach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM

A new computer program can generate photorealistic illustrations of human faces based on crude sketches.
https://www.engadget.com/ai-can-produce-detailed-photos-of-faces-from-simple-sketches-122924655.html

Flat-panel TVs have come a long way from the fuzzy, motion-juddering, narrow-viewing-angle devices I remember from 15 years ago, and there’s room for them to improve farther.
https://youtu.be/RTTiQeXXrhI

The Tesla Model S now has an improved battery pack that gets 402 miles per full charge. That’s more than my gas-powered car.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-s-long-range-plus-building-first-400-mile-electric-vehicle

“The first piston steam engine, developed by Thomas Newcomen around 1710, was slightly over one half percent (0.5%) efficient.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Engine_efficiency&oldid=958282962

The massive Ford car factory site at River Rogue, MI had a “car disassembly plant” from 1930-44. Hundreds of men worked there, systematically stripping parts off of Fords and other brands of cars, reusing or reselling what was still good, and melting down the rest to make metal for new Fords. I predicted this will return by the end of the 2030s thanks to cheap robots: “The same kinds of facilities will make inroads into the junk yard industry, as they would have all the right tooling to cheaply and rapidly disassemble old vehicles, test the parts for functionality, and shunt them to disposal or individual resale. (The days of hunting through junkyards by yourself for a car part you need will eventually end–it will all be on eBay. )”
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A80344909/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=AONE&xid=b0a3b483

Q: “How Will You Get Robots to Pay Union Dues?”
A: “How Will You Get Robots to Buy Cars?”
These are funny quips, probably exchanged between Henry Ford and union leader Walter Reuther in the 1950s, but the insinuation that it will forever be impossible to cut humans out of the economic loop is mistaken. There’s no theoretical reason why there couldn’t someday be a factory run entirely by robots that made cars bought entirely by other robots.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars/

Interesting articles, May 2020

The Philippines Presidential Security Group

The Philippines “Presidential Security Group” has the most interesting camouflage uniforms I’ve seen. As wacky as it looks, it actually adheres to the best principles of military camouflage (coarse pixelation, use of parallel and perpendicular lines and hard angles instead of wavy lines). If you changed the color scheme to black with earth-toned green and brown, it would probably do an excellent job concealing you in vegetated areas from people looking at you from typical combat distances (50 meters and above).
https://youtu.be/ZpsXwolf0Oo

A very bold and recent prediction that didn’t fare well.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8277471/North-Korean-defector-says-99-sure-Kim-Jong-dead.html

The Kennedy administration considered building a nuclear bunker 3,500 feet under the Pentagon that could survive 200 megaton surface detonations. The biggest nuclear weapon ever built was ONLY 50 megatons.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33003/the-pentagons-plan-to-build-a-secret-super-command-bunker-3500-feet-under-washington-d-c

During WWII, the British aircraft carriers had 3 inch-thick armor plates right under their flight decks, and also armored walls around the hangars right below that. Because of this, they could carry fewer planes than the un-armored American carriers, but they were also more durable. Several British aircraft carriers probably would have sunk had it not been for their armored decks.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/were-royal-navys-armored-aircraft-carrier-decks-worth-it-152081

After the U.S. had to dock its two Pacific aircraft carriers due to epidemics of COVID-19 among their crews, China sent its own aircraft carrier battle group out, alarming Taiwan.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3079546/taiwan-scrambles-warships-pla-navy-aircraft-carrier-strike

A new analysis about China’s growing naval strength reveals that they could achieve numerical superiority over the U.S. Navy in a conflict in the Western Pacific.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf

One of China’s army training bases has a full-size replica of Taiwan’s Presidential Building.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33591/chinas-biggest-base-has-huge-replicas-of-taiwans-presidential-building-and-the-eiffel-tower

Francis Fukuyama thinks that Xi Jinping has made China less free than it was 10 years ago, and that the U.S. should now treat it as an enemy with global ambitions.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/05/18/what-kind-of-regime-does-china-have/

You know you’re broke when your best tank is a T-34, and you shoot it by standing outside and pulling on a long rope tied to the trigger because you’re afraid it might blow up.
https://youtu.be/eMMCYWxAtco

This thermal camera video of a Russian tank parade show that much of a tank’s heat signature comes from its wheels and tracks. As the tank drive around, those metal parts rub against each other, producing heat through friction. I don’t see how this can be ameliorated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6RZ9l_Fw4U

