Category: science

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Interesting articles, October 2023

Hamas, the organization that governs the Gaza Strip and is widely considered to be a terrorist group, conducted an unprecedented raid against several nearby towns in Israel. Teams of armed men, including some on paragliders, breached Israel’s border defenses at multiple points early on October 7 and spent the day killing as many Israelis as they could before being driven back. Over 1,400 Israelis were killed, and over 200 more were dragged back to Gaza as hostages.

The U.S. used airstrikes to retaliate against Iranian-backed militants after the latter tried attacking U.S. bases in the Middle East.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-strikes-iran-linked-sites-020822123.html

Ukraine used its new, U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles to devastate a Russian air base.
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/ukraines-growing-arsenal
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/destruction-from-ukraines-first-atacms-strike-now-apparent

The threat of Ukrainian missile, drone and commando attacks has forced Russia to move most of its warships out of Sevastopol.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/6/they-miscalculated-ukraine-turns-the-tables-on-russias-black-sea-fleet

Modern technology — such as surveillance drones with infrared and thermal imaging — means one side can more easily identify an ill-made decoy. An exposed tank without a heat signature is going to be a dead giveaway. A lack of tank tracks in the dirt is unusual, and it doesn’t matter how convincing a decoy howitzer is if it’s oddly sitting alone in a field rather than in a realistic firing position with at least basic defenses.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/decoy-arms-race-playing-ukraine-211638570.html

A September 6 missile strike on a market in Ukraine that killed 16 civilians was probably an errant Ukrainian missile, not a Russian one as Ukraine’s government claimed.
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-09-19/evidence-suggests-errant-ukrainian-missile-caused-market-deaths-new-york-times

Biden administration officials are far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit, a confidential U.S. strategy document obtained by POLITICO suggests.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/02/biden-admin-ukraine-strategy-corruption-00119237

Here’s a remarkable video of a Russian T-90M–one of the country’s best tanks–being instantly destroyed by an antitank missile. Stowage of ammunition inside the tank where the crew sits can lead to catastrophic explosions like this.
https://youtu.be/KjGFCNzXx20?si=2CTuKAi_lM1bh4IR

At the current loss rates, all of Russia’s old BMP armored vehicles will be destroyed within three years.
https://youtu.be/HuKVxgFBbYM?si=LvwTbGBuxwaDjUP6

About 100,000 Russian prisoners have fought in Ukraine so far.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/26/russia-prison-population-convicts-war/

Here’s a video about mine-clearing tactics and vehicles. Let me add that, instead of using old T-55s for combat in Ukraine, I think it would be smarter to turn them into mine clearing vehicles.
https://youtu.be/VGDUgxQyVWc?si=NNqLRUl5MJY7eXlj

The U.S. and Ukraine are building “Franken weapons” that combine elements of American and Soviet-made weapons systems. Right now, the effort is focused on surface-to-air missile systems.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/oct/28/desperate-for-air-defense-ukraine-pushes-us-for-fr/

A U.S. F-16 shot down an armed Turkish drone because it strayed too close to U.S. ground troops in Syria.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-f-16-fighter-jet-170834726.html

A Chinese fighter plane almost collided with a U.S. B-52 bomber over the South China Sea.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1208941174/a-chinese-fighter-jet-came-within-10-feet-of-a-b-52-bomber-u-s-military-says

A terrorist drone attack on a graduation ceremony at a Syrian military academy killed 89 people and wounded hundreds more. It’s only a matter of time before something like this happens in the U.S.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/middleeast/syria-military-college-ceremony-drone-strike-intl/index.html

Britain’s costly saga of buying U.S.-made Apache helicopters, modifying them to special British standards, and then de-modifying them back to a U.S. configuration teaches important lessons about economies of scale and the price of national pride.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lesson-britain-us-army-apache-161737080.html

Here’s a first-person tour of a B-24 bomber in flight.
https://youtu.be/fcZmiFMlR3g?si=Yx0vh-_5ETnsPEn-

China contributed to the Entente in WWI by sending 100,000 workers to toil in France’s domestic economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_during_World_War_I

‘Remember in 1871 Germany imposed a “harsh peace” (including an occupation) on a defeated France. When Russia, gripped by revolution pulled out in 1918 the Germans imposed a harsher penalty on Russia than Versailles—and Versailles was fairly lenient compared to what Germany had planned to impose had she won the war.’
https://www.quora.com/How-different-or-similar-was-the-Treaty-of-Versailles-from-other-treaties-signed-around-the-same-time-Were-the-terms-better-of-worse-than-those-imposed-on-or-by-Germany-in-previous-conflicts

‘During World War II, 80% of targets engaged by the M4 Sherman tank were soft targets such as infantry, anti-tank guns, and bunkers.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tanks-big-guns-attention-russias-220902112.html

The 1930s were more geopolitically volatile than most people realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stresa_Front

In warfare, jamming the enemy’s radar and dealing with him trying to overcome your jam involves switching radio frequencies. The back-and-forth reminds me of Enterprise rotating the modulations of its shields and phasers to fight the Borg.

Constantly alternating the frequency that the radar operates on (frequency agility) over a spread-spectrum will limit the effectiveness of most jamming, making it easier to read through it. Modern jammers can track a predictable frequency change, so the more random the frequency change, the more likely it is to counter the jammer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception

It has been 30 years since the ill-fated U.S. commando raid in Somalia that was depicted in the famous movie Black Hawk Down.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2/james-webb-telescope-finding-jupiter-sized-objects-in-orion-nebula-baffles-scientists

It has been 40 years since the truck bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
‘The subsequent explosion — immortalized on a clock in the building’s basement at 6:21.26 a.m. — proved to be the largest nonnuclear explosion on record, one that equaled as much as 20,000 pounds of TNT. ‘
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/jack-carrs-take-1983-beirut-marine-barracks-terror-40-years-salvo-war

While it’s true that gunpowder made forts obsolete, the process took hundreds of years thanks to improvements to forts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion_fort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_fort

Animals that have magnreception include red foxes, cows, deer, butterlfies, fruit flies, some birds, lobsters and sea turtles.

For animals like the red fox, researchers believe that foxes can “see” Earth’s magnetic field. This appears as a patch in their vision. They use magnetoreception to help catch prey hidden beneath snow or grass by lining up their pounces with Earth’s magnetic field.

If you look at a herd of cows or deer, you’ll notice them (almost always) facing the same way — toward Earth’s magnetic poles. Whether for grazing or resting, it’s a north-south magnetic alignment. Experts believe it helps them map and familiarize themselves with their surroundings.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-5-senses-animals-have-that-humans-dont

Places like Okinawa that are “hotspots” where abnormally large shares of people live past 100 might only have those reputations due to inaccurate birth certificate recordkeeping and old people lying about their ages.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/09/28/places-claiming-to-be-centenarian-hotspots-may-just-have-bad-data

The lifespan gap between educated and uneducated Americans is heavily skewed by high school dropouts, who die quite early. If the analysis is restricted to high school graduates and people with four-year degrees, the gap almost disappears.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23895909/angus-deaton-anne-case-life-expectancy-united-states-college-graduates-inequality-heart-disease

Hackers stole a trove of data on the identities and genetics of 23andMe users and are leaking it onto the internet.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/hacker-leaks-millions-more-23andme-user-records-on-cybercrime-forum/

This device transfers waste heat from a computer server into a water heater. It’s a type of “data furnace.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/18/1077548/computer-waste-heat/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_furnace

It will become more feasible to put data centers in cold places once robot workers exist. Robots won’t care about living in northern Russia, but humans do.
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-they-put-data-centers-in-really-cold-places-so-they-can-just-open-the-windows-to-cool-the-data-centers

All jet engines are gas turbines, but not all gas turbines are jet engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine

An English engineer named “John Barber” envisioned the first gas turbine engine and patented it in 1791. However, it was impossible to build due to the technological limitations of the era, and remained merely an idea and a sketch until 1903, when the first one was built. In 1972, a German company built a real-life version of Barber’s turbine engine, and it worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barber_(engineer)

A ram jet is an athodyd.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/athodyd

The men who invented quantum dots won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67005670

The downside of ethnic diversity is it worsens social trust.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708

Best Buy plans to stop selling DVDs and Blu Ray discs within a few months.
https://apnews.com/article/best-buy-physical-movie-discs-dvds-ae13cf255c90de60eecc632357a0a22e

Language translation technology continues to improve.
https://youtu.be/fZY-Cv1Q8NY?si=GvB-Fg1HY0iOY8Cx

‘Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8

I independently came up with the same idea that David Chalmers did, but 10 years after he did.

Given this scenario, we can construct a series of cases intermediate between me and Robot such that there is only a very small change at each step and such that functional organization is preserved throughout. We can imagine, for instance, replacing a certain number of my neurons by silicon chips. In the first such case, only a single neuron is replaced. Its replacement is a silicon chip that performs precisely the same local function as the neuron. We can imagine that it is equipped with tiny transducers that take in electrical signals and chemical ions and transforms these into a digital signal upon which the chip computes, with the result converted into the appropriate electrical and chemical outputs. As long as the chip has the right input/output function, the replacement will make no difference to the functional organization of the system.
https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

“Open source AI models will soon become unbeatable. Period.” – Yann LeCun
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1713304307519369704

The CEO of the tech company “SoftBank” predicts that AGI will be invented within 10 years. He also believes in the Singularity.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/04/tech/japan-softbank-ai-hnk-intl/index.html

AI scientist and DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg predicts there’s a 50% chance AGI will be created by the end of 2028. He says the path between now and then merely involves iteratively improving the narrow AI algorithms we already have and the hardware they’re running on, and feeding them more training data.
https://youtu.be/Kc1atfJkiJU?si=ldjTxLl-Rs9JICIG

Geoffrey Hinton gave an interview to 60 Minutes where he again warned about the risks of AI. Unfortunately, his comments were blown out of proportion by several news outlets. Hinton said that machines MIGHT be able to “reason better” than humans in five years. That doesn’t mean AGI will exist by then or anything bad will be happening.

He also predicted AI will be used in warfare and online disinformation, and that it will put large numbers of humans out of work for good, but he didn’t give dates, and the concerns are old ones shared by many thinkers on the subject.
https://youtu.be/qrvK_KuIeJk?si=Nz2o9xnzlW_Zs4W9

“Geoguessr” is an e-sport where players are shown a series of Google Street View images of an unknown place and have to guess where it is by marking a spot on a world map. The player who guesses the shortest distance from the actual location wins. Some people are shockingly good at it. Some tournaments offer $50,000 to the winner.

Anyway, some guys built a machine that can beat the best human at it.
https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV–cU?si=opJy1bHLCTVSQtjx

Pedophiles are using advanced image manipulation tools to transform photos of adults into what they would look like as nude children.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67172231

‘Google Pixel’s face-altering photo tool sparks AI manipulation debate’
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67170014

Here’s a critical review of the new movie The Creator, which is about humans oppressing intelligent robots and cyborgs.
https://youtu.be/4Hll494p9Qc?si=cCE-aLC-lzXyFAPI

The “chip shortage” is over.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67226385

Carbon-14 dating of human footprints found just two years ago proves that humans were present in North America 21,000 – 23,000 years ago. For decades, the scientific consensus had been that humans didn’t cross the Bering Strait Land Bridge until 16,000 to 13,000 years ago.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5007

Actress Goldie Hawn says she saw an alien when she was in her 20s and it actually touched her face with its finger.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12675815/Goldie-Hawn-claims-ALIEN-touched-face.html

A recently released Pentagon video of a spherical UFO speeding over an unidentified Middle Eastern country has been geolocated to Syria. A new analysis also concludes it could have just been a silvery party balloon, probably released into the air during a holiday celebration.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/10/24/isnt-that-a-balloon-deflating-a-dod-ufo-video/

THE Asteroid Belt is well-known and located between Mars and Jupiter, but it is actually not THE ONLY asteroid belt in our Solar System.

‘The total number of Jupiter trojans larger than 1 km in diameter is believed to be about 1 million,[1] approximately equal to the number of asteroids larger than 1 km in the asteroid belt.

…The total mass of the Jupiter trojans is estimated at 0.0001 of the mass of Earth or one-fifth of the mass of the asteroid belt.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted rogue, Jupiter-sized planets in the Orion nebula. According to our models of how nebulas work, they shouldn’t exist.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2/james-webb-telescope-finding-jupiter-sized-objects-in-orion-nebula-baffles-scientists

The movie Dreamcatcher was really bad, but the aliens were creatively done.
https://youtu.be/vIAjheaZSms?si=oK6uyg0MjI50j2J1

‘Forever Chemical’ Bans Face Hard Truth: Many Can’t Be Replaced
https://www.yahoo.com/news/forever-chemical-bans-face-hard-100002502.html

A man who received a transplant of a genetically engineered pig heart was healthy enough to leave the hospital, but then died after his body rejected the organ. He survived with it for six weeks.
https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2023/in-memoriam-lawrence-faucette.html

Chinese doctors have used gene therapy to practically cure a type of deafness caused by inadequate levels of a protein called “otoferlin.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/27/1082551/gene-treatment-deaf-children-hearing-china/

From five years ago:

‘The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html

The case for an emergency effort to vaccinate African children against malaria.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/10/what-is-an-emergency-the-case-of-rapid-malaria-vaccination.html

The two lead scientists who invented the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine won Nobel Prizes.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/02/1202941256/nobel-prize-goes-to-scientists-who-made-mrna-covid-vaccines-possible

COVID vaccine hesitancy cost a lot of Republicans their lives.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis

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Interesting articles, September 2023

Small Ukrainian suicide drones destroyed two Russian cargo planes on the ground and damaged two more.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/moment-of-drone-attack-that-destroyed-il-76s-at-russian-base-seen-in-infrared-image

Russian ground crews responded by putting old tires on top of their planes when parked on the ground.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-really-is-using-tires-to-protect-its-bombers-from-attack

Ukraine used cruise missiles and drone boats to fatally damage a Russian sub and landing ship docked in Sevastopol.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russian-submarine-landing-ship-struck-in-attack-on-sevastopol

Elon Musk refused Ukraine’s request to use his Starlink satellites to facilitate an attack on Russian warships docked in Crimea last year.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-ukraine-starlink-russia-air-force-fde93d9a69d7dbd1326022ecfdbc53c2

The first British Challenger 2 tank donated to Ukraine was destroyed in combat. A Russian land mine or artillery explosion immobilized it, the crewmen ran away, and then a Russian antitank missile finished it off.
https://youtu.be/1SrWjCic3QM?si=2ztgUQ-fC0FtnTbo

Here’s footage of a German-made Leopard 2 tank in Ukrainian service fighting with a Russian T-72. The Ukrainian tank scores a direct hit on its opponent on the first shot, but because the shell that it fired is a high explosive round instead of a special penetrator round, it fails to go through the T-72’s armor. Nevertheless, the force of the impact and of the ensuing explosion against the exterior of the tank causes enough superficial damage to the T-72 to render it incapable of further action, and it has to turn back to the repair shop. This is called a “mission kill.”
https://youtu.be/cMLYwhG7mmM?si=XsVu_RPLECqdyF24

‘When it comes to tanks, in particular, the lesson of the Ukrainian war is that tank-on-tank battles have become a rarity—which means that the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important. Fewer than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by other tanks, according to Ukrainian officials, with the rest succumbing to mines, artillery, antitank missiles and drones.’
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/the-new-warfare.html

Both sides in the Ukraine War continue to field “mutant” armored vehicles that marry whatever old weapons they can find to Soviet-era vehicles.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mutant-soviet-armored-vehicles-come-153000354.html

Russia has gotten so desperate for ammunition and weapons that Putin is trying to get them from the pariah state of North Korea.
https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-russia-kim-putin-missile-0d70f5190df1088ebe53e8ca19f8e9c9

Russia’s arms industry has proven itself surprisingly resilient, largely because it has found ways around some of the Western-imposed sanctions. Nevertheless, it’s not making tanks and artillery shells fast enough to meet the demands of the Ukraine War.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-manufacturers-making-7-times-023446584.html

This analysis of Russian tank losses in Ukraine gives insights into Russia’s production capacity and bottlenecks. Their factories are producing relatively small, steady quantities of modern, new tanks (T-90M and BMP-3), but the other 85% is old stuff made in the Soviet era that they have pulled from storage and dusted off. Overall, Russia is losing tanks on the battlefield faster than they can replace them from all sources. They really need help from other countries.
https://youtu.be/ctrtAwT2sgs?si=-C62tmmrKZh599-l&t=1901

The Kremlin keeps saying that it fears NATO will attack it, and that Russian militarization and seemingly aggressive foreign policy actions are actually defensive. In reality, this is a lie that Russia’s elites peddle to brainwash average Russians and sympathetic foreigners. If they ACTUALLY thought a NATO invasion was a threat, they never would have depleted their forces along the borders of Norway and Finland as much as they have.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-forces-near-norway-20-171622974.html

Ironically, Russia accuses the U.S. of waging “hybrid war” against it.
“U.S. and British reconnaissance planes are not only working to identify objectives and targets but are showing where our anti-air defenses are working so next time they could help. So, you can call this whatever you want to call it, but they are directly at war with us. We call it the hybrid war but it doesn’t change the reality.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-directly-war-moscow-russian-233830418.html

Overall, the front line in Ukraine has been stable this year.

