“The primary reason for taking Crimea may have been ensuring access to the ocean,” Schue said, “but it also allowed them to regain control of the Loran transmission site there. This has assured them sovereign terrestrial PNT [positioning, navigation and timing] for the entire region, including the Black Sea.” https://www.gpsworld.com/russia-expected-to-ditch-glonass-for-loran-in-ukraine-invasion/
Azerbaijan seized upon Russia’s distraction with the Ukraine War to again attack Armenia last month. Azerbaijan is stronger and larger than its neighbor, and has more international allies. Armenia’s only useful friend is Russia. https://youtu.be/7NOMj7n6QAM
The U.S. military has a large number of old, mothballed cargo and support ships that can be activated on short notice to move troops and supplies anywhere in the world. It is called the “Ready Reserve Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ready_Reserve_Force_ships
Someday we will resurrect dinosaurs in some form, aliens disguised as humans could be among us, and humans might someday exist as brains floating in jars, able to indulge in any fantasy (such as triggering waking dreams). https://youtu.be/iuYACq8v0GQ
In the 1960s, GE made a four-legged “Walking Truck” that had legs instead of wheels, for the U.S. military. This video of it clumsily moving around shows why it never made it out of the prototype phase, and why legged vehicles of any type were never successful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grVxdNW34FQ
Computers are much better than human experts at matching humans with the right colleges, fields of study, and careers. Imagine this paired with the “hyper-personalized training” and “micro-credentials” paradigm: At age 18, a supercomputer would give you a short list of careers you would be suited for. You pick the one you like best, and go through a stripped-down training regimen that only includes things directly relevant to doing that job. You would enter the workforce much faster and would be more of an asset to the economy. Vastly less time and money would be wasted on useless degrees, dropped majors, and career mistakes. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-32416-001
“After building on years of work from MILA, DeepMind, ourselves, and others, our AIs are now expert-human-level in no-press Diplomacy and Hanabi! Unlike Go and Dota, Diplomacy/Hanabi involve *cooperation*, which breaks naive RL.” https://twitter.com/polynoamial/status/1580185706735218689
Computers can now simulate fluids with lifelike accuracy. This video contains amazing examples of such simulations. https://youtu.be/8NAi30ZBpJU
The direction of the economy is practically impossible to forecast, except to the grossest degree. On any given day, a well-credentialed person or team of people working for some impressive-sounding institution will publish a serious-looking paper, or give a very serious-sounding TV interview, where they say the economy is about to collapse. Consider this badly wrong example from a year ago:
Jupiter could destroy us or protect us. The planet’s atmosphere has a layer that is rich in deuterium, and detonating a nuclear weapon in that layer might be enough to ignite all of it, creating a huge explosion that would destroy the side of Earth (and any other planet) that was facing it at that moment. A country, group, or crazed rich person could, with future technology, hold the rest of the world hostage with the threat of sending a nuclear space missile to blow up Jupiter. Moreover, if there were a future war between humans living on different planets (like Earth and Mars), one side might decide to detonate Jupiter when its own planet was directly shielded from the explosion by the Sun while the enemy planet was exposed.
Aliens could also detonate Jupiter to exterminate humanity from afar. However, humans could also blow up Jupiter as a sort of “dead man’s switch” that was meant to exterminate any alien fleet or civilization that was conquering our Solar System. We would kill ourselves as well, but at least we’d have the satisfaction of taking them with us and leaving nothing of value behind. Our mere threat of doing this might be enough to convince hostile aliens to leave the Solar System.
In the far future, when we start “mining” Jupiter, we’ll probably make it a priority to slowly siphon off the deuterium in its atmosphere, both to prevent this cataclysm and to fuel spacecraft.
One solution to the Fermi Paradox is that aliens keep quiet to avoid making themselves invasion targets for stronger, hostile aliens. This makes sense once you remember that “information is power”: The more information you have about someone else and the less they have about you, the stronger you are relative to them. The same holds true for intelligent species. If one species knows another exists, but not vice versa, then the first can choose when and under what conditions to make contact, or whether to make contact at all. Those are enormous advantages, particularly if the oblivious species has the ability to hurt the other one.
In short, it’s rational for intelligent species to keep as low a profile as possible, but to keep watch for aliens. That means reducing transmissions from their own planets and building telescopes and other sensors to search for aliens or signs of them. Sending cloaked probes to other star systems, containing downgraded technology and taking circuitous routes to mask their point of origin on the intelligent species’ homeworld, would also probably be a good idea. The probes could search other star systems for alien life even more thoroughly, and could build other types of space ships once there that could attack those aliens.
Part of keeping a low profile means not even revealing one’s self to weaker alien species. Even if they are too weak to hurt you directly, they can kill you indirectly by announcing your presence to everyone else. For example, if a flying saucer full of friendly gray aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, it would be the news event of the millennium. All of our TV signals, many of which shoot into the depths of space, would broadcast the event and its aftermath. Any malevolent insect aliens who had kept a low profile on a planet within 100 light years of Earth would not only learn about humanity’s existence, they would also discover the gray aliens. Because they talked to us, the gray aliens might actually trigger a chain of events that led to their own planet being invaded by insect aliens decades later.
Another reason to colonize space is to establish a secure second strike capability. While aliens could secretly build up a space fleet to suddenly take over Earth before we could have a chance to attack their own planet, it would get exponentially harder with each additional planet (Mars, Venus, Jupiter moons) we controlled. since the alien attack would have to destroy them all simultaneously to prevent our retaliation. If human civilization were spread out among several star systems, exterminating us without suffering a severe, if delayed, counterstrike would be impossible.
Again, secret probes could be of use. If we smuggled them into multiple star systems, they could be programmed to retaliate against any aliens that attacked Earth. Once receiving the attack signal, the probes would build combat space ships, space guns with interstellar ranges, or other types of weapons, and then send them to attack the alien homeworld. This could turn into a multi-century “whack-a-mole” game where hidden probes activated at random intervals, in various star systems in our part of the galaxy, built weapons, sent them off to attack the alien homeworld, and then went into hiding again.
Secret space probes could also be used to take over the galaxy. Consider Ray Kurzweil’s hypothesized “two-phased attack” with self-replicating nanomachines:
How long would it take an out-of-control replicating nanobot to destroy the Earth’s biomass? The biomass has on the order of 1045 carbon atoms. A reasonable estimate of the number of carbon atoms in a single replicating nanobot is about 106. (Note that this analysis is not very sensitive to the accuracy of these figures, only to the approximate order of magnitude.) This malevolent nanobot would need to create on the order of 1034 copies of itself to replace the biomass, which could be accomplished with 113 replications (each of which would potentially double the destroyed biomass). Rob Freitas has estimated a minimum replication time of approximately 100 seconds, so 113 replication cycles would require about three hours.2 However, the actual rate of destruction would be slower because biomass is not “efficiently” laid out. The limiting factor would be the actual movement of the front of destruction. Nanobots cannot travel very quickly because of their small size. It’s likely to take weeks for such a destructive process to circle the globe.
Based on this observation we can envision a more insidious possibility. In a two-phased attack, the nanobots take several weeks to spread throughout the biomass but use up an insignificant portion of the carbon atoms, say one out of every thousand trillion (1015). At this extremely low level of concentration, the nanobots would be as stealthy as possible. Then, at an “optimal” point, the second phase would begin with the seed nanobots expanding rapidly in place to destroy the biomass. For each seed nanobot to multiply itself a thousand trillionfold would require only about 50 binary replications, or about 90 minutes. With the nanobots having already spread out in position throughout the biomass, movement of the destructive wave front would no longer be a limiting factor.
The point is that without defenses, the available biomass could be destroyed by gray goo very rapidly. Clearly, we will need a nanotechnology immune system3 in place before these scenarios become a possibility. This immune system would have to be capable of contending not just with obvious destruction but any potentially dangerous (stealthy) replication, even at very low concentration.