As warfare gets more advanced and sensor/communication-dependent, the size and prominence of each field unit’s “electronic emission signature” grows.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-ground-forces-look-like-to-an-electronic-warfare-system-and-why-its-a-big-deal

Ukraine’s military lost half of its aircraft in the first year of war with Russia. While many were destroyed in combat or were captured, some were deleted from the official inventory because they were found to be nonfunctional due to years of neglect when Ukraine desperately tried to activate its whole arsenal.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-russia-nearly-wiped-out-ukrainian-air-force-141857

The U.S. Army is working on small, flying surveillance drones that infantrymen can send airborne using standard 40mm grenade launchers.
https://www.army.mil/article/234300/grenade_launchers_able_to_fire_armys_new_camera_drones

Boko Haram attacked and defeated a garrison of Chadian soldiers, killing almost 100 of them and capturing their weapons. This is the deadliest terrorist attack in that country.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/chad/derriere-lattaque-jihadiste-au-tchad

Russia has sent fighter planes and ground units of its private military contractors to fight for the rebels in Libya’s ongoing civil war. Turkey supports the embattled central government and sent troops to help earlier this year. Syria is of course another battleground between Russian and Turkey proxies.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-camouflaged-fighter-jets-deployed-to-libya-to-back-rebel-air

A large Venezuelan navy patrol ship tried to capture a German cruise ship in the Caribbean. The warship rammed it, not realizing that the other ship had a reinforced hull for breaking through ice, and damaged itself so badly that it sank. The cruise ship had minimal damage.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8189463/Moment-Venezuelan-warship-RAMS-German-liner-Caribbean-sinks.html

A Mickey Mouse plot to take over Venezuela, and involving at least two military contractors from the U.S., failed. It was so amateurish that it’s doubtful the U.S. government ordered it to proceed.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33322/breaking-down-the-absolutely-batshit-botched-coup-attempt-against-venezuelas-maduro

The Apollo 13 near-disaster mission happened 50 years ago. Videos that the crewmen filmed have been used to make new, hi-res still photos through a process that compared the images from multiple frames of video film that showed the same scene (a video camera from that era shot 24 frames per second). It’s similar to the single-pixel camera I linked to in a past blog entry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52264743
http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-single-pixel-camera-lensless-imaging-0330

The explosion that caused the Apollo 13 crisis resulted from an incredible series of small malfunctions. Also, had the explosion happened a few hours before or after it actually did, the crewmen would have all died.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-checklist-of-what-had-to-go-wrong-for-apollo-13-to-1697567898

“Fata morgana” is a rare atmospheric phenomenon that doubtless explains many UFO sightings.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a32389233/optical-illuson-fata-morgana-ufo-flying-ship/

This video explains why exotic forms of communication, like using only smells, touch, or gravity waves, are impractical and grossly inferior to the forms of communication we use (speech, looking at writing, radio signals). Also, it makes the point that aliens could learn human languages by listening to our radio broadcasts and finding simple patterns, like the fact that the word “breakfast” is mentioned most often in the mornings, and is usually associated with words relating to food and hunger. They could learn our languages, at least to an elementary degree, without interacting with us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thdC-HlRHWg

This video provides a good overview of radar jamming. Radar is of course used to detect the locations of planes and ships. A radar station does this by sending out beams of radio waves, and then waiting to see if any of those waves bounce off a solid object and are reflected back to the station. The radar’s computer compiles any such echoes into a visual representation of the planes and ships, which looks like the familiar, circular computer screen image of little white dots against a black background. A human sits at a chair watching this screen. To jam a radar, you point a radio emitter of your own at the radar station and shoot powerful radio beams at it. The radar station’s receiver is overloaded, and the circular screen displays static, or goes 100% white. It’s conceptually the same as blinding a human by shining a very bright flashlight in his eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su44ZU7NcQU

Air radar coverage map

Large parts of America’s airspace are not monitored by aircraft radars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/07/22/u-s-radars-have-come-a-long-way-but-gaps-in-coverage-remain-big-a-risk/

Before radar was developed, militaries would use “acoustic mirrors” to listen for the approach of enemy planes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror

“Artillery sound ranging” is a technique in which the location of a piece of enemy artillery is triangulated by measuring the time delay between when the blast of its discharge is heard at different locations. This can also be used to find sources of small arms fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Artillery_sound_ranging

