Russia’s military losses in the Ukraine War are about $34 billion so far. If the War ended today, Russia could replace its losses over the next five years if it raised its defense budget by 12%, which would be a tolerable strain on its economy and taxpayers. It could replace its armored vehicle losses by upgrading old tanks that have been in storage for decades, and by increasing production rates of new vehicles at existing factories. However, the War isn’t going to end today, and it and the associated sanctions could instead turn into a massive resource drain that depletes even Russia’s famously large stockpiles of old weapons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SJHZAG4c2w
Putin has ordered the Russian army to expand by 13%, or 137,000 men, by the end of this year. This is certainly meant to make up for the country’s losses sustained so far in Ukraine (at least 15,000 dead and some multiple of that permanently put out of action by injury), plus those expected to be lost during the next four months. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-government-and-politics-d0f341d2f5c295c0f7be4ee1ba8b60fe
Taiwan’s tanks are old, but still adequate for their intended defensive role. This is because if China invaded, it would only be able to send its light amphibious tanks to the island, and they have weak armor and only average guns. Taiwan’s tanks are a match for them. That said, Taiwan could substantially improve its loss/kill ratios in such a conflict by buying newer, better thanks now. The video makes it clear that a mixed force of modern, heavy M1 Abrams tanks and a much lighter armored vehicle would dominate the Chinese amphibious tanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf2JYLlqoCE
Here’s an in-depth analysis of the Russian AK-107 assault rifle, which has a complex “balanced recoil system” that its designers claim almost eliminates felt recoil. In reality, it doesn’t yield enough of a benefit to justify the extra cost, complexity, weight, and reliability penalties that it imposes on an AK rifle. Screwing a simple compensator onto the end of the barrel is a much better way to improve the weapon’s controllability. Like so many advanced Russian weapons, the AK-107’s mystique dissolves once Westerners are able to get their hands on it and do tests and analyses. This is why you should be skeptical of Russia’s claims to have things like working hypersonic missiles and nuclear torpedoes that can make tsunamis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LTiCZwEOo
Here’s a nifty new device: rubber bands that go around the barrels of rifles and change colors as they get hotter. Gun barrels warm up as more bullets are shot through them, which temporarily warps the metal and changes the trajectories of the bullets. A shooter could adjust his aim accordingly if he could tell at a glance how hot his barrel was. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2022/08/25/caveman-spark-ar-15-crush-washers/
The USSR’s legendary T-34 tank was overrated in many ways. These men go inside one and show how fundamentally unsafe and uncomfortable it was for its crewmen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBqCLHfcHGY
The U.S. has an enormous economy of scale advantage when it comes to the defense sector, that in turn guarantees the global primacy of American weapons. It makes no economic sense for countries will smaller economies to even try developing their own high-end weapons like fighter planes. https://youtu.be/7Z_gTGJc7nQ
Recent advances in computer-generated art, writing, and other types of content creation suggest a deluge of high-quality, customized digital content is coming in the near future. Maybe humans will end up living in billions of Matrix simulations, with each one optimized for the needs and tastes of each human. https://socialwarming.substack.com/p/the-approaching-tsunami-of-addictive
Google has unveiled experimental house robots that can obey human voice commands to do simple tasks like handing people cans of soda. I’m surprised that machines haven’t mastered such skills, yet can now create artwork as well as the best humans. Expect more counterintuitive improvements to machine capabilities as time passes. It won’t be like in the movies. https://www.reuters.com/technology/ok-google-get-me-coke-ai-giant-demos-soda-fetching-robots-2022-08-16/
These plumbing leak sensors are all impractical due to cost and/or limited leak detection ability. A much better alternative to hooking up an electronic water flow meter to each water fixture in your house would be to have a robot walk around and check them once a week. You could probably get away with doing it much less often than that. You’d get the most bang for your buck by having a robot monitor your house’s water meter during periods of time when no water was being used in your house, like multi-hour stretches when you were away at work. If the meter showed water consumption was happening during those times, the robot would know a pipe was leaking somewhere in your house, and it would look for it. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/smart-gadgets-save-homes-from-water-leaks/
‘The Moon is an ideal location to launch intercepting missions to life-threatening and catastrophic asteroids. The effectiveness of the interception greatly depends on the weight of the spacecraft. Unfortunately, interceptors launched from the Earth lose more than 98% of their weight by burning the majority of their onboard fuel and by jettisoning their lower stage structures before entering a heliocentric orbit. However, if interceptors are launched from the Moon by a lunar surface accelerator, they can enter a heliocentric orbit without consuming any onboard fuel or jettisoning any part of the spacecraft. A 5-ton construction package, which consists of robots and industrial production equipment, would enable mining on the moon and construction of a 3.5 km-long, 5,000-ton accelerator.’ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468896717300617
Batteries only need to get a little bit better for it to make financial sense to convert smaller cargo ships to use electric engines. Today, those ships use diesel engines that burn very dirty fuel and are very polluting. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
Large volcanic eruptions are a greater threat to Earth and humans than asteroid impacts, yet the latter gets more attention and more preventative funding. We should spend more money to monitor volcanoes and investigate the feasibility of defusing volcanoes before they erupt by drilling ventilation holes into their magma chambers. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02177-x
The human eye and its associated nerves and muscles have many design flaws. Octopi and squid actually have better-evolved eyes than we do. Radically redesigned eyes are a good example of a improvement that our descendants will have in the future, courtesy of genetic engineering. Externally, their eyes will look like ours, but the amount of genetic reprogramming necessary to make theirs will be so great that they won’t have Homo sapiens genomes. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1
The first synthetic mouse embryos, which were made from only the mother’s DNA, have been created. This or another technique will eventually be used on humans, and will allow single people to conceive children regardless of their own natural fertility status, and without need of a partner’s DNA. It will also inaugurate an era of unauthorized human cloning, where DNA samples of unwitting third parties will be surreptitiously collected and then traded on black markets. https://apnews.com/article/synthetic-mouse-embryos-created-7f75da0c53f9d22c4e4dbf8a847d75bf
The leading theory about what causes Alzheimer’s disease–agglomerations of protein plaques in the spaces between brain cells–might be wrong. In fact, a seminal scientific paper supporting the theory might be full of fraudulent data. Billions of dollars have been spent developing Alzheimer’s drugs that target the protein plaques in the brain, and all have failed to help patients. If a scientist’s deliberate fraud caused this, then I think it should be considered a crime against humanity. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
Here’s a video of Ukrainian troops operating a captured Russian T-80 tank. They praise its gas turbine engine and high technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFzXiAdfPvw
In 1951, the CIA got its hands on a T-34/85 tank, the USSR’s best tank of WWII, and did a detailed technical analysis of it. Overall, they thought it was great, but with notable defects. It would be interesting to see what an Americanized T-34/85, with all the flaws the CIA found being fixed, would have been like. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81-01044R000100070001-4.pdf
Someone attached a remove-controlled assault rifle to a robot dog’s back. Though it’s clearly too crude to be useful, it points towards something that will be common in the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-It_O0bL0v8
The forgotten 2000 film Red Planet featured a killer robot named “AMEE.” Its superhuman speed and agility make it a potential mass murderer if armed only with a kitchen knife. In the far future, I think robots will have these kinds of capabilities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y75hrsA7jyw
‘[We’re] now releasing predicted structures for nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, which will expand the AlphaFold DB by over 200x – from nearly 1 million structures to over 200 million structures – with the potential to dramatically increase our understanding of biology.’ https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-reveals-the-structure-of-the-protein-universe
It might be possible to grow plants in the dark by feeding them nutrients produced by algae. The algae, in turn, are fed nutrients created through a process called “electrocatalysis,” which harnesses electricity generated by solar panels. In effect, the plant crops would still be nourished by sunlight, though the artificial process might be more efficient since solar panels are better at turning sunlight into energy than chloroplasts inside of plant leaves are. https://www.wired.com/story/plants-growing-in-darkness/
Today’s skyscrapers could stay standing for thousands of years, so long as people are around to do piecemeal replacements of their structural parts as they wear out over time. Buildings can be designed from the outset to make this easier to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v3f_Q-ySa4
Across several domains of software, exponentially large improvements to hardware are required to make linear gains in performance. This means if Moore’s Law stops, progress will really slow down. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14007
Russia continued focusing all its strength on capturing the far eastern region of Ukraine, known as “Donbass.” Over the course of the month, Russian forces used their superior artillery and troop numbers to grind down Ukraine’s defenders in continuous battles of attrition. Losses were high on both sides.
