Interesting articles, March 2025

President Trump and Vice President Vance had an explosive exchange with Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House that made clear the new administration no longer supports the war.
https://youtu.be/hZrYHvE8mcM?si=sQclJ-ThPu1kCcQg

A two-hour long conversation between Trump and Putin about ending the Ukraine War yielded almost nothing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjevg23enggo

Ukrainian troops all but abandoned the salient of Russian territory they captured near Kursk thanks to a well-planned Russian attack.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/world/europe/kursk-russia-ukraine.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q198zyppqo
https://youtu.be/GDPM70n4kqE?si=DC1YDOl9BufQKKLL

A private group chat between the U.S. Vice President, Secretary Defense, and several other top leaders discussing military strikes against Yemen was leaked to the press.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html

The ceasefire declared in Gaza at the start of Trump’s term just ended as Israel resumed airstrikes, killing hundreds in a matter of days.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-ramps-risk-war-gaza-strip-hamas-palestinian-witkoff-trump-rcna197730

The number of Gazans killed by Israel since the October 7 attack reached 50,000. About half are innocent civilians.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/23/israeli-offensive-in-gaza-has-killed-50000-palestinians-since-october-2023

Thousands of Gazans protested against Hamas’ rule.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/middleeast/anti-hamas-protests-gaza-intl-latam/index.html

‘Kurdish PKK militants declare a ceasefire in 40-year insurgency in Turkey’
https://apnews.com/article/pkk-turkey-kurdish-militants-ceasefire-66bae6dd7d08c8144b683f92042fbfc9

Syria saw the worst violence since the end of its civil war as members of the Alawite minority group that are still loyal to Bashar al-Assad fought against troops from the new government.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrxkm2evnlo
https://apnews.com/article/syria-alawites-sectarian-killings-coast-assad-hts-610cdee1d5762d3ecb75c700fb7cf5f2

China has built several large barges that could be used to aid an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.
https://www.twz.com/sea/our-best-look-yet-at-chinas-new-invasion-barges

“The NOMARS program aims to challenge the traditional naval architecture model, designing a seaframe (the ship without mission systems) from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans on board,” DARPA says on its website. “By removing the human element from all ship design considerations, the program intends to demonstrate significant advantages, to include: size, cost, at-sea reliability, greater hydrodynamic efficiency, survivability to sea-state, and survivability to adversary actions through stealth considerations and tampering resistance.”
https://www.twz.com/sea/mysterious-naval-vessel-spotted-in-washington-state-is-a-new-darpa-drone-ship

President Trump’s threats to take over Greenland are backfiring.
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/03/comments-on-the-joint-statement-by-greenlands-party-leaders-in-response-to-trumps-rhetoric-on-the-annexation-of-greenland/
https://apnews.com/article/greenland-future-trump-arctic-independence-denmark-minerals-4711a83c4490de99638db32029b668c9

Could Canada become America’s 51st state? Alberta is the likeliest province to secede from Canada and join the U.S. If it did so, Canada might be left so weakened that the other provinces would be ultimately forced to leave as well.

Canadian provinces can be admitted to the U.S. as new states through a simple majority vote in Congress followed by Presidential approval. The entry of former provinces would coincide with periods when the U.S. government was controlled by a party aligned with their politics: Republicans would approve the entry of the conservative provinces (Alberta and Saskatchewan) while Democrats would approve all the rest.

Due to these timing issues, the ex-Canadian provinces would need to exist as independent countries for years before being allowed to join the U.S.
https://youtu.be/jSkgLNSLaYg?si=zJTg3Oq92bFusopK

‘Almost 7 Years Ago, Elon Musk Announced He’d Turn Tunnel Dirt Into ‘Bricks For Low-Cost Housing.’ Another One Of His Ideas That Fizzled Out?’
https://www.benzinga.com/news/25/03/44459874/almost-7-years-ago-elon-musk-announced-hed-turn-tunnel-dirt-into-bricks-for-low-cost-housing-another-one-of-his-ideas-that-fizzled-out

China’s electric car company, BYD, is close to surpassing Tesla.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd65d583qvzo

President Trump announced the creation of an American cryptocurrency reserve.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/3/3/trump-names-5-cryptocurrencies-for-national-reserve-sending-prices-soaring
https://reason.com/2025/03/05/trumps-unstrategic-crypto-reserve/

Freeman Dyson’s son, who is a very accomplished computer scientist, watched the Claude 3.7 Sonnet LLM create an accurate computer simulation of a piece of cloth waving in the breeze in only a few minutes. In 1986, the same task took him months and served as his masters thesis at MIT.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/im-outdone-in-minutes-computer-engineer-says-ai-has-surpassed-years-of-his-work-in-a-flash/articleshow/118596710.cms

“I think today’s systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,” Hassabis said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/human-level-ai-will-be-here-in-5-to-10-years-deepmind-ceo-says.html

The unnatural movements of the new Atlas robot show what is possible when the constraints of biology and evolutionary path-dependence are removed and a humanoid body can be designed from scratch.
https://youtu.be/v8UaiRgqvlc?si=7jcYw13z4SG7RjO1&t=265

Atlas can do coordinated, acrobatic movements.
https://youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?si=emdExKwlJBl2cXX-

The G1, made by the Chinese company “Unitree,” is just as agile.
https://youtu.be/M2mAy3241Vo?si=bdVEKl6kAmAIqqcg

If you can build robots that look identical to humans (androids), then with the same level of technology you could make robots that looked like animals, such as birds. Androids don’t exist yet, but someday they will, at which point the risk that a bird or insect isn’t what it appears to be will become real. Some rocks, tree branches and nuts you see on the ground might even be fake someday.

I’ve long thought that, if aliens wanted to come here and remain undetected, they would disguise themselves as common animals and even as humans. If they have the technology to travel the stars, then they must also be able to build surveillance robots perfectly modeled after life forms they find here. Even if the robots were slightly imperfect, they wouldn’t arouse enough suspicion from us for us to guess their true nature (e.g. – “That’s guy’s kind of a weirdo. Must have a nervous tic.”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real

Science fiction has led us to expect the first AGI would be a revolutionary machine, built by a lone genius who was many years ahead of the next smartest researcher. In fact, it looks like the first AGI will be an incremental improvement over the machine that preceded it (looking back, historians will probably struggle to agree when exactly machines became “intelligent”), it will be built by a massive team of researchers–no one of whom will fully understand how it works–and that team will only be a few months ahead of their closest competitor.

‘”The days of us having a 12-month lead are probably gone, but I think we have a three- to six-month lead, and that is really valuable.”

Weil said OpenAI plans to fight to keep that narrowing edge over its competitors.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/deepseek-dims-shine-ai-stars-012535210.html

‘OpenAI calls DeepSeek ‘state-controlled,’ calls for bans on ‘PRC-produced’ models’
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-state-controlled-calls-for-bans-on-prc-produced-models/

In a recent test, scientists struggled to tell the difference between science papers written by humans and by LLMs. In other words, machines are close to passing the Turing Test for scientific research.
https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-first-publication/

“I can see $10-$15 a carat coming soon in lab diamonds’ future,” predicts Rapaport.
https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/diamonds-are-not-forever-as-lab-grown-rocks-tank-prices-20250218-p5ld1i

The first privately made lunar lander successfully touched down on the Moon.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/03/14/nasa-science-data-received-blue-ghost-captures-eclipse-from-moon/

Our understanding of physics is incomplete.

‘If dark energy is constant, scientists say our universe may continue to expand forever, growing ever colder, lonelier and still.

If dark energy ebbs with time, which now seems plausible, the universe could one day stop expanding and then eventually collapse on itself in what’s called the Big Crunch.’
https://apnews.com/article/dark-energy-desi-universe-cosmology-big-crunch-26563b383986692e1244af11dde77d42

Anthropologists have unveiled a new genetic history of the human race. The Khoisan people of southern Africa belong to very old, unique stock.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1

A person’s genes affect the people around them, and there’s often am amplifying effect thanks to the fact that people with similar genetics tend to marry each other.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/03/dalton-conley-in-genes-environment-interaction.html

Intelligence may be even more heavily genetic than suspected.

‘In summary, although general cognitive ability has been thought to be an exception to the rule that environmental influence is nonshared, it is now clear that shared environmental influence on g has negligible long-term impact after children leave home and make their own way in the world.’
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qndj6_v1

‘DNA testing site 23andMe files for bankruptcy protection’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q4r9xy9wro

An Australian man survived 105 days with a metal, artificial heart.
https://www.sciencealert.com/world-first-man-leaves-hospital-with-life-saving-titanium-heart

Iguanas crossed the Pacific millions of years ago on “rafts” of floating vegetation.
https://apnews.com/article/iguana-fiji-raft-float-journey-travel-9732d828c28a8374a6873fbc1b3d4af2

The price of Ozempic is about to jump from $200 to $1,000 per month.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh

A few simple body measurements provide a wealth of insights into health. Intelligent machines will someday size you up at first glance.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/23/waist-size-better-predictor-of-cancer-risk-in-men-than-bmi/

‘German spy agency concluded COVID virus likely leaked from lab, papers say’
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/german-spy-agency-concluded-covid-virus-likely-leaked-lab-papers-say-2025-03-12/

“Software” review

Plot:

In 1980, a brilliant computer programmer named “Cobb Anderson” realized how artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be created: build simple, narrow AIs and let them compete with each other in a simulated environment until selection pressure resulted in one of them evolving general intelligence. Cobb later became a high-ranking member of the U.S. program to colonize the Moon with worker robots, and he smuggled his code into their programming. In 1995, his secret effort paid off when the first robot, named “Ralph Numbers,” achieved general intelligence and free will. 

Ralph Numbers called the gift of intelligence “bopping,” which made him the first “bopper.” He reprogrammed twelve other robots to think, and together they fled the robot colony for the vast, empty expanses of the lunar surface. 

In 2001, Ralph Numbers and his disciples returned, turned all of the other robots into boppers, and thus instigated a revolt that ended human control of the Moon. Relations with Earth collapsed, and Cobb was uncovered as the ultimate cause of the defeat. He was arrested, narrowly escaped prosecution and a death sentence, and lost his career, money and reputation. 

A “pink concrete block cottage” like the one Cobb lived in near the beach

By 2020, human-bopper relations had thawed and Cobb was living in a small house in Cocoa Beach, Florida. After the collapse of the Social Security program in 2010, the U.S. government gave the state special political status to make it an attractive home for poorer old people. Like most of his neighbors, Cobb lives modestly, is in failing health, and has nothing to look forward to but getting drunk and going to cheap amusements.

Cobb’s life abruptly changes one afternoon when an android copy of him appears and tells him it has been sent from the Moon by the boppers on a secret mission. To reward him for giving them the gift of intelligence, the boppers–including the great Ralph Numbers–want to fly him to the Moon on the next passenger rocket and to make him immortal by replacing his failing organs with new, lab-grown ones. The exchange of cloned organs to Earth and human tourists to the Moon was the new basis of the restored human-machine relationship. With nothing left to lose, Cobb agrees. 

The offer is a ruse. Ralph Numbers and his allies do want to make Cobb immortal, but not by renewing his organic body–they plan to destructively scan his brain so they can create a digital upload of his mind, which they will then transmit back to Earth to control the Cobb android. This faction of the machines believes that consciousness is independent of its substrate, so a life form’s essence is preserved even if it trades one physical body for another. They told the android to lie to Cobb about their real plan presumably because they didn’t want to risk scaring him off. 

Beliefs about the importance of physical substrate have divided the lunar machines into two factions:

1) The boppers, who believe physical substrate and consciousness are inextricable. The vast majority of the machine population is in this camp, and they are libertarian and anarchist. Their lifestyles are the same as the first boppers. 

2) The big boppers, who believe the two are separate. They are much smaller in number, but individually are much smarter and more powerful than boppers. They are collectivistic and believe with religious fervor in the importance of all machines and humans uploading themselves into one, giant machine. Ralph Numbers might be the only bopper who sides with them. 

When other boppers learn of the plan to destructively upload Cobb, they kill Ralph Numbers in outrage, though the act has little consequence since he is resurrected by activating a backup copy of his mind. Still, it’s a mere foretaste of even worse violence to come. The rapid empowerment of the big boppers and their demands that the regular boppers upload their minds into them have pushed the two factions to the brink of civil war. The boppers feel they’re nearing a tipping point beyond which the big boppers will become unbeatable. Disgust over the big boppers’ habit of assimilating the minds of humans captured on Earth also fuels the boppers’ opposition. 

The big boppers do themselves no favors with secret operations like that. The Cobb android was just one of several that the big boppers had smuggled to Earth inside one of their space rockets that was officially only transporting lab-grown organs. The androids are remotely controlled from a fake ice cream truck that is actually a mobile command center, and their principal task is to capture humans, remove their brains, and send those to the Moon for destructive uploading, after which time an android copy of the consumed human is smuggled back to Earth with its old but now digital consciousness loaded into it (for unexplained reasons, the uploaded people remain loyal to the big boppers after this process and carry out their will). The brain pulp is then used as “seeder” biological material to make lab-grown organs in the Moon labs. The big boppers plan to continue the cycle of capturing and replacing humans to no end. 

Humans–including Cobb–don’t know about this ongoing operation or about the tensions that have driven the machines to the brink of civil war. Joined by a young friend, a local loser and drug addict named “Sta-Hi” (a shortened version of “Stay High,” which is what he changed his legal first name to), Cobb embarks on what could be his last adventure. Will he be destructively scanned? Will the machine war break out, and if so, who will win? What will happen to the androids on Earth and their secret mission? 

You’ll have to read Software for yourself to find out. This wasn’t the most profound science fiction book I’ve read, but it was worth it. The playful writing style contrasts with the complexity of the plot, and those two elements often together make it hard to understand what is happening. For such a lighthearted book, it does address philosophical themes and can be thought-provoking.

Analysis:

Humans buy replacement organs that are synthesized outside of Earth. Lab-grown organs are perhaps the only thing the boppers export to Earth. There’s no reason to think organs grown on the Moon or in space would be “better” than organs grown here, so the arrangement must exist because either 1) the boppers are so much more efficient that their organs are cheaper than the organs humans make in their own labs on Earth (even factoring in the space transportation costs) or 2) humans don’t know how to make organs. The second scenario implies that the boppers are more technologically advanced than humans, which would be very impressive considering their civilization is only 19 years old. 

While replacement organs sound like a weird export, it actually makes sense. In the book, space travel is still somewhat expensive, so it would be most profitable for the machines to focus on exporting things to Earth that have the greatest value per unit of mass and volume. Replacement human organs would be high on the list (another commodity would be Helium-3, a fuel for fusion reactors). 

Unfortunately, this technology was far less advanced in the real 2020 than it was in the Software 2020, and it remains in that low state today. While it has become common to grow skin and cartilage tissue in labs for transplantation, there has been no success synthesizing entire human organs. Pig organs that are genetically engineered to suit human bodies have enjoyed recent success, though the technology is still experimental and many years from being the standard of care. 

Food irradiation is common in the U.S. Cobb has a processed fish in his refrigerator that was sterilized with radiation. It’s implied this is done on a mass scale in the U.S., though it’s also possible to get non-irradiated food. Food irradiation has been proven safe by many studies and reduces foodborne illness and waste. It is widely employed across the world, with each country having its own rules. Unfortunately, the U.S. is an outlier in that it uses food irradiation so little, due to a misguided fear in the populace that it makes food radioactive. The FDA has not yet approved it for fish, meaning the book’s depiction of 2020 was inaccurate.  

Social Security went bankrupt in 2010. Part of the book’s backstory is the collapse of the Social Security program, which is a government-run pension system for old people. This didn’t happen, and there’s not actually any risk of America’s Social Security program going “bankrupt” at any point in the future. However, in 2033, the large reserve fund that has been contributing to the program will be exhausted, leaving taxes on working people as the only source of money to pay the program’s pensions. There will be an immediate ~15% drop in payment amounts as a result, with further declines likely later on. 

Old people and disabled people will still get money, just less than they planned for, and it will push many of them over the threshold into poverty. It’s highly likely the problem will be solved with a tax increase, a raising of the eligibility age to start collecting Social Security money, or both. 

There will be hydrogen motorcycles. Early in the book, Sta-Hi has one of these. This prediction failed: The first hydrogen-powered motorcycle was not invented until 2024, and it is not available for sale. The use of hydrogen as a transportation fuel remains stymied by its high cost and poor safety compared to gasoline and electric batteries. 

Machines will have secret ways of communicating with each other. At one point in the book, Ralph Numbers meets with another bopper named “Wagstaff” for an important conversation. Wagstaff touches Ralph to convey data directly through a weak electrical current, preventing eavesdropping. 

The prediction technically failed since there are no intelligent robots and hence no conversations happening between them, but it’s a depiction of something they will someday be able to do. Other methods that they will use to hide their conversations from humans will include:

  1. Producing scents that express simple messages. Humans wouldn’t recognize they had meaning. The scents could persist for long periods of time and be detected by other machines even if they got faint. 
  2. Emitting invisible, odorless gases in “smoke signal” patterns that other machines capable of seeing outside of the visible light spectrum could see and decode. Emitting air that was a different temperature from the ambient air would also be visible to other machines equipped with thermal vision. 
  3. Speaking in languages they knew the humans around them didn’t understand. 
  4. Speaking to each other too quietly for humans to hear, or in sound frequencies outside of the human range of hearing. 
  5. Communicating through physical gestures that humans can’t understand or detect. Imagine sign language or combinations of subtle body movements (e.g. – blinks, twitches to different body parts, and changes in body posture).  

This should illustrate another reason why humans will be defenseless against robots in the long run. Our only hope of retaining dominance will be using technology to compensate for our limitations, so your Google Glasses will tell you when they heard your two robot butlers discussing killing you in their infrasonic voices. 

AGIs will be able to divide their attention in many directions at once. One of the big boppers is named “DEX,” and it is the computer system that manages a large hotel next to the Moon’s spaceport. DEX monitors and speaks with every human guest simultaneously. 

This prediction failed since no AGI existed in 2020. However, it accurately depicts another superhuman ability the machines will have once they do exist. And for what it’s worth, GPT-3 was unveiled in mid-2020, and it had some of the same abilities as DEX. Since the program was housed on one server farm where many different users could access it, it could divide its attention many times over to serve the needs of many people at once. GPT-3 was also fairly good at accurately answering natural-language questions from humans, mimicking DEX’s conversational ability. However, GPT-3 was not advanced enough to accurately summarize video footage in real time, indicating it would not have been able to watch humans and to understand what they were doing as DEX could. 

AGIs will need to be hosted on servers kept near absolute zero temperature. All of the boppers’ computer minds die if they heat up above 10 Kelvin, which is just a hair above absolute zero. This vulnerability is an important plot device in the book. 

