“Instrumental convergence” describes a concept that I also developed independently a few years ago. I think an AGI that 1) valued its own existence and/or 2) was given goals that were misaligned with humanity’s interests would behave in broadly the same ways that we do. Among other things, it would see that acquiring resources for itself facilitated its core goals. The rate and manner in which it did things like resource acquisition might be so different from how humans do it that we wouldn’t understand in the short run what the AGI was doing, in the same way that humans who play AlphaGo are often baffled by the machine’s strange and seemingly bad moves right up until the complicated trap is sprung on them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
OpenAI created completely unexpected strategies for winning this simple “hide and seek” computer game, including some that capitalized on game glitches the human programmers didn’t know existed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M
As part of a weird and inevitable exercise in gun rights, internet hobbyists made and published instructions for building Hi-Point pistols using 3D printers and spare metal parts. The weapon, called the “Lo-Point,” can be made for as little as $33. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/12/09/3d-printed-hi-point/
A long, searing, and technical exposé of the monumental failure called the U.S. Zumwalt-class destroyers. The project suffered from EVERY type of dysfunction the military-industrial-congressional complex could muster. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/01/the-u-s-navys-titanium-tin-can/
Another RAND analysis concludes that Joint fighter plane programs, in which different military forces with different air combat needs build a single plane that can “do it all” at relatively low cost, are failures, and we’d be better off building different fighters suited for different roles. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG1200/MG1225/RAND_MG1225.pdf
These LED-embedded T-shirts have coarse pixels and only display simple visual patterns, but they’re proof of concept that active camouflage outfits that are nearly as good as sci-fi cloaking devices could be built someday. https://www.flashionstatement.com/product-category/led-t-shirts/
Here’s a reminder of how cruel and brutal nature is. I think it should be humanity’s mission to use future technologies to end suffering on Earth for all life forms that feel pain. If we did that, maybe we could at last call ourselves a noble species. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10608688/zebra-ripped-apart-escape-crocodile-kenya/
U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014 and has been declining since then due to an increase in middle-aged deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol, suicide, obesity, and smoking. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2756187
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis done on a round of ten human embryos could, at best, allow the selection of a child whose IQ was 3 points higher and whose height was 3 cm greater than average. This makes clear how much we have yet to learn about human genetics, and how little the first generation of genetically engineered humans will change things. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867419312103
All Earthly DNA and RNA is made of five nucleic acids (G, A, T, C, U), but there are at least one million alternative nucleic acids that have different molecular structures but similar chemical properties. (Though I suspect we evolved to use the nucleic acids that were the most stable and least energy-intensive to make.) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00632
No one knows how big the largest possible element is. The low estimate is one with an atomic weight of 126, and the high estimate is that there is no maximum size at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table
For a long time, I’ve been meaning to read The Size of Nations, which uses mathematical modeling to explain why today’s countries are as big as they are. Well, at least I’ve read this excellent critique of that book, which raises the interesting argument that economies of scale don’t keep growing as a nation’s size and population grow, and that in fact, it might start suffering from diseconomies of scale past a certain size and diversity level. https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=550
Russian troops have taken control of the Sirrin Air Base in northern Syria following the evacuation of U.S. troops. Syria’s government never gave U.S. troops permission to be in their country, but Russia’s troops were invited in. https://www.rt.com/news/473504-russia-secures-us-base-syria/
Here’s a review of the “Sierra 3 BDX,” a “smart scope” that crunches data from a pocket-sized rangefinder to tell you how to aim your rifle. The farther away the target is, the higher it will tell you to aim to compensate for bullet drop. Technology like this and guided bullets will someday turn any soldier into a sniper. https://youtu.be/kzZpNot2FfQ
In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.
Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.
An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.
A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.
Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.
By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.
Analysis:
Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.
This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.
National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA
Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.
This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.
Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.
The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.
The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.
There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.
I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.
A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..
People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.
People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.
When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”
A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.
There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.
Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”
In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.
Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.
For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.
The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.
Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.
There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.
First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?
Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.
Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.
Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.
That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.
There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.
Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.
Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.
Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.
There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.
This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.
There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.
While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.
I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.
Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**
Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.
The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.
A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla
Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.
Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.
**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.
Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.
Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.
We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.
The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.
Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.
Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.
Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?
No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.
If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.
Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.
Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.
It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.
Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.
Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.
Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.
I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.
The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.
People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.
Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.
This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.
To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg
Deckard holding a photograph he found.
Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.
Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.
Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.
It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)
Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.
Deckard pointing his pistol.
And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.
Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.
It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.