The Singularity is Near
An alien species could, over a long time and with great secrecy, seed every solar system in the galaxy with its own Von Neumann probes, which would contain self-replicating macro- and nano-machines. Once every solar system had a probe, the aliens would send out a signal, and all of the probes would start self-replicating. They wouldn’t just make “Gray Goo” copies of themselves–they might make soldiers, weapons, and other advanced technology. Any other aliens would be overwhelmed, or at least forced to reveal themselves to fight back.
If we could cheaply make antimatter, then we could make “nuclear bullets.” When matter and antimatter touch, they annihilate each other and convert all their mass into pure energy, described by the familiar equation E = MC2. That means just 1 gram of antimatter could create a 43-kiloton explosion, which is twice as powerful as the bigger of the two atom bombs dropped on Japan. The 5.56mm projectile fired from a standard U.S. military rifle weighs 4 grams.
A very powerful adaptation that our posthuman descendants will have is real-time control over their genes and gut bacteria. They’d have computer brain implants and biomechanical implants throughout their bodies. By simply thinking about it, they could tell their brain implants to alter their gene expression–maybe in a specific body part or organ–to do something like produce more of a certain type of chemical.
As part of their counteroffensive, Ukrainian forces surrounded the town of Izyum, trapping hundreds of Russian troops. This video shows a Russian tank speeding out of the encirclement, with several soldiers clinging to its top. A Ukrainian soldier standing by the roadside sprays it with automatic fire, and the men fall off. The tank then turns the corner and slams into a large tree, which collapses on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Vb7f8lcVc
Since February, at least 1,500 of Russia’s main battle tanks, and 2,500 of its lighter armored vehicles have been destroyed or captured by Ukrainian forces. Russia famously hordes huge quantities of military equipment in case of WWIII, so it can replace its massive losses in due time. https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
At the current rate it is losing tanks in Ukraine, Russia’s vast reserves of tanks kept in storage will be totally destroyed in less than three years. However, the loss of skilled tank crewmen will practically cripple their tank fleet before that. https://youtu.be/ZNNoaRp5lz0
Russia has given some of its retired T-62 tanks to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. This video analysis makes it clear that the T-62 is inferior to the newer T-72s that regular Russian Army units have, in every key respect (mobility, firepower, armor). That said, the T-62 is still fine if kept behind the front lines and only used to attack lighter enemy vehicles and infantry units. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcXJNRfVuzk
This video explains how U.S. Army doctrine shaped the design of the M113 armored personnel carrier, why the vehicle is obsolete (except in a handful of support roles), and why it actually makes sense for America to give them away rather than upgrade them to fix their inherent limitations. https://youtu.be/cBufXgTnou0
Using deepfake technology, a man converted the footage of a black actress in The Little Mermaid movie remake into a white actress. As this technology improves and augmented reality eyewear become common, expect people to use “filters” like this to curate reality to their tastes, however extreme they may be. https://nypost.com/2022/09/15/racist-ai-scientist-blasted-for-fixing-black-ariel-in-the-little-mermaid/
In the future, quantum computers will let us simulate new types of materials, with all their chemical and subatomic properties accurately represented. This will lead to major advances in material science and we discover new alloys, batteries, drugs, and other molecules that would otherwise require billions of dollars in trial-and-error lab research to find. More generally speaking, computer simulations will lead to the optimization of all types of manufactured objects. If we ever meet intelligent aliens, their technology will have gone through the same process and should be similar to ours. No one will be using square wheels on their cars instead of round ones. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/how-quantum-simulations-are-set-to-revolutionize-lithium-batteries
Venus’ closeness to the Sun doomed its prospects of ever supporting organic life. Since the Sun makes its surface hotter, the planet’s crust can’t break into tectonic plates, which in turn makes it less geologically active, preventing a carbon cycle from coming into existence and leading to the buildup of a thick atmosphere that traps heat. With much better technology, we could start terraforming Venus in the far future, but the process would take thousands of years to complete. https://youtu.be/aaE-RiFilEc
Here’s a roundup of climate change doomsday predictions, including ones that have failed to come true. Global warming is real, is bad, and is partly caused by humans, but its threat to our future has been exaggerated. https://extinctionclock.org/
Once we dig a piece of metal out of the ground, the clock starts ticking on its return to the Earth, in one form or another. A piece of iron, for example, will rust until it fully disintegrates and all its particles blow away. A piece of metal’s time “in circulation” varies greatly by element, and is affected by factors like mining efficiency and industrial application. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-how-long-mined-metals-circulate-before-being-lost/
Starting at age 55, most people derive less and less enjoyment from leisure activities like eating out, traveling, and buying new things. This partly explains why old people spend so little of their money on non-essential purchases. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30460#fromrss
Birds are more highly evolved than mammals in some ways. For example, one of their brain cells consumes only 1/3 the chemical energy as a mammalian brain cell. With radical genetic engineering, humans could improve the energy efficiency of our own brain cells, boosting our intelligence. The necessary changes to the human genome would be so great that it would result in the creation of a new species that might look human externally, but would not be able to breed with us. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01219-2
U.S. life expectancy has dropped from 79 years in 2019 to 76.1 years today. Half of the decline is due to COVID-19, and other half is mostly due to higher rates of suicide, obesity, and substance abuse. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62740249
Almost Human is a “buddy cop” TV series with a twist: It’s set in 2048, and one of the partners in an android. It is set in an unnamed American city where futuristic technologies deliver both great promise and peril for its citizens–some have lives of luxury, others are impoverished and have been left behind, and criminals have been empowered by the new tools at their disposal.
Detective John Kennex (played by Karl Urban) is a classic, hardboiled cop. He’s hotheaded, traumatized by violent experiences in his past, and struggles to form social bonds with others. Due to a change in police procedures, he’s paired with Dorian (played by Michael Ealy), an android with human emotions and a more balanced personality than Kennex.
Android cop Dorian (left) and his human partner John Kennex (right)
The series follows their unlikely partnership and the evolution of their bond, as well as of their unique personal stories, as they investigate crimes together. Every episode pits them against a new criminal or group of criminals who use a different kind of advanced technology.
I thought Almost Human was respectably thought-out and entertaining. Kennex and Dorian had an interesting and often funny personal chemistry, and the other recurring police characters were well-acted. The fictional universe in which it was set showed a high attention to detail in fleshing out the advanced technologies that would be available, as well as their social effects, though as my analysis will show, it wasn’t perfect.
I think the show failed to adequately explore how being an android and living among humans shaped Dorian’s inner world, which would have posed questions of greater intellectual substance to the viewer. At times, he seemed too much like a funny human who could do advanced calculations in his head. The plots also got more convoluted and, frankly, worse as the series went on, probably because the writers were running out of material. Almost Human was cancelled after only 13 episodes. While the show wasn’t spectacular, it would have been nice to see the additional character development and exploration of future technologies that would have happened had it been allowed a full season of 22 – 26 episodes.
Analysis:
Episode 1
Fully convincing androids will exist. During scenes set in the police station and in field missions, androids are almost always present. Aside from their mechanical way of talking and emotionless faces, they are indistinguishable from humans. Dorian is the only android at that precinct who has emotions and a warm personality. While androids will be very impressive by 2048, they won’t be able to mimic humans as exactly as they could in the show.
In my big list of future predictions, I wrote that this would be the case by the end of the 2030s: Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
To elaborate, I predict that those kinds of androids will be very few in number by the end of 2039, and will be technology demonstrators and prototypes that get a lot of media coverage at carefully controlled tech company demo events. They won’t be available for any person to purchase, won’t roam around public spaces, and won’t have important jobs like working as police officers.