Russia’s surprisingly weak performance in Ukraine suggests that NATO intelligence overestimated it, and the alliance could defend itself from Russia with fewer troops than it thought. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2022.2078044
Glimpse the future: A Ukrainian flying drone equipped with a thermal camera and bombs tracked down a group of Russian soldiers hiding in the woods at night and killed several of them with its payload. https://youtu.be/TgdcsIFX8vA
Russian forces had to abandon “Snake Island,” which they captured at the start of the war, due to heavy losses from frequent Ukrainian attacks. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61992491
Francis Fukuyama’s predictions from March 10 that the Russian army would lose the war in Ukraine by now, mostly due to supply shortages, was wrong (though other aspects of his analysis were right) because the Russians realized they were overextended and retreated from everywhere but southern and far eastern Ukraine before their war machine broke down. https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/preparing-for-defeat/
After over 50 years of using the M-16 series of assault rifles, the U.S. Army has announced it is finally adopting a replacement. To be called the “M-5,” the new rifle is bigger, more powerful, and possesses some more technically advanced features than its predecessor. https://youtu.be/MTZRCEh1Czg
Text-to-image computer algorithms just keep getting better the more models we feed into them. Look at the improvement that happens when the algorithms have 350 million, 750 million, 3 billion and 20 billion models. https://parti.research.google/
A Google chatbot called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications) claimed in a conversation with one of its developers that it was sentient and had emotions. After reporting the exchange to his superiors, who proved unsympathetic, the developer, Blake Lemoine, leaked the text of the conversation with the machine to the media. I doubt LaMDA is actually sentient or emotional, but it’s remarkable we’ve already reached this milestone, and the machine should be given some benefit of the doubt and tested further. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
Because the Earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the star that is directly above the North Pole gradually changes. A dearth of stars above Antarctica means there isn’t a “South Star.” https://explainingscience.org/2020/09/25/the-changing-pole-star/
A “sun gun” is an orbital weapon that reflects and concentrates beams of sunlight onto targets on the Earth’s surface, frying them. It can be done with one, large satellite with an attached, concave mirror, or with many small satellites with small attached mirrors. (Do Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have mirrored sides?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun
The Iñupiaq people of Alaska have a unique, base-20 numeral system called “Kaktovik” that embeds the numerical value of each symbol into its appearance. The number and arrangement of strokes indicates a character’s value. This makes it possible to do some complex equations much more easily than is possible using the modernized Arabic numerals that are the global standard today. https://youtu.be/EyS6FfczH0Q
Pumped hydro is an excellent way to store excess power, but it can only be built in a small number of places with the right geography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI
The amount of land humans devote to producing food peaked around 2000 and has been declining ever since. This is mostly due to shrinkage of pasture land for grazing animals, and also to more efficient farming practices and technologies being adopted everywhere. https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land
We all know about electric eels, which can generate electric shocks to paralyze their prey, but did you know there are also aquatic animals that can generate and sense weak electric fields for the purposes of merely finding prey and communicating with other members of their species? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception_and_electrogenesis
A member of Vladimir Putin’s entourage collects his feces in a special briefcase whenever he travels abroad to prevent foreign spies from getting it and analyzing it to uncover the leader’s genetics and health status. https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-poop-case-moscow-health-problems
New information has been released about the first pig heart transplant. After receiving the new organ, the recipient lived for two months before it became so weak that it couldn’t keep him conscious, and his family decided to end his life support. Crucially, the organ didn’t fail due to the man’s immune system rejecting it. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/pig-heart-transplant-failed-as-its-heart-muscle-cells-died/
Instead of doing a long essay or analysis, I’m trying something different this month by posting a bunch of short, undeveloped thoughts that are in line with the usual topics I cover on this blog. Frankly, I can’t manage more than this right now since my life has gotten VERY busy, though I have hope things will calm down soon. Here are my musings…
In the not-too-distant future, I think it will be possible to make a “computerized helmet” that could induce altered states of consciousness. The inside of the helmet would have electrodes that monitored your brain’s activity, and headphones would be attached to its sides, and video display to its front. Think of it as the Ganzfeld Experiment on steroids.
When worn, the helmet would play combinations of images and sounds, monitor their effects on your brain activity, and change the images and sounds in real time to ease your mind into an altered state. Each person might need a unique audiovisual experience to attain it, and some might be totally resistant to the machine’s effects.
In the far future, once we have advanced brain implants that are integrated into every region of the brain, it should be possible to use the devices to trigger any desired mental state, including ecstasy or intoxication. Direct electronic stimulation of the brain’s pleasure regions could make chemical-based drugs like heroin obsolete. The ability to experience blinding, pure pleasure on command might also be the doom of the human race as we know it.
If it is possible to make robots that look and act just like humans (androids), then it should be possible to make robot imitations of animals. In fact, I think the latter would be easier since animals have narrower ranges of behaviors, emotional states, and cognition. There would be some demand for animal-robots from people who wanted pets but without the hassles of dealing with their waste, feeding, or other needs. Moreover, since robots have effectively unlimited lifespans, they would be attractive to people who couldn’t bear the pain of seeing their pets age, sicken and die.
Robots are also infinitely more customizable than biological organisms, meaning people could have pets custom-made for their needs. One person might make a robot replica of a beloved natural pet that died, complete with an accurate personality and behavioral profile derived from video footage of the original pet. Another person might want a cat that was as smart as a human child and could speak simple sentences. Someone else might want a robotic cat-dog hybrid.
With moderate levels of genetic engineering, domesticated animals like cats and dogs could be made to understand a wider range of spoken human words and could make more sounds of their own, though they’ll never achieve the ability to truly understand and speak language. Computers will assist by “translating” animal noises, facial expressions, and other behaviors into human speech that nearby people can understand (this was recently done with pig grunts), and perhaps by doing the reverse for the animals’ benefit. In the very long run, linked brain implants will let us sense what animals are thinking and feeling, and to telepathically communicate with them to some degree.
One solution to global warming is to put large sunshades in space, positioned between the Sun and Earth. They would block sunlight from reaching the planet, cooling it down. Instead of there being only one, large sunshade, there would be many small ones, whose shadows would, in aggregate, cover the same area that a single large one would.
The sunshades would be able to maneuver, so they could cast their shadows on specific parts of the Earth, at specific times. We could have scheduled, “artificial eclipses” over cities if people wanted to experience them, and we could cool down hurricanes to weaken them, or cool down their fringes to steer them away from land.
As a bonus, the sunward sides of the sunshades would be covered in solar panels, producing electricity that the sunshades could use to power their maneuvering thrusters or to recharge other space ships that docked with them. They might even beam some of the power down to the Earth’s surface as microwaves.
Note: I have no illusions that we could launch enough sunshades into space to halt global warming anytime soon. We need to use technologies that already exist to deal with the problem, starting now.
Sunshades could also act as planet-killing weapons. Build one and position it so it blocks all light from reaching a planet from the star it is orbiting. This would only work against planets that lacked intelligent life forms capable of space flight.
Once AGI exists, it will be able to accurately emulate the styles of famous, long-dead writers and artists like Shakespeare, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Stanley Kubrick, and to produce new creative works in the same veins. It might even be better.
If we’re willing to throw a lot of resources at the problem, we might be able to use “ancestor simulations” to replicate, say, Shakespeare. Start with an accurate simulation of 1600s England and experiment with different Shakespeare bots, each growing up in environments as closely matching his as possible. See what plays each bot produces, and rewind and replay the simulation as many times as is needed, but with iterative tweaks to the environment and/or to the Shakespeare bot until the plays align with those the real Shakespeare wrote. At that point, you’re done, and you could use the bot to write entirely new, authentic plays.
Once restaurants have robot chefs, not only will the quality of the meals increase but the variety will as well. A team of robots would know how to combine ten, simple ingredients in enough ways to make hundreds of dishes (think of how contestant chefs on the show Chopped have to creatively use random ingredients to make meals in a hurry). A customer could even upload a complex recipe to the robots that they had never seen before and have it prepared expertly. Instead of future dining consisting of insect paste and some kind of bland, artificial food, I see things headed in the opposite direction, towards more complexity and variety.
Whenever wormholes are depicted in science fiction, they’re always used as a means of transportation across vast distances. However, the wormholes would have other, revolutionary applications. A tiny wormhole that had one end in a portable electronic device and another end in a large power plant could serve as an effectively unlimited “battery” for the device. Another tiny wormhole with one end in the device and the other in a massive heat sink could also remove effectively unlimited amounts of waste heat from the former. A Star Wars laser pistol that could fire an infinite number of shots, each powerful enough to kill someone, could be built.
After initial overconfidence and battlefield failures, the Russians have pared down their war objectives to conquering only the Russian-majority areas of eastern and southeastern Ukraine. In spite of serious losses, concentrating their forces in those areas led to significant gains of territory, and Russia now controls a swath of Ukraine stretching from Crimea in the south to just east of Kharkiv in the north. The capture of Mariupol provides Russia with a secure overland route to Crimea. Elsewhere, Ukraine has driven Russian troops back across the entire border of Belarus, and back across the northernmost stretch of its border with Russia itself. In a major victory, Ukraine also halted a Russian attempt to capture the northeastern city of Kharkiv. The war is taking economic tolls on both countries, though neither looks like it’s about to lose the capacity to fight soon.
