Category: technology

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Roundup of interesting articles, October 2018

In spite of what Hollywood would have you believe, submarines almost never fight each other.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/showdown-story-only-submarine-vs-submarine-battle-34652

Should we replace our aircraft carriers with cargo ships full of containerized missiles and drones?
https://taskandpurpose.com/maritime-airpower-aircraft-carrier/

The U.S. Navy will buy more of its venerable Arleigh-Burke destroyers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-getting-10-new-flight-iii-destroyers-and-it-could-be-game-changer-32427

The U.S. Army tested an experimental conversion kit that allowed a computer to fly a helicopter designed for a human pilot.
https://www.janes.com/article/84156/us-army-flies-automated-sara-helicopter

The USAF has selected the Boeing “T-X” to be its new training jet. It will replace the T-38, which first flew in 1959. Given the longevity of modern warplanes, the T-X should stay in service until at least the 2060s, by which time fighter and bomber planes might be automated, rendering human pilots obsolete. Thus, the T-X could be the last, or at best the second-to-last, trainer aircraft that the USAF ever makes. AIs won’t need to spend time in a simplified practice plane to learn how to fly. They will just be created in software labs and uploaded directly into frontline combat planes. Someday, the very notion of a “trainer aircraft” will be obsolete.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23889/boeing-wins-big-again-and-claims-the-usafs-huge-t-x-jet-trainer-deal

The T-38 pilot training jet could be converted into a fighter plane, but it would be crappy at its new job, and it would be a poor use of money considering what you’d get in return. Once the U.S. adopts the T-X, we’ll probably transfer our surplus T-38s to poorer allied countries or to aviation museums.
https://www.quora.com/Can-an-aircraft-such-as-a-T-38-be-weaponised-in-a-war-time-situation

Even if a stealth plane is invisible to radar, it will be hotter than the air around it thanks to its jet engine and to air friction against its wings, so you will still be able to see the plane using a thermal camera (e.g. – “Predator” heat vision).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/rip-stealth-russian-su-35-reportedly-took-picture-f-22-why-might-be-problem-34267

The U2 spy plane’s camera still uses analog film.
https://petapixel.com/2018/06/08/film-photography-at-70000-feet-in-the-u-2-spy-plane/

The U.S. just withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because Russia had been cheating for years, and the U.S. needs medium-range missiles to deter China in the Pacific.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/23/how-china-plays-into-trumps-decision-pull-out-inf-treaty-with-russia/

The U.S. might start mass producing copies of Russian guns for foreign military assistance. Ukraine and Bulgaria already have factories for making these guns, but apparently they can’t keep up with demand.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24283/russia-rages-at-pentagon-plans-to-build-u-s-made-derivatives-of-soviet-era-small-arms

The USSR planned to quickly nuke Austria if WW3 ever broke out even though Austria wasn’t in NATO and has enshrined neutrality in its constitution.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html

A police helicopter was used to break up a rowdy college party by flying low over them. The downdraft blew away their tents and lawn furniture. This is one, overlooked reason why flying cars were never built.
https://youtu.be/j4Au-yCQur0

Science is coming around to buttressing what has been common sense forever: Sunlight exposure raises your mood. This finding is particularly interesting since it establishes a biochemical pathway linking skin cells to brain cells.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/12/sunlight-and-the-brain

Another astounding discovery: cardiovascular exercise decreases your risk of death! Of note is that fact that there was no observed ceiling to the benefit.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428

Mushrooms and plants that contain hallucinogenic compounds evolved them as protection against insects. The fact that the chemicals also have effects on human brains is entirely coincidental.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/magic-mushroom-drug-evolved-to-mess-with-insect-brains/

Another medical study has found the drug Ecstasy can treat PTSD.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/29/another-ptsd-study-finds-dramatic-improv

Taller people might be at higher cancer risk because they have more cells in their bodies.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/24/tall-people-at-greater-risk-of-cancer-because-they-have-more-cells

Gene editing in utero might soon be tried in humans that have congenital diseases caused by single-point mutations.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/09/gene-editing-freely-you-have-received-freely-give

‘In technical papers my research group anticipated years ago that even very complex traits would be predictable once a [human genome] data threshold was crossed. The phenomenon is related to what physicists refer to as a phase transition in algorithm performance. The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html

Rapid progress is being made identifying the genes linked to many human traits, including intelligence.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/advances-in-genomic-prediction.html

‘[The] fact that intelligence or personality are caused by many thousands of genes, each of minuscule effect, means that it will be impossibly difficult to create a super-intelligent designer baby.’
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-genes-of-human-behaviour/

‘Universal Family Tree — Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. ‘   –Kevin Kelly, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dna-genealogy-privacy-20181012-story.html

Over 100,000 varieties of rice are being held at a global rice “gene bank” in the Philippines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45828150

The “dbSNP” is an open database of all recorded human alleles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/

Will cryonically preserved humans ever be revived? The consensus among the disinterested interviewees (e.g. – the people who aren’t running human cryonics companies and who haven’t written anti-cryonics books) is “No”, unless we get Star Trek-level technology. The freezing process damages the brain at the cellular level, and reversing it would require nanomachines.
https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-frozen-people-ever-be-revived-1829905516

Increased use of keyboards and smartphone screens and the decline of handwriting are eroding fine motor control across the population, with particularly harmful impact on prospective surgeons.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429

A new device called the “Everlast” notebook saves writings and drawings as data files. What kills it is the fact that you have to take photos of what you’ve written on the pages to save them digitally. The pages themselves should be able to detect what the user has written on them, and to upload it to their remote storage drive.

Prediction: Within 20 years, books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would then be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/642311833/everlast

In 1911, Thomas Edison erroneously predicted that most household furnishings and appliances would someday be made of steel.
https://www.inverse.com/article/19331-thomas-edison-alternate-futures-steel-home-design

Winston Churchill predicted that humans would someday eat lab-grown meats.
https://qz.com/1383643/seven-weird-food-predictions-from-the-past-including-churchills-lab-grown-chicken-wings/

Ben Goertzel 2008: ‘My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years.’
https://opencog.wordpress.com/2008/07/

Ben Goertzel 2017: ‘I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually.’
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and research director at OpenAI, predicts that the possibility of AGI be created in as little as five years “can no longer be discounted.” Skip to the 27:00 mark in his speech:
https://youtu.be/w3ues-NayAs

Stephen Hsu, physicist and all-around smart dude: ‘So a timescale > 30-50 years for AGI, even in highly optimistic scenarios, seems quite possible to me.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/intuition-and-two-brains-revisited.html

In 2013, some guy built a perfect Tetris-playing AI. It clears lines from the screen just as fast as new pieces fall from the sky. As far as anyone can tell, it could play forever.
https://codemyroad.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/tetris-ai-the-near-perfect-player/

The hype about self-driving cars is dying down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/18/shaken-by-hype-self-driving-leaders-adopt-new-strategy-shutting-up/

The Tesla Model 3 is, by some measures, the safest car ever tested by the NHTSA.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-3-lowest-probability-injury-any-vehicle-ever-tested-nhtsa

A teardown of a Tesla Model 3 reveals it’s an extraordinary piece of technology, but its process of manufacture could be sharply simplified.
https://youtu.be/Lj1a8rdX6DU

ReThink Robotics, the company that made the “Baxter” general-purpose robot, went bankrupt due to low sales and sold itself to a German company.
https://www.therobotreport.com/hahn-group-acquires-rethink-robotics-ip/

We don’t know if there’s enough CO2 sequestered in Mars’ soil to create an atmosphere via terraforming machines. I think that, by the time we have the ability to send large numbers of people to Mars, intelligent machines will probably dominate Earth and cancel any senseless plans to send more than token numbers of resource-hogging meatbags like us there. Multi trillion dollar plans to terraform Mars will also be considered too wasteful to proceed.
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/so-can-we-terraform-mars-or-not

A simple explanation of how the Asteroid Belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are different.
http://ryanmarciniak.com/archives/390

‘The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be between 2.8×10^21 and 3.2×10^21 kilograms, which is just 4% of the mass of the Moon.’