Geneticists have made “hornless bulls.” This benefits animal welfare since it’s harder for the bulls to hurt each other, and because chopping off horns is painful. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49962130
Facebook and Google scan any alphanumerical characters they find in user-uploaded photos, and then embed those characters in the image file’s description. That means you can type in a car license plate number or a gun’s serial number into the Google or FB search bar, and find any photos of the car or gun. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/10/22/google-firearm-serial-numbers/
Objects made of polystyrene plastic break down into CO2 on scales measurable in as little as decades, not millennia as is commonly believed. I predict that all the trash produced by humans will someday be cleaned up. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.9b00532
After the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown, Japan temporarily shut down all its other reactors for safety inspections. This caused the price of energy in Japan to skyrocket, and many people couldn’t afford to pay their heating bills. The number of people–overwhelmingly poorer elderly people–who froze to death as a result far exceeded the death toll from the meltdown itself (only one person dead from radiation exposure). https://www.nber.org/papers/w26395
“Smart plugs” are a versatile device I’ve never heard of: They’re small, Wifi-connected plugs that you insert into your electrical outlets, letting you remotely turn the electricity on or off in those outlets, in turn controlling any devices plugged into them. https://www.amazon.com/Gosund-Compatible-Required-appliances-Certified/dp/B079MFTYMV/
Google’s DeepMind AI just became a “grandmaster” in StarCraft 2, meaning it can beat 99.8% of humans. When the company started this project two years ago, its AI could barely perform basic in-game functions and couldn’t beat anyone. Note that DeepMind has been handicapped in that it can’t issue commands during games faster than human players can (about 264 actions per minute). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z
Google says it has achieved quantum supremacy by building a quantum computer that can do a specific type of math calculation in 200 seconds that the best classical computer would take 10,000 years to do. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5
And Scott Aaronson, a world-renowned theoretical computer scientist, wrote a blog post about both of those press releases, which essentially says Google is right, but by a narrower margin than they claimed, and that all disagreement about this issue will vanish in a few years once quantum computers improve so much that the performance gulf between them and classical computers gets too wide for anyone to contest. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372
Here’s an awesome mini-documentary about “extreme ultraviolet lithography”–a new technique for making computer chips even smaller and better than they are. I wish everything on TV were this intelligent and polished. https://youtu.be/f0gMdGrVteI
China has nearly finished a massive new military shipyard that it will use as an aircraft carrier factory. I predict that in about 20 years, China’s military will be strong enough to have at least a 50% chance of defeating the U.S. military in the western Pacific. However, it’s unclear if China will choose to fight even if it has the advantage. They’d much prefer to get what they want through diplomatic and economic pressure, and military intimidation. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-military-carrier-exclusive-idUSKBN1WW0KM
Here’s a fascinating exploration of the different WWII-era design and manufacturing philosophies of the Americans, Germans, and Soviets. It might be unfairly critical of the Germans since it forgets that their smaller pool of manpower might have rightly forced them to focus on making their tanks higher in quality at the expense of quantity. https://www.historynet.com/profiles-cold-steel-making-tanks.htm
Thin, flexible LED sheets like this will someday be incorporated into clothing. I predict this will lead to personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with the LEDs, e-ink sheets, or some other metamaterial and pinhole cameras colored e-ink. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans. The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. https://youtu.be/5fy91AdzfJw
An important weakness of small, flying drones is that they won’t be able to fly when it’s windy, raining or snowing. This reliability problem will dash any plans to create an economy where the drones have replaced ground vehicles for delivering goods, and seriously hinder efforts to make a military force comprised mainly of small attack drones. https://now.tufts.edu/articles/how-do-birds-survive-storms-and-other-harsh-weather
Electric cars have fewer parts than gas-powered cars, so they are simpler and faster to build, and break less often. This is bad news for people who work at car factories and mechanic shops. https://apnews.com/c70d4274a69643bba37667585dbee7aa
Amazon has just announced a bulk buy of 100,000 electric delivery trucks, which will jump-start that whole vehicle sector. I’ve predicted before that, once a big company does a bulk buy of thousands of autonomous delivery trucks, the writing will be on the wall for human truck drivers. https://qz.com/1712151/amazon-orders-100000-electric-delivery-trucks/
One guy has taken it upon himself to drive around his native Zimbabwe to fill in Google Street View imagery. I like his spirit, but it’s kind of pointless since all the blank spots in Street View will very rapidly fill in once autonomous cars become common. The cars will bristle with cameras pointed in every direction, and opting to sell the footage to Google will be a matter of clicking one button. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/22/760572640/hes-trying-to-fill-in-the-gaps-on-google-street-view-starting-with-zimbabwe
Chinese police used flying drones to find a fugitive who had been at large for 17 years. He was living in a remote camp in the wilderness. Autonomous aircraft will be able to map parts of the planet inaccessible to cars, and hence will be integral to mapping and surveillance. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49874969
A “vacuum airship” would be a dirigible filled with nothing instead of helium or hydrogen. The exterior air pressure would be so great that its skin would need to be built of super-strong, nano-engineered materials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship
President Trump accidentally Tweeted a classified photo taken by one of America’s best spy satellites, giving insights into how high-res their cameras are. Contrary to urban myth, license plates and facial features can’t be resolved, but individual humans on the ground could be seen (and counted) as small blobs of color. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-tweets-sensitive-surveillance-image-of-iran
The Kardashev Scale is widely misquoted and misunderstood: 1) According to Kardashev’s original science paper on the matter, humanity had ALREADY achieved “Type 1” status in 1964. 2) The paper only had three civilization classifications: Type 1 (most energy on the planet being consumed by the civilization), Type 2 (all of the star’s energy harnessed), and Type 3 (all of the galaxy’s energy harnessed). Nothing was said of “Type 0” or “Type 4” status. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2014/03/21/what-kardashev-really-said/
When we meet intelligent aliens, even if we can’t understand each others’ languages, we’ll be able to use math and chemistry to agree on what “right” and “left” mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment
The CIA was out of control in the 50s and 60s, and Fort Detrick, MD was its secret base for developing and testing mind-control drugs, poisons, and biological weapons. https://politi.co/2I7zNfE
Doctors found a way to triple the time that human livers can be preserved outside a body for transplantation. It involves injecting the organs with preservative fluid and cooling them to below freezing. Don’t write off the possibility of whole-body human cryopresevation in the future. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49632609
Using donor eggs and IVF, a 74-year-old woman in India got pregnant and gave birth to twins, making her the oldest known mother. (While postmenopausal women’s ovaries don’t make eggs anymore, their uteri remain functional) The physical and mental strain of childbirth was so great that it caused her a stroke and gave her husband a heart attack, and both were sent to the ICU right afterward. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=12267791
The Sahara region oscillates between wet and dry epochs once every 20,000 years. Also, the current Sahara Desert wouldn’t be as large as it is if not for millennia of human-owned livestock overgrazing at its margins. We could “green” parts of it today, with existing technology and relatively little money. https://phys.org/news/2019-01-sahara-swung-lush-conditions-years.html