Surveillance cameras filmed a group of Russian soldiers shooting two Ukrainian men in their backs at a car dealership, then looting the inside of one of the buildings. https://youtu.be/1GUrNPPTSWM
One of Russia’s second-most advanced tanks, the T-90M, was destroyed in Ukraine. The tank had to be abandoned after suffering battle damage or a malfunction in the field, and then another Russian tank in its unit shot it and blew it up before driving away to prevent Ukrainians from capturing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjx_GMLF–Y
‘SHOCKING video captures the moment a Russian tank is reportedly blown up, sending its turret hurtling 250ft into the air following a Ukrainian missile strike.’ https://youtu.be/QiybJ8UuHXA
Russia is sending obsolescent T-62 tanks towards Ukraine. While many crowed that it proved Russian losses were so high that they had run out of modern tanks, it’s likelier that the T-62s will be used to arm pro-Russian militias in occupied parts of Ukraine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNlb8qNykrg
Due to manpower losses, Russia has also removed its upper age limit of 40 for people to enlist in its army. However, recruits over that age will only be allowed to serve in specific, non-combat roles. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61619638
This March 20 Twitter thread, which predicted Russia’s entire military truck fleet would be incapacitated by now, leaving their frontline forces without supplies, was too dire. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505370275273183239.html
During WWII, the Germans captured countless Allied weapons, from small arms to tanks, and even captured foreign weapon factories. They put it all to use, especially as material shortages worsened and undermined their ability to make their own things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeb1-bI5gA
A typical scenario: A tank is immobilized by damage, but not destroyed. It breaks down near the front lines or in enemy territory. While the tank is technically repairable, fixing it would take time, and the crewmen decide to abandon it and flee because enemy forces are nearby and could burst out of the treeline or come over the hill at any minute and kill them. Intact tanks are commonly lost to the enemy this way, and there were many such incidents early in WWII that let the Axis and Allies capture examples of each others’ best tanks, and to study them in labs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_131
BAE Systems unveiled a “robot tank” in the form of a remote-controlled M113 with an advanced rocket launcher on top. Since the vehicle doesn’t carry humans inside, its roof could be lowered to save weight and make it a smaller target. I predicted robot tanks would be smaller than their manned equivalents. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/army-tests-uncrewed-m113-armed-with-laser-guided-rocket-launcher
A Chinese robotics lab built a swarm of flying drones that could navigate an unfamiliar forest without crashing into any trees or other objects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ZbipO8vxM
This video of a soldier holding a 60mm mortar tube and firing the weapon from that position gives a sense of how much recoil it has. No wonder they’re supposed to be firmly set in the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB-r352j2FI
It’s The Future, so where are our jetpacks? Well, even if the technology were affordable and practical, it would be too dangerous to use. https://youtu.be/KWmTZaGpzTo
The first synthetic dye, mauveine, was invented in 1855. For all of human history until 1855, the only way you could add color to a garment was to soak it in natural dyes. Most natural dyes fade shockingly quickly in the sunlight, and the clothing industry has long considered them obsolete. This means, in the old days, people either wore un-dyed clothes or badly faded clothes. Imagine a lot of shades of brown. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273606710_The_rate_of_fading_of_natural_dyes
A new, diamond-based disc can store as much data as a billion Blu-ray discs. I don’t worry about scenarios where all (or most) human knowledge is lost due to a catastrophe like nuclear war or a solar flare frying all our computer hard drives. Someday, we’ll have small, cheap storage devices that can contain all important information we know of, kind of like a thumbdrive containing full downloads of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It would just take one of them survive a global catastrophe. https://gizmodo.com/quantum-computing-diamond-disc-could-store-billion-blu-1848853029
Here’s a long interview with professor Chris Mason, a very fascinating man who envisions the future of space exploration and of humankind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2tPFCGL1U
A small, private space company called “Rocket Lab” used a helicopter to snag one of their rockets in midair as it slowly parachuted back to Earth after putting satellites in orbit. The recovery technique will let them reuse their space rockets, saving large amounts of money. https://www.space.com/rocket-lab-helicopter-booster-catch-satellite-launch
In 1971, a plane taking mapping photos of a remote part of Costa Rica captured one of the clearest images of a UFO to date. The film negatives have been re-scanned, and even higher-res photos derived from it were just released. https://www.uapmedia.uk/articles/costarica-ufo?format=amp
Quantum computers will be so powerful in the future that it will be possible to create accurate simulations of groups of individual atoms and their internal and external forces. This will lead to advances in battery design and materials science more generally as engineers will be able to rapidly experiment with all kinds of simulated alloys and element combinations to discover materials that have the optimal properties for different applications. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/how-quantum-simulations-are-set-to-revolutionize-lithium-batteries
In Madagascar, people of mainland African descent reproduced more than people of Indian Ocean rim descent because the former are more genetically resistant to malaria. Only in the central highlands, where mosquitoes are rarer, do non-Africans still predominate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03342-5
More proof that human intelligence has a strong genetic component: Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific ‘families’, one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20491
Imagine this: the world is wracked by a mysterious disease that some claim the government deliberately created and released as part of a secret plan to expand its power. Infected people and even those suspected of being infected are forcibly quarantined and arrested. The police are the faceless enforcers of these rules, and wear high-tech helmets that thermographically scan passersby, and visually highlight people with high body temperatures on the police officer’s computerized visor. China has turned into a Deus Ex video game. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202004/biometric-face-scanning-helmets-reading-the-temperatures-of-people-in-crowds-in-china
Exposure to sarin nerve gas is probably what caused Gulf War Syndrome. It’s amazing how such faint contact with a substance can cause chronic illness and early death to so many people. The human body is frail. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61398886
On May 7, 1922, an article titled “What the world will be like in a hundred years” appeared in the (now defunct) New York Herald. Its author, W.L. George, was a well-known English novelist. Since we’ve reached George’s deadline, it’s worth analyzing his accuracy by comparing the world as we see it to how he predicted it would be.
Therefore it is without anxiety, that I suggest a picture of this world a hundred years hence, and venture as my first guess that the world at that time would be remarkable to one of our ghosts, not so much because it was so different as because it was so similar.
In the main the changes which we may expect must be brought about by science. It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same.
Correct. X-ray imaging technology was invented in 1895, was a revolutionary medical advance, and was still relatively new in 1922. Since then, many other medical imaging technologies that make use of phenomena other than X-rays have been discovered, including ultrasounds, CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, and fMRIs. On the other hand, human nature and fundamental interpersonal dynamics have not changed. Our technology changes infinitely faster than we as a species can evolve.
I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms. The little girl at Grand Central is a blase child; to her these things are commonplace; the year 2022 would have to produce something very startling to interest her ghost.
Debatable. Today there are many innovations that a person from 1922 would struggle to conceptually understand, like the internet, autonomous cars, space rockets, space stations, video calls, access to a million songs and almost all other human-generated content and knowledge from a pocket-sized device, nuclear weapons, machines that can carry on simple conversations about most topics.
The sad thing about discovery is that it works toward its own extinction, and that the more- we discover the less there is left.
This is an observation, not a prediction, but it could stand analysis. Whether there is a finite amount that can be known is a question we still haven’t answered. Even if potential knowledge is finite and science has boundaries, it might take us thousands or millions of years to run out of things to discover. Just this month, data from the Hubble Space Telescope indicated that astronomers’ long-standing estimate of how fast the universe is expanding is wrong, suggesting that there is a basic and important error in our understanding of physics. Moreover, if the recent, high-profile UFO sightings are to be believed, it is possible to build space ships that can violate the known laws of physics and materials science.
I suspect that commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace. The passenger steamer will survive on the coasts, but it will have disappeared on the main routes, and will have been replaced by flying convoys, which should cover the distance between London and New York in about twelve hours. As I am anxious that the reader should not look upon me as a visionary, I would point out that in an airplane collision which happened recently a British passenger plane was traveling at 180 miles an hour, which speed would have brought it across the Atlantic in eighteen hours. It is therefore quite conceivable that America may become separated from Europe by only eight hours.
Correct. It takes about seven hours to directly fly from New York City to London, and about eight hours to do the reverse (times are different due to the Earth’s rotation). Common passenger planes like the Boeing 787 have cruising speeds of 550 – 600 mph. Air travel between Europe and North America is indeed very common.
“Passenger steamers,” which refers to passenger ships of any size that have steam engines for propulsion, are obsolete, and steam engines are little used among all types of ships (they still make sense for some niches). Planes have replaced ships for transoceanic transport, and in rich countries, cars and commuter trains are much more common modes of transport up and down riverine routes than boats. An important exception is short ferry trips, which remain the most sensible ways to travel in some locales.
As a means of everyday human transportation, ships have sharply declined since 1922, but they’ve found new life serving the leisure demands of people. The cruise ship industry is booming, and the boat tour industry is healthy.
The same cause will affect the railroads, which at that time will probably have ceased to carry passengers except for suburban traffic. Railroads may continue to handle freight, but it may be that even this will be taken from them by road traffic, because the automobile does not have to carry the enormous overhead charges of tracks. Certainly food, mails and all light goods will be taken over from the railroads by road trucks.
Half right, half wrong. In developed countries, trains are used much less for long-distance passenger traffic than they were in 1922, but they are still a primary means of daily transportation for people who live in cities or who commute into them for work. Railroads also remain the backbone of freight transportation. It’s still cheaper to move many types of cargoes by rail instead of by truck, and as the above chart shows, trains moved almost as much cargo in the U.S. as trucks did in 2018. Moreover, the total volume of material moved by rail in the U.S. increased from 1980 – 2018, showing that it’s not dying out.
The people of the year 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky: it Is practically certain that wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system long before the century is done. Possibly, too, power may travel through the air when means are found to prevent enormous voltages being suddenly discharged in the wrong place.
Mostly wrong. Power lines are underground in most parts of American cities, but they are still above ground almost everywhere else due to cost and ease of maintenance. Wireless telephones (cell phones) are indeed common, but the failure to find a safe, economical way to wirelessly transmit electricity means that power lines are still common sights.
Coal will not be exhausted, but our reserves will be seriously depleted, and so will those of oil. One of the world dangers a century hence will be a shortage of fuel, but it is likely that by that time a great deal of power will be obtained from tides, from the sun, probably from radium and other forms of radial energy, while it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed. If It is true that matter is kept together by forces known as electrons. It is possible that we shall know how to disperse matter so as to release the electron as a force. This force would last as long as matter, therefore as long as the earth itself.
This was half right, half wrong. We have used enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the last 100 years, but they are not near depletion. Coal reserves remain highest of all, and BP estimates the world has over 100 years of it remaining, at present usage rates. Oil is not close to running out, and fracking has substantially boosted the size of the global reserve.
Tidal power never became widespread because the technology proved too finicky in practice to be useful outside of a small number of places with ideal geography.
In 1922, when these predictions were made, science supported the notion that sunlight and radioactive metals could be used to generate electricity, so the author’s prescience about the rise of solar and nuclear energy was not thanks to clairvoyance–he was well-read on physics literature. That said, it took decades for the first commercial designs to be invented.
The movies will be more attractive, as long before 2022 they will have been replaced by the kinephone, which now exists only in the laboratory. That is the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only not need to know how to smile but also how to talk.
Correct. Movies started looking and sounding lifelike long before 2022. However, “the stage” did not entirely disappear. Live theatre plays are still held, though attending them is a marker of higher status (or pretensions to be such), whereas in 1922 it was a common venue of entertainment. This inversion also happened with horse ownership over the same period.
One might extend indefinitely on the number of inventions which ought to exist and will exist, but the reader can think of them for himself, and it is more interesting to ask ourselves what will be the appearance of our cities a hundred years hence. To my mind they will offer a mixed outlook, because mankind never tears anything down completely to build up something else; it erects the new while retaining the old; thus, many buildings now standing will be preserved. It is conceivable that the Capitol at Washington, many of the universities and churches will be standing a hundred years hence, and that they will, almost unaltered, be preserved by tradition.
Correct. It’s hard to think of a government capitol building in the U.S. that has been torn down since 1922, and it’s common to come across university buildings, churches and monuments that are over 100 years old today. If anything, we are taking historical building preservation too far, preventing valuable real estate from being used for new purposes. This is particularly bad in older cities like New York and San Francisco, where the inability to tear down smaller buildings and houses made in 1922 or earlier, or to even build contemporary structures next to them for fear of damaging the historic authenticity of the neighborhood, has produced affordable housing shortages and high commercial space rents.
Also, many private dwellings will survive and will be inhabited by individual families. I think that they will have passed through the cooperative stage, which may be expected fifty or sixty years hence, when the servant problem has become completely unmanageable and when private dwellings organize themselves to engage staffs to cook, clean, and mend for the groups. That cooperative stage will be the last kick of the private mistress who wants to retain in her household some sort of slave. In 2022 she will have been bent by circumstances, but she will have recovered her private dwelling, being served for seven hours a day by an orderly. The woman who becomes an orderly will be as well paid as if she were a stenographer, will wear her own clothes, be called “Miss,” belong to her trade union and work under union rules.