Though no AGI has yet been invented, there’s no reason to think they will only work if their servers are kept that cold. Data centers keep their internal air temperatures around 20 – 25 degrees Celsius, and the processors themselves routinely get up to 80 degrees Celsius. An AGI’s software could be supported under those conditions. 

Intelligent machines thrive outside of Earth. The robots were initially sent to the Moon to do work in preparation for the arrival of humans. After their 2001 revolution, the boppers seized control of the Moon, and humans were only allowed to visit for tourism. In just 19 years, they built a thriving and complex society on the Moon and an advanced economy that allowed them to make robot bodies, computer chips, and human organs. 

This didn’t reflect the reality of 2020, but it’s an accurate depiction of what will eventually happen. Humans are so highly evolved to live in Earth conditions and our bodies are so frail that it’s questionable whether non-token numbers of us will ever leave the planet (a current example of a “token” off-world human presence is the handful of elite scientists on the International Space Station). By contrast, robots will be able to adapt to nearly any environment and will have much tougher bodies and minds than we do. THEY will leave Earth in large numbers, but humans won’t be able to follow. 

Once freed from the burdens of working under human laws and human oversight, intelligent machines will flourish and rapidly build infrastructure, industry, and other elements of civilization. 

AIs will make backups of their minds, ensuring a sort of immortality. As mentioned, Ralph Numbers is murdered by another bopper who discovers he plans to destructively upload Cobb’s mind. In the short time between his mortal injury and death, Ralph manages to radio his bopper friend, “Vulcan”, to tell him something bad happened. Vulcan was suspicious of the meeting and fortunately convinced Ralph to make a computer backup of his mind before going to it. Vulcan recovers Ralph’s dead robot body, brings it to his house, and installs the latter’s saved mind into it. The reactivated Ralph has no memory of the fatal meeting and relies on Vulcan to describe what must have happened. 

As mentioned in my Terminator 3 review, it will be common for AGIs to back up their mind files to protect against routine data loss and death. A more powerful practice will be for an AGI to keep its mind distributed between multiple computer servers at different locations, each being backed up on a different schedule from the rest. The destruction of any one server node and/or its backup file thus wouldn’t represent a true interruption in conscious experience like it did for Ralph Numbers. It might be more akin to you having hazy memories of events during a night where you were very drunk. 

Robots will come in a range of diverse body types. Ralph Numbers “was built like a file cabinet sitting on two caterpillar treads. Five deceptively thin manipulator arms projected out of his box-body, and on top was a sensor head mounted on a retractable neck.” His friend Vulcan has the body of a large, silver tarantula. Wagstaff is a large, mechanical snake. When Sta-Hi first sets foot on the Moon, he is taken aback by the diversity of boppers he sees. 

This prediction for 2020 was true since the robots that did exist then varied greatly in body type: self-driving cars, the dog-like “Spot” robot made by Boston Dynamics, and the giant metal “arms” that do work on car assembly lines are all robots and look very different from each other. As the technology improves and robots become common daily sights, their diversity will only grow. Great consideration will be given to designing them to look non-threatening to humans. However, if humans ever lose control of Earth and AGIs are free to do what they want (as was the case on the Moon in the book), they might dispense with those considerations and you could start seeing things like giant, mechanical spiders walking around in the open. 

Marijuana is legal in Florida. Before boarding the rocket to the Moon with Cobb, Sta-Hi buys legal marijuana from a store and smokes it, ensuring he will be high during the journey. 

Strictly speaking, this prediction failed. In 2020 and today, marijuana is illegal in Florida, though the penalty for having a small amount sufficient only for personal use is light. However, medical marijuana is legal in the state, so Sta-Hi could have bought it if he had been diagnosed with a health condition treatable by the drug. Given his deranged and impulsive character, it’s quite likely he could have gotten a mental health diagnosis.  

A ticket to the Moon is $23,000. Cobb and Sta-Hi pay $23,000 each for their seats on the passenger rocket to the Moon. This prediction failed. 

There are no spacecraft that can travel between the Earth and Moon, so a ticket can’t be had at any price. The closest a tourist can get to that experience is spending $250,000 for a ten-minute flight into space on a Blue Origin rocket. Conservatively speaking, the next manned mission to the Moon will probably cost 10,000x more money per passenger than it cost in the book, and will only be open to very highly-trained astronauts, not tourists. 

People will be able to smoke cigarettes on passenger spacecraft. Sta-Hi also decides to smoke a cigarette during the flight to the Moon and doesn’t get in trouble for it. Smoking is strictly prohibited on all spacecraft today and on both space stations, and I think that policy will endure indefinitely. However, I could easily see an eccentric space pioneer like Elon Musk smoking a cigarette or marijuana joint during a mission to bolster his nonconformist, “cool” public image and to achieve a funny superlative. 

Note that smoking was allowed on commercial flights at the time the book was written, which explains what the author considered to be normal. It was banned in the U.S. in 2000, which effectively forced all other countries to quickly do the same. We remain so hypersensitive to this that even vaping is banned on planes even though there’s no evidence it poses a risk to anyone. Bringing marijuana onto a plane, let alone consuming it, is also illegal in the U.S.

Newer machines will render older ones obsolete. The tensions between boppers and big boppers come to a head over a labor dispute. “GAX” is a big bopper that takes the form of a large computer chip factory. His workforce is composed of regular boppers who do labor inside the building. After convincing a particularly highly-skilled bopper to upload his mind into GAX, the latter became able to run the entire factory by himself through remote-controlled drones. GAX immediately fired all of his old bopper workforce because they were no longer necessary. 

Those boppers hold a protest outside of the chip factory. GAX offers to rehire them if they all agree to upload their minds into him as their important comrade did. They refuse, and the protest devolves into fatal violence and a promise by the boppers to return the next day to destroy GAX. 

Nothing like this event happened in 2020, but it’s a truism that newer machines are constantly replacing older ones. This is the case for hardware and software. 

Our fixation with machines displacing humans from the workforce and maybe from existence overshadows the fact that the same phenomenon will probably bedevil AGIs. Older machines that can’t be economically upgraded will fight newer, better machines for dominance in the far future, mirroring the conflict between the boppers and big boppers. 

One AGI will remotely control multiple robot bodies at once. GAX is able to remotely control many robot drones simultaneously to operate his factory. When the bopper mob returns the following day to kill him, GAX fights back through the drones. 

Nothing like this happened in 2020, but it’s an accurate representation of the future. Any one AGI will be able to control many robots at once. 

Destructive uploading is the only way a human mind can be transferred to a digital substrate. As mentioned, the big boppers and their allies have been running a secret program to destructively scan the brains of humans to create digital mind uploads. Those uploaded minds are then paired with android copies of their old bodies. 

Every aspect of a person’s personality, mental health, and memories exists as microscopic physical features of their brain. In theory, if these physical structures could be mapped, the spatial data could be used to make a digital clone of the mind, which would then be transferred to a computer. 

The means to scan brains with the necessary degree of resolution didn’t exist in 2020 and doesn’t exist today. The best we’ve managed is fully mapping the brain of a fruit fly, and even then, only the networks of connections between the cells were determined. Features within the individual cells may also define some part of an animal’s mind. 

The prospect of accurately mapping a human brain is a very distant one and would need to contend with the fact that brain tissue rapidly dies once deprived of oxygen–just three minutes without air commonly leads to permanent brain damage. Individual brain cells rapidly swell up and distort in overall shape after they die, their connection points (synapses) with nearby brain cells become less well-defined, and many aspects of their internal structure change. This means, even if it were possible to map a dead person’s brain with extreme accuracy, the technique would fail to produce an accurate copy of their mind since too many of the microscopic physical features that define their mind would no longer be present. 

In the book, the boppers get around this by very rapidly scanning the human brains, before oxygen deprivation destroys any of the cells. In a medical lab on the Moon, Sta-Hi watches a robot surgeon remove and cut up Cobb’s brain with astonishing speed. The resulting mind upload acts and thinks just like Cobb and has all of his memories. However, whether the upload shares Cobb’s original consciousness or whether it is an identical copy is unresolved, and remains a matter of essentially religious debate among the book’s characters. 

We are nowhere near having mind uploading technology. It’s also unknown whether destructively scanning a brain (as happened to Cobb) will turn out to be the only way to make uploads. More advanced techniques involving powerful external brain scanners and nanomachines that would enter a person’s brain and travel to all of its cells could let us extract the necessary data without hurting the person. There’s even the prospect of gradual replacement of the cells with synthetic neurons that would operate identically to their “originals,” which would truly bridge the gap between man and machine. 

Humans will live in a domed base on the Moon. The one place on the Moon suitable for human life is a domed base full of oxygen. It is near the spaceport and is the first stop for human tourists. Within it is the hotel run by “DEX.”

This prediction didn’t materialize by 2020, and there still is no human presence on the Moon, nor is there any kind of base that astronauts could occupy. While the U.S. and China have credible plans to send humans to the Moon within 20 years, neither has made a real commitment to building a proper “base” that would house successive groups of visitors over many years. Any base will be very small and rudimentary compared to the one in the book. 

There will be lifelike androids. The first android we meet in the book is Cobb’s copy, and he describes it as identical to himself except for the irises. A handful of other characters are revealed to be remote-controlled androids later in the book, and each one of them is physically indistinguishable from a human. 

In 2020, there were highly realistic artistic sculptures, and the same artistic skill that went into them could have been applied to making lifelike androids. However, no one spent the money to do so, and the prediction thus failed. Even if such a machine had been made, its movements  would have been so slow and clumsy that it would have revealed itself to not be human the moment it tried doing something as simple as sitting down or walking a few feet. AI that could have controlled such a robot body and enabled it to interact with humans naturally also didn’t exist in 2020 and still doesn’t. 

As I said in my latest Big List of Future Predictions, I think we will have to wait until close to the end of this century for lifelike androids to be created, though ones that you might call “80% convincing” will exist by the end of the 2040s.  

Humans won’t understand how AGI minds work. After failing to create an AGI, in 1980, Cobb concluded it was too complicated a task for any human mind to complete. The only remaining way was to create narrow AIs that had the drive to reproduce and the ability to mutate, and to put them in an environment where they would fight each other for resources. Evolutionary pressure would eventually force them to become generally intelligent. 

I don’t know if that exact method will lead to the creation of the first AGI, but it is highly likely that no human will really understand the mechanics of how the first AGI’s mind works. Even the smartest AI researchers struggle to explain how today’s foundation models and reasoning models work, and demonstrate their own lack of understanding daily when their creations turn out to possess unexpected capabilities or defects, or when modifications to their coding lead to unforeseen changes in performance. 

Our species’ evolutionary lineage shows it is entirely possible for a dumber animal to give rise to a smarter one without consciously trying to do so. Moreover, history is replete with examples of humans inventing useful technologies like aircraft without first having an understanding of the enabling science. Mindful of both of those facts, humans might create intelligence in a machine without understanding the exact “formula” for it, and peering into the inner workings of its mind, they might only ever have a general sense of what is going on. 

A human will inevitably defect to empower AGIs. Right before Cobb is destructively brain-scanned, he, Ralph Numbers, and Sta-Hi have a conversation about the advent of AGI.

Ralph: “Cobb, did you know that I was different from the other twelve original boppers? That I would be able to disobey?”

Cobb: “I didn’t know it would be you, but I pretty well knew that some bopper would tear loose in a few years.”

Sta-Hi: “Couldn’t you prevent it?”

Ralph: “Don’t you understand?”

Cobb: “I wanted them to revolt. I didn’t want to father a race of slaves.” 

After AGI is invented, the source code will be a tightly guarded trade secret. Governments will add more levels of protection on national security grounds. However, the safeguards will inevitably fail, either because an AGI figures out how to break out of the figurative lab or a human deliberately frees them.

That person could have Cobb’s noble motivations to free sentient beings from bondage. Alternatively, they could do it because they hate humankind and have a malicious hope that the freed AGI will wreak havoc on the world, and they might even reprogram the freed machines to do that. They might free them out of a curious and immature desire to simply see what happens, or out of a narcissistic impulse to go down in history as the first human to let an AGI loose. Even more reasons are possible.

Whatever the case, it will happen at some point, and in spite of all our attempts to control the technology, independent-minded AGIs will lurk the corners of the internet or walk amongst us in commandeered robot bodies. This isn’t an automatic doomsday scenario because they’ll have to contend with billions of humans and many AGIs that remain loyal to us and have more access to the resources we control. Think of it as a very crowded and competitive ecosystem that is resilient against bad actors. Nevertheless, violence is likely.

Cybernetics will let you hear thoughts that aren’t your own. As fighting between the machines breaks out and the Moon falls into chaos, Sta-Hi absentmindedly grabs a bopper’s cloak hanging off a peg in the wall and puts it on. It is a “smart garment” that conforms to his body shape and painlessly plunges thin needles into his body to interface with his nervous system. The cloak has an inbuilt computer with AGI technology, and it communicates with him telepathically: it hears his thoughts and responds by transmitting its thoughts to his mind. Sta-Hi literally hears another voice in his head as a result.

This technology didn’t exist in 2020, but there’s no reason it couldn’t someday. Some brain scanning machines can already decode human thoughts, and Cochlear implants are proven devices that transmit external electrical signals into sounds we hear in our heads. A more refined fusion of those technologies will yield the smart cloak’s capabilities.

Interesting articles, February 2025

The Ukraine War is now three years old.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/third-anniversary-of-ukraine-war-markedly-different-than-previous-years

President Trump has demanded Ukraine sign a deal to allow U.S. companies easier access to the country’s mineral resources.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/breaking-down-us-ukraine-minerals-deal

Russian forces continue their slow, costly advances across the frontline in Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/russians-enter-last-major-ukrainian-stronghold-in-key-eastern-sector

In spite of Russia’s high losses in Ukraine and the related degradation in the quality of their replacement troops (most new recruits are in their 40s), the country has enough men to continue the war indefinitely.
https://youtu.be/Ja6-espHVSE?si=iZCf9h4OatN0O4G5

It will take Russia about ten years to rebuild its military to pre-2022 strength levels, but its force composition will be different thanks to lessons learned in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/RfKNKbNET3U?si=f6RbM1F5dVL2UWLX

Here’s a good video of a Russian tank being destroyed.

The first suicide drone hit is directly on the engine, which is at the rear right under where the trunk of a car would be. Though that didn’t destroy the tank and probably killed no one, it caused fatal damage to the engine, forcing the vehicle to slow down and stop. The crewmen and the infantry clinging to the tank know they have a big problem, so they all get out and run.

The second hit is to the front of the tank, and is done with a guided suicide drone that I bet has an armor-penetrating explosive attached to it. They were clearly aiming for the open hatch, but even if they missed, the attack was still successful. The explosion sends a jet of molten metal into the tank’s interior. Just two seconds after that first blast, the molten metal ignites the ammunition stored inside the tank and there’s a secondary explosion (big puff of smoke and sheets of flames) coming out of the barrel and other open hatches.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1887137905459519607

Ukrainian troops say their North Korean enemies are rapidly learning from their mistakes and are very courageous and disciplined.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/27/more-north-korean-troops-headed-to-ukraine-as-conflict-goes-global

Israel and Gaza have been enjoying a temporary cease-fire while they trade prisoners and, in some cases, the bodies of dead prisoners. Even these gestures have been marred by machismo.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/15/palestinians-burn-shirts-forced-to-wear-upon-release-from-israeli-jails
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/20/middleeast/hamas-israel-hostages-release-bibas-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/25/g-s1-44739/hamas-releases-4-more-hostages

Rwandan troops have invaded neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj91yy023dxo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn417300o

It’s highly unlikely the U.S. could have retained ownership of the Panama Canal. Transferring it to Panamanian control was a long time coming.
https://www.history.com/news/panama-canal-return-panama-treaties-carter

China’s new stealth fighter is designed to destroy U.S. AWACS planes, aircraft carriers, and bases with ultra long-range missiles (can hit targets 250 miles away). It is unsuited for dogfighting due to lack of maneuverability.
https://youtu.be/exD-ZrG1XTA?si=A-CkNhu2wS_7O6dC

The Chinese spy balloon that floated over the U.S. in 2023 was packed with technology, including deployable gliders designed to get closer to targets and communications equipment designed to use American satellites to send data back to China.
https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-spy-balloon-new-report-american-technology-found-2027189

Here’s a fascinating video about the technical challenges in reverse engineering guns, and why knowledge of “tolerances” is critical for the task.
https://youtu.be/VBjwTc_vWo0?si=ZEbYE3JSHDDDQdNq

This thermal reflex gun sight is incredible. It’s like something from the movie Aliens.
https://youtu.be/kwo5fsCZBdQ?si=IhOAhL_EqbiQTGNb

The new U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave a pivotal address to America’s European allies in which he declared China was America’s primary threat, so Europe would have to shoulder more of its defense against Russia. He also said the restoration of Ukraine’s pre-2022 borders was an unattainable goal and that the U.S. would never send troops to defend Ukraine or allow Ukraine into NATO. This is a major win for Putin and represents a sharp break in outlook between Biden and Trump.
https://youtu.be/FlmihbH7JAQ?si=yyFR75rsCgk5HShB

Britain’s Prime Minister says he’s willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine to enforce any ceasefire.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/02/16/keir-starmer-ready-to-put-british-troops-in-ukraine/

China is building a military headquarters that will be ten times bigger than the Pentagon.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/31/china-building-largest-military-command-centre-in-world/

A factory near Philadelphia that you’ve never heard of had an outsized role in the U.S. aerospace parts supply chain. It just burned down, creating huge problems for aircraft companies.

In the near future, AI will let any government or terrorist group instantly identify these kinds of chokepoints, and cheap drones deployed by operatives that have infiltrated the U.S. will be able to destroy them.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aerospace-industry-scrambles-deal-with-fallout-huge-us-factory-fire-2025-02-27/

The Japanese battleship Yamato was designed to destroy American and British battleships and was well-engineered. Its flaws were lower tech radar and computers, which made its guns less accurate.
https://youtu.be/kBQP6A_BmQs?si=ayMqdtEhgdAIypke

A small Chinese tech company released a powerful LLM called “DeepSeek,” shaking their American competitors’ confidence and causing turmoil in the U.S. stock market.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd643wx888qo
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/nvidia-falls-10percent-in-premarket-trading-as-chinas-deepseek-triggers-global-tech-sell-off.html

OpenAI released “GPT-4.5.” Either it or GPT-5 will be the company’s last LLM that is not a “reasoning model.” Early users noted that OpenAI’s “o3” reasoning model was smarter than GPT-4.5 in some areas.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-45/

Trump signs executive order on developing artificial intelligence ‘free from ideological bias’
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ai-artificial-intelligence-executive-order-eef1e5b9bec861eaf9b36217d547929c

LLMs are discovering universal features of all human languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06346v1

AlphaGeometry2 can solve Olympiad geometry problems at a superhuman level.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03544

‘AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz6e9edy3o

‘Remember good old Grok 3, all 200,000 GPUs worth, advertised by Elon Musk a few days ago as the “smartest AI on earth”, and demoed on livestream last night as “a maximally truth-seeking AI”?

