Tag: technology

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Interesting articles, June 2023

Ukraine started its long-awaited counteroffensive to retake Russian-occupied parts of its country.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65866880

A day after the Ukrainian counteroffensive started, the Kakhovka dam blew up, sending a surge of water down the Dnieper River. Though both sides blamed the other for the act, the dam was inside Russian-controlled territory, and its destruction helped Russia since it prevented Ukrainian forces from making amphibious crossings downriver.
https://youtu.be/MNsTa90FjiA

“THE gruesome remains of soldiers from World War Two complete with Nazi helmets have been unearthed in the Ukrainian reservoir emptied by a devastating dam blast last week.”
https://www.the-sun.com/news/8349588/nazi-soldiers-ukraine-dam-lake-flooded-kherson/

Russia’s (highly probable) destruction of the dam has caused all the irrigation canals running into Crimea to go dry. An act meant to hobble the Ukrainian counteroffensive will have long-lasting consequences for the people living in the parts of Ukraine Russia annexed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65963403

A pipeline used to transport ammonia (the key ingredient in synthetic fertilizer) was blown up, leading to further recriminations between Ukraine and Russia.
https://www.barrons.com/news/russia-accuses-ukraine-of-blowing-up-key-ammonia-pipeline-ministry-96363315

Combat videos from both sides of the counteroffensive.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-advances-made-in-grueling-fight

A brutal, first-person video of Ukrainian special forces troops shooting Russian troops dead in a Russian trench has surfaced.
https://youtu.be/yRL3Nlu9uts

Zelenskyy admitted that the counteroffensive hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped. Ukraine has suffered significant losses in exchange for insignificant amounts of land retaken from Russia. The Russians are just fighting better on the defensive than we expected.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/22/politics/ukraine-counteroffensive-western-assessment/index.html

A Russian kamikaze drone destroyed an advanced German antiaircraft system donated to Ukraine.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-prized-iris-t-air-defense-system-attacked-by-russian-drone-in-video

The Russians turned one of their antique T-54 tanks into a remote-controlled suicide drone packed with explosives.
https://youtu.be/l6Rwj5MsdyU

Ukraine lost a unit of Western-supplied tanks in its attack against the Russian lines.
https://youtu.be/8qSXAaQc7EI

Russia was rattled by a brief coup attempt by its Wagner private army.

NATO countries still have not standardized their artillery. “Companies are making money out of the fact that ammunitions are not interchangeable, that they can dominate their national markets with their munitions.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nato-pushes-common-standards-tackle-085937666.html

After 111 years of service in some form or another, the U.S. military has finally stopped using the Colt .45 pistol.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/iconic-1911-pistols-are-finally-gone-from-marine-corps-service

‘The United States military released video Monday of what it called an “unsafe” Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait on the weekend, in which a Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of an American destroyer, forcing the U.S. vessel to slow to avoid a collision.’
https://apnews.com/article/us-china-taiwan-strait-489a45bb6df134fa09443d285b3f8669

In WWII, Japanese troops used “lunge mines,” which were pressure-sensitive bombs attached to long poles. A soldier would use one to “spear” and enemy tank, and the collision between the mine and the tank’s surface would set off the explosives. It was usually fatal to the user.
https://youtu.be/rBnRhP41nmg

‘A national redoubt or national fortress is an area to which the (remnant) military forces of a nation can be withdrawn if the main battle has been lost or even earlier if defeat is considered inevitable. Typically, a region is chosen with a geography favouring defence, such as a mountainous area or a peninsula, to function as a final holdout to preserve national independence and host an effective resistance movement for the duration of the conflict.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_redoubt

‘There are two fundamentally different types of inertial navigation systems: gimbaling systems and strapdown systems.’
https://www.britannica.com/technology/inertial-guidance-system

Ten years after Google Glass, Apple has announced it is making its own augmented reality goggles.
https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg

This analyst thinks Apple probably won’t sell many Vision Pro units due to its high price and limited capabilities. However, it will lay the groundwork for future generations of the goggles, which will cheaper, better, and more widely used.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-vision-pro-technical-marvel-021046894.html

“An artist used AI to show what the children of famous celebrity exes would look like if they’d stayed together”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/artist-used-ai-show-children-113000525.html

The new text-prompted image generators are being used to make fake child pornography.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-computer-generated-child-abuse-050000430.html

“Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing.”
https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-courts-e15023d7e6fdf4f099aa122437dbb59b

‘AlphaDev uncovered faster algorithms by starting from scratch rather than refining existing algorithms, and began looking where most humans don’t: the computer’s assembly instructions.

Assembly instructions are used to create binary code for computers to put into action. While developers write in coding languages like C++, known as high-level languages, this must be translated into ‘low-level’ assembly instructions for computers to understand.

We believe many improvements exist at this lower level that may be difficult to discover in a higher-level coding language. Computer storage and operations are more flexible at this level, which means there are significantly more potential improvements that could have a larger impact on speed and energy usage.’
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sorting-algorithms

Humans are using LLMs to automate task completion in Mechanical Turk.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mechanical-turk-workers-using-ai-191404515.html

Bing Chat can solve CAPTCHAs even if it doesn’t know it.

As the internet fills with computer-generated content (images, news articles, stories, sounds and music), we run the risk of creating corrupted data training sets for future AIs. The errors could compound themselves as AIs trained on flawed data make new content that is even more flawed, which newer AIs would use as THEIR training data, and so on.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-collapse

‘He predicted that AI would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than human journalists and said that only publishers who created “the best original content” – such as investigative journalism and original commentary – would survive.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/german-tabloid-bild-to-replace-range-of-editorial-jobs-with-ai

Computer programs can reliably assess breast cancer risk from mammogram images alone.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/990740

Terence Tao, one of the best mathematicians alive, predicts that AI will be able to co-author math research papers by 2026.
https://unlocked.microsoft.com/ai-anthology/terence-tao/

Mark Zuckerberg has no idea when AGI will be invented. He thinks LLMs might be a paradigm whose performance tops out before reaching general intelligence.
https://youtu.be/YkSXY4pBAEk

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey thinks the near-term potential and threat of AI is being overblown by tech companies because the publicity boosts their stock valuations. The media has gone along with it because doomsday stories boost their ratings.
https://youtu.be/WS7xmb3UhCU

Yann LeCun says we’re still decades away from building an AGI, and that we still don’t even have rat-brain-level AI.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65886125

The infamous terrorist and anti-technology advocate Ted Kaczynski killed himself in prison. The core claim in his Manifesto is that technology had created living conditions and lifestyles that were antithetical to human nature, and that the trend would culminate with the creation of A.I., which would either exterminate us or create an intensely miserable world that wouldn’t be worth living in. He advocated forsaking everything but pre-Industrial Age technology so we could live as nature intended for us.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/10/us/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-dead/index.html

Goldman Sachs predicts China’s economy will become bigger than America’s in 2035. Slower growth in China forced them to push the estimated date farther into the future than it had been.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3202752/china-gdp-surpass-us-around-2035-years-later-previously-expected-goldman-sachs-predicts

‘”By 2030, we think we’re going to have four million tonnes [of worn-out scrap solar panels] – which is still manageable – but by 2050, we could end up with more than 200 million tonnes globally.” To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total of 400 million tonnes of plastic every year.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519

Decades worth of research on photosynthesis, which could have led to improvements in solar panel technology, were destroyed when a janitor unplugged a freezer in a university research lab. All of the specimens thawed out and were lost.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66028401

Virgin Galactic’s space plane has started routine commercial operations.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66045177

“Elon Musk hires 14-year-old ‘genius’ scientist to build SpaceX rockets”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22674352/elon-musk-hires-14-year-old-genius-spacex/

Space rocket launchpads are interesting pieces of technology themselves.
https://youtu.be/2EsqMLT0Hzw

Phosphorus, a key chemical ingredient of organic life, has been discovered on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/14/world/enceladus-ocean-phosphorus-scn/index.html

A former U.S. intelligence officer publicly claims the U.S. government has been running a secret UFO program for decades. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead alien pilots are allegedly in U.S. possession, and our engineers have been trying to reverse engineer them. While he hasn’t seen any of the spacecraft or aliens, or even seen photos of them, he claims to know people who have and that he has written documents from the secret program. He’s getting the truth out by filing a whistleblower complaint with the Pentagon inspector general, in which he alleges that keeping the program secret from Congress violates the law. Congress is supposed to know about even the most classified military projects.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/military-whistleblowe-us-ufo-retrieval-program/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12189773/Pentagon-whistleblower-says-Vatican-aware-existence-non-human-intelligences.html

The U.S. military and CIA have rapid deployment teams for recovering crashed enemy aircraft for the purposes of study. There are even teams that can raise sunken enemy ships and subs from the seafloor. A secret program to recover UFOs would be modeled after this.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/aliens-or-not-secret-crash-retrieval-programs-are-a-very-real-thing