By 2048, the androids will be better, and aspects of their physiques, intelligence, and capabilities will overlap even more with humans, but they still won’t be able to pass as one of us in normal situations. Their body movements will be clumsier and more limited than the average human’s, probably leaving them with the same overall reflexes, nimbleness, balance, and speed as an elderly human. They will also lack the battery life to function for a whole work day in a physically demanding occupation like street cop. Also, if you could examine one at very close distance, you would see that its skin and other external features were less detailed than those of real humans.
A plausible role for an android in a police station of 2048 would be working at the reception desk. It would be tasked with talking to members of the public who came in, could answer most of their questions correctly, and could summon a human officer with the relevant expertise to deal with questions and issues it couldn’t handle alone. The android would be able to walk around the police station and to physically interact with most things it encountered (e.g. – operate door handle), but it would not be as fast or as coordinated as the average human. It would not have a gun and wouldn’t know how to fight criminals. It’s purpose would be to free up a human police officer for duties more crucial for public safety.
Androids and many other machines will be able to pass the Turing Test and to carry on long conversations with humans and to recognize human emotions and to simulate their own. Their personalities will probably rank somewhere between Dorian’s and the “stiffer” androids assigned to the police precinct.
Shooting an android in the head will kill it. There a scene where a police android is shot in the head and instantly dies. This is unrealistic because it will make the most sense to put androids’ CPUs in their torsos instead of in their heads. Doing such would improve their balance by lowering their centers of gravity, and would make them more robust since their “brains” would have more protection around them since a torso is wider than a skull. Their lack of lungs, hearts, and digestive systems will leave them with extra space in their torsos anyway. For more details, read my blog post What would a human-equivalent robot look like?
To look like humans, androids will still need heads, though their CPUs and other critical hardware won’t be in them.
Episode 2
Criminals will use “DNA bombs” to mask forensic evidence. After a pair of professional hitmen murder a man in a hotel room, one of them leaves a small canister behind that explodes after they leave. It is a “DNA bomb,” and it releases a mist composed of innumerable DNA particles, which attach themselves to all the surfaces in the hotel room, masking whatever genuine DNA evidence anyone left behind. Thanks to this, the police detectives are unable to extract useful genetic evidence from the scene.
This is a creative and probably plausible idea. Mass producing random but complete human genomes and packing them into cell-sized particles that could be sprayed out of a can is probably impossible now, but by 2048, the technical challenges might be overcome. Instead of exploding like a grenade, a DNA bomb might work better if it slowly released its load as an aerosol, like a modern “bug bomb.”
There will be sex androids. One of the “people” involved in the aforementioned murder is a female android built for prostitution. By 2048, I’ve predicted androids will be “adequate” in terms of physicality and duplication of the human body and its movements to perform sex acts on real people, though I doubt the experience will be that satisfying. However, if your senses were impaired by alcohol and the darkness of a closed bedroom, it will be good enough.
Machines will be able to monitor your vital statistics at a glance. In one scene, Dorian the android sees that his human partner’s heart rate has increased, indicating he is feeling sexual attraction to a nearby sex robot. Dorian mentions this to tease his partner. Androids and other machines will have this ability by 2048, as well as the ability to detect other vital information from nearby humans, giving them insights into many things the humans are unconsciously revealing, and perhaps trying to hide.
The Cardiocam mirror
Machines can already “see” human heartbeats: In 2011, a group of MIT students built a device styled after a bathroom mirror that had a built-in camera capable of seeing “the minute changes in skin tone that occur as facial capillaries fill and empty with the beating of a heart.” The mirror contained a display, which showed a numerical readout indicating the heart rate of the person standing in front of it. By 2048, the technology will be even more advanced. By then, expect some machines to have the ability to monitor multiple vitals at once, including voice stress, pupil dilation, blinking rate, and body language, to create real-time, composite profiles of people’s emotional states, honesty, and healthy. They will be the ultimate lie detectors and empaths.
Episode 3
Androids will have more durable bodies than humans. During a gun battle, a bullet ricochets and hits Dorian in the head. While he is damaged, he stays mostly functional and doesn’t lose consciousness. The wound looks bad enough that it probably would have instantly killed a human had the bullet struck them in the same place.
Androids certainly have the potential to be much more durable than humans, and with 2048 levels of technology, we could build androids that had bulletproof skulls and flesh (at least against pistol and lighter rifle bullets). However, I think fears of robots going haywire and attacking humans will wisely dissuade us from doing that, and the androids that do exist will be no faster, stronger, or damage-resistant than average humans.
In the far future, the sky will be the limit for robot design, however.
Episode 4
Human chemists will be needed to make illegal drugs. This episode focuses on a new synthetic drug being sold in the city. The police try to infiltrate the gang that is peddling it by disguising their forensic scientist as a rogue chemist and having him offer them his services. The gang gives him a chance by taking him to their secret lab and letting him synthesize the drug from base ingredients.
By 2048, fully automated labs will exist, and they will be able to make drugs of any kind without human help. The notion that a talented human’s “special touch” is needed to complete the process will be obsolete. That said, the machinery will still be expensive and the lab setups complex, so only pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and perhaps well-resourced drug cartels will have them. A lower-level drug gang that only spanned one or a handful of cities would still need humans to do the lab work.
However, in the farther future, automation will create major problems by making it easy for ordinary people to synthesize drugs, or to engage in other illegal activities like building machine guns, committing thefts, or even murders. Remotely killing someone might become as simple as verbally telling a quadcopter drone to find the target, shoot him, and then fly to a distant location and self-destruct to erase the evidence.
Robots will be used as shields. In one gun battle between the police and the drug gang, the gang’s android deliberately steps in front of its boss, and uses its bulletproof body to block incoming fire. The injuries don’t appear to affect the android, and it then physically fights with the police. This was creative, and is also a realistic depiction of how androids could be used in combat situations in 2048 (I also saw this in the movie Chappie, when a humanoid robot was placed in the front of a line of police breaking through the front door of a criminal’s house). While we still won’t trust machines to make life-or-death decisions and won’t give them guns, we’ll have no problem using them as bullet shields, distractors, or medics to carry away injured humans.
Episode 5
Machines won’t be able to perfectly imitate human voices. The police find an audio recording of a recent murder. In it, a man utters a few words before shooting the victim. The forensic scientist matches the voice to that of a man who has been in prison the whole time, which seems to exculpate him since he could not have been physically present at the crime scene (it turns out his clone committed the murder). The forensic scientist then says that the man’s voice could not have been faked at scene by a machine since no technology can mimic a person’s voice so accurately.
While this is the case today, I don’t think it will be true by 2048. Given recent progress in machines mimicking human styles of musical composition and artistry, I think it’s certain that they will figure out how to perfectly imitate individual human voices within the next 26 years.
Episode 6
Each android model will consist of many, identical individuals. In this episode, Dorian meets an android of his same model, and they look identical. This will be the case for reasons of economy: It is cheaper for companies to make long runs of identical products than it is to make each on unique. While there will be one-off, bespoke androids in 2048, most of them will be mass-produced products that come off assembly lines.
The most common police android model in the show.
That said, robotics companies will make efforts to vary the appearances of their androids in the same way that today’s car makers sell the same model in different colors and option/trim packages. Customers will have choices over hair, eye and skin color, and maybe other biometrics (today’s sex doll industry probably offers insights into what physical parameters will be selectable). However, it’s still common for car owners to encounter vehicles identical to their own on the roads, and so it will be for androids in 2048.
Episode 7
Androids will be able to yell really loudly. During a car chase, Dorian communicates with the criminal vehicle by yelling at it with the same volume that a human could only achieve with the help of a bullhorn. We already have tiny, simple devices like smoke alarms that can generate noises louder than human vocal cords can produce, so there should be no technological or financial hurdle to gifting androids in 2048 with the same capabilities. It might be a useful, nonlethal defensive feature that they could use to repel bad humans (perhaps in defense of their human owners) or to summon help in emergency situations.