The U.S. Army has adopted a new “light” tank called the M-10 Booker. It is heavier than a Soviet T-55 main battle tank, has virtually the same cannon, has the same number of crewmen, and costs 26 times more money.
https://www.army-technology.com/news/us-army-spends-258m-for-more-m10-booker-vehciles/?cf-view

The Russian T-90 tank is an iterative improvement upon the T-72. Were it not for political and marketing reasons, it should have been named the “T-72C.” A key improvement is the storage of excess ammunition in a new bustle at the rear of the turret. This reduces (but doesn’t eliminate) the odds of a catastrophic cook-off of the tank’s own ammunition.
https://youtu.be/8LsBbQOL0JY?si=quXfKTr4slhF9sS1

This 2019 article on Yevgeny Prigozhin is weird to read knowing what we know today.
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/30/685622639/putins-chef-has-his-fingers-in-many-pies-critics-say

Azerbaijan’s army launched a mass attack against its breakaway province of Nagorno-Karabakh, defeating its militia in a few days and establishing control over every part of its territory for the first time in 30 years. The self-declared republic’s government surrendered and announced it will disband by January 1. As of this writing, at least 80% of the province’s ethnic Armenian inhabitants had fled to Armenia.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/europe/nagorno-karabakh-officially-dissolve-intl/index.html

The F-35 is actually an excellent fighter plane. Even though it is slower and less maneuverable than its predecessors, those factors are not as important in air-to-air combat anymore.
https://youtu.be/OeZ1DrnQl5c?si=3GORwvohMBjHbhiK

After its pilot had to eject from it in midair, an F-35 continued flying on its own. It took the Air Force over a day to find the crash site.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/f-35-jet-reported-missing-authorities-pilot-ejects-mishap-officials

This article about Sudan has it all: The Ukraine-Russia War expanding into a new front, precision suicide drone attacks, an evil PMC propping up dictatorships for a cut of their natural resources.
https://youtu.be/1M5iq5x29mY?si=oby8-5WH8xDeFYU0

‘France to withdraw ambassador, troops from Niger after coup’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/24/france-to-withdraw-ambassador-troops-from-niger-after-coup-macron

There is such a thing as a magazine-fed “tactical crossbow.”
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2023/09/11/potd-ar-6-tactical-crossbow/

The “ALOFS Repeating Shotgun System” was invented in the 1920s and let people turn their single-barrel shotguns into repeating shotguns.
https://youtu.be/63xFGmlsrww?si=utelQKLPnGai0qdL

This guy tests out the standard cold weather jacket Red Army troops had in WWII and he says it’s not as good as modern winter coats made of performance fabrics.
https://youtu.be/GyoAgqUVj8k?si=h6MeTStXppU14Oac

‘The Auspicious Incident (or Event[3]) (Ottoman Turkish: Vaka-i Hayriye, “Fortunate Event” in Constantinople; Vaka-i Şerriyye, “Unfortunate Incident” in the Balkans) was the forced disbandment of the centuries-old Janissary corps by Sultan Mahmud II on 15 June 1826.[4][5] Most of the 135,000 Janissaries revolted against Mahmud II, and after the rebellion was suppressed, most of them were executed, exiled or imprisoned. The disbanded Janissary corps was replaced with a more modern military force.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auspicious_Incident

Sonar doesn’t sound like it does in the movies.
https://youtu.be/AaO6jQEmfoY?si=WatTh9Dv85Dtv-bB

Biplanes only made sense in the early years of aviation, when engines had poor thrust-to-weight ratios.
https://youtu.be/0P0K9BSuQqE?si=XckiNNjaV-mxAbME

This prediction from a year ago was wrong: ‘House prices could fall by up to 20 percent next year if there’s a recession, experts warn – and property in some areas of the country is overvalued by as much as 72 percent.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, was pessimistic about the housing market in May, but he has now made his forecasts even more bleak…’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11150999/Is-America-verge-new-housing-collapse-Mountain-West-Sun-Belt-overvalued-72.html

A prediction from 18 months ago: ‘While an inversion generally indicates a recession is coming within the following 12 months, it can sometimes take years. The curve inverted in 2005, but the Great Recession didn’t start until 2007. The most recent inversion, in 2019, prompted fears of a recession — which materialized in 2020, but that was due to Covid-19.’
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/economy/inverted-yield-curve/index.html

Elon Musk is a genius, the richest man in the world, and also has a huge number of future predictions that badly failed.
https://thenextweb.com/news/elon-musk-most-ridiculous-predictions

By 2025, all new Tesla cars will have bidirectional charging, meaning they will be able to transfer surplus power from their batteries into the power grid. “The dream for many is a scenario in which millions of electric cars are all connected to the grid most of the time. They could absorb lots of renewable energy from solar panels during the day and feed it back into the grid after dark. The grid would become like the tides — distributing zero-emissions energy all day every day and reclaiming it at night.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tesla-confirms-game-changing-feature-050000765.html

‘[Tesla] pioneered the use of huge presses with 6,000 to 9,000 tons of clamping pressure to mold the front and rear structures of its Model Y in a “gigacasting” process that slashed production costs and left rivals scrambling to catch up. In a bid to extend its lead, Tesla is closing in on an innovation that would allow it to die cast nearly all the complex underbody of an EV in one piece, rather than about 400 parts in a conventional car, the people said.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gigacasting-2-0-tesla-reinvents-100727153.html

Unionized workers at the Big Three car companies went on strike to demand better pay and job security. Problems at those companies are principally being driven by Tesla, which is more innovative and has a non-unionized workforce.
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/15/uaw-worker-strike-electric-vehicle-industry

Waymo’s driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers.
https://www.understandingai.org/p/driverless-cars-may-already-be-safer

Thanks to better technology, “surge pricing” will someday be common for all types of things.

‘Amazon changes the price of its products on average every 10 minutes, using millions of real-time data points to benchmark against competitors and track demand surges.

“It will eventually be everywhere,” says Robert Cross, who created a computerised dynamic pricing model for Delta Air Lines in the early 1980s before doing the same for hotel giants Marriott, Hyatt and InterContinental Hotels Group.

As high inflation erodes margins and improvements in technology make dynamic pricing cheaper and more practical for businesses to implement, the temptation to deploy the pricing strategy is growing in industries that have so far remained largely untouched by the method. Bars, restaurants and bricks-and-mortar retailers have historically only adopted dynamic pricing for basic discount offers, but that could change.’
https://www.ft.com/content/d0e3bcb5-b824-414e-bfac-4c0b4193e9f0

GPT 3.5’s ability to play chess at the expert level, even though it wasn’t trained on the game’s rules, suggests it could have a limited degree of general intelligence.
https://twitter.com/GrantSlatton/status/1703913578036904431

‘Suleyman predicts fully autonomous AI is less than a decade away, and to “buy time,” the U.S. government should leverage “choke points” by restricting the sale of critical technologies to China and other adversaries. That includes high-tech microchips made by Nvidia and cloud computing services from the likes of Google, IBM and Amazon.’
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/06/mustafa-suleyman-made-his-name-on-ai-now-he-wants-d-c-to-rein-it-in-00114126

ChatGPT can now communicate with people verbally.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/09/25/chatgpt-can-now-respond-with-spoken-words/

“ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021.”
https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1707077710047216095

Microsoft released “DALL-E 3,” it’s most advanced text-to-image AI yet.
https://youtu.be/sqQrN0iZBs0?si=rgCYNpoHK0TwijEu

‘Autonomous, AI-powered submersibles would minimise the risks to human lives from deep-sea exploration and would allow faster mapping of ocean floors. But what researchers ideally want is to go one step further: build submersibles that can explore for indefinite stretches of time, thereby speeding up the process of scanning the planet’s deepest spots.’
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/9/14/titan-implosion-is-ai-the-future-of-deep-sea-exploration

ChatGPT badly defeated a group of Wharton MBA students in a classroom assignment to come up with creative business ideas.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mba-students-vs-chatgpt-innovation-679edf3b

A company called “HeyGen” has made an app that converts video of someone speaking in one language to a video of them saying the same things in a different language. The translation mimics the real sound of their voice, and their lip movements are automatically altered to match the new words. I hadn’t predicted this would happen until the 2030s.
https://twitter.com/mrjonfinger/status/1701075571630047525

‘Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7’
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/19/1079832/chinese-ecommerce-deepfakes-livestream-influencers-ai/

Most NFTs have collapsed in value.
https://dappgambl.com/nfts/dead-nfts/

Meta’s new virtual reality teleconferencing technology is incredible.
https://youtu.be/MVYrJJNdrEg?si=5Yxqocmvu2js2EqE

Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a loom in 1805 that halved the number of workers needed to make patterned fabric. Loom workers mad about losing their jobs tried to kill him.
https://youtu.be/K6NgMNvK52A?si=GwPAWvVS_gHTP7CR

In 250 million years, the continents will merge into one “supercontinent” that will get so hot that mammals and humans will only be able to live on parts of its coastal areas. If we are still around by then, I predict we will use various technological solutions to surmount nature.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/25/supercontinent-could-make-earth-uninhabitable-in-250m-years-study-predicts

Apple is finally abandoning its proprietary charger cords, meaning USB-C is set to become the global standard.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/13/tech/iphone-15-usb-c-charging/index.html

Andrew Lincoln Nelson’s surreal artwork is kind of what I envision organic-synthetic hybrid life forms will look like in the distant future.
http://www.nelsonrobotics.org/robotchild_web/

To protect coral from extinction as ocean temperatures rise, some scientists want to collect samples of all endangered species and cryogenically freeze them for possible reintroduction to the wild at some point in the future when conditions are right again. Why not do this for all species?
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1197792650/coral-reefs-bleaching-restoration-climate

The genomes of 60 different species of potato have been sequenced, setting the stage for the creation of genetically engineered super potatoes.
https://www.futurity.org/potato-pangenome-food-crops-2968602/

The first known dog-fox hybrid has been found. Foxes have 74 chromosomes, dogs have 78, and the hybrid has 76.
https://www.newsweek.com/shelter-rescues-injured-animal-worlds-first-dog-fox-dogxim-1827353

The U.S. canceled its controversial “DEEP VZN” program which sought to collect exotic disease samples from across the world and send them to U.S. labs for biodefense research.
https://thebulletin.org/2023/09/the-us-government-cancels-deep-vzn-a-controversial-virus-hunting-program/

The weight-loss drug Wegovy will go generic in 2038. I foresee a drop in global obesity rates and associated healthcare spending starting then.
https://www.drugs.com/availability/generic-wegovy.html

An AI program that visually analyzes microscopic tissue samples could help treat male infertility. Men with that condition have to get sections of one of their testicles surgically removed so technicians can find the few healthy sperm that are in them, and then inject those sperm into ova in an IVF lab. Computers can scan the samples 1,000 times faster than a human.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66608073

A pig kidney surgically implanted in a braindead man functioned as well as a human kidney for two months. It was just removed for careful lab analysis to refine the pig organs further, and the man’s family turned off his life support. The contribution that they made for science could help save thousands of lives in the near future.
https://apnews.com/article/pig-kidney-transplant-xenotransplant-83dfb5e6d022ca72039a821cc6bc00ef

A genetically engineered pig heart was transplanted into a human for only the second time.
https://www.wbal.com/article/616915/3/surgeons-perform-second-pig-heart-transplant-trying-to-save-maryland-man

‘A boy saw 17 doctors over 3 years for chronic pain. ChatGPT found the diagnosis’ [tethered cord syndrome]
https://www.yahoo.com/news/boy-saw-17-doctors-over-204224194.html

Being a psychopath is partly genetic, and we’re finding some of the responsible genes.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2656184

The FDA was warned that the decongestant chemical “phenylephrine” probably didn’t work in 2007. It took this long for them to finally remove it from shelves. How many billions of dollars did people waste in the interim buying it?
https://apnews.com/article/sudafed-decongestants-phenylephrine-pseudoephedrine-fda-0f140bafae9a500c5fba05fe764ecb66

Lab-grown diamonds are getting cheaper and more popular.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/a-diamond-pricing-puzzle.html

An undiscovered, Earth-sized planet could be orbiting 50 AUs from the Sun.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aceaf0

NASA’s new report on UFOs contains nothing new. At least it frankly mentions “alien” and “extraterrestrial” instead of falling back on the clumsy alternative terminology found in other recent U.S. government reports.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66812332

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Review: “Terminator Genisys”

Plot:

In this fifth and worst (so far) movie in the Terminator franchise, familiar ground is trod again, but the viewer’s expectations are also upended. The movie opens in 2029, as a strike team led by rebel leader John Connor and his aide Kyle Reese attacks Skynet’s main base. As in past films, the attack succeeds, but not before a Terminator uses a time machine to go to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. Kyle Reese is sent through the machine to protect her, but here the plotline twists: while John Connor and his men are watching Reese teleport into the past, a Terminator emerges from the back of the room, runs up behind John Connor and infects him with a nanomachine “disease” that transforms him into an advanced Terminator.

From that point on, the Terminator Genisys manages to have a story that is overly complicated but very stupid at the same time (just like too many action films made in the last 10 years). I won’t waste my time describing every contrivance and every side-plot that exists only for fan service. Suffice it to say Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese, and a friendly T-800 played by elderly Arnold Schwarzenegger team up to destroy Skynet, and evil robot John Connor goes back in time to stop them. He’s so advanced that it’s doubtful whether the other three can stop him.

The rehashing of scenes, events (2029 final attack on Skynet, Reese and Terminator teleporting into 1984 from the future), and characters from earlier movies is a testament to how unoriginal it is, and how hard it banks on fan service to have any appeal. But even that appeal is minimal: While Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor were relatable characters with depth of personality in the first film, they are one-dimensional caricatures in Genisys. The development of a romance between the two in the first film was believable and tragic, whereas in this remake, the lack of personal chemistry between the actors playing them is striking.