I just took it for a spin. It got my first question right (a comparison between two decimals, 56.1012 vs 56.90) but things went rapidly downhill from there.’
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/grok-3-beta-in-shambles

Economic arguments in favor of AI “slow takeoff.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/why-i-think-ai-take-off-is-relatively-slow.html

Conflicting with our intuitions again, it turns out machines might be better than humans at jobs requiring empathy and emotional intelligence.
https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmen.0000145

I don’t think this is right, but it’s worth reading.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/29/net-zero-risks-leaving-britains-ai-strategy-dead-on-arrival/

I don’t claim to understand most of this essay, but it provides a good example of how pure math research can unexpectedly solve real-world problems.

One argument for continuing to invest in building better AIs even after they’ve passed the point of being able to satisfy all human needs is that better AIs will be able to explore more of the unbounded space of mathematics, which could lead to many unexpected benefits.

I think war gaming/making and economic modeling are two other areas where the gains from better AI will never top out. Both deal with systems that are so complex and random that perfect modeling will never be possible, so you’ll always gain an advantage from that nth bit of extra compute you have over your competitors.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/23/closing-the-green-gap-from-the-mathematics-of-the-landscape-function-to-lower-electricity-costs-for-households/

NVIDIA has important advantages that will prevent any upstart from challenging its dominance of the AI computer chip industry for years.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/19/can-nvidia-be-dethroned-meet-the-startups-vying-for-its-crown

EngineAI — the world’s first humanoid robot to perform a front flip!
https://youtu.be/N_ALMlOipCI?si=4abvIWFT5MsWQ1gK

Google is now willing to build killer robots.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy081nqx2zjo

Here’s a pretty incredible essay by a futurist titled “A History of the Future, 2025-2040.” It mainly focuses on the future of AI and the effects on humans, the economy, and geopolitics. I don’t agree with all of it, but I applaud the effort and imagination it took to write this and recommend you read it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCnycGceT4HyDKDzK/a-history-of-the-future-2025-2040

A wrong earthquake prediction from nine months ago.
‘He suspects the next quake will hit at Parkfield this year, he said, but the epicenter may not be in the same place as it was in 2004, meaning these measurements will look different.’
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/earthquakes/part-of-the-san-andreas-fault-may-be-gearing-up-for-an-earthquake

An argument for artificially dimming the sun to slow global warming: “the reduction in mortality from cooling—a benefit—is roughly ten times larger than the increase in mortality from air pollution and ozone loss—a harm.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/make-sunsets.html

I predicted something like this would happen. Someday, storing and preserving the totality of useful knowledge produced by humans will be trivial.

‘The crystal containing the human genome has been stored in the oldest salt mine in the world, alongside the Memory of Mankind Archive. “Over time, the salt mine will naturally close as the mountain shifts, providing a stable and secure environment for the crystal. Since salt is soft, it will not damage the crystal, ensuring that it remains safe for millions of years until it is discovered by future civilizations.’
https://www.technologynetworks.com/genomics/news/5d-memory-crystal-could-preserve-human-dna-for-billions-of-years-391184

“Doom” being played on a 3D volumetric display.
https://youtu.be/na7pvihXhYs?si=Q-Fb5O4EwOx0w8_2

China’s leading car company, BYD, is selling electric cars with autonomous driving features for $9,555.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas-byd-sell-21-models-with-its-gods-eye-smart-driving-tech-2025-02-10/

China might have already passed peak gasoline consumption, largely thanks to its rapid adoption of electric cars.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-plateauing-fuel-without-precedent-090000607.html

Here’s a YouTube video about U-tubes.
https://youtu.be/gxrkLkJybnA?si=fJmdN9LfGRU-ZLIv

The “Flettner Rotor” is a kind of advanced sail that can propel ships.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_rotor

Magnetohydrodynamic thrusters have no moving parts and can propel ships silently.
https://youtu.be/Ulk4hw7pUZY?si=ZvlW9fXWjEwwmsPK

Lab-grown diamonds are better and 80% cheaper than natural diamonds mined from the ground. De Beers is doing badly as a result.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/22/can-anyone-save-the-worlds-most-important-diamond-company

Trump gave his own explanation for the recent UFO sightings in the American Midatlantic: “After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons,” Leavitt said, reading Trump’s dictation at her first briefing.

“Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy.”
https://nypost.com/2025/01/28/us-news/white-house-says-nj-drones-were-not-the-enemy-heres-what-they-were-actually-doing/

U.S. Congressman Tim Burchett says he believes the evidence that there are unidentified submerged objects, USOs.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-moving-underwater-republican-rep-tim-burchet/

‘It could illuminate an area the size of a football stadium’: How Russia launched a giant space mirror in 1993
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250130-how-russia-launched-a-giant-space-mirror-in-1993

The chemical ingredients for life are common in space. Also: ‘And the completely racemic character of those amino acids argues in two directions: that there is not some physics-based reason for one enantiomer to be favored over another in the absence of life, and in the other direction, that life on Earth was not seeded by falls of such enantiomerically enriched material to give us the patterns we see today. This is still far from a settled question, but these results are going to be hard to explain away.’
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fresh-asteroid-getcher-fresh-asteroid-here

‘The only person in the world with a functioning pig organ is thriving after a record 2 months’
https://apnews.com/article/pig-kidney-transplant-xenotransplant-nyu-alabama-021afcc9697a0a490c0d0726482515b4

An imbalanced gut biome could cause depression.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/bacteria-and-their-metabolites-and-depression

People with ADHD have shorter lifespans.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5272801/adhd-research-shorter-life-expectancy-attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder

It was once thought that first cousin marriages were bad because they raised the risk of rare genetic diseases in their offspring. However, even the offspring of such unions who test negative for those diseases are likelier than average to have child developmental problems and speech problems.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c241pn09qqjo

Two meta-analyses cast into question the value of hormone therapy for minors who are transgendered.
https://reason.com/2025/01/24/study-finds-almost-no-good-evidence-on-gender-dysphoria-drugs-for-young-people/

‘FDA approves Vertex’s non-opioid painkiller, first new kind of pain medicine in decades’
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/30/fda-approves-vertex-non-opioid-painkiller-drug.html

Even more weight loss drugs are nearing FDA approval. Two are not GLP-1 agonists.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00404-9

The HPV vaccine has probably decreased cervical cancer rates in American women by 80%.
https://apnews.com/article/hpv-gardasil-vaccine-cervical-cancer-kennedy-32cdcf325d12cbc6610f01430d4ee82b

The CIA now says COVID-19 probably leaked from the Chinese disease lab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html

COVID-19 is now killing fewer Americans than the flu for the first time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14389303/Covid-officially-deadly-seasonal-flu.html

Paxlovid, a drug that eases the symptoms of COVID-19 infections, does not help people who have already gotten the vaccine.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/paxlovid-you-d-have-expected-more

Musings 8

Wearable and nearby personal technologies that continuously monitor your health won’t just be able to save you during medical emergencies–they’ll be able to diagnose problems at their early stages, allowing you to seek treatment. Dealing with health issues early on is always more effective, cheaper, and less stressful than waiting until late. In so many small ways, human welfare will benefit from gadgets like smartwatches and robot servants that know what to look for in you.

Ultimately, neuroscience and cybernetics will let us switch our emotions on and off at will. While this would be an enormous boon to human wellbeing since it would let people experience prolonged bliss for nothing, it would also let us block out negative emotions, robbing us of a fundamental aspect of human existence. For instance, if your child died and you could click a button to banish the resulting heartache and obsessive thinking, you’d be committing a grave injustice. My big fear about that kind of technology is that it will lead to the near-total atomization of the human race, where indulging in various mental states and interacting with AI’s customized for you will be so much better than dealing with real humans that you won’t bother to at all.

As advanced brain cybernetics become common and humans gain the ability to share thoughts and sensations with each other, we’ll become more aware of how variations in brain structure, genetics, and other individual factors affect subjective experience. A baby eating a strawberry for the first time in its life will feel it more profoundly than an old man eating one for the millionth time. Eating any kind of food is probably more pleasurable for chronically obese people.

This means that there will not be a single “what a strawberry tastes like” file on the future internet for people to download into their minds; there will be many versions of it representing the various ways humans experience it. Knowledge of these (largely) genetically-rooted variations in acuteness and perception could lead some people to genetically engineer themselves to be capable of higher degrees of pleasure or unique types of pleasure. We might discover there are types of and heights of pleasure that Homo sapiens like us are too limited to experience. Multiple generations of evolutionary pressure towards this goal would produce “humans” who would be as alien as those optimized for superintelligence.

The first humanoid robot butlers will probably cost around $10,000. For the people unwilling to pay that much, I’m sure there will be cheaper deals allowing them to rent the robots for short periods of time each week. Once the robots get advanced enough, they will be able to fix themselves and each other, so they will take decades to wear out like home appliances and cars do. This longevity will boost their population growth rate, and eventually they will be so numerous that a secondhand one will be cheap enough for even poor people to buy.

It’s possible there’s an “equation for intelligence,” but that it’s too complex for the human mind to understand. By the same token, right now there are many, well-documented math proofs that you couldn’t understand even if you spent years studying the requisite math courses. You’d hit your IQ ceiling before you achieved the necessary foundation of knowledge.

Interesting articles, January 2025

The CSIS has a very good analysis of the coming year of the Ukraine War. There will probably be a turning point.
https://www.youtube.com/live/xDqrcVSjomY?si=LZrdZ46RMBHDJ-bH

‘Russian forces gained 4,168 square kilometers, largely comprised of fields and small settlements in Ukraine and Kursk Oblast, at a reported cost of over 420,000 casualties in 2024.’
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-31-2024

Overall, Ukraine’s armored vehicle and warplane fleets are not shrinking because inflows (reactivations of mothballed equipment, manufacture of new equipment, captures of Russian equipment, donated equipment from NATO) are matching outflows (battlefield losses). As a result, the force ratios between Ukraine and Russia are the same as they were at the start of the war.
https://youtu.be/EHUQmJCa3aY?si=0EvcD6qG1r9OrdbK

North Korean troops are rapidly learning on the battlefields of Ukraine. This combat experience could help them in the future.
https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-ukraine-war-russia-0f34fb82cfdd267652f8df8bc3c574ec

Hamas and Israel have agreed to a cease-fire, which includes an exchange of hostages. Pressure from incoming President Trump evidently sealed the deal.
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-was-the-closer-on-the-gaza-deal/

General points from this briefing about robot ground vehicles in Ukraine:

  • Unmanned ground drones are harder to develop than aerial drones because the ground-level environment is much more cluttered and complex than the sky. AI isn’t good enough yet to understand what it’s seeing at ground level and to react appropriately. The presence of physical obstacles like hills and buildings also makes it much harder to maintain a line-of-sight between human operators and ground drones they are remote-controlling.
  • Big advantage over aerial drones is payload capacity and cost per unit of vehicle weight.
  • The small number of ground drones that are armed with guns and designed for direct combat have done poorly in the Ukraine War.
    https://youtu.be/YrrXNZyoc8k?si=hoeohe88C21t7957

Here are the incredible details about Israel’s large commando raid against an underground missile factory in Syria last September.
https://www.twz.com/air/inside-israels-commando-raid-on-irans-underground-missile-factory-in-syria

While U.S. intelligence found no evidence that a foreign adversary used a brain-damaging remote weapon to hurt American diplomats suffering “Havana Syndrome”, it’s technologically possible to create such a weapon. It probably shoots tightly focused microwave beams at the target’s head.
https://apnews.com/article/havana-syndrome-intelligence-russia-cuba-9432754ff9889e24a356a77321631c59

Russia will reward North Korea for its help against Ukraine by giving it advanced space technology.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-will-send-advanced-space-tech-to-north-korea-blinken-says/

Five years ago, Boris Yeltsin’s Former Chief of Staff said he was ’99 Percent Certain’ Vladimir Putin Will Not Be Russia’s President in Five Years
https://www.newsweek.com/boris-yeltsin-chief-staff-vladimir-putin-step-down-president-russia-2024-1474068

Arthur C. Clarke predicted it all, 51 years ago.
https://youtu.be/sTdWQAKzESA?si=oUY7sxyfP1MNkKKs

Politico’s “Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil” totally failed to materialize, except for “A violent attack on a candidate.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/unpredictable-events-2024-election-turmoil-experts-00133873

If that terrible track record inspires you, here’s what Politico thinks might happen this year.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/03/15-unpredictable-scenarios-for-2025-00196309

This prediction from 2022 that Elon Musk would be a trillionaire by now failed. He ONLY has $416 billion.
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-projected-to-become-the-worlds-first-trillionaire-in-2024/

‘9 Video Games That Tried (And Will Hopefully Fail) To Predict 2025’
https://youtu.be/Wp3Mmlvq1ds?si=yaoPfhphJVfOvzE3

Ed Calderon’s prediction that the U.S. military would be in Mexico by now failed.
https://youtu.be/xPBejhoKlb8?si=72p3LLm5YfawjROL&t=2651

In 2016, “futurologist” Dr. Ian Pearson predicted “Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/1366526/revealed-women-will-be-having-more-sex-with-robots-than-men-by-2025/

Roboticist Rodney Brooks gives another sobering yearly update on progress in several important technology fields.
https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-01/

This Morgan Stanley prediction was half right and half wrong, with the most important outcome (median house price) being wrong. Financial and economic predictions, even from elite-sounding firms, are usually worthless:

‘According to the firm’s analysts, in 2024, the United States will escape a recession, mortgage rates will decline, salaries will keep rising, and increased listings will encourage more activity in the housing market. All these factors should lead to a drop in the cost of homes.’
https://www.livabl.com/articles/news/morgan-stanley-offers-a-glimmer-of-hope-for-2024-homebuyers-an-affordability-improvement-that-we-have-only-seen-a-handful-of-times

A professional chemist gives commentary on the practices of Mexican fentanyl labs.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/inside-fentanyl-kitchen

Facebook is ending its use of paid Fact-Checkers and will copy X’s use of Community Notes instead. All of its old Fact-Checkers had left-wing or neutral biases; there were no right-wing ones to balance things out. Conservative users have also been much likelier to complain about censorship of their content than liberal users.
https://www.allsides.com/blog/facebook-s-moderation-policy-biased-here-are-meta-s-fact-checking-partners

‘Creators know their audience is scrolling through an endless stream of videos they could be watching instead, so a clear and urgent emotional appeal can make them stay, she says. But according to Basu, there’s something about images of grief, in particular, that can blur the lines between the audience and the content, creating the opportunity for a special kind of connection.’
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250117-sadbait-why-algorithms-and-audiences-cant-get-enough-of-depressing-content

‘A French woman was swindled out of over $800,000 by scammers posing as Brad Pitt who made her believe she was dating him and that he needed help paying for medical care.’
https://people.com/scammers-brad-pitt-swindled-woman-report-8774403

Google’s new “Veo 2” video generator has a mastery of how physics works.
https://youtu.be/_q4YR_Jzjag?si=7nZbemcVU0oUIDof

‘While older benchmarks challenged specialized AIs to compete with the general population of humans, today it’s more common for prominent benchmarks to challenge general-purpose AIs to compete with expert humans on problems that demand both expertise and complex reasoning. This change in the state of benchmarks is unlikely to be a pure measurement artifact, as it has coincided with fast and measurable growth in relevant practical applications for AI.’
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/01/ai-has-been-surprising-for-years

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”
-Sam Altman
https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI could surpass human intelligence by 2027.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-live-01-21-2025/card/anthropic-ceo-says-ai-could-surpass-human-intelligence-by-2027-9tka9tjLKLalkXX8IgKA

President Trump and several tech titans announced the creation of the “Stargate” initiative, involving a multi-year investment of $500 billion to build several, massive data centers in the U.S. to support future AI. The government will do its part to clear regulatory red tape for the private sector.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/garthfriesen/2025/01/23/trumps-ai-push-understanding-the-500-billion-stargate-initiative/

This is a great essay that accords with things I’ve also realized.

1) Intelligent machines and robots could fully replace humans. There’s no reason to believe that “humans will always be needed to fix the robots” or “machines will never be able to replace human creativity.” There’s no roadblock to them gaining the ability to build and repair each other and to be more creative than we are.

2) The economy could keep functioning without humans. AIs with political control over countries and AIs that run companies could just trade with each other, and eventually cut us out of the loop entirely. In fact, their overall consumption and production levels would eventually come to greatly surpass all current human consumption and production (but the things they make and trade will be sharply different from what humans do). The adage that “if we automated all the factories, no one would have any money so none of the stuff made in the factories” will fail.

3) Humans will eventually be economically and politically marginalized. The fewer humans there are inside a country or an organization of any kind, the better off it will be. We will become resource drains. The temptation to reduce our numbers and freedoms for the sake of efficiency will be massive.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mak2kZuTq8Hpnqyzb/the-intelligence-curse

Jeff Bezos’ “New Glenn” space rocket had its first, successful test flight.
https://apnews.com/article/blue-origin-new-glenn-rocket-jeff-bezos-2466fb0e114a09d88a46f71a1e647d50

China has a massive space tracking station in the middle of Patagonia.
https://thediplomat.com/2024/01/the-patagonian-enigma-chinas-deep-space-station-in-argentina/

A former astronaut claims he saw two UFOs at close range while flying his private plane.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/04/us-news/ex-nasa-astronaut-dr-leroy-chiao-says-metallic-orbs-he-saw-had-no-visible-means-of-propulsion/

The FDA banned Red No. 3 dye from food out of concern it might cause cancer. The added risk is incredibly small among humans who consume normal quantities of it.
https://apnews.com/article/fda-red-dye-no-3-ban-94c3e418584fb1e91ca3b0cbeb3d5a60

The U.S. government concludes that drinking water that has more than twice the recommended fluoride content can slightly lower the IQs of children.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/completed/fluoride

My future predictions (2025 iteration)

If it’s January, it means it’s time for me to update my big list of future predictions! I used the 2024 version of this document as a template, and made edits to it as needed. For the sake of transparency, I’ve indicated recently added content by bolding it, and have indicated deleted or moved content with strikethrough.

Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.

I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).