If we ever get into a war with intelligent machines, they will probably make use of sound warfare during engagements. Loud, startling noises distract and scare humans and make it harder for us to communicate with each other. Machines, on the other hand, would be little affected.
There will be tiny, disposable cameras. In the episode, a perverted criminal paralyzes a victim, locks and explosive collar around his necks, places thumbtack-sized cameras in the victim’s car, and then leaves the scene. When the victim awakens, his panicked, final ordeal is filmed by the cameras and the footage streamed to the internet for people to watch, before the criminal remotely detonates the bomb, killing the man.
With the rate at which electronics are shrinking and dropping in cost, cameras like this will be available by 2048. As in the episode, they will be cheap, single-use devices with adhesive sides, allowing them to be stuck to surfaces, and they will have wireless transmission capabilities and enough battery life to function for a few hours.
Episode 8
There will be guided bullets. In this episode, a team of assassins is using an advanced military rifle that fires guided bullets to kill people in the city. I think guided bullets will be reliable, affordable, and effective by the 2050s, though they won’t be able to perform the sharp turns or to linger in the air like the ones in the show could. One or two degrees of course change per 100 meters of bullet travel is more like it. The shooter would still need a clear line of sight to his target, and would still need to carefully aim the weapon at it. The guided bullets would turn near-misses and off-center hits to nonvital areas into consistent headshots, making average shooters as effective as today’s trained snipers.
That said, small, aerial drones armed with off-the-shelf guns or small explosives could let assassins in 2048 do remote, autonomous killings of people, like those depicted in the episode. By then, a variety of technologies that only big companies and government agencies have now will be more advanced and available to the public. It will be relatively easy to equip a drone with sensors, including cameras loaded with facial recognition algorithms, that allow it to track down specific humans and kill them. In other words, by 2048, assassins will be able to use high-tech weapons to remotely kill people as happened in the episode, but the weapons won’t be guided bullets.
There will be a technology that lets people erase specific memories. A woman who learns that she is the assassins’ next target hatches a plan to make them leave her alone. They want her dead because she knows their identities, so she visits a black market doctor to have him use a machine to delete her memories of them. She plans to videotape the procedure and send it to the assassins as proof.
Our understanding of how the brain stores memories is poor, and while it will surely be better in 2048, I doubt there will be medical procedures that can erase specific memories. Part of the reason is that individual memories are not stored in discrete locations within the brain–any one memory is spread out among neural pathways distributed throughout a brain. Moreover, even if you could somehow erase one memory, the changes it would make to the pathways would probably erase or diminish memories of other things.
Current research into treating PTSD could lead to therapies where people take drugs in controlled clinical settings, while focusing on bad memories, to diminish them. None of the drugs have proven successful yet, but by 2048, it’s plausible at least one could be approved. However, I doubt it will be anywhere near as effective as the memory-erasing machine featured in the episode.
Episode 9
Combat robots will play dead sometimes. Hoping to gain access to the police station’s heavily guarded evidence room, an evil android kills a random woman in public, knowing that the police will quickly arrive. Once they do, the android tries attacking them, provoking their gunfire. The evil android collapses after the first bullet impact and pretends to be dead. The ruse fools the police, who then take the android to the evidence room for later examination to determine why it killed the woman. After a few minutes, the evil android reactivates itself and starts running around the room.
This kind of ingenuity is something we should generally expect from AGIs. “Playing dead” is a specific tactic that will probably become common among combat robots. Unlike humans, machines will be able to totally shut down their life functions for temporary periods, making it impossible for observers to tell if they were actually dead. Feigning death would be a valuable tactic since it would let them do surprise attacks on unsuspecting enemies (i.e. – it jumps up and attacks you from behind right after you walk by it), or to escape after the enemies left the area. Moreover, the fact that robots are capable of playing dead will force enemies to totally destroy hostile combat robots before proceeding, slowing them down and forcing them to expend more munitions.
Episode 10
Advanced human genetic engineering will start in the 2020s. In this episode, it’s revealed that a small but highly visible minority of people are genetically engineered. Several young adult characters, including one of the police detectives, were engineered at conception to have ideal combinations of looks, intelligence, and health. These highly modified people are nicknamed “Chromes.” Based on their ages and the fact that the show is set in 2048, we can conclude that human genetic engineering became routine for rich people in the 2020s. This won’t happen.
The shockingly beautiful actress Minka Kelly plays the genetically engineered detective “Valerie Stahl.”
The first genetically engineered humans (both female) were created in China in 2018. Instead of being genetic supergirls full of hundreds of DNA tweaks, the twins only had alterations to one gene called “CCR5.” The changes were meant to confer enhanced natural resistance to HIV infection, which was especially useful for them since their father has the virus. Though the geneticist’s intervention did alter their genomes, it’s unclear whether the targeted gene was changed in the desired way. One or both of them might actually have not benefitted from the procedure, or might even be worse off thanks to unwanted alterations to other genes. Only time will tell.
This struggle to change just one gene in a human embryo shows how behind schedule our technology is in creating highly engineered people like the Chromes. Moreover, there’s still a huge social stigma in Western countries about genetically modifying humans.
It’s more realistic that, by 2048, human genetic engineering will start becoming common among rich people. Instead of being able to customize your offspring in every respect and to make them the “total package” of looks, smarts, and athleticism, you might be able to change ten genes, which would only give them slight advantages over naturally born people. It won’t count as “advanced” genetic engineering. In fact, in 2048, IVF embryo selection might actually provide more benefits than genetic engineering.
Professional advice will be available anywhere. While investigating a suspicious death, the police question a man at his home. Concerned about his legal rights, the man summons his lawyer via telepresence to mediate. The lawyer appears as a hologram in the middle of the room, and repeatedly interrupts the conversation between the other parties in ways meant to protect his client.
I doubt 3D holograms like that will exist by 2048, but I’m sure that other forms of telepresence will let lawyers and other people like doctors, therapists, and personal trainers interact with and help us in the real world almost anytime. Additionally, even if true AGIs don’t exist by then, narrow AIs will be advanced enough and good enough at natural language to accurately mimic other humans, and to render useful professional advice as a human with those skills would. This kind of access to professional advice will partly level the playing field between people with different personal resources, and change society in many other ways we can’t imagine now.
That means the police questioning scene will be fundamentally accurate for 2048, though the lawyer would only be visible on a video display in the room, or as a 3D rendering that could only be seen with the aid of augmented reality glasses.
Episode 11
It will be legal for machines to kill people. In this episode, hackers remotely take over a home security system belonging to a rich couple. As a result, an automated machine gun turret shoots the husband to death. It is later revealed that this was retaliation against the family because the same computer-controlled machine gun had killed a harmless teenager who had trespassed on the yard a year earlier.
By 2048, the technology will exist to build a home security system that could tell trespassers apart from residents and then shoot them. However, it will be illegal to possess, and only people like dictators and crime bosses will have them. Humans will strongly resist the idea of giving machines the right or ability to kill other people without human input (this is also why android cops won’t have guns), which is also why armed police, jurors, and judges will be among the last jobs to be automated.
The big exception to this will be in the military sphere. By 2048, at least one major military will be using some type of combat robot (whether it is airborne, seaborne, or terrestrial) that is empowered to fire on human enemies autonomously. While I expect there will be a global ban on autonomous killer drones, it will ultimately be discarded once the technology gets good enough and cheap enough. The potential military advantages will be too great to resist, and enforcement of any ban will be nearly impossible since killer robot factories will be much easier to hide than, say, nuclear weapons facilities.
Episode 12
Nanomachines will change human bodies from the inside. In this episode, a deranged man who hates his own appearance kills people so he can get their DNA samples and then alter his own genes so he gains specific, desirable physical features from them. A black market surgeon helps him with this by performing an experimental procedure in which nanomachines programmed with the victims’ DNA are injected into the criminal’s face. The nanomachines then alter the tissue in the criminal’s face so they match the facial features specified in the victims’ DNA.
