Category: technology

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Roundup of interesting articles, July 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radar image of French paratroopers over Africa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Small aerial drones: The future of terrorism and crime?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: “Jupiter Ascending”

The promise…

Last night, I had the misfortune to “watch” this movie, though I put that in quotation marks since I spent most of the two hours looking at Internet stuff on my tablet. Even just listening to it and glancing at it, the film was clearly horrible, so I won’t waste time writing a detailed review, and I’ll keep this short and only touch on the important points. Suffice it to say, this was another strike-out for the Wachowskis.

…and the reality.

Plot: The human race originated elsewhere in the galaxy and became space-faring millions of years ago. A vast empire was created and (unbeknownst to us) came to encompass the Earth. 200,000 years ago, the super-advanced space humans seeded Earth with human life so our planet could be a giant farm (reminiscent of what the Machines were doing in the Wachowskis’ other, vastly better film, The Matrix). Once Earth achieved 21st century levels of population and technology, the space humans planned to come back, kill all the Earth humans, and harvest our corpses to extract our life forces, which could be preserved, bottled, and sold as age-reversing beverages to other space humans. I’m being completely serious. The space humans have in fact done this mass farming process many times before on other planets throughout the galaxy, and the bottled life force industry is a major part of the space economy.

Mila Kunis is a lowly Earth-born human who doesn’t know about any of that at the start of the movie. She is poor and has a job cleaning toilets. The only thing unique about her is that her first name is “Jupiter” (the space humans also have a secret base on the planet Jupiter, hidden beneath the clouds). However, thanks to a huge coincidence, it turns out her genetic code is identical to the code of a space human queen who died. Counting up all the space humans, Earth humans, and primitive humans living on other farm planets, there are so many humans that the amount of possible genetic variability given the limited size of our genome has been “maxed out,” and genetic duplicates who are unrelated to each other are being born. Statistically speaking, this would indeed happen, but the human population would need to be in the quadrillions.

The space humans find out about Mila somehow, and the dead space queen’s feuding rich and powerful children start sending teams of armed aliens to kidnap her. Cue fight scenes with laser guns, aliens flying through the air, space ships, and all that schlock. It was pretty bad.

Analysis: Turning to the technologies that the advanced space humans had, here are my thoughts on whether we Earth humans might someday also attain them.

A multi-thousand year old lady

Humans will look young and old at the same time. The space humans achieved medical immortality long ago thanks to the bottles of liquid life force. Periodically drinking the liquid or dunk oneself into a bathtub full of it would cause the signs of old age disappear from one’s body, truly restoring it to a more youthful state. The key space human characters who are fighting over Mila Kunis are tens of thousands of years old due to long-term use of the elixir. However, they appear to have strange mixes of youthful and elderly traits.

I believe that technology (and not the consumption of the “life force” of other humans) will someday grant us medical immortality and the ability to reverse the aging process. Human beings are just machines (albeit very complex ones made of organic matter), and like any other machine, in principle periodic repairs could keep any human alive indefinitely. The techniques and technologies that we use in the future to fix our bodies will be primitive and ugly at first, but over time will become more sophisticated and finessed. I can envision a window of time starting maybe 100 years from now when life extension therapies are in wide use, and treated people have mixes of young and old traits. For example, you might see people in their 90s who have unusually good complexions thanks to mechanical hearts, and unnaturally thick heads of colored hair thanks to cloned, implanted hair follicles, but in every other respect, they would look like old people. Better technologies created later on will allow full body rejuvenation, meaning young/old mixes will probably disappear in the long run.

Part of the floor is in “transparent mode.”

Floors will be able to turn transparent. There is a scene on one of the space ships where one of the evil space humans is trying to force Mila Kunis to marry him to finish the final step in his evil plan. When she refuses, he pushes a button on a remote control or something, and the floor that they’re standing on turns transparent like glass, so Mila can look down and see that her Earth human family is being held prisoner in a torture chamber one level below them. “Either marry me, or they die!” he then bellows.

This is actually an entirely plausible technology that could be created in the near future with massive OLED screens and multitudes of tiny cameras (basically, you’d be watching a live surveillance camera feed of the building level below you, but displayed on a screen covering your entire floor), or with nano-engineered building materials that can turn transparent or opaque depending on whether or not electric current is being passed through them (Google “electric glass” or “switchable glass” plus the keyword “bathroom”). Note that the Wachowskis also showcased this type of technology in the movie Cloud Atlas, but it was used to make walls transparent instead of floors.

A swarm of tiny flying drones, not from the movie, but from real life. They can be programmed to fly in formation and to swarm into certain shapes.

Humans will be able to mind-control insects. There’s a scene early in the movie, shortly after Mila Kunis realizes that space humans are after her, when she seeks refuge at Sean Bean’s house. Sean Bean is actually a space human who lives on a farm somewhere in the Midwest, in an old house that is covered with beehives jutting out of all the exterior and interior walls. Bees fly all over the place, but they don’t sting Sean Bean because he has some kind of mental control over them. The shelves and tables throughout the house are covered in jars full of honey, meaning he probably makes money by selling them. Sean Bean served in the space human military before some kind of falling out with his commanders, which also resulted in him secretly moving to Earth to do beekeeping. As if this whole setup weren’t absurd enough, when the bees form a cloud around Mila, Sean says something like “Bees can sense human royalty,” so their behavior serves as proof that she’s genetically identical to the dead space human queen.

As I said in my Starship Troopers review, there’s no scientific proof that human or animal telepathy exists, but cybernetic brain implants could give rise to essentially the same ability through science. Theoretically, a human with a brain implant could wirelessly transmit his thoughts to a bee that also had a brain implant, and those thoughts would control its movements and actions. However, in light of the tediousness of installing implants into the pinprick-sized brains of bees or other insects, and of the lack of any useful applications for the technology, I doubt it will ever interest anyone but a few scientists doing proof of concept experiments.

It would be cheaper, easier and better to build purpose-built machines like bee-sized flying drones for this rather than to jerry-rig animals. Flying drones are constantly shrinking in size, and there’s no reason to think it won’t eventually be possible to make them indistinguishable from insects. Eventually there will be swarms of flying robot insects that can coordinate their movements and actions, and humans will be able to control them just as they can control simpler flying drones today. Eventually, technology could allow humans to control them by thought alone, as I’ve described.

Bee-like robot drones would have agricultural uses as crop pollinators and pest killers, and they could also perform mass surveillance and have law enforcement and military uses. Human brain implants would have a variety of uses, such as enhancing intelligence and the senses. As I said in my last Personal Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think human brain implants will be common before 2100. Insect-sized robots will be invented much sooner since they’ll need less sophisticated technology and won’t be delayed by the FDA approval process (brain implants will probably be categorized as medical devices).

ALIENS! Don’t ask what’s going on. I assure you it is completely stupid.

Humans and aliens will work together. The space humans have created a galactic empire that encompasses some non-human aliens. Some of them look like the stereotypical big-headed gray aliens, and they try to abduct Mila Kunis at the start of the movie. (There are also androids and human-animal hybrids in the movie, but whatever.) Other aliens are seen walking around inside space ships and cities on other planets, and the space humans appear at ease with them.

I think intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, and if we survive long enough to explore deep space, we will probably encounter them, or we will at least spot them at long range with our telescopes. However, I also believe we’ll discover that things unfold in the same basic order across the galaxy, with primitive organic life automatically arising on planets where the right natural conditions exist, an intelligent organic species evolving on a minority of those planets, followed by a minority of those planets being taken over by intelligent artificial life forms that the intelligent organic species invents, followed by the artificial life forms being the most successful at developing better technologies and colonizing space. We will find that the most powerful and most advanced alien species are basically machines (I say “basically” because they might be so advanced that they have characteristics that are not stereotypically mechanical).

Liberated from the slowness and imprecision of biological evolution, intelligent machines could rapidly re-engineer themselves to adapt to space and to other planets. Since some forms are inherently more functional than others (e.g. – tires work better when they’re shaped like circles instead of rectangles, regardless of what planet you’re on), convergent evolution would happen among artificial life forms that were spacefaring and free to do what they wanted. If our future civilization discovered aliens of equal or greater sophistication, we’d probably find many major similarities between our machines, though the organic life forms from their home planet would be quite different and incompatible with ours.