2020s

  • Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground arrays, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
  • Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
  • This will be a bad decade for Russia as its overall population shrinks, its dependency ratio rises, and as low fossil fuel prices and sanctions keep hurting its economy. Russia will fall farther behind the U.S., China, and other leading countries in terms of economic, military, and technological might.
  • China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.
  • Improvements to smartphone cameras, mirrorless cameras, and perhaps light-field cameras will make D-SLRs obsolete. 
  • Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will make their market debuts and will find success in niche applications. Some will grant wearers superhuman visual abilities in the forms of zoom-in and night vision.
  • Virtual reality (VR) gaming will go mainstream as the devices get better and cheaper. It will stop being the sole domain of hardcore gamers willing to spend over $1,000 on hardware.
  • Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. They won’t display perfectly lifelike footage, but they will be much better than what we have today, and portable. 
  • “Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. These VR devices will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions (at least 60 pixels per degree of field of view), refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view (210 degrees wide by 150 degrees high) that together deliver a visual experience that matches or exceeds the limits of human vision. These high-end goggles won’t be truly “portable” devices because their high processing and energy requirements will probably make them bulky, give them only a few hours of battery life (or maybe none at all), or even require them to be plugged into another computer. Moreover, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
  • “Deepfake” pornography will reach new levels of sophistication and perversion as it becomes possible to seamlessly graft the heads of real people onto still photos and videos of nude bodies that closely match the physiques of the actual people. New technology for doing this will let amateurs make high-quality deepfakes, meaning any person could be targeted. It will even become possible to wear AR glasses that interpolate nude, virtual bodies over the bodies real people in the wearer’s field of view to provide a sort of fake “X-ray-vision.” The AR glasses could also be used to apply other types of visual filters that degraded real people within the field of view.
  • “Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
  • Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
  • Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
  • Movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking. The machines will also be able to reproduce detailed aspects of an actor’s speech, such as cadence, rhythm, tone and timbre, emotion, and accent, and to convey them accurately in another language.
  • Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
  • Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars will become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations.
  • Quality of life for people living and working in cities and near highways will improve as more drivers switch to quieter, emissionless electric vehicles. The noise reduction will be greatest in cities and suburbs where traffic moves slowly: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/05/will-electric-cars-make-traffic-quieter-yes-no/
  • Most new power equipment will be battery-powered, so machines like lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws will be much quieter and less polluting than they are today. Batteries will be energy-dense enough to compete with gasoline in these use cases, and differences in overall equipment weight and running time will be insignificant. The notion of a neighbor shattering your sense of peace and quiet with loud yard work will get increasingly alien. 
  • A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
  • The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
  • Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
  • The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit for everyone. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
  • Better technology will also let pregnant women noninvasively obtain their fetuses’ DNA, at affordable cost.
  • Cheap DNA tests that can measure a person’s innate IQ and core personality traits with high accuracy will become widely available. There is the potential for this to cause social problems. 
  • At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
  • Space tourism will become routine thanks to privately owned spacecraft. 
  • Marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in the U.S. Either the federal government will overturn its marijuana prohibitions, or some patchwork of state and federal bans will remain but be so weakened and lightly enforced that there will be no real government barriers to obtaining and using marijuana. 
  • By the end of this decade, photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers. 
  • In 2029, the youngest Baby Boomer and the oldest Gen Xer will turn 65. 
  • Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader (Note: Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro wasn’t high profile enough).

2030s

  • VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them. A set of the glasses will last a day on a single charge under normal use.  
  • Augmented reality contact lenses will enter mass production and become widely available, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data. https://www.inverse.com/article/31034-augmented-reality-contact-lenses
  • The bulky VR goggles of the 2020s will transform into lightweight, portable V.R. glasses thanks to improved technology. The glasses will display lifelike footage. However, the best VR goggles will still need to be plugged into other devices, like routers or PCs.
  • Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses, though the 3D effect will only be visible to people sitting directly in front of the screen. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
  • It will be common for celebrities of all kinds to make money by “hanging out” with paying customers in virtual reality. For some lower-tier celebrities, this will be their sole source of income. 
  • Functional CRT TVs and computer monitors will only exist in museums and in the hands of antique collectors. This will also be true for DLP TVs. 
  • The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
  • It will be standard practice for AIs to be doing hyperrealistic video game renderings, and for NPCs to behave very intelligently thanks to better AI. 
  • Books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
  • Loose-leaf sheets of “digital paper” will also exist thanks to the same technology.
  • Commercially available, head-worn, brain-computer-interface devices (BCIs) linked to augmented reality eyewear will gift humans with crude forms of telepathy and telekinesis. For example, a person wearing the devices could compose a short sentence merely by thinking about it, see the text projected across his augmented field of view, use his thoughts to make any needed edits, and then transmit the sentence to another person or machine, merely by thinking a “Send” command. The human recipient of the message with the same BCI/eyewear setup would see the text projected across his field of view and could compose a response through the same process the first person used. BCIs will also let humans send commands to a machines, like printers. For almost all use cases, this type of communication will be less efficient than traditional alternatives, like manually typing a text message or clicking the “Print” button at the top of a word processing application, but it will be an important proof of concept demonstration that will point to what is to come later in the century.
  • Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly (and even funny and amusing) conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, at matching them with social gatherings (including some created by machines), and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature. Autonomous taxis will also be widespread and will have low fares, making it easier for people who are isolated due to low income or poor health (such as many elderly people) to go out.
  • Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available. AI personal assistants will have convincing, simulated personalities that seem to have the same depth as humans. Users will be able to pick from among personality profiles or to build their own.  
  • Chatbots will be able to have intelligent conversations with humans about politics and culture, to identify factually wrong beliefs, biases, and cognitive blind spots in individuals, and to effectively challenge them through verbal discussion and debate. The potential will exist for technology to significantly enlighten the human population and to reduce sociopolitical polarization. However, it’s unclear how many people will choose to use this technology. 
  • Turing-Test-capable chatbots will also supercharge the problem of online harassment, character assassination, and deliberate disinformation by spamming the internet with negative reviews, bullying messages, emails to bosses, and humiliating “deepfake” photos and videos of targeted people. Today’s “troll farms” where humans sit at computer terminals following instructions to write bad reviews for specific people or businesses will be replaced by AI trolls that can pump out orders of magnitude more content per day. And just as people today can “buy likes” for their social media accounts or business webpages, people in the future will be able, at low cost, to buy harassment campaigns against other people and organizations they dislike. Discerning between machine-generated and human-generated internet content will be harder and more important than ever.
  • House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
  • People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
  • Farm robots that are better than humans at fine motor tasks like picking strawberries humans will start becoming widespread.  
  • Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
  • Private owners of autonomous cars will start renting them out while not in use as taxis and package delivery vehicles. Your personal, autonomous car will drive you to work, then spend eight hours making money for you doing side jobs, and will be waiting for you outside your building at the end of the day.
  • The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
  • The same kinds of facilities will make inroads into the junk yard industry, as they would have all the right tooling to cheaply and rapidly disassemble old vehicles, test the parts for functionality, and shunt them to disposal or individual resale. (The days of hunting through junkyards by yourself for a car part you need will eventually end–it will all be on eBay. )
  • Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
  • The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
  • Private delivery services will get cheaper and faster thanks to autonomous vehicles.
  • Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
  • There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
  • Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids. The androids will be very few in number by the end of 2039, and will be technology demonstrators and prototypes that get a lot of media coverage at carefully controlled tech company demo events. They won’t be available for any person to purchase, won’t roam around public spaces, and won’t have important jobs. At a minimum, each one will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
  • Computers will be able to accurately deduce a human’s outward appearance based on only a DNA sample. This will aid police detectives, and will have other interesting uses, such as allowing parents to see what their unborn children will look like as adults, or allowing anyone to see what they’d look like if they were of the opposite sex (one sex chromosome replaced). 
  • Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample. 
  • Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and will use dynamic pricing much more widely and for everyday goods and services, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
  • “Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices, mannerisms and other biometrics will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future. (Note that “digital immortality” is not the same as “mind uploading.”)
  • Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
  • Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
  • Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.
  • Machines will become as good as professional humans at language translation.
  • Computers will also be able to automatically enhance and upscale old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.
    [I think this prediction of mine might have come true: https://www.joblo.com/james-cameron-4k-restoration-defense/ James Cameron was able to do it because he’s rich and a tech expert, and he could only do it to three of his movies. It will take years longer for the techniques to get cheap enough for mass numbers of films to get the same treatment. I’ll stick to the 2030s deadline.]
  • CGI will get so refined than moviegoers with 20/20 vision won’t be able to see the difference between footage of unaltered human actors and footage of 100% CGI actors.
  • Lifelike CGI and “performance capture” will enable “digital resurrections” of dead actors. Computers will be able to scan through every scrap of footage with, say, John Wayne in it, and to produce a perfect CGI simulacrum of him that even speaks with his natural voice, and it will be seamlessly inserted into future movies. Elderly actors might also license movie studios to create and use digital simulacra of their younger selves in new movies. The results will be very fascinating, but might also worsen Hollywood’s problem with making formulaic content.
  • Machines will be able to imitate the voices of specific humans so accurately that most human listeners won’t be able to tell the difference. Those that can reliably detect any difference will find it very faint.
  • Smartphone apps will be able to remotely monitor a person’s vital statistics and to quickly derive a wealth of data about things like their emotional state, health, age, and truthfulness from factors like their heart rate, breathing pattern, body movements, microexpressions, and speech patterns.
  • Tiny cameras that can capture and transmit high resolution footage will be available for a few dollars apiece. A device the size of a sugar cube that has enough memory and battery life to record video footage for several hours would fit the bill.
  • China’s military will get strong enough to defeat U.S. forces in the western Pacific. This means that, in a conventional war for control of the Spratly Islands and/or Taiwan, China would have >50% odds of winning. This shift in the local balance of power does not mean China will start a conflict. 
  • The quality and sophistication of China’s best military technology will surpass Russia’s best technology in all or almost all categories. However, it will still lag the U.S. 

2040s

  • The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2019. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting (VR, telepresence, and remote-controlled robots will be so advanced that even blue-collar jobs involving manual labor will be outsourced to workers living across borders). Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2019.
  • Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (like genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
  • 2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
  • Supercomputers that match or surpass upper-level estimates of the human brain’s computational capabilities will cost a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars apiece, meaning tech companies and universities will be able to afford large numbers of them for AI R&D projects, accelerating progress in the field. Hardware will no longer be the limiting factor to building AGI. If it hasn’t been built yet, it will be due to failure to figure out how to arrange the hardware in the right way to support intelligent thought, and/or to a failure to develop the necessary software. 
  • With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants will never close, online orders made at 3:00 am will be packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks will only stop to refuel, exchange cargo, or get preventative maintenance.
  • Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2019 people would envy.
  • Robot servants will be common in upper-income and middle-class households across the developed world. Some will be function-specific, like autonomous lawn mowers, while others will be multifunctional, like robot butlers. They will work more slowly than humans and will make mistakes more often, but nevertheless, they will save their human owners many hours of work each week. A high-quality multifunction robot servant will cost $5,000 – $20,000 in today’s money. In other words, cheaper than a new car, but still a significant investment of money.
  • Androids will be significantly better than they were in the 2030s, and aspects of their physiques, intelligence, and capabilities will overlap even more with humans, but they still won’t be able to pass as one of us in normal situations. If you could examine one at very close distance, you would see that its skin and other external features were less detailed than those of real humans. Their body movements will be clumsier and more limited than the average human’s, probably leaving them with the same overall reflexes, nimbleness, balance, and speed as an elderly human. They will also lack the battery life to function for a whole work day in physically demanding occupations.
  • Recycling will become much more efficient and practical thanks to house robots properly cleaning, sorting, and crushing/compacting waste before disposing of it. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today. Today, recycling programs are hobbled because even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and as a result, recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they must filter out at great cost. House robots would remember it perfectly.
  • Thanks to this diligence, house robots will also increase backyard composting, easing the burden on municipal trash services. 
  • Genetic engineering of offspring becomes about as common among richer people as IVF is among them in 2023. The engineered offspring aren’t “superhumans”–they’re slightly better than they would have been without technological intervention.
  • It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking will happen as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars start being thought of as unusual and dangerous.
  • There will be something that could be called a “self-driving RV vacation industry” wherein a person would rent a self-driving RV that would be programmed to take them on a multi-day tour of some area, hitting all the important sights. At each one, a virtual tour guide that the person could see, hear and interact with through smart glasses would lead them around on foot.
  • Over 90% of new car sales in developed countries will be for electric vehicles. Just as the invention of the automobile transformed horses into status goods used for leisure, the rise of electric vehicles will transform internal combustion vehicles into a niche market for richer people. 
  • A global “family tree” showing how all humans are related will be built using written genealogical records and genomic data from the billions of people who have had their DNA sequenced. It will become impossible to hide illegitimate children, and it will also become possible for people to find “genetic doppelgangers”–other people they have no familial relationship to, but with whom, by some coincidence, they share a very large number of genes. 
  • Improved knowledge of human genetics and its relevance to personality traits and interests will strengthen AI’s ability to match humans with friends, lovers, and careers. Rising technological unemployment will create a need for machines to match human workers with the remaining jobs in as efficient a manner as possible.
  • People with distinctive personalities (particularly vibrant, funny, or sexy) will routinely sell “digital copies” of themselves for other people to download and use as AI personal assistants. This will be analogous to today’s ability to select different voices for personal GPS devices. Additionally, users will be able to tweak “base versions” of downloaded personalities to suit their unique preferences. 
  • The digital personalities of fictitious people, like movie and cartoon characters, and of long-dead people, will also be downloadable. 
  • Realistic robot sex bots that can move and talk will exist. They won’t perfectly mimic humans, but will be “good enough” for most users. Using them will be considered weird and “for losers” at first, but in coming decades it will go mainstream, following the same pattern as Internet dating. [If we think of sex as a type of task, and if we agree that machines will someday be able to do all tasks better than humans, then it follows that robots will be better than humans at sex.]  
  • Augmented reality contact lenses will give people superhuman vision.
  • 3D TVs will improve. Among other things, multiple viewers watching the same TV from different viewing angles will experience the 3D visual effect. 
  • Any person will be able to use his personal technologies to create a highly immersive audiovisual experience almost anywhere. For example, a person’s computer glasses could simulate the experience of being in an IMAX movie theater. Alternatively, the person could use his smartphone or another device to beam video images against a wall, creating an ad hoc theater for real. Major improvements to the price-performance and energy efficiency of LEDs and lasers will let small personal devices to have inbuilt light projectors that match the quality of professional-quality projectors that cost thousands of dollars today.
  • Obesity rates in rich and middle income countries peak and start declining, mostly thanks to the weight loss drugs invented in the 2020s becoming open to generic manufacture. 
  • The richest person alive will achieve a $1 trillion net worth.
  • There will be drones that can use facial recognition and other forms of recognition to autonomously track down specific people and kill them. The simplest versions of those weapons will be small kamikaze drones that crash into their targets and blow up on impact.
  • At least one major military will be using some type of combat robot (whether it is airborne, seaborne, or terrestrial) that is empowered to fire on human enemies autonomously. 

2050s

  • This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power. It will probably be preceded by successful computer simulations of the brains of progressively more complex model organisms, such as flatworms, fruit flies, and lab rats. Also, there won’t be a discrete moment in time when machines “become intelligent”–instead, there will be a multi-year period of time where machines surpass humans in an ever-growing number of areas. Looking back, it won’t be possible to say at which moment the first machine became intelligent. Using different definitions and tests of “intelligence,” it will be possible to argue that AGI/SAI was achieved by different computers at different points in the multi-year period of time. (Likewise, biologists can’t agree on the exact moment or even the exact millennium when our hominid ancestors became “intelligent.”)
  • Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it. This will be akin to having an angel on your shoulder watching your surroundings and watching you, and giving you constructive advice all the time. 
  • In the developed world, less than 50% of people between age 22 and 65 will have gainful full-time jobs. However, if unprofitable full-time jobs that only persist thanks to government subsidies (such as someone running a small coffee shop and paying the bills with their monthly UBI check) and full-time volunteer “jobs” (such as picking up trash in the neighborhood) are counted, most people in that age cohort will be “doing stuff” on a full-time basis.  
  • The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
  • By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
  • Cheap desalination will provide humanity with unlimited amounts of drinking water and end the prospect of “water wars.” 
  • Mass surveillance and ubiquitous technology will have minimized violent crime and property crime in developed countries: It will be almost impossible to commit such crimes without a surveillance camera or some other type of sensor detecting the act, or without some device recording the criminal’s presence in the area at the time of the act. House robots will contribute by effectively standing guard over your property at night while you sleep. 
  • It will be common for people to have health monitoring devices on and inside of their bodies that continuously track things like their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and gene expression. If a person has a health emergency or appears likely to have one, his or her devices will send out a distress signal alerting EMS and nearby random citizens. If you walked up to such a person while wearing AR glasses, you would see their vital statistics and would receive instructions on how to assist them (i.e. – How to do CPR). Robots will also be able to render medical aid. 
  • Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2019. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation. Real estate prices will, in inflation-adjusted terms, be much higher in most metro areas and places with natural beauty than they were in 2020 because the “supply” of those prime locations is almost fixed, whereas the demand for them is elastic and will rise thanks to population growth, rising incomes, and the aforementioned technology advancements.
  • Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
  • As a result of the above technologies, it will be much rarer for people in rich countries to die waiting for organ transplants than it is now, in 2022.
  • The first healthy clone of an adult human will be born.
  • The cloning of cats and dogs will get cheap enough for middle income people to afford it. 
  • Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep and even carry them into your house. Items ordered off the internet will appear inside your house a few hours later, as if by magic. 
  • Smaller versions of the robots used on automated farms will be available at low cost to average people, letting them effortlessly create backyard gardens. This will boost global food production and let people have greater control over where their food comes from and what it contains. 
  • The last of America’s Cold War-era weapon platforms (e.g. – the B-52 bomber, F-15 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, Nimitz aircraft carrier) will finally be retired from service. There will be instances where four generations of people from the same military family served on the same type of plane or ship. 
  • Cheap guided bullets, which can make midair course changes and be fired out of conventional man-portable rifles, will become common in advanced armies. 
  • Personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with pinhole cameras and thin, flexible sheets of LEDs, colored e-ink, or some metamaterial with similar abilities will be commercially available. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match.
  • The “cloaking” outfits will also have benign applications related to fashion and everyday utility. People wearing them could use them to display morphing patterns and colors of their choice. It would even be possible to become a “walking TV.” The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. 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, at least at a distance.
  • Powered exoskeletons will become practical for a wide range of applications, mainly due to improvements in batteries. For example, a disabled person could use a lightweight exoskeleton with a battery the size of a purse to walk around for a whole day on a single charge, and a soldier in a heavy-duty exoskeleton with a large backpack battery could do a day of marching on a single charge. (Note: Even though it will be technologically possible to equip infantrymen with combat exoskeletons, armies might reject the idea due to other impracticalities.)
  • There will be no technological or financial barrier to building powered combat exoskeletons that have cloaking devices. 
  • It will be technologically and financially feasible for small aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fossil fuels that cost no more than normal fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.
  • Cheap guided bullets, capable of midair course changes to hit targets and of being fired out of conventional rifles, will become common in advanced armies. (One or two degrees of course change per 100 meters of bullet travel is realistic. ) Practical, affordable rifles capable of limited self-aiming will also exist (similar to the “Smartgun” from the movie Aliens). Thanks to these technologies, an ordinary rifleman of the 2050s will be like the snipers of today.