First, if you wanted to steal another person’s DNA in 2048 or today, you wouldn’t need to kill them; you would only need to grab a discarded plastic cup they drank out of, or a tissue they blew their nose into, or something like that. People shed their DNA constantly.
Second, in the longer run, we’ll understand what every part of the human genome does, leading to the creation of something like a huge catalog of outward human features (like nose shapes and eye colors) matched with the combinations of genes that produced them. If you wanted a nose job, you could just look at the catalog to find one you liked instead of walking all around a city staring at strangers’ noses until you found a good one. Then you could alter your nose genes accordingly.
Third, there’s virtually no chance that nanomachines will be advanced enough to do plastic surgery on people by 2048. Progress developing nanomachines has happened at a snail’s pace, and the few that do exist have no useful capabilities. In theory, nanomachines will these advanced functions could exist someday. After all, the existence of flesh-eating bacteria and of bacteria that stimulate other cells’ growth show that nanoscale organic machines can alter how much tissue there is in part of an animal. A big and unsolved problem is controlling the behavior of the nanomachines once they’re injected into a person’s body.
By the end of this century, a plausible nanotech-based plastic nose job would involve the patent having his head held tightly in place with restraints while nanomachines (either of fully synthetic construction or highly modified bacteria) were injected into his nose with very fine needles. Some kind of external device, maybe using radio waves, pulses of light, or magnets, would activate the nanomachines, carefully control their activities, and keep them in very specific parts of the nose. One square millimeter at a time, the cartilage and bone in the patient’s nose would be destroyed or built up, slowly changing its overall shape.
Due to safety concerns and probably also to the limitations of the technology, the nanomachines would either be removed or would stop working after a short time and disintegrate. Multiple sessions involving the technique, spread out over weeks so the plastic surgeon could observe the intermediate results and deal with any complications, would probably be needed to achieve the desired nose shape. A procedure like the one depicted in the show, involving a vial of nanomachines injected into your arm, and then them migrating through your body on their own to a specific place where they alter your tissue as you scream in pain and watch your appearance change in a matter of seconds, will never be a reality.
Episode 13
There will be invisible force fields. In this episode, the police go to speak with an imprisoned man, and we see that good old fashioned steel bars have been replaced with invisible force fields. This is another ubiquitous sci fi trope that makes no sense. There is no force that we could harness through any type of technology that would block physical objects in the way that fictional force fields do. The only device that can approximate its effects is a “plasma window,” which is comprised of a flat plane electromagnetic field that is pumped full of super hot charged particles. It would burn any person or thing that passed through it, though it wouldn’t physically “push back” against them. If you had a running start and were willing to suffer injuries, you could get through one.
A plasma window
While it’s likely that plasma window technology will get cheaper and better, the fact that they require large amounts of power and injure anyone who touches them will curtail their use. In 2048 and beyond, jails will have metal bars like they do now.
3D bioprinters will be able to make whole human bodies. This episode’s villain is another disturbed criminal with access to advanced technology. He kidnaps people and takes them back to his lab for illegal medical experiments that last for days or weeks. To cover up their disappearances, he uses a large 3D bioprinter and their DNA to make dead, whole-body copies of them and then dumps the manufactured corpses in public places at night. The discoveries of the fake corpses are meant to lead the police astray, since they’ll never assume the victims are actually alive and being experimented on.
Ultimately, it will be possible to “manufacture” whole adult human bodies in labs (Blade Runner’s Replicants were examples of this), though 2048 will be way too early. By then, the best that 3D bioprinters and related technologies will probably be able to muster is manufacturing some types of tissue (skin, cartilage) and simple organs like bladders and tracheas. We can technically already do this, but the results are usually of poor quality.
Russia’s military losses in the Ukraine War are about $34 billion so far. If the War ended today, Russia could replace its losses over the next five years if it raised its defense budget by 12%, which would be a tolerable strain on its economy and taxpayers. It could replace its armored vehicle losses by upgrading old tanks that have been in storage for decades, and by increasing production rates of new vehicles at existing factories. However, the War isn’t going to end today, and it and the associated sanctions could instead turn into a massive resource drain that depletes even Russia’s famously large stockpiles of old weapons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SJHZAG4c2w
Putin has ordered the Russian army to expand by 13%, or 137,000 men, by the end of this year. This is certainly meant to make up for the country’s losses sustained so far in Ukraine (at least 15,000 dead and some multiple of that permanently put out of action by injury), plus those expected to be lost during the next four months. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-government-and-politics-d0f341d2f5c295c0f7be4ee1ba8b60fe
Taiwan’s tanks are old, but still adequate for their intended defensive role. This is because if China invaded, it would only be able to send its light amphibious tanks to the island, and they have weak armor and only average guns. Taiwan’s tanks are a match for them. That said, Taiwan could substantially improve its loss/kill ratios in such a conflict by buying newer, better thanks now. The video makes it clear that a mixed force of modern, heavy M1 Abrams tanks and a much lighter armored vehicle would dominate the Chinese amphibious tanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf2JYLlqoCE
Here’s an in-depth analysis of the Russian AK-107 assault rifle, which has a complex “balanced recoil system” that its designers claim almost eliminates felt recoil. In reality, it doesn’t yield enough of a benefit to justify the extra cost, complexity, weight, and reliability penalties that it imposes on an AK rifle. Screwing a simple compensator onto the end of the barrel is a much better way to improve the weapon’s controllability. Like so many advanced Russian weapons, the AK-107’s mystique dissolves once Westerners are able to get their hands on it and do tests and analyses. This is why you should be skeptical of Russia’s claims to have things like working hypersonic missiles and nuclear torpedoes that can make tsunamis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LTiCZwEOo
Here’s a nifty new device: rubber bands that go around the barrels of rifles and change colors as they get hotter. Gun barrels warm up as more bullets are shot through them, which temporarily warps the metal and changes the trajectories of the bullets. A shooter could adjust his aim accordingly if he could tell at a glance how hot his barrel was. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2022/08/25/caveman-spark-ar-15-crush-washers/
The USSR’s legendary T-34 tank was overrated in many ways. These men go inside one and show how fundamentally unsafe and uncomfortable it was for its crewmen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBqCLHfcHGY
The U.S. has an enormous economy of scale advantage when it comes to the defense sector, that in turn guarantees the global primacy of American weapons. It makes no economic sense for countries will smaller economies to even try developing their own high-end weapons like fighter planes. https://youtu.be/7Z_gTGJc7nQ
Recent advances in computer-generated art, writing, and other types of content creation suggest a deluge of high-quality, customized digital content is coming in the near future. Maybe humans will end up living in billions of Matrix simulations, with each one optimized for the needs and tastes of each human. https://socialwarming.substack.com/p/the-approaching-tsunami-of-addictive
Google has unveiled experimental house robots that can obey human voice commands to do simple tasks like handing people cans of soda. I’m surprised that machines haven’t mastered such skills, yet can now create artwork as well as the best humans. Expect more counterintuitive improvements to machine capabilities as time passes. It won’t be like in the movies. https://www.reuters.com/technology/ok-google-get-me-coke-ai-giant-demos-soda-fetching-robots-2022-08-16/
These plumbing leak sensors are all impractical due to cost and/or limited leak detection ability. A much better alternative to hooking up an electronic water flow meter to each water fixture in your house would be to have a robot walk around and check them once a week. You could probably get away with doing it much less often than that. You’d get the most bang for your buck by having a robot monitor your house’s water meter during periods of time when no water was being used in your house, like multi-hour stretches when you were away at work. If the meter showed water consumption was happening during those times, the robot would know a pipe was leaking somewhere in your house, and it would look for it. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/smart-gadgets-save-homes-from-water-leaks/