‘At long last, ocean drillers exhume a bounty of rocks from Earth’s mantle’
https://www.science.org/content/article/long-last-ocean-drillers-exhume-bounty-rocks-earth-s-mantle

Billionaire Peter Thiel will have himself cryogenically frozen upon death.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/billionaire-peter-thiel-still-plans-to-be-frozen-after-death-for-potential-revival-i-dont-necessarily-expect-it-to-work/

‘In all, five rats received a vitrified-then-thawed kidney in a study whose results were published this month in Nature Communications. It’s the first time scientists have shown it’s possible to successfully and repeatedly transplant a life-sustaining mammalian organ after it has been rewarmed from this icy metabolic arrest. Outside experts unequivocally called the results a seminal milestone for the field of organ preservation.’
https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-preservation-transplants/

Scientists used genetic engineering to turn unfertilized mouse eggs into viable mouse embryos, in a process called “parthenogenesis.” One of the resulting offspring survived until adulthood and had natural children of its own. In the far future, this technique will be used to create humans and posthumans.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115248119

‘Dolphin moms use baby talk to call to their young’
https://apnews.com/article/dolphin-mothers-baby-talk-calves-cc0c189aa1b8e1298155b1ea78c1002a

‘Henneguya salminicola is the only known multicellular animal that does not rely on the aerobic respiration of oxygen, relying instead on an exclusively anaerobic metabolism.[8][7] It lacks a mitochondrial genome and therefore mitochondria, making it one of the only known members of the eukaryotic animal kingdom to shun oxygen as the foundation of its metabolism.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henneguya_zschokkei

‘A new study published in Lancet estimates that 101 million people in India – 11.4% of the country’s population – are living with diabetes. A survey commissioned by the health ministry also found that 136 million people – or 15.3% of the people – could be living with pre-diabetes. ‘
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65852551

The USDA has approved the first company to sell lab-grown chicken meat in the U.S.
https://apnews.com/article/cultivated-meat-lab-grown-cell-based-a88ab8e0241712b501aa191cdbf6b39a

Evidence is building that the amino acid taurine extends human lifespan.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/health/taurine-longevity-wellness/index.html
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/taurine

There are no shortcuts in drug development.
‘But this accelerated approval process is controversial because some companies fail to follow through on their promises to confirm their treatments work. A drug approved this way to prevent premature birth was recently withdrawn after being found useless.’
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/22/1183576268/muscular-dystrophy-patients-get-first-gene-therapy

“Osimertinib” is a pill that has just been found to sharply reduce death rates among people with lung cancer.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/04/lung-cancer-pill-cuts-risk-of-death-by-half-says-thrilling-study

The former head of China’s Center for Disease Control says a lab leak could have started the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65708746

It’s now known that three scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill right before the COVID-19 outbreak started in their city, and almost simultaneously.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wuhan-clan-we-finally-know-the-identity-of-the-scientists-in-the-lab-linked-to-covid/

U.S. intelligence says it can’t tell whether those three scientists got sick with COVID-19 or something else.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/23/biden-administration-intelligence-wuhan-lab-00103523

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Review: “Event Horizon”

Plot:

In 2040, a large space ship named Event Horizon is built, incorporating a new propulsion system that allows instantaneous travel between any two points in the universe. The new technology will revolutionize space travel and free humans from our Solar System. Immediately after activating the new engine to do a test run to Proxima Centauri, the ship vanishes and is presumed destroyed.

Seven years later, the Event Horizon reappears in orbit of Neptune and emits an automated distress beacon. A team of U.S. military salvage astronauts goes to the ship to figure out what happened. Immediately upon boarding it, the rescue team realizes something very bad happened. Almost all of its systems are offline, and all that is left of the original crew is a mutilated corpse in the bridge along with bloody flesh smeared on the window panes. The team members also start having disturbing hallucinations and violent outbursts towards each other.

They discover that the experimental engine accidentally transported the Event Horizon to a different universe “of pure chaos and evil” where the indigenous life forms and laws of physics made the original crew go violently insane and murder each other, and then infused the ship itself with an evil, psychic life force that persisted even once it returned to our universe. The ship itself is therefore alive and is causing the rescue team members to go insane. It wants them to reactivate the special engine to take them all back to the crazy universe so the beings there can have fun torturing them.

Even though most people hate this movie, it’s been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. When I saw this in the theater at age 13, I think it was the scariest film I’d ever watched up to that point except maybe Alien.

Analysis:

In 2015 there will be a permanent human presence on the Moon. When the film starts, text appears describing 21st century milestones in space exploration. The film was released in 1997, so at that time, these events were in the future. One milestone was the establishment of a manned Moon base in 2015. That never happened in real life, and generally speaking, space exploration and space technology have proceeded much slower than it did in the film universe.

I predict a manned base will be built on the Moon in as little as 20 years, though it will have a tiny crew. It will be probably be the product of a broader space race between the U.S. and China, and that it will be a money loser that exists for prestige and scientific research. After an initial surge of attention, the public’s interest in the base will wane, just as happened with the International Space Station (ISS).

Profitable Moon bases might come decades later, and will probably center around the extraction of Helium-3 from the surface soil for use as fuel in future nuclear fusion reactors. While it’s tempting to think this would mean an enlarged human presence on the Moon to operate the mining equipment, A.I. and robots might be so advanced by then that humans would be unnecessary. As I’ve written before, I predict our machine creations will beat us into deep space, and humans like us might never even leave the Solar System. I’d be impressed if the off-world human population surpasses just 1,000 by the end of this century.

In 2032, commercial mining will start on Mars. The film’s opening text also says this. This prediction will fail, and I doubt the first humans will even land on Mars until the end of the 2030s at the earliest. Elon Musk has repeatedly predicted that his SpaceX company would take people to Mars by 2029, and his “Starship” rocket has the ability to get there and is now being tested, but other critical technologies haven’t even started development, like the crew vehicle that will house the astronauts for months long journey between Earth and Mars, and the landing capsule that will take them to and from Mars’ surface. By 2032, the best we could hope for is an unmanned mission to Mars meant to test out some of the technologies meant for a future human landing, and maybe meant to drop supplies or cargo capsules on the planet’s surface to form the genesis of a human base.

It won’t make sense to do commercial mining on Mars until well after 2032 since the planet’s gravity will impose prohibitively high launch costs for any mined ores a company is trying to export to Earth or other space colonies. It would make more sense to mine the Moon or the asteroid belt because gravity will be much weaker. Even launching stuff from Earth would probably be cheaper considering the infrastructure advantage there will be here vs. on Mars for many decades if not centuries.

The first commercial mining operation on Mars will be meant to service the Martian economy and not send anything off planet. It would only become economically justified once a significant population of humans or, more likely, intelligent machines were present on the planet. The mining operations would be focused on extracting basic materials like iron and aluminum to make mundane things like buildings and vehicles. 

In 2040–only 17 years from now–a massive space ship like the Event Horizon will be built. Aside from its teleportation drive, the Event Horizon is remarkable for its sheer size: it is about a mile long, dwarfing today’s biggest surface ships and tallest buildings in length.

There’s no chance something of this scale will be built until the 22nd century. The biggest spaceship in 2040 will probably be one that is designed to transport astronauts from Earth orbit to Mars orbit. The internal area that is accessible to the human crew will be comparable in volume to a large RV or an American house.

By 2047 there will be a large space station orbiting the Earth. This is shown at the start of the movie and appears to be a general purpose space station. The rescue ship docks with it to pick up its crew before heading on to the Event Horizon. The station looks cuboidal in overall shape and consists of a scaffold structural frame studded with function-specific modules (e.g. – maneuvering thrusters, fuel tanks, crew compartments, tunnels linking modules). Its size is impossible to judge accurately, but the length of any side can be measured in hundreds of feet. The ISS is 356 long along its longest axis, so the movie space station’s size is within an order of magnitude of something that already exists.

Unfortunately, nothing approaching the size or complexity of the fictitious station will exist by 2047. The ISS, which costs billions of dollars a year to operate, is scheduled to crash back to Earth in 2031. Even if it gets a life extension to 2047, it’s highly unlikely it will be significantly expanded in size by then. No space agency or private company has credible plans to build new space stations that will be nearly as big as the ISS for the foreseeable future. Keep in mind the political decision to build the ISS was made in the mid-80s, it took another ten years for construction to start, and the station wasn’t fully assembled in space for another 15 years. 2047 is 24 years in the future, so if we expect to have something even bigger than the ISS in orbit by then, the agreement between several space agencies to start work should be getting signed about now if the ISS’ developmental timeline is any guide.

No international deal has been made, and we shouldn’t expect serious space cooperation between the U.S., China and Russia to happen anytime soon thanks to worsened diplomatic relations, so in 2047, manned ships intended for interplanetary missions will dock with space stations that are SMALLER than what we have today.