An American private military company has bought Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s personal Boeing 707 and plans to turn it into an aerial refueling plane.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32962/romanian-dictators-boeing-707-makes-first-flight-in-years-for-delivery-to-air-refueling-firm

The article doesn’t make the case that the 737 Max’ computer hardware was the problem. Flying a plane is complicated, but there are only so many variables your computer needs to keep track of, and a 20-year-old processor design might be fully adequate (by the same token, a Godlike supercomputer would not be better at tic-tac-toe than a teenager). Rather, a particular software algorithm installed in the 737 Max planes was the real defect.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21197162/boeing-737-max-software-hardware-computer-fcc-crash

The “Baltimore Stockbroker Scam” is kind of ingenious. It touches on a point I made about good futurism: ‘You can be right thanks to luck alone, and “a stopped clock is right twice a day.”’
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-predict-future-simply-predict.html

The Apple Watch is five years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apple_Watch&oldid=956160178

The average human’s brain size has significantly shrunk over the last 20,000 years. Have we gotten dumber as a result? Maybe.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/if-modern-humans-are-so-smart-why-are-our-brains-shrinking

Most of the fruit fly’s brain has been mapped. It’s a step forward, though it should be remembered that a human brain has 600,000 times as many neurons. Mapping the brains of progressively larger, smarter animals will be a long pathway to building AI.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.030213v1

Another small step towards building an AGI: “With Agent57, we have succeeded in building a more generally intelligent agent that has above-human performance on all tasks in the Atari57 benchmark.”
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Agent57-Outperforming-the-human-Atari-benchmark

The rise of AI will revolutionize warfare because it will let countries build arbitrarily large numbers of combat robots. The size of a country’s military will no longer be limited by the size of its human population. Conventional warfare will become as big a threat to humanity’s existence as nuclear war is now.
“We envision fleets of smaller, multi-mission vessels, operating with surface warfare leadership. People talk about a 355-ship Navy, how about a 35,000-ship Navy?,” Maj. Gen. David Coffman…[he] explained it as a “family of combatant craft, manned and unmanned, integrated in a distributed maritime operation.”
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/autonomous-navy-ships-could-revolutionize-amphibious-assault-156481

It will be interesting to see the prototype ship designs that result from this.
‘NOMARS will challenge the traditional naval architecture paradigm, designing a seaframe from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans at sea. By removing the human element from all ship design considerations, NOMARS will demonstrate significant advantages, to include size, cost (procurement, operations, and sustainment), at-sea reliability, survivability to sea-state, survivability to adversary actions (stealth considerations, resistance to tampering, etc.), and hydrodynamic efficiency (hull optimization without consideration for crew safety or comfort).’
https://beta.sam.gov/opp/fd0ba75d1ef64d569db637571f659dbb/view

The examples of the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors might offer insights into how AGIs could take over the world. Machines could play different human groups against each other, and then turn on their allies at the end.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ivpKSjM4D6FbqF4pZ/cortes-pizarro-and-afonso-as-precedents-for-takeover

This interesting exploration of “slack” underscores why species and civilizations are more successful if they all for some diversity, even if that diversity makes them slightly sub-optimal most of the time. This is part of why I doubt intelligent machines will eradicate the human race.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/

I like it when a distinguished but elderly scientist (Dr. Martin Rees) states that we’re going to evolve into genetically engineered cyborgs, some of whom will live on Mars.
https://youtu.be/A1dfjX0STEk

Ben Goertzel offers good challenges to the notion that suffering and death give meaning to human life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LbGwcDOmiQ

The citizens of the U.S. and Canada would get richer if their countries fully merged. Even with a “free trade agreement,” there’s a lot of potential cross-border trade that isn’t happening, costing everyone money. A fully unified internal market would solve that.
“Borders and Growth” https://www.nber.org/papers/w9223.pdf
“Gravity with Gravitas” https://www.nber.org/papers/w8079.pdf
“National Borders Matter” https://online.fliphtml5.com/tcva/smhp/#p=2

Here’s an interesting list of everyday things that have improved for Americans since the 1990s.
https://www.gwern.net/Improvements

The process of innovation and invention is a team effort full of trial-and-error, failed experiments, and small modifications to existing ideas and things. It can also be slowed or quashed by something as mundane as government red tape.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/innovation-can-be-quashed/

