Here’s an awesome, long-lost Joe Rogan interview with sci-fi writer Daniel H. Wilson. Unlike many other guests on the show, Wilson isn’t a kook, and I see he shares my view that robot butlers will be made smaller, weaker, and slower than humans to prevent accidental injuries to us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5fH-o-258Y
Elon Musk’s OpenAI company and Microsoft are partnering to build an AGI. It’s funny how this news got no reaction.
https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/
Ten years ago, brain scientist Henry Markram said: “It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8164060.stm
A machine-learning program that has a limited natural language understanding ability can scan through chemistry papers and predict unknown properties of molecules. This has the potential to speed up discoveries in the field by directing human research chemists to focus on the most promising things.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/07/15/machine-mining-the-literature
Once again, an AI has defeated some of the world’s best human players at poker. This time, in six-player games instead of just one-on-one games.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/science.aay2400
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qtq6KDvj86DXqfp6/let-s-read-superhuman-ai-for-multiplayer-poker
Google’s DeepMind AI is now anonymously playing against human Starcraft 2 opponents.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48950103
AIs will learn your taste preferences so well that they’ll be able to create individualized meal recipes for you. With so much focus on how robots will end the era of mass-produced clothing and let anyone afford tailored outfits, we’ve overlooked the fact that the customization will spread to all kinds of other goods and services.
https://www.france24.com/en/20190721-kitchen-disruption-better-food-through-artificial-intelligence
Deep fake technology is now being used to replace characters in movies. Some recently subbed Sylvester Stallone into Terminator 2‘s lead role, and the footage looks great. I predict someday it will be common for TV shows and movies to have multiple “variations” appealing to different segments of their audiences, with the plots diverging at key points and the characters played by different actors. This will get easier to do once lifelike CGI actors exist and once AIs can at least help to write scripts. The endpoint will be entertainment content (including VR worlds) custom-tailored to individual people.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ctrl-shift-face-deepfake-changing-hollywood-history/
Facebook used AI to scan high-res satellite photos of Thailand and to add more than 300,000 miles of roads to official maps of the country. Instead of satellites, why don’t we use fleets of small, autonomous drone planes with belly cameras?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49091093
“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-solves-computer-science-conjecture-in-two-pages-20190725/
The “smart home” or “wired home” concept is older than most people realize. Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to launch it in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Personal_Objects_Technology
In spite of the end of Moore’s Law, some in the semiconductor industry still believe that integrated circuit features could shrink to 1.5 nm by 2030.
https://semiengineering.com/transistor-options-beyond-3nm/
All is not well between America’s strategic opponents.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/venezuela-borrowed-10-billion-russia-pay-jet-fighters-and-tanks-it-cant-pay-it-back-69467
About 1/3 of Americans would support using nuclear weapons for a disarming first strike against North Korea, even if it meant killing over 1 million Koreans.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1629576#
In the 1960s and 70s, an experiment was conducted at Brookhaven Lab to study the effects of radiation on the natural environment.
‘It was like walking up a mountain. The higher up you climb, the smaller and fewer the trees. Eventually, the trees drop out completely and you reach a zone of low shrubs, then a tundra zone of smaller ground plants and, finally, if the mountain is high enough, no life at all.’
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-10-op-8635-story.html
In 1951, Argentina’s kooky dictator Juan Peron announced that his scientists had invented a fusion reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project
100 years ago almost exactly, sailors aboard the captured German Fleet interned in British waters simultaneously sunk their own ships. Out of 74 ships, 52 sank that day. However, since it happened in shallow waters, all but seven of them were eventually re-floated and re-used for scrap metal.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-scuttling-of-the-german-fleet-1919
“Operation Pedestal” sounds like one of the craziest missions of WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pedestal
Russia’s aircraft carrier is a net resource drain that they’d be better off decommissioning, but national pride prevents that.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/july/russias-only-aircraft-carrier-2nd-lease-life-or-slow-death
The U.S. kicked Turkey out of the F-35 fighter club because the latter bought an advanced Russian anti-aircraft missile system. I can remember the ancient days when Turkey was doing everything it could to schmooze the E.U. into giving it membership.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/turkey-kicked-out-of-f-35-program-because-its-purchasing-s-400-but-greece-and-other-nato-countries-already-have-russian-surface-to-air-missile-systems-that-are-part-of-alliances-shared-mis/
“Quantum sensors” could make stealth aircraft obsolete, and could make it easier to detect submarines.
https://www.australiandefence.com.au/defence/cyber-space/quantum-sensors-to-make-australia-safer
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47294704
3D printed gunpowder grains would burn faster and more thoroughly than standard grains, making bullets more powerful without making them longer or heavier.
https://techlinkcenter.org/technologies/optimized-solid-propellant-manufacturing-through-3d-printing/
https://www.janes.com/article/89808/eda-research-group-to-explore-new-3d-printed-weapons-propellants
DARPA’s self-steering .50 cal bullets are better than ever. I’ve predicted before that “smart bullets” and “smart guns” will become common this century.
https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2019/07/watch-darpas-smart-exacto-bullets-change-path-mid-flight/
The plastic parts of guns can be made transparent, like glass. Wouldn’t this be the best way to camouflage them since other people looking at you would see through (most of) your gun as if it weren’t there, and instead see whatever was on the other side of it (e.g. – your camouflaged uniform, a tree trunk, a bush).