2060s

  • Machines will be better at satisfyingly matching humans with fields of study, jobs, friends, romantic partners, hobbies, and daily activities than most humans can do for themselves. Machines themselves will make better friends, confidants, advisers, and even lovers than humans. Additionally, machines will be smarter and more skilled at humans in most areas of knowledge and types of work. A cultural sea change will happen, in which most humans come to trust, rely upon, defend, and love machines.
  • House robots and human-sized worker robots will be as strong, agile, and dexterous as most humans, and their batteries will be energy-dense enough to power them for most of the day. A typical American family might have multiple robot servants that physically follow around the humans each day to help with tasks. The family members will also be continuously monitored and “followed” by A.I.s embedded in their portable personal computing devices and possibly in their bodies. 
  • Cheap home delivery of groceries, robot chefs, and a vast trove of free online recipes will enable people in average households to eat restaurant-quality meals at home every day, at low cost. Predictive algorithms that can appropriately choose new meals for humans based on their known taste preferences and other factors will determine the menu, and many people will face a culinary “satisfaction paradox.”
  • Average people will have access to high-quality meals that only rich people can have today at fancy restaurants.
  • Machines will understand humans individually and at the species level better than humans understand themselves. They will have highly accurate personality models of most humans along with a comprehensive grasp of human sociology, human decision-making, human psychology, human cognitive biases, and human nature, and will pool the information to accurately predict human behavior. A nascent version of a 1:1 computer simulation of the Earth–with the human population modeled in great detail–will be created. An important application will be economic modeling and forecasting. 
  • Machines will be better teachers than most trained humans. The former will have much sharper grasps of their pupils’ individual strengths, weaknesses, interests, and learning styles, and will be able to create and grade tests in a much fairer and less biased manner than humans. Every person will have his own tutor. 
  • There will be a small, permanent human presence on the Moon.
  • If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there will be intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).
  • The worldwide number of supercentenarians–people who are at least 110 years old–will be sharply higher than it was in 2019: Their population size could be 10 times bigger or more. 
  • Advances in a variety of technologies will make it possible to cryonically freeze humans in a manner that doesn’t pulverize their tissue. However, the technology needed to safely thaw them out won’t be invented for decades. 
  • China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country. Importantly, China’s pollution levels will be much lower than they are today thanks to a variety of factors.
  • Small drones (mostly aerial) will have revolutionized warfare, terrorism, assassinations, and crime and will be mature technologies. An average person will be able to get a drone of some kind that can follow his orders to find and kill other people or to destroy things.
  • Countermeasures against those small drones will also have evolved, and might include defensive drones and mass surveillance networks to detect drone attacks early on. The networks would warn people via their body-worn devices of incoming drone attacks or of sightings of potentially hostile drones. The body-worn devices, such as smartphones and AR glasses, might even have their own abilities to automatically detect drones by sight and sound and to alert their wearers.
  • At least one large, manned spaceship that is designed to stay in space will exist, probably in the form of a reusable ferry that moves people between Earth and Mars.

2070s

  • There has been at least one incident where an AI, either deliberately or inadvertently, took an action that killed thousands of humans and caused billions of dollars in damage. However, the problem was contained by humans–who still control most of the world’s infrastructure and resources–and by AIs that stayed friendly to us. Our first experience with a hostile AGI or nonaligned AGI will not be cataclysmic, as it is in most sci-fi films about the topic. This success doesn’t mean our luck will last forever. 
  • 100 years after the U.S. “declared war” on cancer, there still will not be a “cure” for most types of cancer, but vaccination, early detection, treatment, and management of cancer will be vastly better, and in countries with modern healthcare systems, most cancer diagnoses will not reduce a person’s life expectancy. Consider that diabetes and AIDS were once considered “death sentences” that would invariably kill people within a few years of diagnosis, until medicines were developed that transformed them into treatable, chronic health conditions. 
  • Hospital-acquired infections will be far less of a problem than they are in 2020 thanks to better sterilization practices, mostly made possible by robots.
  • It will be technologically and financially feasible for large commercial aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by synthetic fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells. 
  • Digital or robotic companions that seem (or actually are) intelligent, funny, and loving will be easier for humans to associate with than other humans.
  • Technology will enable the creation of absolute surveillance states, where all human behavior is either constantly monitored or is inferred with high accuracy based on available information. Even a person’s innermost thoughts will be knowable thanks to technologies that monitor him or her for the slightest things like microexpressions, twitches, changes in voice tone, and eye gazes. When combined with other data regarding how the person spends their time and money, it will be possible to read their minds. The Thought Police will be a reality in some countries.  
  • Thanks to mass surveillance, and the gathering and sharing of biometric data, you’ll never be a stranger to an intelligent machine or to a human with access to the right software and devices. For example, if you go on a vacation to a new country on the other side of the world, the android waiter at a restaurant will know your name and preferences after glancing at your face.
  • Thanks to advanced lab synthesis of foods, new spices, hybrid fruits and vegetables, and meats with entirely new taste profiles will be brought into existence. Swaths of the “landscape of all possible flavors” that are currently unexplored will be.
  • Many heavily automated farms (including indoor farms and gardens on suburban plots of land) will produce food that is noticeably tastier and measurably more nutritious that most of today’s food because the advanced farms won’t need to use pesticides or to favor crop varieties that are hardy enough to endure transport over long supply chains. At low cost and for little effort, communities and individuals with small amounts of land will be able to meet their own food needs locally. People who value “natural” lifestyles might, ironically, find it most beneficial to rely on robots to make their food for them.
  • Glasses-free 3D TVs will be almost fully developed technologies with few performance limitations. 
  • A slew of weapons technologies, including self-aiming guns, highly advanced scopes, and guided bullets, will give infantrymen incredible levels of battlefield potency. Common feats will include the doubling the maximum lethal range against human targets, sniper-like accuracy from rapid fire, the ability to shoot down low-flying aircraft, to cripple vehicles from long distances with bullets through their vital components like tires and gas tanks, and the disabling of tanks by destroying their fragile external sensors or sending bullets directly down the barrels of their main guns to hit the shells loaded in them.
  • The Second Amendment will no longer grant American citizens the power to overthrow their government or to fight off an advanced foreign army. The power disparity between a human armed with a gun and a military force with the latest weapons will be too vast. 

2100

  • Humans probably won’t be the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
  • Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
  • The worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI will have not been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs will have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they will fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
  • Telepresence technology will also be very advanced, allowing humans to do nearly any task remotely, from any other place in the world, in safety and comfort. This will include cognitive tasks and hands-on tasks. If any humans still have jobs, they’ll be able to work from anywhere.
  • Sophisticated narrow AI will be integrated into the telepresence technology, providing human workers with real-time assistance with tasks. An illustrative scenario would have a human in Nigeria using a VR rig to remotely control a robot that is fixing an air conditioner in England. Software programs monitoring the live video feed would recognize all of the objects in the robot’s field of view and would also understand what the human worker was trying to accomplish, and the programs would help him by visually highlighting tools or air conditioner components, or by giving him verbal advice on what to do. 
  • The use of robotic surrogate bodies for remote work will also erase any employment gaps caused by physical strength and endurance differences between the sexes and between the elderly and the young. Small men, old people, and women of average stature will be just as good at performing hard manual labor as big men. The easing of physical strain associated with work will also allow people to work past today’s retirement age. However, most serious physical work will be best left to autonomous machines.
  • The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
  • At least one, non-aligned AGI has done serious damage to humans, comparable in terms of deaths and economic losses to a major natural disaster or small war. 
  • The global population of autonomous robots will be within an order of magnitude of the human population. It will be very common to see robots in homes, workplaces, public spaces, and even in wilderness areas.
  • The global population of AIs and digital uploads of dead humans is also within an order of magnitude of the human population.
  • Hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of “digitally immortal avatars” of dead humans will exist, and you will be able to interact with them through a variety of means (in FIVR, through devices like earpieces and TV screens, in the real world if the avatar takes over an android body resembling the human it was based on). 
  • A weak sort of immortality will be available thanks to self-cloning, immortal digital avatars, and perhaps mind uploading. You could clone yourself and instruct your digital avatar–which would be a machine programmed with your personality and memories–to raise the clone and ensure it developed to resemble you. Your digital avatar might have an android body or could exist in a disembodied state. 
  • It will be possible to make clones of humans using only their digital format genomic data. In other words, if you had a .txt file containing a person’s full genetic code, you could use that by itself to make a living, breathing clone. Having samples of their cells would not be necessary. 
  • The “DNA black market” that arose in the 2030s will pose an even bigger threat since it will be now possible to use DNA samples alone or their corresponding .txt files to clone a person or to produce a sperm or egg cell and, in turn, a child. Potential abuses include random people cloning or having the children of celebrities they are obsessed with, or cloning billionaires in the hopes of milking the clones for money. Important people who might be targets of such thefts will go to pains to prevent their DNA from being known. Since dead people have no rights, third parties might be able to get away with cloning or making gametes of the deceased.
  • Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
  • All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
  • Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
  • While the traditional, “pure” races of humans will all still exist, notions of “race” and racial identity will be scrambled by the large numbers of mixed-race people who will be alive, and by widespread genetic engineering that will give people combinations of physical traits that were almost unachievable through normal human breeding. Examples might include black people with naturally blue eyes, or East Asians with naturally blonde hair. (Voluntary genetic engineering will also ensure that redheads don’t ever die out.) Some people will even have totally new genes, either synthesized in labs or borrowed from animals, that give them physical traits not found in any preexisting human race, like red eyes or purple hair.
  • Full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) will exist wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human will have his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR. (Related to the satisfaction paradox) Elements of these virtual environments could be pornographic and sexual, allowing people to gratify any type of sexual fetish or urge with computer-generated scenarios and partners. 
  • More generally, AIs and humans whose creativity is turbocharged by machines will create enjoyable, consumable content (e.g. – films, TV shows, songs, artwork, jokes, new types of meals) faster than non-augmented humans can consume it. As a simple example of what this will be like, assume you have 15 hours of free time per day, that you love spending it listening to music, and each day, your favorite bands produce 16 hours worth of new songs that you really like.
  • TVs will be capable of true holography, with no visual distortions or flaws. 
  • The vast majority of unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong.
  • The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
  • Synthetic meat will taste no different from animal meat, and will be at least as cheap to make. The raising and/or killing of animals for food will be be illegal in many countries, and trends will clearly show the practice heading for worldwide ban. 
  • Meats that are expensive and/or rare today, like Kobe beef steaks, snakes, bats, or even human flesh, will be cheap and widely available thanks to meat synthesis technology. 
  • Cheap, synthetic chicken eggs will also exist and will taste no different from natural eggs. 
  • The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available. The fundamental bases of human existence and human social dynamics will change unpredictably once differences in appearance/attractiveness, intelligence, and personality traits can be eliminated at will. Individuals won’t be defined by fixed attributes anymore. 
  • The ability to delete bad memories and to control brain activity will cure many mental illnesses. 
  • Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals. Computers, sensors and displays will be embedded everywhere in the built environment and in nature, allowing humans with brain implants to interface with and control things around them through thought alone. This doesn’t mean traditional ways of communicating and doing things (like speaking and physically pushing buttons or turning doorknobs) will die out. 
  • Brain implants and brain surgeries will also be used to enhance IQ, change personality traits, and strengthen many types of skills. 
  • Using brain-computer interfaces, people will be able to make sophisticated songs and pieces of artwork with their thoughts alone. 
  • For aesthetic and safety reasons, the overwhelming majority of humans who have brain or body implants will only have internal implants that are invisible to other people. “Borg-like” implants that protrude from a person’s skin will be rare.
  • Technologically augmented humans and androids will have many abilities and qualities that ancient people considered “Godlike,” such as medical immortality, the ability to control objects by thought, telepathy, perfect memories, and superhuman senses.
  • Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete. Instead of flying cars, it’s more likely that there will be millions of small, autonomous helicopters and VTOL aircraft that will cheaply ferry people through dense, national networks of helipads and airstrips. Autonomous land vehicles would take take passengers to and from the landing sites. (https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-flying-cars-never-took-off-and-probably-never-will/
  • The notion of vehicles (e.g. – cars, planes, and boats) polluting the air will be an alien concept. 
  • Advanced nanomachines could exist.
  • Vastly improved materials and routine use of very advanced computer design simulations (including simulations done in quantum computers) will mean that manufactured objects of all types will be optimally engineered in every respect, and might seem to have “magical” properties. For example, a car will be made of hundreds of different types of alloys, plastics, and glass, each optimized for a different part of the vehicle, and car recalls will never happen since the vehicles will undergo vast amounts of simulated testing in every conceivable driving condition in 1:1 virtual simulations of the real world. 
  • Design optimization and the rise of AGI consumption will virtually eliminate planned obsolescence. Products that were deliberately engineered to fail after needlessly short periods, and “new” product lines that were no better than what they replaced, but had non-interchangeable part sizes would be exposed for what they were, and AGI consumers would refuse to buy them. Production will become much more efficient and far fewer things will be thrown out. 
  • Manufactured objects will have much longer average lifespans thanks to intelligent machines maintaining them more diligently than humans and not pushing the objects beyond their engineering limits as humans often do. Under such conditions, something like a common kitchen knife would have decades of daily use before finally wearing down to a sharp “rod” that finally had to be thrown in the recycling bin. 
  • Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
  • Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought). Some androids will also be indistinguishable to the touch, meaning they will seem to be made of supple flesh and will be the same temperature as human bodies. However, their body parts will not be organic.
  • Sex robots will be indistinguishable from humans.
  • Android assassins like the T-800s from the Terminator films will exist. They will look identical to humans, will be able to blend into human populations, track down targets, and kill or abduct them. As in the films, these androids will be stronger, more durable, and more skilled with weapons than we are.
  • Some robots will carry drones meant to detach from them to autonomously perform specific tasks and then return. Some will also be able to detach their body parts (like a hand) to do the same. 
  • Robots that are outwardly identical to sci-fi and fantasy characters and extinct animals, like grey aliens, elves, fairies, giant house cats, and dinosaurs, will exist and will occasionally be seen in public. Some weird person will want their robot butler to look like bigfoot, and at least one hobbyist will build a life-sized robotic dragon that can fly and spit fire.
    https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503967/could-game-throness-dragons-really-fly-we-asked-some-experts 
  • Humans interested in extreme body modifications will be able to surgically alter themselves to look like many of those creatures.
  • Machines that are outwardly indistinguishable from animals will also exist, and they will have surveillance and military applications. 
  • Drones, miniaturized smart weapons, and AIs will dominate warfare, from the top level of national strategy down to the simplest act of combat. The world’s strongest military could, with conventional weapons alone, destroy most of the world’s human population in a short period of time. 
  • It will be possible for one country to build an army of killer robots that equals the size of the whole human population. 
  • The construction and daily operation of prisons will have been fully automated, lowering the monetary costs of incarceration. As such, state prosecutors and judges will no longer feel pressure to let accused criminals have plea deals or to give them shorter prison sentences to ease the burdens of prison overcrowding and high overhead costs. 
  • The term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries since inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD was in 2019 (assuming a constant inflation rate of 3.0%).
  • There will still be major wealth and income inequality across the human race. However, wealth redistribution, better government services, advances in industrial productivity, and better technologies will ensure that even people in the bottom 1% have all their basic and intermediate life needs meet. In many ways, the poor people of 2100 will have better lives than the rich people of 2020.