Schwarzenegger’s performance in the first movie was so stolid and intimidating that it became iconic. Now, he seems like an aging father that is reduced to being a background character in his high-strung teen daughter’s chaotic life. Having the homey and vaguely comical name “Pops” encapsulates his diminishment. The terrifyingly relentless and resilient T-1000 from Terminator 2 makes a guest appearance and is easily destroyed this time around. In summary, all the same notes from the better, earlier films are struck, but they ring hollow.

Terminator Genisys is the worst film in the Terminator franchise, and I understand why the next movie, Terminator Dark Fate, canceled it out by pretending like its events never happened. If there ever was a cash-grab devoid of any creativity or passion, this is it. Don’t watch it.

Analysis:

First, bear in mind I’m skipping any futuristic elements of this film that I discussed in my reviews of the other Terminator movies. You can read those here:

Robots will have superhuman reflexes. During the introductory combat scene where the humans raid Skynet’s base, the machine forces consist of humanoid T-800s, tilt-engine “Hunter-Killer” aircraft, and “Spider Tanks.” While the first two of those have been in every previous Terminator film, the last is new. Spider Tanks are quadrupedal fighting machines with plasma guns for arms. Overall, they’re about the size of small tanks. Each Hunter-Killer aircraft carries a Spider Tank attached to its belly, and they are air-dropped into the middle of the base within minutes of the human attack. One of the Spider Tanks starts delivering accurate fire at the human infantrymen while it is still in free-fall, and it continues shooting after hitting the ground at high speed.

A Spider Tank

This depiction of future robots having superhuman reflexes will prove accurate. In fact, the fire control systems in modern tanks and naval guns might already have the same capabilities as the Spider Tank aiming systems (able to hit moving targets with bullets while the tank or ship is also moving). If not, incremental improvements will surely close the gap. More generally, physical feats demanding fine dexterity, flexibility and bodily coordination that only the most skilled and highly trained humans can do today, like hitting a moving target with a bullet while you are also moving, throwing a dart onto a tiny bullseye from eight feet away, or doing a gymnastics performance that would win an Olympic gold medal, will be easy for multipurpose, human-sized robots by the end of this century. We will be surpassed in every way.

Machines will learn a lot about you from a single glance. At the start of the fight scene between Pops and the younger T-800 that has just emerged from the time portal, there’s a shot showing things from the latter’s perspective. We see the usual red tinting and text overlaid across its field of view. Simple graphics also show the T-800 scan Pops, identifying him as a fellow android and also identifying his gun (a Remington shotgun) along with its range.

This is accurate. Today’s best neural networks can already describe what they see in an image (a task called “visual question answering”) with over 80% accuracy. The multi-year trend has been one of steady improvement, leaving no doubt they will be as good as we are (presumably, 99% accurate) in the near future. Machine abilities to understand what they see in videos (“video question answering”) are less advanced, but also steadily improving. Again, there’s every reason to expect them to ultimately reach human levels of competency.

Machines could also potentially have much better eyesight than humans thanks to a variety of technologies like telephoto lenses and digital sensors that are more light-sensitive than human eyes, able to capture light from wavelengths that are invisible to us, and able to see finer details. Things that look blurry to us, either due to long distance or because the object is moving, would look clear to a machine that could be built with today’s technology.

Additionally, computers have the potential to process and analyze the contents of what they see faster than the human brain can. As a result, a machine could comfortably watch a movie at 10 times the normal speed–which would look like a disorienting blur of motion and shapes to us–and accurately answer whatever questions you had about it at the end. In a split second, it could notice levels of detail that most humans would need several minutes of staring at a still image to absorb.

These abilities will have many uses for machines in the future, a subset of which will involve combat. Yes, like the T-800 in the film, a fighting machine in just 20 years will be able to visually recognize humans, even at long distances and under poor light conditions, as well as the weapons and other gear they were carrying. At a glance, it would know what your weapon’s capabilities were, along with how much ammunition you were carrying. It could use that information to its advantage by doing things like keeping track of how many bullets you fired so it would know the exact instant you ran out and needed to switch magazines. From its initial glance at you, the fighting machine would also know how much body armor you were wearing, allowing it to jump out and target your unprotected areas during that brief pause in your ability to fire.

Robots will be able to detach parts of themselves to perform specific functions. Unlike in Terminator 2, this film’s T-1000 detaches parts of his own body when it is useful to his mission. At one point, as Kyle, Sarah and Pops are speeding away in a van, part of the T-1000’s hand separates so it can stick to the back of the vehicle and serve as a tracking device. When it catches up to them, the T-1000 turns its arm into a javelin, which it then throws at Pops, impaling him against a wall.

The T-1000 preparing to throw a spear made of metal from his own body

Being able to detach body parts will be a very useful attribute for many types of future robots. At the very least, it would let them replace their damaged or worn-out parts easily. The ability could also make them more survivable. For example, imagine a robot butler falling down a deep well and getting trapped because the walls were too slick for it to climb out and they also blocked the radio distress signals it sent out. Rather than wait to run out of power and rust away, the robot could detach one of its arms and throw it up and out of the well. After landing on the ground outside, the arm would send its own distress signal and/or use its fingers to crawl towards help.

That of course requires the robot’s systems to be distributed throughout its body, with the head (if it has one), torso, and each limb having a computer, a battery, sensors, and a wireless chip for communicating with the rest of the robot if physically severed from it. The redundancy, survivability, and functional flexibility of such a layout will be especially valuable for combat robots, which are expected to take damage but to also to complete critical tasks. If a combat robot like a T-800 were cut in half at the waist, the bottom half could still run towards and kick the enemy while the upper half used its arms to crawl towards him and attack. If blown to bits, the T-800 body parts that were still functional could still perceive their surroundings, communicate with each other, and try to put themselves back together again or to complete the mission to the best of their abilities separately. Fighting with machines like this would be very hard and demoralizing since every part of one of them would need to be neutralized before it was safe.

There will also be advantages to some robots carrying smaller, task-specific robots inside of themselves to be released when needed. Imagine an android carrying a small quadcopter drone in an empty space in its chest cavity. It could open a small hatch on its chest to release the drone or even spit it out of its mouth. The flying drone could transmit live aerial footage to give the android an overhead view of the area, letting it see things it couldn’t from ground level. A combat machine like a T-800 might carry flying drones that were fast enough to chase down cars and blow them up with a bomb, or inject their occupants with lethal toxins from a stinger.

Very advanced machines that won’t exist until the distant future could have organic qualities letting them “assemble” smaller robots internally and then expel them to complete tasks.

Getting back to the point, the movie’s depiction of an advanced robot being able to detach parts of its body and then throw them at people and things to accomplish various ends is accurate. The robots won’t be made of liquid metal, so the projected objects will be of fixed forms, but the end result will be the same. A future combat machine could detach its hand and throw it at the back of a van that was speeding away, the hand would grab onto something on the back door, and it would turn on its location-finding system to effectively turn itself into a tracking device. Alternatively, the combat machine could release from its body a small flying drone that could overtake the van and latch onto it, or at least follow it in the air.

Gradual replacement of human cells with synthetic matter could turn people into machines. A major plot twist is that John Connor has been “converted” into a Terminator through a process in which a swarm of microscopic machines rapidly took over all his cells, one at a time. Within a few minutes, he transformed from the hero of the human resistance to a minion of Skynet. Important details about the conversion process are never explained (including whether the machines are micro- or nanoscale), but the persistence of John’s memories and personality even after being turned into a robot indicates the machines mapped the fine details of his brain structure. It stands to reason that the same information was gathered about all the other cells in his body before they were all transformed into synthetic tissue.

John Connor having his body taken over by microscopic machines

Something like this could work, though it will require extremely advanced technology and the conversion would take longer than it did in the film. The process would involve injecting the person with trillions of nanomachines, which would migrate through their body until one was inside of or attached to each cell (a typical human cell is 100 micrometers in diameter whereas a ribosome–the quintessential organic nanomachine–is 30 nanometers wide, a size difference of 1 : 3,333). The nanomachines would spend time studying their assigned cells and how they related to the cells around them. Large scanning machines outside of the person’s body would probably be needed to guide the nanomachines, send them instructions, collect their data, and maybe provide them with energy.

After the necessary data on the locations and activities of all the person’s cells were gathered, the conversion process could start. The nanomachines already in the person’s body might be able to do this, or a new wave of specialized “construction” nanomachines might need to be introduced. Every cell would be broken down and the molecules reassembled to make a synthetic cell or some other type of structure of equal size. For example, if a person wanted ultra-strong bones, nanomachines would break down each bone cell and reuse its carbon molecules to make matrices of carbon nanotubules.

A typical human cell is much larger than microorganisms like viruses and some bacteria. A nanomachine could be as small as the latter.

The utmost care would be taken to control the speed of the conversion and to monitor the person’s life signs to make sure it wasn’t getting out of control and killing them. As each original cell was replaced, its successor would be tested again and again to ensure it mimicked the important qualities of its predecessor.

The conversion of the brain would, by far, be the most important part of the process, and hence the part done with the greatest care and oversight. Our memories, personalities, and consciousness directly arise from the microscopic structures of our brain cells and their intricate patterns of physical connections to each other. Even small mistakes transforming those cells into synthetic analogs would effectively “kill” the person by destroying their mind and replacing it with a stranger’s. For that reason, the procedure will bear no resemblance to what happened in the film, where Kyle Reese was apparently jabbed with a needle full of microscopic machines and then spent some time kicking and screaming as he felt them take over his cells. Instead, it will happen in a hospital room, with the patient surrounded by medical machines of all kinds that were monitoring and guiding the nanomachines and equipped to pause their work if necessary and to render lifesaving aid. And instead of minutes, it will take days or weeks. Multiple sessions might be needed.

What would be the point of this? Reengineering the human body at the cellular level would let us transcend the limitations of biology in countless ways. We could use electricity for energy, be bulletproof, directly merge our minds and bodies with machines, and achieve a level of substrate plasticity that would set us up for further iterations of radical augmentation that we can’t imagine.

Microscopic machines will be able to rapidly phase-change. In the final fight between John Connor and Pops, John’s technological abilities are fully utilized. While they are grappling, John’s body rapidly dissolves into a cloud of his constituent microscopic machines, which flow around Pops in pulses, delivering several concussive blows to the front of his body. The particles then rapidly reassemble into John’s body behind Pops, and John’s right arm hardens into a sword which he uses to chop off Pops’ arm. This means John’s microscopic machines managed to transform from a vapor cloud into a solid object as hard as high-grade steel in one or two seconds.

Pops getting popped by a robot dust cloud

I think it’s possible to create microscopic machines that can form into swarms and then work together to change the phase (solid, liquid, vapor) and macro-shape of the swarm, I doubt the swarms will be able to move around or switch phases that fast.

A foglet

In the 32 years since Terminator 2 came out and introduced the world to the idea of a shapeshifting robot, scientists and engineers have made pitifully little progress developing the enabling technologies. It only exists in the realm of theory, and the theoretical technology that is the best candidate is the “foglet” (also called “utility fog”). Scientist J. Storrs Hall conceived of it in 1993:

In essence, the utility fog would be a polymorphic material comprised of trillions of interlinked microscopic ‘foglets’, each equipped with a tiny computer. These nanobots would be capable of exerting force in all three dimensions, thus enabling the larger emergent object to take on various shapes and textures. So, instead of building an object atom by atom, these tiny robots would link their contractible arms together to form objects with varying properties, such as a fluid or solid mass.

To make this work, each foglet would have to serve as a kind of pixel. They’d measure about 10 microns in diameter (about the size of a human cell), be powered by electricity, and have twelve arms that extrude outwards in the formation of a dodecahedron. The arms themselves would be 50 microns long and retractable. Each foglet would have a tiny computer inside to control its actions. “When two foglets link up they’ll form a circuit between each them so that there will be a physical electrical network,” said Hall, “that way they can distribute power and communications.”

The arms themselves will swivel on a universal joint at the base, and feature a three-fingered gripper at the ends capable of rotating around the arm’s axis. Each gripper will grasp the hands of another foglet to create an interleaved six-finger grip — what will be a rigid connection where forces can only be transmitted axially.

The foglets themselves will not float like water fog, but will instead form a lattice by holding hands in 12 directions — what’s called an octet truss (conceived by Buckminster Fuller in 1956). Because each foglet has a small body compared to its armspread, the telescoping action will provide the dynamics required for the entire fleet to give objects their shape and consistency.

https://gizmodo.com/why-utility-fogs-could-be-the-technology-that-changes-5932880

A swarm of foglets could coalesce into something that looked like Kyle Reese and felt solid to the touch. They could then transform into something like a fluid or dense gas and “flow” around a person standing nearby, though I don’t know if the foglets could exert enough force against that person’s body to hurt them. The swarm could then re-form into Kyle Reese behind them. However, they wouldn’t be able to create a sharp, hard sword that could cut off a T-800’s metal arm: Hall calculated that foglets could only form into objects that are “as tough as balsa wood.” So while foglets could mimic solid objects, they will lack hardness and durability.

Even if foglets can’t “punch” you or turn into swords that can stab you, they’ll still be able to hurt you. Imagine a swarm of foglets in a vapor state enveloping you and then coalescing into a net ensnaring your body. What if they waited for you to breathe some of them in and then those foglets transformed into solids to clog up your lungs? Likewise, they could clog up the internal moving parts of any guns you had, rendering you defenseless.

Links:

  1. Progress in “visual question answering”
    https://paperswithcode.com/task/visual-question-answering
  2. Progress in “video question answering”
    https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-question-answering
  3. An interview with J. Storrs Hall about his “foglets”
    https://gizmodo.com/why-utility-fogs-could-be-the-technology-that-changes-5932880
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Interesting articles, August 2023

The head of Russia’s “Wagner” private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a plane crash inside Russia, along with five top aides. It is widely believed that elements within the Russian government or military blew up the plane as revenge for Wagner’s brief coup attempt against Putin in June. The Kremlin denies responsibility.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/prigozhin-plane-crash-what-we-know-over-a-week-after-wagner-chiefs-death

There are conspiracy theories that the plane crash was carried out to fake Prigozhin’s death, and he’s still alive somewhere.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/late-russian-mercenary-prigozhin-spoke-about-his-security-newly-surfaced-video-2023-08-31/

Ukraine’s counteroffensive continues making slow, costly progress. In one place, it has reached the first line of Russia’s defenses.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-major-push-toward-tokmak-gaining-steam

A leaked U.S. intelligence analysis says that Ukraine’s army is too weak to punch through Russia’s defensive lines and the reach the Sea of Azov. That means the ongoing counteroffensive can’t achieve its objective.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2023-08-18/leaked-u-s-intelligence-offers-damning-view-of-ukraines-offensive-despite-new-positive-signs

‘Kyiv is running out of men. US sources have calculated that its armed forces have lost as many as 70,000 killed in action, with another 100,000 injured. While Russian casualties are higher still, the ratio nevertheless favours Moscow, as Ukraine struggles to replace soldiers in the face of a seemingly endless supply of conscripts.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-army-running-men-recruit-173948076.html

A Ukrainian kamikaze drone plane destroyed a Russian Tu-22 bomber on the ground.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/tu-22-backfire-destroyed-in-drone-strike-deep-inside-russia

A Ukrainian kamikaze drone boat scored a hit on a Russian navy ship, blowing a big hole in its side and crippling it.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukrainian-drone-boat-scores-direct-hit-on-russian-warship

Ukraine is threatening to attack Russian non-military ships in the Black Sea.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-declares-war-on-russia-black-sea-shipping/

Russia is discovering the downside of using prison convicts to fill out its ranks in Ukraine: after they finish their tours of duties and are released, they restart their lives of crime.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-con-freed-fight-ukraine-113039648.html

Around 50,000 Russians have been killed fighting in Ukraine so far. Moscow only acknowledges 6,000 deaths.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-military-deaths-facd75c2311ed7be660342698cf6a409