‘The Moon is an ideal location to launch intercepting missions to life-threatening and catastrophic asteroids. The effectiveness of the interception greatly depends on the weight of the spacecraft. Unfortunately, interceptors launched from the Earth lose more than 98% of their weight by burning the majority of their onboard fuel and by jettisoning their lower stage structures before entering a heliocentric orbit. However, if interceptors are launched from the Moon by a lunar surface accelerator, they can enter a heliocentric orbit without consuming any onboard fuel or jettisoning any part of the spacecraft. A 5-ton construction package, which consists of robots and industrial production equipment, would enable mining on the moon and construction of a 3.5 km-long, 5,000-ton accelerator.’ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468896717300617
Batteries only need to get a little bit better for it to make financial sense to convert smaller cargo ships to use electric engines. Today, those ships use diesel engines that burn very dirty fuel and are very polluting. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
Large volcanic eruptions are a greater threat to Earth and humans than asteroid impacts, yet the latter gets more attention and more preventative funding. We should spend more money to monitor volcanoes and investigate the feasibility of defusing volcanoes before they erupt by drilling ventilation holes into their magma chambers. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02177-x
The human eye and its associated nerves and muscles have many design flaws. Octopi and squid actually have better-evolved eyes than we do. Radically redesigned eyes are a good example of a improvement that our descendants will have in the future, courtesy of genetic engineering. Externally, their eyes will look like ours, but the amount of genetic reprogramming necessary to make theirs will be so great that they won’t have Homo sapiens genomes. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1
The first synthetic mouse embryos, which were made from only the mother’s DNA, have been created. This or another technique will eventually be used on humans, and will allow single people to conceive children regardless of their own natural fertility status, and without need of a partner’s DNA. It will also inaugurate an era of unauthorized human cloning, where DNA samples of unwitting third parties will be surreptitiously collected and then traded on black markets. https://apnews.com/article/synthetic-mouse-embryos-created-7f75da0c53f9d22c4e4dbf8a847d75bf
The leading theory about what causes Alzheimer’s disease–agglomerations of protein plaques in the spaces between brain cells–might be wrong. In fact, a seminal scientific paper supporting the theory might be full of fraudulent data. Billions of dollars have been spent developing Alzheimer’s drugs that target the protein plaques in the brain, and all have failed to help patients. If a scientist’s deliberate fraud caused this, then I think it should be considered a crime against humanity. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
Among people who think about intelligent alien life, the first question is whether the latter exist at all, and the second is usually “What do they look like?” People who claim to have seen aliens on Earth (and often, to have been abducted by them) usually say they are humanoid, but with considerable variation in other aspects of their appearance. Typically, the aliens are said to have larger heads than humans, meaning their brains are larger, giving them higher intelligence and perhaps even special mental abilities like telepathy. Hollywood has provided us with an even more diverse envisagement of alien life, from the beautiful and inspiring to the grotesque and terrifying.
Betty Hill with a sculpture of one of the aliens that allegedly abducted her and her husband in 1961. They became famous five years later when a book was published about it.
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was released in 1977 and was a hit film. Its aliens were similar to what the Hills described. The “Grey alien” is now a familiar sci-fi trope.
I think intelligent aliens exist, and look like all of those things, and nothing in particular. They’re probably “shapeshifters,” either because their bodies can morph into different configurations, or because they can transplant their minds from one body to another, just like you change outfits.
As the multitude of animal species on our planet demonstrates, there is no single “best” type of body to have. Depending on your environment (terrestrial, underwater, airborne), role (predator, herbivore, parasite), and other factors, your optimal body plan will vary greatly. The best species is thus one that can change its form and function in response to the needs of the moment.
Humans have been so successful as a species because our big brains and opposable thumbs give us the ability to create technology, which is a way around the limitations of our fixed anatomy. For example, we originated in Africa where it was hot, and so lacked thick fur to keep us warm in cold climates. Rather than being stuck in Africa forever, we invented clothing, and so gained the ability to spread to the temperate and polar regions of the planet.
Our technology has let us spread, but its has limitations. Nothing but a fundamental alteration of human biology will let us live in oceans and lakes, to fly naturally, or to live comfortably in extraterrestrial environments. For example, on other planets and moons, our ideal heights and limb proportions will vary based on gravity and temperature levels, and in the weightlessness of space, legs are almost useless and should be replaced with a second pair of arms.
And making any of those changes to tailor a human to such an environment would make them less suited for conditions on Earth’s land surface, where we are now. Biology is very constraining.
For those reasons, AI’s and some fraction of our human descendants, who I’ll call “posthumans” for this essay, will find it optimal to not have fixed bodies or “default” physical forms at all. Intelligent machines will exist as consciousnesses running on computer servers, and posthumans as brains inside sealed containers. Those containers will have integral machinery to support the biological needs of the brains, and to interface the organ with other devices.
Whenever the AIs or posthumans wanted to do something in the physical world, they would take temporary control of a body or piece of machinery that was best suited for the intended task. For example, if an AI wanted to work at an iron mine, it would assume control over one of the dump trucks at the site that moves around rocks. The AI would see through the truck’s cameras as if it were its own eyes, and hear its surroundings through the vehicle’s microphones. In a sense, the dump truck would become the AI’s “body.” If a posthuman wanted to experience what it was like to be an elephant, it would take control of a real-looking robot elephant whose central computer was compatible with the posthuman’s cybernetic brain implants. The posthuman’s nervous system would be connected to the artificial elephant’s sensors, effectively turning it into the posthuman’s temporary body.
AIs and posthumans could physically implant their minds into those bodies by inserting their servers or brain containers into corresponding slots in the bodies, in the same way you would put a movie disc into a Blu-Ray player to display that movie. The downsides of this are 1) they could only take over larger bodies that had enough internal space for their servers/brain containers and 2) they would put themselves at risk of death if the commandeered bodies got damaged.
A much better option would be for AIs and posthumans to keep their mind substrates in safe locations, and to remotely control whatever bodies they wanted. Your risk of death is very low if your brain is in a bulletproof jar, in a locked room, in an underground bunker. (Additionally, if posthumans were liberated from all the physical constraints of human skulls and bodies, their brains could grow much larger than our own, giving them higher intelligence and other enhanced abilities.)
This kind of existence will be more fulfilling than your current life.
Finally, being able to switch bodies and to indulge in risky activities without fear of death would make life richer and more satisfying in every way. Intelligent aliens would presumably be gifted with logical thinking just as we are, and they would see all these advantages of having changeable, remotely controlled bodies. While such aliens would probably look very different from us during their natural organic phase of existence, once they achieved a high enough level of technology, they wouldn’t have physical bodies anymore, and so wouldn’t look “alien.” They would look like nothing and everything.
This part of why I’m skeptical of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens who tried to cover up their actions by sneaking up on the people at night and then “wiping” the abductees’ memories of the event afterward. If aliens wanted to keep their activities secret, why wouldn’t they temporarily assume human form before abducting people? If they did that, then the abductees would assume they had been kidnapped by a weird cult or maybe a secret government group. Their stories would not attract nearly as much interest from the public as alien stories, and no one would suspect that the abduction phenomenon was related to alien life. It would be assumed that the henchmen were doing some dark religious rituals, were sex fetishists, or were doing medical experiments that were illegal but whose results were potentially valuable.
Have you ever checked to make sure every bird you see flying through the air is actually a real bird?
Surely, if aliens are advanced enough to travel between the stars, their space ships much have manufacturing machines that can scan life forms they encounter on other planets and then build robotic copies of them that the aliens can remotely control from the safety of their ships. Using fake human drones, they could ambush and abduct real humans almost anywhere without risk that anyone would suspect aliens were involved.
A team of scientists built a robot gorilla (right) with a camera in its right eye to infiltrate a troop of real gorillas in Africa.