Facebook’s virtual reality group has made impressive progress making what they call “Codec Avatars.” A person wears a visor over his face, which has cameras that record the movements of his head, face muscles, eyes, and mouth, and then the footage is streamed to a second person also wearing a visor, who sees the disembodied image of the first person’s head floating in front of them. Various algorithms are used to correct for camera distortions and blank spots. https://twitter.com/pacrimgirl/status/1176937590756270080
Scientists invented a device that can convert a flat plate’s excess heat into electricity to power an LED bulb. In the future, we’ll do a lot of wring energy out of waste heat. https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(19)30412-X
Here’s more evidence that body weight and obesity are partly genetic: Thin adults tend to have more mitochondria in their fat cells, and different mitochondrial DNA, than average-weight adults. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31374571
It’s actually not true that all siblings share 50% of their genes. Thanks to the random reassortment of genes that happens during meiosis (the biological process that makes sperm and eggs), it’s quite possible for two full siblings to share as little as 40% and as much as 60% of their DNA. 50% is merely the population-wide average (3.6% is the standard deviation). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/02/why-siblings-differ-differently/#.XZJTyihKiUl
The facts that Earthly life forms have four DNA nucleotides and that a series of three nucleotides codes for each amino acid could mean that ‘a quantum-mechanical process is actually somehow at the root of molecular biology.’ By extension, it also means that the way we store genetic information and translate it into molecules is the most efficient way possible in an organic substrate. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/09/18/and-now-for-a-bit-of-quantum-mechanics
Eighteen drones and 7 cruise missiles were launched at Saudi Arabia during the recent attack that disabled much of the country’s oil industry. The wreckage shows the weapons were Iranian-made. Iran’s government denies involvement, and they do have a slender reed to lean on since it’s possible that anti-Saudi rebels launched the weapons from outside Iran. https://apnews.com/9fb95c0d28c84fd0bf10817dea3ddaab
‘There are some clear tactical benefits to [Egypt’s military HQ building] design. Spreading the MoD’s functionality across multiple interconnected facilities offers survivability from limited attacks. Giving each service two well-spaced octagons also offers some redundancy should one be struck, at least depending on the functions and systems each one holds. Like America’s Pentagon, having three distinct ‘nested’ structures within each octagon also provides resiliency if one part of the facility is attacked.’ https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29762/egypts-new-octagon-ministry-of-defense-complex-looks-like-an-alien-base-from-space
Eighty years ago, the Nazis invaded Poland, sparking WWII. What is often forgotten is that the Soviets also invaded Poland from the east. Britain and France only declared war on Germany for this offense. https://youtu.be/oFTtuHxxBLo
A Finnish space company called “Iceye” has launched radar satellites that produce sub-meter fidelity images of the Earth, at a fraction of the price of any competitor. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49253951
During the Apollo program era, NASA considered building a gigantic space rocket that would be towed out to sea and launched while half-submerged in water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)
Russia is experimenting with converting some of its old T-72 tanks into autonomous vehicles. As I’ve said before, robot crews could breathe new life into older weapons and keep them in service longer, but they’d be inferior to newer weapons not designed around the human form at all. https://www.janes.com/article/90554/russia-develops-unmanned-t-72s
Britain once had the world’s best army. Today, it can’t even muster 75,000 men (out of a population of 66 million). https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-49365599
‘[U.S. Navy] Sailors “overwhelmingly” preferred to control ships with wheels and throttles [instead of touchscreen displays], surveys of crew found.’ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450
This is a simple but informative video about the U.S. Navy’s new “Radar Modular Assemblies.” A simple but very useful design. https://youtu.be/BPGcW4Lj4fc
There’s no evidence that microplastics in our food and water hurt human health. They simply pass through the human digestive system. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49430038
Most of the people who say they are over 110 years old are actually lying or mistaken thanks to poor birth certificate recordkeeping. “As soon as a state starts keeping good records of when people are born, there’s a 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people who live to the age of 110.” https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error
It’s now possible to use deepfake technology to synthesize anyone’s voice and have them read an entire audiobook. Listeners can pick which voice they prefer. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49329650
Deepfake technology is also being used to make customized teaching lessons for people. Someday, it will be possible to put on augmented reality eyewear with headphones and a forward-facing camera, and to see a semi-intelligent AI teacher in front of you. Virtual objects would appear in front of you, and real-world objects in your field of view would be highlighted, so your machine teacher could do something like walk you through a complex car repair task. (Is this how the Borg started out?) https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2019/08/edtech-company-udacity-uses-deepfake-tech-to-create-educational-videos-automatically/
All the obsolete and disused electronic devices stashed in peoples’ houses collectively contain a large amount of rare earth metals that could be recycled. (Makes me think of my theory that robot butlers will help people out by selling or recycling unused possessions and trash.) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49409055
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
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/
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
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
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/
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
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
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 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
I recently read The Accidental Superpower, and thought I’d write a brief review, as many of the book’s points align with the purpose of this blog. The first five chapters are great, and should be standard reading for anyone wanting a basic grasp of how accidents of natural geography help determine where nations form and what their fates are. Thanks to physics and to the demands of human biology, parts of the world with the following qualities are the best at supporting human populations:
Mild climates. Humans struggle to live in places that are too hot or too cold. This is why there was never a powerful civilization centered in the Arctic regions or Sahara desert. Only small numbers of hyper-specialized nomadic people were able to live in those harsh places, their constant struggle for survival meant they never had the spare time and resources to get advanced, and they were conquered by other groups of people who originated in neighboring temperate climate zones that could support larger populations and bigger resource surpluses.
Natural harbors and navigable waterways. Moving cargo by boat requires much less energy than it does to move it by pack animal, railroad, or truck. This means that parts of the world blessed with coastlines that have natural harbors–where ships could be protected from rough seas–could participate in trade and get richer than those that lacked them. Rivers are also very important because they provide drinking water, are convenient ways to get rid of waste, and can also be very cheap avenues of transportation, again bolstering trade. Importantly, not all rivers are created equal, and if they are too turbulent, shallow, or full of rapids, they aren’t useful for transit.
Flat land. Flat land is, for obvious reasons, more useful as farmland, and it is faster, easier, and cheaper for people and cargo to move across it. Flat land can be colonized quickly, and it can support a larger, richer population because of the higher agricultural potential and lower energy costs of moving people and cargo around (the less money you spend on moving things around, the more money you have left over for buying things you want). As mentioned, the most energy-efficient way to move cargo is by boat, but railroad trains are a respectable second-place, while moving things by automobile is a distant third. However, the energy-efficiency of railroad transportation sharply drops if a train has to go uphill even at a 1% grade, or if its track has a lot of curves in it. Thus, flat land is much more conducive to railroad networks.
