Career chemist sees no reason why chemical synthesis can’t be automated with current levels of technology. This may or may not
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/30/automated-chemistry-a-vision
Alternate headline: “Humans can’t beat a simple computer program at predicting crimes.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/equivant-compas-algorithm/550646/
Microsoft’s CEO says that quantum computing will be an indispensable component of AI.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42797846
The “Nuro” is a Smart Car-sized, remote-piloted delivery vehicle. I think something like this will prove cheaper and more practical than flying drones for autonomous deliveries of cargo.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16936548/nuro-self-driving-delivery-last-mile-google
This is one of those future concepts that I think will 50% completely fail and 50% succeed–albeit taking a different form than the author imagines.
https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1
1997 NYT article: When a computer masters the game of Go, “it will be a sign that artificial intelligence is truly beginning to become as good as the real thing,” but don’t worry since “It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer.” [It happened in 2016.]
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/29/science/to-test-a-powerful-computer-play-an-ancient-game.html?pagewanted=all
In the 20 years since Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the Elo scores of the best human chess players have barely improved, whereas machines have gotten vastly better: today’s best player, Magnus Carlsen, has a score of 2834, and the best computer chess programs are in the 3400s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.html
‘Once developed, [killer robots] will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.’
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/killer-robots-weapons.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&referer
Just five years after Google’s neural network taught itself to recognize cat faces, the company thinks machines are ready to recognize 5,000 species of plants and animals. How many species could you correctly identify from photos?
https://qz.com/954530/five-years-ago-ai-was-struggling-to-identify-cats-now-its-trying-to-tackle-5000-species/
An article about how AIs will replace human workers slowly, and for the foreseeable future, will not destroy more human jobs than they create.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-augments-human-skills/
One of the clearer descriptions of what a blockchain is.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/blockchain-technology-concepts-explained.html
A fascinating description of how a blockchain-based replacement for Uber might work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html
Did someone say…”Predictions”?
https://qz.com/1171977/ten-2018-predictions-from-the-founder-of-the-blockchain-research-institute/
On the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, it’s worth looking back at the weapons of the Vietnam War, and considering the handful of them that are still not obsolete (most notably, the AK-47 rifle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_the_Vietnam_War
Forty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. is selling warships to its former enemy.
http://www.janes.com/article/76746/vietnam-s-ex-us-coast-guard-cutter-arrives-home
Iraq plans to slap on some upgrades to keep their junker T-55 and Type 69 tanks running. The Type 69 is a Chinese copy of the Soviet T-62, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-55, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-54. If countries like Iraq keep cheapskating their militaries, will we someday have robot crews driving around 100-year-old tanks?
http://warisboring.com/iraq-learned-tank-lessons-in-the-war-with-islamic-state/
This clunker was commissioned in 1970 and will probably stay in service until 2039.
https://www.stripes.com/news/navy-s-oldest-deployable-warship-comes-out-of-yokosuka-dry-dock-after-19-months-1.508005
The first Cash for Clunkers program
http://warisboring.com/49425-2/
Swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones will probably dominate future warfare. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” concept could make a comeback.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17698/chinas-is-hard-at-work-developing-swarms-of-small-drones-on-multiple-levels
BAE is building microwave weapons that can fry the electronics of enemy planes, ships, and drones at close range. It might be an effective defense against swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17796/bae-systems-wants-its-new-microwave-close-in-weapon-system-concept-on-us-navy-ships
India’s aircraft carriers are vanity projects that will have little use in any all-out war with the most likely enemy, Pakistan.