Future space ships will have weird, utilitarian designs. The Event Horizon is shaped like a…well…just look at it and decide for yourself! While I don’t think future space ships will look exactly like this, I’m sure they’ll look just as weird, but in different ways. For one, since there’s no air in space, nothing needs to be streamlined (look at satellites). A space ship’s front could be a flat slab, instead of a pointy cone like an airplane nose or an arrow like a ship’s bow. However, the minimize the risk of collision with space debris, it would still be a good idea to make space ships oblong in overall layouts, with their narrowest ends facing the direction of travel, so a gross design similarity with ships and cars would remain.

Since there’s also almost no gravity, a compact and robust layout is less important, so major sections of a space ship could be connected to each other with flimsy little tunnels or braced steel frames.

Giant arrays of solar panels dwarfing the ship like a parachute dwarfs its occupant could be common. Huge fins meant to radiate waste heat from the ship’s engine and other systems might also be present.

Ships designed for long, manned missions will probably need gravity for the health and comfort of their crews. The only way to generate it is to have the ships rotate so centrifugal force pushes people objects outwards from the ship’s central axis. Shaping the habitat module of such a ship like hollow cylinder would take maximum advantage of the artificial gravity.

Put all of these design considerations together, and you do indeed get space ships that look as weird as the Event Horizon. In 2047, the basic scenario of a weird-looking space ship docking with a space station orbiting Earth before it heads out to another planet will probably be a reality. However, both crafts will be much smaller than those shown in the film, and ship’s range will be limited to Earth’s nearest neighbors (Venus or Mars) and won’t extend to Neptune.

Future space ships will have dark, gothic interiors. The inside of the Event Horizon consists of dimly-lit, menacing rooms, and some of the walls are dark colors. Long duration space missions are already stressful enough, so there’s no way real space ships will be like this. A good deal of research goes into making spacecraft psychologically pleasant, and future space ships will, to the greatest extent practical, feel warm, comfortable, and remind humans of Earth.

However, rarely-used parts of the ship might not obey such rules. The Nostromo from the movie Alien is closer to the mark–the part of the ship where the crew sleep, eat and do recreation is light-colored, well-lit, and inviting, whereas the parts reserved for machinery and cargo storage are industrial-looking and darker.

Future astronauts will have black space suits. This makes no sense. In space there’s a gigantic black background. If you were working outside the ship, would you want to be camouflaged against that background if your tether broke loose and your crewmen had to find you? And why would a military rescue crew whose members spend most of their time going into broken-down space ships with all the interior lights disabled wear black suits? It would make it harder for them to see each other.

I can’t think of a single benefit to black space suits. White is the ideal color, which is probably why the American and Russian suits designed for extravehicular use are white.

Artificial gravity will be generated from the floors of space ships. The Event Horizon and the rescue ship both have this form of artificial gravity. As I’ve discussed in other reviews, the laws of physics don’t allow for the existence of this kind of technology, and gravity can only be simulated by spinning a space ship so the centrifugal force pushes the astronauts and objects down into the deck.

The tablet computers of 2047 will be big, chunky and will have thick frames. A tablet computer is shown in one scene, and it is clearly inferior to one from five years ago (the film was released in 1997, and the first iPad was not sold until 2010). The prediction has thus already failed. By 2047, we’ll be able to make tablets that are only a few millimeters thick and whose displays go to their edges, meaning they won’t have frames.

This raises an interesting question: If you COULD make a tablet like that, would it make sense to do so? If your tablet is almost as thin as paper, it can easily be damaged by creasing or being poked too hard by a stylus. If you make it strong like metal to resist damage and still keep it as thin as a sheet of paper, then it turns into a sharp and potentially deadly object. Excessive thinness will also make the device hard to hold and grip in some ways, and every time you pushed a button on it, the whole thing would wobble.

So even if you COULD make a tablet as thin as paper, I think you’d still want to put it in a protective case, which would give it a depth and a border frame similar to a modern iPad. Extra thickness will also mean longer battery life no matter what.

These considerations also apply to smartphones–just imagine how hard it would be if your phone were a 3″ x 5″ note card made of rigid metal.

Suspended animation technology will exist by 2047. The crewmen use suspended animation pods during the multi-month journey between Earth and Neptune. It’s vanishingly unlikely the technology will exist by then. I don’t think we’ll be able to cryonically freeze humans and revive them until the end of this century or later. A milder alternative to that process, which involves keeping a person in a deep, drugged sleep like a hibernating bear while they’re drip-fed nutrients for months, could be developed sooner, though I question whether it would be wise to use it on astronauts. Yes, it would reduce their consumption of calories and oxygen and would lower the odds of certain types of mission problems, but it could jeopardize the mission by damaging their health before reaching the destination.

In 2047, astronauts on interplanetary space missions will bide their time in transit just as the Apollo astronauts did and workers in Antarctic bases do: mostly in boredom, staring at the same four walls.

We will invent a space ship engine that can exceed the speed of light. Our current understanding of physics holds that this is impossible. It’s unwise to stake any expectations about the future on fundamental laws of science being overturned. Moreover, even if it were theoretically possible to exceed light speed, the next show-stopper will probably be finding a way to generate the impossibly high amounts of energy needed to do it.

The space ships of 2047 will still be using conventional means of propulsion, like chemical fueled rockets and ion thrusters.

Under the light speed constraint, it would literally take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years for us to colonize our nearest stars, by which time A.I.’s will be running Earth’s civilization, with obvious implications for who gets chosen for the missions. Furthermore, any future space empire we created would be impossible to hold together since it would take years for simple communications to transit between the different star systems. People and intelligent machines would take orders of magnitude longer to traverse the gulfs, so the isolation would lead to unique cultures and perhaps political identities developing in each system.

Wars with aliens at the edge of space would be very hard to deal with since the rest of our civilization wouldn’t hear about it until years after it started, by which time the situation in the warzone would have totally changed. A coordinated military response drawing upon the resources of the other star systems would be almost impossible. It would be a mess.

The space ships of 2040 will still use CDs for data storage. There’s a brief shot on the Event Horizon’s bridge where we see an astronaut removing a CD from the main computer’s disc drive. Storage discs are already obsolescent and rare to see today. By 2040, only people interested in deliberately indulging in nostalgia will use them.

That said, removable storage devices will still exist in 2040, but they won’t be rotating. Sometimes it’s more hassle than it’s worth to transfer or store data in the cloud, and it’s preferable having your data on a physical device you can put in your pocket. This is especially true for anything you want to keep private.

Astronauts will use magnetic boots. When the rescue crew first enters the Event Horizon, its gravity is not working because the power is disabled. To get around, they use magnetic boots, which stick to the metal floors. NASA developed these in the 1960s, so there’s no technological barrier to equipping astronauts with them in the 2040s. However, they’ve never been used in space because spacecraft are built of aluminum and titanium, which magnets are not attracted to. The space ships of that era will still need to be very lightweight, meaning they will still be made of non-magnetic materials, and the boots will be useless.

Moreover, walking is an inefficient way to move around in a weightless environment, as you’ll discover if you try to walk across the bottom of a swimming pool. It’s much better to aim your body at your destination and to use one or two of your limbs to push off from a nearby surface so you float towards it. There’s a scene where the rescue ship’s captain does something like that to quickly move along the outside of the Event Horizon to reach a comrade who is about to be ejected from an airlock.

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Interesting articles, May 2023

For anyone who believes Russia’s propaganda that the war is going according to Putin’s elaborate master plan: ‘[The head of Russia’s “Wagner” private army] posted a gruesome video of him walking among dead fighters’ bodies [in Bakhmut], asking defence officials for more supplies…”Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where is the… ammunition?… They came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten yourselves in your mahogany offices.”‘
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65493008

A Russian soldier surrendered to a flying drone in Bakhmut. It dropped a written note to him instructing him to walk towards the Ukrainian lines, and as he did, his comrades tried to kill him.
https://youtu.be/yE2sKbEjsRY

After months of costly fighting, Russian forces captured the small city of Bakhmut. The head of Russia’s Wagner Group said over 20,000 of his men died there.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-border-raid-4f63ade7fb3899b6fa903b562ada0e2c

Two small drones were used in a suicide attack on the Kremlin in the middle of the night, causing no real damage. The perpetrators haven’t been found, but they were likely Ukrainian agents who carried out the attack for its symbolic rather than military value. It also may have been an inside job perpetrated by some faction of Russia’s security apparatus.
https://youtu.be/2Oiagfj_Mik

Russia launched 54 kamikaze drones against Kiev in the largest such attack of the war so far.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-65736730

Glimpse the future: In Ukraine, small drones are fighting each other in the air.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-posts-video-rare-drone-104726320.html

Due to the Ukraine War, the Russian military had almost no tanks and planes available for the annual May 9 military parade. Even the number of infantrymen was visibly lower.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/just-one-old-tank-no-105934766.html

A group of militants claiming to be Russian expatriates against Putin crossed from Ukraine into Russia’s Belgorod region and did damage to infrastructure and several structures. Thousands of Russian civilians had to evacuate the area. While the incursion had insignificant military value, it left many Russians shaken by demonstrating how depleted their border defenses had become thanks to the manpower drain of the Ukraine invasion.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/belgorod-raid-exposes-russia-defenses-ukraine-prigozhin-putin-military-rcna85945