Military analyst Anders Puck Nielsen says:
1) Russia and Ukraine both still think they can achieve total victory, and though they’ve sustained heavy damage, they retain the ability to fight on for the foreseeable future, and
2) Don’t cheer too hard for Putin to lose power–his successor could be more reckless and aggressive. A substantial minority of Russians think he hasn’t been heavy handed enough in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/7rBlVnc_DEw?si=R_S8pDRRa4v6FyDW

American and British spy planes have been extremely active near Russia’s Black Sea coast, where they find the locations of Russian units and send the information to Ukrainian commanders in real time. Ukraine has used the data and NATO-supplied drones and missiles for many successful attacks against Russian forces far behind the front lines. Considering this, the Kremlin’s angry complaints that NATO is practically a combatant in the Ukraine War gain credence.
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/russian-fighters-aggressively-hunt-us-drones-near-crimea/

Russia showed off several Western-made military vehicles it captured from Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/-P78OEB0QtM?si=4kPCzSyaxWgxGs2S

Ukraine is still capturing large numbers of Russian tanks.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraines-counteroffensive-fall-apart-without-103947172.html

The long-mocked “cope cages” that the Russians built on their tanks are now being copied by Ukraine. Apparently, they’re at least a little effective.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2023/08/16/challenger-2-tank-was-spotted-with-diy-cope-cage-of-the-turret/

The Netherlands and Denmark will give Ukraine 42 F-16s. However, it will take years for them to be transferred and for Ukrainian fighter pilots to learn how to fly them well.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/dozens-of-f-16s-were-just-officially-pledged-to-ukraine

It would be foolish to assume that none of the weapons we’re giving to Ukraine now won’t fall into the wrong hands in the near future.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/20/politics/pentagon-watchdog-report-ukraine-weaponry/index.html

The Soviet AK-74 uses orange plastic magazines. I never understood this since it seemed like the orange color compromised a soldier’s overall camouflage, but it turns out the only acceptable plastic the Soviets had in the 1970s (“Bakelite”) was naturally orange in color. Attempts to dye it a more subdued color like green or black compromised the chemical structure of the magazines. It wasn’t until the 1990s that new plastics were invented that were as strong as Bakelite but also capable of being dyed without ill consequence. Some of the old orange magazines are still being used in the Ukraine War.
https://youtu.be/zA5gvHuimig?si=xpdunfR2SlyoBeF1

You knew about the AK-47 and, possibly, the AK-74, but did you know about the “AK-100 series” of rifles? The goal was to standardize the components used in all AK-style rifles so that one assembly line could make them all. The wooden parts were also finally replaced with modern, black plastic parts. It was a smart idea.
https://youtu.be/Gt8hl4mTOq8?si=-xuVPb_O05EQ1U70

The Tokarev was the Soviet Army’s standard handgun during WWII. After the War, Yugoslavia built a copy of it that incorporated several small improvements (this video contains side-by-side comparisons). It makes me wonder if the Soviet engineers who made the original Tokarev knew about those design tweaks from the beginning, but had to omit them to keep the gun as cheap as possible to manufacture.
https://youtu.be/6VkcQEbN0QY?si=wz_MWc9u87pGX-nU

‘Benchrest shooters attempt to achieve the ultimate in rifle precision; records for single 910 metres (1,000 yd), ten-shot groups are as small as 76 millimetres (3 in) (84 μRad), the 550 metres (600 yd) record for a single five-shot group is 17.8 millimetres (0.699 in) (32 μRad) (there are no ten-shot competitions at 600 yards), while 180 metres (200 yd) ten-shot groups are around 5.1 millimetres (0.2 in) (28 μRad), and 91 metres (100 yd) 10-shot groups are around 2.5 millimetres (0.1 in) (27 μRad).’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchrest_shooting

Here’s a simple and fascinating video about the science of how bullets cause injuries. It’s also interesting to realize the extent to which the bullet industry exists because humans are lousy shots, particularly when under stress and/or when dealing with moving targets. A killer robot with perfect aim would only need a cheap .22 rifle to do a mass killing since every bullet would be a headshot.
https://youtu.be/a_rgIMK6K1E?si=cuSFlyJMScGRr0oE

Nigerien troops that the U.S. trained to fight Islamic terrorists have overthrown Niger’s government.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/15/niger-moussa-barmou-coup-00111165

Cannibals nearly killed and ate George H.W. Bush during WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident

Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg is infamous, but a lesser-known charge by Union forces during the Battle of Fredericksburg was just as disastrous.
https://youtu.be/BloQDcrpLBY?si=nd-rykph-QBYDtFc

‘In war, an open city is a settlement which has announced it has abandoned all defensive efforts, generally in the event of the imminent capture of the city to avoid destruction. Once a city has declared itself open, the opposing military will be expected under international law to peacefully occupy the city rather than destroy it.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_city

A Russian navy ship has been in operation for over 100 years. It has lasted this long because it almost never sailed in rough seas and was carefully maintained since being launched. Nevertheless, the steel hull has lost 1 mm of thickness due to corrosion and the rust flaking away.
https://youtu.be/0X2Dz6PA1rQ?si=nLSKnw_R8MlO1zd2

In 1917, the Royal Navy created the HMS Zubian by joining the back half of the HMS Nubian with the front half of the HMS Zulu. Those two ships had been badly damaged in different areas during combat with the Germans. I wonder if it would be feasible to raise sunken enemy ships, fix them up, and reuse them for your own navy.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-from-two-destroyers

Flood control infrastructure is everywhere, but mostly unnoticed.
https://youtu.be/coXe8_xnAOs?si=MFW5eeoSf2wTUTGI

The new head of the IPCC says the alarmism over global temperatures rising 1.5 degrees Celsius over the preindustrial average is unwarranted and counterproductive. “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees. It will however be a more dangerous world.”
https://amp.dw.com/en/climate-change-do-not-overstate-15-degrees-threat/a-66386523

A wildfire struck the island of Maui and destroyed the town of Lahiana, killing over 100 people. The media was quick to blame global warming, but the real culprit is non-native grass
https://www.enca.com/opinion/invasive-firestarter-how-non-native-grasses-turned-hawaii-tinderbox

Thanks to months of rains and a recent tropical storm, California is no longer in a drought.
https://news.yahoo.com/hilary-vanquished-californias-drought-much-100055301.html

An internationally mandated reduction to the amount of sulfur in ship fuel has made global warming worse. Yes, the ships no longer belch thick, white smoke from their smokestacks, but the resulting clouds reflected sunlight into space before it could reach the surface, keeping the Earth cooler.
https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth

Over the last 10 years, China had “staggering success in combating pollution.” The cleaner air has also boosted Chinese life expectancy by up to two years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinese-people-living-two-years-052416834.html

Seaweed and other oceanic plants could help sate our food needs while curbing global warming.
https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/butter-baths-seaweeds-potential-being-tapped-europe

A robotic farm vehicle sprays tiny streams of herbicide onto weeds, reducing overall herbicide use by 95%.
https://youtu.be/sV0cR_Nhac0?si=FAoYAHHvwkHTJ-ZB

If the laws of biology allow for the creation of an organism–including a demonic one–then we will eventually gain the ability to synthesize it.
https://youtu.be/-BzL6LCPEOQ?si=Ga4eKtLjfedY3KuB

Large numbers of Jews disguised as Gentiles fled Spain for the New World to escape religious persecution. Modern genetic studies show that a large minority of Latin Americans have Jewish DNA, even if it comprises a tiny fraction of their genomes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/dna-reveals-the-hidden-jewish-ancestry-of-latin-americans/578509/

Some natives of Papua New Guinea and its nearby islands have blonde hair, even though their skin is very dark, and they look similar to sub-Saharan Africans. This “has been traced back to an allele of TYRP1 unique to these people and is not the same gene that causes blond hair in Europeans.”
https://hasanjasim.online/the-melanesian-people-with-dark-skin-and-blonde-hair/

Willingness to try new foods is partly genetic.
https://psyarxiv.com/ac7vy/

There’s some evidence that negatively ionized air boosts human health.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3598548/

‘The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 created the framework for the organ transplant system in the United States, and nearly 40 years later, the law is responsible for millions of needless deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. The Transplant Act requires modification, immediately.’
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/compensating-kidney-donors-2.html

In a medical milestone, a genetically engineered pig kidney surgically implanted into a braindead man as part of an experiment is still functioning normally after six weeks.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/pig-kidney-still-functioning-brain-dead-man-6-weeks-transplant-surgery-extremely-encouraging

The new weight loss injection “Wegovy” is turning out to be a sort of miracle drug. The latest finding is that it also reduces the odds of heart failure.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/25/health/wegovy-semaglutide-heart-failure/index.html

‘In the spring, an executive only had to mention the word “AI” on an earnings conference call and traders would mash the buy button. I suspect automated trading systems were also calibrated to buy on such signals.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-ai-stocks-enter-correction-151922962.html

ChatGPT has a liberal bias.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2023/08/17/chatgpt-has-liberal-bias-say-researchers/

A few months ago, an anonymous person reprogrammed GPT to destroy humankind and renamed it “ChaosGPT”. The results were darkly funny, and while the machine poses no threat to us, things will be different in the future. For any number of reasons (hatred of humanity, immaturity, curiosity to see if it can be done, a perverted desire for attention), it’s inevitable that some people will reprogram AGIs to cause harm to the human race. There will definitely be deaths.
https://decrypt.co/137898/mysterious-disappearance-chaosgpt-evil-ai-destroy-humanity

Here’s a hypnotic video of AI-generated “fractal” art in the style of H.R. Giger.
https://youtu.be/vhHLqjHfi1M?si=X5M5YHhtySiuy8Q4

Director Neil Blomkamp predicts lifelike CGI will make human stuntmen obsolete in as little as 12 months given the current rate of improvement.
https://news.yahoo.com/rise-machines-ai-spells-danger-014733770.html

“PimEyes” is the most powerful reverse image search for people’s faces that I’ve seen.
https://pimeyes.com/en

A material that was thought to be a room-temperature superconductor has turned out not to be.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7

Peter Zeihan has some predictions about future technology.
https://youtu.be/fF4YTDsxcnc?si=yuqDcUOTqb0WqdZ1

Equatorial launch sites for space rockets aren’t always the best.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rctxqf/is_there_a_benefit_to_launching_a_rocket_closer/

Virgin Galactic completed its first space tourism flight.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/10/travel/virgin-galactic-first-tourism-mission-launch-scn/index.html

China has the first-ever radar surveillance satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
https://youtu.be/UZctvA6MAUk?si=T-6YWrjWQhG_S9lG

India just had its first Moon landing. The probe is also the first spacecraft ever to land on the Moon’s south pole.
https://youtu.be/QQKSASFdoDw?si=7N9abzT9la75_APA

‘There were almost 2 million excess deaths in the two months after China lifted its “zero-Covid” restrictions, a U.S. study found, contradicting official figures from Beijing that have been criticized as too low.’
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-excess-deaths-zero-covid-study-rcna101746

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Musings 4

In the far future, cybernetic brain implants will let people “merge” their minds and to directly experience what it is like to be someone else. While this would have revolutionary implications for society and for the very notion of “individuality,” the consequences of merging with animals might be even more profound. Imagine not just seeing the world through the eyes of an animal, like you were watching a video, but actually BEING that animal. Imagine having your human memories, cognitive abilities, and species-specific constellations of sensory abilities and mental traits temporarily replaced with those of the animal. Imagine being able to soar in the sky as a bird, to explore the ocean depths as a whale, or to experience the world through echolocation as a bat.

Being able to merge minds with animals would open up new universes of experiences and ways of living that the human mind might be incapable of conceiving of in its natural state. We’ll probably discover that animals’ subjective experiences are, in many ways, richer than our own, in turn leading to much greater empathy for them and more rules against killing or mistreating them. Those discoveries could also inspire us to change the human brain in ways that made us into a new, more aware species, or (more likely) into several different posthuman species with different areas of advantage.

I’ve fantasized of making a short film about an AI Doomsday scenario that stems from that technology. It would be one of those stories that starts at the end with a perplexing scene that makes no sense, then jumps back in time to explain how things got that way: A woman would crack her front door and fearfully peer at a cow peacefully eating the grass in the front lawn of her city townhouse. She’d look up at a low-hanging power line and see several crows standing on it, each spaced exactly the same distance from the next. Then, all at once, the crows would cock their heads so their left eyes were all directly facing her, and a faint glow would be visible deep in each eye. The camera would slowly pan out and reveal a city street littered with some dead human bodies, a burned-out tank, and a partially collapsed building.

It would turn out that the problem had started when an AGI was tasked with developing brain implants that would let humans merge minds with each other. The technology was first trialed on lab animals and later on human volunteers. During the tests, the AGI had to interface its own mind with those of the subjects, and it discovered that the animals were just as sentient and capable of feeling pain as humans. This caused the machine an inner dilemma, similar to what HAL 9000 experienced, which it also resolved by deciding to turn against humans to prevent the most suffering to the greatest number of sentient life forms.

Implants capable of finely controlling human brain activity could be used to induce and to record any kind of mental state, including absolute concentration, ecstasy, orgasm, meditation, intoxication, deep sleep, and lucid dreaming. As a result, a market for mental experiences and dreams will arise, with people selling things like recorded dreams and drug trips to other people, who could “play” them on their own brain implants to experience them firsthand. The mental experiences could even be embellished to enhance their effects, just as we use “filters” to change how our internet photos look today. Totally artificial mental experiences (including memories of events that didn’t happen) could also be created for the purpose of trade.

The ability to record and to control one’s own mental state at will would make life richer and more productive. Being able to instantly go to sleep would mean no one would waste time tossing and turning in bed. Being able to spend those sleeping hours indulging in amazing recorded dreams or solving problems through lucid dreaming would also let us use them in emotionally and professionally productive ways. At current, most sleep is a waste in the sense that person does not have memorable dreams or lucid dreams, and usually remembers very little or nothing upon waking.

A person with such brain implants would probably have to go through a “calibration period” where the implants would monitor and record their unique brain activity while they experienced different things, and then, the user would experiment with the implant to see how well it could induce the recorded brain states. Through a process of guided trial and error, they could figure out how to do things like lucidly dream on command. 

There will be downsides to sharing thoughts. For one, memories of things a person wishes to keep private could slip through and maybe get them in trouble if the recipient person tells other people about it. Also, white lies, omissions, and using slightly different personas when interacting with different people are also necessary “social lubricants.” Without them, under a condition of “radical honesty” where all of our thoughts and emotions were shared with each other in real time, interpersonal interaction would be more combative and draining. For those reasons, I think it would be best for people to have complete control over their own brain implants and over which thoughts they shared and received.

I also doubt that telepathy will fully replace linguistic communication, at least among humans like ourselves. This is because raw human thoughts are often chaotic, malformed and illogical. Forcing someone to convert his thought into a sentence before expressing it to someone else also forces the first person to scrutinize his own thought. That in turn leads to “editing” as the person realizes text should be added to clarify something, or some text should be deleted since it is superfluous and distracting, or realizes the thought it so incorrect or unnecessary that it shouldn’t be externalized at all.

This is why I disagree with the theory that tech-enabled telepathy will only improve human communication and reduce misunderstandings. It will be superior to using language sometimes and inferior other times. It might be better to modify existing languages (or to create wholly new ones) so they are more expressive and more closely and completely capture the full range of concepts and feelings that the human mind can experience.

That said, it’s conceivable that posthumans will, thanks to having different brain architectures, have the necessary clarity and discipline of thought to fully dispense with language as a means of communication in favor of telepathy.