Wrong. This prediction touches on some peculiarities of life in 1922 that are almost forgotten today. Widespread poverty and sexism created a large number of women who were desperate for work, but could only find it in a handful of career fields that men eschewed. In 1922, it was much more common for women to work as domestic servants, and each day they would go to the houses of richer people to do cleaning, cooking, and other household tasks. Additionally, it was normal for even lower-middle-class households to employ domestic servants.
In 1922, labor-saving machines like dishwashers, clothes washers, and vacuum cleaners were not yet common, and because the average family was larger than today’s, it produced more of a daily mess. Most households simply lacked the time to meet their own cleaning and cooking needs, making domestic servants essential, or close to it.
At the same time, few people were willing to pay maids, cooks, and cleaners decent wages, making domestic servitude an unpopular and low-status line of work. There were never enough of them. The “servant problem” mentioned in the prediction was a common term in 1922 that described the shortfall of domestic servants in America. W.L. George predicted that the shortfall would keep growing until families would be forced to take advantage of economies of scale and get their domestic work done at an affordable cost by sharing servants. However, that “cooperative” arrangement would ultimately fail as the domestic servants unionized and forced households to give them high wages and reasonable workloads.
Things didn’t turn out that way. Labor-saving household innovations like the machines listed earlier, and like microwaveable and pre-packaged meals became widespread shortly after WWII, reducing the need for home servants. Clothing styles also became less formal, reducing the need to launder and iron clothes. Also, as laws and social norms changed, better types of careers opened for women, steadily thinning the ranks of domestic servants. By the 1970s, they had become rarities seldom encountered outside of rich households.
Naturally the work of the household, which is being reduced day by day, will in 2022 be a great deal lighter. I believe that most of the cleaning required to-day in a house will have been done away with. In the first place, through the disappearance of coal in all places where electricity is not made there will be no more smoke, perhaps not even that of tobacco. In the second place I have a vision of walls, furniture and hangings made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along the edges. Thus, instead of scrubbing its floors, the year 2022 will unscrew the brass edges or unstitch the tapes and peel off the dirty surface of the floor or curtains. Then every year a new floor board will be laid. One may hope that standard chairs, tables, carpets, will be peeled in the same way.
Half right and half wrong. Thanks to environmental laws enacted starting in the 1950s, levels of soot and other industrial toxins in the air are much lower than they were in 1922, and there are few places in the developed world where people have to scrub residue films off their houses and cars. W.L. George was right that this partly owes to changes in coal use: coal-burning stoves and boilers are no longer common in homes, buildings and factories, and the remaining coal consumption overwhelmingly occurs at large power plants. Those plants also have much better technology for filtering particulates out of their waste gas before it is released into the atmosphere.
W.L. George was also right that it would be much less common in 2022 for people to smoke indoors, leading to a further improvement in air quality and decreased need for cleaning since brownish nicotine stains no longer build up on walls and other surfaces.
However, his weird prediction that people would cover their floors and furniture in giant stickers that they could peel off and replace to avoid doing any cleaning didn’t come true. The impracticality of such a thing should have been obvious even in 1922, as getting a sticker that is the exact shape and size of the floor in a particular room of your house, removing all the objects from the room, peeling off the old sticker, applying the new sticker, and then putting the objects back in the room costs a lot of time and trouble. (Additionally, applying the new floor sticker without trapping any visible air bubbles under it or creating creases in it would probably be a frustrating effort) It’s easier to sweep or vacuum the bare floor as needed.
Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will–roll by their side.
Wrong. While culinary competence has declined in most countries, people still eat regular food, and “meal pills” don’t exist. This is because it’s impractical to cram enough calories into a swallowable pill to substitute for a full meal.
You’d have to swallow about this many large pills full of saturated fat to equal what you consume during a typical meal.
Saturated fat is the most calorie-dense substance, and “tallow” is the food product made of it and nothing else. One-hundred grams of tallow contains 902 calories, so obtaining a full day’s worth of 2,000 calories would require the consumption of 222 grams (nearly 8 ounces) of it. Divided equally between three meals, you’d have to swallow a literal cupped handful of tallow pills each time. It wouldn’t be convenient, it might take longer than expected to down them all, and the sudden dumping of fat into your body would cause havoc in your digestive system and damage your health over time if you subsisted on the pills. It wouldn’t be possible to pack 667 calories of tallow into four pills that would still be small enough for you to swallow, as W.L. George predicted.
Anyway, I doubt we missed out on anything. Eating food is one of the great pleasures in life.
But at that time few private dwellings will be built: in their stead will rise the community dwellings, where the majority of mankind will be living. They will probably be located in garden spaces and rise to forty or fifty floors, housing easily four or five thousand families. This is not exaggerated, since in one New York hotel to-day three thousand people sleep every night. It would mean also that each block would have a local authority of its own. I imagine these dwellings as affording one room to each adult of the family and one room for common use. Such cooking as then exists will be conducted by the local authority of the block, which will also undertake laundry, mending, cleaning and will provide a complete nursery for the children of the tenants.
Wrong. Most people in the world do not live in high-rise co-op apartments. Moreover, residential skyscrapers that are over 40 stories high are rare outside of major cities, and they tend to be prestige locations where richer people live.
While the share of humans that live in urban areas has greatly increased since 1922–and in fact, more people now live there than in rural areas–they mostly live in low-rise apartment buildings, rowhomes, detached homes, and slum shacks that would be recognizable in proportions and style to W.L. George. Services like meals, laundry, and childcare are rarely provided by landlords, and most people today either provide them for themselves or obtain them through the private market and pay out-of-pocket.
Perhaps at that time we shall have attained a dream which I often nurse, namely, the city roofed with glass. That city would be a complete unit, with accommodations for houses, offices, factories and open spaces, all this carefully allocated. The roof would completely do away with weather and would maintain an even temperature to be fixed by the taste of the period. Artificial ventilation would suppress wind. As for the open spaces, if the temperature were warm they would exhibit a continual show of flowers, which would be emancipated from winter and summer; In other words, winter would not come however long the descendants of Mr. Hutchinson might wait.
Wrong. This quote explains why:
The construction of the Montreal Biosphère, a 250-foot diameter climate controlled World Expo attraction, proved incredibly difficult. And when people built domed houses and other buildings, they tended to leak, requiring frequent and expensive maintenance. Would a domed city really result in energy savings, given the enormous volume of air conditioned, largely unused, space? Decades later, we may have a solid answer: No…[Buckminster] Fuller long promised that domes would be essential to the occupation of the Arctic, Antarctic, and other planets, but there too, reality has fallen short. From 1975-2003 the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Scientific Station was encased inside a 160-feet-wide dome, but reviews were mixed. The dome could keep snow off the buildings inside, but not off of the dome itself, where it accumulated. Eventually, the entire station found itself buried in snow and, by 1988, the dome’s foundation was cracking spectacularly under the pressure. Today, the gold standard for Antarctic architecture is not domes, but modular units that can be elevated to escape an icy burial.
The family would still exist, even though it is not doing very well to-day. It is inconceivable that some sort of feeling between parents and children should not persist, though I am of course unable to tell what that feeling will be. I imagine that the link will be thinner than it is to-day, because the child is likely to be taken over by the State, not only schooled but fed and clad, and at the end of its training placed in a post suitable to its abilities.
Part right, part wrong. The traditional family has certainly declined over the last 100 years: divorce, single-parent households, and children born out of wedlock are many times more common now, with most deleterious effects on everyone (a good roundup of statistics is here: https://lanekenworthy.net/families/). However, things have fortunately not gotten so bad that the government raises children in orphanages as a matter of course. The only country I know of that tried such a policy was communist Romania, which banned abortion in 1967 in a deliberate attempt to spur population growth and increase the number of workers. The result was a humanitarian tragedy, as hundreds of thousands of unwanted children were born each year, many of whom ended up in the country’s state-run orphanages. Lack of resources, neglect, and abuse left them permanently traumatized and stunted. It was a disaster that showed the government is totally unsuited for the child-rearing role W.L. George envisioned.
This may be affected by birth control, which In 2022 will be legal all over the world. There will be stages: the first results of birth control will be to reduce the birth rate; then the State will step in as it does in France, and make it worth people’s while to have more children; then the State will discover that it has made things too easy and that people are having children recklessly; finally some sort of balance will establish itself between the State demand for children and the national supply.
The map shows abortion rights by country
Unclear! First, what does “legal all over the world” mean? Legal in every country, or in a group of countries encompassing most of the human population, or something else? And what counts as “legal”? Countries that let women get abortions at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason, or would W.L. George be satisfied with countries that still applied significant restrictions on abortion, like a ban on doing it in the third trimester (a common limitation in Europe)?
Globally, abortion access has decreased the fertility rate, but so have other major factors like greater career opportunities for women, higher costs of raising children, and a diminished cultural emphasis on having children. As a result, many rich and even middle-income countries have such low birthrates that their populations are shrinking or will soon start doing so. W.L. George was right to foresee that some governments would recognize the problem and enact policies to incent their citizens to have more children (China’s abandonment of its One Child policy, and the generous welfare programs in Western Europe for mothers are the most notable examples), though at best these have merely slowed the rate of population decline. Encouragement of immigration has become the preferred policy response, though East Asian countries seem resigned to accepting decline.
A “balance” to the population growth rate has not been achieved in any country as of 2022, unless by pure luck and not through focused government policy and the compliant behavior of citizens. Globally, the rate and distribution of human population change is uncoordinated and unbalanced: Most of the population growth is happening in places that are the least able accommodate more people, economically and environmentally.
Largely the condition of the family will be governed by the position of woman, because woman is the family, while man is merely its supporter. It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily “makers of men.” Most fit women will then be following an individual career. All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.
Correct, so long as we exclude large parts of the world where conservative religious values still dominate. Focusing on the U.S., it is true that “most fit women,” which is probably another way of saying “most healthy women of working age,” have jobs. The figure is 76%, much higher than it was 100 years ago. The law prohibits hiring on the basis of sex and other demographic factors, so all jobs are technically open to women.
In Congress, 27% of the House consists of female Representatives, and in the Senate, 24% of its membership is female. It would be fair to call those a “large number” of women, and in fact, female representation in Congress is at a record high in 2022. Three of the nine Supreme Court Justices are women, and their number will grow to four once Stephen Breyer retires and is replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson. Half of the members of President Biden’s cabinet are female, including its most important member, Vice President Harris.