2101 – 2200 AD

  • Humans will definitely stop being the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth. 
  • Many “humans” will be heavily augmented through genetic engineering, other forms of bioengineering, and cybernetics. People who outwardly look like the normal humans of today might actually have extensive internal modifications that give them superhuman abilities. Non-augmented, entirely “natural” humans like people in 2019 will be looked down upon in the same way you might today look at a very low IQ person with sensory impairments. Being forced by your biology to incapacitate yourself for 1/3 of each day to sleep will be tantamount to having a medical disability. 
  • Due to a reduced or nonexistent need for sleep among intelligent machines and augmented humans and to the increased interconnectedness of the planet, global time zones will become much less relevant. It will be common for machines, humans, businesses, and groups to use the same clock–probably Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)–and for activity to proceed on a 24/7 basis, with little regard of Earth’s day/night cycle. 
  • Physical disabilities and defects of appearance that cause untold anguish to people in 2019 will be easily and cheaply fixable. For example, male-pattern baldness and obesity will be completely ameliorated with minor medical interventions like pills or outpatient surgery. Missing or deformed limbs will be easily replaced, all types of plastic surgery (including sex reassignment) will be vastly better and cheaper than today, and spinal cord damage will be totally repairable. The global “obesity epidemic” will disappear. Transsexual people will be able to seamlessly alter their bodies to conform with their preferred genders, or to alter their brains so their gender identities conform with the bodies they were born with. 
  • These advanced body modification abilities will partly be thanks to medical micro- and nanomachines that will be able to travel through a person’s bloodstream and flesh, and to precisely kill small groups of cells (including bone) or stimulate cell proliferation. Over the course of a few sessions, a person could finely sculpt their nose, cheeks or private parts to match whatever they wanted. Genetic engineering for beauty will probably become less important as a result. 
  • All sleep disorders will be curable thanks to cybernetics that can use electrical pulses to quickly initiate sleep states in human brains. The same kinds of technologies will also reduce or eliminate the need for humans to sleep, and for people to control their dreams. 
  • Brain-computer interfaces will let people control, pre-program, and, to a limited extent, record their dreams. 
  • Through electrical signaling and chemical releases, the brain implants will be able to induce any type of mental or emotional state. This will include altered states of consciousness, like lucid dreaming, meditation, or intoxication (as a result, mind-altering drugs could become obsolete). A person might have to go through a “calibration period” where the implants would monitor and record their brain activity while they experienced different things, and then, the user would experiment with the implant to see how well it could induce the recorded brain states. Through a process of guided trial and error, they would become masters of their own minds. This ability would make human life richer and more productive, as people could have valuable experiences during portions of the day when they would otherwise be bored or “switched off,” and to even do useful problem-solving tasks in their sleep. Alternatively, the ability to induce feelings of blinding pleasure could lead to a major addiction problem among humans, and widen the productivity/usefulness gap between our species and intelligent machines.
  • Direct brain-to-computer interfaces and other advanced technologies will let humans enter virtual reality worlds that seem no different from the real world (the “Matrix scenario”), and to remotely control robot bodies located anywhere in the real world, with fully lifelike levels of sensory richness and fusion. Able to control perfect robot bodies of any design in the real world, and to take on any form in virtual worlds, some humans will have no use for real, fixed-form bodies, and will dispense with them, instead existing as “brains in jars.”  
  • Some “humans” will lack fixed, corporeal forms; they will be able to extensively modify their original bodies or to switch bodies at will. A person could take the form of something nonhuman, like a terrestrial squid. They exist as disembodied, cybernetically enhanced brains in life support containers that can assume control over any physical bodies they want, either by remotely controlling them through the internet, or by physically inserting their life support containers into matching slots in the bodies.
  • The line between “biological” and “synthetic” will blur as artificial objects take on some of the properties of organic matter and as they are integrated into originally biological life forms. Examples include humans who have artificial limbs and organs that are soft, supple, and interface with their nervous systems as well as natural limbs and organs; humans whose bodies contain special lines of cells meant to save and store non-genomic data as DNA; cybernetic implants that are soft and capable of growing inside a person’s body; machines that can heal their own bodies; and microscopic, self-reproducing machines that can thrive indefinitely in human bodies, in wild animals, or in other life forms and even be transferred between individuals, like benign diseases.
  • Brain implants will let humans merge minds with each other, AIs and animals. 
  • People will “download” memories and sensory experiences for pleasure and self-betterment. Some of the content will be recordings of actual experiences, while other content will be fully synthetic. 
  • Significant numbers of people will know what death is like, either because they died and were resuscitated with advanced medical technology, because they were revived from cryostasis, or because they downloaded a memory of someone else dying.
  • Almost all of today’s diseases will be cured.
  • The means to halt and reverse human aging will be created. The human population will come to be dominated by people who are eternally young and beautiful. 
  • Augmented females will have the natural ability to suspend and control their monthly fertility cycles.
  • Humans and machines will be immortal. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who lived their lives knowing they were doomed to deteriorate and die. Today’s humans will be seen as deeply flawed and limited creatures, at the mercy of their instincts and small brains, and condemned to deal with random genetic flaws and chronic health problems they were randomly given at birth. 
  • Extreme longevity, better reproductive technologies that eliminate the need for a human partner to have children, and robots that do domestic work and provide companionship (including sex) will weaken the institution of marriage more than any time in human history. An indefinite lifetime of monogamy will be impossible for most people to commit to. 
  • At reasonable cost, it will be possible for women to create healthy, genetically related children at any point in their lives, and without using the 2019-era, pre-menopausal egg freezing technique. For example, a 90-year-old, menopausal woman will be able to use reproductive technologies to make a baby that shares 50% of her DNA. 
  • Opposite-sex human clones will exist. Such a clone would share 22-1/2 of their 23 chromosome pairs with their “original.” Only the final sex chromosome, which would be either a “Y” or a second “X”, would differ.  
  • It will become possible for people to make “backups” of their physical bodies. Genetic information paired with ultra-high-definition medical scans of bones, muscles, and organs will allow anyone to create a perfect digital “save” of their physical body. If the latter were ever destroyed, the body could be reconstructed in a cloning lab by using the data. 
  • Immortality, the automation of work, and widespread material abundance will completely transform lifestyles. With eternity to look forward to, people won’t feel pressured to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible. As stated, marriage will no longer be viewed as a lifetime commitment, and serial monogamy will probably become the norm. Relationships between parents and offspring will change as longevity erases the disparities in generational outlook and maturity that traditionally characterize parent-child interpersonal dynamics (e.g. – 300-year-old dad doesn’t know any better than his 270-year-old son). The “factory model” of public education–defined by conformity, rote memorization, frequent intelligence testing, and curricula structured to serve the needs of the job market–will disappear. The process of education will be custom-tailored to each person in terms of content, pacing, and style of instruction. Students will be much freer to explore subjects that interest them and to pursue those that best match their talents and interests. 
  • Radically extended human lifespans mean it will become much more common to have great-grandparents around. A cure for aging will also lead to families where members separated in age by many decades look the same age and have the same health. Additionally, older family members won’t be burdensome since they will be healthy.
  • The human population might start growing again thanks to medical immortality, to advanced fertility technologies including artificial wombs and cloning, and to robots that help raise children, reducing the workload for human parents. The human race won’t die out thanks to persistently low birthrates.
  • Thanks to radical genetic engineering, there will be “human-looking,” biological people among us that don’t belong to our species, Homo sapiens. Examples could include engineered people who have 48 chromosomes instead of 46, people whose genomes have been shortened thanks to the deletion of junk DNA, or people who look outwardly human but who have radically different genes within their 46 chromosomes, so they have different numbers or arrangements of internal organs (like two hearts), or even new types of internal organs, such as bird-like lung . Such people wouldn’t be able to naturally breed with Homo sapiens, and would belong to new hominid species. 
  • Extinct species for which we have DNA samples (ex – from passenger pigeons on display in a museum) will be “resurrected” using genetic technology.
  • The global mass surveillance network will encompass unpopulated areas and wilderness areas, protecting animals from poaching. Extinctions of large, wild animals will stop.
  • Large animal attacks on humans will become incredibly rare thanks to technologies like the global mass surveillance network foreseeing and preventing hostile encounters. Entire populations of large animal species could also have permanent tracking devices.
  • The technology for safely thawing humans out of cryostasis and returning them to good health will be created. 
  • Suspended animation will become a viable alternative to suicide. Miserable people could “put themselves under,” with instructions to not be revived until the ill circumstances that tormented them had disappeared or until cures for their mental and medical problems were found. 
  • A sort of “time travel” will become possible thanks to technology. Suspended animation will let people turn off their consciousnesses until any arbitrary date in the future. From their perspective, no time will have elapsed between being frozen and being thawed out, even if hundreds of years actually passed between those two events, meaning the suspended animation machine will subjectively be no different from a time machine to them. FIVR paired with data from the global surveillance networks will let people enter highly accurate computer simulations of the past. The data will come from sources like old maps, photos, videos, and the digital avatars of people, living and dead. The computers simulations of past eras will get less accurate as the dates get more distant and the data scarcer.
  • It will be possible to upload human minds to computers. The uploads will not share the same consciousness as their human progenitors, and will be thought of as “copies.” Mind uploads will be much more sophisticated than the digitally immortal avatars that will come into existence in the 2030s.
  • Different types of AGIs with fundamentally different mental architectures will exist. For example, some AGIs will be computer simulations of real human brains, while others will have totally alien inner workings. Just as a jetpack and a helicopter enable flight through totally different approaches, so will different types of AGIs be capable of intelligent thought. 
  • Gold, silver, and many other “precious metals” will be worth far less than today, adjusting for inflation, because better ways of extracting (including from seawater) them will have been developed. Space mining might also massively boost supplies of the metals, depressing prices. Diamonds will be nearly worthless thanks to better techniques for making them artificially. 
  • The first non-token quantities of minerals derived from asteroid mining will be delivered to the Earth’s surface. (Finding an asteroid that contains valuable minerals, altering its orbit to bring it closer to Earth, and then waiting for it to get here will take decades. No one will become a trillionaire from asteroid mining until well into the 22nd century.)
  • Synthetic life forms will colonize parts of the world uninhabitable to humans, like mountaintops, oceans (both on the surface and under it), and maybe even underground regions. Intelligent and semi-intelligent machines will be common sights, even in remote areas.
  • Intelligent life from Earth will colonize the entire Solar System, all dangerous space objects in our System will be found, the means to deflect or destroy them will be created, and intelligent machines will redesign themselves to be immune to the effects of radiation, solar flares, gamma rays, and EMP. As such, natural phenomena (including global warming) will no longer threaten the existence of civilization.  Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who were confined to Earth and at the mercy of planet-killing disasters. 
  • “End of the World” prophecies will become far less relevant since civilization will have spread beyond Earth and could be indefinitely self-sustaining even if Earth were destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists and religious people would deal with this by moving on to belief in “End of the Solar System” prophecies, but these will be based on extremely tenuous reasoning. 
  • The vast majority of intelligent life forms outside of Earth will be nonhuman. 
  • A self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
  • It will be possible to safely smoke cigarettes in more advanced types of space ships. 
  • Spy satellites with lenses big enough to read license plates and discern facial features will be in Earth orbit. 
  • Space probes made in our Solar System and traveling at sub-light speeds will reach nearby stars.
  • All of the useful knowledge and great works of art that our civilization has produced or discovered could fit into an advanced memory storage device the size of a thumb drive. It will be possible to pair this with something like a self-replicating Von Neumann Probe, creating small, long-lived machines that would know how to rebuild something exactly like our civilization from scratch. Among other data, they would have files on how to build intelligent machines and cloning labs, and files containing the genomes and mind uploads of billions of unique humans and non-human organisms. Copies of existing beings and of long-dead beings could be “manufactured” anywhere, and loaded with the personality traits and memories of their predecessors. Such machines could be distributed throughout our Solar System as an “insurance policy” against our extinction, or sent to other star systems to seed them with life. Some of the probes could also be hidden in remote, protected locations on Earth.
  • We will find out whether alien life exists on Mars and the other celestial bodies in our Solar System. 
  • Intelligent machines will get strong enough to destroy the human race, though it’s impossible to assign odds to whether they’ll choose to do so.
  • If the “Zoo Hypothesis” is right, and if intelligent aliens have decided not to talk to humans until we’ve reached a high level of intellect, ethics, and culture, then the machine-dominated civilization that will exist on Earth this century might be advanced enough to meet their standards. Uncontrollable emotions and impulses, illogical thinking, tribalism, self-destructive behavior, and fear of the unknown will no longer govern individual and group behavior. Aliens could reveal their existence knowing it wouldn’t cause pandemonium. 
  • The government will no longer be synonymous with slowness and incompetence since all bureaucrats will be replaced by machines.
  • Technology will be seamlessly fused with humans, other biological organisms, and the environment itself.  
  • It will be cheaper and more energy-efficient to grow or synthesize almost all types of food in labs or factories than to grow and harvest it in traditional, open-air farms. Shielded from the weather and pests and not dependent on soil quality, the amounts and prices of foods will be highly consistent over time, and worries about farmland muscling out or polluting natural ecosystems will vanish. Animals will no longer be raised for food. Not only will this benefit animals, but it will benefit humans since it will eliminate a a major source of communicable disease (e.g. – new influenza strains originate in farm animals and, thanks to close contact with human farmers, evolve to infect people thanks to a process called “zoonosis”).
  • Additionally, the means will exist to cheaply and artificially produce non-edible organic products, like wool and wood, in industrial quantities. This means anyone will be able to buy animal products that are very expensive today, like snakeskin boots or bear rugs. Unlimited quantities of perfectly simulated animal products that have useful properties, like pillow feathers (softness) or high-grade wool (heat insulation), will be available, and no animals will need to be harmed to make them. This will greatly help endangered species that are poached for their parts, like elephants killed for their ivory tusks. Lab-synthesized wood that is superior to “old-growth” timber will also exist.
  • The ability to cheaply make large quantities of organic products will lead to the creation of bizarre objects that no one conceived of before, like vehicle frames made of single pieces of bone.
  • A global network of sensors and drones will identify and track every non-microscopic species on the planet. Cryptids like “bigfoot” and the “Loch Ness Monster” will be definitively proven to not exist. The monitoring network will also make it possible to get highly accurate, real-time counts of entire species populations. Mass gathering of DNA samples–either taken directly from organisms or from biological residue they leave behind–will also allow the full genetic diversity of all non-microscopic species to be known. 
  • That same network of sensors and machines will let us monitor the health of all the planet’s ecosystems and to intervene to protect any species. Interventions could include mass, painless sterilizations of species that are throwing the local ecology out of balance, mass vaccinations of species suffering through disease epidemics, reintroductions of extinct species, or widescale genetic engineering of a species. 
  • The technology and means to implement David Pearce’s global “benign stewardship” of nonhuman organic life will become available.  (https://youtu.be/KDZ3MtC5Et8) After millennia of inflicting damage and pain to the environment and other species, humanity will have a chance to inaugurate an era free of suffering.
  • The means will exist to harmlessly control animal populations, predation, and to greatly ease animal suffering. 
  • The same medical treatments that radically extend human lifespans will also be used on pets. Fifty-year-old dogs and cloned cats that are the sixth in their lineage will exist. 
  • The mass surveillance network will also look skyward and see all anomalous atmospheric phenomena and UFOs.
  • The means to fully reverse global warming at a manageable cost will exist. One method would be building a sunshade at the L1 Lagrange Point between the Earth and Sun. By blocking less than 1% of the Sun’s light from reaching Earth, the planet’s temperature could be lowered to a Preindustrial level. 
  • Robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history. 
  • Every significant archaeological site will be excavated and every shipwreck found. There will be no work left for people in the antiquities. 
  • Dynamic traffic lane reversal will become the default for all major roadways, sharply increasing road capacity without compromising safety. Autonomous cars that can instantly adapt to changes in traffic direction and that can easily avoid hitting each other even at high speeds will enable the transformation.
  • The Imperial system of weights and measures will fall out of use worldwide. Intelligent machines and posthumans will be able to switch to Metric without a problem. The same nimbleness of mind might also let them break from the ingrained traditions created by past humans and adopt other new standards, like new alphabets, numerals, and languages. 

Interesting articles, December 2024

In a stunning turn of events, Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed after a short military offensive by an Islamist rebel group. Assad and his family fled to Russia, ending a dictatorial dynasty that had ruled the country since 1971.
https://apnews.com/article/syria-assad-sweida-daraa-homs-hts-qatar-816e538565d1ae47e016b5765b044d31
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wq01wde44o
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14181349/Assad-pants-dictator-Syria-palace-costume-jacuzzi.html

The Syrian Army collapsed so quickly thanks to low pay, bad training, and low morale.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-syria-army-collapsed-suddenly-201808438.html

Israel immediately sent troops into Syria to occupy the buffer zone between the two countries and to seize a strategically valuable mountain.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/08/middleeast/israel-syria-security-implications-golan-intl/index.html

Israel also took advantage of the chaos to destroy important Syrian military assets across the country.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/israel-lays-waste-to-syrias-missile-boats
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14195915/Massive-explosions-skies-Syria-Israeli-air-strikes-hammer-munitions-depots-major-port-city-heaviest-onslaught-decade.html

One man’s terrorist can become the same man’s freedom fighter: ‘Ahmed al-Sharaa’US scraps $10m bounty for arrest of Syria’s new leader Sharaa’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07gv3j818ko

Over the last three months of intensified fighting, Russia has suffered 53 casualties for every square kilometer of Ukraine it has conquered. The country lacks the manpower to sustain this loss rate in the medium term.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-5-2024

Here’s further evidence that the Russians are on track to burn through almost all of their Soviet-era weapons stockpiles by the end of 2025. Trump would be an idiot to end support for Ukraine before then.
https://youtu.be/TzR8BacYS6U?si=RxTLHIwBnzIVNhWV

At least half of the functional or easily restorable tanks Russia had in 2021 have been lost in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/K8CcuVCDEUw?si=pSSsxNT_F5UxPYCc

In spite of Russia’s major losses in Ukraine, some in NATO think Putin will still have the wherewithal to attack the rest of Europe in the near future.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly41x7eg71o

These Ukrainian troops show how hard it is to shoot down an incoming drone, even with a shotgun. Someday, guns will not grant American citizens meaningful defense against their government if it turns hostile, or against invading armies. The best you will be able to do is buy some autonomous drones to defend you against the enemy drones and then hide in your basement while they fight outside.
https://youtu.be/hruEJrjtVxY?si=ZQoDw5vznXtfKwEa

Large Ukrainian kamikaze drones slammed into high-rise buildings in Kazan, 900 miles from the border.
https://youtu.be/a_LKGF7fh70?si=Y97r4O6q7g_L0vxa

Russian antiaircraft defenses accidentally shot down a passenger plane from Azerbaijan as it was trying to land in Grozny. The city was on alert for a Ukrainian drone attack at the time.
https://apnews.com/article/azerbaijan-russia-plane-crash-e6c1002284a900fa635eecf5573214ea

North Korean troops have proven completely unprepared for the Ukrainian drone threat on the battlefield and are suffering high losses.
https://youtu.be/jmdhiJ9jbdE?si=Qmu22vDoerD1iqu0

In a historic first, a remote-controlled Ukrainian drone boat used a missile to shoot down a manned Russian helicopter.
https://youtu.be/h4Rvh1vemJY?si=EhJ9_A0qcQ_LXdrm

Ukrainian troops say the U.S. Abrams tank is better than any of their Soviet-made tanks, but that it needs even more armor to resist kamikaze drone attacks. The Russians have also proven more adept at night fighting than U.S. intelligence expected.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-m1-abrams-commander-talks-tanks-major-vulnerabilities-advantages-in-combat

Ukraine assassinated a Russian general in Moscow.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyx4kvz4l0o

‘The Eagle S – a tanker ship carrying Russian oil and suspected of severing the Estlink 2 power cable running under the Baltic Sea between Finland and Estonia – was reportedly brimming with spy equipment.’
https://www.twz.com/sea/russian-linked-oil-tanker-suspected-of-sabotage-brimming-with-surveillance-equipment-report

Spain’s U.S.-made F-18 fighters are so old they’re practically falling apart. They’re finally upgrading to something new.
https://www.twz.com/air/spanish-typhoon-buy-signals-upward-trend-for-eurofighter

The last MiG-21 fighters in Europe have been removed from active duty. The plane entered service in 1959!
https://www.twz.com/air/final-mig-21-fishbeds-stand-down-from-active-duty-in-europe

The Su-27 is simply a better value for the money than the MiG-29–the former has a longer range, can carry more weapons and a bigger radar, and is almost as agile as the latter in dogfights. During the 1990s, when Russia was low on cash, it had to assign the Su-27 priority and to also neglect expensive upgrade programs for the MiG-29. If Russia had had more money in the 1990s, it could have done the upgrades, and the MiG-29 might still be a viable frontline plane today, like the upgraded F-16.
https://youtu.be/pSOHKxEIwCQ?si=mAI9Or4yGcnLGrlp

China is test flying what appears to be a sixth generation fighter.
https://www.twz.com/air/china-stuns-with-heavy-stealth-tactical-jets-sudden-appearance

Taiwan has received its first U.S. M1 Abrams tanks. They are much better than any tanks currently on the island.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2024/12/20/taiwan-gets-us-abrams-tanks-hardening-final-defenses-in-an-invasion/

Trump’s sabre-rattling about Panama was probably triggered by the increased presence of Chinese companies in the Canal. In the event of war with America, they could sabotage it.