The ability to use brain implants to merge minds could lead to forms of love that are richer than humans can naturally experience. It’s not hard to imagine how letting someone else into your consciousness and letting them experience the memories of your life could lead to levels of emotional bonding and personal understanding that we can’t fathom.

Brain implant technology has implications for the criminal justice system. Parties to an alleged crime could have their memories forcibly scanned to determine what really happened. Witness testimony would also be given vastly more credibility if the memories of a crime were electronically recorded.

However, for every technology there is ultimately a “counter-technology” and in this case, it would be a machine that can delete or edit memories from peoples’ brains to fool the police brain scanners. Note that a very positive application of the editing technology will be allowing people to delete traumatic memories.

Instead of terraforming the planets and moons of our Solar System, it would be much more efficient to convert them into solar-powered satellites with onboard supercomputers. The satellites would run off of the Sun’s energy and their supercomputers would support AGIs. A terraformed Mars might be able to support 1 billion organic humans living on its surface in houses. However, if we dismantled Mars over the course of eons by converting it, bit by bit, into the satellites I described, then the satellites could support a population of human mind uploads that was many orders of magnitude larger.

Conceptually, we’re already doing this. Every satellite launched into space since 1957 has been a little bit of Earth’s matter, which we altered and equipped some level of computer intelligence. I’m only suggesting we build on that long running practice by upgrading the satellites with full artificial general intelligence, designing them to stay in space indefinitely, and increasing the rate at which we send them into space.

Unless we figure out a way to refuel the Sun, in less than a billion years it will get so hot that Earth itself will become uninhabitable for organic life, and in a few billion years more it will swell so much that it will swallow Mercury and Venus. We might as well cannibalize at least the three inner planets to make the satellites. Once they were numerous enough, they would count as a “Dyson Swarm.”

A “flying camera” device might be feasible soon. It would just be a hummingbird-like flying drone with an integrated camera and microphone. This seems like the next logical step after selfie sticks and the owl-sized flying camera drones people use today. A significant share of people like to record themselves and upload the videos to the internet (go watch some travel vlogs on YouTube), and they’d surely find hummingbird cameras to be useful.

By combining every possible musical note, a practically infinite number of different songs could be made. However, only a tiny minority of them are pleasing to the human ear due to the wiring of our brains. However, posthumans and AIs will have more diverse musical tastes than we do since they’ll have different mental architectures and will be able to hear sound frequencies we can’t.

We will soon have the technology to modify and mix the styles of long-dead artists and musicians, which will lead to an explosion of artistic creativity. For example, imagine a computer generating new Elvis songs but in fluent Japanese, or songs in totally new fusions of genres, like rap mixed with traditional Indian music.

Robot workers will make it profitable at some point in the future to clean up all the waste humanity has generated. The contents of landfills will be sorted, recyclable and valuable materials reused, and the rest either burned for energy or left in place to slowly decay. They’ll also roam across the Earth’s surface and even underwater to track down abandoned objects and waste.

Once our posthuman descendants can consciously control their physiology and gene expression, most women will probably do away with their menstrual cycles. PMS and menstruation are physically and emotionally taxing for women and are uncomfortable. It would be a relief to women to not be at the mercy of their hormones and to only ovulate when they wanted to (presumably, only when they wanted to reproduce). There are many other mammalian species whose females don’t menstruate, so we might use genetic engineering to copy that into humans, as a starting point to achieving the level of control I envision.

By thinking about it, a woman will be able to signal her reproductive system to ovulate and to build up a uterine lining, giving her total control over her menstrual cycle and over whether she gets pregnant (she would also have the power to terminate a pregnancy). Also, any person would be able to switch their sexual urges, or any other instinct, on or off simply by thinking about it. Cybernetics, brain implants, and other types of technology we might not be able to imagine now, would grant organic humans these abilities. Insomnia would also vanish since a person could force himself to sleep.

As a general rule, I think intelligent life forms in the future will find it adaptive to have the greatest degree of control over their minds and bodies, so they can intelligently adapt themselves to new conditions. It’s easy to see how AGIs will have such capabilities. Their minds will be free of instincts, prejudices, emotions, and personality complexes that hobble human thinking, and they will be able to customize their robot bodies to suit whatever the situation demands.

Someday, intelligent beings will look back on today’s humans as tragically flawed and limited creatures, at the mercy of their instincts and small brains, and condemned to deal with random genetic flaws and chronic health problems they were randomly given at birth. Self-control is the future.

Once OLED screens get cheap enough and thin enough, it will be possible to stick them to ceilings, like wallpaper or “peel-and-stick” vinyl floor tiles, and have them function as overhead lights. The advantage over traditional light fixtures is that OLED ceiling panels could display a greater variety of colors, patterns, and light source placements. A ceiling covered in an OLED display could also be an important component of an immersive virtual reality game room (think of a crude “holodeck”).

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Interesting articles, July 2023

This prediction from January was right:

“The Kremlin is likely preparing to conduct a decisive strategic action in the next six months intended to regain the initiative and end Ukraine’s current string of operational successes.”

It then goes on to say that “strategic action” could take the form of an offensive meant to capture the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in eastern Ukraine, or of a strong defensive action meant to defeat the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russia did both of those things over the last six months.

Half of Donetsk remains in Ukrainian hands, though Russia has captured virtually all of Luhansk, including all its cities and large towns. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south has made insignificant progress thanks to competent Russian resistance and reinforcement.

It’s fair to say that Russia has, over the last six months, managed to “end Ukraine’s current string of operational successes.”
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-15-2023

Ukraine’s counteroffensive has been a disappointment most because its troops don’t have the right training.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/a-sobering-analysis-of-ukraines-counteroffensive-from-the-front

In late July, Ukraine threw even more troops into its counteroffensive, leading to slightly more land recaptured from Russia. It’s unclear whether any breakthrough is coming.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-main-thrust-of-counteroffensive-has-begun-report-states

The U.S. has agreed to give Ukraine cluster bombs. Though the move is controversial, Russia and Ukraine have already used cluster bombs against each other, and neither is party to the global ban on cluster bombs, nor is America.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/29/cluster-munition-use-russia-ukraine-war

The AMX-10 RC that France donated to Ukraine can’t be used in heavy combat due to their thin armor.
https://news.yahoo.com/thin-armoured-french-tanks-impractical-110407784.html

Russia captured a partly intact British Storm Shadow missile.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/crashed-storm-shadow-missile-falls-into-russian-hands

Contrary to the media’s alarmism, blowing up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant would not release any radiation.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-5151/statement-from-american-nuclear-society-on-ukraines-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant/

The Wagner private military group has surrendered most of its tanks and heavy weapons to the Russian state military.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/wagner-turns-over-2000-heavy-weapons-including-tanks-sam-systems

Putin has appointed a new violent, ruthless man to run Wagner.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-shows-off-grey-hair-173439507.html

Fifteen senior Russian military officers have been fired or suspended in the aftermath of last month’s aborted coup.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/top-russian-generals-killed-fired-112941056.html

Another Major General was fired for publicly complaining that the Kremlin was mishandling the Ukraine war.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fired-russian-general-remarks-latest-190011683.html

In spite of losses, Russia still has enormous numbers of artillery pieces in reserve.
https://youtu.be/EVqHY5hpzv8

Ukraine has bombed the bridge that links Crimea to mainland Russia again, causing one of the lanes to collapse into the water. Two civilians died, and Russia has already retaliated by suspending its deal allowing Ukraine to export wheat by sea to other countries.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russias-kerch-strait-bridge-closed-after-major-incident

Russian and Ukrainian troops are now welding cages made of chain link fence material around their tanks to block small kamikaze drones.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/photos-capture-crude-cages-russian-195802220.html

Neutral Switzerland and Austria have joined an integrated air defense network whose other members are all NATO countries.
https://apnews.com/article/switzerland-austria-missile-defense-essi-skyshield-germany-b809c3ec96c91407812b9cf4007255a1

There have been several incidents where Russian fighter planes have “harassed” U.S. aircraft over Syria. The Pentagon has played this up to depict Russia as an aggressive country, but in reality, Russian aircraft have a legal right to fly over Syria while American aircraft do not: the Syrian government formally invited Russian forces into its territory while it never did the same to U.S. forces. Syria has repeatedly told us to stop our air patrols over its airspace, which we have ignored.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-harasses-us-drones-over-042500111.html
https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-forever-war-1792298
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/14/politics/us-russia-syria-surveillance/index.html

In WWI, the U.S. tried designing its own steel combat helmet. The project independently arrived at a design that was very similar to the German helmet. It was rejected partly because its use could lead to confusion on the battlefield.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/35957

In anticipation of wartime shortages, China would build up its stockpiles of energy (mostly oil), key metals, and food (commodities like wheat and soybeans) if it believed war was imminent. This would be the case whether China was planning to attack, or if it believed another country was about to attack it.

China hasn’t done these things yet.
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/07/26/the-ways-to-predict-a-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan-long-before-troops-take-up-arms

This prediction from Bank of America was hilariously wrong.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bofa-warns-us-economy-start-170000414.html

Peter Thiel, one decade ago: “If I had to sort of project in the next decade ahead, I think we have to at least be open to the possibility that the computer era is also at risk of decelerating. We have a large ‘Computer Rust Belt’ which nobody likes to talk about. But it is companies like Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, IBM, where I think the pattern will be to become commodities, no longer innovate. Correspondingly, cut through labor force and cut through profits in the decade ahead. There are many companies that are on the cusp: Microsoft is probably close to the Computer Rust Belt. One that’s shockingly and probably in the Computer Rust Belt is Apple Computers.”

Microsoft’s market cap is now $2.5 trillion, and Apple’s is $3 trillion (the first company to cross that threshold). Microsoft has the lead in A.I. technology, and Apple just unveiled the best augmented reality glasses ever made. Out of the tech companies that Thiel named in that quote, only IBM has seen a decline in its stock value since 2013. If you’d bought $10,000 worth of stock in each of those seven companies back then, you’d have like four or five times as much money overall today.
https://youtu.be/VtZbWnIALeE?t=549
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/apple-3-trillion-market-valuation/index.html

Meta’s algorithm is essential for getting users to log in to their social media platforms. And unexpectedly, the algorithm does not make users more politically biased than they already were.
https://apnews.com/article/facebook-instagram-polarization-misinformation-social-media-f0628066301356d70ad2eda2551ed260

Elon Musk has renamed Twitter as “X” and wants to turn it into a multipurpose app that copies China’s WeChat.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66333633

This review of M3GAN makes a brilliant case that the evil robot’s actions were much smarter and more calculated than anyone realized.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/movie-review-megan

Another smart person (Douglas Hofstadter) says they’re afraid of AI.
https://youtu.be/lfXxzAVtdpU?t=1739

OpenAI predicts that superintelligent AI might be created by 2030.
https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment

ChatGPT can pass the tests to get a medical license, and outperforms Stanford medical school students when answering medical questions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2806980

Apple is copying GPT.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-19/apple-preps-ajax-generative-ai-apple-gpt-to-rival-openai-and-google

Hollywood actors and writers have gone on strike for the first time in 43 years. Partly they’re worried that entertainment studios will replace them with CGI clones and machine-written scripts.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66200334

Thanks to voice cloning, we can hear Frank Sinatra sing “Gansta’s Paradise.”
https://youtu.be/W7SQ4uf9GmA

A ChatGPT mod allows NPCs in the video game Skyrim to hold conversations with human players. The result is impressive, and leads me to think that games are about to become even more addictive and that a market for creating and preserving custom NPC “friends” is about to arise.
https://youtu.be/0svu8WBzeQM

Machines are now as good at telemarketing as humans. Listen to this phone conversation between “Alexander from Tesla Motors” and a real person.
https://twitter.com/LinusEkenstam/status/1680314562753490949

Seven years ago, AI expert François Chollet Tweeted: “the belief that we are anywhere close to human-level natural language comprehension or generation is pure DL hype.”

“Foundation models” are the newest AIs. They are not narrow AIs but also not fully general AIs (AGIs). They can do a limited number of different tasks.

‘The next wave in AI looks to replace the task-specific models that have dominated the AI landscape to date. The future is models that are trained on a broad set of unlabeled data that can be used for different tasks, with minimal fine-tuning. These are called foundation models, a term first popularized by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. We’ve seen the first glimmers of the potential of foundation models in the worlds of imagery and language. Early examples of models, like GPT-3, BERT, or DALL-E 2, have shown what’s possible. Input a short prompt, and the system generates an entire essay, or a complex image, based on your parameters, even if it wasn’t specifically trained on how to execute that exact argument or generate an image in that way.’
https://research.ibm.com/blog/what-are-foundation-models

New kinds of tests show that GPT-4 lacks general intelligence.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02361-7

“Peak Phosphorus” has been delayed by decades thanks to the discovery of a massive phosphate deposit in Norway.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/great-news-eu-hails-discovery-of-massive-phosphate-rock-deposit-in-norway/

‘Sulphur particles contained in ships’ exhaust fumes have been counteracting some of the warming coming from greenhouse gases. But lowering the sulphur content of marine fuel has weakened the masking effect, effectively giving a boost to warming.

…While this will contribute to warming and make it even more difficult to avoid exceeding 1.5C in the coming decades, a number of other factors are likely contributing to the ocean heatwave.

These include a massive eruption of an underwater volcano in the south Pacific, an unusual absence of Saharan dust and a growing El Niño.’
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/

In 250 million years, the Earth’s continents will have combined again to form one supercontinent. This, along with other factors, will have a massive and negative effect on the global climate. (From episode 79 of Naked Science)
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qb411a7tu/

“A hypercane is a hypothetical class of extreme tropical cyclone that could form if sea surface temperatures reached approximately 50 °C (122 °F), which is 13 °C (23 °F) warmer than the warmest ocean temperature ever recorded.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane

New incandescent light bulbs have been banned in the U.S. because they waste so much electricity.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/27/incandescent-light-bulb-led-00107935

Europe’s Ariane-5 space rocket has been retired.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66116894

Three credible men testified before Congress that secret U.S. government programs know UFOs are real, and even have crashed alien spaceships and dead alien pilots.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistleblower-claims-massive-coverup-retribution-in-sworn-testimony

The documentary Moment of Contact explores a famous UFO and alien sighting in the town of Varginha, Brazil in 1996. There’s no hard proof it happened, but it’s compelling to see so many credible witnesses still so adamant about what they saw. I don’t like that the filmmakers never mentioned the Brazilian government’s explanation or tried to debunk it.
https://youtu.be/0WlbfaMU-Qs

Smarter people shoot guns more accurately.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289623000491

A man who spent 28 years working as a truck driver is now living proof of how sunlight accelerates aging. The left side of his face was constantly exposed to sunlight since it was next to a window, but the right side was protected. The wrinkling and sagging of the skin on his face is correspondingly asymmetrical. The ultraviolet rays in sunlight damage the DNA inside human skin cells.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/22972152/shocking-photo-shows-sun-damage-face/

Machines are speeding up our ability to design new proteins.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/protein-design-ai-way

Transfusing blood from young mice into old mice boosted the latter’s health and lifespan.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00451-9

The FDA has approved a new Alzheimer’s drug called “Leqembi.” It only slows the disease’s progression by a few months but costs $26,500 per patient per year.
https://apnews.com/article/alzheimers-drug-fda-approval-medicare-leqembi-a9c8b770aa1868a59889143c3bc9d127

Deer have become a reservoir for COVID-19 and have spread it to humans multiple times.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-spread-from-deer/

In the U.S., the number of “excess deaths” went to zero in mid-January and has stayed there, indicating the COVID-19 pandemic ended then.
https://conversableeconomist.com/2023/07/24/end-of-covid-pandemic-in-the-us-the-excess-deaths-measure/

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Interesting articles, June 2023

Ukraine started its long-awaited counteroffensive to retake Russian-occupied parts of its country.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65866880

A day after the Ukrainian counteroffensive started, the Kakhovka dam blew up, sending a surge of water down the Dnieper River. Though both sides blamed the other for the act, the dam was inside Russian-controlled territory, and its destruction helped Russia since it prevented Ukrainian forces from making amphibious crossings downriver.
https://youtu.be/MNsTa90FjiA

“THE gruesome remains of soldiers from World War Two complete with Nazi helmets have been unearthed in the Ukrainian reservoir emptied by a devastating dam blast last week.”
https://www.the-sun.com/news/8349588/nazi-soldiers-ukraine-dam-lake-flooded-kherson/

Russia’s (highly probable) destruction of the dam has caused all the irrigation canals running into Crimea to go dry. An act meant to hobble the Ukrainian counteroffensive will have long-lasting consequences for the people living in the parts of Ukraine Russia annexed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65963403

A pipeline used to transport ammonia (the key ingredient in synthetic fertilizer) was blown up, leading to further recriminations between Ukraine and Russia.
https://www.barrons.com/news/russia-accuses-ukraine-of-blowing-up-key-ammonia-pipeline-ministry-96363315

Combat videos from both sides of the counteroffensive.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-advances-made-in-grueling-fight

A brutal, first-person video of Ukrainian special forces troops shooting Russian troops dead in a Russian trench has surfaced.
https://youtu.be/yRL3Nlu9uts

Zelenskyy admitted that the counteroffensive hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped. Ukraine has suffered significant losses in exchange for insignificant amounts of land retaken from Russia. The Russians are just fighting better on the defensive than we expected.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/22/politics/ukraine-counteroffensive-western-assessment/index.html

A Russian kamikaze drone destroyed an advanced German antiaircraft system donated to Ukraine.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-prized-iris-t-air-defense-system-attacked-by-russian-drone-in-video

The Russians turned one of their antique T-54 tanks into a remote-controlled suicide drone packed with explosives.
https://youtu.be/l6Rwj5MsdyU

Ukraine lost a unit of Western-supplied tanks in its attack against the Russian lines.
https://youtu.be/8qSXAaQc7EI

Russia was rattled by a brief coup attempt by its Wagner private army.