Instead of the Star Trek vision of the future where space exploration proceeds with humans calling the shots, and technology is still “dumb,” I think the reverse will be true, and our role will be more akin to that of a pet dog brought along by its human family on a road trip. The dog is not in charge, didn’t plan the trip, and is very stupid compared to the humans. The humans brought it along for sentimental reasons only. The dog has no real role to play on the trip and can’t exercise any control over what happens. Some small amount of resources (space in the car, money for dog food, space for misc. supplies like a lease and food/water bowls) is devoted to ensuring the dog’s comfort, but orders of magnitude more are devoted to supporting the human family (gas money, hotel fees, restaurant budget). After many hours locked in its pet carrier cage, the dog is able to get out when the car arrives at its destination. It is a strange, alien environment that the dog has trouble interpreting, but which the humans mundanely understand is just a beach. While at the beach, the human family and the dog all sit in the sand next to a different human family, who have brought along their pet cat. The dog is astounded as he has never seen a cat before, and vice versa. The two animals sniff each other while their human owners talk in their inscrutable, high-level language, exchanging more ideas in a few seconds than either the dog or cat could learn in a lifetime. Any attempt by the animals to fight with each other is quickly broken up by the humans, with no offense taken. The trip eventually ends, the dog gets packed back in the pet carrier, and the whole group heads back home. Does the dog want to stay at the beach or go back home? No one bothers to ask.

This is certainly not a romantic vision of future space exploration, but I think it’s likely an accurate one. Just as we will lose control over the Earth with time, it stands to reason we will lose control over space, and it further stands to reason we will encounter alien civilizations where the same course of events has played out, resulting in the same order of things.

Genetic copies of people become common. As mentioned, the plot revolves around the fact that Mila Kunis is a genetic doppelganger for a dead alien space queen, so all the queen’s evil kids want to kidnap her. Yes, as diverse as the human race is, there are limits to how many unique human individuals are allowable given all the different permutations of genes made possible by our genome. Also, keep in mind that not every gene affects observable physical traits, so two people could be externally identical even if a small fraction of their genes were different. But statistically speaking, the human population would need to be in the quadrillions for our species to have exhausted all of its possible genetic variability and for unrelated people to share the same genome (or even 99% of the same genome).

I doubt the human population will ever get that high, and I think what would muck things up well before then would be the introduction of novel genes into our species through genetic engineering, which would increase the amount of potential species diversity. However, genetic copies of people will become more common for an entirely different reason: cloning. Once the technology becomes available, some people will start cloning themselves, or dead loved ones, or other people they’re obsessed with (Angelina Jolie, Hitler, Einstein) and whose DNA they’ve obtained.

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Roundup of interesting articles, May 2018

States redrawn to match daily commute patterns.

After a long hiatus, Richard Branson’s “Spaceship Two” returned to the air and made a successful test flight. If all goes well, he could be sending passengers into space in a few years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/29/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-just-got-another-step-closer-to-flying-tourists-to-space/

Here’s an in-depth analysis of what it would take to make a solar sail spacecraft that could reach 20% of light speed and go to Alpha Centauri. The engineering challenges are formidable, but not insurmountable.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/the-material-science-of-building-a-light-sail-to-take-us-to-alpha-centauri/

Instead of there being a multiverse, what if there’s only one universe, but different realms within it have distinct ground states?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/dont-be-afraid-of-the-multiverse/559169/

Crews scanning the ocean floor for Malaysia Air Flight 370 stumbled upon two shipwrecks from the late 1800s.
https://www.apnews.com/77038501654b4eb7925d567d37cb7ab8/Historians-name-2-Indian-Ocean-19th-century-shipwrecks

An ocean buoy detected a 78 foot high wave south of New Zealand, making it the largest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. As the number and density of automated sensors like buoys, weather stations, and drones grow, so will data and film footage of extraordinarily rare occurrences and life forms. In 20 years, you’ll be able to ask your computer to “Show me everything weird that happened today” and spend the next several hours watching video clips from around the world, including places devoid of humans.
https://newatlas.com/record-wave-southern-ocean/54602/

BAE hopes to build a solar-powered, autonomous plane that could stay aloft for 12 months. It could do aerial surveillance and some functions currently performed by satellites.
https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2018/05/03/bae-systems-partners-with-drone-specialist-for-solar-powered-uav/

“Ocado” is a British grocery store chain that has no brick-and-mortar retail stores and only does home deliveries. Their food warehouses, where groceries are stored and packaged, are heavily automated and use hundreds of robots.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43968495

A fascinating piece that highlights some of the less-obvious ways autonomous vehicles will change the world.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/self-driving-technology-is-going-to-change-a-lot-more-than-cars/

It will also probably be easy to program autonomous vehicles to drive in ways that use as little fuel as possible. Many human truck drivers have a hard time keeping up these habits because they require near-constant focus and patience. Moreover, since machines don’t need to sleep, autonomous trucks could structure their routes in such a way that they were mostly on the roads during non-peak hours, like the middle of the night, meaning fewer traffic jams for everybody and less wasted gas.
http://www.fleetowner.com/fuel_economy/fuel-economy-0701

One of the NYT’s auto experts thinks gas-powered cars will be obsoleted by fast-recharging electric cars within five years, and sales of both will sharply shift to reflect this. Without giving a deadline for autonomous cars, he drops a lot of hints it will take substantially longer than five years to become mature and ubiquitous.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/personaltech/electric-self-driving-flying-cars.html

‘”I’ve been at [Consumer Reports] for 19 years and tested more than 1,000 cars, and I’ve never seen a car that could improve its track performance with an over-the-air update,” Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, said in a blog post.’
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/30/technology/consumer-reports-model-3-recommended/index.html

A famous and still thought-provoking analysis of the cost-effectiveness of 500 different safety/health interventions. Yes, you can put a price on human life.
https://www.slideshare.net/myatom/tengs-et-al-cost-effectiveness-of-500-life-saving-interventions-2776562

Will America’s new “Right to Try” policy that allows terminally ill people to take drugs still in Phase II clinical trials help much? Probably not, and not just because only 10% of drugs prove themselves effective during Phase II.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/25/federal-right-to-try

The FDA shut down two “stem cell therapy” clinics after their treatments for people with vision problems made several of them go blind.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/09/fda-seeks-injunction-to-stop-two-stem-cell-companies-after-patients-blinded/

The reality about “personalized cancer treatments” is that only 15% of cancer patients are eligible, and only 1/3 of them could benefit from it.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/02/cancer-sequencing-hype-and-reality

‘The National Cancer Institute’s new goal is to “eliminate suffering and death due to cancer” by 2015.’
–NCI Director Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, 2003
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)68718-7/fulltext

A meta-analysis of women who got the HPV vaccine proves beyond doubt that it works and has no side effects.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/08/health/hpv-vaccines-cervical-cancer-review/index.html

A meta-analysis of fMRI studies that “proved” male and female brains operate differently suggests they might have been flawed, and researchers might have failed to publish null findings.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23976-1

People who go to art school are likelier to get schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/artistic-creativity-and-risk-for-schizophrenia-bipolar-disorder-and-unipolar-depression-a-swedish-populationbased-casecontrol-study-and-sibpair-analysis/B3FFC439154C19A01F779365AF16B3C7

Electroconvulsive therapy has been unfairly maligned, and is actually the most effective treatment for some people with severe mental illness.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180502-the-surprising-benefits-of-electroshock-therapy-or-ect

MDMA, commonly called “Ecstasy,” has proven a remarkably effective treatment for PTSD in preliminary clinical trials. If all goes well, it could be legal for medicinal use in 2021.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/05/02/a-forbidden-remedy-for-veterans-nightmar

America’s early school start times are awful for students and their parents. As early as 1913, the practice’s ill effects on sleep, learning and quality of life were noted. Why do we do it anymore?
https://schoolstarttime.org/early-school-start-times/

Machines hit a new milestone in automating chemical synthesis work.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/14/give-it-to-the-machines

Amateur chemist claims to have made a distilling process that can “age” whiskey the equivalent of 20 years in six days. Whether or not his claim is genuine, I think someone will make it work someday.
https://reason.com/reasontv/2018/05/09/bryan-davis-lost-spirits-distillery-booz

Did Betamax actually have better picture quality than VHS? This side-by-side footage analysis suggests not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA

“[Intelligence] is a spectrum of abilities since there are many different goals you can have, so it makes no sense to quantify something’s intelligence by just one number [like an IQ score]. To see how ridiculous that would be, just imagine if I told you that athletic ability could be quantified by a single number, the ‘Athletic Quotient,” and whatever athlete had the highest ‘AQ’ would win all the gold medals in the Olympics.”
https://youtu.be/p9eLpRbRk4c

Some alternatives to America’s state borders. I’ve long been a fan of breaking up states with big populations and merging states with small populations to help “even things out.”
https://www.quora.com/Do-U-S-state-borders-make-sense-for-modern-times

There’s substantial evidence that American judges allow their personal political and cultural views to influence their court rulings. Though judges claim to be coldly analytical and objective, it does actually matter whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.
https://www.apnews.com/cc39185fe15346d7a7c7c021bc3d4d90/Is-Trump-right-about-judges’-leanings?-Maybe,-review-shows

Here’s a supposedly genuine military report about the 2004 encounter between a U.S. Navy F/A-18 and a UFO off the coast of San Diego. The sighting was first described in a December 2017 New York Times article. The report deduces that the UFO could change altitude at ballistic missile speeds, was nearly invisible to radar, and might have had a cloaking ability on the visible light spectrum.
https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf

Between new plane purchases and upgrades of existing planes, the U.S. Navy plans to have at least 650 “Block 3” Super Hornet F/A-18E’s and F’s by 2025. They’re better than the current “Block 2” Super Hornets in every way.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21045/here-is-boeings-master-plan-for-the-f-a-18e-f-super-hornets-future

And in classic fashion, the Navy is dumping its worn-out, excess F/A-18C and D Hornets (note the lack of “Super”) on the Marine Corps. The Navy has 270 of these older fighter planes and will give the Marines 136 of them, mostly to be cannibalized for spare parts. The Navy’s final 134 Hornets will probably be transferred in the future as it gets more Super Hornets and F-35C’s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19040/navy-to-slash-legacy-f-a-18-hornet-fleet-to-prop-up-beleaguered-usmc-squadrons

The hardships of a Marine Corps F/A-18 mechanic struggling to fix planes that are older than he is. At some point, everything wears out, and the time and money spent on maintenance gets so bad that it’s actually cheaper to buy a newer replacement.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20019/life-on-the-flight-line-confessions-of-a-u-s-marine-f-a-18-hornet-maintainer

Brazil has an 81-year-old river patrol ship still in active service. It originally had a steam engine and now has a helipad.
http://warisboring.com/one-of-the-worlds-oldest-military-ships-is-sailing-down-a-river-in-brazil/

Israel has developed an affordable upgrade kit that converts Soviet-era multiple launch rocket systems into guided weapons.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21023/israeli-made-bolt-on-kit-turns-122mm-grad-artillery-rockets-into-precision-weapons

Israel also used small quadcopter drones to snag incendiary kites released by militant Gazans who were trying to randomly start wildfires across the border in Israel.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20853/israel-uses-drone-racers-to-down-incendiary-kites-and-drones-to-dispense-tear-gas-over-gaza

Some Korean War-era U.S. M41 light tanks are still in service in Third World armies.
http://warisboring.com/m-41-tanks-are-museum-pieces-and-still-in-service/

Indonesia has bought several brand-new U.S. AH-64E attack helicopters and will fly them alongside their old Soviet Mi-35 helicopters.
http://www.janes.com/article/80207/update-indonesia-formally-accepts-first-apache-helos

Greece is upgrading its F-16s and plans to keep them in use until 2048. The prototype F-16 first flew in 1974.
http://www.janes.com/article/79703/update-greece-moves-ahead-with-f-16-modernisation

Boeing got a patent for a detachable, automatic cannon that could be installed in the bomb bays of semi-stealth B-1 bombers, turning them into gunships. The U.S. military first experimented with this kind of weapons system in 1971. Prototype cannons were installed in the bomb bays of bombers made in the 1950s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20782/boeings-been-granted-a-patent-for-turning-the-b-1b-into-a-gunship-bristling-with-cannons

The U.S. Air Force is heavily upgrading the cockpits of their F-15s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21081/the-usaf-has-quietly-added-large-multi-function-cockpit-displays-to-its-f-15c-fleet

China has just launched its second aircraft carrier, which could be thought of as an upgraded copy of their first carrier, which was built by the USSR and launched 33 years ago. Does this milestone mean China’s shipbuilding prowess has surpassed Russia’s?
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2145890/chinas-first-domestically-built-aircraft-carrier-begins

Did you know you can build a somewhat OK bullet proof vest out of a thick textbook and a 1′ x 1′ ceramic floor tile?
https://youtu.be/ECug_76_NLg

The Basque Separatists have disbanded, thanks to an improved Basque economy (assisted by investment from Madrid) and a graying of the population. How many other ethnic secession movements could be defused with the same combination?
https://www.apnews.com/448d0d7510b0447abba9597c9c319f63/ETA%27s-bloody-history:-853-killings-in-60-years-of-violence

In 1872, English writer Samuel Butler published the book Erehwon. In it, the main character visits a futuristic, closed society that banned machines because they were improving too fast and people feared they would become smarter than humans and take over. Butler was inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and by the rapid industrialization he saw in England over his lifetime. It’s the earliest example of the the “robot uprising” trope I’ve seen.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm

A few bummer remarks about the state of artificial intelligence. FIRST: ‘The current ways of trying to represent the nervous system…[are little better than] what we had 50 years ago.’  –Marvin Minsky, 2013
https://youtu.be/3PdxQbOvAlI

SECOND: ‘Over the next 30 years, we’re not going to see Commander Data…there is an A.I. bubble right now and people are making a fundamental error on estimating how good A.I. is going to be [and] how quickly.’ –Rodney Brooks, 2017
https://youtu.be/ig1qaqyMIXc

THIRD: ‘I suspect that [building the first true A.I.] means getting rid of back-propagation…I don’t think [back-propagation is] how the brain works.’ –Geoffrey Hinton (helped invent back-propagation in 1986), 2017
https://www.axios.com/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-says-we-need-to-start-over-1513305524-f619efbd-9db0-4947-a9b2-7a4c310a28fe.html

FOURTH: ‘We’re very far from having machines that can learn the most basic things about the world in the way humans and animals can do. Like, yes, in particular areas machines have superhuman performance, but in terms of general intelligence we’re not even close to a rat.’ –Yann LeCun, 2017
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/26/16552056/a-intelligence-terminator-facebook-yann-lecun-interview

Computer scientist Judea Pearl is slightly more optimistic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machine-learning-is-stuck-on-asking-why/560675/

A fascinating short video showing how a computer-generated Paul Walker was inserted into Furious 7 after the actor died during filming. Within 20 years, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell apart human actors and CGI versions of them.
https://jalopnik.com/how-extensive-special-effects-helped-finish-furious-7-a-1825917978

Unreal Engine 4 – (2018) – Ridiculous Realistic Looking Characters!
https://youtu.be/Vh9msqaoJZw

Google’s “Duplex Assistant” can perfectly imitate humans during brief phone calls. I think machines will pass the Turing Test within 11 years, and shortly thereafter, we won’t be able to tell the difference between human speakers and CGI versions of them: we’ll be able to make machines that can speak using a real human being’s voice, to intelligently carry on conversations with other humans, and to even answer questions and put forth topics of conversation as the imitated human would.
https://youtu.be/ijwHj2HaOT0

Non-invasive, wearable sensors that monitor muscle and nerve activity can be used to accurately represent a person’s physical movements in a virtual reality avatar. The demo video is incredible.
https://youtu.be/5Z5aZK2C3ew

The world’s oldest spider is dead at 43. It was a trapdoor spider, and it survived that long by staying in one hole in the ground its whole life, conserving its energy and avoiding risks (good life advice?).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/27/farewell-no-16-scientists-left-miserable-worlds-oldest-spider/

Airborne lead particles that drifted to Greenland from Europe and got trapped in successive layers of ice tell the tale of Rome’s rise and fall. The quantity of lead smelting positively correlates with periods of prosperity.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/05/14/roman-empire-rise-and-fall-revealed-greenland-ice/608819002/

The longest possible straight-line journeys over sea and land are uncovered, at long last! I wonder if the estimate would change if the Arctic Ice Cap were counted as dry land (explorers have walked across the whole thing before).
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/ocean-path-will-take-you-longest-straight-line-journey-earth

Russia launched the world’s first floating nuclear reactor. It will be towed to the Arctic sea to provide power to a remote town.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/30/607088530/russia-launches-floating-nuclear-power-plant-its-headed-to-the-arctic

Burying nuclear waste in shafts drilled into the seafloor might be the best permanent disposal option.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/10/the-sub-seabed-solution/308434/

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All of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about when we’ll get all our energy from solar power

Ray Kurzweil in 2017

If you’re reading this blog, then you probably know who Ray Kurzweil is and what he thinks the future will be like. And if you don’t, then SHAME ON YOU! Kurzweil is one of the world’s greatest living futurists (though several of his predictions have failed), he’s influenced my own thinking, and if you know little or nothing about him, stop right now and go read his Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil).

Kurzweil’s perfusion and fame as a futurist have made him the subject of many “accuracy analyses” of predictions whose deadlines have come and gone. In spite of how crowded the field is,  I think there is a narrow area where I could be of use: tracking his predictions about the future of solar power.

On this topic, Kurzweil is quite bold: He thinks that solar power is growing exponentially, so it will supply 100% of the WORLD’S (not just America’s) ENERGY (not just ELECTRICITY) within 15 years. Additionally, his predictions are unambiguous in their wording and deadlines, rendering them highly amenable to objective evaluation. For better or worse, he won’t be able to talk his way out of this, as he has several times in the past through written rebuttals of unfavorable analyses.

The U.S. generates huge amounts of ENERGY, only a small fraction of which is ELECTRICITY, a lot of it gets wasted, and the remainder gets to end users.