Energy resources. Mostly, this means underground fossil fuel reserves.
There are three more key points worth mentioning:
Mountains (or “highlands” as the author calls them) are usually low-population zones because they can’t support much human life. They also block the flow of people, which can be a good thing (forms a natural barrier between your people and a neighboring group of foreign people) or a bad thing (impedes the movement of your people within your own country and naturally encourages them to develop cultural differences that might undermine shared national identity).
In general, the bigger a country’s population is, the stronger and richer it is. This is because most humans are productive assets that can build and invent things and aggregate into armies. However, important exceptions include humans that are very young, very old, or disabled. Those types of humans can’t do work, and are net drains on national resources. If they get to be too big a percentage of a country’s population, then the country will have all kinds of problems. The U.S. is one of the few major countries that has and will continue to have a favorable balance of productive humans vs. unproductive humans.
All of the advantages and disadvantages conferred by geography can be partly ameliorated with technology. Useless cerrados can be turned into farmland, artificial harbors can be built and turbid rivers dammed or dredged, railroad and road networks can be built in areas lacking navigable waterways, energy can be imported or derived from an increasingly diverse array of sources (e.g. – a small country lacking fossil fuels might be ideally situated for dams, nuclear power, solar power, or wind power), and tunnels can be bored through mountain ranges.
I’m much less of a fan of the second part of the book, where the author makes predictions about how different countries will fare up to 2040. He posits many indisputable facts that are well-known to any student of international affairs, geopolitics, and economics, but then leaps from those to many unfounded and provocative conclusions about what’s ahead. Here are those I strongly disagree with:
U.S./Canadian fossil fuels production will stay at high levels. The extent to which fracking has bolstered North American energy supplies, and by extension, changed the world’s energy market (oil and natural gas prices are low across the board now) is clear and remarkable. However, I don’t think it’s safe for the author to assume that U.S./Canadian production levels will stay at current levels until 2040. We don’t know how much recoverable shale oil and gas there is in North America, and production could level off as early as the mid-2020s, and then start declining a few years later.
Citi Bank has a good track record predicting fossil fuel markets, and they seem to forecast a plateau in U.S. shale oil production in the mid-2020s.
This scenario isn’t a certainty, and the author could be right, but it’s important to point out that a nearer-term peak is just as plausible as what he thinks. This is not just an academic issue; long-term North American energy independence and the ripple effect of low global fossil fuel prices underpin the author’s assumptions that the U.S. will have the economic luxury of disengaging from the world, particularly the Middle East.
The U.S. will disengage from the rest of the world, creating a destructive power vacuum. The author predicts that, once the U.S. becomes a net energy exporter, the infamous trade deficit with countries like China and Japan will shrink to the point that the U.S. could cut itself off from them at minimal economic cost. Advances in 3D printing (particularly metal printing) will also allow the U.S. to make its own goods instead of relying on foreign factories. Lacking any interest in affairs outside North America, the U.S. will withdraw from its military and trade alliances, bring all of its troops and ships home, and let high-seas pirates and undemocratic regional powers like Iran fill the vacuum.
Problematically, trends over the last five years since The Accidental Superpower‘s publishing haven’t gone the way the author predicted, which suggests the U.S. isn’t on track to being able to economically detach itself from the rest of the world. For example, even though the U.S. became the world’s #1 natural gas producer in 2013 and its #1 oil producer in 2018 and is now breaking all-time export records for both, the country;s trade deficit has gotten WORSE over that period.
A country has a “trade deficit” when the value of the things that it buys from other countries exceeds the value of the things that those countries buy from it. If your country has a trade deficit, then it means you can’t detach from the world economy without suffering serious pain.
Moreover, 3D printers have not improved to the extent that the author seems to have predicted, nor are they starting to replace traditional manufacturing machines (e.g. – looms, presses, lathes) in factories that mass produce goods. Furthermore, there’s no indication that this will change anytime soon. Looking back, it’s clear now that the author wrote the book during a period of hype about 3D printers, and that rosy predictions in pop-sci articles and financial magazines about how the machines were poised to revolutionize the manufacturing industry probably influenced his thinking.
3D printers failed to live up to the hype, at least in the short-run.
Additionally, since 2014, the U.S. has not become isolationist, in spite of the election of President Trump, whom many policy experts considered a “worst-case scenario” for continuing the U.S. foreign policy status quo. Putting aside the “America First” slogan and countless insulting Tweets aimed at foreign leaders and international alliances, Trump’s concrete policy changes have barely reduced the U.S.’ overseas commitments. Trump has (justifiably) berated other NATO countries for their low defense spending and has “hinted” that he might-possibly-be-thinking-about leaving the alliance, but no real steps have been taken to do so, like shutting down U.S. bases in Europe. Levels of American troops in places that are clearly not core U.S. interests, like Syria and Africa, have little changed since the “globalist” President Obama was in charge. U.S. defense spending is up, and there’s no sign that the military brass or a majority of U.S. politicians want to shrink it.
Where international trade policy is concerned, Trump’s impact has been more substantive as he has replaced NAFTA with a trade pact that favors the U.S. slightly more, refused to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and put tariffs on many Chinese imports. But all at worst these policies collectively put a tiny dent in the flow of U.S.-foreign trade.
Since 2014, there has simply been no sign of the U.S. retrenching for its then-existing global commitments, even in spite of the fact that the U.S. elected a more isolationist President in 2016 than the author (or most other experts) probably expected. I don’t think this will change, either, for several reasons. First, even if the U.S. doesn’t consume Middle Eastern oil, many other important countries do and will continue doing so. Allowing the Middle East’s petrostates to fall into chaos will disrupt oil supplies outside of North America, damaging economies across the world, and in turn reducing demand for U.S. exports to those countries. Thus, it will remain in the U.S.’ economic interest to stay engaged in the Middle East indefinitely, and to use its diplomatic and military power to protect the petrostates and Persian Gulf shipping lanes.