NATO countries still have not standardized their artillery. “Companies are making money out of the fact that ammunitions are not interchangeable, that they can dominate their national markets with their munitions.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nato-pushes-common-standards-tackle-085937666.html

After 111 years of service in some form or another, the U.S. military has finally stopped using the Colt .45 pistol.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/iconic-1911-pistols-are-finally-gone-from-marine-corps-service

‘The United States military released video Monday of what it called an “unsafe” Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait on the weekend, in which a Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of an American destroyer, forcing the U.S. vessel to slow to avoid a collision.’
https://apnews.com/article/us-china-taiwan-strait-489a45bb6df134fa09443d285b3f8669

In WWII, Japanese troops used “lunge mines,” which were pressure-sensitive bombs attached to long poles. A soldier would use one to “spear” and enemy tank, and the collision between the mine and the tank’s surface would set off the explosives. It was usually fatal to the user.
https://youtu.be/rBnRhP41nmg

‘A national redoubt or national fortress is an area to which the (remnant) military forces of a nation can be withdrawn if the main battle has been lost or even earlier if defeat is considered inevitable. Typically, a region is chosen with a geography favouring defence, such as a mountainous area or a peninsula, to function as a final holdout to preserve national independence and host an effective resistance movement for the duration of the conflict.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_redoubt

‘There are two fundamentally different types of inertial navigation systems: gimbaling systems and strapdown systems.’
https://www.britannica.com/technology/inertial-guidance-system

Ten years after Google Glass, Apple has announced it is making its own augmented reality goggles.
https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg

This analyst thinks Apple probably won’t sell many Vision Pro units due to its high price and limited capabilities. However, it will lay the groundwork for future generations of the goggles, which will cheaper, better, and more widely used.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-vision-pro-technical-marvel-021046894.html

“An artist used AI to show what the children of famous celebrity exes would look like if they’d stayed together”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/artist-used-ai-show-children-113000525.html

The new text-prompted image generators are being used to make fake child pornography.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-computer-generated-child-abuse-050000430.html

“Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing.”
https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-courts-e15023d7e6fdf4f099aa122437dbb59b

‘AlphaDev uncovered faster algorithms by starting from scratch rather than refining existing algorithms, and began looking where most humans don’t: the computer’s assembly instructions.

Assembly instructions are used to create binary code for computers to put into action. While developers write in coding languages like C++, known as high-level languages, this must be translated into ‘low-level’ assembly instructions for computers to understand.

We believe many improvements exist at this lower level that may be difficult to discover in a higher-level coding language. Computer storage and operations are more flexible at this level, which means there are significantly more potential improvements that could have a larger impact on speed and energy usage.’
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sorting-algorithms

Humans are using LLMs to automate task completion in Mechanical Turk.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mechanical-turk-workers-using-ai-191404515.html

Bing Chat can solve CAPTCHAs even if it doesn’t know it.

As the internet fills with computer-generated content (images, news articles, stories, sounds and music), we run the risk of creating corrupted data training sets for future AIs. The errors could compound themselves as AIs trained on flawed data make new content that is even more flawed, which newer AIs would use as THEIR training data, and so on.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-collapse

‘He predicted that AI would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than human journalists and said that only publishers who created “the best original content” – such as investigative journalism and original commentary – would survive.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/german-tabloid-bild-to-replace-range-of-editorial-jobs-with-ai

Computer programs can reliably assess breast cancer risk from mammogram images alone.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/990740

Terence Tao, one of the best mathematicians alive, predicts that AI will be able to co-author math research papers by 2026.
https://unlocked.microsoft.com/ai-anthology/terence-tao/

Mark Zuckerberg has no idea when AGI will be invented. He thinks LLMs might be a paradigm whose performance tops out before reaching general intelligence.
https://youtu.be/YkSXY4pBAEk

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey thinks the near-term potential and threat of AI is being overblown by tech companies because the publicity boosts their stock valuations. The media has gone along with it because doomsday stories boost their ratings.
https://youtu.be/WS7xmb3UhCU

Yann LeCun says we’re still decades away from building an AGI, and that we still don’t even have rat-brain-level AI.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65886125

The infamous terrorist and anti-technology advocate Ted Kaczynski killed himself in prison. The core claim in his Manifesto is that technology had created living conditions and lifestyles that were antithetical to human nature, and that the trend would culminate with the creation of A.I., which would either exterminate us or create an intensely miserable world that wouldn’t be worth living in. He advocated forsaking everything but pre-Industrial Age technology so we could live as nature intended for us.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/10/us/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-dead/index.html

Goldman Sachs predicts China’s economy will become bigger than America’s in 2035. Slower growth in China forced them to push the estimated date farther into the future than it had been.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3202752/china-gdp-surpass-us-around-2035-years-later-previously-expected-goldman-sachs-predicts

‘”By 2030, we think we’re going to have four million tonnes [of worn-out scrap solar panels] – which is still manageable – but by 2050, we could end up with more than 200 million tonnes globally.” To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total of 400 million tonnes of plastic every year.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519

Decades worth of research on photosynthesis, which could have led to improvements in solar panel technology, were destroyed when a janitor unplugged a freezer in a university research lab. All of the specimens thawed out and were lost.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66028401

Virgin Galactic’s space plane has started routine commercial operations.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66045177

“Elon Musk hires 14-year-old ‘genius’ scientist to build SpaceX rockets”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22674352/elon-musk-hires-14-year-old-genius-spacex/

Space rocket launchpads are interesting pieces of technology themselves.
https://youtu.be/2EsqMLT0Hzw

Phosphorus, a key chemical ingredient of organic life, has been discovered on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/14/world/enceladus-ocean-phosphorus-scn/index.html

A former U.S. intelligence officer publicly claims the U.S. government has been running a secret UFO program for decades. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead alien pilots are allegedly in U.S. possession, and our engineers have been trying to reverse engineer them. While he hasn’t seen any of the spacecraft or aliens, or even seen photos of them, he claims to know people who have and that he has written documents from the secret program. He’s getting the truth out by filing a whistleblower complaint with the Pentagon inspector general, in which he alleges that keeping the program secret from Congress violates the law. Congress is supposed to know about even the most classified military projects.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/military-whistleblowe-us-ufo-retrieval-program/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12189773/Pentagon-whistleblower-says-Vatican-aware-existence-non-human-intelligences.html

The U.S. military and CIA have rapid deployment teams for recovering crashed enemy aircraft for the purposes of study. There are even teams that can raise sunken enemy ships and subs from the seafloor. A secret program to recover UFOs would be modeled after this.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/aliens-or-not-secret-crash-retrieval-programs-are-a-very-real-thing

‘At long last, ocean drillers exhume a bounty of rocks from Earth’s mantle’
https://www.science.org/content/article/long-last-ocean-drillers-exhume-bounty-rocks-earth-s-mantle

Billionaire Peter Thiel will have himself cryogenically frozen upon death.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/billionaire-peter-thiel-still-plans-to-be-frozen-after-death-for-potential-revival-i-dont-necessarily-expect-it-to-work/

‘In all, five rats received a vitrified-then-thawed kidney in a study whose results were published this month in Nature Communications. It’s the first time scientists have shown it’s possible to successfully and repeatedly transplant a life-sustaining mammalian organ after it has been rewarmed from this icy metabolic arrest. Outside experts unequivocally called the results a seminal milestone for the field of organ preservation.’
https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-preservation-transplants/

Scientists used genetic engineering to turn unfertilized mouse eggs into viable mouse embryos, in a process called “parthenogenesis.” One of the resulting offspring survived until adulthood and had natural children of its own. In the far future, this technique will be used to create humans and posthumans.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115248119

‘Dolphin moms use baby talk to call to their young’
https://apnews.com/article/dolphin-mothers-baby-talk-calves-cc0c189aa1b8e1298155b1ea78c1002a

‘Henneguya salminicola is the only known multicellular animal that does not rely on the aerobic respiration of oxygen, relying instead on an exclusively anaerobic metabolism.[8][7] It lacks a mitochondrial genome and therefore mitochondria, making it one of the only known members of the eukaryotic animal kingdom to shun oxygen as the foundation of its metabolism.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henneguya_zschokkei

‘A new study published in Lancet estimates that 101 million people in India – 11.4% of the country’s population – are living with diabetes. A survey commissioned by the health ministry also found that 136 million people – or 15.3% of the people – could be living with pre-diabetes. ‘
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65852551

The USDA has approved the first company to sell lab-grown chicken meat in the U.S.
https://apnews.com/article/cultivated-meat-lab-grown-cell-based-a88ab8e0241712b501aa191cdbf6b39a

Evidence is building that the amino acid taurine extends human lifespan.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/health/taurine-longevity-wellness/index.html
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/taurine

There are no shortcuts in drug development.
‘But this accelerated approval process is controversial because some companies fail to follow through on their promises to confirm their treatments work. A drug approved this way to prevent premature birth was recently withdrawn after being found useless.’
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/22/1183576268/muscular-dystrophy-patients-get-first-gene-therapy

“Osimertinib” is a pill that has just been found to sharply reduce death rates among people with lung cancer.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/04/lung-cancer-pill-cuts-risk-of-death-by-half-says-thrilling-study

The former head of China’s Center for Disease Control says a lab leak could have started the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65708746

It’s now known that three scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill right before the COVID-19 outbreak started in their city, and almost simultaneously.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wuhan-clan-we-finally-know-the-identity-of-the-scientists-in-the-lab-linked-to-covid/

U.S. intelligence says it can’t tell whether those three scientists got sick with COVID-19 or something else.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/23/biden-administration-intelligence-wuhan-lab-00103523

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Review: “Event Horizon”

Plot:

In 2040, a large space ship named Event Horizon is built, incorporating a new propulsion system that allows instantaneous travel between any two points in the universe. The new technology will revolutionize space travel and free humans from our Solar System. Immediately after activating the new engine to do a test run to Proxima Centauri, the ship vanishes and is presumed destroyed.

Seven years later, the Event Horizon reappears in orbit of Neptune and emits an automated distress beacon. A team of U.S. military salvage astronauts goes to the ship to figure out what happened. Immediately upon boarding it, the rescue team realizes something very bad happened. Almost all of its systems are offline, and all that is left of the original crew is a mutilated corpse in the bridge along with bloody flesh smeared on the window panes. The team members also start having disturbing hallucinations and violent outbursts towards each other.

They discover that the experimental engine accidentally transported the Event Horizon to a different universe “of pure chaos and evil” where the indigenous life forms and laws of physics made the original crew go violently insane and murder each other, and then infused the ship itself with an evil, psychic life force that persisted even once it returned to our universe. The ship itself is therefore alive and is causing the rescue team members to go insane. It wants them to reactivate the special engine to take them all back to the crazy universe so the beings there can have fun torturing them.

Even though most people hate this movie, it’s been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. When I saw this in the theater at age 13, I think it was the scariest film I’d ever watched up to that point except maybe Alien.

Analysis:

In 2015 there will be a permanent human presence on the Moon. When the film starts, text appears describing 21st century milestones in space exploration. The film was released in 1997, so at that time, these events were in the future. One milestone was the establishment of a manned Moon base in 2015. That never happened in real life, and generally speaking, space exploration and space technology have proceeded much slower than it did in the film universe.

I predict a manned base will be built on the Moon in as little as 20 years, though it will have a tiny crew. It will be probably be the product of a broader space race between the U.S. and China, and that it will be a money loser that exists for prestige and scientific research. After an initial surge of attention, the public’s interest in the base will wane, just as happened with the International Space Station (ISS).

Profitable Moon bases might come decades later, and will probably center around the extraction of Helium-3 from the surface soil for use as fuel in future nuclear fusion reactors. While it’s tempting to think this would mean an enlarged human presence on the Moon to operate the mining equipment, A.I. and robots might be so advanced by then that humans would be unnecessary. As I’ve written before, I predict our machine creations will beat us into deep space, and humans like us might never even leave the Solar System. I’d be impressed if the off-world human population surpasses just 1,000 by the end of this century.

In 2032, commercial mining will start on Mars. The film’s opening text also says this. This prediction will fail, and I doubt the first humans will even land on Mars until the end of the 2030s at the earliest. Elon Musk has repeatedly predicted that his SpaceX company would take people to Mars by 2029, and his “Starship” rocket has the ability to get there and is now being tested, but other critical technologies haven’t even started development, like the crew vehicle that will house the astronauts for months long journey between Earth and Mars, and the landing capsule that will take them to and from Mars’ surface. By 2032, the best we could hope for is an unmanned mission to Mars meant to test out some of the technologies meant for a future human landing, and maybe meant to drop supplies or cargo capsules on the planet’s surface to form the genesis of a human base.

It won’t make sense to do commercial mining on Mars until well after 2032 since the planet’s gravity will impose prohibitively high launch costs for any mined ores a company is trying to export to Earth or other space colonies. It would make more sense to mine the Moon or the asteroid belt because gravity will be much weaker. Even launching stuff from Earth would probably be cheaper considering the infrastructure advantage there will be here vs. on Mars for many decades if not centuries.

The first commercial mining operation on Mars will be meant to service the Martian economy and not send anything off planet. It would only become economically justified once a significant population of humans or, more likely, intelligent machines were present on the planet. The mining operations would be focused on extracting basic materials like iron and aluminum to make mundane things like buildings and vehicles. 

In 2040–only 17 years from now–a massive space ship like the Event Horizon will be built. Aside from its teleportation drive, the Event Horizon is remarkable for its sheer size: it is about a mile long, dwarfing today’s biggest surface ships and tallest buildings in length.