The head of Russia’s private army praised the fighting skill of Ukraine’s forces, criticized the heads of Russia’s armed forces, and said that more setbacks in the war could lead to a loss of public support for it, and even a revolution against Putin.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/europe/wagner-prigozhin-russia-manpower-ukraine-intl/index.html

A Russian attack destroyed a Ukrainian munitions depot in one of the biggest explosions of the war so far.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-ammo-storage-site-obliterated-where-huge-fireball-seen

Russia is using their antique T-54 tanks in Ukraine in ways mindful of their combat limitations.
https://youtu.be/ObF_cSe_6UM

In a Ukrainian weapons depot, there are still unopened crates full of WWII Tommy Guns that the U.S. gave the USSR in WWII. Instead of putting them into service, it would make the most sense to sell them to international gun collectors and to use the proceeds to buy newly made guns of different types.
https://youtu.be/ApFT-pLcAXQ

For the second time, Ukrainian forces used a U.S.-supplied Patriot missile system to shoot down one of Russia’s “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles. As with so many other weapons, the Russians’ frightful claims about its performance turned out to be false.
https://mwi.usma.edu/hypersonic-hype-russias-kinzhal-missiles-and-the-lessons-for-air-defense/

The U.S. will give F-16s to Ukraine.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-f16-biden-a281e3cd1474b2e6f453946075824565

I think the Ukraine War will end like this, in an echo of the Korean War: ‘It’s a scenario that may prove the most realistic long-term outcome given that neither Kyiv nor Moscow appear inclined to ever admit defeat. It’s also becoming increasingly likely amid the growing sense within the administration that an upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive won’t deal a mortal blow to Russia. A frozen conflict — in which fighting pauses but neither side is declared the victor nor do they agree that the war is officially over — also could be a politically palatable long-term result for the United States and other countries backing Ukraine.’
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/18/ukraine-russia-south-korea-00097563

Ukraine has terrible demographics. While it will probably survive the current Russian invasion with most of its territory, its overall and working-age populations will be 15-20% smaller in 2040 than they were in 2021, undermining its ability to defend itself from future invasions. A long-term Russian effort to chip away at Ukraine and to absorb it will succeed if Russia is willing to bear the high price and if the West’s support for Ukraine flags.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/psp.2656#

In spite of the Russian military’s heavy losses and painful mistakes in Ukraine, it would be a mistake to write it off as an incompetent force on its last legs. This report shows the Russians have adapted in many ways to the nature of the fighting, and still hold large advantages over the Ukrainians.
https://static.rusi.org/403-SR-Russian-Tactics-web-final.pdf

Russia is still selling oil to some European countries, and through pipelines that go through Ukraine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/24/ukraine-gas-russia-pipeline-oil/

During WWII, the U.S. Army Surgeon General found that, in Italy, his troops usually became mentally unfit to serve after spending 200-240 cumulative days in combat.
https://youtu.be/1sC3tCXrbwQ

For all of its faults, the M4 Sherman tank was the best in its class when it came to easy crew egress. This is a critical feature when a tank is disabled and burning and the crewmen have to get out immediately. The men represent investments of money that might exceed the value of their own tank, so saving their lives when possible makes sense from a national resource efficiency perspective.
https://youtu.be/q6xvg5iJ4Zk

Warren Buffet is divesting from the world’s biggest microchip company because its factories are in Taiwan, and he thinks the risk of a Chinese attack on the island has gotten too high.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/16/investing/berkshire-hathaway-taiwan-tsmc-stock-exit-hnk-intl/index.html

Key points from a long interview with Henry Kissinger:

  • The U.S. and China are on the path to confrontation, probably over Taiwan.
  • Trump was right to confront China about its unfair trade practices, but he should have stopped there and not made the relationship worse in any other ways.
  • The leaders of America and China should have a major meeting and make a joint declaration that neither wants war with the other. They should form a high-level joint committee to periodically meet to discuss all the countries’ problems with each other.
  • Most Chinese thinkers believe America is declining.
  • The Ukraine War will probably end with some Ukrainian territory still in Russian hands. However, both sides will still have strong enough armies to restart the war later to try getting what they want. As soon as this war stops, it would be a good idea for NATO to let Ukraine in as it would reduce the odds of either side attacking the other again.
  • Russia becoming a “vassal” of China is unlikely because the two have long running contempt for each other.
  • If Russia falls into chaos, then there will be a power vacuum in Central Asia, likely leading to civil wars and interventions by other Asian powers who are ethnically related to various Central Asian groups.
  • It’s actually not in the U.S. or global interest for Russia to suffer such a big defeat in Ukraine that it collapses.
  • Japan will have nuclear weapons within five years.
  • The Chinese have always been inward-looking and have never wanted to take over the world. They also have no interest in trying to Sinicize the cultures of other people. They just want to become to dominant power in East Asia, and to be respected (and possibly paid some kind of tribute by) their neighbors. This is fundamentally different from how the Europeans thought and acted during the Colonial Era.
  • If the U.S. defeats China in a war, China is likely to have its own civil war, which could have very bad external effects. It’s not in our interest to ever fight with them over anything.
  • AI will be as impactful as the printing press.
  • AI will make conventional military forces as destructive as nuclear weapons. Every person will be vulnerable to attack.
  • China’s approach to developing AI is about as reckless as America’s.
  • In spite of its serious cultural and political divisions, America is not doomed. It’s still possible for a leader or political movement to unify the country for something positive.
  • https://www.economist.com/kissinger-transcript

Here’s a great interview with economist David Goldman about the future of U.S.-China relations.
https://youtu.be/8aN5Mryo8jI

If a simultaneous heat wave and power blackout hit Phoenix, up to 817,000 people would need emergency medical treatment, and 13,250 of them would die. Using cheap drones, a small terrorist group could probably bring about the scenario by attacking critical pieces of power infrastructure. Drones could also be used to set wildfires and forest fires at the most inopportune moments.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2023/05/25/phoenix-is-not-prepared-for-a-simultaneous-heat-wave-and-blackout/70252691007/

Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s AI research division, seems to suggest that the first AGI could be invented in less than a decade.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google-deepmind-ceo-says-some-form-of-agi-possible-in-a-few-years-2705f452

Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of A.I.”, just quit his job at Google so he can be a public voice about the dangers posed by A.I.
‘His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”’
https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/01/the-godfather-of-a-i-leaves-google-and-warns-of-danger-ahead/

A leaked Google memo predicts that LLM’s will inevitably become open-source, meaning big tech companies will lose their monopoly over the technology, and there will be countless varieties of narrow AIs made by small companies.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/05/11/what-does-a-leaked-google-memo-reveal-about-the-future-of-ai

“The ‘Sparks of A.G.I.’ is an example of some of these big companies co-opting the research paper format into P.R. pitches,” said Maarten Sap, a researcher and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “They literally acknowledge in their paper’s introduction that their approach is subjective and informal and may not satisfy the rigorous standards of scientific evaluation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/microsoft-ai-human-reasoning.html

Sam Altman, head of the Microsoft team that made ChatGPT, told Congress that AI development should be regulated by a new national or international agency.
https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-openai-ceo-sam-altman-congress-73ff96c6571f38ad5fd68b3072722790

Altman and two fellow lead executives also released a statement about AI: “It’s conceivable that within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains, and carry out as much productive activity as one of today’s largest corporations.”
https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Elon Musk: “Over 20/30 year time frame I think things will be transformed beyond belief. Probably won’t recognize society in 30 years. [AGI] I think we’re only 3 years, maybe 6 years away… we are on the event horizon of the black hole that is ASI.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1661834925488881664

A large number of AI experts and technology executives signed this public statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk

‘The former Google CEO told The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council: “My concern with AI is actually existential, and existential risk is defined as many, many, many, many people harmed or killed. And there are scenarios not today but reasonably soon, where these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits in cyber issues or discover new kinds of biology.” Schmidt also said that governments needed to ensure the technology was not “misused by evil people.”‘
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-111500864.html

Remember back in 2015 when computer-generated artwork looked like an acid trip? In another eight years, we’ll look back on today’s computer-generated art–with its six-fingered fake people–the same way.
https://uproxx.com/technology/let-googles-deep-dream-ai-turn-your-photos-into-psychadelic-nightmare-fuel/
https://hyperallergic.com/808778/ai-image-generators-finally-figured-out-hands/

There’s now a ChatGPT phone app, and it can communicate through speech instead of writing if you want. I predict the level of AI technology depicted in the first half of the film “Her” will exist by the end of this decade.
https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-iphone-app/