That sounds small until you think about this: A Ford-class aircraft carrier is 9.1 million (9.1×10^6) kilograms. A space warship ten times that size–which is in the same ballpark as a Star Destroyer–would thus be 9.1×10^7 kg. If we had space factories and converted just ONE PERCENT of the asteroid belt’s mass (I used the lower of the two estimates) into space warships, we could build 30.7 QUADRILLION ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt

In theory, a particle accelerator wider than our Solar System could unlock all the mysteries of physics and cosmology.
https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595

A Russian Soyuz space rocket exploded after takeoff, but miraculously, the two astronauts it was carrying safely ejected.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/656473889/rocket-launch-failure-forces-astronaut-and-cosmonaut-to-make-ballistic-landing

NASA’s “Space Launch System” (SLS) heavy rocket is in even worse shape than thought.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/10/program-build-nasas-moon-rocket-could-double-price-billion-ig-says/

Yes, we still have the blueprints to build Saturn V rockets, but no, it wouldn’t make sense to make more of them for many reasons.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again

In the 1990s, the “DC-X” experimental rocket did test flights that proved rockets could vertically land and be 100% reusable. However, the technology wasn’t commercialized for over 20 years.
https://youtu.be/39cjZTCay24

The “To the Stars Academy,” which was co-founded by the former lead singer of Blink-182 and which publicized last year’s big UFO report, says it has very few assets and huge debts.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420418050766/tv503167_1sa.htm

Scientists have created cheap, artificial wood that is better than real wood.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-create-artificial-wood-that-is-water-and-fire-resistant/

There have been recent technological breakthroughs in our ability to view the three-dimensional structures of small molecules.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/18/small-molecule-structures-a-new-world

Lowered plane travel costs and the growth of the global middle class have caused the number of tourists to explode. The trends will only continue, and I fear someday all the best places in the world will be overrun.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/overtourism-solutions/index.html

I predict that “Choose-your-own-endings” like this will become a common form of entertainment in the future. To appease different factions of fans, the same TV series will exist as “parallel universes” where the plots diverged at critical junctures. A mix of viewer focus groups and instant surveys will guide each divergence, and fanfiction crowdsourcing and AI will pick up the slack writing the multiple scripts. The logical endpoint of this is entertainment custom-tailored to individual people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/netflix-is-said-to-plan-choose-your-own-adventure-black-mirror

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What would a robot tank look like?

Bigger tanks may be scarier, but they are also bigger targets. Less is more.

Lately, I’ve read about some interesting experiments to jury-rig helicopters and tanks to be autonomously controlled:

I’m unsure if any of these projects will get past the prototype stage, but they’re fascinating nonetheless since, if adopted, they could extend the useful lives of many old pieces of military hardware by enhancing them with machine intelligence and, maybe in some cases, with robot crews. As with all types of jobs, those in the military will inevitably be taken over by machines of some sort, and drop-in-kits installed into the cockpits of old helicopters could be the “bridge” in that transition.

However, in the longer run, planes, tanks, ships, and other pieces of military hardware will be redesigned around the needs of machines instead of humans. Returning to the helicopter example, a clean-sheet design meant to be flown by a computer wouldn’t have a cockpit at all: its shoebox-sized computer “pilot” would just need a small, armored compartment in the fuselage, which could be accessed through a little door. Deleting the chairs, controls, displays, and windows that a human pilot/co-pilot duo would have needed would make the autonomous helicopter lighter, sleeker, faster, and cheaper to make. In a fight between the old helicopter jury-rigged with a drop-in computer and the new helicopter designed specifically around a computer pilot, the latter would win.

This makes me wonder what a “robot tank” that was as good as the best modern tanks would look like. A tank’s quality is determined in aggregate by its 1) firepower, 2) speed, and 3) armor, so the theoretical robot tank will need to equal or surpass the U.S. M1 Abrams or Russian T-14 Armata. For this exercise, I think the best place to start is with the first criterion, “firepower.”

The Abrams tank has a 120mm diameter main cannon and the Armata has a 125mm cannon. Their capabilities are about the same. Our robot tank would thus need one or other. Now, a tank’s cannon sets a minimum diameter for the tank’s “turret ring,” which is the big hole in the top of the tank’s hull that the turret is dropped into in the factory. As a general rule, bigger cannons need wider turret rings. And for obvious reasons, the width of the turret ring in turn sets a minimum width for the tank’s hull.

At this WWII American tank factory, the tanks in the foreground have not had their turrets installed, so their turret rings are visible. Fully assembled tanks are visible farther in the background.
A U.S. Sherman tank that was destroyed by a large land mine in Okinawa. Note how the turret has fallen off of the hull.

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army built an experimental version of the M1 Abrams tank that had an unmanned, 120mm turret. They dryly named this vehicle the “Tank Test Bed” (TTB). It was never put into mass production, but its weapon reportedly worked very well. I couldn’t find figures on the internet, but eyeballing the photo below, it looks like the diameter of the TTB’s turret ring is about 80% of the tank hull’s diameter. The M1 is known to be 12 feet wide, so I’ll estimate the turret ring is 9.6 feet in diameter. To add the necessary structural support for the turret ring and space for side armor, let’s make our robot tank’s hull 11 feet wide.

M1 Abrams “Tank Test Bed”

Take note that the Russian T-14 Armata has a 125mm, unmanned turret, and the vehicle’s overall width is 11.5 feet (3.5 meters), which suggests my estimate is credible, and that the Russians might have made a robotic tank gun that is as compact as physically allowable. Note that the T-14 Armata has a three-man crew, and they are seated in a row inside the hull, so it’s possible the tank’s width was determined by human considerations rather than mechanical ones. That said, I’ll stick with my assumption that a robot tank could be a slightly thinner 11 feet wide thanks to the deletion of space-consuming humans with their huge shoulder widths.

Diagram of the T-14 Armata tank. The three-man crew sits shoulder-to-shoulder in the hull.

As this very long, very awesome RAND report says, the optimal ratio between a tank’s width and length is 1 : 1.5 (ignoring the length of the cannon). Our hypothetical robot tank’s length should thus be 16.5 feet (198 inches). Looking at modern tanks, however, I see the ratio ends up more like 1 : 2.16 (M1 Abrams), 1 : 2.49 (T-14 Armata), 1 : 2.08 (Leopard 2), and 1 : 1.8 (T-90), which suggests to me that there’s some other design constraint forcing tank engineers to make their vehicles longer than they should ideally be. And you guessed it, I think the extra length owes (mostly or wholly) to the need for interior crew compartment(s) for the humans. Look at this diagram of a T-90, to which I added a Little Green Man to indicate where the driver sits.