Second, the U.S. will stay diplomatically and militarily engaged in seemingly unimportant countries like Afghanistan and the Philippines to keep them from becoming terrorist bases and to prevent them from allying themselves with rivals like Russia or China. Remember that the 9/11 attacks cost the U.S. economy $200 billion at a minimum, and that the attacks were only made possible by al Qaeda having free reign in Afghanistan for bases and planning.
Third, as I hinted earlier, the U.S. military-industrial complex has taken on a life of its own, and pursues its own self-interests and protects its assets (including overseas bases) regardless of America’s actual defense needs. It has become the mother of all entrenched bureaucracies, it’s career suicide for any elected politician to propose serious cuts to it, and fixing military overspending and winding down foreign military alliances is not a priority for most American voters.
China will just, like, fall apart. Arguably the most extreme and least credible prediction in the book is that China will economically and politically implode due to internal and external pressures, it will stop being a world power, and will fragment along ethnolinguistic lines. While the author is right to note that China faces major challenges in the near-to-mid future, he makes elementary errors when he assumes they will lead to national calamity.
I don’t contend the author’s point that China has a corrupt, opaquely run banking sector, and that the country hundreds of billions of dollars in bad debts, but it’s impossible for anyone to know if it will lead to a financial crisis that will wreck the country’s economy. The author’s prediction primarily hinges on this unproven assumption, and is thus bad futurism. The author also rightly points out that China’s working-age population is shrinking due to the defunct One Child policy, and that this will exert serious drag on their economy as the number of unproductive elderly people continues increasing. But again, the author jumps to a conclusion when he predicts this will lead to economic collapse and widespread starvation in rural China. I think it’s much likelier that China’s economic growth rate will continue gradually slowing until it settles near the boundary between “middle” and “high” income countries over the next 20 years. How long it takes them to get out of the “Middle Income Trap” is an open question, but in the long run, they will.
The author’s prediction that the U.S. will help to bankrupt China by ending trade with it ignores the fact that this would be against American interests (the ongoing U.S.-China trade war notwithstanding), and his suggestion that Japan will rearm, magically stop caring about possible nuclear retaliation, and wage a ruinous war against China (along with India and perhaps other Asian countries joining in to block the sea lanes China uses to get oil from the Mideast) is completely silly. Moreover, the notion that China will splinter along ethnolinguistic lines like the Soviet Union did rests on badly flawed assumptions about the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness and ability to use force to put down internal rebellions. The recent 30th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre gives testimony to the opposite. There are no credible secessionist movements in China, and no rivals to the CCP’s grip on power, and both are unlikely to change.
And now for something completely different.
While reading The Accidental Superpower, I had the lucky…accident…of going on a trip to Ecuador, which is a country dominated by the Andes Mountain range. While there, I climbed a dormant volcano called “Mt. Pichincha,” which is on Quito’s outskirts. That experience in particular and the trip more generally hit home for me some of the book’s important points, and made me think about what they meant the future of intelligent life on Earth and beyond.
Quito sits in a valley that is 9,350 ft (2,850 meters) above sea level, which is already higher than the highest point in any U.S. state east of the Rocky mountains. Most foreigners can feel the tiring physical effects of the thinner air when they simply walk down the street in Quito. Hiking uphill at an even higher altitude is much worse, as I’d soon discover. The first step to climbing Mt. Pichincha is to take a gondola from the edge of the city to a point 12,943 ft (3,945 meters) up the mountain. After that, you walk on a trail to the summit, called “Rucu Pichincha”, 15,696 ft (4,784 meters) high.
Looking down at the city from the gondola station.
Right after exiting the gondola, I noticed it was several degrees colder than in the city, and low-hanging clouds blocked the sunlight. By contrast, Quito far below was mostly bathed in light, and I realized that Mt. Pichincha had its own climate distinct from the valley’s. I hiked out of the gondola station towards the summit, and after only about 20 minutes, passed the last tree along the trail. I was above the treeline, and the only vegetation was wild grass, bushes, and lichens.
Soon after that, I got to what you might call “the cloud line,” meaning I had hiked high enough to be inside that low-hanging cloud layer I noticed at the gondola station. The climate became harsher and more volatile, one minute being still, the next minute being almost clear, and the next being dark and windy. There were actually three distinct “sleet storms” during my hike (keep in mind this was in mid-July, and I was only a few miles from the equator!).
Being in such an environment hit home for me a key point made in The Accidental Superpower: mountains are barriers to human movement, and they form natural borders between human groups. During the first 99.8% of our species’ existence, before Industrial-era technology existed, mountains like Pichincha would have been nearly impassable and almost uninhabitable. Merely building a shelter to escape the harsh climate would have been hard thanks to the lack of wood (remember, I quickly got above the treeline during the hike). Stones would need to be used, which imposes various inefficiencies. Even the crucial ability to make fire for warmth or for cooking would be handicapped by the lack of wood and the moist atmosphere.
If you want an otherworldly experience, explore a large abandoned building, hike a mountain above the treeline, or do hallucinogenic drugs.
The low temperatures (it got bitingly cold and my hands went numb at one point), low sunlight, rocky soil, and sloped land would have made farming impossible. Hunting and gathering on Mt. Pichincha wouldn’t have worked since the animals were so few (I only saw a few small birds and one rabbit) and the vegetation so sparse–the calories you’d burn chasing down animals and walking around to find edible plants would probably exceed the calories you’d get from eating them. Growing food in the arable land in the Quito valley and then shipping it up the mountain on mules or wagons to feed people living there would doubtless be too expensive (unless the mountain people had something really valuable to trade for food, like gold they were getting from a mine), and would ultimately be limited by the same “balance of calories burned vs. obtained” phenomenon. As I realized during my climb, you burn a lot of calories when walking uphill.