But it is unlikely that women will have achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery. Women will work, partly because they want to and partly because they will be able to. Thus women will pay their share in the upkeep of home and family. The above suggestion of community buildings, where all the household work will be done by professionals, will liberate the average wife and enable her out of her wages to pay her share of the household work which she dislikes.
This is partly correct. Even in countries with progressive values, women have yet to achieve full equality with men in a number of important areas, mainly related to money and educational achievement. Contrary to the author’s view, motherhood has not been rendered obsolete by communal childrearing, and in fact it remains as probably the biggest impediment to sex equality. Women still do the lion’s share of household labor, even if they also have full-time jobs outside the home, and mothers are much likelier to drop out of the workforce to raise their children or to eschew more demanding jobs for the same reason.
Marriage will still exist much as it is to-day, for mankind has an inveterate taste for the institution, but divorce will probably be as easy everywhere as it is in Nevada. In view, however, of the improved position of woman and her earning power, she will not only cease to be entitled to alimony, but she will be expected, after the divorce, to pay her share of the maintenance of her children.
The author’s predictions are wrong for being both too conservative and too liberal! In 1922, Nevada had the most lax divorce laws in America, and couples could be granted a divorce for almost any reason. However, doing so required at least one of them to first establish legal residency, which required them to live in Nevada for at least six months. This created a strange, churning diaspora of people who were biding their time in the state for half a year to obtain divorce decrees. It disappeared later in the 20th century as other states made their own divorce laws less strict, removing the need for anyone to visit Nevada. In 2022, it’s much easier to get a divorce in America.
On the other hand, alimony laws have not changed nearly as much, and it’s the norm for women to be awarded sizeable alimonies from their ex-husbands upon divorce. Income and net worth determine the size and direction of alimony payments, and since men are likelier to make more money than their wives, most of the divorcees who receive alimony payments are women.
As regards the politics of 2022, I should expect the form of the State to be much the same. A few rearrangements may have taken place on the lines of self-determination; for instance, Austria may have united with Germany, the South American republics may have federated, &c, but I do not believe that there will be a superstate. There will still be republics and monarchies; possibly, in 2022, the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian kings may have fallen, but for a variety of reasons, either lack of advancement or practical convenience, we may expect still to find kings in Sweden, Jugo-Slavia, Greece, Rumania and Great Britain.
This prediction was mostly correct. When the author says the basic “form of the State” will not have changed by 2022, it’s unclear whether “form” refers to the shapes and boundaries of countries or to the status of countries as the essential political units of the world. As the 1922 political map below shows, some borders have radically changed (Africa and Asia) while many others have not shifted at all (the Americas).
In spite of a lot of hoopla about transnational corporations becoming stronger than countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels carving out territories for themselves, and globalization erasing borders, the nation-state system still reigns supreme. For better or worse, central governments matter, national identity matters, and borders matter. Indeed, there is no global superstate, we are not poised to create one, and the continent that is closest to transforming into one, Europe, might have already reached the limits of how much integration its people will allow.
The author was right that the nation-states of 2022 would be governed by a mix of republics and monarchies, though his specific guesses of which European monarchies would survive were wrong: the Spanish, Dutch and Norwegian royal families HAVE NOT fallen from power, but the Yugoslavian, Greek, and Romanian royal families HAVE fallen.
Overall, monarchies have weakened over the last 100 years: the number of countries with monarchical governments has declined, the fraction of the human population living under monarchies has declined, and the amount of political power held by the remaining monarchs is generally less than their ancestors had in 1922.
On the inside, these States may have slightly changed, for there prevails a tendency to socialization which has nothing to do with socialism. Most of the European governments are unconsciously nationalizing a number of industries, and this will go on. One may therefore presume that in 2022 most States will have nationalized railways, telegraphs, telephones, canals, docks, water supply, gas (if any) and electricity. Other industries will exist much as they do to-day, but it is likely that the State will be inclined to control them, to limit their profits, and to arbitrate between them and the workers. We find a hint of this in America in the anti-trust acts; a hundred years hence the tendency will be much stronger. It is worth noting as an international factor that by that time purely national industries will almost have disappeared, and that the work of the world will be in the hands of controlled combines governing the supply of a commodity from China to Peru.
Across the Western world, people were still adjusting to the dislocations of the Industrial Age, and laws and social attitudes lagged behind economic realities. Cities were overcrowded with people seeking work in factories, there were few laws pertaining to labor rights or building standards, and a huge wealth gap existed between the capitalists who owned the factories and land, and the people who worked in and lived on them. The Bolshevik Revolution had just happened in Russia, Vladimir Lenin was still alive, and Communist forces worldwide had not yet killed or let starve millions of people. Communist ideology had not yet been discredited, and its leaders and adherents could still have reason to believe it was a superior and even inevitable alternative to capitalism.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone badly. In spite of Russia’s fearsome reputation and its recent military modernization, its battlefield performance has been disappointing and marred by many mistakes. The Ukrainians have fought harder than anyone anticipated, and have inflicted serious losses on their enemy. What was supposed to have been a quick, surgical operation to replace Ukraine’s regime with one friendlier to Moscow is turning into a bloody stalemate. Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion have been very severe, setting the country on course for major economic problems within a few months. It’s clear that Putin badly miscalculated when he decided to launch the war. Here’s a roundup of war articles:
On March 4, Russia scholar Michael Kofman predicted: “I try not to make too many predictions. I think given all the problems in the Russian campaign, delusional assumptions, an unworkable concept of operations, little prepared for a sustained war like this, I give it ~3 more weeks before this is an exhausted force.” https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1499967950975115269
This is a great analysis of Russia’s mistakes, and the likely future of the war. One basic insight is that the Russians were too weak to attack Ukraine on three fronts (northern, eastern, and southern) and achieve major objectives on all of them. They should have used all their forces to attack only one front. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/21/michael-kofman-russia-military-expert-00018906
It’s also prudent to remember that Russia has a much greater warmaking capacity than Ukraine. In the long run, and if it were willing to pay the price, Russia could take over its smaller neighbor. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60881915
Ukraine has captured at least one, seemingly intact example of the Russian Army’s most advanced field radio, the “R-187P1 Azart.” The Russians have far fewer Azarts than they claimed before the invasion, and are mostly relying on older radios and even cellphones, which can all be more easily jammed and eavesdropped on. And, in an example of the corruption that pervades Russia and has damaged its battlefield performance, there’s evidence that the Russian company in charge of making Azart radios secretly imported electronic components from China to make them, and pocketed the difference between what the Russian government paid them, and what they saved by using Chinese parts. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-comms-ukraine-world-hertz
‘The CIA director said Putin premised his war on four false assumptions: He thought Ukraine was weak, he believed Europe was distracted and wouldn’t mount a strong response, he thought Russia’s economy was prepared to withstand sanctions and he believed Russia’s military had been modernized and would fight effectively.’ https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085155440/cia-director-putin-is-angry-and-frustrated-likely-to-double-down
Here’s a video of a Ukrainian infantry platoon going into battle armed with a variety of Western-supplied antitank missiles. These have caused major damage to Russia’s military vehicle fleet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gezu6A9zcLU
The Ukrainian soldiers who ambushed and destroyed a small column of Russian vehicles near Kiev give a detailed description of the battle, at the site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ryCBcq_qxk
Video of Ukrainian troops blowing up an abandoned Russian tank, presumably because of the chance that Russian forces might recapture the area and return the vehicle to service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFhspNJEHIk
The U.S. government’s official stance is now that Russian forces have committed war crimes against the Ukrainian people, and the matter should be investigated by an international criminal court. https://www.state.gov/war-crimes-by-russias-forces-in-ukraine/
An interesting bit about NATO standards: ‘Finally, some national standards are recognized as not inferior to NATO standards and do not require revision (in Ukraine, for instance, these are those related to potable water quality). The fact that compliance with all NATO standards is not the norm even for leading states members is evidenced by the fact that no country of the Alliance has achieved the mark of 100%, although in some, including Germany (91%), Great Britain (83%), France, Norway (81% each), Canada (76%), the degree of the implementation of standards is very high…Let us assume that if the current pace of implementation is maintained, Ukraine will implement at least 90% of the existing standards of the Alliance in approximately 13–14 years.’ https://rpr.org.ua/en/news/ukraine-and-nato-standards-progress-under-zelenskyy-s-presidency/
Britain is planning on upgrading its tank fleet to indigenously made Challenger 3’s, but it’s not economical for them to keep such a small fleet of one-off tanks that are specific to their country. They should switch to either the U.S. M1 Abrams or German Leopard 2, and maybe sell their Challenger 2’s to smaller NATO countries, like the Balkan states. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44927/british-armys-next-generation-challenger-3-tank-is-now-under-construction
The Soviet VVA-14 was one of the weirdest but potentially most versatile aircraft ever built. Its designer had plans for even more dramatic variants that weren’t built. https://youtu.be/UD7xiWWs-bs
NASA briefly experimented with “passive” communications satellites that were large balloons made out of radar-reflecting materials. One ground station would aim a powerful radio at it and broadcast a signal, which would bounce off the balloon and deflect at such an angle that another ground station thousands of miles distant would receive it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo
Using CRISPR, scientists were able to self-fertilize a female mouse with her own eggs. One of the resulting 12 zygotes lived to adulthood. It was not a clone of her. A clone shares 100% of your DNA, and a natural child shares 50% of your DNA. This new technique could be used to make offspring that shared an unnatural amount of your DNA, like 75 or 85%. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-mammalian-offspring-derived-unfertilized-egg.html
My predictions about humans in 12,022 A.D.: -There might still be some Homo sapiens, though they will be genetically engineered. Imagine today’s all-star athlete who graduated from high school at 17, went to MIT on an academic scholarship, and is also a model on the side being the average human by then. We could breed with them. -There will be “human-looking” people that will have radically different genetics and anatomical/physiological features from us. Imagine a person who looks externally normal, but has bird lungs, octopus eyes, and a different number of chromosomes than you. They will be so different that they will count as different species, and we won’t be able to breed with them. -There will be intelligent but nonhuman-looking life forms that are the products of many iterations of genetic engineering. Imagine something like a horse-sized spider with a big brain occupying most of its torso. It could trace its lineage back to a normal human that is alive today. -Some members of those three groups of intelligent life forms will be meshed with technology that augments their abilities. There might be a Homo sapien with synthetic, self-healing organs that are superior to his old, natural organs, there might be a “human-looking” Homo neosapien that also has brain implants to make him smarter, and there might be intelligent spiders with nanomachines circulating in their bloodstreams to assist with various bodily processes.