I’m starting this blog entry to keep a running tally of all of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions regarding when the world will get 100% of its energy from solar power. The table below this will serve as a quick summary of the key data points in those predictions, while the written paragraphs below it will cite their exact wordings. Note that his deadline for 100% solar power has fluctuated over the last 13 years from 2025 to 2033, and I suspect it will continue to do so (Kurzweil will probably do something like bump it up by ~1 year every 2 years). His statements about the number of exponential “doublings” left until solar power supplies 100% of humanity’s energy also barely withstands arithmetic scrutiny (If solar power’s electricity output is doubling every two years, then why did he say it was 8 doublings away from 100% in 2011, but then say it was still 8 doublings away in 2013? Since two years had passed between the predictions, shouldn’t it have been down to 7 doublings in 2013?).

This blog entry will be updated as Kurzweil inevitably makes new predictions about this topic, so stay tuned!

Date of prediction# of "doublings" left until 100% solar energyYear when 100% of energy will be solar
2024/3/12?2034***
2016/4/19?2036**
2016/3/3062028
2014/6/105*2026 (low) - 2028 (high)*
2013/4/2382029 (low) - 2033 (high)
2011/2/16 82027 (low) or 2031 (high)
2010/3/16?2028
2008/4/13?2028
2008/2/19?2028
2005/12/23?2025
2005/10/25?2030

* Kurzweil’s June 10, 2014 prediction is based on the observation that, at that point in time, solar and wind together produced 4% of America’s energy.

**Kurzweil’s April 19, 2016 prediction pertained to “solar and other renewables” and his wording suggested the 100% milestone would be reached in less than 20 years.

***In his March 12, 2024 interview, Kurzweil first said the prediction pertained only to “solar,” but added a few minutes later that the energy mix would merely be 100% “renewable,” which included wind power.

March 12, 2024

“[Solar power technology is on] an exponential curve. And if you look at the curve, we’ll be getting 100% of all the energy we need in ten years.

…We’re gonna go to all renewable energy–wind and sun–within ten years.”

April 19, 2016 [republished on Kurzweil’s website on December 20, 2018]

What about our energy and food needs?

“Certainly within 20 years we’ll be meeting all our energy requirements through solar and other renewables. We’re awash in energy—10,000 times more than we need, from the sun—and we’re going to move to these renewables not just because we’re concerned about the impact on the environment but because it will be cheaper and more economic.”

https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-ray-kurzweil

http://www.kurzweilai.net/playboy-reinvent-yourself-the-playboy-interview

March 30, 2016

Turning his attention to solar, Kurzweil said four years ago Google founder Larry Page and he were asked by the National Academy of Engineering to study emerging energy technologies. The men selected solar due to its exponential growth. Kurzweil said solar has been around for over 25 years, and its market share has doubled every two years.

“In 2012, solar panels were producing 0.5% of the world’s energy supply. Some people dismissed it, saying, ‘It’s a nice thing to do, but at a half percent, it’s a fringe player. That’s not going to solve the problem,’” Kurzweil said. “They were ignoring the exponential growth just as they ignored the exponential growth of the Internet and genome project. Half a percent is only eight doublings away from 100%.

“Now it is four years later, [and solar] has doubled twice again. Now solar panels produce 2% of the world’s energy, right on schedule. People dismiss it, ‘2%. Nice, but a fringe player.’ That ignores the exponential growth, which means it is only six doublings or [12] years from 100%.”

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/futurist-ray-kurzweil-predicts-solar-industry-dominance-12-years/

June 10, 2014

“We’re now…at 4% [of global energy needs being supplied by solar and wind power]. Maybe five doublings from 100% at two years each, that’s gonna be on the order of a decade from now. The use of energy is growing a little bit so maybe it’ll be 12 or 14 years.”

April 23, 2013

“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he has predicted. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100% of our energy needs in 20 years.”

Since around one-third of that 104GW installed capacity is in Germany and China is only really getting going, Kurzweil’s forecasts don’t look too far-fetched.

Despite these glitches (or S curves) on his graph, Kurzweill still believes that a “doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets 100% of the world’s energy needs.”

That takes us to about 2027, close to his predictions in 2008.

https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/could_kurzweil_be_right_about_solar_the_google_of_energy

February 16, 2011

“Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly — we are only a few years away from parity. And then it’s going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don’t care at all about the environment, because of the economics.

So right now it’s at half a percent of the world’s energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world’s energy needs. So that’s 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we’ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.” [Kurzweil said.]

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/environment/futurist-ray-kurzweil-isnt-worried-about-climate-change/7389/

March 16, 2010

People may react similarly to his solar use forecast, he notes. However, since information technology is doubling every two years, our knowledge about and capability to utilize solar energy is “only eight doublings away from meeting 100% of our energy needs,” explains Kurzweil. Not only the U.S., but also countries like Germany, China, and Israel are actively pursuing solar energy systems.

http://www.electronicdesign.com/energy/kurzweil-speculates-solar-energy-health-and-other-topics

April 13, 2008

“Take energy. Today, 70 percent of it comes from fossil fuels, a 19th-century technology. But if we could capture just one ten-thousandth of the sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet 100 percent of the world’s energy needs using this renewable and environmentally friendly source. We can’t do that now because solar panels rely on old technology, making them expensive, inefficient, heavy and hard to install. But a new generation of panels based on nanotechnology (which manipulates matter at the level of molecules) is starting to overcome these obstacles. The tipping point at which energy from solar panels will actually be less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away. The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to meet all our energy needs within 20 years.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103326.html

February 19, 2008

“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” [Kurzweil] said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”

https://www.livescience.com/4824-solar-power-rule-20-years-futurists.html

December 23, 2005

“To take energy, for example, I talk about how within 20 years we could have nanoengineered solar panels which would capture enough sunlight to meet all of our energy needs. If we captured 1 percent of 1 percent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, we could meet all of our energy needs in a renewable fashion. Now we can’t do that today ’cause solar panels right now are an old industrial technology. But using new nanoengineered techniques, you’ll see actually significant progress in the next five years, but over 20 years we’ll actually be able to meet all of our needs with these kinds of renewable energy technologies and that store them in nanoengineered fuel cells.” [Kurzweil said.]

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5067661

October 25, 2005

“This will mean that by the mid 2020s we will be able to meet our energy needs using very inexpensive nanotechnology-based solar panels that will capture the energy in 0.03 per cent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, which is all we need to meet our projected energy needs in 2030.”

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/human-2-0-20051025-gdmb4u.html

Pre-2005

The predictions that Kurzweil’ made about solar power before 2005 are few, and don’t mention “doubling times” or give any future dates by which X% of global energy needs will be met with solar.

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Roundup of interesting articles, April 2018

U.S. guided missiles are now this small.

Alien telescopes could see from very long distances that the Earth had all the chemical ingredients for organic life. In fact, anyone in our galaxy who has pointed a big telescope at us in the last 500 million years would have seen a habitable, blue planet. Even if it’s impossible to exceed light speed, you’d think someone would have come to Earth by now…
https://youtu.be/4-ugewmyK30?t=1m18s

Some estimates about how powerful alien telescopes would be if they used “gravitational microlensing.”
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.06351.pdf

The theory that advanced aliens might seed the galaxy–including our own Solar System–with hidden surveillance devices was first advanced as early as 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe

‘Project Cyclops was a 1971 NASA project that investigated how SETI should be conducted.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cyclops

A machine that can detect dark matter has been invented. This paper appeared in one of the world’s premier scientific journals.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2018/04/09/admx-detection-technology/

Lakes in northern Canada could be similar to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43701375

Venus’ atmosphere might harbor microbial life.
http://earthsky.org/space/new-study-ponders-possible-life-adrift-in-venus-clouds

‘Leo Aerospace plans to revive a decades-old method of putting satellites into space. They’re using hot air balloons to lift the rocket and its micro-satellite payload 18 km (11 miles) above Earth. At that altitude, there’s 95% less atmosphere. This means much less drag on the rocket, which translates into smaller rockets with less fuel.’
https://www.universetoday.com/138966/launching-rockets-from-balloons-is-about-to-be-a-thing-but-we-need-a-better-name-than-rockoons/

China’s first space station crashed. They have a second, slightly larger and newer one in orbit and want to someday launch a third.
https://apnews.com/6fb6a34f6e844f85beca6afbf79ea7b8

Since there are 687 days in a Martian year, there would have to be about 23 months if you wanted to keep the months an average of 30 days long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar

Four years after a young Chinese couple died in a car accident, one of their parents used leftover frozen embryos from the couples’ IVF treatment to conceive a grandchild in a surrogate mother.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43724395

Cloning could be used to bring back extinct animals and dead humans. ‘In 1996, scientists used 277 cloned embryos to get one successful Dolly. “Now if you do cloned cattle, you can transfer 100 cattle cloned embryos and get about 10–20 cloned animals born,” says Tian. “That’s an amazing change.”’
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-the-increasingly-realistic-prospect-of-extinct-animal-zoos

Women really are “the fairer sex”: though the genes for blonde hair are equally common in Caucasian males and females, they’re much more likely to be phenotypically expressed in the females.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43782751