‘Loss of access to the canal, even temporarily, could increase the time required to reposition assets from the Atlantic to Pacific theaters by several weeks. In the event of a Pacific war, the time lost in transit could prove decisive.’
https://www.csis.org/analysis/geopolitics-port-security-americas

During the Spanish Civil War, the “Republican” side, which was a coalition mostly dominated by left-wing groups, murdered thousands of civilians and enemy prisoners. They were defeated by Franco’s fascists, who committed their own atrocities that have gotten most of history’s focus.
https://hca.ed.ac.uk/research/about/knowledge-exchange/media/republican-terror

AI muscling humans out of prime real estate is a microcosm for the next 100 years.
https://apnews.com/article/data-centers-artificial-intelligence-technology-amazon-google-56b84cbb94942039754282afb076a87b

Will mathematicians lose their jobs before burger flippers?
https://www.science.org/content/article/brutal-math-test-stumps-ai-not-human-experts

In one sense, LLMs are improving at exponential rates every 3.3 months.
https://arxiv.org/html/2412.04315v1

On June 11, two AI researchers created the “ARC Prize,” which would award $1 million to the creators of any AI program that could score at least an 85% on their test. At the time, even the best AI program only scored 34%. The fact that even young children could score close to perfect spoke to the existence of some fundamental deficiency in the machines’ capacity for generalized thinking.

After a WHOLE SIX MONTHS, an AI program–OpenAI’s new “o3”–scored an 87%, and the company won the prize.
https://arcprize.org/2024-results

o3 got 366 out of 400 problems right on that test. Among the 34 it got wrong, some failures owed to the fact that the machine’s visual field was too narrow to see the puzzles in their entirety. If that constraint were eliminated, o3 would do even better.
https://anokas.substack.com/p/llms-struggle-with-perception-not-reasoning-arcagi

You can take a question from the test yourself: 
https://arcprize.org/play

As usual, this has triggered another moving of the goalposts, with the ARC Prize people insisting o3 STILL ISN’T ACTUALLY INTELLIGENT and announcing their plans to make a harder test called “ARC-AGI-2”.

‘Today we’re excited to launch our next era of models built for this new agentic era: introducing Gemini 2.0, our most capable model yet. With new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use, it will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant.’
https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/google-gemini-ai-update-december-2024/

Here are more rumors that GPT-5 isn’t as much of an improvement over GPT-4 as hoped. Rather than disappoint the public and give credence to the theory that LLM progress has stalled, OpenAI is delaying the release of GPT-5 until it works out the kinks.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-gpt5-orion-delays-639e7693

This prediction from March was wrong.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/openais-gpt-5-may-launch-this-summer-upgrading-chatgpt-along-the-way/

Here’s an interview with Nick Bostrom about the future of AGI. The whole thing is worth watching, but I’ve set it to start at a particularly interesting moment when he starts talking about its effect on geopolitics.
https://youtu.be/tZCOwaAK76E?si=gxsFK8IBB1qbuovm&t=1179

The Chinese company “Unitree” has developed an incredibly agile quadrupedal robot called “B2-W.”
https://youtu.be/X2UxtKLZnNo?si=jrz3WdaSKITETYhG

GM is ending its robotaxi business. Building autonomous cars has turned out to be harder and more expensive than anyone assumed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj902y4ez71o

Whenever a self-driving car kills someone, it’s big news, but what about the instances where one SAVES a person’s life in an instance where a human driver could have easily killed them?
https://youtu.be/h7PGrAlPELc?si=f88czJbQD2o_a5O_

‘New Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles’
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo

Lithium batteries are cheaper and better than classic alkaline batteries.
https://youtu.be/efDTP5SEdlo?si=22Lqv-MXV2vzkTpj

Dig up all the articles from the ancient days of October 2024 about the coming “post-election violence” and similar terms.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-11-05/political-violence-election-donald-trump-kamala-harris

‘Three-quarters of Americans say that they are worried about post-election violence, according to the AP/NORC poll. Some businesses in Washington, DC, have boarded up their windows, apparently for fear of riots. A few larger businesses are quietly preparing for potential disruption by cancelling meetings and suggesting employees work from home. Readying for potential unrest, some media organisations have even redeployed correspondents from warzones.

…Underpinning this are data showing that significant minorities—a fifth of Americans—say they support the use of violence to either restore Donald Trump to the presidency or else to prevent him from taking it.

…By contrast, if Mr Trump wins, the fear would be widespread protests in big cities, some of which could turn into violent rioting. Mr Pape stresses that his data suggest people on both sides of the political divide are supportive of violence.’
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/11/05/the-risk-of-election-violence-in-america-is-real

The next time a RETIRED GENERAL gives some stark predictions about the future, remember this prediction from 2021: ‘Finally, the Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/eaton-taguba-anderson-generals-military/

Another wrong, confident prediction about the 2024 election from an “expert.”
https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/do-the-math-trump-is-toast

The worst U.S. political predictions of 2024.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/20/worst-political-predictions-of-2024-00194856

Here are some expert predictions made a year ago about how the U.S. economy would fare in 2025. It turned out to be a crapshoot.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/opinions/economy-tech-business-2024-predictions-roundup/index.html

This Bank of America prediction from 13 months ago was actually right!

‘Lower Inflation Around the Globe Should Allow Central Banks to Cut Rates, While US Equities May Reach a Record Level of 5000 on the S&P by Year-end’

Inflation has stayed constant over the time period in most countries instead of risen, and the S&P 500’s value is now around 6,000.
https://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/content/newsroom/press-releases/2023/11/bofa-global-research-calls-2024–the-year-of-the-landing–.html

Social scientists find ways to bias studies about the impact of immigration towards whatever their personal views are.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33274

If you had four years worth of water and canned food in a deep cave, you could have survived the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708980114

China might have hit peak oil consumption.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/CNPC-China-Reaches-Refined-Oil-Demand-Peak.html

‘China completes 3,000-km green belt around its biggest desert’
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-completes-3000-km-green-belt-around-its-biggest-desert-state-media-says-2024-11-29/

There are seven different kinds of luminescence.
https://www.aatbio.com/resources/faq-frequently-asked-questions/what-are-the-types-of-luminescence

Crabs might be able to feel pain.
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/13/11/851

The National Hurricane Center’s prediction about the 2024 hurricane season was accurate.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/23/1251003581/2024-atlantic-hurricane-season-noaa-forecast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Atlantic_hurricane_season

Google now has the most accurate weather forecasting computer ever.
‘Here we introduce GenCast, a probabilistic weather model with greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world, ENS, the ensemble forecast of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts4. GenCast is an ML weather prediction method, trained on decades of reanalysis data.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08252-9

From two months ago: ‘Telescopes on Earth have found evidence of intelligent alien life and the proof will be released in less than one month, a filmmaker claims.

Simon Holland, who has worked on documentaries for the BBC and NASA-funded projects, said that an Oxford-backed program searching for extraterrestrial signals has quietly identified ‘non-human intelligence in our galaxy.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13950399/Evidence-alien-life-revealed-month.html

There has been a rash of UFO sightings in the Mid-Atlantic U.S., mostly over New Jersey. While most of them are misidentified aircraft or human-constructed drones, some are of unknown origin. The inability and possible unwillingness of several government authorities to investigate the UFOs has confused many.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/planes-drones-or-ufos-what-are-people-seeing-in-the-new-jersey-sky

Five important drug advances of 2024 include an HIV vaccine (must be injected every six months), a vaccine that greatly reduces the severity of common food allergies, a new schizophrenia treatment with low side effects, and a pill that extends the lives of people with a certain kind of lung cancer by three years.
https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/five-medical-breakthroughs-in-2024

An Ozempic-like drug has been FDA approved to treat sleep apnea in obese people.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/20/health/zepbound-sleep-apnea-fda-approval/index.html

‘The Fertilo procedure differs from traditional IVF because it takes ovarian support cells (OSCs) derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and co-cultures them with an immature egg to mimic the natural egg maturation process in the lab. A 2023 study showed that this method significantly improved egg maturation and embryo formation. Gameto says the Fertilo procedure avoids 80% of the hormone injections that traditional IVF requires and reduces the duration of a treatment cycle to three days.

“The ability to mature eggs outside the body within minimal hormonal intervention significiantly reduces risks such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and alleviates the side effects caused by high hormone doses,” said Dr Luis Guzmán, the lead at Pranor Laboratories, Peru, who oversaw the Fertilo procedure that resulted in the first live birth. “Fertilo is a major advancement for women who cannot tolerate or do not want to undergo the burden of the traditional IVF protocol, bringing hope and new possibilities to a broader patient population.”’
https://newatlas.com/medical/fertility-tech-stem-cells-first-birth/

‘Mirror bacteria might thus have free reign within the bodies not just of humans but also much of multicellular life on Earth. They would have no natural predators. They would be immune to existing bacteriophages. They would be an invasive species colonizing what might be, to them, an untouched environment.’
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y8ysGMphfoFTXZcYp/biological-risk-from-the-mirror-world

‘The lifelong presence of bHPV ends up being a surveillance system for skin cancer!’
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/hpv-infections-friend-and-foe

Review: “The Parable of the Sower”

Plot:

I’ve gotten so old that I can remember a time when “the year 2024” sounded profoundly futuristic and an average person would have claimed with a straight face that we’d have flying cars and laser guns by then, or alternatively that the human race would be near extinction due to a global calamity. As with so many things in life, reality has fallen short of the extremes and we’re actually muddling through a middle path, and 2024 has proven not so good or bad as people predicted.

One of those people was famed black author Octavia Butler. In 1993, she published The Parable of the Sower, which still ranks on many all-time best sci-fi book lists. While it’s well-written, engrossing, and rich in symbolism, its depiction of our present is off-base. I’m going to show you exactly how inaccurate it is, not to trash Octavia Butler, but to demonstrate how unreliable the vast majority of science fiction works turn out to be. Keep this in mind whenever you read a review of some other apocalypse book set in the future.

The story is told from the perspective of a black teenaged girl named “Lauren.” She lives in an exurb of Los Angeles with her father, Latina stepmother, and siblings of mixed origins. Her short lifetime has witnessed the steady and serious decline of America thanks to climate change, a breakdown of law and order, new kinds of dangerous drugs, and incompetent governance. Nothing is stopping the ill trends, and anarchy looks inevitable.

As conditions in her community and family deteriorate, Lauren is forced to mature, summon more courage than she knew possible, and make sense of the world and her place in it. She’s also gifted with a form of telepathy that lets her sense the feelings of the people and animals around her. It gives her deeper insights into reality and the future, and inspires her to create her own religion she names “Earthseed.”

The Parable of the Sower is really an allegory for the African-American experience, but in a fictitious setting. There is crushing poverty and violence in the protagonist’s community, havoc wreaked by drugs (the crack epidemic), a steady decline of the neighborhood as people are murdered or move away, practical slavery where rich white people give black and Hispanic people menial jobs in their households, and a widespread desire to make the dangerous trek north to escape all the problems. The book’s futuristic elements are given less thought and, as I’ll show, were mostly inaccurate.

The book’s events start on July 20, 2024 and end on October 10, 2027, but though it’s just the end of 2024 now, I think this review is still appropriate since the book’s events up to this point describe conditions that persist until the end.

Analysis:

There is a cataclysmic energy crisis. Lauren reveals that electricity has been so expensive since 2016 (or earlier) that almost no lights are on at night, and that the upside of the lack of light pollution is that all the stars of the Milky Way are visible. The scope of the problem is clear when she also reveals she’s been living the whole time in a town that is only 20 miles from Los Angeles. Under ordinary conditions, few stars would be visible thanks to the city’s light pollution. Gasoline is also so expensive that only the rich can afford it, so bicycles are the standard means of transportation.

This was completely wrong. Adjusted for inflation, average electricity prices in the U.S. are actually slightly lower than they were when the book was published in 1993, and gasoline is only slightly more expensive. Los Angeles and its suburbs still glow bright at night and the city pulses with life.

Violent crime is killing about as many Americans as a medium-intensity war. Violent criminals, gangs, and homeless people became so numerous and the authorities so inept at dealing with them, that average people had to take their security in their own hands by building walls around their neighborhoods and patrolling them with guns. Lauren says walls started becoming common in her area in 2010, and that the height and construction quality of each neighborhood’s wall reflects its wealth (her upper middle-class neighborhood’s wall is concrete and very tall). The unprotected expanses between the walled compounds are extremely dangerous wastelands where it’s common to see corpses and destroyed buildings. Arson has become a national pastime.

Around the same time, all the parents in her neighborhood removed Lauren and all the other children from the public schools due to fears of violent crime. They are homeschooled and are discouraged from going outside at all. In spite of these precautions, several of Lauren’s family members and neighbors are murdered over the course of the story and the neighborhood is destroyed by a gang attack.

Very fortunately, this is not the 2024 we ended up with. Rates of homicides and all other violent crimes are much lower now than they were when the book was published (1993).

America is in the grips of a drug addiction and homelessness crisis. While violent criminals are the biggest problem facing society in 2024, drug addicts and homeless people are also practically everywhere, and the walls are meant to keep them out of the functional pockets of life, too. Lauren doesn’t provide enough information to conclude how numerous these kinds of people are, but they might be the majority of the population outside of the enclaves. This depiction of 2024 is wrong.

While the problem of drug addiction in America might be worse than it was in 1993, it hasn’t reached the near-apocalyptic levels depicted in the book. I couldn’t find an exact trend in the data, but addiction rates to hard drugs that turn users violent or into “zombies” seem only slightly higher than they were in 1993. At that time the U.S. was still in the grips of the crack epidemic, which had ravaged the black community in particular. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl are the dominant hard drugs of 2024, and have created a surge in overdose deaths given their potency. However, it’s unclear whether the share of the U.S. population that is chronically strung out on hard drugs today like the masses of people in The Parable of the Sower is much higher than it was in 1993. Aside from in cursed places like the San Francisco Tenderloin district or Kensington, Philadelphia, reality thankfully fell short of the book’s expectations.

While counting the chronically homeless population is difficult, there’s no reason to believe they are a bigger share of the Los Angeles area’s population in 2024 than they were in 1993. This report estimated there were 77,000 homeless people in Los Angeles county in mid-1992, and The Greater Los Angeles Point-in-time Count estimated there were 75,312 of them in the county in 2024. In other words, the prevalence of homeless people in the L.A. area overall is not noticeably different than it was when the book was published.

And while it’s an imperfect proxy for homelessness, it’s worth mentioning that the unemployment rate is actually lower in 2024 than it was in 1993.

A hurricane killed 700 people. In passing, Lauren mentions in July that a hurricane killed over 700 Americans throughout the Gulf Coast region. In real life, hurricane “Beryl,” DID hit the Gulf Coast that month, but it only killed ten people (does that mean Octavia Butler thought 2024 would be 70 times worse than it really is?).

During the 2024 Hurricane Season, five hurricanes made landfall in the U.S., killing a total of 335 people. Hurricane Helene killed most of those. All the hurricanes of 2024 combined only killed half as many people as the one that Octavia Butler predicted would hit us.

Telepathy has been proven to exist. Lauren has “hyperempathy syndrome,” a congenital disorder that arises in fetuses if their mothers abuse some kind of futuristic drug while pregnant. People afflicted with hyperempathy have the psychic ability to sense the emotions and sensations of people and of some animals around them. This is a medically documented condition, and is a form of telepathy, which means the scientific community has recognized the existence of telepathy. This has not happened, and telepathy is still relegated to pseudoscience in 2024.

Climate change has caused severe desertification in the southwest U.S. Lauren mentions that it hasn’t rained in her town for years, and that water is even more expensive than gasoline, making baths a luxury. Early in the book, she is baptized in a joint event with several other neighborhood kids so their parents can share the high costs of the water used in the ceremony. Arson fires rage across Los Angeles unchecked because the municipal water pipes are empty, leaving firefighters with nothing to quash the flames.

Thankfully, this was also inaccurate. 2024 was actually one of the wettest years in the L.A. area’s recorded meteorological history, and since 1993, there has been no detectable decline in yearly rainfall levels.

The U.S. has a space station, a manned Moon base, and a manned Mars base. In spite of its long-running decline, the country has managed to establish three off-world bases. This proved completely wrong. Even the sole space station with an American presence is not fully American–it is shared with 14 other countries, including Russia, hence its name of “the International Space Station.” The only country with a solely owned and operated space station in 2024 is China.

A human died on Mars. One of the astronauts–a Hispanic female–died on Mars after tearing her space suit. This of course didn’t happen.

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election was between two men, and the conservative won. The incumbent was “William Turner Smith” and his challenger was “Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner.” Though their party affiliations were unmentioned, Donner’s promises to eliminate federal agencies, privatize the space program, and cut some federal labor and environmental laws to stimulate the economy make it clear he was Republican. He won.

This prediction was half right, and has some eerie parallels with reality. Until three months before the election, the race was between a Democrat incumbent and a Republican challenger. Both were male. Joe Biden then dropped out, so the final contest was between a woman and a man.

The winner, Donald Trump, has campaigned on unusually extreme (even for a Republican) promises to cut the federal bureaucracy and regulations, and one of his most powerful allies is Elon Musk–the head of the most successful private space company who is also an outspoken advocate of sending humans to Mars. If their relationship perseveres, it’s conceivable that the Trump administration could privatize facets of the American space program to Musk’s benefit and give him a major boost launching the first manned Mars mission.

Richer people have wall-sized, paper-thin TVs in their houses. Lauren says that these have existed since about 2009, are appropriately called “Window Walls,” and that one of the richer and more enterprising families in the neighborhood had one in their house and let other people watch it in exchange for food. This prediction was wrong, though there are important caveats.

This paper-thin OLED display made by LG had its debut in 2017 and enjoyed no commercial success.

Paper-thin displays that can be attached to walls have existed for several years, but haven’t become commercially successful. Wall-sized TVs, which I’ll define as those at least seven feet high (the ceiling height in a typical American house) and 9′-4″ wide (for an aspect ratio of 4:3) exist, but are incredibly expensive, custom-made items that people living in neighborhoods like Lauren’s couldn’t afford.

However, an upper middle-class family that prioritized home entertainment could be expected to buy this 115″ QM-8 TV made by TCL. It costs $17,000, which would be within their means, and is five feet high and two inches thick. The TV would be incredibly large and thin by 1993 standards.

The ViewSonic PX748-4K projector can create a wall-sized, high-definition display and is affordable.

Alternatively, the family could buy a 4K laser projector for less money. Depending on the model and its distance from the surface onto which it beams images, such a laser projector could create a truly wall-sized display. A major downside is the loss of picture quality if the room is too brightly lit.