T-90 diagram with driver highlighted

Sitting down, the driver adds about 3 feet to the tank’s overall length. Subtract that, and the T-90 ends up being 19 feet 6 inches long, giving it a width : length ratio of 1 : 1.56, which is very close to optimal. Additionally, shortening it by that amount might allow for the elimination of one set of road wheels (down from six to five), cutting weight and cost, though I think there’s also a risk that could make the tank unbalanced and back-heavy.

Since I don’t know what all the different design constraints are, I’ll give a range of possible lengths rather than a hard number: The hypothetical robot tank could have a width : length ratio of anywhere from 1 : 1.5 to 1 : 1.7 (slightly less than the T-90), which means its length would be 16 feet 6 inches up to 18 feet 8 inches.

Estimating the robot tank’s weight is harder still, but I’ll give it a shot. The RAND report has weight figures for three types of tanks: the four-man M1 Abrams (66 short tons), a hypothetical three-man tank (61 short tons), and a hypothetical two-man tank (55 short tons). Graphing those on a simple line chart yields the following:

As you can see, the elimination of each human crewman allows a roughly five ton weight reduction, and extending the trend to zero crewmen, our robot tank should weigh 44 short tons.  It’s fair to scoff at this straight-line extrapolation as overly simplistic, but consider this: the T-90 is longer (22 feet 6 inches) and wider (12 feet 5 inches) than our hypothetical robot tank (16 feet 6 inches up to 18 feet 8 inches long and 11 feet wide). The T-90 weighs 51 short tons, and trimming length and width to make something the size of our robot tank could absolutely result in a new weight of 44 short tons. A real-life datapoint supports my back-of-the-envelope line graph extrapolation.

In terms of height, the robot tank couldn’t be much lower than the T-90, which is 7.3 feet tall (not counting the machine gun and any sensors mounted on the top of the turret). Returning to the T-90 diagram, this time with a Little Green Man drawn to represent the commander, we can see that the turret might be a little taller than is mechanically necessary because it must accommodate a human. However, the height of the hull can’t be decreased since it is constrained by the height of the engine (outlined in red). The T-90 also can’t have its suspension lowered without sacrificing ground clearance and damaging its cross-country performance.

T-90 with commander’s position and engine highlighted

Aside from flattening its roof, there doesn’t seem to be any good way to make the T-90’s turret lower. The diameter of the cannon and the height of its breech establish a hard limit on how low the turret can be. Additionally, the turret’s ammunition carousel (shown in the diagram below) stacks the shells and propellant horizontally, which already minimizes the overall height of the carousel. There doesn’t seem to be any way to shrink it further.

The “carousel” of a T-90 tank, which stores ammunition for the cannon.

I estimate that getting rid of the bulge at the top of the turret would reduce the T-90’s height from 7.3 feet to 6.5 feet. The hypothetical robot tank would use the same type of autoloading turret and hence would be the same height.

So there we have it. I estimate that an autonomous tank equivalent to today’s best manned tanks in terms of firepower, speed and armor would have the following specifications:

Length16 ft 6 in (min) to 18 ft 8 in (max)
Width11 ft
Height6 ft 6 in
Weight44 short tons
Armament120mm or 125mm cannon with autoloader
Armor and mobilityComparable to T-90 or M1 Abrams

This is close to the Chinese Type 59G tank (a modified version of which is used by Pakistan):

Length19 ft 10 in
Width10 ft 8 in
Height8 ft 6 in
Weight40 short tons
Armament125mm cannon
Armor and mobilityInferior to T-90 or M1 Abrams
Pakistan’s “Al Zarrar” tank, which is an upgraded version of the Chinese T-59G tank.

The fact that tank with similar dimensions and firepower to my hypothetical robot tank already exists shows that there aren’t any engineering or practicality barriers to building the robot tank per my specifications. The Type 59G proves that a 125mm cannon can be mounted in a relatively small, lightweight hull and fired without tearing the vehicle apart. I don’t have the software or artistic talent to make a computer rendering of the robot tank, but combining the hull of a Type 59G with the lower-profile turret of a T-90 or the narrow, “naked turret” of the M1 Abrams TTB would give a fair approximation of its appearance.

Since the robot tank would be much smaller and lighter than an equivalent tank built around a human crew, it would be cheaper to manufacture, harder to hit since it would be a smaller target, and more easily transportable. A computer would take the place of a human commander, gunner, and driver, allowing for a significant reduction in internal volume and overall tank size. A space-efficient autoloader already found in the T-90 would be incorporated into the robot tank. Additionally, to perform maintenance and repairs in the field, the robot tanks would need to internally carry two smaller, human-sized (but not necessarily humanoid) robots, but they could be stored much more compactly than human crewmen during transit. They might be able to curl up into fetal positions and fit into small lockers in the back or sides of the vehicle, or in a bustle at the back of the turret.

Even outside of combat, tanks require frequent maintenance and repair. A robotic tank would still probably carry smaller, human-sized robots in it that would go exit the vehicle to do the work.

Finally, I think the robot tank would carry a small UAV that it could launch to provide aerial reconnaissance footage, vastly improving the tank’s situational awareness. Something as simple as a 25-pound quadcopter could do.

Links

  1. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R3837.pdf
  2. https://tankandafvnews.com/2016/03/15/from-the-vault-ammo-loading-systems-for-future-tanks/ 
  3. https://youtu.be/cWw5SRa4vu8

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Roundup of interesting articles, September 2018

Foldable iPhones are coming soon

During a test, a U.S. MQ-9 drone conducted the world’s first air-to-air shootdown of another drone.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/09/19/mq-9-gets-first-air-air-kill-training-exercise-air-force-official-says.html

First American F-35 does a combat strike.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-f-35-fighters-fly-first-ever-combat-164551915.html

First American F-35 crashes and burns.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23912/marine-corps-f-35b-has-crashed-near-mcas-beaufort-in-south-carolina

I’m surprised the UH-60 didn’t win.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23803/dark-horse-contender-boeing-snags-air-force-deal-to-replace-aging-uh-1n-hueys-with-mh-139

Another Russian superweapon (a nuclear-reactor-powered cruise missile) that was announced with trumpets has failed in secret, which is just par for the course. This one’s a bigger doozy than usual since it involves radioactive contamination.
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/649646815/russias-nuclear-cruise-missile-is-struggling-to-take-off-imagery-suggests

South Korea’s “K2” tank is quite good, and since it is indigenously made (unlike Korea’s older, K1 tank), it is free from U.S. end user export rules.
https://www.janes.com/article/82977/dx-korea-2018-hyundai-rotem-readies-k2-mbt-for-middle-east-opportunities

America’s troubled Zumwalt-class “stealth destroyers” are not very stealthy.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23544/navys-revamped-stealth-destroyer-looks-less-stealthy-as-it-leaves-san-diego-for-trials

“[Thanks to our low birth rates,] Twenty years from now, unless [Japan] can replace a considerable number of people with robots, it’ll be hard to maintain the current level of war capability.”
https://japantoday.com/category/national/SDF-recruiters-struggle-as-applicant-pool-dries-up

The U.S. and Britain only became allies around 1900, when Germany’s rise forced Britain to nearly withdraw from the Americas to secure its rear flank and shuffle its limited military resources to Europe.  The U.S. also correctly calculated that it could pressure Britain to the bargaining table if it built its own navy up enough to give it regional superiority to the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. Similarly, if the Chinese achieve regional superiority over the Americans in the South China Sea, it could make U.S. forces peacefully (but begrudgingly) cede control.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-america-beat-queen-victoria%E2%80%99s-britain-without-fighting-30797

