Sorry about my long absence, but I promise more blog entries are coming. In the meantime…
- High-tech solutions to global poverty still aren’t substitutes for basic infrastructure, good government, property rights, and cultures of trust. Here’s one recent article about it and two older ones:
https://qz.com/1090693/zipline-drones-in-africa-like-rwanda-and-tanzania-have-an-opportunity-cost/
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-08-30/debunking-microenergy
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/08/bot-we-trust - GE is working on robots the sizes of small animals and insects that can crawl around inside jet turbines for inspections, and maybe for repairs as well in the future. Are we headed for a future where things never break down?
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21729737-robotic-mechanics-can-go-anywhere-tiny-robots-will-inspect-and-fix-jet-engines - ‘Professor Simon Blackmore, head of engineering, argues that an even bigger benefit could be in providing fleets of small, light robots, perhaps aided by drones, to replace vast and heavy tractors that plough the land mainly to undo the damage done by soil compaction caused by . . . vast and heavy tractors. Robot tractors could be smaller mainly because they don’t have to justify the wages of a driver, and they could work all night, and in co-ordinated platoons.’
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/robot-farm-machinery/ - If machines take all of our jobs and do them better and faster than we can, then it could portend a world where billions of unemployed humans spend their days in hyperrealistic virtual reality games engineered by machines.
https://youtu.be/jOOB9Q1Nj8Y
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/03/economist-explains-24 - Many of the action scenes in the superhero movie Logan were done using incredibly lifelike CGI simulacra of the actors. Will actors someday make money by licensing the use of their digital likenesses in movies instead of physically starring in them?
https://youtu.be/TxWu5Brx_As - I definitely agree with this. I think Elon Musk’s statements about AI and other things are part of a deliberate strategy to keep the public’s attention focused on him. As a businessman dependent upon the faith of his investors to keep his enterprises afloat, he needs to constantly stay in the spotlight and to project an image of being smarter than everyone else to keep the dollars flowing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/google-s-ai-boss-blasts-musk-s-scare-tactics-on-machine-takeover - Per my previous blog entry, being able to quickly replace 100,000 cars destroyed by a hurricane is a respectable feat, but it would be better to find a way to keep the 100,000 cars from being destroyed at all.
http://www.npr.org/2017/09/25/553475557/rental-firms-disaster-readiness-may-help-usher-the-age-of-self-driving-cars - Computers make weird mistakes in some object recognition tasks, but so do humans.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/human-vs-deep-neural-network-performance-in-object-recognition - ‘Distributed ledgers are useful technology, just like banks. As they become a larger part of finance, the temptation to abuse them will be just as great. History instructs that no governance is perfect, and humans are reliably awful.’
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/09/not-so-novel - Our cells are full of organic nanomachines which support our most basic life functions, and since Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture on the subject, it has been recognized that this was proof of concept that fully synthetic nanomachines were also feasible. Yet only recently have scientists managed to build crude but functional nanomachines in labs.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/25/building-our-own-molecular-machines - Don’t get your hopes up about Amazon flying drone package delivery: there are legal liability issues with packages accidentally dropping on people’s heads, and major noise issues. Flying cars would be handicapped by the same problems. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of room for improving the efficiency of ground transit with technology.
https://qz.com/1085214/google-moonshot-lab-cofounder-sebastian-thrun-talks-flying-cars-automated-teaching-and-an-ai-arms-race-with-china/ - A useful quote to remember when contemplating flying cars: ‘Flying machines are inherently more complicated to operate than ground vehicles, and the consequences of error or malfunction are much greater—because of gravity.’
https://warisboring.com/u-s-marines-portable-helicopters-were-too-crazy-to-survive/ - And in typical form, McKinsey beats this issue to death: ‘Drones require good weather and are now limited to loads of 7.5 kilograms or less and a route of 15 to 20 kilometers. Infrastructure that will support commercial delivery is lacking, and concerns about theft, hacking, crashes, and privacy worry consumers. Finally, drones need a minimum of about two square meters to land, more than many urban households can offer.’
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability-and-resource-productivity/our-insights/urban-commercial-transport-and-the-future-of-mobility - Would aliens 10,000 more advanced than humans have electric motors that are any better than ours? Would they have better mousetraps as well?
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21728888-better-motors-go-better-batteries-electric-motors-improve-more-things - Seeing as how so many people vote on the basis of falsehoods, prejudice, or party affiliation and commonly vote against their own self-interests without realizing it, might democracy benefit if machines tried to reason with voters one-on-one before elections?
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40860937 - Disreputable peer-reviewed scientific journals are an even bigger problem than thought. Some of the junk papers are written by NIH-funded scientists and by scientists working at prestigious universities like Harvard.
http://www.nature.com/news/stop-this-waste-of-people-animals-and-money-1.22554 - Anytime you’re down on the U.S. Big Pharma industry, consider the massive fraud that exists within China’s equivalent. (Russia is just as bad.)
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-fakes-09272016141438.html - Your month of birth determines a surprising amount about your academic performance, all the way to college.
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/oldest-kids-class-do-better-even-university-u-t-study - Birth month also affects your odds of becoming an athlete, thanks to the same cutoff date effect.
http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/18891749 - An important counterpoint to the growing anti-Vaxx movement is this: Teen vaccination rates for HPV are now over 50% and rising. The vaccine actually prevents several types of cancer.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/health/hpv-vaccine-teenagers.html - Chinese scientists have edited the genomes of human embryos to fix single-point DNA mutations (yes, this appeared in a peer-reviewed journal).
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41386849 - One more experiment finished showing that humans could bear the psychological stresses of a years-long Mars mission. Now about that space radiation problem…
https://www.space.com/38180-hi-seas-8-month-mars-simulation-ends.html - Two years ago, Russia and Turkey were at each other’s throats over the latter’s shootdown of the former’s attack plane, and there was talk of all NATO being dragged into war over it. Recently, Turkey turned it back on the the alliance to buy an advanced antiaircraft system from Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/europe/turkey-russia-missile-deal.html - The U.S. Army’s first upgraded Stryker rolled off the assembly line.
http://www.janes.com/article/74356/first-us-army-upgraded-stryker-dvh-rolls-through-production