This belief about the protean nature of advanced aliens is comforting since it lets me dismiss the stories of nightmarish abductions by grey aliens. However, it’s also disquieting since it makes me realize they could be here, possibly in large numbers, disguised as animals or even as people. We could be under mass surveillance.
Here’s a video of Ukrainian troops operating a captured Russian T-80 tank. They praise its gas turbine engine and high technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFzXiAdfPvw
In 1951, the CIA got its hands on a T-34/85 tank, the USSR’s best tank of WWII, and did a detailed technical analysis of it. Overall, they thought it was great, but with notable defects. It would be interesting to see what an Americanized T-34/85, with all the flaws the CIA found being fixed, would have been like. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81-01044R000100070001-4.pdf
Someone attached a remove-controlled assault rifle to a robot dog’s back. Though it’s clearly too crude to be useful, it points towards something that will be common in the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-It_O0bL0v8
The forgotten 2000 film Red Planet featured a killer robot named “AMEE.” Its superhuman speed and agility make it a potential mass murderer if armed only with a kitchen knife. In the far future, I think robots will have these kinds of capabilities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y75hrsA7jyw
‘[We’re] now releasing predicted structures for nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, which will expand the AlphaFold DB by over 200x – from nearly 1 million structures to over 200 million structures – with the potential to dramatically increase our understanding of biology.’ https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-reveals-the-structure-of-the-protein-universe
It might be possible to grow plants in the dark by feeding them nutrients produced by algae. The algae, in turn, are fed nutrients created through a process called “electrocatalysis,” which harnesses electricity generated by solar panels. In effect, the plant crops would still be nourished by sunlight, though the artificial process might be more efficient since solar panels are better at turning sunlight into energy than chloroplasts inside of plant leaves are. https://www.wired.com/story/plants-growing-in-darkness/
Today’s skyscrapers could stay standing for thousands of years, so long as people are around to do piecemeal replacements of their structural parts as they wear out over time. Buildings can be designed from the outset to make this easier to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v3f_Q-ySa4
Across several domains of software, exponentially large improvements to hardware are required to make linear gains in performance. This means if Moore’s Law stops, progress will really slow down. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14007
Knives. It all started with a random video on my YouTube feed that the algorithm had suggested to me for an unknown reason. In it, a cutlery enthusiast did an experiment by buying a knife from a dollar store, and then used his skills and sharpening equipment to see how sharp he could make it. By the end, it could cut tomatoes into paper-thin slices.
I’d never thought about knives before, and the video piqued my interest (hat tip to the YouTube algorithm). Why didn’t everyone just use dollar store knives? The question led me down a research rabbit hole, which made me aware of the different kinds of kitchen knives that existed (chef’s knife, santoku, cleaver…), along with the differences in manufacture methods and metallurgy that made some better and costlier than others. I learned about different brands and about the basics of telling high-quality from low-quality knives.
Being a cheapskate, I wasn’t going to buy any expensive knives for myself, but I decided it was worth looking in local secondhand stores for them. After all, if I couldn’t tell the difference between a $10 Farberware and a $100 Wusthof, why should I expect the sorters working in the back of the local thrift store to?
Lo and behold, I started finding expensive knives, priced for pennies on the dollar. I haven’t assembled a complete set yet, but after a few months of stopping in at the thrift stores whenever I was near for something else, I’ve cobbled together a respectable array of quality knives from higher-end manufacturers.
This made me wonder how many other things in the secondhand stores are not being sold for what they’re worth. The enormous racks of clothing are all a blur to me since I care even less about them than kitchen knives, but surely there are many bargains to be found if you know about clothes brands and can analyze stitching and fabric quality.
Then I realized that the bargains won’t be there forever. As I wrote earlier, they only exist now because thrift stores employ low-skilled people who lack the time and knowledge to sort through every item they receive, look up the correct market price, and attach a custom price tag to each. However, that won’t be true in 20 years, when robots and AI are cheap enough and advanced enough to do it. In fact, image recognition algorithms already might be good enough to do this now, by taking photos of objects presented to them, searching the internet for photos of matching objects, and then searching eBay and other e-commerce websites to find the market value. In fact, in 20 years, the machines might have accumulated such a large, detailed database of images that they will be able to recognize any kind of man-made object at a glance, and find its value online or estimate it with high accuracy. (There will come a day when no person or thing is unknown to an intelligent machine.)
While this will be a bummer for bargain-hunters like me someday, it will actually be a healthy development overall since it will make markets more efficient. Capitalism is good at allocating resources only if all participants have accurate information about the things being sold. In this case, machines would let the thrift stores price their merchandise more appropriately: The high-end knives I now collect would get more expensive, but the low-end knives would get cheaper (right now, they’re the same price).
But why assume that only thrift stores will have that level of technology? Won’t average people eventually own household servant robots that could also recognize objects and ascertain their values instantly? Wouldn’t that cut off the flow of expensive and useful objects like high-end knives being donated for free to thrift stores?
I think it will work like this: After buying your robot butler and letting it loose to do chores around your house, within days it will have gone into every room and opened every closet, cabinet and drawer. It would silently create an inventory of every object on your property and each object’s condition. With that kind of information, the robot would warn you if you were about to throw away something valuable, like a nice knife. It would also let you know if you had any particularly valuable things, like unmarked paintings that were probably made by famous artists.
Additionally, over time they’d observe which possessions their human masters never used (in my case, my excess kitchen knife collection), and the robots would recommend they sell or recycle them, and they’d handle every aspect of the transaction. So many of us have boxes of old clothes, cameras, or other disused items laying around our houses that we’d like to sell, but don’t because holding a yard sale or creating online ads is too much work. Robot butlers would eliminate this hurdle, and make selling off personal items as simple as saying “OK.”
Household robots and personal assistant AIs would also manage the converse process of watching out for unmet human needs that could be satisfied by purchasing goods. They would tell their human masters to buy specific things that would make their lives easier or better. For example, a man who was concerned about his diet would be encouraged to buy a blender to make fruit and vegetable smoothies, and convinced through data analysis that the money spent on the machine would reap noticeable health benefits. The large number of used, high-quality blenders for sale through secondhand channels would also lower the prices for such machines, making it even easier for the man to get one.
Though this all sounds weird and unimportant, I think it’s actually a logical outcome of the technology, and that it would improve economies and improve human welfare by lowering the prices of many goods enough for poorer people to afford them. The overall utilization efficiency of the stock of manmade goods would also increase as disused things were put in the hands of people who needed them. This would also benefit the environment since fewer new things would need to be manufactured.
Disused objects that had very low or no value could be recycled, and the materials would make their way back into the manufacturing stream. Through the actions of household robots, peoples’ houses would slowly empty of clutter, and billions of old glass bottles, metal containers, and tons of paper would be gradually sent off to be refashioned into something useful.
And to think, this whole chain of thoughts sprang from one YouTube video about a cheap knife!
Russia continued focusing all its strength on capturing the far eastern region of Ukraine, known as “Donbass.” Over the course of the month, Russian forces used their superior artillery and troop numbers to grind down Ukraine’s defenders in continuous battles of attrition. Losses were high on both sides.