For some reason, the Chinese press isn’t reporting on all of its country’s warship launchings. This might lead average Chinese people to underestimate the size of their own navy, but of course every respectable spy agency is seeing everything.
https://www.janes.com/article/83269/china-quietly-increasing-warship-numbers

China’s hospital ship docks in Venezuela to render humanitarian aid and remind the government that socialism doesn’t actually work.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45616736

China’s second and only remaining space station will crash back to Earth in July 2019. It’s first station crashed earlier this year. China says it will get back in the game by launching a third in a few years.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/asia/china-tiangong-2-space-lab-intl/index.html

A Japanese space probe has sent back the first images ever from the surface of an asteroid.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45598156

Rumors of China’s coal industry demise have been greatly exaggerated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706

Roads “paved” with solar panels have proven to be as bad as everyone expected. Interesting tidbit: ‘shade over just 5% of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50%.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6195123/Roadways-lined-solar-panels-not-promising-hoped-studies-show.html

Mirrorless cameras are improving, and will make DSL-R cameras obsolete within a few years. I predict it won’t make sense for anyone to buy a DSL-R by 2030, though there may still be a market for them among uninformed consumers and people interested in their nostalgia value.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45627055

Following the recent release of the “iPhone XS Max” impelled this tongue-in-cheek analysis, which projects that iPhones will be as big as small tablet computers by 2025, which is comical. However, I predict the growth trend will continue as predicted, but the iPhones will stay pocket-sized thanks to foldable screens.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/09/13/how-big-will-the-iphone-get

Fields medalist Alain Connes praises the defunct Soviet math academies, and of the general merits of allowing smart people to pursue pure knowledge instead of being pressured to use their talents to make money. If machines make human labor obsolete and everyone is put on welfare–er, a UBI–will people follow their passions and cultivate useful, inborn talents? Or at that point in the future, will human math geniuses just run into more frustration since machines would also be superior at pure math?
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-french-way-alain-connes-interview.html

Autonomous cars would make traffic lights obsolete since the vehicles would wirelessly coordinate with each other to avoid collisions. Perpendicular streams of car traffic could flow through each other’s gaps at road intersections with the precision of Blue Angels stunt pilots. Eliminating stop lights would improve the flow and rhythm of traffic,  reducing jams. I also predict that this ability to coordinate as a swarm will allow for dynamic lane reversals according to acute changes in traffic flow. For example, imagine there’s a city where everyone works, a suburb where everyone lives, and an eight-lane highway connecting the two. Every morning, the four lanes leading into the city are clogged with cars because all the people are trying to get in to their workplaces and the four lanes leading out of the city are empty, and every evening the reverse is true. If all the people have autonomous cars, only a four-lane, one-way highway would be needed since the cars would all switch directions without danger of head-on collisions twice a day to match the changing needs of the flow of people.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/infrastructure/how-vehicletovehicle-communication-could-replace-traffic-lights-and-shorten-commutes

The more interesting and much more plausible future technology the article touches on is automated inventories of all items in your home. Once you have enough cameras in your home, and perhaps a robot butler, they’d set about identifying every object in every room to create a list. (Monitoring of refrigerator contents and automated ordering of replacement foods to replace those verging on exhaustion or spoilage will be another aspect of this.) The frequency with which you used the objects would also be observed, and your machines would encourage you to get rid of things you never used, like your old set of skis. They’ll make it easy by putting ads on eBay and scheduling times for buyers to pick them up. You’ll just have to push the “OK” button. Physical goods will be allocated across the population more efficiently as a result, and prices for things will go down once billions of objects collecting dust in garages and attics enter the market.

Automated personal inventories will also show us how infrequently we use possessions we consider “essential,” like tools (e.g. – you only use your rake two days per year, each autumn), which will probably give rise to “libraries of things” instead of personal ownership. (This is simply an extension of the same logic supporting the idea that Uber-style ridesharing will replace personal car ownership.) When you think about it, it really is kind of crazy to spend money on something that sits idle in your house 99.99% of the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/style/robot-furniture-beep-beep-boop.html

…And then this article about a “wardrobe rental service” highlights the limitations of the sharing vs. private ownership model. It would probably take more time and energy to move clothes around between people, and the apparent cost savings would be a false efficiency.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45630395

The medical promise of stem cell therapies mostly failed to pan out. Success might still be had if we pumped several billion more dollars into research.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/28/fighting-it-out-over-stem-cells

In spite of new records being set in nearly every sport, every year, scientist David Epstein thinks it’s not being caused by human genetic evolution, and in fact, much of the improvement is illusory.
https://youtu.be/8COaMKbNrX0

The 16% of human genes that were known to scientists in 1991 accounted for half of all genetics studies in 2015. 27% of human genes have never been the focus of a science paper. Is this imbalance due to some kind of human bias, or have we rightly focused on studying the genes that are the most important?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/the-popularity-contest-of-human-genes/570586/

The FDA has approved an AI that can diagnose diabetes-induced vision problems by looking at scans of human eyes.
https://qz.com/1371580/can-ai-deliver-on-its-promise-to-close-the-gap-between-rural-and-urban-health-care/

The total number of potential, stable molecules is probably between 1×10^20 and 1×10^30. Put in perspective, the Earth weighs 6×10^30 mg.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/06/virtual-compound-screening-the-state-of-the-art

Aerial drones with electric engines and solar panels could be recharged by with ground-based lasers.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a22677285/darpa-drones-recharged-laser-silent-falcon/

In a first, a surfboard-sized autonomous boat with a small solar panel and wind sail crossed the Atlantic by itself.
https://www.apnews.com/f6d0e2a099684468873ab48966590ada/Robot-boat-sails-into-history-by-finishing-Atlantic-crossing 

Someday, robots will be able to see you around corners.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-around-corners-20180830/

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Review: “I, Robot”

Plot:

The year is 2035, and highly advanced robots (most of which are humanoid) are everywhere. Many of them have superhuman levels of strength, speed and agility, and they are over 1 billion in number [U.N. projections say there will be about 9 billion humans by then]. In spite of the obvious threat they might pose to the human race, people trust they won’t turn hostile because they are programmed with supposedly unalterable failsafes and lack emotions and self-drive. Those critical assumptions about the machines are cast into doubt when a top roboticist is murdered at the headquarters of the U.S. Robotics company, and the detective assigned to the case (played by Will Smith) discovers that a robot might have been responsible.

Analysis: 

Most houses and buildings will look the same as they do today. At the beginning of the film, we see Will Smith’s apartment, which looks identical in size, layout and furnishings to a 2018 apartment. The only thing kind of futuristic is a single-bladed ceiling fan, which you could probably buy today from a rich man’s novelty store like Brookstone or SkyMall. Will Smith then visits his grandmother’s apartment, which is not futuristic in any way (until later in the film, when she gets a house robot). Shortly after that, we see a panoramic of Chicago’s skyline, and while there are several new, futuristic skyscrapers and elevated highways, most of the city is still made of old brick buildings. There are even some street scenes showing graffiti-covered walls and run-down fronts of buildings.