The controversy over race-swapping actors in movies will disappear thanks to technology allowing viewers to customize which actors play which roles in the films they watch. Taken to its logical endpoint, each person will someday live in his own custom, virtual universe where they only see what they want to. The people who stand to lose out the most from this are those with especially strong inner drives to exercise power and dominance over other people through control of mainstream narratives and culture. It’s nothing more than an animal impulse, and is only a step removed from shouting down the other person during a debate so only your voice can be heard by other people.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1659935325488021507

IBM will stop hiring humans for jobs that computers can now do. As human workers in those positions leave and are not replaced, the company could ultimately slim down its workforce by 7,800.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-01/ibm-to-pause-hiring-for-back-office-jobs-that-ai-could-kill

NVIDIA used the latest technology to create an immersive, first-person game with an NPC that can carry on non-scripted conversations with human players.
https://youtu.be/5R8xZb6J3r0

A fake computer-generated image of thick smoke billowing from a building near the Pentagon caused stocks to drop within minutes of it appearing on social media. Though the image was quickly revealed to be fake and the stocks recovered, the incident shows how such computer-generated disinformation can affect the real world.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/23/an-a-i-generated-spoof-rattles-the-markets/

Our failure to create an AI that reliably predict the results of chemical reactions underscores how poor quality our data are. The temptation to fudge results and to omit reporting unwanted results is very widespread among chemists.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/give-me-those-hard-hard-numbers

These videos of “Robotis OP3” robots playing soccer with each other show how far machine dexterity has come, and how far it still has to go.
https://youtu.be/WlIYa3lH5UI

Computers can scan fMRI brain scan data to determine what moving images people were seeing. I’m starting to think it will be possible someday to scan peoples’ brains to download their memories. We might even be able to implant them in other peoples’ brains.
https://mind-video.com/

‘Boring Report is an app that aims to remove sensationalism from the news and makes it boring to read. In today’s world, catchy headlines and articles often distract readers from the actual facts and relevant information. By utilizing the power of advanced AI language models capable of generating human-like text, Boring Report processes exciting news articles and transforms them into the content that you see. This helps readers focus on the essential details and minimizes the impact of sensationalism.’
https://www.boringreport.org/app

Lab-grown diamonds are getting much more common.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/05/diamond-arbitrage.html

Famous investor Balaji Srinivasan conceded his bet that Bitcoin’s value would rise to $1 million within 90 days.
‘Bitcoin is currently trading at about $29,000. That’s about a 10% gain from the $26,000 mark when Srinivasan made the bet.’
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonkochkodin/2023/05/02/balaji-srinivasan-concedes-bet-that-bitcoin-will-reach-1-million-in-90-days/

If, like most sensible people, you think Jim Cramer is terrible at predicting the stock market, you can invest in an ETF that bets against whatever he recommends.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bet-against-jim-cramer-etf-122021151.html

NVIDIA’s market capitalization reached $1 trillion, making it the first semiconductor company to do so and only the ninth company of any kind to do so. It makes computer processors specialized for AI systems like the GPT series, so its profits have surged along with the popularity of those programs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/nvidia-crosses-1-trillion-market-193710045.html

Here’s a fascinating video explaining the pros and cons of building motorcycles out of different types of metals.
https://youtu.be/ah7Ubbq5EAA

3D printed guns have greatly improved over the last 10 years.
https://youtu.be/rdu53_aCsOM

China is the leader in retracted science papers.
https://dapp.orvium.io/deposits/6442fee5c93d17c257de17d2/view

I knew that smoke clouds could reflect sunlight back into space before it reached the ground, lowering ground-level temperatures. However, under some circumstances, the clouds can also RAISE ground temperatures by blocking ground heat from radiating into space.
https://www.weather.gov/bgm/WeatherInActionSmokePlume

Across the world, there are dried-up lakes that we could refill by building pipelines connecting them to the oceans. The Dead Sea and Death Valley are examples. Since the dried up lakes are below sea level, gravity would move the water through the pipelines and no pumps would be needed. We could even put hydroelectric turbines in the pipelines to generate electricity from the flow.

Once refilled with water, the dead lakes could support life along their shores. Their filling would also slightly decrease sea levels, partly mitigating one effect of global warming.

The dead lakes are all barren deserts with almost no life, so flooding them would not cause any ecological damage. If anything, it would help the environment since plants and animals would have new places to live.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/seaflooding

Paradoxically, building more housing units in an expensive city like San Francisco might actually increase its average home prices.
“My claim is that increasing density within a city shifts the demand curve for housing within that city, because of increasing desirability.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-housing

In the U.S., the rise of telework has done serious damage to small businesses in downtown areas that depended on patronage from office workers.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/12/1173902715/work-from-home-office-space-small-businesses

Microsoft has pledged to buy electricity from a company called “Helion,” which plans to have a working fusion reactor, starting in 2028. I’m skeptical it will work out.
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-helion-fusion-PPA-with-microsoft-constellation/

Dr. Garry Nolan claims that there has been a long-term alien presence on Earth, that they’re beyond our comprehension and interact with us using more primitive “intermediaries,” and that he knows people who have worked on reverse-engineering alien technology possessed by the U.S. government. It would be easy to dismiss him if he weren’t such an intelligent and extraordinarily credentialed person.
https://youtu.be/e2DqdOw6Uy4
https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/garry-nolan

Virgin Galactic’s space plane made another successful, manned flight to the edge of space.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/business/virgin-galactic-test-flight-space-scn/index.html

China wants to put a human on the Moon by 2030.
https://apnews.com/article/china-space-program-moon-368d45fa997307ae2c94bcd7e066e2b4

A paraplegic can walk again thanks to a brain implant that sends wireless signals to a second implant in his spinal cord.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01728-0

ChatGPT answers medical questions from average people just as correctly as human doctors, and with a higher level of empathy on average.
https://today.ucsd.edu/story/study-finds-chatgpt-outperforms-physicians-in-high-quality-empathetic-answers-to-patient-questions

Doctors perform lifesaving brain surgery on fetus in the womb
https://news.yahoo.com/doctors-perform-lifesaving-brain-surgery-175040202.html

The new Alzheimer’s drug probably doesn’t help much.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lilly-s-new-donanemab-data-alzheimer-s

The FDA approved a vaccine for a respiratory virus that afflicts elderly people and kills 6,000 – 10,000 of them each year in the U.S.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv-vaccine

The WHO ends global health emergency declaration for COVID-19
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/05/05/1174269442/who-ends-global-health-emergency-declaration-for-covid-19

The WHO also ends its global health emergency about Monkey pox
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-65564033

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Musings 3

Transgendered and transsexual people clue us in to the attributes that posthumans will have. Like other organisms, humans have no natural control over their genetics or of the conditions they experience while developing in their mother’s womb. Those factors very heavily determine most of a person’s traits, including sex, gender, and anatomy. We accept the crapshoot of unchosen genes and prenatal influences since it is beyond any individual’s control has always been the basic reality of our existence, but technology will free our descendants from it and its severe limitations.

Posthumans will have the inbuilt ability to change their genes and biology to do things like become a different sex, become a different gender with the attendant changes in mental preferences, or to change many other aspects of themselves like intelligence level or height. That kind of adaptability will make posthumans more adaptable to a broader range of environments, will make their lives much more experientially rich than our own, and will let them understand one another in ways we can’t. For example, a person born male might be able to experience pregnancy. Individuals could also create offspring (perhaps clones of themselves) through self-fertilization, which would make them more survivable as a species than we are since just one individual could create a community of posthumans. Space colonization would also be easier for them as a result.

Instead of having XY or XX sex chromosomes, posthumans would all have XXY chromosomes, with one of the X’s or the Y chromosome inactive at any one time to make them male or female, respectively. It might be advantageous for some parts of their body to have different sex chromosome expressions than other parts.

If we create technology that can slow, halt, or reverse the aging process in humans, then it will inevitably be used to prolong the lives of animals. People already spend fortunes on their beloved pets, and some are already cloning their dead pets, so this is just a logical next step. Cryopreservation of dead pets will also happen, if it isn’t being done already.

This raises the possibility of weird scenarios, like 200-year-old dogs running around, and someone putting their dog into cryostasis due to a catastrophic vehicle injury and the slim hope the future surgeries will be able to fix it, and also making a clone of that dog to be a companion in the interim. Like Barbra Streisand bringing her two cloned dogs to the gravestone of the dead original, maybe our fictitious person will bring his clone to Alcor to stand next to one of the vats. Moreover, if mind uploading becomes possible and is a viable means of radical life extension, then some animals will inevitably have their minds uploaded. What would it be like to merge digital minds with a cat?

One explanation for Fermi’s Paradox is all aliens leave our universe for ones that are much better. Maybe in our universe, the Higgs Boson is not at its true vacuum state, meaning our universe could literally cease to exist at any moment (for all we know, the decay has already started somewhere and the shockwave will hit Earth tomorrow). Assume that, once an intelligent alien species reaches the level of science and technology we’ll reach in, say, 2200 AD, it discovers the truth about the Higgs Boson and also discovers how to travel to other universes that don’t have this problem and/or how to create universes that don’t have the problem. Intelligent species by definition make intelligent choices, so they all leave our universe. This happens long before any of them have had enough time to colonize more than a few light years of space.