http://warisboring.com/indias-third-aircraft-carrier-is-most-likely-a-waste-of-money/
Nuclear depth charges were a thing: a 30 kiloton underwater detonation (this is a below-average yield tactical nuke) sank dummy subs out to a radius of 1 mile.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-to-nuke-a-submarine-2f0bd50f39e
“The rule of thumb is that vertical takeoff and landing means a 50% reduction in payload.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/us-navy-baby-carrier-deploys-to-pacific-intl/index.html
In spite of the recent saber-rattling and improvements to North Korea’s nuclear missiles, a second Korean War is highly unlikely.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/11/should-you-worry-about-a-u-s-war-with-north-korea-not-really/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/03/why-nuclear-war-with-north-korea-is-less-likely-than-you-think/
Bill Gates and Steven Pinker agree that the state of humankind is continuing to improve, but only seems to be getting worse thanks to information technology and to an increasing williness of long-marginalized people to speak out, making us hyper-aware of what problems remain.
https://Fmobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/business/mind-meld-bill-gates-steven-pinker.html
Another step towards fleets of cheap, autonomous ships for oceanic and climate monitoring. In time, they would have even more uses.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/141674.html
Someone has been photoshopping faces of female celebrities onto nude performers in porn videos. This is only the beginning: It’s only a matter of time before computers can easily make highly accurate, 3-D models of people just by looking at photos and video footage of them. As an intermediate step, the data could be used to find porn stars whose body types best matched each celebrity’s and to digitally graft the celebrity’s face onto each nude doppelganger, but ultimately, it will be possible to make fully lifelike, CGI porn movies starring any person.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley
“Average” is beautiful: “Facial averageness” is considered beautiful.
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/langloislab/face-perception/the-beauty-of-averageness/
Chinese geneticists have cloned monkeys, but the failure rate was extremely high: Out of 79 clone embryos they created and implanted into female monkeys, only two were born healthy. All the rest either spontaneously aborted or died shortly after being born. The technique or a slight modification of it could probably be used to clone humans.
http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30057-6
In the early 1800s, Iceland got its first non-white immigrant: a half black, half white man named “Hans Jonathan.” He had two kids with a white woman, and today, his DNA is found in 788 Icelanders. By sequencing the genomes of 182 of these descendants and cross-referencing them, geneticists were able to reconstruct 19% of Hans’ genome. The task was made easy by the fact that African DNA easily stood out, and by Iceland’s highly detailed genealogical records, but in principle, the same method could be used to reconstruct any ancestor’s DNA. With advanced enough technology, we could make “clones” of long-dead people.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0031-6
Genealogy is kind of meaningless since ultimately, we all share the same ancestors and are from the same place. Stopping your research at one point in the past is an arbitrary choice, and having an ancestor that was famous or royal doesn’t make you special.
http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-everybody-else
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-genealogy-is-bunk.html
Identical twins also share the same epigenetics.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/not-just-genes-identical-twins-exhibit-supersimilarity
Using frozen human embryos for IVF is just as likely to succeed as using fresh embryos.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1705334
Baseline, subjective happiness level is also highly heritable, which raises the prospect of genetically engineering humans to be happier.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6
https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/classic-study-on-happiness-and-the-lottery.html
More on that: Brain damage and surgical removals of parts of the brain can improve people’s personalities. I wonder if it will be common for people in the future to get brain surgeries that make them happier or nicer.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180108-when-personality-changes-from-bad-to-good
Scientists have developed tiny needles that can inject drugs into the brain. Targeted injection sites can be as small as 1 sq mm.
http://news.mit.edu/2018/ultrathin-needle-can-deliver-drugs-directly-brain-0124
The amino acids and three-unit codons that form the basis of all genetics might be optimally evolved in form and function. Whenever we find organic alien life, its DNA will look and work almost identically to our own. There is, however, a small chance that a clean-sheet genome consisting of more types of amino acids and longer codons might be superior, but there’s no plausible way natural selection could bring it about (we have settled into a local optimum when the global optimum still lurks far off). Ultimately, optimizing biological life forms from the molecular level up is probably a task that only intelligent machines will be able to do in the distant future. All multicellular life forms are so finely-tuned to use the existing genetic alphabet that testing the hypothesis by changing things at the margins probably impossible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/expanding-the-genetic-alphabet/549620/
Is human wealth inequality just a manifestation of broad resource- and genetic-dominance inequality observed in any group of organisms?