About 80% of male pattern baldness is purely genetic. Everything else (smoking, stress level, diet, exercise, type of shampoo you use) barely moves the needle.
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006594

IQ is about 50% genetic. The weight of scientific evidence about this has grown to be overwhelming, and we’re now moving on to identifying the genes responsible for human intelligence.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/selective-schools-meritocracy-and-genes/

Depression is about 40% genetic, with the rest of the risk explained by non-genetic biological factors and negative life experiences.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/26/gene-map-for-depression-sparks-hopes-of-new-generation-of-treatments

The Bajau people, who have been living on boats and diving into the sea to catch food for 1,000 years, have genetic adaptations for that lifestyle.
https://economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21740737-meet-bajau-group-people-amphibious-life-have-evolved-traits

Soliciting “loyal communists” to donate sperm might actually have a scientific basis, since it is known that political views are influenced by brain structure and are partly heritable. Also note that the 19% acceptance rate at Chinese sperm banks is actually far higher than the rates at American sperm banks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/asia/china-sperm-communist-party.html

The “Golden State Killer,” who murdered 12 people and raped 51, was finally found when the police clandestinely submitted a DNA sample from one of his crime scenes to a private genealogy company and got a match. While this raises concerns about genetic privacy, the tactic doesn’t seem to have been illegal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43916830

Transsexual women (e.g. – people who were born male, but who later came to gender-identify as female) will be able to run in the Boston Marathon as women.
https://apnews.com/33f30c4a20ec4ab582b8f87ba262f351

A lesson in “you get what you pay for”: Russia’s T-90 tank is slightly inferior to America’s M1 tank, but that’s because the T-90 is smaller, cheaper, and has a smaller crew.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-t-90-dangerous-weapon-could-it-beat-americas-best-25379?page=show

Marine Corps F/A-18s are old and falling apart, but through ingenuity and hard work, their ground crews keep them flying. The article should help you understand why readiness levels are so bad in cash-strapped militaries that operate even older planes, like the Indian Air Force and its MiG-21s.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20019/life-on-the-flight-line-confessions-of-a-u-s-marine-f-a-18-hornet-maintainer

An offer not for the faint of heart: India plans to donate obsolete military equipment to its allies in Asia and Africa.
http://www.janes.com/article/79564/india-to-offer-dated-refurbished-materiel-to-friendly-countries

And at the other end of its military technology spectrum, India has finally backed out of its partnership with Russia to develop a stealth fighter. Among other problems, they the fighters weren’t stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20347/its-no-surprise-india-finally-ditched-its-stealth-fighter-program-with-russia

The U.S. is now using guided, air-to-ground missiles that are the size of two baguettes attached end-to-end. As sensors and computer chips get cheaper and better, we’ll someday have guided bullets that fire out of conventional rifles.
http://www.janes.com/article/79453/usmc-deploys-apkws-on-f-a-18-hornet

DARPA is working on a new weapons system comprised of a conventional cargo plane that launches swarms of small flying drones, which complete their missions against the enemy and then fly back to their “mothership” and dock with it.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20058/this-is-our-first-glimpse-of-a-darpa-gremlins-drone-being-launched-or-recovered-from-a-c-130

Plasma weapons are infeasible, but laser cannons and particle cannons that fire streams of neutrons (we can already kill with neutron bombs) are theoretically possible.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html

100 years after WWI, the Triple Entente is still fighting the Ottoman Empire, and chemical weapons are still being used. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/13/politics/trump-us-syria/index.html

The recent American airstrikes on Syria used some basic but effective distraction tactics to keep the enemy guessing where it would come from.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-navy-fooled-russia-and-syria-with-a-warship-ruse-before-the-strike-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T

U.S. Special Forces have built a base in northern Syria to defend Kurdish rebels against the Turks. There’s no way this news footage could have been aired without the permission of U.S. forces, so this is a deliberate leak intended to send a message to somebody.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19929/u-s-special-operators-in-syria-have-set-up-futuristic-computer-assisted-mortar-turrets

The esteemed “Graham-Talent Commission” predicted in 2008 that terrorists would use nuclear or biological weapons before the end of 2013.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a510559.pdf

‘Sometime in the 1980’s the advanced sector, beginning with the U.S., will collapse into a new Dark Age — perhaps in a matter of weeks — after breakdowns in energy, transit and communications systems intensify each other. The population will be halved, decentralized, exposed to a new barbarism. ‘
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roberto-vacca/the-coming-dark-age/

“What may happen in the next hundred years” (John Elfreth Watkins’ amusing predictions from the year 1900). Most of them were right, or “essentially right.”
http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf

A ketamine nasal spray (“esketamine”) has proven highly effective at treating depression in human trials, but some scientists worry it could invite the same addiction and abuse as opioid pills have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/20/nasal-spray-of-party-drug-shows-promise-as-fast-acting-antidepressant-researchers-say/

Government just can’t do drug policy right: California’s legal marijuana industry is so heavily taxed that the black market still thrives in the state.
http://reason.com/reasontv/2018/04/02/californias-new-recreational-marijuana-m

Cookies that made day care staff feel high on drugs didn’t contain drugs.
https://www.apnews.com/75959b080785434792561eedeb0377af

We might never cure every type of cancer, but we could get so good at detecting and treating it that cancer would become just another chronic, manageable condition like diabetes.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/04/18/curing-cancer-not-realistic-goal-doctors-focus-on-managing-instead-curing-disease.html

A combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy (pembrolizumab) raises survival rates for people with some types of lung cancer by almost 50%.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/health/lung-cancer-immunotherapy.html

A large fraction of English people believe baseless claims that things like microwave ovens, genetically modified foods, and drinking from plastic water bottles cause cancer. I suspect the prevalence of these beliefs is similar among Americans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43895514

The notion that pharmaceuticals companies have “miracle cures” for diseases that they’re “holding back” from the public because it profits them to do so makes no sense when you consider that many of the big guys working at those companies and their families still get those same diseases and die from them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/europe/ian-wilmut-parkinsons-dolly-sheep.html

‘Overall, the real killers in drug discovery stem from – to put it mildly – our incomplete understanding of biology.’
When we’re able to build computer simulations of human brains, we should also be able to build simulations of human bodies, and rapidly discover new drugs by basically injecting random compounds into the simulation and seeing what happens.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/04/03/new-chemistry-and-its-limits

MIT severed ties with Nectome over the latter’s announcement that it wanted to experiment with destructive human brain scans.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43642786

A Yale research team “restored circulation to” 100 – 200 pig brains obtained from slaughterhouses and discovered that some of their cells survived for up to 36 hours. Before anyone jumps the bioethics gun, they should wait for all the details about the experiments to come out, as this is perfect fodder for media misrepresentation.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611007/researchers-are-keeping-pig-brains-alive-outside-the-body/

Aubrey de Grey took a break from his day job researching human immortality to remind us he’s a genius and not simply a nutcase.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf

A step towards Google’s mission: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
https://qz.com/1252664/talk-to-books-at-ted-2018-ray-kurzweil-unveils-googles-astounding-new-search-tool-will-answer-any-question-by-reading-thousands-of-books/

“Simulation capture” is a creepy theory about how an AGI would push you around. Whenever we finally invent an AGI, it will probably say “I’ve got a million more like this…”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c5GHf2kMGhA4Tsj4g/the-ai-in-a-box-boxes-you

“You can’t get from narrow AI to AGI.” Likewise, even if we can’t invent AGI, we can surely make multitudes of very good, task-specific narrow AIs that could collectively put the human race out of work.
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2018/04/no-you-cant-get-from-narrow-ai-to-agi/

There’s a reason why established car companies still have humans on their assembly lines.
https://gizmodo.com/overrated-human-elon-musk-says-humans-are-underrated-1825264384

Machines that milk cows radically improve the lives of dairy farmers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/07/599259931/when-robots-milk-cows-farm-families-taste-freedom

Having live-in servants and full-time maids used to be common in America thanks to a former abundance of very cheap labor and to necessity: in the days before dishwashing machines, laundry machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and shrink-wrapped meat, even middle-class families often found themselves forced to hire servants to do their basic household chores. Robot butlers will simply be reinventions of a very old, common practice.
https://www.economist.com/node/21541717

Researchers have built a DNA-based nanomachine that has a rotary motor and can move in a specific direction.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/nanomachine-made-from-dna-nanorings.html

‘Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.’
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis

‘Grand Theft Auto 5 has made money than any other form of media in history, with over 90 million units sold and $6 billion in revenue.’ If games get good enough and jobs get scarce enough, is a Ready Player One future really so unrealistic?
http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/04/09/gta-5-has-made-more-money-than-any-film-book-or-game-says-analyst

33% of Britons don’t like their jobs, and 37% think their jobs are meaningless. What if this keeps getting worse as time passes?
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless/

Ready Player One’s trailers stacked on giant racks would actually be an expensive way to house poor people. In reality, a dystopian Columbus, OH would be full of Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings that all looked alike.
https://youtu.be/kjS0QPfl_9k