There’s no chance something of this scale will be built until the 22nd century. The biggest spaceship in 2040 will probably be one that is designed to transport astronauts from Earth orbit to Mars orbit. The internal area that is accessible to the human crew will be comparable in volume to a large RV or an American house.

By 2047 there will be a large space station orbiting the Earth. This is shown at the start of the movie and appears to be a general purpose space station. The rescue ship docks with it to pick up its crew before heading on to the Event Horizon. The station looks cuboidal in overall shape and consists of a scaffold structural frame studded with function-specific modules (e.g. – maneuvering thrusters, fuel tanks, crew compartments, tunnels linking modules). Its size is impossible to judge accurately, but the length of any side can be measured in hundreds of feet. The ISS is 356 long along its longest axis, so the movie space station’s size is within an order of magnitude of something that already exists.

Unfortunately, nothing approaching the size or complexity of the fictitious station will exist by 2047. The ISS, which costs billions of dollars a year to operate, is scheduled to crash back to Earth in 2031. Even if it gets a life extension to 2047, it’s highly unlikely it will be significantly expanded in size by then. No space agency or private company has credible plans to build new space stations that will be nearly as big as the ISS for the foreseeable future. Keep in mind the political decision to build the ISS was made in the mid-80s, it took another ten years for construction to start, and the station wasn’t fully assembled in space for another 15 years. 2047 is 24 years in the future, so if we expect to have something even bigger than the ISS in orbit by then, the agreement between several space agencies to start work should be getting signed about now if the ISS’ developmental timeline is any guide.

No international deal has been made, and we shouldn’t expect serious space cooperation between the U.S., China and Russia to happen anytime soon thanks to worsened diplomatic relations, so in 2047, manned ships intended for interplanetary missions will dock with space stations that are SMALLER than what we have today.

Future space ships will have weird, utilitarian designs. The Event Horizon is shaped like a…well…just look at it and decide for yourself! While I don’t think future space ships will look exactly like this, I’m sure they’ll look just as weird, but in different ways. For one, since there’s no air in space, nothing needs to be streamlined (look at satellites). A space ship’s front could be a flat slab, instead of a pointy cone like an airplane nose or an arrow like a ship’s bow. However, the minimize the risk of collision with space debris, it would still be a good idea to make space ships oblong in overall layouts, with their narrowest ends facing the direction of travel, so a gross design similarity with ships and cars would remain.

Since there’s also almost no gravity, a compact and robust layout is less important, so major sections of a space ship could be connected to each other with flimsy little tunnels or braced steel frames.

Giant arrays of solar panels dwarfing the ship like a parachute dwarfs its occupant could be common. Huge fins meant to radiate waste heat from the ship’s engine and other systems might also be present.

Ships designed for long, manned missions will probably need gravity for the health and comfort of their crews. The only way to generate it is to have the ships rotate so centrifugal force pushes people objects outwards from the ship’s central axis. Shaping the habitat module of such a ship like hollow cylinder would take maximum advantage of the artificial gravity.

Put all of these design considerations together, and you do indeed get space ships that look as weird as the Event Horizon. In 2047, the basic scenario of a weird-looking space ship docking with a space station orbiting Earth before it heads out to another planet will probably be a reality. However, both crafts will be much smaller than those shown in the film, and ship’s range will be limited to Earth’s nearest neighbors (Venus or Mars) and won’t extend to Neptune.

Future space ships will have dark, gothic interiors. The inside of the Event Horizon consists of dimly-lit, menacing rooms, and some of the walls are dark colors. Long duration space missions are already stressful enough, so there’s no way real space ships will be like this. A good deal of research goes into making spacecraft psychologically pleasant, and future space ships will, to the greatest extent practical, feel warm, comfortable, and remind humans of Earth.

However, rarely-used parts of the ship might not obey such rules. The Nostromo from the movie Alien is closer to the mark–the part of the ship where the crew sleep, eat and do recreation is light-colored, well-lit, and inviting, whereas the parts reserved for machinery and cargo storage are industrial-looking and darker.

Future astronauts will have black space suits. This makes no sense. In space there’s a gigantic black background. If you were working outside the ship, would you want to be camouflaged against that background if your tether broke loose and your crewmen had to find you? And why would a military rescue crew whose members spend most of their time going into broken-down space ships with all the interior lights disabled wear black suits? It would make it harder for them to see each other.

I can’t think of a single benefit to black space suits. White is the ideal color, which is probably why the American and Russian suits designed for extravehicular use are white.

Artificial gravity will be generated from the floors of space ships. The Event Horizon and the rescue ship both have this form of artificial gravity. As I’ve discussed in other reviews, the laws of physics don’t allow for the existence of this kind of technology, and gravity can only be simulated by spinning a space ship so the centrifugal force pushes the astronauts and objects down into the deck.

The tablet computers of 2047 will be big, chunky and will have thick frames. A tablet computer is shown in one scene, and it is clearly inferior to one from five years ago (the film was released in 1997, and the first iPad was not sold until 2010). The prediction has thus already failed. By 2047, we’ll be able to make tablets that are only a few millimeters thick and whose displays go to their edges, meaning they won’t have frames.

This raises an interesting question: If you COULD make a tablet like that, would it make sense to do so? If your tablet is almost as thin as paper, it can easily be damaged by creasing or being poked too hard by a stylus. If you make it strong like metal to resist damage and still keep it as thin as a sheet of paper, then it turns into a sharp and potentially deadly object. Excessive thinness will also make the device hard to hold and grip in some ways, and every time you pushed a button on it, the whole thing would wobble.

So even if you COULD make a tablet as thin as paper, I think you’d still want to put it in a protective case, which would give it a depth and a border frame similar to a modern iPad. Extra thickness will also mean longer battery life no matter what.

These considerations also apply to smartphones–just imagine how hard it would be if your phone were a 3″ x 5″ note card made of rigid metal.

Suspended animation technology will exist by 2047. The crewmen use suspended animation pods during the multi-month journey between Earth and Neptune. It’s vanishingly unlikely the technology will exist by then. I don’t think we’ll be able to cryonically freeze humans and revive them until the end of this century or later. A milder alternative to that process, which involves keeping a person in a deep, drugged sleep like a hibernating bear while they’re drip-fed nutrients for months, could be developed sooner, though I question whether it would be wise to use it on astronauts. Yes, it would reduce their consumption of calories and oxygen and would lower the odds of certain types of mission problems, but it could jeopardize the mission by damaging their health before reaching the destination.

In 2047, astronauts on interplanetary space missions will bide their time in transit just as the Apollo astronauts did and workers in Antarctic bases do: mostly in boredom, staring at the same four walls.

We will invent a space ship engine that can exceed the speed of light. Our current understanding of physics holds that this is impossible. It’s unwise to stake any expectations about the future on fundamental laws of science being overturned. Moreover, even if it were theoretically possible to exceed light speed, the next show-stopper will probably be finding a way to generate the impossibly high amounts of energy needed to do it.

The space ships of 2047 will still be using conventional means of propulsion, like chemical fueled rockets and ion thrusters.

Under the light speed constraint, it would literally take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years for us to colonize our nearest stars, by which time A.I.’s will be running Earth’s civilization, with obvious implications for who gets chosen for the missions. Furthermore, any future space empire we created would be impossible to hold together since it would take years for simple communications to transit between the different star systems. People and intelligent machines would take orders of magnitude longer to traverse the gulfs, so the isolation would lead to unique cultures and perhaps political identities developing in each system.

Wars with aliens at the edge of space would be very hard to deal with since the rest of our civilization wouldn’t hear about it until years after it started, by which time the situation in the warzone would have totally changed. A coordinated military response drawing upon the resources of the other star systems would be almost impossible. It would be a mess.

The space ships of 2040 will still use CDs for data storage. There’s a brief shot on the Event Horizon’s bridge where we see an astronaut removing a CD from the main computer’s disc drive. Storage discs are already obsolescent and rare to see today. By 2040, only people interested in deliberately indulging in nostalgia will use them.

That said, removable storage devices will still exist in 2040, but they won’t be rotating. Sometimes it’s more hassle than it’s worth to transfer or store data in the cloud, and it’s preferable having your data on a physical device you can put in your pocket. This is especially true for anything you want to keep private.

Astronauts will use magnetic boots. When the rescue crew first enters the Event Horizon, its gravity is not working because the power is disabled. To get around, they use magnetic boots, which stick to the metal floors. NASA developed these in the 1960s, so there’s no technological barrier to equipping astronauts with them in the 2040s. However, they’ve never been used in space because spacecraft are built of aluminum and titanium, which magnets are not attracted to. The space ships of that era will still need to be very lightweight, meaning they will still be made of non-magnetic materials, and the boots will be useless.

Moreover, walking is an inefficient way to move around in a weightless environment, as you’ll discover if you try to walk across the bottom of a swimming pool. It’s much better to aim your body at your destination and to use one or two of your limbs to push off from a nearby surface so you float towards it. There’s a scene where the rescue ship’s captain does something like that to quickly move along the outside of the Event Horizon to reach a comrade who is about to be ejected from an airlock.

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Interesting articles, May 2023

For anyone who believes Russia’s propaganda that the war is going according to Putin’s elaborate master plan: ‘[The head of Russia’s “Wagner” private army] posted a gruesome video of him walking among dead fighters’ bodies [in Bakhmut], asking defence officials for more supplies…”Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where is the… ammunition?… They came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten yourselves in your mahogany offices.”‘
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65493008

A Russian soldier surrendered to a flying drone in Bakhmut. It dropped a written note to him instructing him to walk towards the Ukrainian lines, and as he did, his comrades tried to kill him.
https://youtu.be/yE2sKbEjsRY

After months of costly fighting, Russian forces captured the small city of Bakhmut. The head of Russia’s Wagner Group said over 20,000 of his men died there.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-border-raid-4f63ade7fb3899b6fa903b562ada0e2c

Two small drones were used in a suicide attack on the Kremlin in the middle of the night, causing no real damage. The perpetrators haven’t been found, but they were likely Ukrainian agents who carried out the attack for its symbolic rather than military value. It also may have been an inside job perpetrated by some faction of Russia’s security apparatus.
https://youtu.be/2Oiagfj_Mik

Russia launched 54 kamikaze drones against Kiev in the largest such attack of the war so far.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-65736730

Glimpse the future: In Ukraine, small drones are fighting each other in the air.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-posts-video-rare-drone-104726320.html

Due to the Ukraine War, the Russian military had almost no tanks and planes available for the annual May 9 military parade. Even the number of infantrymen was visibly lower.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/just-one-old-tank-no-105934766.html

A group of militants claiming to be Russian expatriates against Putin crossed from Ukraine into Russia’s Belgorod region and did damage to infrastructure and several structures. Thousands of Russian civilians had to evacuate the area. While the incursion had insignificant military value, it left many Russians shaken by demonstrating how depleted their border defenses had become thanks to the manpower drain of the Ukraine invasion.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/belgorod-raid-exposes-russia-defenses-ukraine-prigozhin-putin-military-rcna85945

The head of Russia’s private army praised the fighting skill of Ukraine’s forces, criticized the heads of Russia’s armed forces, and said that more setbacks in the war could lead to a loss of public support for it, and even a revolution against Putin.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/europe/wagner-prigozhin-russia-manpower-ukraine-intl/index.html

A Russian attack destroyed a Ukrainian munitions depot in one of the biggest explosions of the war so far.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-ammo-storage-site-obliterated-where-huge-fireball-seen

Russia is using their antique T-54 tanks in Ukraine in ways mindful of their combat limitations.
https://youtu.be/ObF_cSe_6UM

In a Ukrainian weapons depot, there are still unopened crates full of WWII Tommy Guns that the U.S. gave the USSR in WWII. Instead of putting them into service, it would make the most sense to sell them to international gun collectors and to use the proceeds to buy newly made guns of different types.
https://youtu.be/ApFT-pLcAXQ

For the second time, Ukrainian forces used a U.S.-supplied Patriot missile system to shoot down one of Russia’s “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles. As with so many other weapons, the Russians’ frightful claims about its performance turned out to be false.
https://mwi.usma.edu/hypersonic-hype-russias-kinzhal-missiles-and-the-lessons-for-air-defense/

The U.S. will give F-16s to Ukraine.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-f16-biden-a281e3cd1474b2e6f453946075824565

I think the Ukraine War will end like this, in an echo of the Korean War: ‘It’s a scenario that may prove the most realistic long-term outcome given that neither Kyiv nor Moscow appear inclined to ever admit defeat. It’s also becoming increasingly likely amid the growing sense within the administration that an upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive won’t deal a mortal blow to Russia. A frozen conflict — in which fighting pauses but neither side is declared the victor nor do they agree that the war is officially over — also could be a politically palatable long-term result for the United States and other countries backing Ukraine.’
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/18/ukraine-russia-south-korea-00097563

Ukraine has terrible demographics. While it will probably survive the current Russian invasion with most of its territory, its overall and working-age populations will be 15-20% smaller in 2040 than they were in 2021, undermining its ability to defend itself from future invasions. A long-term Russian effort to chip away at Ukraine and to absorb it will succeed if Russia is willing to bear the high price and if the West’s support for Ukraine flags.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/psp.2656#

In spite of the Russian military’s heavy losses and painful mistakes in Ukraine, it would be a mistake to write it off as an incompetent force on its last legs. This report shows the Russians have adapted in many ways to the nature of the fighting, and still hold large advantages over the Ukrainians.
https://static.rusi.org/403-SR-Russian-Tactics-web-final.pdf

Russia is still selling oil to some European countries, and through pipelines that go through Ukraine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/24/ukraine-gas-russia-pipeline-oil/

During WWII, the U.S. Army Surgeon General found that, in Italy, his troops usually became mentally unfit to serve after spending 200-240 cumulative days in combat.
https://youtu.be/1sC3tCXrbwQ

For all of its faults, the M4 Sherman tank was the best in its class when it came to easy crew egress. This is a critical feature when a tank is disabled and burning and the crewmen have to get out immediately. The men represent investments of money that might exceed the value of their own tank, so saving their lives when possible makes sense from a national resource efficiency perspective.
https://youtu.be/q6xvg5iJ4Zk

Warren Buffet is divesting from the world’s biggest microchip company because its factories are in Taiwan, and he thinks the risk of a Chinese attack on the island has gotten too high.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/16/investing/berkshire-hathaway-taiwan-tsmc-stock-exit-hnk-intl/index.html

Key points from a long interview with Henry Kissinger:

  • The U.S. and China are on the path to confrontation, probably over Taiwan.
  • Trump was right to confront China about its unfair trade practices, but he should have stopped there and not made the relationship worse in any other ways.
  • The leaders of America and China should have a major meeting and make a joint declaration that neither wants war with the other. They should form a high-level joint committee to periodically meet to discuss all the countries’ problems with each other.
  • Most Chinese thinkers believe America is declining.
  • The Ukraine War will probably end with some Ukrainian territory still in Russian hands. However, both sides will still have strong enough armies to restart the war later to try getting what they want. As soon as this war stops, it would be a good idea for NATO to let Ukraine in as it would reduce the odds of either side attacking the other again.
  • Russia becoming a “vassal” of China is unlikely because the two have long running contempt for each other.
  • If Russia falls into chaos, then there will be a power vacuum in Central Asia, likely leading to civil wars and interventions by other Asian powers who are ethnically related to various Central Asian groups.
  • It’s actually not in the U.S. or global interest for Russia to suffer such a big defeat in Ukraine that it collapses.
  • Japan will have nuclear weapons within five years.
  • The Chinese have always been inward-looking and have never wanted to take over the world. They also have no interest in trying to Sinicize the cultures of other people. They just want to become to dominant power in East Asia, and to be respected (and possibly paid some kind of tribute by) their neighbors. This is fundamentally different from how the Europeans thought and acted during the Colonial Era.
  • If the U.S. defeats China in a war, China is likely to have its own civil war, which could have very bad external effects. It’s not in our interest to ever fight with them over anything.
  • AI will be as impactful as the printing press.
  • AI will make conventional military forces as destructive as nuclear weapons. Every person will be vulnerable to attack.
  • China’s approach to developing AI is about as reckless as America’s.
  • In spite of its serious cultural and political divisions, America is not doomed. It’s still possible for a leader or political movement to unify the country for something positive.
  • https://www.economist.com/kissinger-transcript