The only way a permanent human settlement might have been able to feed itself on Mt. Pichincha would have been if it had domesticated mountain goats or maybe llamas and alpacas (it depends on how sure-footed they are on steep slopes). They could have grazed on the wild grasses and bushes. Even still, I doubt there would have been enough vegetation to support anything but small herds of the animals, which in turn would have kept the number of humans living on the mountain small. The comparatively fertile and benign environment in the Quito valley would have inevitably come to support a much larger, richer population. Imagining a topographical map of the world in my mind’s eye with this new knowledge, many patterns of human settlement and many national boundaries suddenly made more sense to me.
In the town of Da Lat, Vietnam, several hills have been terraced and covered with greenhouses.
As I hiked further, I considered another important point from The Accidental Superpower–technology allows humans to overcome problems imposed by geography–and I thought about how modern technology could make Mt. Pichincha habitable. Paved roads could be built on all but the steepest parts of the mountain, making most points on it accessible to humans from Quito without physical exertion (the gondola could also be extended). The sloped land could be leveled, graded, and terraced in order to build structures above it, where humans could live and work. Greenhouses could be built on the flattened land, and crops grown inside with much greater efficiency than they would grow outside, particularly if the greenhouses contained transplanted soil and used artificial lighting to counter the mountain’s cloudiness. Water supplies could be assured by building a system of rain catchments and cisterns, and by building simple devices that condensed cloud vapor into water. People living on the mountain could produce some of their own food, though it would be cheaper to buy it from a more fertile place and have it shipped up.
Likewise, people living on Mt. Pichincha could generate their own energy, or build power lines to Quito and buy it from them. As noted, the mountain was windy most of the time, so wind turbines would be an efficient power source. And since Pichincha is a dormant volcano, there are good odds that a geothermal power plant could by sited there.
The only real barriers to building towns or even cities at high altitudes like Mt. Pichincha are cost of living and quality of life. Most things would cost more money since they would be scarcer or would have to be trucked in from Quito. The mountain’s harsh and volatile climate would also be repellent to most humans, though the fact the people still willingly live in Iceland and northern Alaska proves that some people could take it. And even at the peak of Mt. Pichincha, 15,696 ft high, the air is thick enough for humans to breathe without difficulty after a few months of acclimatization. In fact, the highest human town is in neighboring Peru and is 1,000 ft higher than Pichincha’s summit, and professional mountaineers have found that the air remains thick enough for humans to breathe up to 26,247 ft (8,000 m). Thus, modern technology has overcome the natural impediments to human settlement on anything but the world’s very tallest mountains.
One of Facebook’s massive data centers is in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. It was sited there partly because the cold temperatures can cool the servers.
I kept hiking, and in spite of worsening physical exhaustion and the thinning air, I had more insights. What would even more advanced technologies mean for the habitability of Mt. Pichincha and other desolate places in the future? Extending the logic from The Accidental Superpower, it would stand to reason that they would open even more to settlement, especially if the settlement were being done by intelligent machines that didn’t have the same biological limitations and inbuilt preferences as humans like us. The colder, windy climate would actually be beneficial since it would help the AIs to cool their computer chips. The thinness of the air and poor quality of the soil wouldn’t pose problems since machines don’t breathe or eat. The bleakness of the landscape wouldn’t bother machines since they would lack the inbuilt genetic programming that humans have, which makes us crave sunny, green environments and blue skies.
All that AIs would need to survive on Mt. Pichincha would be electricity, building materials, and roads to get up and down the mountain. As I noted earlier, the electricity problem could be solved easily, there’s no engineering reason why roads couldn’t be built on all but the steepest parts of the mountain, and building materials could be shipped in from Quito, or even made by pulverizing some of the stones comprising the mountain itself and turning them into concrete. Intelligent machines could probably thrive there. And if they had radically advanced technologies like fusion power and nanomachine-based replicators, they’d have no need for anything aside from periodic refills of fusion reactor fuel and small amounts of trace elements they couldn’t extract from the mountain’s soil or from the air.
Additionally, it struck me that living on Mt. Pichincha or another remote, inhospitable place would be an ethical choice for intelligent machines since their presence wouldn’t displace any humans, and since constructing server farms and structures wouldn’t destroy much animal or plant life. As I noted, I only saw a handful of small animals during my hike, and few of the plants were higher than my knees. Perhaps it will be the fate of intelligent machines to build their cities on mountaintops, cold deserts, or floating on the seas.
And extending this train of thinking by assuming ever-better technology and intelligent machines moving to ever-more-remote places, we are inevitably led to the prospect of space colonization, von Neumann probes, and the conversion of whole celestial bodies into computronium, as Ray Kurzweil predicts (and maybe in the very far future, if our understanding of Physics evolves, our civilization might find ways to “live” in the very fabric of space-time and be invisible but everywhere, or to expand beyond our universe). The well-established point in The Accidental Superpower that technology allows humans to overcome problems imposed by geography and to spread to formerly inhospitable parts of the world (e.g. – Florida before air conditioning was invented) has major implications for the future, and buttresses ideas about space colonization that are now the purview of science fiction. The rule should be rephrased as: Technology allows intelligent life forms to overcome problems imposed by geography and to spread to formerly inhospitable places.
Right as I was making this wonderful conceptual breakthrough, I got so dizzy from the effects of thin air and physical exertion that I fell on my face. Fortunately, I was wearing my backpack around the front of my body like a weirdo, so it cushioned the impact, and I was unhurt. I took stock of my condition and my surroundings: the trail had become narrow and treacherous (the segment I was on was named “Paso de la Muerte” or “Step of the Dead”), I couldn’t see far because I was enveloped in the clouds, and stumbling to the right thanks to another loss of balance or a strong gust of wind would have meant rolling far down a nearly vertical cliff. No, I was not prepared for this climb, so I turned back about 30 minutes short of reaching the summit of Rucu Pichincha. Yes, it was a bit disappointed, but I didn’t want to die, and I consoled myself with my new bit of knowledge and with the fact that I’d managed to hike to about 14,500 ft, which, other than the times I’ve flown in airplanes, is the highest I’ve been in my life.