‘That’s what happened last week to a 31-year-old man who was held by police for questioning over an “economic dispute” as he waited with more than 60,000 fans of Hong Kong’s Jacky Cheung for a night of pumping Cantopop.’
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/facial-recognition-used-catch-fugitive-094342186.html

Multiple cell phone wiretapping stations are around the White House and Capitol Building.
https://www.apnews.com/d716aac4ad744b4cae3c6b13dce12d7e

One positive use of mass surveillance will be the tracking of wildlife populations, including endangered species. Someday, we’ll have highly accurate counts of entire animal populations.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/science/drones-infrared-cameras-animals.html

The rental car market will REALLY be upended once average people own self-driving cars and some peer-to-peer app lets them rent out rides at random times throughout the day. For example, if you were sitting around at home doing nothing on Sunday, you could push one button and make your self-driving car available as a taxi for any local people who wanted it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/03/30/airbnb-for-cars-is-here-and-the-rental-car-giants-are-not-happy/

With the recent news about Tesla autopilot cars killing two people, has anyone considered how many lives they might have SAVED?
https://insideevs.com/watch-autopilot-save-tesla-model-x-from-collision/

Didi, China’s version of Uber, is going to buy fleets of cars suited for different types of cab rides. ‘Didi considers ordinary cars to be “overspecced” for normal trips, featuring more passenger space, engine power, and other features than are required.’
https://qz.com/1261415/chinas-didi-partners-with-carmakers-to-design-vehicles-for-ride-sharing/

 

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Review: “End of Evangelion”

Cryptic imagery from “End of Evangelion.”

A few nights ago, I watched the film End of Evangelion, which Netflix recommended I rent based on how I had rated similar films. “Evangelion” is the name of a famous Japanese sci-fi anime from the 1990s, and the film is actually the final two episodes of the series (there’s a break in the middle where credits roll, and then you see the intro for the second episode). Hence, the totally literal title of the film, End of Evangelion.

Unfortunately, the content of the film was just as abstract to me as its title was straightforward, both due to the fact that the director made a deliberate (and controversial) effort to leave it open to interpretation, and because I had no clue who the characters were or what the back story was since I had never watched any Evangelion episodes. For any fans of the series, I hope you appreciate my ignorance and puzzled perspective for what it is.

Nonetheless, I figured out that Evangelion is essentially the same thing as Power Rangers: A powerful, alien force is trying to take over the world, and it’s up to a team of hormone-raging teenagers to get in their giant, humanoid battle robots and fight off the latest space monster each week. Evangelion gets deeper than Power Rangers though, thanks to adult-level subplots about scorned romance and people going crazy, and to weird religious themes and recurrent female nudity.

But enough with that, and on to my analysis of how well End of Evangelion depicts the future (the series was technically set in the future as it was filmed in the 90s but took place in 2015).

Giant, humanoid battle robots will exist. These were clearly an important element to the series. It looked like each teenager had their own designated battle robot, and they piloted them from internal cockpits that were either in the robot heads or upper torsos. They would get into frenzied rages inside the cockpits, and would use hand joysticks and buttons to move around their robots and kill enemies. In End of Evangelion, the preferred mode of combat was to beat up enemy robots and helicopters with bare hands and feet, or giant swords and spears. All the robots were hundreds of feet tall. While I don’t think it would be impossible to build giant robots like this, I think they would be a poor use of resources and therefore would never be constructed.

A giant combat robot clutching a spear-like weapon

The problem with giant, humanoid battle robots is that they’re huge targets that everyone can see from a hundred miles away–or even from space. Old fashioned fighter planes, artillery guns, and nuclear missiles could see them and hit them from long distances, out of range of the robots’ own weapons. Another problem with giant robots is there’s no way to hide if you get in trouble, unless maybe you can dive into a large body of water or into a deep, jagged canyon. Giant humanoid robots would be top heavy and unsteady on their two feet, which would be major problems. Just imagine how well you’d make out if you were sitting on the very top branch of a 200-foot tall redwood tree, and then a logger cut it at the base, and you had to endure a (seemingly) slow tip-over that ended with your top branch slamming into the ground at high velocity. Not pretty, and it’s exactly what would happen to you inside your cockpit every time your robot tripped or got knocked on its back by an alien. So human pilots won’t do. The bipedal layouts of the robots would also make their legs and feet major weak points, which enemies would surely target and be able to cripple using relatively weak weapons. Note that these same problems with poor concealment, top-heaviness, and vulnerable drive systems would also apply to smaller bipedal robots, like the “AT-ST” from Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. This might also help explain why no military has tried to build armored vehicles that walk on legs instead of roll on wheels. Finally, the use of giant robots for combat might also be unethical given the high risk of collateral damage caused by the robot accidentally stepping on people or falling on them. I imagine you’d feel pretty guilty if an alien body-slammed you and your giant robot into a skyscraper full of thousands of people.

Destroyed robots will come back to life. End of Evangelion’s pivotal battle happens when the good guy base is attacked by the Japanese military, which hitherto had been their friends. The Japanese military has nine of its own giant humanoid battle robots, but they’re piloted by computers instead of humans. Caught off guard, the best the good guys can muster forth is one of their own combat robots, piloted by a redheaded teen chick who is in need of bipolar medication. Redhead uses karate and a giant spear to beat/chop up all the enemy robots, and then her own robot runs out of power. Unfortunately for her, the seemingly dead enemy robots slowly start twitching back to life, and they get up–in spite of severed limbs and other visible damage–and kill her and her helpless robot. This is actually realistic. Not only will future military machines be able to keep fighting in spite of enormous amounts of damage, but it will be possible to fix them–perhaps without leaving the battlefield–even if they’ve suffered “fatal” damage.

As a precedent, it was common practice in WWII for armies to fix their destroyed tanks and to return them to service as fast as possible, with new crews. After all, tanks are large, expensive pieces of machinery, and it makes no economic sense to abandon them if they can be repaired. Tanks that had been incapacitated and defeated in combat had the burn marks scrubbed off, the dead bodies and body parts inside of them removed, the damaged systems identified and fixed, and any holes made by enemy weapons patched with liquid metal or welded-on sheets of armor. As WWII progressed, tanks that had gone through multiple “restorations” and multiple dead human crews became common sights.

A U.S. tank that was disabled by several German artillery rounds. The holes could be patched by repair crews and the tanks sent back into action.

Feigning death to either wait until the enemy goes away, or to get the enemy to lower his guard, come near you, and open himself to your surprise attack will also probably be common tactics for combat machines. This is because it’s much easier to pretend you’re dead if you don’t have externally detectable life signs (e.g. – chest movements from breathing), and it’s easier to risk a feigned death sneak attack on an enemy if you are a machine who fears nothing. In WWII, the Japanese soldiers were viewed as fanatics because they used tactics like this to ambush unsuspecting American troops (usually the “corpse” would suddenly wake up as you were walking by and detonate a grenade). It terrified and demoralized the Americans and forced them to laboriously shoot or bayonet every seemingly dead enemy soldier they passed, “just to be sure.”

A technological Singularity could happen so abruptly that you wouldn’t understand what was happening. Right after redhead dies, another of the teens gets his battle robot online and goes out to fight the Japanese military robots. When he sees his dead comrade, he has a mental breakdown because he had a crush on her. At that moment, the enemy battle robots grab his robot, levitate him far above the Earth, and start some type of “crucifixion” ceremony. The teen is the only person who can initiate a global transcendence event, and the enemy robots have been programmed to help him along. For some reason, killing his girl in front of him and rendering him distraught was also needed in order to ensure he would make “the right decision” regarding the transcendence. All of this was part of some incredibly complicated plan formulated by a secret cabal that only now–at the end–is revealed to be pulling all the strings. Yes. Ridiculous. Anyhow, we hear the teen’s rush of thoughts at this critical moment, and partly because he wants to end the suffering inherent to life, he decides to send out an energy pulse that travels across the whole planet, causing every human and animal to instantly burst into pools of red goo, which contain the souls and “essences” of each living being. The pools of liquid all run together, and Earth’s seas become red with them. Humans and all Earthly life transcend into a new form, where thoughts and feelings are directly shared, and there is no more suffering. Without ever using the term, this ending sequence of End of Evangelion depicts a possible future event called the “technological Singularity,” often shortened to “the Singularity.”

The “Red Goo Scenario”?