The ACLU is suing “Clearview AI,” for violating the privacy rights of some Americans by compiling a searchable, massive trove of face photographs taken from publicly available internet sites.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-clearview-ai

If manmade impermeable surfaces (e.g. – roads, roofs, parking lots, sidewalks) increase by 1%, then the frequency of floods grows by 3.3%. What fraction of today’s flooding is caused by this and not by global warming?
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL086480

Global warming will make snowstorms less frequent and less severe in the U.S.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/26/climate-change-reduce-big-winter-snowstorms-study/5258663002/

The cost of solar power has dropped faster than any credible person predicted, even ten years ago. This supports my prediction that the 2020s will be the decade when better, cheaper solar panels and grid storage batteries will make solar power cost-competitive with standard forms of energy, even without government subsidies.
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/

A big problem with solar and wind power is intermittency. To compensate for their sudden swings in electrical output over the course of the day, the people in charge of the electric grids have to throttle other power plants up and down. Natural gas power plants are best suited for this, but quickly dialing them up and down still greatly reduces their efficiency, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere than they otherwise would. (We REALLY need to invent better batteries for grid energy storage.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/03/11/what-happens-when-we-put-renewables-on-the-grid-to-green-our-electric-cars-is-really-complicated/#53b195e57022

There are genetic differences between northern and southern Italians.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8348963/First-study-Italians-genetic-diversity-reveals-dates-19-000-years-ago.html

A graduate math student just solved the 50-year-old “Conway Knot Problem.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem-20200519/

Just as the air gets thinner as you go up a mountain, it gets thicker as you go down into a mine.
https://www.saimm.co.za/Journal/v105n06p387.pdf

Here’s a video of 300 Amish men picking up a barn and moving it across a field with their bare hands. When robots become cheap and widespread, we’ll be able to use them to do things like this all the time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8320953/Amazing-moment-300-Amish-men-lift-huge-barn-bare-hands-field.html

Finland’s big experiment with giving a UBI to unemployed people found that the money doesn’t make them any likelier to get jobs, but it makes them feel happier. (Who would have thought free money would do that?)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-06/milestone-free-money-study-shows-happiness-grows-but-jobs-don-t

Internal U.S. State Department communiques show that diplomats were concerned about lax safety protocols at a Chinese animal disease lab in Wuhan. The lab had samples of diseases similar to COVID-19.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/

Is the COVID-19 pandemic SAVING some lives? The lockdown means less air pollution, which in turn means fewer people dying of respiratory distress. (Also, less car traffic means fewer road fatalities)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8180063/Coronavirus-lockdown-slashes-air-pollution-China-25-36-000-lives-month.html

The U.S. COVID-19 death toll has hit 100,000. Remember the White House press conference from two months ago when Trump’s advisors put forth that number, and how sobering it was? It’s strange that we’ve arrived there.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/31/21202188/us-deaths-coronavirus-trump-white-house-presser-modeling-100000

In this interview from two months ago, Bill Gates predicted that that the number of active COVID-19 cases would peak in every part of the U.S. by late April. He was pretty accurate, though a handful of states didn’t peak until early May, and Arizona has still not peaked. Gates went on to predict that a month would have to pass after those peaks for states to start safely lifting their lockdowns, meaning that we’d start seeing a lot of that around late May (now). Again, he was right.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/03/27/bill-gates-coronavirus-town-hall-shutdown-april-peak-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/stories-worth-watching/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/05/14/coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19-peak-dates-for-every-state/111695368/

Bill Gates now predicts:
-The world won’t return to its pre-COVID-19 state until a good vaccine has been invented and given to almost the whole human population.
-A vaccine won’t be invented until early 2021 or mid-2022.
-After that, distributing the vaccine to everyone will take months or years.
-By the end, the COVID-19 pandemic will have cost the world tens of trillions of dollars. (2019 global GDP was $85 trillion)
-The vaccine will probably become part of the standard vaccine schedule given to infants.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-you-need-to-know-about-the-COVID-19-vaccine
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/at-a-time-when-leadership-is-rare-bill-gates-stands-tall-on-covid-19/

Though we’ll endure a sucky “new normal” for the next year or two, I disagree with predictions that the pandemic will permanently alter how people interact (e.g. – no more hugging, no more going to restaurants). Such predictions run contrary to human nature.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/i-predict-your-predictions-are-wrong/611896/