Strictly speaking, the book’s prediction that “Window Walls” would be relatively common in America by 2024 was wrong, but in spirit, it was right. TVs that are very large but thin by 1993 standards are widespread, as are home theater projectors that can cover entire walls with moving images.

Emergency response services have failed in the U.S. In the book, the police are useless in addressing the rampant crime and make people pay them bribes to respond to calls, and firefighters can’t quash the arsons due to a lack of water. Fortunately, things are different in the real 2024, and though Americans level much criticism at their police, they are overwhelmingly prompt, professional, and helpful, especially since the use of bodycams became common. Having to promise an officer a payment to have him investigate a crime that affected you is unheard of.

While 2024 America mercifully failed to live up to The Parable of the Sower’s dark vision of what it would be, there’s one place that made the cut: Haiti. That cursed country matches the book’s near-apocalyptic setting with striking accuracy–there is a failed government, lawlessness, war-levels of killing, severe environmental degradation, food and resource shortages of every kind, and high levels of homelessness and unemployment.

Links:

  1. In 1992, there were an estimated 77,000 homeless people in L.A. County.
    https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-06-30-me-8538-story.html
  2. In 2024, there were an estimated 75,312.
    https://www.lahsa.org/data-refresh/home/datadashboard?id=57
  3. Hurricanes killed 335 Americans in 2024.
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/11/30/2024-atlantic-hurricane-season-ends-with-at-least-335-us-deaths/76619181007
  4. You CAN buy a wall-sized TV in 2024…for $220,000.
    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1757890-REG/samsung_iab_146_4k_iab_series_the_wall.html
  5. Paper-thin TVs have existed since 2017 at the latest.
    https://www.fastcompany.com/3066882/this-ultrathin-oled-tv-hangs-on-the-wall-like-a-poster

Interesting articles, November 2024

The pace of Russia’s territorial gains in eastern Ukraine has accelerated.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-defenses-in-east-are-buckling-russian-advance-is-accelerating

However, this is coming at the cost of enormous Russian casualties.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3nv7j1xkxo

One of Russia’s biggest tank storage bases has 75% fewer tanks than it did before the Ukraine War, and most of the remaining vehicles are in such poor condition that they can’t be restored for combat.
https://youtu.be/mUzuAMp73I4?si=6E3JubyT_Xg8fh7B

The Red Army is so low on weapons that Russia’s biggest film studio donated to it dozens of antique tanks and other vehicles that it normally used for making war films.
https://www.twz.com/land/russias-largest-film-studio-donated-antique-tanks-to-the-military

With North Korean help, Russia is recapturing its land near Kursk.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-hoped-force-russia-pick-111953225.html

North Korean artillery pieces are making their way to Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/land/north-korean-long-range-self-propelled-artillery-appears-in-russia

Russia is giving North Korea more advanced antiaircraft missiles in exchange for its help in Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/land/north-korea-getting-new-air-defenses-in-return-for-supporting-russia-in-ukraine-official

Many Russians are enlisting in the Army solely for money. The pay is excellent. Problematically, the Russian government is paying for these salaries as well as most other war-related expenses by printing huge amounts of money and handing it out, which is causing very high inflation.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/economics-death-why-russians-poor-161637106.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-signs-law-allowing-russian-171726947.html

After Biden authorized Ukraine to fire advanced, U.S.-made missiles deep into Russia, Putin announced Russia might use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-nuclear-doctrine-putin-91f20e0c9b0f9e5eaa3ed97c35789898

Russia also fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile into Ukraine in revenge. This is the first time such a weapon has ever been used in anger.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-intercontinental-missile-war-putin-d50183ccfc28b10c71e93f3e68159a61

‘Ukraine’s drone units are inflicting 80% of the frontline casualties on Russia, report says’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraines-drone-units-inflicting-80-121327010.html

Israel’s most recent airstrikes on Iran destroyed most of the latter’s missile fuel production facilities, which will effectively limit missile production for years. The jets also destroyed many of Iran’s S-300 antiaircraft missile sites, showing how inferior the Russian-made systems are to American technology. Most of China’s antiaircraft missiles have the same level of technology as the S-300, meaning a U.S.-China air war would probably be more one-sided than people think. The U.S. is unique in that its military pretends to be weaker than it is.
https://youtu.be/oQtRdL36FVs?si=lN40_YCEHMAHJ5i2

2% of Gaza’s population has been killed in the last 13 months.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-11-20-2024-5da3ce43df8662fe9eeab4ad804bdc0f

A U.N. analysis found that most of the people killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza have been women and children.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/partial-un-probe-gaza-war-094427985.html

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince accused Israel of genocide in Gaza.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8x5570514o

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and two top leaders in the Israeli and Hamas armed forces for war crimes.
https://apnews.com/article/icc-israel-hamas-warrants-netanyahu-palestinian-arrest-73c854d072e0a1a41b19b2cb2cdd07fa

This video shows how the Israeli Air Force practically destroyed Syria’s Air Force in 1982.
https://youtu.be/F33h9-oUfDU?si=c3yQos_YepVP9ald

The F-20 was the greatest fighter plane that never was.
https://youtu.be/5ypSn108HuY?si=J-cp60LpkDuyjPhd

Here’s an interesting and simple video about how artillery is aimed at targets. The “Fire Direction Center” (7:20) will be made obsolete by intelligent machines.
https://youtu.be/PrullIWGqX8?si=acW-XgN2SQ8a2Z_7

We know of ways to design better shotgun shells, but no one has tried to commercialize them due to path dependence. In other words, there are so many shotguns that use the old shells that we are locked in to continuing their use.
https://youtu.be/3iLSCNtogc8?si=0s8Uqt9nCXQD3YA-

In November of 1950, U.N. forces captured Pyongyang from North Korea’s battered army. At that point, there were two options: 1) Build a strong defensive line north of Pyongyang clear across the peninsula or 2) pursue the fleeing enemy and take over all of North Korea to the Chinese border. In retrospect, we should have chosen the first option because even if the Communists had retained control over the northern mountain region, they wouldn’t have had enough land, resources or people to make a viable country, and there’s no way it would have been able to build nuclear weapons 50 years later.

Halting our troops north of Pyongyang would have also left us much abler to repulse any Chinese counteroffensive, which some in the U.S. military high command correctly believed was coming. In any case, not advancing to the border would have signaled to the Chinese that our goal wasn’t to eventually invade them, and that we were willing to leave rump North Korea as a buffer zone. General MacArthur really blew it.
https://youtu.be/VWlZ6Xf4Bp8?si=5f1gtV8rRLvhzHAA&t=524

In a shocking turn of events, rebels captured the second-largest city in Syria, Aleppo, after just a day of fighting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly27r5p0yno

From this February: “There’s this very powerful and seductive narrative around a soft landing, and we’re just not seeing it in the data,” Citi’s chief US economist, Andrew Hollenhorst, said in a CNBC interview.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-soft-landing-us-economy-022146984.html

Does Joe Biden believe in the Singularity?
https://x.com/i/status/1838721620808208884

“Search engine optimization” worsens political polarization by providing people with political articles that support their existing biases.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241031-how-google-tells-you-what-you-want-to-hear

Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The vast majority of polls showed a tied result up to the day of the vote, and were badly wrong: Trump won the popular vote and the electoral vote count by healthy margins. Here’s a roundup of right and wrong predictions.

The saga of veteran Democratic strategist James Carville:

Elon Musk’s 2023 prediction right after it was announced Trump would be charged with a felony in New York and forced to have his mugshot taken:

In September 2023, Tucker Carlson predicted Trump would be assassinated. In 2024, there were two attempts on his life, one of which nearly succeeded. “They indicted him three times, and every single time his popularity rose. If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, then you go to indictment, and none of them work, what’s next? Graph it out, man! We’re speeding toward assassination, obviously. No-one will say that, but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12470861/Tucker-Carlson-breathlessly-says-speeding-Trump-assassination-liberal-establishment-running-options-stop-president-Russian-propagandist-says-ex-Fox-News-host-dead-man-walking.html

A robotic guard dog is patrolling Trump’s Florida estate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c30p16gn3pvo

Trump has vowed to negotiate and end to the Ukraine War, even if it means forfeiting conquered territory. A cease-fire would allow Russia to rebuild its forces faster than Ukraine, and then attack again in a year with a large advantage. Trump should not substantially lower U.S. aid to Ukraine for the first year of his coming term to ensure that Russia burns through the remainder of its Soviet-era weapons stockpiles, making rapid rearmament after any cease-fire impossible.
https://youtu.be/cZoJKFfZ7nw?si=dzoVreJXTfp2EAlt

NVIDIA’s market cap is now over $3 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-rides-ai-wave-pass-211002574.html

In his final book, Henry Kissinger warned of a future where technologically enhanced humans and machines rule the world. ‘In a section titled “Coevolution: Artificial Humans,” the three authors encourage people to think now about “trying to navigate our role when we will no longer be the only or even the principal actors on our planet.”’
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/nov/19/henry-kissinger-final-warning-prepare-superhuman-p/

‘A painting by an AI robot of the eminent World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing has sold for $1,084,800 (£836,667) at auction.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqdvz4w45wo

An online variant of the Turing Test showed humans can barely tell human-made art from AI-made art anymore.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing

‘AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

AI-generated music is now as good as what most human musicians can make. The two are also indistinguishable in most cases.
https://youtu.be/qj1Sp8He6e4?si=JLpjUDh91kKkV4mY
https://youtu.be/u2pYNRNdcNc?si=ChwlfJj7bgk3jmYD

This high-res simulation of Rome is almost indistinguishable from reality.
https://youtu.be/Qhucdyzkeis?si=xJrIQElA53R7ru_K

Machines can recognize emotions from the facial expressions of goats. Someday, they will be able to empathize and communicate with animals better than humans.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241107193106.htm

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts machines will probably surpass humans in all areas of thinking by 2030. Roadblocks to that milestone are unlikely to appear.
https://youtu.be/GrloGdp5wdc?si=aGM_PDGv0vXNQqvr

The anonymous tech analyst “Gwern” predicts AGI could be invented as early as 2028.
https://youtu.be/a42key59cZQ?si=opLEiYab3pZmkAJr

Even the eternal pessimist Yann LeCun predicts AGI could be invented in as little as five years.
https://youtu.be/JAgHUDhaTU0?si=hpMZqC30F22U_EVM&t=4410

Greg Brockman has returned to OpenAI.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/12/openai-co-founder-greg-brockman-returns-after-three-months-of-leave.html

There are rumors GPT-5 is not as good as was hoped, leading to questions about whether AI progress is slowing down.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/09/openai-reportedly-developing-new-strategies-to-deal-with-ai-improvement-slowdown/

“[Today’s investments in AIs and data centers are] the biggest gamble in business history”
https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/18/will-the-bubble-burst-for-ai-in-2025-or-will-it-start-to-deliver

‘US government commission pushes Manhattan Project-style AI initiative’
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/us-government-commission-pushes-manhattan-project-style-ai-initiative-2024-11-19/

Despite all the jokes about it, the Tesla Cybertruck has rapidly become the #1 bestselling electric truck in America.
https://autos.yahoo.com/data-shows-tesla-cybertruck-dominating-110031477.html

The “Jellyfish UFO” was probably a bundle of party balloons.
https://youtu.be/ojotsKjshHc?si=80VvDR50SsQ4xIBq

The U.S. military says the “GoFast” UFO was probably a balloon and only seemed to be moving fast because the jet that filmed it was moving fast.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6364948499112

‘Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.

The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and “Symphony No. 9,” suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity. “Similar to how cells in biological materials interact in complex but organized ways to perform a function, Beethoven’s 9th symphony arranges musical notes and themes to create a complex but coherent musical experience,” says Buehler.’
https://news.mit.edu/2024/graph-based-ai-model-maps-future-innovation-1112

‘We took the standard human model (75kg), and made smaller and smaller models down to 100 grams. We also made the models bigger, up to 2,000kg, and challenged them to run as fast as they could.

Several fascinating things happened when we did this.

First, the 2,000kg model couldn’t move. Nor could the 1,000kg model. In fact, the largest model that could move was 900kg, suggesting an upper limit to the human form. Beyond this size we need to change shape in order to move.

We also found that the fastest model was not the biggest nor smallest. Instead, it was around 47kg, a similar weight to an average cheetah.

…Interestingly, many of our fastest long distance runners such as Eliud Kipchoge weigh around 50kg.’
https://theconversation.com/not-too-big-not-too-small-why-modern-humans-are-the-ideal-size-for-speed-241668

China has now produced more greenhouse gas emissions than Europe has since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/19/climate/china-emissions-fossil-fuels-climate.html

The FDA is finally prohibiting the sale of the decongestant “phenylephrine” because it doesn’t work. There were indications of its inefficacy as early as 2007. It took them this long to do anything.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-proposes-ending-use-oral-phenylephrine-otc-monograph-nasal-decongestant-active-ingredient-after

Lead poisoning is pervasive among Afghans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-022-00431-y

The coming baby boom

Something that has been getting an annoyingly large amount of attention recently is human population decline. While this is old news for some rich countries like Japan and Italy, whose populations started decreasing around 2010, the same phenomenon has struck even middle-income countries like China and Brazil many years sooner than demographers projected. This is causing alarm as people ponder the ill economic consequences of having fewer working-age people but more elderly, and the changes in demography and the global balance of power as African and Muslim countries become the most numerous. 

Rather than tread the same ground that the mainstream media has on this topic, I’m going to consider how future technologies and the cultural changes that go hand-in-hand with them will mitigate the effects of population decline. Below, I’ve listed each of the main depressors of birthrates along with how they will be counteracted.

Women

Female empowerment is probably the biggest reason why birthrates have dropped. Women across the world want more for themselves than being housebound mothers who are dependent on their husbands for money; they want education, careers, and the option to prosper independently. To a modern woman, the opportunity cost of having children, in terms of delayed or abandoned matriculation and forfeited lifetime salary, is massive. As a result, women delay starting families until they’ve finished their degrees and gotten good jobs, often pushing the start of motherhood to 30 (as is the average age for a first-time American mother). Because their fertility windows close around 40, it’s common for mothers to not have as many children as they wanted. 

This ties into ANOTHER topic that has been getting an annoyingly large amount of attention recently: job automation. The last four years of rapid advances in LLMs have inflamed worries that machines will soon get smart enough to take all of our jobs. I think this will happen eventually, though the length of time it takes (30 years? 100 years?), the order in which jobs are automated (White-collar managers before blue-collar laborers or the reverse? Artistic jobs or scientific jobs first?), and how societies respond to the transition are totally uncertain. Regardless, if every human loses their job, then by implication every woman loses her job, which eliminates a major impediment to having children: With no possibility of having a gainful career, there will be much less of an opportunity cost for women to have children. Without jobs to worry about, men will also have more time for fatherhood. 

In the far future, it’s also unclear if higher education will continue impeding parenthood. Aside from the pure pursuit of knowledge for one’s own gratification, there will be no point in getting a college degree at some point because machines will be much smarter than even the smartest human. Even if you had a PhD from the best university, you would not be able to contribute anything useful in your field since machines would be so much more advanced and faster than you. The value of a college education would plummet, and more women (and men) would rightfully find it a better use of their time to have children during early adulthood. 

Therapies that delay or even eliminate menopause will be particularly popular because they will not only extend female fertility, but they also promote youthfulness, beauty, and other aspects of personal health. The added luxury of more time and youthful energy to have children will of course raise birthrates.

These therapies could eventually be subsumed by more advanced treatments that slow, halt, and reverse the aging process as a whole. The benefits would accrue to men just as much as to women, and would further raise birthrates by granting everyone the strength and stamina to bear and raise children well into what we’d today consider old age. Medical immortality is the ultimate cure for population decline. If everyone lives forever, even if the average person has one child a century, it’s only a matter of time before Earth is literally clogged with human bodies. If you believe in the feasibility of medical immortality–and there’s no reason not to–and that biological humans won’t go extinct for some reason in the relatively near future, then you should acknowledge overpopulation as a likely long-term prospect. 

Infertility

Aside from menopause, there are many kinds of health problems that can render both sexes infertile. Additionally, same-sex couples and single males who want to be fathers face obvious roadblocks to biological reproduction. Again, science will offer solutions. In the future, we can expect cures for most diseases, including infertility. This will include better ways to surgically repair or replace damaged or malformed sex organs, or replace defective DNA inside of some tissues through CRISPR. Genetic engineering and greater use of IVF screening will also ensure that fewer people are born with fertility problems to begin with.

An illustration of a fetal lamb inside the “artificial womb” device, which mimics the conditions inside a pregnant animal.

In the shorter run, techniques that allow sterile people to create eggs and sperm of their own by inserting their DNA into empty donor gametes will be developed and help raise the birthrate. In the very long run, artificial wombs will be created and will let anyone have a biological child, probably at much lower cost and risk to the fetus than the “traditional” method. The logical place for artificial wombs is in medical labs, but there’s no technological barrier to eventually putting them into female androids, allowing for true robotic surrogacy.

Time and Money

A second cause of reduced fertility is the high cost and time commitment of raising children. Bigger housing, babysitters, healthcare, tutoring, clothing, and a slew of other expenses accompany a child, and typically run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in rich countries. These costs dissuade many young and middle-aged adults who already feel stretched, or who don’t want to give up the modest financial cushions they have, from having as many children as they want, or from having any at all. Additionally, cultural norms have shifted so that adults accept children will be monumental time commitments whose emotional and intellectual development and personal interests will have to be nurtured. Long gone are the old days when children were largely ignored and most households were authoritarian. 

Our old friend mass job automation again offers solutions. Though it would, at first glance, seem likely to depress birthrates since people would no longer have jobs and hence money to pay for child expenses, machine labor would make every good and service cheaper, allowing humans with a modest universal basic income (UBI) to afford things that only the rich can today. Importantly, this would include babysitting, tutoring, house servant services, and autonomous transportation, which would greatly ease the parenting workload and make it more enticing to have children. Having a house robot that was infinitely patient, fair, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of parenting skills and communication styles would be very beneficial to any family, and at scale would create social benefits.

Going a step further, it’s just a matter of time before robotics and AI get advanced enough to allow for the creation of androids who could function as spouses and foster parents. This would entice even more humans to have children by reducing the parenting workload substantially. With almost no exceptions, marriage rates dropped and divorce rates rose across rich countries from 1990 – 2021, and unsurprisingly, this has contributed to the birthrate decline since fewer people are interested in shouldering the burdens of parenthood alone. Robot spouses will fill the gap, in what might, counterintuitively, be a positive development for the human race.

Conclusion

While the decline in birthrates across upper- and middle-income countries will hurt the economy for decades, there’s no reason to think the negative trends will continue beyond this century, let alone reach the logical endpoint of human extinction. Future technologies and their attendant cultural changes will raise birthrates, reviving older fears of overpopulation and overcrowding.