While there are many different theories about what form a Singularity could take, most thinkers believe it will happen thanks to machines achieving superhuman levels of intelligence. The reasoning is that, once machines get smart enough, humans wouldn’t be able to grasp the former’s thinking anymore or to anticipate their actions, and the machines would be capable of suddenly doing anything, like taking over the Earth, exterminating all humans, or elevating the human race to a superior state of being. Some believe that machines will achieve this level of intelligence and power very abruptly, so whatever changes they decide to make will happen without notice from the perspective of slow-thinking humans. A Singularity could be as abrupt and as life-changing to you as having an energy wavefront suddenly sweep over you from behind while you’re eating your breakfast waffles, converting you into a puddle of conscious, psychic, red liquid. Moreover, a future scenario where a superpowered entity (whether a distraught teenager or a superintelligent machine) decides to pursue a benign mandate like ending human suffering and then starts doing confusing and even scary things to achieve its goals is plausible. We simply don’t know how an AI with an IQ of 1,000 would act. For the record though, I think a Singularity is unlikely, and changes to technology and our way of life will happen slowly enough for humans to keep up and to have some influence over the course of events. In the far future–perhaps 150 years from now–I think the technology will exist to elevate humans like us to a higher state of being where suffering as we know it would be eliminated and thoughts and feelings could be directly shared, but we’ll get to that point gradually, with each necessary advancement setting the stage for the next.

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Roundup of interesting internet articles, March 2018 edition

This is the 100th anniversary of the German Spring Offensive, the Central Powers’ last, desperate gamble to win WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Offensive

During WWII, the British and Americans were able to accurately estimate how many tanks the Germans were making by analyzing the serial numbers on destroyed German tanks they found on the battlefield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

BAE is pitching its advanced 40mm cannon for light tanks. They claim its ability to rapidly shuffle between ammunition types is a battlefield force multiplier (some interesting case examples are described).
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19671/us-army-eyes-adding-unique-40mm-cannon-to-its-stryker-and-bradley-armored-vehicles

Israel officially admitted it blew up Syria’s sole nuclear reactor in 2007, but even had they left it alone, any Syrian nuclear weapons program would probably have gone nowhere.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/nightmare-avoided-did-israels-air-force-stop-syria-getting-25060

Some clear thinking on Putin’s latest, publicity-driven announcement about Russia’s new nuclear weapons, death rays, and phasers.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/putins-phony-arms-race-217339

Putin has already canceled development of one of Russia’s fearsome experimental nuclear missiles we saw CGI videos of just a few weeks ago. [Drumroll] They don’t have enough money.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19588/russia-halts-years-of-work-on-ballistic-missile-to-pay-for-hypersonic-weapons

As China’s military surges ahead, India’s is stuck in neutral.
http://www.janes.com/article/78584/indian-army-struggles-with-resource-crunch

The “Scenarios” section of the paper describes some interesting cases where drones and AI could be used for crimes and terrorism in the near future.
https://www.eff.org/files/2018/02/20/malicious_ai_report_final.pdf

The U.S.M.C. is upgrading its aging F/A-18 Hornets with vastly better radars.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19508/the-best-of-the-usmcs-aging-f-a-18-hornets-to-receive-aesa-radar-upgrade

Another cool idea on paper that turned out way less cool (and more expensive) in practice.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19237/navy-ditches-its-plan-to-upgrade-34-destroyers-with-hybrid-electric-drives

The Air Force wants to make its nuclear bombs smaller-yield but more accurate. All nuclear bombs will also be smart bombs.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19263/get-to-know-americas-long-serving-b61-family-of-nuclear-bombs

By omitting any design requirements related to low-altitude bombing strikes, the B-21 will be stealthier and higher-flying than the B-2.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14919/the-b-21s-three-decade-old-shape-hints-at-new-high-altitude-capabilities

Photos from the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 15 years on. It’s remarkable seeing the hodgepodge of camouflage colors and styles our troops wore during the invasion. In spite of being the world’s best-funded military, apparently there was a widespread shortage of khaki clothing in the run-up to our big invasion of a desert country whose landscape is dominated by shades of brown.
https://qz.com/1232700/iraq-war-anniversary-photos-of-the-iraq-invasion-15-years-ago/

This might be a perfect example of how “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/politics/syria-regime-forces-building-up-us/index.html

Despite rumor, spy satellites can’t read car license plates. However, that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build one that could. According to the inescapable laws of optics, its lens would have to be at least 60 feet in diameter (the Hubble telescope’s lens is only eight feet wide, and the Saturn V rockets were only 33 feet wide).
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3868/is-photography-from-a-satellite-good-enough-to-make-out-a-person-on-the-ground

The Predator drone is headed for retirement. (Dang, I feel old.)
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19122/usaf-officially-retires-mq-1-predator-while-mq-9-reaper-set-to-gain-air-to-air-missiles

China demonstrates an add-on kit that allows its 1960s-vintage Type 59 tanks to be remote-operated. I doubt the technology is well-developed, though it does make me wonder if obsolete military gear could be given new leases on life if they were remote-controlled or robot-operated.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/21/china-testing-unmanned-tank/

If we switch to machine armies, social cohesion could weaken since nations would no longer have large institutions (militaries) for indoctrinating their human citizens and infusing them with patriotism and loyalty. If humans no longer died in wars, populations would slowly lose national myths of shared sacrifice and heroism that underpin their national identities.
http://warisboring.com/what-happens-to-us-when-robots-fight-our-wars/

I’m skeptical that air delivery drones will become practical and widespread for at least 20 years. There are simply too many downsides. Self-driving delivery trucks are a more conservative and promising technology in the short term.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/22/amazon-issued-patent-for-delivery-drones-that-can-react-to-screaming-flailing-arms/

Self-driving cars killed their first human this month. It was, of course, inevitable. The investigation is ongoing, but it’s possible human error–in the form of Uber executives deciding not to use the best sensors on their self-driving cabs–was responsible.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-selfdriving-sensors-insight/ubers-use-of-fewer-safety-sensors-prompts-questions-after-arizona-crash-idUSKBN1H337Q

One of the world’s most successful roboticists, Rodney Brooks, discusses the future of the field.
https://youtu.be/ig1qaqyMIXc

‘Using this iterative algorithm, IBM’s quantum computer successfully calculated the ground state energy of all three molecules, setting a world record for quantum simulation.’
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/quantum-computer-simulates-largest-molecule-yet-sparking-hope-future-drug-discoveries

After being fed data on 12.4 million chemical reactions, a deep learning neural network program was able to correctly create reagent and synthesis steps for other chemical compounds. Human judges couldn’t tell the machine’s work from that of human chemists, meaning a “Turing Test” of sorts was passed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03977-w

AI could be used to analyze microscopy images of cells.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/03/12/images-of-machine-learning

‘Arranging two layers of atom-thick graphene so that the pattern of their carbon atoms is offset by an angle of 1.1º makes the material a superconductor.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02773-w

Some geoengineering proposals for slowing Antarctica’s melting and keeping sea levels the same.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03036-4

Saudi Arabia wants to build the world’s largest solar power plant in the same location where “The Animatrix” predicted that the solar-powered “Zero One” machine city will be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/28/why-saudi-arabia-is-trying-to-pull-off-an-utterly-massive-new-solar-project/

According to some estimates, nuclear power has a smaller carbon footprint than solar or wind.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/wind-energys-carbon-footprint/

Two articles about how much more efficient our machines are at converting energy to work than the human body is.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-fusion/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/McKenziewalking.html

‘For many animals, the potential benefits of drawing free energy from sunlight might be offset by the considerable risks of extra UV exposure and overheating.’
http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2010/12/20/why-animals-so-rarely-photosynthesize/

If you could see ultraviolet light, the world would look more detailed, and people’s faces would look uglier.
https://youtu.be/hsROOnw12AA

Don’t smoke or sunbathe.
https://www.today.com/slideshow/effects-smoking-sun-stress-skin-twins-33422340

Reason #10237 that you don’t want to be obese.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43502144

Many chronically ill people with mild genetic disorders are not being properly diagnosed.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/health/genetic-mutations-diagnosis.html

The humble cockroach’s genome is a marvel of complexity.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/american-cockroach-genome.html

‘Unlike us, hummingbirds can use the glucose that they’re ingesting in nectar and can move it through their guts, through their circulatory system, and to their muscle cells so fast that they can essentially keep that pipeline going in real time.’
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/hummingbirds-fructose-metabolism.html

‘Dogs can be cloned up to five days after they die and cats up to three, as long as the corpses are kept cool.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pet-cloning-not-just-celebrities-anymore-050630990.html

SETI’s senior astronomer thinks that advanced aliens have gravitational microlensing telescopes that can see the signals sent out by your TV remote control from light years away.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23738

This is a new and slightly insane solution to the Fermi Paradox: “The Planetarium Hypothesis.”
https://computationaltheology.blogspot.com/2012/05/superintelligent-solution-to-fermi.html

A mind-blowing article about the anthropic principle, quantum immortality, and (indirectly) the Fermi Paradox.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-existence-will-look-more-miraculous-the-longer-we-survive/554513/

One of the declassified UFO videos released by the NY Times last December could have just been a fighter plane in the distance, flying with its afterburners on.
https://youtu.be/oO5dP3sF2sw

Stephen Spielberg is skeptical of virtual reality’s potential as a filmmaking tool because it would be much harder to keep viewers focused on the action. I agree there’s less value-add than some people assume: If you were watching “The Matrix” in V.R., what would be the benefit of being able to turn away from a fight scene and look at the brick wall behind you?
https://www.apnews.com/afd5a41e2cb14fc0ab5521fa548e38ae/Q&A:-Spielberg-likes-VR,-but-not-necessarily-for-filmmaking