‘[By 1,000 years from now] The bulk of technology will remain simple or semi-simple, while a smaller portion will continue to complexify greatly. I expect our cities and homes a thousand years hence to be recognizable, rather than unrecognizable. As long as we inhabit bodies approximately our size – a few meters and 50 kilos — the bulk of the technology that will surround us need not be crazily more complex. And there is good reason to expect we’ll remain the same size, despite intense genetic engineering and downloading to robots. Our body size is weirdly almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than ourselves, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. We inhabit a middle scale that is sympathetic to sustainable flexibility in the universe’s current physics. Bigger bodies encourage rigidity, smaller ones encourage empheralization. As long as we own bodies – and what sane being does not want to be embodied? – the infrastructure technology we already have will continue (in general) to work. Roads of stone, buildings of modified plant material and earth, not that different from our cities and homes 2,000 years ago. Some visionaries might imagine complex living buildings in the future, for instance, but most average structures are unlikely to be more complex than the formerly living plants we already use. They don’t need to. I think there is a “complex enough” restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided to me that he believed that there’s a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a unix kernel and TCP/IP. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria, or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don’t have to get more complex.’ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-arc-of-comp/
What happens if you load an enormous amount of data on chemical reactions and human biology into an AI, and then task it with finding lethal compounds against us?
‘In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9
This analysis predicts that the U.S. trucking industry will probably switch to a “transfer-hub” model where autonomous trucks transport goods over long, simple highway routes, while human drivers in smaller trucks move the cargoes over shorter distances at both ends. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01103-w
Small doses of radiation might actually benefit human health thanks to a process called “hormesis.” Note that nuclear power is so expensive partly because the power plants aren’t allowed to release any radiation at all to the surrounding environment, and that requirement is predicated on the assumption that any amount of radiation exposure hurts people. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/832949v1
I agree that the fake meat industry has been overhyped. Though meat substitutes are cheaper and more convincing than ever, they will not render meat consumption extinct. Not even close. Lab-grown meats will eventually eliminate the need to kill animals for food, but the technology won’t be good enough until near the end of this century (it’s not as good or advancing as fast as its contemporary cheerleaders claim). https://reason.com/2022/03/05/the-fake-meat-revolution-has-stalled/
Computers have translated pig noises into a basic “vocabulary” of emotional and mental states. A variety of technologies will let us communicate with animals in the future, and possibly to even share thoughts with them. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8
North Korea still operates some Japanese-made trains from the 1930s. Thanks to the country’s socialist economy, labor is practically free, making it financially possible to keep fixing the trains in spite of their age. Once robots have made labor free across the world, will it become common for manufactured objects of all kinds to stay in service much longer than they do now? https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/07/blast-from-past-north-koreas-whacky.html
The German gunboat Graf von Goetzen was launched in 1915 and sent to Tanzania (then a German colony) to dominate Lake Tanganyika. Though the Germans left, the ship didn’t, and it remains in service to this day as a ferry, renamed the Liemba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Liemba
There’s a new scientific paper claiming that ivermectin doesn’t treat COVID-19. Instead, it kills parasitic worms in people, boosting their immune systems just enough to let them survive COVID-19. Parasites are only common in tropical areas. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.3079
The pandemic isn’t over: China just locked down one of its biggest and most important cities due to a surge in COVID-19 cases. It will have global economic consequences. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60893070
Russia has invaded Ukraine for a variety of reasons.
I’m not defending Putin, but he’s not simply an evil man who wants to conquer his neighbors. Years of Western European and, specifically, American foreign policy decisions have made him feel disrespected and backed into a corner. Our lack of a long-term, realist grand strategy for dealing with Russia has done major damage. https://reason.com/2022/02/25/how-the-past-4-american-presidents-helped-escalate-tensions-in-ukraine/
This may have been right. ‘But kicking off an invasion of Ukraine in the middle of Xi’s Olympic moment could throw a wrench into such warmth, and risk drawing China into the diplomatic fray. It’s possible Xi asked Putin in their recent call not to invade Ukraine during the Games, according to one diplomat in Beijing who asked not to be identified talking about such scenarios.’ https://nationalpost.com/news/world/war-in-ukraine-is-putin-waiting-for-the-beijing-winter-olympics-to-begin
This was wrong. ‘Russia may stage a large-scale military intervention in the Ukrainian region of Donbass at the end of January, and it could involve around 94,300 troops, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov claimed on Friday.’ https://thepressunited.com/updates/ukraine-says-russia-may-invade-in-january/
Here’s a remarkable video of a CNN reporter stumbling across Russian paratroopers who just took over an airport in Ukraine. He approached them because he mistakenly thought they were Ukrainian. The Russians were friendly to him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1J6LpkG9zo
The “Henry Long Ranger” is probably the most advanced lever-action rifle ever made. However, the big unsolved design flaws were making it easy to clean the barrel and to clean and remove the internal mechanism. https://youtu.be/wsCO0XV5rwA
‘Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is the process of extracting bioenergy from biomass and capturing and storing the carbon, thereby removing it from the atmosphere. The carbon in the biomass comes from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) which is extracted from the atmosphere by the biomass when it grows. Energy is extracted in useful forms (electricity, heat, biofuels, etc.) as the biomass is utilized through combustion, fermentation, pyrolysis or other conversion methods. Some of the carbon in the biomass is converted to CO2 or biochar which can then be stored by geologic sequestration or land application, respectively, enabling carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and making BECCS a negative emissions technology (NET).’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage
“Nucleosynthesis” is a process in which a light element is put inside a fusion reactor and bombarded with protons and neutrons, some of which it captures, converting it into a heavier element. Once we have built commercial fusion reactors, we could use the technique to make heavier elements like gold and uranium, and to ensure that we never ran out of any type of element. Terrestrial nucleosynthesis would also decrease the need for asteroid mining to satisfy Earth’s mineral needs. https://twitter.com/friedberg/status/1492382218307575809
This very technical article estimates that the first holographic TVs will become commercially available in the 2040s. They will present slightly different images to a viewer’s right and left eyes, fooling their brains into perceiving the displayed images as being 3D. In short, you’ll be able to watch movies in 3D without having to wear the glasses. The first generation of holographic TVs will operate on the principle of “multiview horizontal parallax only” (HPO), meaning 1) several people watching the same TV set from different angles (e.g. – watching from the left, watching straight-on from the center, watching from the right) will perceive its footage as being 3D and 2) the picture will only look 3D if the viewers’ heads are level. If one of them tilted his head 90 degrees, so his ear was flat against his shoulder, the footage would look 2D instead of 3D. Improved holographic displays operating on more advanced principles will emerge in the decades after. https://www.light-am.com/en/article/doi/10.37188/lam.2021.028
‘In North America, gradient is expressed in terms of the number of feet of rise per 100 feet of horizontal distance. Two examples: if a track rises 1 foot over a distance of 100 feet, the gradient is said to be “1 percent;” a rise of 2 and-a-half feet would be a grade of “2.5 percent.”…The effect of grades on train operations is significant. For each percent of ascending grade, there is an additional resistance to constant-speed movement of 20 lbs. per ton of train. This compares with a resistance on level, straight track of about 5 lbs. per ton of train. A given locomotive, then, can haul only half the tonnage up a .25-percent grade that it can on the level. Descending grades carry their own penalties in the form of equipment wear and tear and increased fuel consumption.’ https://www.trains.com/trn/train-basics/abcs-of-railroading/grades-and-curves/
The adoption of widespread tea drinking in England starting around 1700 led to a 12% decline in mortality since more adults were boiling their dirty water before drinking it. https://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Antman.pdf
An important health benefit of smoking is that it reduces appetite, in turn lowering a smoker’s body weight. From 2002-17, the decline in smoking in the U.S. caused a small increase in the country’s obesity rate. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29701
For the last 20 years, efforts to create a new Lyme disease vaccine have failed because scientists made a wrong assumption about how an important part of the Lyme bacterium was shaped. Several candidate vaccines failed because they were designed to attach themselves to the wrong shape on the outsides of the bacteria. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lyme-disease-molecule-revealed
At a meeting between French president Macron and Vladimir Putin, the latter refused to take a COVID-19 test out of fear the Russia would use it to secretly sequence his DNA, and use the information against him. Note my relevant prediction, which I said will come true in the 2030s:
“Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample.” https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-kept-macron-distance-snubbing-covid-demands-sources-2022-02-10/
“Tetrachromats” are people who have four types of photoreceptors in their eyes instead of the usual three, allowing them to see more colors. This article profiles one tetrachromat, and she finds the colors of nature more stimulating than the average person, while color schemes found in many buildings and manmade environments are bracing. I think our descendants will be able to see more colors than we can. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/im-really-just-high-on-life-and-beauty-the-woman-who-can-see-100-million-colours
As a reminder of how unexpected the current real estate price boom is, consider this July 2020 article from The Economist: “Many economists still expect house prices to fall over the whole of 2020—but such forecasts are looking increasingly shaky.”
In other words, as late as mid-2020, there was still no consensus over what direction the U.S. housing market was headed, and even the experts were unaware of how much prices were about to jump. Keep this in mind when reading today’s news articles where those same experts predict what the housing market will do over the next few years. I doubt a big crash in prices is coming, but the possibility can’t be written off. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/07/02/americas-housing-market-is-so-far-unfazed-by-recession
Consider the years of (highly expensive) training men go through just to become fighter pilots, the need for nearly continuous re-training to prevent them from forgetting skills, and the many hours of preparation and after-action work that they must do for each single hour of flight of actual combat missions. It’s amazing but also colossally inefficient. Once someone figures out how to build autonomous fighter planes that can be mass produced, programmed in a few hours at the factory, and uploaded with mission instructions in a few seconds, it will be the end of human pilots. They will be overwhelmed by machine fighter planes that can do missions around the clock, even if the human fighter pilots are better in 1:1 combat against them. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44099/why-fighter-pilots-work-for-eight-hours-intensely-to-only-fly-for-30-minutes
One of Google’s most advanced narrow AIs was tasked with finding a better way to losslessly compress internet videos. It did, but its method was only 4% better than what human computer scientists had created. Across a surprising number of technologies, humans have already achieved optimums or come very close to them. https://deepmind.com/blog/article/MuZeros-first-step-from-research-into-the-real-world
James Cameron now thinks that Skynet would destroy humanity by circulating deepfake videos on the internet to turn people against each other. “The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it’s exposed as a fake.” https://www.pcmag.com/news/james-cameron-skynet-would-destroy-humanity-with-deepfakes-not-nukes
For the record, I think a hostile AI would use a variety of weapons and tactics against us in a war, including advanced digital disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic shows how effective biological warfare would be against us, so we should expect that, and I also think Skynet would build some robots to kill us “kinetically,” though the vast majority of them wouldn’t look like T-800s.