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/114/50/13154.full.pdf
Reality check on a “revolutionary new cancer test” that the media massively overhyped. More health information isn’t always better thanks to the risk of false positives.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/22/a-hard-look-at-liquid-biopsies
Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime provide extraordinarily cheap entertainment. Never in human history has it been easier for people to occupy themselves.
http://efficiencyiseverything.com/entertainment-per-dollar/
More on that:
http://empathyeducates.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Costs-For-Americans.png
Fallout 3 is a very highly rated game, takes 23-130 hours to complete, and can be bought for only $5. That averages out to…basically free.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=3340
http://www.gamelengths.com/games/playtimes/Fallout+3/
Stephen Spielberg thinks “Ready Player One” is an accurate representation of the future…everyone is unemployed and spends their lives playing virtual reality games.
https://youtu.be/aWz6d1Z6bnU
Rollable TV screens will become mainstream once rigid screens get too big to fit through standard-sized entry doors. I think rollable, 8K resolution TVs that cover entire walls should become common in the 2030s.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/08/technology/lg-rollable-display-ces-2018/index.html
Google Glass may have failed, but I’ve always thought augmented reality (AR) glasses were a worthy tech concept that would return in an improved form. The “Vuzix Blade,” which reviewers have described as being an improved version of Google Glass that also makes use of the Alexa voice-activated AI assistant, could herald that return.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16869174/vuzix-blade-ar-glasses-augmented-reality-amazon-alexa-ai-ces-2018
I really like the prediction about the future “on-demand economy.” Someone puts out a gig announcement, and AIs instantly figure out which human can do the gig the best, and they notify the person. If robots are constantly telling you to do one gig after another, it will kind of add up to something like a job.
https://msblob.blob.core.windows.net/ncmedia/2018/01/The-Future-Computed.pdf
It’s been one month since the NYT front page article exposing the existence of a secret U.S. government program to study UFOs appeared, and the government has still made NO ATTEMPT to deny its claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html
Guillermo del Toro saw a UFO: ‘The UFO, says del Toro, “Went from 1,000 meters away [to much closer] in less than a second — and it was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights [blinking]. It’s so sad: I wish I could reveal they’re not what you think they are. They are what you think they are. And the fear we felt was so primal. I have never been that scared in my life.’
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/guillermo-del-toro-seeing-a-ufo-hearing-ghosts-shaping-water-1068754
A critic breaks down all of the reasons why the Star Wars First Order’s space ships make no design sense. I agree that advanced space ships won’t really have “top” and “bottom” parts, but they could still be asymmetrical.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/news/a28088/star-wars-the-last-jedi-dreadnought-star-destroyer/
The $30 million XPrize award for the first company that landed a private rover on the Moon will go unclaimed.
https://lunar.xprize.org/news/blog/important-update-google-lunar-xprize
It’s possible the recent SpaceX rocket launch was actually successful, but the military satellite they put in orbit is so secret that they had to claim it crashed and the mission failed.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17612/the-secret-zuma-spacecraft-could-be-alive-and-well-doing-exactly-what-it-was-intended-to
Diesel car engines have been unfairly villified by the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42666596
If New York’s government can sue oil companies for making global warming worse, than can someone else sue New York’s government for shutting down its nuclear power plants, which also made global warming worse?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/new-york-suing-oil-companies-but-how-about-suing-new-york-for-shutting-nuclear-reactors.html
An argument against “geoengineering” turned on its head: Whale feces contains high levels of iron, iron dumped in seawater causes plankton blooms, and plankton blooms sequester CO2. Whale populations are about 70% lower now thanks to human predation than they were in pre-Industrial times. If we dumped iron powder in the oceans, we’d be restoring the natural carbon sequestration mechanism of the ocean rather than doing something unnatural.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/iron-fertilization-of-the-ocean-is-as-natural-as-whale-poop-and-it-can-save-the-planet.html
Transhumanists are overwhelmingly likely to be the oldest children in their families.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-psychologists-birth-order-effects-exist-and-are-very-strong/