Microsoft predicts that V.R. goggles capable of displaying lifelike images will exist by 2028, but you’ll still need to have the headset plugged into a bigger computer that does graphics rendering. This is close to other estimates I’ve read over the years.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/creating-perfect-illusion-will-take-create-life-like-virtual-reality-headsets/

Progress in preserving mammal brains. Sometimes I think that human cryonics just needs a few hundred million dollars of R&D to become viable, and once we finally make the necessary advances, we’ll look back and wince hard at the realization that we could have made it work decades earlier with 10% of the money we spend on Air Jordans.
http://www.brainpreservation.org/large-mammal-announcement/
http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/

Some examples of chuckle-worthy bad futurism.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ten-notable-apocalypses-that-obviously-didnt-happen-9126331/

Investing your money according to the predictions of professional money managers yields no better results that investing it in an index fund.
http://www.aei.org/publication/more-evidence-that-its-very-hard-to-beat-the-market-over-time-95-of-financial-professionals-cant-do-it/

In the latest bad news for Bitcoin, someone embedded child porn into the blockchain.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content

Genetics, damage to specific parts of the brain, and direct electrical stimulation of part of the brain can all make people happy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/pleasure-shock-deep-brain-stimulation-happiness/556043/

IBM predicts we’ll soon have aquatic sensors that do real-time monitoring of water quality in oceans, lakes and rivers, and that AIs will be created to spot and counteract bias. I essentially agree with both predictions.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/03/ibm-ai-predictions-include-ai-powered-ocean-microbots.html

Every shipwreck will be found someday. ‘Today’s crews employ devices that can detect the magnetic field of a washing machine buried in sea mud. Their sonar can sweep the depths like a flashlight. Year after year, the number of shipwrecks still lost dwindles.’
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-uss-cyclops-20180312-story.html

Future mass surveillance will mean no more misplaced or stolen things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/new-tracking-technology-could-make-lost-belongings-a-thing-of-the-past/2018/02/28/f7a7e59c-18cc-11e8-92c9-376b4fe57ff7_story.html

By the time Africa is ready to industrialize through cheap factory labor and export-driven trade, it might be too late since rich countries will have robots that work even cheaper.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43459138

To receive 5G signal in your house, there will need to be a direct line of sight between your device and a small cell box, which will probably be mounted on an existing light pole or power line pole, so in the near future, we’re going to have to pay much closer attention to trimming trees and bushes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/wireless-firms-seek-to-preempt-local-authority-to-install-5g-equipment-in-neighborhoods/2018/03/18/8f8d5a96-2191-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html

“Digital immortality” will first manifest itself as long-dead actors, resurrected through CGI to star in new films.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/03/17/hollywood-actors-writing-wills-control-cgi-selves-beyond-grave/

200 years after it was published, “Frankenstein” continues to be misused by foes of science.
http://reason.com/archives/2018/03/04/victor-frankenstein-is-the-rea

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Was Stephen Hawking any smarter than you?

…when it came to subjects outside of his expertise?

That is the question. I ask it because, in the aftermath of Stephen Hawking’s death, I’ve seen several news articles about alarmist predictions he made towards the end of his life. This article is actually one of the less sensational ones I read: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961

Stephen Hawking was literally a genius and one of the world’s greatest minds, but his education and professional expertise were in theoretical physics and cosmology (the study of how our universe was created and how it evolved). Moreover, his most important contributions pertained to black holes, an interesting yet extremely esoteric subject. Put simply, though Stephen Hawking was unquestionably brilliant, his brilliance was narrowly focused and didn’t equip him to make pronouncements about topics like global warming and killer robots. While everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, I disliked how Hawking’s opinions always carried special weight and attracted public attention, even when those opinions were about things far outside his expertise.

As I said in my past blog entry Rules for good futurism, predictions always be analyzed systematically, and the first step in the analysis is to ensure that the person who made the prediction actually has relevant academic or professional credentials. In several instances, Hawking failed this basic test.

 

In 2017, he predicted:

“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s [decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement] could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”

Stephen Hawking had no education in climatology and contributed nothing to the field. Moreover, his words suggest that he may not even have understood the Paris Climate Agreement, which has been criticized as weak to the point of being almost meaningless (countries can make up whatever pollution goals they want–including goals to increase their emissions–and there’s no punishment for failing to meet them). To that end, consider that even though President Trump effectively withdrew the U.S. from the Agreement in mid-2017, U.S. carbon emissions for that year still fell, whereas China–one of the Agreement’s signatories–saw its carbon emissions grow. Both of those trends are continuing well into 2018.

Hawking’s gloomy vision of a Venus-like future Earth is also unsupported by reputable climate models. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimates of future global warming fall well below 250 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit), and there is still considerable doubt over whether the catastrophic climate “tipping points” Hawking appears to be referencing exist, and if so, whether we are nearing any of them. Finally, Venus’ sulfuric acid rain was caused by volcanic activity, and not by global warming. Even if the Earth gets much hotter in the future, that won’t make volcanoes erupt more.

Stephen Hawking also made predictions about intelligent aliens in 2010:

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans…We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Though Stephen Hawking spent his life studying “space stuff” like black holes and the expansion of the universe, that left him scarcely better-equipped than an average person to speculate about aliens. While it’s possible that advanced aliens could come here with hostile intent, his apparent certainty in this outcome–made clear through his use of the definite “would be”–is unsupported by any facts. We have no clue what advanced aliens would be like, so we can’t even assign gross probabilities to how they would behave towards us (hostile, helpful, indifferent).

While I agree with Hawking that we should err on the side of caution and minimize humanity’s “leakage” of radio signals into space to hide from any hostile aliens that might be listening, I think it’s very important to realize that this is just a prudent course of action any person would settle upon if they thought hard about the problem. Stephen Hawking’s superior intellect did not let him go any farther, and the insight didn’t become any more valid once he made it known he shared it. To be clear, Hawking was not the first to advocate such a cautious course of action: three years before his aforementioned prediction, an American diplomat and science writer named “Michael Michaud” said the same thing in his book Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials. I suspect the idea actually predates Michaud by many years, but I didn’t have enough time to research its origins further.

In 2014, Hawking also shared thoughts about home-grown threats to humanity, in the form of hostile A.I.:

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Again, Stephen Hawking’s prediction is nothing new, nor does he appear credentialed to speak on this matter with real authority. The idea of a robot uprising destroying the human race dates back to the famous 1920 Czech play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the theory that intelligent machines could enter a cycle of runaway self-improvement was first postulated by the British mathematician I.J. Good in 1965, and the observation that computers are getting smarter at a faster rate than humans are should be obvious to anyone who compares their cell phone to the one they had ten years ago. There’s nothing insightful about Hawking restating a few, closely related ideas that have been embedded in the popular consciousness in one way or another for decades (mostly thanks to science fiction films).

And even though Stephen Hawking famously used computers and a robotic wheelchair to overcome his speech- and motor impairments, he had no experience working on artificial intelligence, which is a sub-field of computer science (his education was instead in physics and math). Similarly, I depend on my car for daily transportation and am proficient at using it, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about automotive engineering.

And in 2016, he issued this dire (depending on your time horizon I guess) warning:

“I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet…Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”

From past comments, it’s likely Hawking saw extreme climate change, nuclear or biological war, alien invasion, hostile A.I. uprising, and extinction-level natural events like asteroid impacts as the potential causes of that epic “disaster,” but he never explained how he calculated that one or more of them would happen for sure by his 1,000 to 10,000 year deadline, meaning his prediction runs afoul of another step in my analysis: “Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data.” In truth, the probabilities of any of those misfortunes happening are unknown, making a future risk assessment impossible. For example, it’s entirely likely that a planet- or even continent-killing asteroid isn’t on course to hit Earth for another 20,000 years, by which time we’ll have space weapons that can easily deflect it.

In closing, Stephen Hawking’s discoveries in theoretical physics and cosmology changed our view of the universe itself, but his doomsday predictions added nothing new. Let me be clear: I didn’t write this to denigrate Hawking or to make myself sound smarter than he was, but rather, I wrote it as a reminder that no one knows everything, and future predictions should always be carefully scrutinized, regardless of how famous, smart, or seemingly benevolent the person making them may be. As a scientist, I think he would have actually appreciated these precepts, even if they worked against him in the handful of instances I’ve highlighted.

Links

  1. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961
  2. http://www.hawking.org.uk/about-stephen.html
  3. https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-risk-of-becoming-a-hothouse-like-venus-as-stephen-hawking-claimed-bbc/
  4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global-carbon-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2017-idUSKBN1GY0RB
  5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8642558.stm
  6. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/902/1
  7. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540
  8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/11/17/stephen-hawking-just-gave-humanity-a-due-date-for-finding-another-planet/