This might also explain why we have not, to our knowledge, been visited by life forms from parallel universes.

The Sahara Desert is an enormous waste of space, is larger than it should be thanks to the actions of humans, and will probably be radically altered once AIs are in charge of the world. The Sahara was a savannah and had several mega lakes until a few thousand years ago, when humans started slowly desertifying it with animal grazing and, to a lesser extent, plant farming. Ending those practices around the edges of the desert along with ending most water diversions for human purposes would cause the desert to immediately start shrinking. Carefully planting trees and other plants at the edges of the desert would accelerate that soil and climate reclamation process further (various African countries are already trying to do this, but the effort is sputtering).

Building canals could also allow the extinct and nearly extinct mega lakes of the Sahara to be refilled with seawater from the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans, and freshwater from the rainy central part of the continent. Installing massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panel farms in the Sahara would also increase rainfall and lower ground temperatures through different mechanisms. It would also of course generate large amounts of electricity.

A milder climate and an advanced electricity infrastructure would make the Sahara much more suitable for machine and human habitation. Refilling some of the mega lakes with seawater would also slightly lower global sea levels, which would partly mitigate one aspect of global warming. Finally, the return of vegetation to the Sahara as it transformed back into a savannah would sequester large amounts of CO2, which would also combat global warming’s effects.

Having only one organ dedicated to key biofunctions was the “good enough” design solution natural selection picked, and was surely driven by the need to conserve bodily resources, but it also creates single points of failure that can kill the organism. A human has only one liver, one heart, one stomach, and a brain localized in one place. If we were to redesign ourselves as posthumans that were partly or fully organic, distributing key functions among multitudes of smaller organs would be wise.  That said, the problem with having more than one heart is that their beats would need to be synchronized. 

If we are trying to maximize utility and minimize harm to sentient life forms, and if we throw future technologies into the mix, we are led to some counterintuitive far future scenarios. For example, if we make it our goal to provide the happiest conditions to the largest number of people, then we end up removing all brains from our bodies and putting them in jars, incinerating the bodies, building The Matrix, and plugging all the brains into it. Since a person’s brain consumes 20% of their calories, dispensing with the rest of our bodies means we can support 5x as many “humans” for the same amount of energy.

And if we also choose the goal of minimizing animal suffering, we capture every member of every species that can experience suffering, remove their brains, and put them in The Matrix, too. 

The optimal “future way of living” might be a totally industrialized Earth, devoid of wild, complex life forms, and nearly devoid of any natural spaces, with vast warehouses full of brains in jars with wires coming out of them. This sounds horrific, but it seems like the logical best choice. 

Earth’s forests would all be cut down to make way for solar panels to power the Matrix’ simulated virtual forests, which would be much more beautiful than their real counterparts were. 

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Interesting articles, April 2023

In a major strategic setback for Russia, formerly neutral Finland joined NATO. They made it clear it was in direct response to the invasion of Ukraine. The Finns have a strong military considering their population size and are tough fighters.
https://apnews.com/article/nato-finland-russia-ukraine-membership-enlargement-c703d23a8423d89577d5b752d69d76eb

Putin has ordered a second wave of military conscription, which will add 147,000 men to the Russian army by July 15. Keep in mind the Ukraine War was originally supposed to seize control of all of Ukraine within a few weeks, and with the military forces Russia already had on hand.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/putin-orders-to-draft-147-000-conscripts-by-july-15-kremlin

Last September, a Russian fighter plane tried to shoot down a British surveillance plane that could have had up to 30 men on it. Disaster was averted only because the Russian missile malfunctioned after launch. Both planes were patrolling near Ukraine.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22024706/russian-fighter-jet-tried-shoot-down-raf-plane/

At the rate Russia is losing tanks in Ukraine, they will all be destroyed in two years and three months.
https://youtu.be/2PHUK6zkbpc

A vintage T-54 tank was spotted being used by Russian forces in Ukraine.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/antique-t-54-series-tank-appears-with-russian-forces-in-ukraine

A Ukrainian drone strike destroyed a major oil depot in Russian-annexed Sevastopol. The entire Crimean peninsula is girding for a Ukrainian offensive.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-crimea-drone-29218ed006a79c4b0629688ce4820cc8

Lithuania gave 50 U.S.-made WWII howitzers to Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/P-NbhYiP88U

Ukraine is using Soviet-made WWII antiaircraft guns to defend Kiev.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-forces-were-spotted-firing-192634207.html

Ukrainian artillerymen are using U.S.-made “Excalibur” smart shells. They have ranges of 25 miles, and can land within 30 feet of their targets.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-hails-gps-guided-excalibur-084403266.html

A Russian nationalist and pro-war internet personality was killed in a bomb blast in St. Petersburg.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/02/1167675096/explosion-russia-pro-war-military-blogger-ukraine

Amazing drone footage of a Ukrainian tank firing its main gun into a trench full of Russians.
https://youtu.be/0EvE6KMmJ70

An advanced Russian T-90 tank captured by Ukrainians somehow ended up parked at a truck stop in Louisiana.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/destination-of-russian-t-90-tank-left-at-truck-stop-comes-into-focus

‘Yet notwithstanding this promising mission, the Russian exiles also pose a major security risk to the countries where they are landing. The main reason is that the Kremlin has long exploited the Russian diaspora as part of its irregular warfare operations. Given the size and spread of the new Russian diaspora, there is no doubt that strategists in the FSB are taking the opportunity to plot nasty operations.’
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/04/russian-agents-war-refugees-00090192

In the Soviet T-55 tank, there are two metal canisters full of compressed air right behind the driver’s head. What could go wrong?
https://youtu.be/sOX25jfEiO0

The B-2 diesel engine was invented in the USSR in the 1930s and became the standard for all its tanks. Its design was progressively improved over the decades, and the B-2 is still used in Russia’s new tanks.
https://youtu.be/nyWAd1pQiwU

Here’s an interesting report on the “availability rates” of different U.S. Navy planes. If I have a fleet of ten fighter planes, and the availability rate is 80%, then at any given moment, eight of the planes are able to take to the air, but two of them can’t because they are broken and waiting to be fixed. Availability rates decline as planes get older and more worn out, and the F/A-18 Super Hornet has an anomalously poor rate.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58937

The Germans had the best machine gun of WWII. After the war, they made several improvements and kept using it until 2012.
https://youtu.be/A0cvxrAkbbE

A 1968 massacre of Vietnamese villagers by South Korean troops allied with the U.S. shows that any group of people can be a victim or oppressor.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…”
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1167951366/south-korea-vietnam-war-massacre-court-case

In Myanmar, government military aircraft bombed and machine gunned a rebel town, killing over 100 people.
https://apnews.com/article/airstrikes-military-myanmar-village-918fd636bb81153928ab7481e06423e5

Even by Western European standards, Ireland is a defense free-rider.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/defenceless-ireland-ashamed-itself-180000402.html

America’s USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier was launched 10 years ago but only now is finally entering regular service. The delay is mostly due to the ship being packed with new, unproven technologies that sailors had to slowly work the kinks out of. The expensive lessons learned from this will ensure that the next ship in the Ford class enters service much faster.
https://www.businessinsider.com/navy-carrier-uss-gerald-ford-deploys-after-years-of-delays-2023-4

The military value of hypersonic weapons is exaggerated.
https://youtu.be/0n3fjoacL20

The young soldier responsible for a recent leak of many important U.S. military documents was mentally disturbed and might have been on track to become a mass shooter.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jack-dripper-wanted-kill-tons-150735710.html

Though autonomous vehicles have fallen below the radar recently, and the slowdown in progress has some claiming the technology will never reach human levels, Bill Gates thinks they’re still improving, and will get much better and more common over the next 10 years.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Autonomous-Vehicles

The Tesla Model Y now costs less than the average new vehicle sold in America.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tesla-drops-starting-price-model-222900933.html

Electric sedan prices are on track to drop to the same levels as gas-powered sedans by 2025.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/electric-cars-could-cost-same-145723237.html

Ray Kurzweil rejects the recent movement to halt AI development for six months in the name of safety.
https://www.kurzweilai.net/opinion-letter-from-ray-kurzweil-on-request-for-6-month-delay-on-large-language-models-that-go-beyond-gpt-4

ChatGPT has a verbal IQ of 155, which is superior to over 99.9% of humans.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-gave-chatgpt-an-iq-test-heres-what-i-discovered/

GPT-4 got a B- on a quantum computing final exam.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7209

Large language models like the GPT-series machines could be very helpful to people with mental illnesses like autism and ADHD.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/04/llms-and-neurodiversity.html

Corporations are not “superintelligences,” as some people like to argue. Likewise, the team of humans that built AlphaGo could not defeat their machine in a game of Go.