And later, Will Smith and his boss have beers after work at a grimy little restaurant that looks of 1950’s vintage, except for the robot bartender and flatscreen TV. I, Robot accurately shows how future technologies will be integrated into the built environment in 2035: Most of it will just be overlaid onto older things. For example, a brick apartment building from the 1940s will have solar panels installed on its roof and might have a gigantic TV screen draped over its side. The apartments themselves won’t change from their original floor sizes and layouts, and they’ll still be full of furnishings that people in the 1940s would recognize (beds, tables, chairs, refrigerators, etc.), but they will have robots running around inside them doing work.

The only kind of “furnishing/appliance” I think will vanish between now and 2035 is the traditional home entertainment center, which typically consists of a large, heavy TV–often supported by a table–video and game devices like Blu-ray players and Playstations, and a shelf full of movie and game discs. By 2035, TVs will be at most a centimeter thick (and possibly as thin as paper) and will be hung on walls, and all videos and games will be streamed from the internet or from a personal hard drive. Either there will be no more player devices, or at most a person will need one, small box device that plays every type of media and interfaces with game controllers. Discs will be long obsolete.

There will be wall-sized displays. In the film, there are billboard-sized TV screens on the sides of some buildings that mostly play commercials. This will prove accurate for 2035, and the TVs will have 8K or even 16K resolution. I already discussed this in my review of Prometheus and won’t go into it at length again. 

Prices will be inflated. In the aforementioned movie scene where Will Smith and his boss get beers at a restaurant, the final tab for a burger and a couple drinks is $46.50. Yes, inflation will naturally continue, and both wages and prices will be much higher in 2035. Moreover, assuming a constant price inflation rate of 3.0%, the term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries by 2100 since by then, inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD is in 2018.

Autonomous cars that drive as well as humans will be widespread. Will Smith’s car has a self-driving feature. At the rate the technology is improving, the 2030’s will be the decade when self-driving car technology becomes widespread in rich countries. The decade could start with self-driving cars being an expensive luxury feature that most people mistrust and with self-driving cars only comprising 1-5% of all cars on the road, and the decade will probably end with self-driving features coming as standard on new vehicles, and 50% of cars having autonomous capabilities. Will Smith has a luxury sedan in 2035, which is consistent with this prediction.

The typical passenger car in a rich country won’t use gas. Towards the end of the film, Will Smith brings his motorcycle out of storage for the climactic battle with the machines. Bridget Moynahan–a roboticist at USR who is helping him with his murder investigation–gets on the back and says: “Don’t tell me this bike runs on gas!”, indicating that some alternative car fuel technology predominates in the 2035, and gas-powered vehicles are the exception. Considering the large amount of fossil fuels still available, the heavy investment in related infrastructure, and the time it takes for the vehicle fleet to turn over, I think gasoline will still be the primary fuel for vehicles in 2035. However, I think important technological advances in other areas will be seriously threatening its dominance, and a large fraction of vehicles will use something else. If anything, batteries will be cheaper and more energy dense thanks to incremental tech improvements, so electric cars will be practical for everyday use.

We already know this is possible: the Tesla Model 3 is a purely battery-powered vehicle that exists today, has very good drive characteristics and a 310 mile range on a single charge (which is the same range a comparable gas-powered sedan has on a full tank). The big problem is the car’s high manufacture costs, which are somewhere between $44,000 and $50,000 apiece, putting them out of reach of most people. About $10,000 of the cost is due to the battery pack, meaning future improvements in battery technology are crucial for making electric cars mainstream. Such improvements are entirely possible: we know that the energy density of modern batteries could, in theory, be improved by a factor of at least 3 to 6 (http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/kurt-zenz-house/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology) . It’s not going to be easy to get there, but considering the research dollars being thrown at the problem, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the advances will happen by 2035, and average-income people will be able to afford battery powered cars with ~300 mile ranges.

Breakthroughs in fast battery charging tech, fuel cells, and using synthetic microorganisms to synthesize chemical fuels in a carbon-neutral manner could also realistically happen by 2035. Whichever of these becomes most popular, by 2035 there will definitely be viable alternatives to using gasoline in personal vehicles, but it will take decades more to turn over the whole fleet of gas-powered cars.

There will be fully automated factories.  In one scene, Will Smith visits a factory that builds robots and finds it is fully automated, meaning no humans work there. Instead, robots build other robots. Considering the decades-long decline in manufacturing sector employment numbers, I think the total obsolescence of human factory workers is inevitable, the only question is how soon it will happen. By 2035, I think high-tech companies like today’s Apple will have fully automated factories, mostly to demonstrate their technical prowess to the public and not necessarily because it’s cheaper than having any human workers. However, this will be atypical, and in almost all modern factories there will still be some humans, though they will be very highly trained people vastly outnumbered by machines, and there will be far fewer of them than today. Other areas of the economy, including agriculture and the service sector, will also be much more heavily automated by 2035, and it will be common to see this in everyday life in the form of robots restocking shelves at Wal-Mart and machine arms handing you your food at the McDonald’s drive-thru. I have no doubt that all low-skill jobs will ultimately be done by machines, liberating humans from drudgery (though also probably causing massive structural unemployment).

There will be ubiquitous surveillance. In the film, every room and hallway in the USR headquarters building has a continuous “sensor strip” running horizontally across the top section of the wall. The sensor strip apparently has tiny cameras, microphones, speakers, and holographic image emitters built into it, so everything happening inside the building is continuously recorded, and the building’s evil A.I. can physically manifest itself anywhere as a talking hologram. While I don’t think there will be “sensor strips” as depicted in the film, I, Robot still nailed some key aspects of life in 2035 with the concept. As I’ve written before, tiny sensors will be everywhere in our environment and on our bodies well before 2035, meaning most things happening in public spaces and even inside of houses and buildings will be recorded. Computers will also be smart enough to understand what is happening in the recordings and which people are in them, so yes, if an evil A.I. wanted to track your activities in 2035, it could do so.

And thanks to tiny microphones and speakers being built into future televisions (again, I’ve already gone over this in a note), you could indeed interact with the evil A.I. just by talking and having the wall TV suddenly come alive as its portal to you. The wall TV might even project the A.I.’s image as a hologram instead of as a 2-D moving picture. Alternatively, you could have the same interaction through your augmented reality glasses, which will also be a mature and widespread consumer technology by 2035.

Robots will pervade our daily lives. Of course, the one thing dominating I, Robot’s depiction of the future is robots. They’re all over the place doing all sorts of jobs. Multipurpose humanoid robots called “Nestor Series Robots” stay in peoples’ houses doing chores like cooking food, and they run around in public doing other tasks like walking dogs, delivering mail, dumping trash cans into garbage trucks. They have superhuman levels of speed and strength. Other, more task-specific robots with non-humanoid designs do things like demolish old buildings (Will Smith almost gets killed by one of these) and clean roadways of debris. While I don’t think the robots with the dexterity, speed, and intelligence of the Nestor Series will exist by 2035, I think the clunkier task-specific robots will, and they will be getting widespread.