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/02/13/the-transparent-heckler-koch-g36/
https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2012/08/flat-lens-offers-perfect-image
Arthur C. Clarke’s book July 20th 2019 predicted that we’d have manned Moon colonies by now, but that computing devices would be considerably more primitive than they actually are.
https://www.sffworld.com/2019/07/arthur-c-clarkes-july-20th-2019/
China has officially rejoined the “Zero Space Stations in Orbit” club.
https://www.universetoday.com/142948/chinas-tiangong-2-was-destroyed-last-week-burning-up-in-the-atmosphere-over-the-south-pacific-ocean/
Even if we used genetic engineering to purge all disorders from the human genome, we would have to genetically screen each new generation of humans for new disorders caused by random genetic mutations.
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/apert-syndrome
The first baby has been born in the U.S. from a dead donor’s transplanted womb. I’m obviously a fan of assisted reproduction technologies, but I don’t see a justification for this.
https://apnews.com/c328217fa0ba43afa258067701ba3aee
Simple lab techniques could be used to separate healthy from unhealthy human sperm before use in IVF. They could also allow for sex selection of the offspring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sperm_sorting&oldid=883645243
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/03/11/sexed-semen-and-embryo-selection-in-human-reproduction-and-fertility-treatment/
40-60% of all fertilized human eggs don’t survive long enough to be born. Most are miscarried while still microscopic in size, and the woman has no clue she ever had a zygote inside her.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443340/
And for the first 99.9% of the human race’s existence, the child mortality rate was about 60%, meaning that, if you were lucky enough to survive the womb and to be born, there were better-than-even odds that you would die before age 16.
https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2013/09/infant-mortality-then-and-now.html
One of Elon Musk’s new projects is to create brain implants that will connect human minds with computers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2546&v=TJI9UFUUCcg
Human voices sound terrifying to some animals.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/humans-predators-mountain-lions-landscape-of-fear/594187/
Prince Charles continues his losing streak of Global Warming Doomsday predictions.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2019/07/16/prince-charles-at-it-again-issues-yet-another-climate-tipping-point-deadline-after-previous-100-month-deadline-expires/
‘Within one generation’s lifetime we will probably reach element 124,’ speculates Rykaczewski. Eric Scerri, a chemistry historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, agrees: ‘Fifteen years ago it was inconceivable that anyone would ever get as far as we got.’
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/beyond-element-118-the-next-row-of-the-periodic-table/9400.article
Instantaneous communication and constant access to Breaking News is doing more harm than good. “Slow news” is better because the people releasing it have time to confirm that it is real and to carefully word it. Also, people should ask themselves how they’d be worse off if there were, say, a 12-hour time delay in having access to news reports on things that didn’t immediately impact their lives.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/twitter-pause-button/592762/
The Soviet Concorde jet plane crashed in front of thousands of people at an airshow in 1973, just four years after it was built.
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/tupolev-tu-144-concordski/index.html
The U.S. Secret Service has a forensic lab with samples of 85,000 different types of inks, which they use to figure out where threatening letters and counterfeit money came from.
https://apnews.com/b541d7175ef64358a1e63a5cc3e5aeba
It’s been 20 years since Segways were invented, so the patent has expired and anyone can make and sell them. The Segway’s concept (small, motorized personal transport) was right, but the form factor was wrong, and the company’s sales strategy was bad. Rentable e-scooters succeeded instead, and do all the things Segways did.
https://www.kimt.com/content/national/499023511.html
Using data from user-submitted photos, scientists were able to make a 3D model of a 3,000 year old statue that ISIS destroyed a few years ago, and to make a copy of it using a 3D printer. As time passes, it will get easier and easier to make scans of objects and places, and to recreate them in the physical world or in virtual reality. The past will never die.
https://apnews.com/dbca5e23519f44c4a881c9cd69f41cd6
Would the world be better off with fewer humans and more machines? Are we wrong to worry about population decline and job automation?
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/automation-favors-shrinking-populations-by-adair-turner-2019-07