‘To that end, here is what I expect AI progress will look like if it fits the patterns of past progress.
Major new methods or capabilities for AI will be demonstrated in systems that are generallypretty poor.
Under the right conditions, such as a multi-billion-dollar effort by a state actor, the first version of an important new AI capability or method may be sufficiently advanced to be a major global risk or of very large strategic value.
An early system with poor practical performance is likely to be followed by very rapid progress toward a system that is more valuable or dangerous
Progress leading up to an important new method or capability in AI is more likely to be accelerating than it is to be stagnant. Notable advances preceding a new capability may not be direct ancestors to it.
Plot: At an unspecified point in the future, it has become common for people to implant their children with devices that record everything they see and hear. The implants, called “Zoes” (two syllables), are organic, are implanted at the fetal stage of life somewhere in the central nervous system, and “grow” as the child grows. The implants are unnoticeable, and people are only told they have them once they hit adulthood. For technical reasons, the audiovisual contents of the Zoes can’t be downloaded until after the person dies.
Robin Williams is the main character and protagonist. The film starts with a memory from his own childhood where he is hanging out alone during a day trip to the countryside and encounters another boy his age, who is also alone. The two get on friendly terms and explore an abandoned building together. While walking over a narrow beam, the other boy falls over the edge, lands on his head and immediately dies. Kid Robin Williams could have saved him by grabbing him as he was dangling from the edge, but he hesitated and the boy died. He runs away and never tells anyone else about this traumatic and shameful memory.
Years later, Robin Williams has found work as a “cutter”–a sort of futuristic video editor who downloads Zoe recordings from the recently deceased and then edits them down into two- or three-hour movies that show all the milestones and positive highlights of their lives. These recordings are usually shown at funerals, given to loved ones, and serve as semi-official records of what happened in a person’s life.
Robin Williams editing footage from a zoe
The editing process entails deleting recordings of bad things the person did (like spousal abuse, child molestation, and everyday acts of cruelty), leaving a happy but false representation of the person’s life. Robin Williams’ choice of this profession clearly stems from his own desire to assuage his own guilty memories of the childhood incident. His character’s last name–“Hakman”–brings the symbolism to an even more obvious level.
The movie’s main conflict arises when Robin Williams is asked to cut the Zoe footage for a wealthy businessman who recently died. After reviewing it, not only does Robin Williams realize the man was a secret pedophile, but he also finds clues that the dead boy from his own childhood might have actually survived and crossed paths with the businessman. Added to the mix is the fact that Robin Williams is under a short deadline to do the cut and return the original footage to the family, and a dangerous terrorist group wants to steal the Zoe footage for blackmail purposes.
The year is never revealed in The Final Cut. Also, aside from the Zoes, the film depicts a world identical to our own–there are no flying cars, laser guns, robots, etc. Most people don’t even have stainless steel dishwashers. It’s a cop-out and makes the film more of a fantasy than anything else. By the time Zoes exist, it will be so far in the future that nearly everything about the world will be different from today.
Analysis:
There will be brain implants that record what people see and hear. In principle, this technology is possible and we already have crude versions of it. Implants that can monitor brain activity and turn a person’s thoughts into written text were recently invented to help people with speech disabilities. More advanced implants that monitor the parts of the brain that processed vision and hearing could someday decode the things a person was seeing and hearing. Alternatively, implants could be attached to the optic and cochlear nerves to directly monitor the stimuli being received by the eyes and ears (respectively), before any of it had been processed by the brain.
Safe, affordable central nervous system implants with capabilities like “Zoes” won’t exist until sometime in the 22nd century. However, average people will be able to effectively do the same type of lifelogging by the end of this decade by wearing the new generation of augmented reality (AR) glasses that are coming.
Brain implants will have “organic” characteristics. The Zoes “grew” along with their hosts, and since they were permanent, lasted a lifetime, and didn’t need to be removed for maintenance, they must have had self-healing capabilities and the ability to extract energy from blood or body heat. The devices thus had “organic” characteristics.
Some technologies will eventually gain organic attributes, and it’s clear this would be especially advantageous for devices implanted in “wet” brains and bodies. As one example, storage of digital information can presently only be done using artificial substrates like hard disk drives and flash drives, but scientists are developing ways to do it using DNA, which is an organic molecule. DNA is an incredibly efficient way to store information (a microscopic amount of it in just one of your cells can hold close to 1 GB of data), and existing cellular self-repair mechanisms are excellent at protecting the data contained in DNA from decay. This might be the ideal data storage medium for brain implants considering the enormous amounts of audiovisual data that would need to be saved.
Beyond that, advanced nanomachines and/or micromachines could fully bridge the gap between organic and synthetic since they would be artificial microorganisms and would allow macro-scale machines to grow, heal, and to move their parts in totally organic ways. Some robots will have supple bodies and will be made of what could be thought of as “artificial cells,” and some humans will have synthetic implants and body parts that look biological and have some properties of organic tissue. The line between “natural” and “artificial” might disappear, leading to life forms combining the attributes of both in refined ways.
Of course, that milestone won’t be reached anytime soon. Again, we’ll probably have to wait until the 22nd century to see this level of technology.
People won’t be able to control their own implants. Another two of the film’s conceits are that people can’t turn their own Zoes off or view the footage they have captured. Only after a person dies can the footage be downloaded (presumably, this involves brain surgery) and viewed (by other people).
Things will never turn out this way. Users will always demand control over their devices and their data privacy, and they will find Zoes useless if they can’t view their own recordings. Actual brain implants we create in the future will be able to transmit and receive data to and from external devices, and will also have simple features allowing users to do things like delete and play back recordings, or temporarily deactivate. (Also consider the legal, employment, and social consequences for a person if it were known that he was always recording everything he was experiencing.) If, for some reason, brain implants lacked these features, then people would instead use AR glasses for their lifelogging.
Machines will be able to recognize what is happening in video footage. A scene I really liked in The Final Cut was where Robin Williams used his computer to scan through the wealthy businessman’s Zoe footage. The data file is thousands of hours long, and the computer rapidly shuffled through every second of it, recognized what the dead man was doing each moment, and categorized each clip appropriately. It automatically sorted clips into groups like “Eating,” “Watching TV,” “At work,” “Walking around,” and “Having sex.” With the basic level of sorting completed, Robin Williams could then go through the clips and use his human judgment to select the ones best representing the man’s major achievements, milestones, and positive traits.
Well before Zoes are invented, computers will become smart enough to do this. In just the last five years, major progress has been made teaching machines to understand what’s going on in video footage, to accurately transcribe speech and recognize sounds, and to identify people through biometrics. Within ten years, a person will be able to upload his lifelogging footage from his AR glasses to a computer and have it sorted with the same speed, accuracy and thoroughness as Robin Williams’ computer. They will even be able to identify locations based on visible landmarks and other clues, and to make other intelligent inferences about the contents of clips.
Far from being a parlor trick or something that is only useful to obsessive-compulsives, this technology could help ordinary people. For example, in 10 years you could ask: “Who was that guy in the white jacket that I talked to at that party last week?” and your AR glasses will understand your spoken question, scan through its stored footage, and answer you, perhaps also offering an instant replay of the episode. It will be like having superhuman memory.
Parents will put implants in their newborn children. In the film, Zoes are implanted in their hosts in early childhood, meaning the decision is made by a host’s parent. It may sound unrealistic for parents to have unnecessary brain surgeries done on their children, but once Zoe-like devices are cheap and surgical techniques are more advanced, it could become common. It might be considered a great blessing for parents to enable their kids to re-live episodes from their childhoods later on. Just don’t expect any of this until the 22nd century.
The FDA just approved the “Eversense E3” glucose monitoring implant. It is surgically placed in a person’s upper arm and can remain there for up to 180 days. More advanced and longer-lasting implants are sure to come.
What might become common much sooner is the installation of health monitoring implants in children. The devices would be smaller, simpler and cheaper than Zoes and would be placed in less vital parts of the body than the brain, making surgery far less risky. Such implants could monitor vital functions (e.g. – heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, cholesterol, hormone levels, diet, gene expression) and alert parents and doctors to health problems in their earliest phases, and to sudden medical emergencies. The implants might even double as location trackers for use if the children became lost or were kidnapped. If the price and risk are low enough, and the benefits are high enough, the natural parental instinct to do everything to protect one’s children could lead to monitoring implants becoming common in a few decades.
Will tech implants ever be worth it?
But in the interim, body-worn devices will satisfy those functions. As discussed in my Cloud Atlas review, external devices can do most of the same things implanted devices could, but at lower cost and without need for surgery. In my analysis of Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 predictions, I explained how smart watches had become affordable and could continuously monitor many of their wearers’ vital signs, warn them of irregular heartbeats, and alert the local paramedics if they detected “hard falls” followed by user nonresponse. More features, like blood pressure monitoring, will be added with time. Smart watches can also be used as tracking devices.
In my analysis of how accurate my predictions for the 2010s were, I also calculated that it was feasible in 2020 for an average person to record every waking hour of his life with a GoPro, and at a respectable 720p video resolution. The cost of storing the footage would be only $1 a day, putting the whole system well within the financial means of most people in rich countries. Of course, that would require the person to strap a small box to his forehead, which would look so silly few would do it. However, the new generation of AR glasses that will be commercially available by the end of this decade will be sleek and stylish, and have unobtrusive cameras. Hard disk prices will also keep declining, meaning it won’t be long until it costs mere pennies a day to store videos of one’s waking life.