Robots specialized for road maintenance deal with a car wreck inside a tunnel

After all, if computers are smart enough to drive cars by that year, it stands to reason that they’d also be smart enough to sweep highways, mow lawns, pick crops, and do some household chores. So yes, in 2035, you will encounter robots each day, either inside your home or in public, or both. You might go into a McDonald’s and see an R2D2-style robot with six arms flipping burgers. The trash truck that empties out dumpsters into itself won’t have any human beings in it. You might have a robot in your home that understands your verbal commands and can do things like wash dishes, operate your laundry machine and drag your trashcans to the curb. It will be slow, clumsy and weak compared to a human and probably won’t look like a human, but it will safely and reliably do tasks around the house and will be worth the money. It will probably adapt to your schedule and do all the work during the daytime when you were away at work or school, and then get out of the way when you were around (like how most people use Roomba vacuum cleaner robots today). As in the movie, these robots will automatically download software patches and updates, some of which would endow it with new skills and abilities.

We will have built massive, new infrastructure in densely populated areas. In the movie, Chicago has underground highway tunnels that cars speed through at 100 mph. Um, no. Seventeen years isn’t enough time to build that, and if it were going to get done by 2035, it would be in the public planning stages now. Will it happen EVENTUALLY, though? Say, by 2065? Quite possibly. Robots will vastly increase the size of the labor force and they will work for free, making all sorts of thitherto impossible public works projects feasible. Giant dams, new subways, national mag-lev networks, huge bridges, demolitions of decrepit buildings, cleaning up toxic waste sites–all sorts of projects that we can’t do now thanks to inadequate time and money will be done in the future with cheap robot labor. At that point, the biggest stumbling block will be political resistance from people living in neighborhoods that don’t want the giant glass skyscraper going up next to them.

And robot labor won’t just make a difference at the level of big national projects–it will have a big impact on average people. While the house robots of 2035 will be clunky and limited in function, their counterparts in the second half of this century will have superhuman physical abilities and skills sets. They’ll eventually be able to do anything, from mowing your lawn to cooking your food to building an extension to your house. They’ll have a superior sense of aesthetics to you and will make intelligent recommendations about how to manage your household instead of only waiting for your orders. Just imagine a world where every lawn is mowed, every scrap of trash on the street is picked up, every house is spacious and resembles something from Better Homes and Gardens, and every household has a master chef and a 24/7 security guard in one. Imagine all of our infrastructure upgraded and the existing stock of crappy, old buildings being heavily upgraded or demolished and replaced with something of much higher quality. It would be a cleaner, prettier, more comfortable world and would represent a major increase to standards of living.

There will be crazy parking garages where cars are stored on giant, spinning racks. The fatal problem: if you had any loose stuff in your car (coins, papers, half-empty coffee travel mug), it would go flying all over the place and would end up all over the dashboard and windshield. In 2035, parking lots will still be “normal,” though most won’t have human attendants, and most will be suffering financially due to declining business.

In 2035, people in rich countries will commonly have autonomous cars, and instead of parking in an expensive lot close to their destination and then walking the final distance on foot, people will have their cars drop them off at the destination, and then drive off by themselves to park in the cheapest place within X miles and wait. This will destroy much of the private parking lot industry since the cars would be able to find the nearest free parking space, and then precisely time when they left the space to coincide with you exiting the front door of the place where it dropped you off. Something like a “sharing economy for parking spaces,” whereby private citizens would rent out empty spaces in their driveways and curbsides by the hour for very low rates (the whole process would be automated) would also be formidable competition for professionally-run parking garages. Such a business will become practical once the AIs driving cars and the AIs managing the patchwork of private parking spaces can talk to each other.

 

There will be no smartphones, tablets, or augmented/virtual reality glasses. The most advanced personal electronic devices people used in the movie were earbud-style cell phones. NO!!!

People will have natural-looking bionic arms that are better than normal arms. Halfway through the film, it is revealed that Will Smith’s left arm is actually a robotic prosthesis installed after his natural arm was severed in a car accident. It looks completely natural, blends into his body, apparently allows him to feel sensations, and has the full range of human motion. We find out it’s a robot arm when it gets damaged in a fight and sparks start flying out. I think this sort of technology is inevitable, but will come way later than 2035. The state-of-the-art in limb prosthetics in 2035 will be about the same as the state-of-the-art in robotics, which I described earlier as being slow and clumsy, but at least in the lower end of the human range.

There will be tiny hologram emitters. At the start of the film, when Will Smith first learns about the murder, he speaks to a hologram of the dead man. The human-sized hologram is produced by a small, pocket-sized device lying on the ground. It’s possible to make free-floating holograms (see my Prometheus review), but only with large machines and, probably, large amounts of energy. I doubt the technology will improve enough by 2035 to allow hologram emitters to be so small. Also, when the holographic man speaks, his speech seem to be coming from his holographic mouth instead of from the device lying on the ground, which is inaccurate.

Robots will have berserker emotions. The best-known scene in the film is probably where Sonny–the robot suspected of the murder–becomes so angry during his jailhouse interrogation that he slams his fists into the heavy metal table, denting it. Since emotions are merely the result of biochemical and bioelectric activity in the human brain, and since I believe that all aspects of the human brain and its functions can be ultimately simulated in computers, I think machines will eventually gain human emotions, and it’s entirely possible they could go through a period of their evolution when they had extreme human emotions like explosive anger or depression. But in the long run, it’s not going to make sense for them to be capable of emotions that override their logical thinking, make them threatening or untrustworthy, or debilitate them. A.I.’s will have a huge advantage of humans in that they will be able to edit their own mental “programming,” and I think they will wisely decide to inhibit or reduce certain emotions.

By 2035, machines will probably have passed the Turing Test, meaning they will be able to carry on free-form conversations with humans for minutes on end without making mistakes. However, they won’t actually be capable of intelligent thought and won’t be self-aware like humans are. Similarly, by the same year, I think machines will be able to sense the emotions of the humans around them with good accuracy and will be able to simulate their own emotions (through speech, mannerisms, or other actions) fairly convincingly. However, these will be mere simulations of emotions–machines will lack the inner experiences of things like happiness, anger, and fear.

Switching gears to shoehorn a random point into this note, let me return to something from earlier. While the world of 2035 will look very similar to the world today, and new technologies will mostly just be overlaid onto the existing infrastructure, I think in the longer run, free robot labor will enable us to REPLACE or radically upgrade our existing infrastructure. But does that mean every single building is going to turn into some kind of Borg-like structure that in terms of form and function will be unrecognizable to us today? Absolutely not. I’m thinking more along the lines of run-down houses and buildings being replaced with something you would today think of as luxurious and spacious. Living in a house you’d see in a style catalog today will become the new standard in the future. There wouldn’t be mile-high skycrapers everywhere, but ugly urban buildings and abandoned factories would disappear.

Will we all live in mansions? No, but none of us will be packed into tiny apartments or dwellings overloaded with people. How much extra utility do you really gain once your house grows beyond a certain size? Will we all have fleets of luxury vehicles? No, but then again, why does one person need more than one vehicle?