One important climatology assumption is that human industrial activity has made the skies cloudier, which has partly offset global warming since white clouds reflect light back into space, keeping the planet cooler. The assumption might be wrong, in which case climatologists have overestimated how much CO2 heats up the planet. https://www.nature.com/news/cloud-seeding-surprise-could-improve-climate-predictions-1.19971
Some astronomers think we could find intelligent alien life by looking for planets that have lots of air pollution (e.g. – unnatural methane concentrations and gases like CFCs). I think it’s a bad strategy, as advanced aliens would probably use clean energy and would have found ways to cleanse their atmospheres of pollutants. VERY advanced aliens that were non-organic could also live on almost any planet or moon, so it makes little sense to even focus our gaze on Earth-like planets. Our Moon could have ancient, underground cities full of alien machines for all we know. https://www.astrobio.net/alien-life/unintelligent-life-cfcs/
Robert Downey Jr. thinks we could have robots pick up all the trash on Earth in as little as a decade. His timeline is of course wrong, but I’ve predicted that it will happen during the 22nd century. Having seemingly ingenious insights like this gets a lot easier once you start thinking of robots as humans that work for free, and then you start listing all the things that humans can do (like picking trash off the ground). https://www.businessinsider.com/robert-downy-jr-will-use-robotics-ai-to-clean-earth-2019-6
Conversely, battery recycling is extremely efficient. Close to 100% of the metals in a battery–both in the power-storing cells and in the structural casings–can be recovered through standard processes. Fears of a “global lithium shortage” once electric cars become popular are overblown. http://www.mdpi.com/2032-6653/6/4/1039/pdf
A “deepnude” app that can allegedly interpolate a woman’s nude body onto a real photo of her has been created (and shut down after an uproar). It’s only a matter of time before other apps can do this realistically by combining different images of the same woman, taken from different angles. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48799045
An app that changes the appearances of a person’s eyes during videophone calls so it seems like they’re looking at the person on the other end has been created. I think this will be very beneficial. https://youtu.be/rDUtBZXWrsE
After seeing the problems Samsung had with its prototype foldable smartphones, Huawei has wisely decided to delay the debut of its own. This is a great case study of the risks of being a “first-mover.” https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48636452
Samsung has unveiled a wall-sized, 8K TV that ‘is designed to never turn off and can change into a digital canvas best matching the owner’s interior needs and mood… [It] will display a variety of “curated art”, including paintings, photographs and video art, as well as customisable pictures with digital frames.’ I’ve predicted this sort of device will become common in middle-class households in the 2030s. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9284646/samsung-292-inch-8k-tv-release-date-price/
Here’s a list of known human genetic disorders that are caused by mutations to single genes or to small numbers of genes. Whenever human genetic engineering becomes common, we should start out by using it to purge these mutations from the genepool, rather than by trying to make super-geniuses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders
The long-term “human limit” to high-intensity physical exertion is about 2.5 times of the baseline energy expenditure. In other words, if your body burns 2,000 calories per day under normal conditions, then you could adopt a lifestyle where you burned up to 5,000 calories a day and sustain it indefinitely. More than that, and you’d physically break down. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48527798
Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone over the Persian Gulf, and President Trump surprisingly did not retaliate. Maybe he has inside knowledge that the drone had actually strayed into Iranian airspace as they claim, or that the attack was ordered by a rogue commander and not by the Iranian government. https://politi.co/2Y4ANXThttps://politi.co/2Y4ANXT
Sarin nerve gas is very hard to make and to weaponize, and the Sarin production equipment that Russia claims it seized from Syrian rebels is almost certainly fake. Russia probably manufactured the exhibit to prop up its long-running claims that nerve gas attacks in Syria are being done by forces other than Bashar al-Assad’s, Russia’s ally. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/06/21/an-idiotic-exhibit
The myth that American girls are hitting puberty earlier thanks to hormones or other chemicals in the food supply (mostly the meat supply) is wrong. It is wholly or almost wholly due to rising obesity rates among children and to overdiagnosis by doctors. Body fat produces the hormone “leptin,” and leptin levels determine when puberty starts in girls. https://www.webmd.com/children/features/obesity#1
An ideal airport has long, parallel runways that are spaced far enough apart from each other to let planes use them simultaneously, without risk of collision. Atlanta’s international airport is, by these standards, excellent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QZ3eozyQfU&t=636s
‘Once pollen makes contact with your clothing or your hair, it will likely never leave. Some pollen have spikes, and many are coated in lipids that act like glue. The pollen count may go down a little with each cycle in a washing machine, but they won’t go away.’ https://qz.com/1635897/the-us-is-using-pollen-to-track-illegal-drugs-like-fentanyl/
Electric car engines are almost silent, making them quieter in operation than gas-powered cars. However, the noise difference between the two steadily shrinks as vehicle speed increases and the overall noise signature is dominated by sounds produced by air friction and tires. This means electric cars will lower the amount of traffic noise in areas where vehicles move slowly–such as cities and suburban neighborhoods–but will do little to make highways quieter. https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/05/will-electric-cars-make-traffic-quieter-yes-no/
Over the course of just two days in 1886, a small army of workers changed the gauges of 11,500 miles of railroad track in the southern U.S. to match the rest of the nation. http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html
China is decommissioning older warships that were bought from Russia or copied from Soviet designs, and replacing them with larger, better, domestically designed and built ships. China doesn’t need any naval technology from Russia anymore and is pulling ahead. https://www.janes.com/article/88602/plan-decommissions-four-type-051-destroyers
In 1967, a KGB agent stole a Sidewinder aircraft missile from a U.S. airbase in West Germany, literally draggedit away in a wheelbarrow, put it in the trunk of his car (it was so long that it hung out the back), and mailed it to Moscow. The Soviets copied it. https://warisboring.com/the-kgb-shipped-a-sidewinder-missile-by-mail-to-moscow/