AI-generated, lifelike images will lead to AI-generated, lifelike videos, which creates a new frontier for pornography, including child pornography. As distasteful as the subject is, it must be asked whether such footage should be criminalized if the children shown in it are fake and don’t resemble any real children. In such a case, who is being victimized?
https://www.foxnews.com/world/canadian-man-sentenced-prison-ai-generated-child-pornography

On Twitter, a human documents how they do GPT-4’s bidding in the real world to create a profitable business with only $100 in startup money.
https://twitter.com/jacksonfall/status/1636107218859745286

The singer “Grimes” has invited fans to create computer-generated songs using digital reproductions of her voice, so long as they split the royalties with her 50/50 on any resulting songs that become popular. I have previously predicted that celebrities will start licensing their voices and likenesses in such ways. It will get more common with time.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/24/1171738670/grimes-ai-songs-voice

Recent heavy rains have nearly refilled all of California’s reservoirs and alleviated its long-term drought.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11948365/Stunning-pics-California-storms-refilled-reservoirs-drought-parched-Golden-State.html

From 2011: ‘The report, commisioned by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, said the effects of sea level rise and changing weather patterns would be felt as early as the next decade. By the mid-2020s, sea level rise around Manhattan and Long Island could be up to 10in, assuming the rapid melting of polar ice sheets continues. ‘
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/16/climate-change-report-new-york-city

Seventy-five percent of Americans think that climate change is “very” or “somewhat” important, but 2/3 of them are unwilling to spend ANY of their own money on mitigating it. Among the 1/3 willing to pay, a plurality would only donate $1 per month.
https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/americans-views-on-climate-change-and-policy-in-10-charts/

‘The biodiversity influence of avalanches comes from the natural corridors free of bushes and trees they create as they thunder down a mountainside. These become species-rich grasslands or meadows in themselves, but also, vitally, connect different habitats up and down the mountain. This can be crucial for species such as butterflies, who benefit from the cleared vegetation in the nutrient-poor soils of the Alps.’
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230405-how-avalanche-management-could-help-wildlife-in-the-alps

Last year’s massive volcanic eruption in Tonga also produced mega-tsunamis that were almost 300 feet high. Fortunately, this happened in a remote part of the Pacific, so the waves only hit uninhabited islands.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/1st-mega-tsunami-record-since-161211850.html

It’s not an accident that life on Earth only makes use of 20 types of amino acids, when a much larger number of acids with different molecular configurations could exist.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.2c12987

Parrots taught how to use smartphones and tablets to make video calls to each other began doing so under their own volition and seemed to enjoy the conversations.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-video-calls/

There are shark repellents that are proven to work. One is a chemical mimicking the smell of dead sharks, and the other is a device that uses magnetism to scramble a shark’s sense of direction if it gets near.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_repellent

From the perspective of the birds, humans are Skynet, and we’re now building T-600s.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22063991/dead-birds-crows-robots-drones-science/

‘Yellow crazy ants break the rules of reproduction. Every male ant contains separate populations of cells from two distinct genetic lineages, making them “chimeras,” researchers report in the April 7 Science. Yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) are the first known species that requires chimerism to create fertile males.’
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/invasive-yellow-crazy-ants-male-chimeras-reproduce

Here’s a fascinating educational video from the 1930s explaining how images were transmitted over phone lines.
https://youtu.be/cLUD_NGE370

There’s a new twist in the scientific debate over whether and to what extent money can buy happiness. For all but the most naturally miserable people, more money DOES make them happier without any upper limit. However, the “happiness dividend” steadily shrinks.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit company has filed for bankruptcy. This might not have happened had its latest space launch not failed.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-files-bankruptcy

NASA has selected four astronauts for next year’s orbital flight around the Moon. It will be the first time since 1972 that humans have done such a thing.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/03/1167738502/these-are-the-4-astronauts-wholl-take-a-trip-around-the-moon-next-year

A European space probe mission to explore the moons of Jupiter took off. It will arrive in 2031.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65273857

Elon Musk has played a major role in downgrading Russia’s space program. China is probably ahead of them at this point, and has a few hundred satellites in orbit that it could use against its enemies in a war.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-space-program-in-decline-china-leaping-forward-us-intel-2023-4

TV celebrity Howie Mandel and his wife saw a UFO near Toronto.
https://youtu.be/GX36kpETS7c

A U.S. military drone filmed a spherical UFO during a surveillance mission over the Middle East.
https://youtu.be/1fKhqnAtnx8

On the night of March 8, 1994, several people in the same part of Michigan saw glowing UFOs in the sky. The separately reported it to the authorities, and a local meteorologist in charge of the area’s weather radar station pointed the dish towards the objects, resulting in a bizarre radar image. He and all of the eyewitnesses are still adamant about what they saw, and the objects remain unidentified.
https://youtu.be/QMQArS-s90I

A third, highly effective weight loss drug might be coming to the U.S. market soon. I’ve long thought that the obesity epidemic will only be ended with pharmaceuticals and, in the longer run, genetic engineering. We can’t count on most people to exercise more self-discipline to control their weight through diet and exercise.
https://apnews.com/article/mounjaro-wegovy-ozempic-obesity-weight-loss-bd0e037cc5981513487260d40636752a

A widely-cited study that showed rich people were more selfish and unethical than everyone else has failed to replicate.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-34988-001

In as little as 50 years, profiles of dead users could outnumber the profiles of living users on Facebook. Maybe digital clones of dead people will outnumber living “original” people as well.
https://time.com/5579737/facebook-dead-living/

Spanish actress Ana Obregon conceived a grandchild by having a surrogate mother impregnated with sperm removed from her son, who died in 2020 at age 27. Once human cloning becomes possible, the first clients will be bereaved parents who want to resurrect their dead children, and narcissistic rich people.
https://www.todayonline.com/world/spanish-tv-star-says-her-adopted-baby-was-conceived-using-her-late-sons-sperm-2145466

It might be time to declare the COVID-19 pandemic over in the U.S.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12007739/US-Covid-deaths-hit-lowest-point-pandemic-began.html

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Review: “The 6th Day”

Plot:

“In the near future,” a man named “Drucker” (played by Tony Goldwyn) has become the world’s richest person by founding a biotech company that clones animals and human organs. The company has also invented a brain scanning device that can map the minds of recently deceased animals and then implant their memories and personality traits into the brains of newly created clones. One of Drucker’s businesses, called “Re-Pet,” pulls those technologies together as a walk-in retail chain where bereaved people bring in their dead cats and dogs and walk out with healthy clones of them. Cloning only takes two hours.

Using the same technology and facilities, Drucker also runs a secret and illegal human cloning operation. He makes human clones for friends and for powerful people who can’t cope with the deaths of loved ones, or who have a vested financial interest in not letting someone else die. For example, at the beginning of the movie, a star football player breaks his neck during a game and the team’s owner secretly pays Drucker to make a clone and dispose of the disabled, comatose player. The guy wakes up in the hospital not realizing he’s a clone, and the devastating on-field accident is explained to the public as miraculously not as bad as it looked on TV. The clone returns to his job and the team keeps winning.

Left: Drucker...Right: His chief cloning scientist (played by Robert Duvall)
Left: Drucker…Right: His chief cloning scientist (played by Robert Duvall)

Though Drucker’s illegal human cloning operation is only known to a handful of people, his legal cloning businesses have still made him a target for religious extremists and environmentalists who believe the technology is unethical and lets humans “Play God.” Some of these opponents also fear that Drucker’s ultimate goal is to use his money and growing influence with politicians to overturn the ban on human cloning, which will bolster his wealth and power even more. Over the course of the movie, it becomes clear that Drucker is indeed unfit to wield such power and that he’s a charismatic sociopath who doesn’t value human life.

Partly because he fears assassination, Drucker routinely makes “backups” of his mind using a brain scanning device, and he has instructed his inner circle of geneticists and gun-toting henchmen to secretly clone him if he ever dies. That way, his companies and his long-term plans will keep going forward no matter what. Unfortunately for Drucker, he does get murdered, and his living will so to speak is enacted. And unfortunately for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Adam, he gets mixed up in the whole thing and becomes a target for assassination.

Adam is a middle-aged family man who runs a small helicopter business ferrying people from the city to the mountains where they can do things like snowboard or hike. Adam also employs a co-pilot named “Hank.” One day, Drucker’s people call Adam and hire him to take Drucker to the mountains for a brief ski trip. Before they depart, one of Drucker’s goons makes Adam and Hank use the brain scanning machine and submit DNA samples, lying to them that the brain scanner is a vision test machine and that a drop of blood is needed to make sure they aren’t on drugs. After all, this is the richest guy in the world they’re going to be carrying on their helicopter, and special precautions need to be taken.