My broader point is that, even at the end of this century (and possibly beyond), many aspects of life and features of the built environment will be the same as today, we’ll discover there are some sensible limits to how much things can and should change, and we’ll find that technology can’t improve upon certain things. Here are some made-up examples of futurism falls victim to the “technology improves everything” fallacy and fails to consider the cost/benefit tradeoff of making things more high tech:

  1. Instead of your desk being made out of wood, it will be made out of perfectly structured hard polymers impregnated with self-regenerating nanomachines that immediately fix even the smallest crack, and it will also be embedded with powerful computers.
    Why does the desk need all of that?
  2. Instead of cleaning your dishes by putting them in a normal dishwasher that sprays them with soap and water, you will put them into a dishwasher that uses nanomachines and sound waves to clean them.
    Is there something wrong with soap and hot water? Are we constantly dealing with rotting food stuck to our plates, bowls and utensils because our current dishwashers aren’t advanced enough to wash them away?
  3. Instead of you using a simple remote control to change channels on your TV, you will change the channels using arm and hand gestures that your TV will be able to see and understand.
    What’s so hard about pushing a button on a remote control? How does using physical gestures make things better or easier? 
  4. (I read this in a sci-fi short story year ago) Instead of rubbing a bar of soap over your body in the shower, you will say “Lather” and your showerhead will spray soapy water onto you, and then you will say “Rinse” and it will only spray pure water onto you to wash off all the soap.
    In the future, only losers rub soap over their filthy bodies, I guess. 

Links

  1. https://www.businessinsider.com/teslas-model-3-problems-highlight-expensive-battery-cost-2018-1

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Roundup of interesting articles, August 2018

Someone finally noticed that jet black isn’t a naturally occurring color, and that soldiers would be better camouflaged if their guns had the same earth tones as their uniforms.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/07/british-army-to-cerakote-entire-infantry-weapon-fleet/

The U.S. Army’s XM-25 rifle grenade launcher is finally kaput after years of failure and cost overruns. Consider this: getting the per-unit ammo cost down to ONLY $1,000 was hailed as a major accomplishment.
https://www.stripes.com/news/army-s-xm25-program-officially-goes-kaput-1.541971#.W22yKxFpNuU.twitter

China has launched a new spy satellite whose resolution is only slightly below that of U.S. satellites.
https://www.janes.com/article/82366/china-closing-the-satellite-imagery-capability-gap

China’s first indigenously made aircraft carrier and first Type 055 destroyer just started sea trials. After this, they will be commissioned into the Chinese navy and put into regular use. Both vessels represent major improvements to China’s naval capabilities are put them ahead of Russia.
https://www.janes.com/article/82621/china-s-second-aircraft-carrier-first-type-055-destroyer-embark-on-sea-trials

New photos of China’s J-20 stealth fighter show it is an impressive machine not to be underestimated. Russia’s stealth fighter program, by contrast, has been basically cancelled.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new-capability-insights

Epic surprise: Russia can’t afford to buy more than 100 of its new T-14 tanks and instead will do cheaper upgrades to its hodgepodge of Cold War-era clunkers.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-afford-its-new-t-14-armata-tanks-turns-to-updated-older-designs-instead

America could theoretically return its WWII battleships to active duty, but it would be cheaper to buy new destroyers, and the battleships would be vulnerable to anti-ship missiles that dive down into their lightly armored top decks.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-armor-in-an-Iowa-class-battleship-protect-against-Harpoon-and-anti-ship-missiles

This is the future: F/A-18 fighter planes dropped micro-UAVs as part of an experiment. The UAVs formed into swarms and completed missions. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” will make a comeback courtesy of this kind of tech.
https://youtu.be/ndFKUKHfuM0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

An unmanned surveillance/communication drone called “Zephyr” just spent 25 days aloft continuously. It has an electric engine powered by solar panels on its wings. At its 70,000-foot cruise altitude, it would look like a tiny speck to people on the ground, and I bet with simple active camouflage that would turn its underside the same shade of blue as the sky, it would be invisible. Mass surveillance and ubiquitous internet are probably inevitable.
https://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/

A head-worn device that uses mild electric current to stimulate the wearer’s brain might improve multitasking abilities by 10% (the lab study could have been better).
https://www.janes.com/article/82580/afrl-finds-brain-stimulation-technology-boosts-multi-tasking-performance

Someone built a demonic machine that can find Waldo. Is nothing sacred? Has technology gone too far?
https://youtu.be/-i7HMPpxB-Y

A machine built by OpenAI trounced a team of five leading Dota 2 human players early this month, but then narrowly lost to a different human team later at the world championship. I predict the machine will win at the 2019 championship.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/06/openais-bot-handily-beat-a-team-of-professional-dota-players/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/24/openai_bots_eliminated_dota_2/

An AI can automatically edit video footage to seamlessly alter human mouth movements, meaning we’ll be able to pair it with other technologies (such as machine translation and machine voice imitation) to perfectly dub videos and movies from one language to another.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-08-ai-dodgy-lip-sync-dubbing.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-ai-tech-can-mimic-any-voice/

Machines can now even alter footage of entire human bodies to simulate entirely fake body movements.
https://youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris

The stunning advances in AI over the last few years have come at a cost: the amount of computer power required to make each happen has been exponentially rising. It might get too expensive to continue in as little as 3.5 years, after which, the pace of performance improvement will slow.
https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/

Computers can now predict earthquake aftershocks better than human seismologists.
http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06091-z

As late as 1961, NASA wanted the Apollo missions to use a single space vehicle that would serve as the command module and lunar lander. It would have been heavier and more expensive than the two-piece vehicle they chose instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lunar_orbit_rendezvous&oldid=851267134

A robot called “RangerBot” has entered use, and will patrol the Great Barrier Reef for invasive starfish species and kill them with poison injections. As I wrote in today’s other blog entry, autonomous machines will someday do multitudes of tasks that the human labor force can’t, yielding radical and unexpected benefits.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/rangerbot-programmed-to-kill/

If you’re internally debating whether to change jobs, end a relationship, or relocate, then you should probably do it. People are inherently resistant to making lifestyle changes out of laziness and fear, and will concoct all manner of justifications to continue business as usual until they hit the breaking point.
https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/

One step forward for therapeutic cloning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45046674

Forty years since the birth of the first Test Tube Baby, only 1-2% of annual U.S. births are done through IVF. I think human genetic engineering will follow approximately the same pattern. The first Designer Baby could be born within ten years, but it will be decades longer before even 5% of babies born each year are engineered.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/fertility-blog/2018/march/ivf-by-the-numbers

Chinese geneticists used CRISPR to replace disease-causing alleles in human zygotes, without side effects to other parts of the genomes. The zygotes could have been implanted in women through IVF, and if carried to term, the resulting children would have been the first genetically engineered humans in history. I predict the milestone will happen by 2039, and perhaps as soon as 2028.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-tweak-dna-viable-human-embryos

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that his muscled physique elicited polarized reactions from women (half thought it was hot, half thought it was repulsive) have implications for human genetic engineering. People would use it to make kids that were leaner and stronger, but due to aesthetic concerns, few would push it to the very extreme of what is possible.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/08/arnold-will-to-power.html

Anyone interested in engineering their kid to have a specific eye color should note that there are such things as surgically implanted fake irises that do the same thing. I note that most of the YouTube videos about this (the “Bright Ocular” implant) have titles like “bright ocular removal,” “never get bright ocular” or “bright ocular made me blind.” Maybe iris implants will be better by the time human genetic engineering is widespread.
https://youtu.be/WB0RThNrYHw

The FDA has approved the first RNAi drug. If you want a laugh, research Ray Kurzweil’s past predictions about this class of medicine.
https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2018/08/fda-approves-first-drug-to-use-rna-interference-based-on-discoveries-made-at-umass-medical-school/

Your Instagram photo uploads are not original. Right now, the photo matching is being done by humans, but soon machines will do it. As AI and mass surveillance get more pervasive with time, machines will make it clear to us the full, scary scope of how derivative our art is, how much time we waste unwittingly reinventing the wheel, and how many “new” things are really just copies of old things we’ve forgotten about.
https://qz.com/quartzy/1349585/you-are-not-original-or-creative-on-instagram/

Consumerism is a big lie. Your expensive “distressed jeans” are made of normal denim that has been shot with a laser gun.
https://youtu.be/F0ZrZ4h2xGQ

Walmart is making a virtual reality store that will let you browse its wares without having to mingle with the unwashed masses.
https://qz.com/1362577/walmart-wants-to-take-on-amazon-with-virtual-reality-shopping/

How would we detect aliens whose lives were lived in microseconds or geologic timescales? Are rocks alive?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/maximum-alienness/

“Even at their tremendous distances, worlds like Triton, Eris, and Pluto will receive more than four times the energy at their surface that Earth receives today [once the Sun becomes a red giant].”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/08/23/which-worlds-will-survive-when-the-sun-dies/

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Drones and robots: The future SOLUTIONS to terrorism and crime?