Here’s a great interview with economist David Goldman about the future of U.S.-China relations.
https://youtu.be/8aN5Mryo8jI

If a simultaneous heat wave and power blackout hit Phoenix, up to 817,000 people would need emergency medical treatment, and 13,250 of them would die. Using cheap drones, a small terrorist group could probably bring about the scenario by attacking critical pieces of power infrastructure. Drones could also be used to set wildfires and forest fires at the most inopportune moments.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2023/05/25/phoenix-is-not-prepared-for-a-simultaneous-heat-wave-and-blackout/70252691007/

Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s AI research division, seems to suggest that the first AGI could be invented in less than a decade.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-deepmind-ceo-says-some-form-of-agi-possible-in-a-few-years-2705f452

Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of A.I.”, just quit his job at Google so he can be a public voice about the dangers posed by A.I.
‘His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”’
https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/01/the-godfather-of-a-i-leaves-google-and-warns-of-danger-ahead/

A leaked Google memo predicts that LLM’s will inevitably become open-source, meaning big tech companies will lose their monopoly over the technology, and there will be countless varieties of narrow AIs made by small companies.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/05/11/what-does-a-leaked-google-memo-reveal-about-the-future-of-ai

“The ‘Sparks of A.G.I.’ is an example of some of these big companies co-opting the research paper format into P.R. pitches,” said Maarten Sap, a researcher and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “They literally acknowledge in their paper’s introduction that their approach is subjective and informal and may not satisfy the rigorous standards of scientific evaluation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/microsoft-ai-human-reasoning.html

Sam Altman, head of the Microsoft team that made ChatGPT, told Congress that AI development should be regulated by a new national or international agency.
https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-openai-ceo-sam-altman-congress-73ff96c6571f38ad5fd68b3072722790

Altman and two fellow lead executives also released a statement about AI: “It’s conceivable that within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains, and carry out as much productive activity as one of today’s largest corporations.”
https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Elon Musk: “Over 20/30 year time frame I think things will be transformed beyond belief. Probably won’t recognize society in 30 years. [AGI] I think we’re only 3 years, maybe 6 years away… we are on the event horizon of the black hole that is ASI.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1661834925488881664

A large number of AI experts and technology executives signed this public statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk

‘The former Google CEO told The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council: “My concern with AI is actually existential, and existential risk is defined as many, many, many, many people harmed or killed. And there are scenarios not today but reasonably soon, where these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits in cyber issues or discover new kinds of biology.” Schmidt also said that governments needed to ensure the technology was not “misused by evil people.”‘
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-111500864.html

Remember back in 2015 when computer-generated artwork looked like an acid trip? In another eight years, we’ll look back on today’s computer-generated art–with its six-fingered fake people–the same way.
https://uproxx.com/technology/let-googles-deep-dream-ai-turn-your-photos-into-psychadelic-nightmare-fuel/
https://hyperallergic.com/808778/ai-image-generators-finally-figured-out-hands/

There’s now a ChatGPT phone app, and it can communicate through speech instead of writing if you want. I predict the level of AI technology depicted in the first half of the film “Her” will exist by the end of this decade.
https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-iphone-app/

The controversy over race-swapping actors in movies will disappear thanks to technology allowing viewers to customize which actors play which roles in the films they watch. Taken to its logical endpoint, each person will someday live in his own custom, virtual universe where they only see what they want to. The people who stand to lose out the most from this are those with especially strong inner drives to exercise power and dominance over other people through control of mainstream narratives and culture. It’s nothing more than an animal impulse, and is only a step removed from shouting down the other person during a debate so only your voice can be heard by other people.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1659935325488021507

IBM will stop hiring humans for jobs that computers can now do. As human workers in those positions leave and are not replaced, the company could ultimately slim down its workforce by 7,800.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-01/ibm-to-pause-hiring-for-back-office-jobs-that-ai-could-kill

NVIDIA used the latest technology to create an immersive, first-person game with an NPC that can carry on non-scripted conversations with human players.
https://youtu.be/5R8xZb6J3r0

A fake computer-generated image of thick smoke billowing from a building near the Pentagon caused stocks to drop within minutes of it appearing on social media. Though the image was quickly revealed to be fake and the stocks recovered, the incident shows how such computer-generated disinformation can affect the real world.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/23/an-a-i-generated-spoof-rattles-the-markets/

Our failure to create an AI that reliably predict the results of chemical reactions underscores how poor quality our data are. The temptation to fudge results and to omit reporting unwanted results is very widespread among chemists.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/give-me-those-hard-hard-numbers

These videos of “Robotis OP3” robots playing soccer with each other show how far machine dexterity has come, and how far it still has to go.
https://youtu.be/WlIYa3lH5UI

Computers can scan fMRI brain scan data to determine what moving images people were seeing. I’m starting to think it will be possible someday to scan peoples’ brains to download their memories. We might even be able to implant them in other peoples’ brains.
https://mind-video.com/

‘Boring Report is an app that aims to remove sensationalism from the news and makes it boring to read. In today’s world, catchy headlines and articles often distract readers from the actual facts and relevant information. By utilizing the power of advanced AI language models capable of generating human-like text, Boring Report processes exciting news articles and transforms them into the content that you see. This helps readers focus on the essential details and minimizes the impact of sensationalism.’
https://www.boringreport.org/app

Lab-grown diamonds are getting much more common.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/05/diamond-arbitrage.html

Famous investor Balaji Srinivasan conceded his bet that Bitcoin’s value would rise to $1 million within 90 days.
‘Bitcoin is currently trading at about $29,000. That’s about a 10% gain from the $26,000 mark when Srinivasan made the bet.’
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonkochkodin/2023/05/02/balaji-srinivasan-concedes-bet-that-bitcoin-will-reach-1-million-in-90-days/

If, like most sensible people, you think Jim Cramer is terrible at predicting the stock market, you can invest in an ETF that bets against whatever he recommends.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bet-against-jim-cramer-etf-122021151.html

NVIDIA’s market capitalization reached $1 trillion, making it the first semiconductor company to do so and only the ninth company of any kind to do so. It makes computer processors specialized for AI systems like the GPT series, so its profits have surged along with the popularity of those programs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/nvidia-crosses-1-trillion-market-193710045.html

Here’s a fascinating video explaining the pros and cons of building motorcycles out of different types of metals.
https://youtu.be/ah7Ubbq5EAA

3D printed guns have greatly improved over the last 10 years.
https://youtu.be/rdu53_aCsOM

China is the leader in retracted science papers.
https://dapp.orvium.io/deposits/6442fee5c93d17c257de17d2/view

I knew that smoke clouds could reflect sunlight back into space before it reached the ground, lowering ground-level temperatures. However, under some circumstances, the clouds can also RAISE ground temperatures by blocking ground heat from radiating into space.
https://www.weather.gov/bgm/WeatherInActionSmokePlume

Across the world, there are dried-up lakes that we could refill by building pipelines connecting them to the oceans. The Dead Sea and Death Valley are examples. Since the dried up lakes are below sea level, gravity would move the water through the pipelines and no pumps would be needed. We could even put hydroelectric turbines in the pipelines to generate electricity from the flow.

Once refilled with water, the dead lakes could support life along their shores. Their filling would also slightly decrease sea levels, partly mitigating one effect of global warming.

The dead lakes are all barren deserts with almost no life, so flooding them would not cause any ecological damage. If anything, it would help the environment since plants and animals would have new places to live.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/seaflooding

Paradoxically, building more housing units in an expensive city like San Francisco might actually increase its average home prices.
“My claim is that increasing density within a city shifts the demand curve for housing within that city, because of increasing desirability.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-housing

In the U.S., the rise of telework has done serious damage to small businesses in downtown areas that depended on patronage from office workers.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/12/1173902715/work-from-home-office-space-small-businesses

Microsoft has pledged to buy electricity from a company called “Helion,” which plans to have a working fusion reactor, starting in 2028. I’m skeptical it will work out.
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-helion-fusion-PPA-with-microsoft-constellation/

Dr. Garry Nolan claims that there has been a long-term alien presence on Earth, that they’re beyond our comprehension and interact with us using more primitive “intermediaries,” and that he knows people who have worked on reverse-engineering alien technology possessed by the U.S. government. It would be easy to dismiss him if he weren’t such an intelligent and extraordinarily credentialed person.
https://youtu.be/e2DqdOw6Uy4
https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/garry-nolan

Virgin Galactic’s space plane made another successful, manned flight to the edge of space.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/business/virgin-galactic-test-flight-space-scn/index.html

China wants to put a human on the Moon by 2030.
https://apnews.com/article/china-space-program-moon-368d45fa997307ae2c94bcd7e066e2b4

A paraplegic can walk again thanks to a brain implant that sends wireless signals to a second implant in his spinal cord.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01728-0

ChatGPT answers medical questions from average people just as correctly as human doctors, and with a higher level of empathy on average.
https://today.ucsd.edu/story/study-finds-chatgpt-outperforms-physicians-in-high-quality-empathetic-answers-to-patient-questions

Doctors perform lifesaving brain surgery on fetus in the womb
https://news.yahoo.com/doctors-perform-lifesaving-brain-surgery-175040202.html

The new Alzheimer’s drug probably doesn’t help much.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lilly-s-new-donanemab-data-alzheimer-s

The FDA approved a vaccine for a respiratory virus that afflicts elderly people and kills 6,000 – 10,000 of them each year in the U.S.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv-vaccine

The WHO ends global health emergency declaration for COVID-19
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/05/05/1174269442/who-ends-global-health-emergency-declaration-for-covid-19

The WHO also ends its global health emergency about Monkey pox
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-65564033

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Musings 3

Transgendered and transsexual people clue us in to the attributes that posthumans will have. Like other organisms, humans have no natural control over their genetics or of the conditions they experience while developing in their mother’s womb. Those factors very heavily determine most of a person’s traits, including sex, gender, and anatomy. We accept the crapshoot of unchosen genes and prenatal influences since it is beyond any individual’s control has always been the basic reality of our existence, but technology will free our descendants from it and its severe limitations.

Posthumans will have the inbuilt ability to change their genes and biology to do things like become a different sex, become a different gender with the attendant changes in mental preferences, or to change many other aspects of themselves like intelligence level or height. That kind of adaptability will make posthumans more adaptable to a broader range of environments, will make their lives much more experientially rich than our own, and will let them understand one another in ways we can’t. For example, a person born male might be able to experience pregnancy. Individuals could also create offspring (perhaps clones of themselves) through self-fertilization, which would make them more survivable as a species than we are since just one individual could create a community of posthumans. Space colonization would also be easier for them as a result.

Instead of having XY or XX sex chromosomes, posthumans would all have XXY chromosomes, with one of the X’s or the Y chromosome inactive at any one time to make them male or female, respectively. It might be advantageous for some parts of their body to have different sex chromosome expressions than other parts.

If we create technology that can slow, halt, or reverse the aging process in humans, then it will inevitably be used to prolong the lives of animals. People already spend fortunes on their beloved pets, and some are already cloning their dead pets, so this is just a logical next step. Cryopreservation of dead pets will also happen, if it isn’t being done already.

This raises the possibility of weird scenarios, like 200-year-old dogs running around, and someone putting their dog into cryostasis due to a catastrophic vehicle injury and the slim hope the future surgeries will be able to fix it, and also making a clone of that dog to be a companion in the interim. Like Barbra Streisand bringing her two cloned dogs to the gravestone of the dead original, maybe our fictitious person will bring his clone to Alcor to stand next to one of the vats. Moreover, if mind uploading becomes possible and is a viable means of radical life extension, then some animals will inevitably have their minds uploaded. What would it be like to merge digital minds with a cat?

One explanation for Fermi’s Paradox is all aliens leave our universe for ones that are much better. Maybe in our universe, the Higgs Boson is not at its true vacuum state, meaning our universe could literally cease to exist at any moment (for all we know, the decay has already started somewhere and the shockwave will hit Earth tomorrow). Assume that, once an intelligent alien species reaches the level of science and technology we’ll reach in, say, 2200 AD, it discovers the truth about the Higgs Boson and also discovers how to travel to other universes that don’t have this problem and/or how to create universes that don’t have the problem. Intelligent species by definition make intelligent choices, so they all leave our universe. This happens long before any of them have had enough time to colonize more than a few light years of space.

This might also explain why we have not, to our knowledge, been visited by life forms from parallel universes.

The Sahara Desert is an enormous waste of space, is larger than it should be thanks to the actions of humans, and will probably be radically altered once AIs are in charge of the world. The Sahara was a savannah and had several mega lakes until a few thousand years ago, when humans started slowly desertifying it with animal grazing and, to a lesser extent, plant farming. Ending those practices around the edges of the desert along with ending most water diversions for human purposes would cause the desert to immediately start shrinking. Carefully planting trees and other plants at the edges of the desert would accelerate that soil and climate reclamation process further (various African countries are already trying to do this, but the effort is sputtering).

Building canals could also allow the extinct and nearly extinct mega lakes of the Sahara to be refilled with seawater from the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans, and freshwater from the rainy central part of the continent. Installing massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panel farms in the Sahara would also increase rainfall and lower ground temperatures through different mechanisms. It would also of course generate large amounts of electricity.

A milder climate and an advanced electricity infrastructure would make the Sahara much more suitable for machine and human habitation. Refilling some of the mega lakes with seawater would also slightly lower global sea levels, which would partly mitigate one aspect of global warming. Finally, the return of vegetation to the Sahara as it transformed back into a savannah would sequester large amounts of CO2, which would also combat global warming’s effects.

Having only one organ dedicated to key biofunctions was the “good enough” design solution natural selection picked, and was surely driven by the need to conserve bodily resources, but it also creates single points of failure that can kill the organism. A human has only one liver, one heart, one stomach, and a brain localized in one place. If we were to redesign ourselves as posthumans that were partly or fully organic, distributing key functions among multitudes of smaller organs would be wise.  That said, the problem with having more than one heart is that their beats would need to be synchronized. 

If we are trying to maximize utility and minimize harm to sentient life forms, and if we throw future technologies into the mix, we are led to some counterintuitive far future scenarios. For example, if we make it our goal to provide the happiest conditions to the largest number of people, then we end up removing all brains from our bodies and putting them in jars, incinerating the bodies, building The Matrix, and plugging all the brains into it. Since a person’s brain consumes 20% of their calories, dispensing with the rest of our bodies means we can support 5x as many “humans” for the same amount of energy.

And if we also choose the goal of minimizing animal suffering, we capture every member of every species that can experience suffering, remove their brains, and put them in The Matrix, too. 

The optimal “future way of living” might be a totally industrialized Earth, devoid of wild, complex life forms, and nearly devoid of any natural spaces, with vast warehouses full of brains in jars with wires coming out of them. This sounds horrific, but it seems like the logical best choice. 

Earth’s forests would all be cut down to make way for solar panels to power the Matrix’ simulated virtual forests, which would be much more beautiful than their real counterparts were.