The “Jalisco New Generation” cartel used a drone to drop bombs on people in Mexico, and then released the drone’s camera footage. Weaponized drones will get better, cheaper, and available to an ever-growing number of people as time passes.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10394093/Terrifying-footage-shows-people-running-lives-cartel-controlled-DRONE-drops-bombs.html
On the second anniversary of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani’s assassination by a U.S. drone strike, two Iranian drones attacked an American military base in Baghdad. Both were shot down by a U.S. antiaircraft system called “C-RAM.” A C-RAM unit has a built-in radar that identifies the locations and flight paths of enemy aircraft and missiles, and it uses the data to aim its heavy machine gun so the bullets intercept them. All the human operator has to do is push a button to allow the C-RAM to fire. At the 0:26 mark in the video, the C-RAM opened fire on one of the Iranian drones. Note the laser-like stream of bullets. The machine’s aim was perfect.
https://youtu.be/Ajkg8yfgug0
Contrast that with footage of human-aimed antiaircraft guns trying to shoot down Japanese kamikaze planes in WWII. You’ll see dozens of machine guns spewing out thousands of bullets at one plane, and missing–often being wildly off-target.
https://youtu.be/4mTECUWP0Hk?t=171
120,000 Russian troops have massed near Ukraine for a possible invasion of that country. A frenzy of diplomacy is now underway to head off a confrontation. Putin has said he wants several assurances from NATO countries to bolster Russia’s national security.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/politics/us-intelligence-russia-false-flag/index.html
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43942/flotilla-of-russian-amphibious-warships-has-entered-the-english-channel
This analysis concludes that the human brain is actually a very efficient type of computer, and AIs brains will need to be similar to ours.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xwBuoE9p8GE7RAuhd/brain-efficiency-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know
As impressive as GPT-3 is, it’s still easy to confuse it with well-chosen questions. It’s nowhere near passing the Turing Test.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/01/13/chatbots-still-dumb-after-all-these-years/
At the same time, GPT-3 is a much better chatbot than the best of ten years ago. I think each iteration of GPT will make fewer conversational mistakes than the last, until some future version (GPT-6?) is finally “good enough” to pass the Turing Test.
http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
Once “Metaverse” technology is mature and widespread, it will be common for sports fans to “hang out” in the bleachers of sports arenas during games. They could even pay for retired athletes and other popular commentators to sit with them in VR and narrate the games. Other fans will still be willing to buy tickets to sit in the real bleachers and attend the games in-person.
https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/when-nfl-football-moves-into-the-metaverse/
Elon Musk says Tesla’s humanoid robot will probably be 5ft 8in robot, have a screen on its face, be able to lift 150lb, and walk at 5 mph. This mostly matches my own predictions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60154782
Machines can now convert a series of still photos of a building or place into a hi-res, 3D mock-up. Eventually, there will be a hyper-realistic, 1:1 virtual version of the real world that people will be able to explore in VR.
https://youtu.be/yptwRRpPEBM
The once-ubiquitous BlackBerry cell phone has been thrown into the dustbin of history.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/01/tech/blackberry-end-of-life/index.html
Apple is now the world’s first $3 trillion company. It hit the $1 trillion mark only three years ago. My prediction that the first trillionaire would be minted in the 2050s might be too conservative.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/investing/apple-three-trillion-dollar-market-cap/index.html
“Frequency hopping” is a method of sending encrypted messages with radio signals. A message like a simple sentence is chopped up into bits, each of which is transmitted on a different frequency from the other. To anyone listening to just one radio wavelength, they will only hear a single, brief sound of the message. However, the intended recipient will hear the whole thing thanks to a special radio descrambler that knows how the bits are distributed across the frequency spectrum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Dial-up modems from 20+ years ago used sounds to send and receive data. This is why, if you established the connection and then picked up the phone, you’d hear loud static for a moment–the static was the digital data being conveyed as sounds. Telephone lines weren’t built with the future needs of the internet in mind–they were designed around the much less demanding needs of human speech and listening. As a result, they can’t handle more than 56 kilobytes of data transfer.
https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dialup-modem-speed.php
Thanks to sound transmission of data, people use to also download video games from their radios.
https://interestingengineering.com/you-could-download-video-games-from-the-radio-in-the-1980s
You might remember BetaMax, but you’ve probably forgotten (or never heard about) “V2000.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_2000
What old sci-fi films imagined 2022 would be like.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/04/1070110448/2022-movies-past-future-soylent-green
In 1991, George Friedman published a book predicting the U.S. and Japan would fight a war by 2020. This is something to remember when thinking about his other geopolitical predictions, which also look likely to fail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrbUX84LcXg
Six months ago, Peter Zeihan predicted “We are gonna have inflation in the last half of this year that is absolutely going to be higher than what we had in the early 80s [and] probably faster than what we had in the 70s.” He was basically right. The U.S. inflation rate for November was the highest since July 1982.
https://youtu.be/x_fpY63fcd8?t=3560
In August 2019, 74% of economists said the U.S. would have a recession by the end of 2021. They were right! The recession happened in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://apnews.com/article/economy-donald-trump-us-news-ap-top-news-global-trade-3d77bbfda266497699554a754c124735
Nuclear-powered civilian ships were introduced before the technology was fully ready, and were doomed by irrational public fears about radiation and by unfair press coverage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI
Here’s a load of encouraging data from Ramez Naam about the rise of solar and wind power and grid battery storage. He estimates that solar and wind power will generate electricity more cheaply than coal and natural gas in the U.S., China, and most other countries by 2030. The transition has already happened in some places.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l6qr9x1zhvc4yq7/Naam%20Clean%20Energy%20Revolution%20-%20Chinese%20Edition%20-%20Shareable%20-%20Jan%202022.pdf?dl=0
Theoretically, we could also build antennas that used the planet’s radiation of excess heat into space to generate electricity.