With that in mind, AR glasses that give people the same audiovisual recording abilities as the Zoe brain implants will be affordable and available by the end of this decade. Smart watches that can closely monitor their wearers’ health and provide them with significant medical help will be available around the same time. Improved computer algorithms will be able to pool and analyze all of the data gathered by a person’s various devices to detect patterns and make sophisticated inferences. For instance, it could correlate your early-afternoon headaches with your cup of yogurt at breakfast, and inform you that you are probably going lactose intolerant. Your devices could give you real-time summaries of your health status and make hourly activity recommendations based on the day’s data (“Go for a walk”…”Breathe deeply to calm down”…”Take your medication”).
And very importantly, putting on these or other body-worn devices won’t require surgery, and if they ever broke or became obsolete, you could simply take them off and and throw them away. That won’t be true for body implants. So are cyborg implants merely another poorly conceived sci-fi trope, like laser pistols, which will never materialize?
No. Body implants like Zoes will ultimately make sense for humans to get, and will have important advantages over body-worn devices, but it will take a long time for the implants to become common.
AR glasses can only record what you are seeing and hearing, not what you are tasting, smelling, or feeling on your skin. Only a brain implant like a Zoe could capture those senses, as well as your moment-to-moment emotional states. If you wanted to truly re-live happy memories, an implant would be needed.
And while smart watch technology will reach impressive heights, it will be handicapped by its inability to access the wearer’s bloodstream. Devices inside a person’s body could monitor hormone levels, glucose levels, immune system activity, gene expression, toxin levels, and other important metrics, in addition to doing everything smart watches do. Implants could even stimulate your body with things like electric shocks to your heart, hormone dumps into your bloodstream, or neurotransmitter releases into your brain to counteract health problems. Even without any future cures for diseases or breakthroughs in reversing the aging process, such devices by themselves would significantly improve public health and lifespan.
These and other cybernetic devices will migrate into our bodies once we have found ways to make them totally unobtrusive and reliable, and once the cost and invasiveness of surgery dramatically improves (robot surgeons that work for free might help). Some limited ability to self-repair and to internally reconfigure to account for technology updates will also be needed, and the radically advanced nature of such technology is is why I don’t see the cyborg era dawning this century.
Four final points that weren’t covered in the film:
Ubiquitous surveillance will reduce bad behavior. If people know they’re probably being recorded and the recordings will be stored forever and possibly shared with millions of people, they’re less likely to commit crimes or behave uncivilly. The effect is greater if they know that biometric analysis like facial recognition or voice recognition can easily uncover their real identities from video footage. Thanks to everything being recorded and to the world being populated by intelligent machines and posthumans that will lack berserker emotions and extreme stupidity, the 22nd century will probably be a very polite era.
Having implants in your brain and body that monitor your surroundings, your behavior, and your physiological state could lead to a spooky condition where your personal assistant AI that is watching them could anticipate your thoughts, actions, and needs. If gifted with high enough intelligence and tasked with furthering your long-term enlightened self-interests, your AI could find clever ways to nudge or even control you. As a simple example, it might act like an angel on your shoulder and tell you through your ocular nerve “Don’t eat that pie. You’ve already consumed 2,300 calories today. You get a break on your health insurance premiums if I report you’ve been eating well.” More paternalistically, it might be able to release synthetic dopamine into your brain to calm you down from fits, or just plain take over your body if you were doing something highly illegal or self-destructive. Mind-influencing and mind-control could, along with ubiquitous surveillance, give rise to a very peaceful and harmonious world (or a dystopian one).
Ubiquitous surveillance will create interesting tensions between peoples’ memories and what actually happened. The film touches on this when the brother of a recently deceased man remarks to Robin Williams that the video clip of a childhood boat trip was at odds with his own recollection. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to discuss this issue in depth, but the replacement of fuzzy human memories with clear, unchanging recordings will be a two-edged sword. Past traumas and failures would never be forgotten, but people would also be able to see their own actions through unbiased lenses and to see themselves in a more honest light.
There will be “snitch apps” in the future. Once people have AR glasses, they will be able to download apps that automatically compare the faces of every person they encounter with mugshots of all known criminals and terrorists, and then report sightings to law enforcement. Even if just 0.1% of the population used these when in public, it would be highly effective. There might even be crowdsourced “Wikis” of non-criminal rude people (ex – “Karens” who had public outbursts made notorious by YouTube) whom you could also set your devices to look out for and to highlight for your avoidance or mockery. Likewise, your own reputation would be viewable to other people wearing their own AR glasses.
Implants that can do simple functions like monitoring blood cholesterol levels already exist. As they get cheaper, smaller and better, they will get more common. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-21841829
On the second anniversary of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani’s assassination by a U.S. drone strike, two Iranian drones attacked an American military base in Baghdad. Both were shot down by a U.S. antiaircraft system called “C-RAM.” A C-RAM unit has a built-in radar that identifies the locations and flight paths of enemy aircraft and missiles, and it uses the data to aim its heavy machine gun so the bullets intercept them. All the human operator has to do is push a button to allow the C-RAM to fire. At the 0:26 mark in the video, the C-RAM opened fire on one of the Iranian drones. Note the laser-like stream of bullets. The machine’s aim was perfect. https://youtu.be/Ajkg8yfgug0
Contrast that with footage of human-aimed antiaircraft guns trying to shoot down Japanese kamikaze planes in WWII. You’ll see dozens of machine guns spewing out thousands of bullets at one plane, and missing–often being wildly off-target. https://youtu.be/4mTECUWP0Hk?t=171
At the same time, GPT-3 is a much better chatbot than the best of ten years ago. I think each iteration of GPT will make fewer conversational mistakes than the last, until some future version (GPT-6?) is finally “good enough” to pass the Turing Test. http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
Once “Metaverse” technology is mature and widespread, it will be common for sports fans to “hang out” in the bleachers of sports arenas during games. They could even pay for retired athletes and other popular commentators to sit with them in VR and narrate the games. Other fans will still be willing to buy tickets to sit in the real bleachers and attend the games in-person. https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/when-nfl-football-moves-into-the-metaverse/
Machines can now convert a series of still photos of a building or place into a hi-res, 3D mock-up. Eventually, there will be a hyper-realistic, 1:1 virtual version of the real world that people will be able to explore in VR. https://youtu.be/yptwRRpPEBM
“Frequency hopping” is a method of sending encrypted messages with radio signals. A message like a simple sentence is chopped up into bits, each of which is transmitted on a different frequency from the other. To anyone listening to just one radio wavelength, they will only hear a single, brief sound of the message. However, the intended recipient will hear the whole thing thanks to a special radio descrambler that knows how the bits are distributed across the frequency spectrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Dial-up modems from 20+ years ago used sounds to send and receive data. This is why, if you established the connection and then picked up the phone, you’d hear loud static for a moment–the static was the digital data being conveyed as sounds. Telephone lines weren’t built with the future needs of the internet in mind–they were designed around the much less demanding needs of human speech and listening. As a result, they can’t handle more than 56 kilobytes of data transfer. https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dialup-modem-speed.php
In 1991, George Friedman published a book predicting the U.S. and Japan would fight a war by 2020. This is something to remember when thinking about his other geopolitical predictions, which also look likely to fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrbUX84LcXg
Six months ago, Peter Zeihan predicted “We are gonna have inflation in the last half of this year that is absolutely going to be higher than what we had in the early 80s [and] probably faster than what we had in the 70s.” He was basically right. The U.S. inflation rate for November was the highest since July 1982. https://youtu.be/x_fpY63fcd8?t=3560
Nuclear-powered civilian ships were introduced before the technology was fully ready, and were doomed by irrational public fears about radiation and by unfair press coverage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI
Theoretically, we could also build antennas that used the planet’s radiation of excess heat into space to generate electricity. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/3927
Theoretically, 10 quadrillion people could live on Earth. We’d just have to build 300,000-storey high skyscrapers to fit everyone, plus a bunch of other megaprojects to radiate the planet’s excess heat into space and regulate global sunlight levels. https://hereticalupdate.substack.com/p/is-earth-running-out-of-resources
‘The result is that you see a distinct parabolic shape in the returns on investment for a tall building. The point of maximum return varies depending on the city, the type of construction and the location of building, and real estate professionals go to great effort to determine the economic building height for a given case. For an office building on a piece of valuable urban real estate, this has traditionally been considered to be in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 storeys tall. During planning for the Empire State Building, it was calculated that 75 storeys was the optimal height, and developers suggested that 70 storeys should be the maximum during the planning of One World Trade Center. But the existence of an increasing number of Manhattan supertall residential buildings suggests that this limit might be increasing, at least for luxury residential real estate.
Building height in excess of this “theoretical optimum” is often height for height’s sake, with the idea that an exceptionally tall building will have “prestige value” that more than compensates for the less efficient design. The (real or perceived) benefits of prestige, combined with the rising costs of servicing the upper floors, often results in buildings that achieve their height by adding large volumes of unoccupied space at the top. The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building, is perhaps the ultimate example of this, with the top 29% of the building being unoccupied space.’ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-skyscrapers-are-so-short/
Imagine a 1 – 10 rating scale for your full possible range of emotional experiences.
1 = Most miserable and painful you can be 5 = Feel neither good nor bad 10 = Most happy and blissful you can be
People intuitively think that the increments between each number are subjectively constant, so the felt difference between levels 9 and 10 is the same as the difference between levels 5 and 6. However, there’s evidence that the good and bad extremes are way, way, way more extreme, so that going from level 9 to level 10 is much more of a jump in subjective pleasure than going from level 5 to 6 is. https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/log-scales
With training, most people can learn to control single neurons in their brains. In the far future, I think humans will be able to control their own thoughts, emotions, and gene expression, just by thinking about it. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.079038v1.full
For the first time, a pig heart has been transplanted into a human without killing the person. The pig had been genetically engineered so its heart cells would be similar enough to human tissue to not be rejected by the human immune system. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59944889
This article was published in June 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, it was unclear what the effect on birthrates would be, and it could have been argued that more children that normal were going to be conceived since couples would have more time at their homes together. The article predicted the 2021 U.S. birthrate would be 300,000 – 500,000 lower than it was in 2020. The data are still coming in, but there was a decline, closer towards the lower end of their estimate. https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-children-the-coming-covid-baby-bust/