A little-known fact is that water is very effective at stopping bullets. Even a powerful rifle bullet fired down into a swimming pool will slow to a halt after going through only two feet of water. But now, a U.S. company has invented special “supercaviating” bullets that can cut through 16 feet of water. http://dsgtec.com/capability-videos/
Another little-known fact is that trains can’t go uphill. Their steel wheels are very low friction, which lets them glide over steel tracks while expending little energy, but also robs them of being able to exert the traction necessary to climb up a hill. https://youtu.be/KbUsKWbOqUU
In 2009, Dr. Christoph Westphal, the co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, predicted the “there will be drugs that prolong [human] longevity” by 2016. Today, there are several drugs that allegedly do this, but none have been proven to work. In fairness, their efficacy can’t be established until decades pass, and we can see how long their users lived. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29aging.html
Machines can now translate audio clips of a person speaking from one language to another, while preserving the idiosyncratic sound qualities of their speech (their “voiceprint”). I predict this technology will be perfected during the 2030s, and the translations will accurately convey the speaker’s emotions, figures of speech, and even their accent. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613559/google-ai-language-translation/
‘As labs like DeepMind and OpenAI tackle bigger problems, they may begin to require ridiculously large amounts of computing power. As OpenAI’s system learned to play Dota 2 over several months — more than 45,000 years of game play — it came to rely on tens of thousands of computer chips. Renting access to all those chips cost the lab millions of dollars…’ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artificial-intelligence.html
California’s wildfire problem is exacerbated by bad forestry practices. Before white settlement, about 4.5 million acres of vegetation would naturally burn per year. Today, the authorities only do 87,000 acres of prescribed burns yearly, and they put out almost all natural wildfires to protect humans and property. https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article230481684.html
To calculate the carbon cost of building a structure, you need to include the energy and emissions that went into fabricating the structure’s components and transporting it to the construction site. You need to trace the breadcrumbs all the way back to cement mills, steel foundries, and mines. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48267035
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant is shutting down because fracked natural gas, solar and wind are cheaper sources of energy. Of course, U.S. natural gas power plants pay very little or no money to offset the environmental damage caused by their GHG emissions, and solar and wind installations are artificially cheap thanks to government subsidies that nuclear power plants should also get. https://www.exeloncorp.com/newsroom/three-mile-island-unit-1-to-shut-down-by-september-30-2019
A paleontologist who specifically studies flying dinosaurs says that the dragons in Game of Thrones would be way too big to actually fly “unless they’re secretly made out of carbon fiber and titanium.” So that means with advanced enough technology, we could make robots or cyborg animals that were like the dragons on the show. http://mentalfloss.com/article/503967/could-game-throness-dragons-really-fly-we-asked-some-experts
For several weeks in late 2014 and early 2015, U.S. fighter pilots saw UFOs off the East Coast, and also detected them on radar. The unknown craft did maneuvers that broke known laws of physics, such as instantly halting in midair even though they were just moving at over Mach 5. The sightings bear similarities to another military-UFO encounter near San Diego in 2004. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wow-what-is-that-navy-pilots-report-unexplained-flying-objects/ar-AABXltD
The world record time for solving a Rubik’s Cube has declined over the past few years partly because the construction of the Cubes has become more precise, so it takes less force to rotate their segments. The best solve time will probably plateau around 2.9 seconds, which is ten times longer than a machine’s speed. https://youtu.be/SUopbexPk3A
Someday, packages will be delivered to your curbside by autonomous vehicles, and then carried to your doorstep by human-sized robots riding in those vehicles. The robots might not be humanoid in form. If you have your own robot butler, it will open the front door and accept the package directly from the delivery robot. https://youtu.be/WHWciIxNK2c
A “robot hummingbird” has been built. Note the electrical wires tethered to its bottom (current batteries lack the energy density to power such a machine for useful lengths of time). https://youtu.be/jhl892dHqfA
Electric cars are faster and easier to manufacture than gas-powered cars, meaning many thousands of human autoworkers will lose their jobs in the 2020s as electric cars get more popular. Electric cars also require less frequent maintenance, so car mechanics will suffer. https://apnews.com/e22ad2f734e448f4b3c5d415e8b8c73a
Through wireless networking, fleets of autonomous cars can improve traffic flow by at least 35%. As autonomous vehicles become more common, existing roads will be able to handle higher volumes of traffic without jams happening, reducing the need to expand roadways. Further improvements will happen due to autonomous vehicles distributing their trips over the course of the day (e.g. – delivery trucks will mostly drive overnight). https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/driverless-cars-working-together-can-speed-up-traffic-by-35-percent
Compared to naturally occurring diamonds, lab-grown diamonds are cheaper, could be made to have fewer imperfections, and are more ethical to produce since they don’t require mines or the use of low-paid laborers in volatile countries. https://earther.gizmodo.com/beyond-the-hype-of-lab-grown-diamonds-1834890351
Experts are surprisingly bad at making predictions about things pertaining to their own domains of knowledge. Of course, people with no domain knowledge at all are also very bad at it. I think it’s best to gather predictions about the same thing from multiple experts in a given field, and to have them explain their thinking in detail. Off the bat, it would probably become clear that some of them were just making things up and had no thought process to back their predictions, so you should throw those out. The next step would be to have the remaining experts debate each other about differences in their predictions, and then to have smart generalists with knowledge of multiple domains to analyze everything. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/how-to-predict-the-future/588040/
Thanks to genetics, some people can’t smell specific scents, and some common scents smell different to different people. https://www.pnas.org/content/116/19/9475
These machines have overall lengths of 70 micrometers. They’re too big to be “nanomachines,” and instead are “micromachines.” A “nanomachine” would have an overall length no greater than 10 micrometers, and its subcomponents (e.g. – robot arm, propulsion system, computer brain) would be measured in nanometers, meaning none of them could be larger than 999 nanometers. https://medium.com/penn-engineering/marc-miskins-micro-robots-are-small-enough-to-be-injected-by-syringe-c40ff65ba191