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/3927
Theoretically, 10 quadrillion people could live on Earth. We’d just have to build 300,000-storey high skyscrapers to fit everyone, plus a bunch of other megaprojects to radiate the planet’s excess heat into space and regulate global sunlight levels.
https://hereticalupdate.substack.com/p/is-earth-running-out-of-resources
‘The result is that you see a distinct parabolic shape in the returns on investment for a tall building. The point of maximum return varies depending on the city, the type of construction and the location of building, and real estate professionals go to great effort to determine the economic building height for a given case. For an office building on a piece of valuable urban real estate, this has traditionally been considered to be in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 storeys tall. During planning for the Empire State Building, it was calculated that 75 storeys was the optimal height, and developers suggested that 70 storeys should be the maximum during the planning of One World Trade Center. But the existence of an increasing number of Manhattan supertall residential buildings suggests that this limit might be increasing, at least for luxury residential real estate.
Building height in excess of this “theoretical optimum” is often height for height’s sake, with the idea that an exceptionally tall building will have “prestige value” that more than compensates for the less efficient design. The (real or perceived) benefits of prestige, combined with the rising costs of servicing the upper floors, often results in buildings that achieve their height by adding large volumes of unoccupied space at the top. The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building, is perhaps the ultimate example of this, with the top 29% of the building being unoccupied space.’
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-skyscrapers-are-so-short/
The world’s oldest tortoise is 190.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2022/1/190-year-old-jonathan-becomes-worlds-oldest-tortoise-ever-688683
Some people who have become social media stars by uploading videos of their pets have gotten those pets cloned after they died so they can keep making (profitable) content. Will humans someday do the same thing?
https://www.the-sun.com/tech/4497683/instagram-influencer-clone-dog-cat/
The eruption of an underwater volcano near the Pacific island of Tonga produced a dust cloud big enough to cover all of England.
https://graphics.reuters.com/TONGA-VOLCANO/lgpdwjyqbvo/
The Martian meteorite that, in 1996, was claimed to have evidence of alien microbial life, has been proven not to. I remember when this was news.
https://apnews.com/article/space-exploration-science-business-planets-mars-33dc55ce0ebced0b65322b03ae06feda
The Big Five Personality traits predict how well-suited people are for various jobs. “Conscientiousness” level is the strongest predictor of general success.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001879121001275
Imagine a 1 – 10 rating scale for your full possible range of emotional experiences.
1 = Most miserable and painful you can be
5 = Feel neither good nor bad
10 = Most happy and blissful you can be
People intuitively think that the increments between each number are subjectively constant, so the felt difference between levels 9 and 10 is the same as the difference between levels 5 and 6. However, there’s evidence that the good and bad extremes are way, way, way more extreme, so that going from level 9 to level 10 is much more of a jump in subjective pleasure than going from level 5 to 6 is.
https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/log-scales
With training, most people can learn to control single neurons in their brains. In the far future, I think humans will be able to control their own thoughts, emotions, and gene expression, just by thinking about it.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.079038v1.full
For the first time, a pig heart has been transplanted into a human without killing the person. The pig had been genetically engineered so its heart cells would be similar enough to human tissue to not be rejected by the human immune system.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59944889
Genes inherited from Neanderthals cause inflammatory diseases in some people.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abm1148
Getting infected with Epstein-Barr virus causes some people to later develop Multiple Sclerosis, a devastating, chronic disease. Developing a vaccine for the virus could ease enormous human suffering.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/multiple-sclerosis-causality
A new study adds to the growing body of medical evidence that alcohol consumption causes some kinds of cancer.
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/alcohol-consumption-directly-cause-cancer-oxford-genetic-study/
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria now kill over 1 million people per year. HIV/AIDS and malaria killed 860,000 and 640,000 people, respectively, in 2019.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/20/antimicrobial-resistance-antibiotic-resistant-bacterial-infections-deaths-lancet-study
This article was published in June 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, it was unclear what the effect on birthrates would be, and it could have been argued that more children that normal were going to be conceived since couples would have more time at their homes together. The article predicted the 2021 U.S. birthrate would be 300,000 – 500,000 lower than it was in 2020. The data are still coming in, but there was a decline, closer towards the lower end of their estimate.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-children-the-coming-covid-baby-bust/
COVID-19 has killed at least 3 million Indians. That’s 6-7 times higher than their government’s official death toll.
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abm5154