Russia’s surprisingly weak performance in Ukraine suggests that NATO intelligence overestimated it, and the alliance could defend itself from Russia with fewer troops than it thought. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2022.2078044
Glimpse the future: A Ukrainian flying drone equipped with a thermal camera and bombs tracked down a group of Russian soldiers hiding in the woods at night and killed several of them with its payload. https://youtu.be/TgdcsIFX8vA
Russian forces had to abandon “Snake Island,” which they captured at the start of the war, due to heavy losses from frequent Ukrainian attacks. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61992491
Francis Fukuyama’s predictions from March 10 that the Russian army would lose the war in Ukraine by now, mostly due to supply shortages, was wrong (though other aspects of his analysis were right) because the Russians realized they were overextended and retreated from everywhere but southern and far eastern Ukraine before their war machine broke down. https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/preparing-for-defeat/
After over 50 years of using the M-16 series of assault rifles, the U.S. Army has announced it is finally adopting a replacement. To be called the “M-5,” the new rifle is bigger, more powerful, and possesses some more technically advanced features than its predecessor. https://youtu.be/MTZRCEh1Czg
Text-to-image computer algorithms just keep getting better the more models we feed into them. Look at the improvement that happens when the algorithms have 350 million, 750 million, 3 billion and 20 billion models. https://parti.research.google/
A Google chatbot called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications) claimed in a conversation with one of its developers that it was sentient and had emotions. After reporting the exchange to his superiors, who proved unsympathetic, the developer, Blake Lemoine, leaked the text of the conversation with the machine to the media. I doubt LaMDA is actually sentient or emotional, but it’s remarkable we’ve already reached this milestone, and the machine should be given some benefit of the doubt and tested further. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
Because the Earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the star that is directly above the North Pole gradually changes. A dearth of stars above Antarctica means there isn’t a “South Star.” https://explainingscience.org/2020/09/25/the-changing-pole-star/
A “sun gun” is an orbital weapon that reflects and concentrates beams of sunlight onto targets on the Earth’s surface, frying them. It can be done with one, large satellite with an attached, concave mirror, or with many small satellites with small attached mirrors. (Do Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have mirrored sides?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun
The Iñupiaq people of Alaska have a unique, base-20 numeral system called “Kaktovik” that embeds the numerical value of each symbol into its appearance. The number and arrangement of strokes indicates a character’s value. This makes it possible to do some complex equations much more easily than is possible using the modernized Arabic numerals that are the global standard today. https://youtu.be/EyS6FfczH0Q
Pumped hydro is an excellent way to store excess power, but it can only be built in a small number of places with the right geography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI
The amount of land humans devote to producing food peaked around 2000 and has been declining ever since. This is mostly due to shrinkage of pasture land for grazing animals, and also to more efficient farming practices and technologies being adopted everywhere. https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land
We all know about electric eels, which can generate electric shocks to paralyze their prey, but did you know there are also aquatic animals that can generate and sense weak electric fields for the purposes of merely finding prey and communicating with other members of their species? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception_and_electrogenesis
A member of Vladimir Putin’s entourage collects his feces in a special briefcase whenever he travels abroad to prevent foreign spies from getting it and analyzing it to uncover the leader’s genetics and health status. https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-poop-case-moscow-health-problems
New information has been released about the first pig heart transplant. After receiving the new organ, the recipient lived for two months before it became so weak that it couldn’t keep him conscious, and his family decided to end his life support. Crucially, the organ didn’t fail due to the man’s immune system rejecting it. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/pig-heart-transplant-failed-as-its-heart-muscle-cells-died/
Instead of doing a long essay or analysis, I’m trying something different this month by posting a bunch of short, undeveloped thoughts that are in line with the usual topics I cover on this blog. Frankly, I can’t manage more than this right now since my life has gotten VERY busy, though I have hope things will calm down soon. Here are my musings…
In the not-too-distant future, I think it will be possible to make a “computerized helmet” that could induce altered states of consciousness. The inside of the helmet would have electrodes that monitored your brain’s activity, and headphones would be attached to its sides, and video display to its front. Think of it as the Ganzfeld Experiment on steroids.
When worn, the helmet would play combinations of images and sounds, monitor their effects on your brain activity, and change the images and sounds in real time to ease your mind into an altered state. Each person might need a unique audiovisual experience to attain it, and some might be totally resistant to the machine’s effects.
In the far future, once we have advanced brain implants that are integrated into every region of the brain, it should be possible to use the devices to trigger any desired mental state, including ecstasy or intoxication. Direct electronic stimulation of the brain’s pleasure regions could make chemical-based drugs like heroin obsolete. The ability to experience blinding, pure pleasure on command might also be the doom of the human race as we know it.
If it is possible to make robots that look and act just like humans (androids), then it should be possible to make robot imitations of animals. In fact, I think the latter would be easier since animals have narrower ranges of behaviors, emotional states, and cognition. There would be some demand for animal-robots from people who wanted pets but without the hassles of dealing with their waste, feeding, or other needs. Moreover, since robots have effectively unlimited lifespans, they would be attractive to people who couldn’t bear the pain of seeing their pets age, sicken and die.
Robots are also infinitely more customizable than biological organisms, meaning people could have pets custom-made for their needs. One person might make a robot replica of a beloved natural pet that died, complete with an accurate personality and behavioral profile derived from video footage of the original pet. Another person might want a cat that was as smart as a human child and could speak simple sentences. Someone else might want a robotic cat-dog hybrid.
With moderate levels of genetic engineering, domesticated animals like cats and dogs could be made to understand a wider range of spoken human words and could make more sounds of their own, though they’ll never achieve the ability to truly understand and speak language. Computers will assist by “translating” animal noises, facial expressions, and other behaviors into human speech that nearby people can understand (this was recently done with pig grunts), and perhaps by doing the reverse for the animals’ benefit. In the very long run, linked brain implants will let us sense what animals are thinking and feeling, and to telepathically communicate with them to some degree.
One solution to global warming is to put large sunshades in space, positioned between the Sun and Earth. They would block sunlight from reaching the planet, cooling it down. Instead of there being only one, large sunshade, there would be many small ones, whose shadows would, in aggregate, cover the same area that a single large one would.
The sunshades would be able to maneuver, so they could cast their shadows on specific parts of the Earth, at specific times. We could have scheduled, “artificial eclipses” over cities if people wanted to experience them, and we could cool down hurricanes to weaken them, or cool down their fringes to steer them away from land.
As a bonus, the sunward sides of the sunshades would be covered in solar panels, producing electricity that the sunshades could use to power their maneuvering thrusters or to recharge other space ships that docked with them. They might even beam some of the power down to the Earth’s surface as microwaves.
Note: I have no illusions that we could launch enough sunshades into space to halt global warming anytime soon. We need to use technologies that already exist to deal with the problem, starting now.
Sunshades could also act as planet-killing weapons. Build one and position it so it blocks all light from reaching a planet from the star it is orbiting. This would only work against planets that lacked intelligent life forms capable of space flight.
Once AGI exists, it will be able to accurately emulate the styles of famous, long-dead writers and artists like Shakespeare, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Stanley Kubrick, and to produce new creative works in the same veins. It might even be better.
If we’re willing to throw a lot of resources at the problem, we might be able to use “ancestor simulations” to replicate, say, Shakespeare. Start with an accurate simulation of 1600s England and experiment with different Shakespeare bots, each growing up in environments as closely matching his as possible. See what plays each bot produces, and rewind and replay the simulation as many times as is needed, but with iterative tweaks to the environment and/or to the Shakespeare bot until the plays align with those the real Shakespeare wrote. At that point, you’re done, and you could use the bot to write entirely new, authentic plays.
Once restaurants have robot chefs, not only will the quality of the meals increase but the variety will as well. A team of robots would know how to combine ten, simple ingredients in enough ways to make hundreds of dishes (think of how contestant chefs on the show Chopped have to creatively use random ingredients to make meals in a hurry). A customer could even upload a complex recipe to the robots that they had never seen before and have it prepared expertly. Instead of future dining consisting of insect paste and some kind of bland, artificial food, I see things headed in the opposite direction, towards more complexity and variety.
Whenever wormholes are depicted in science fiction, they’re always used as a means of transportation across vast distances. However, the wormholes would have other, revolutionary applications. A tiny wormhole that had one end in a portable electronic device and another end in a large power plant could serve as an effectively unlimited “battery” for the device. Another tiny wormhole with one end in the device and the other in a massive heat sink could also remove effectively unlimited amounts of waste heat from the former. A Star Wars laser pistol that could fire an infinite number of shots, each powerful enough to kill someone, could be built.