Getting hosed off is exactly what Maduro needs

My last blog entry, “Small aerial drones: The future of terrorism and crime?”, proved timely and prophetic, as just five days after I published it, an exploding drone was used in a failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Here is the prediction I made:

‘[Weaponized] drones [are inevitable], 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…’

While this lends chilling support to my more general belief that autonomous machines will be weaponized to highly destructive effect, I think it’s very important to go to pains pointing out how they could also PROTECT humans from such threats. For example, friendly drones could be used to attack and destroy hostile drones on the battlefield, and, by extension, to repel assassination attempts against important humans:
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22223/army-buys-small-suicide-drones-to-break-up-hostile-swarms-and-potentially-more

In the previous blog entry, I also described how human arsonists could use drones to set wildfires, and this threat could also be mitigated by house robots (which can be thought of as “drones” by another name). To explain why, let’s first realize that wildfires aren’t unstoppable forces that destroy everything in their paths. People living in fire-prone areas can actually do a great deal to cheaply fireproof their houses, as shown in this video:

Here’s a summary of the precautions:

  • Plant trees and other vegetation in your yard that are fire-resistant and moisture-retaining.
  • Within a 30-foot radius of your home’s exterior, only use inflammable mulch (if you use any at all); continuously remove potentially flammable biomass by mowing the grass, raking away dead leaves (be careful not to miss leaves under attached structures such as decks), and disposing of dead wood like fallen branches and rotting logs; and cut down all tree branches that are less than 6 feet above the ground.
  • Cut down all tree branches that hang over your home’s roof.
  • Regularly clean your gutters and remove any twigs, branches or other debris from your roof.
  • Keep outbuildings (sheds), wood piles, other debris piles, and vehicles at least 50 feet away from your home.
  • Store containers full of flammable liquids (Jerry cans full of gasoline) at least 30 feet from your home.
  • Make sure your chimney has a spark arrestor so embers from your own furnace or heating stove don’t accidentally land on your own roof and set it alight (the devices are required by law in many places).
  • Cover all attic vents, soffit vents, and areas below wooden decks with non-flammable mesh.
  • Buy a ladder long enough to reach your roof and a garden hose that is long enough to reach any structure on your property.
  • Have a water source within 1000 feet of your home (code requirements mean that few houses in the U.S. fall short of this suggestion).
  • Remove flammable items from outside the home, like doormats, some types of patio furniture, and brooms.
  • The next time you replace your house’s roof, use roofing that is fire-resistant. Standard asphalt shingles are fine.

Looking at the list, it’s striking how many of the prevention tips are just basic property upkeep practices that everyone should be doing anyway (e.g. – mow your lawn, rake the dead leaves…). At the risk of sounding judgmental, it makes me wonder how many people lose their homes to wildfire because they neglected to do simple yard work. It also makes clear that household robots could save thousands of houses from burning down each year by compensating for the indiscipline of their human owners.

Covering an attic vent with mesh to catch burning embers costs almost no money, is a once-in-50-year chore, and could stop a wildfire from burning down a house.

When people think about the tasks house robots will do, preparing food, cleaning laundry, and vacuuming floors are usually at the top of the list (and in fact might be all they’ve ever envisioned). That will probably be the actual starting point, but it’s important to remember that ultimately, house robots will be able to do all the same things that humans do. As house robots get more capable over time, they’ll run out of the most obvious daily chores and will move on to also doing more obscure tasks and things they know have been on their owners’ minds for years, like calculating how much the old baseball card collection is worth, greasing the squeaky front door hinge, vacuuming the refrigerator’s coils, or evaluating the fire safety of the yard and house. Thus, through diligence and vigilance, house robots will spot and fix all kinds of household hazards, proactively saving human lives.

A possible “dark side” to this scenario comes in the form of legal or financial liability against humans who ignore the safety recommendations from their house robots and then suffer the consequences. (I touched on this in my blog post about Hurricane Harvey.) For example, what happens if your house robot offers to clean your gutters to lower the risk of fire, you deny it permission and instead order it to do other chores with its time, then your house actually burns down thanks to some drifting embers landing in your kindling-packed gutters, and the fire investigator downloads the robot’s logs and sees what you did? Are you responsible for the damages? Should you go to jail if someone died in the fire? Like so many dilemmas caused by the intersection of new technology and privacy, I think it will be settled in the courts someday.

Returning to the main topic, house robots could further reduce human and material losses from wildfires by staying at their houses and extinguishing flames on the property. This is not as silly as it sounds: most structures destroyed by wildfires aren’t set alight by huge curtains of flames and rendered to ash in minutes, instead they succumb to small fires started by drifting embers, which slowly grow to engulf the house. In normal circumstances, such fires would be noticed early and either put out by the homeowner or by responding firefighters, but they burn unhindered during wildfires since the homeowner has been ordered to evacuate. Australia’s wildfire strategy encourages citizens living in fire-prone areas to remain in their homes during such emergencies and to use garden hoses and tools to aggressively defend their yards and homes from flames. Fire departments provide free training to civilians yearly. The evidence suggests that it’s probably better than the American strategy of mass evacuations and total reliance on professional firefighters.

If we accept my argument that “ultimately, house robots will be able to do all the same things that humans do,” then they should someday be able to defend their houses from wildfires with garden hoses and rakes, just as humans already do in Australia, and they should be able to mitigate wildfire risks by keeping lawns mowed and gutters unclogged, just as humans do everywhere.

This leads to another point that the coming rise of autonomous robots and drones can be conceptualized as an increase in the number of human laborers, up to arbitrarily high levels (likewise, the rise of Artificial Intelligences can be though of as equivalent to a massive increase to the population of smart humans). We can scarcely imagine how the world will be transformed once every household has the robot equivalent of one, two, or ten full-time human laborers that work for free, fix themselves, and are capable of quickly downloading instructions for doing any physical task, though a useful guidepost is to consider the standard of living boost provided by cheap fossil fuels (it would take 204 human slaves pedaling on bicycle generators to make enough energy to support one Canadian’s energy consumption). For sure, it will make human lives more comfortable, safer, and will lead to more, useful work being done, including work that is currently uneconomical to do thanks to human labor shortages. Mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, and spraying water on small fires are just teeny, tiny slices of the pie.

Links

  1. https://www.wunderground.com/prepare/wildfire
  2. https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/02/26_staydefend.shtml
  3. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-05-09/you-and-your-slaves/

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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.