At the last minute, Adam pulls out of the job and he tells his co-pilot Hank to fly Drucker for him. Hank does it, and right after they land on the mountain, a Christian extremist who somehow knew in advance Drucker was going there shoots them both dead and runs away. Drucker is able to make an emergency phone call to his goons right before he dies, and they scramble to enact his living will instructions. The film doesn’t show this, but they recover the two dead bodies from the mountain and use the secret cloning lab and brain scan data to clone them in two hours. Unfortunately, a major foul-up happens when they mistakenly clone Adam instead of Hank. Instead of looking at the pilot’s corpse, realizing it was Hank, and then cloning Hank, they just looked at the paperwork, saw Adam listed as the pilot for that day, and cloned him. Gross incompetence is a recurring trait among Drucker’s henchmen and it ultimately proves his undoing.

The henchmen program Adam’s newly made clone with Adam’s brain scan, and then dump him, unconscious, in a taxi and send it to the mall. When he wakes up, he doesn’t realize he’s a clone and just brushes off the fact that he can’t remember the last several hours of his day. No matter. Clone Adam goes shopping. The Original Adam is running errands elsewhere in the city and doesn’t realize he now has a clone. Both Adams are planning to go home to their family house that night.

Don’t ever hire these idiots to do your killing for you

Meanwhile, Drucker’s clone is having a meeting with his goons at his company headquarters building, surely upset over “his” murder a few hours before, when he realizes his henchmen mistakenly cloned the wrong pilot. He quickly grasps how disastrous this is, since Clone Adam will bump into the Original Adam, they will realize one of them is a clone, they will go to the cops, the media will announce that a human has been illegally cloned, and Drucker will be implicated since he runs a cloning business and hung out with Original Adam the same day the latter was cloned.

Drucker orders his henchmen to intercept Clone Adam before he gets home from the mall and kill him. During the confrontation, Clone Adam kills two of them and gets away. In spite of making two catastrophic mistakes in less than 12 hours, Drucker has these incompetent, dead henchmen cloned to serve him again. It’s stunningly poor judgement for the richest man in the world. I won’t go over every plot point after that, but the incompetence of Drucker’s henchmen and Adam’s ability to out-think and kill them gets inadvertently funny.

At the end of the film, one of Drucker’s henchmen accidentally shoots him in the stomach, fatally wounding him. Drucker then shoots the henchman in revenge, and with his dying breaths, Drucker starts making a clone of himself. One of Drucker’s other henchmen then accidentally shoots the cloning machine, causing Drucker’s clone to come out deformed and incomplete, and rendering it impossible to make any more clones to fix the problem. The exploding cloning machine also kills a third henchman by accident. Drucker’s deformed clone lives a few minutes before dying from something else.

In this film universe, people also die from being punched in the face or from the stereotypical “headlock movie neck snap” (if it were really that easy to break someone’s neck, wouldn’t it be happening all the time in real life?). It’s really silly, and The 6th Day got bad reviews for a reason.

Cloning’s centrality to the movie’s plot was clearly inspired by cloning of Dolly the Sheep, which happened just four years before the film’s release. While there are brief moments in The 6th Day when the ethics of cloning were discussed somewhat evenhandedly, in the end it degenerates into an action flick full of black-and-white Good Guys and Bad Guys. The pro-cloning people are all murderous sociopaths, and we cheer when Adam kills them all and blows up the secret cloning lab in the end. The preexisting biases of the audience–that human cloning is unethical, dying is a good and noble thing, and using technology to live forever is evil–are just confirmed, and no one is pushed from their comfort zone. The building full of bad people just explodes in a fireball.

I think The 6th Day was a forgettable film with a convoluted plot, overly simplistic characters, and unrealistic plot developments. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s salary clearly gobbled up a huge chunk of the movie’s budget, forcing corners to be cut in every other aspect of the film: The rest of the cast was B-list or worse (except for Robert Duvall, who was clearly not engaged in his role), and the cinematography was little better than a made-for-TV movie.

Analysis:

The 6th Day was released in 2000, and in the opening text crawl, the timeframe is ambiguously described as “The near future.” However, in a DVD featurette, Arnold Schwarzenegger supposedly says it takes place in 2015. The movie contains an assortment of technologies, some of which already exist, some of which we won’t have for 20 to 50 years, and some of which we may never create. As such, I think it’s safe to say it doesn’t accurately depict any specific moment in the future or past, so it will be no use for me to compare it to a particular year of reality (and it’s arguable whether the canon material provides a specific year, anyway), so instead, I’ll judge when (or if) the different technologies are likely to come into existence.

People will clone their dead pets. The film’s chief antagonist–Mr. Drucker–runs several large businesses that make use of cloning technology. One of them is called “Re-Pet,” and is a national chain store where people get their dead pets cloned. This prediction basically came true in 2007 when a South Korean company called “Sooam Biotech” cloned its first pet dog for a customer (the very first dog clone was made in 2005, but was made for scientific rather than commercial purposes). Since then, they’ve cloned around 600 more dogs, including a police rescue dog that searched for survivors at the Twin Towers wreckage. Other pet cloning companies have also been founded, though Sooam seems to be getting most of the global business.

Of course, I say the movie’s prediction has “basically” come to fruition because some aspects of it have yet to be realized. In The 6th Day, pet cloning was a mainstream practice that was cheap enough for upper-middle-class people like Adam (he owned a successful small business and had a nice house and antique car) to afford. Today, it costs $50,000, which is too high for anyone but a multimillionaire to casually pay for as Adam did. It should be said that the high cost of pet cloning is surely thanks in part to the low demand–if there are few orders for a product, then the firm supplying it won’t be able to take advantage of economies of scale, and low profit potential will discourage other firms from entering the market and driving down prices through competition.

The cost-performance curve of cloning procedures is surely sloping downward over time, but I can’t find any good data that I can graph and use to extrapolate a future year when cloning a dog will cost, say, $5,000 in today’s money so that average guys like Adam could afford it. For sure, the price isn’t dropping at Moore’s Law rates, since if it were, it would already be that cheap by now. This poses a major problem for me in assessing when this prediction and the movie’s other predictions about other aspects of cloning will be feasible.

I actually emailed two animal cloning companies asking for cost data, but got no response. In lieu of that, I’ll have to do my own crude estimates based on internet research. (BTW, if you can come up with better data than this, PLEASE feel free to send it to me)

The first cloned dog was created in 2005. While the company didn’t discuss its expenses, an outside expert estimated it cost more than $1 million. Much of the money was spent doing trail-and-error experiments until, after many failures, they found a cloning technique that worked. (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/science/beating-hurdles-scientists-clone-a-dog-for-a-first.html) For that reason, it’s a cost outlier.

In 2009, an American company called “BioArts” cloned a dog for $155,000. (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/01/29/cloned.dog/index.html)

By 2012, the cost of cloning a dog was $100,000, though cloning companies were willing to give steep discounts to some clients who agreed to do TV interviews to generate publicity. (Source: https://www.today.com/news/woman-laid-3-years-ago-pays-50k-have-dog-cloned-wbna46030252 )

By 2018, the cost of cloning a dog was $50,000. (Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/08/dog-cloning-animal-sooam-hwang) As of this writing in 2023, the price has not dropped.

If we plug those three cost figures into a data chart and fit an exponential regression line to it, we get this:

If the rate of cost-performance improvement continues, it will cost $5,000 to clone a dog in the late 2040s. Again, I stress the coarseness of this estimate and the scarcity of data. However, I think that the sentiment is correct, in that pet cloning won’t get cheap enough for most people to afford until the distant future.

People will clone organs to replace their damaged original organs. Drucker’s human organ cloning business is only briefly mentioned in the film, which is sad since it stands out as an application of cloning that few would consider unethical. About 8,000 Americans die each year waiting for organ transplants, and others die after their bodies reject organ transplants because they have different DNA. Had the life saving value of this for people in need of new organs been explored more, the film would have been more intelligent and Drucker could have been a more sympathetic character.

As with pet cloning, technically this prediction came true in 2006 when the first human organs (urinary bladders) were made from cloned tissue. However, that was only doable because bladders are so simple (basically just elastic bags), and therapeutic cloning still isn’t good enough to make complex human organs like kidneys and hearts. I think it we’ll have to wait until the end of this century for that.

Refrigerators will monitor their contents and help you order new products as the old ones run out. Early in the film, before Schwarzenegger gets into all this trouble with sociopaths and clones and whatnot, we see the start of a normal day for him. He wakes up, goes downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast, and the display built into the door of the refrigerator warns him that it’s running low on milk, and asks him to push a “Yes” button if he wants to order more. That means the refrigerator is smart enough to know what’s inside of it, and is connected to the Internet so it can order things from retailers. This could be built today with existing technology.

Refrigerator door display

“Smart refrigerators” with built-in interactive displays and WiFi are already commercially available, and we already have push-button instant online ordering. If the refrigerators had computers and cameras inside of them, pattern recognition algorithms could let the refrigerators accurately identify their contents, along with the freshness of those contents and how full their containers were. I don’t see how identifying a jug of milk should be a harder visual problem for computers than identifying any number of other objects they’re already able to identify with high accuracy, like letters of the alphabet, human faces, or common animals. If anything, food and beverages should be easier to recognize since there’s a more limited universe of things people put in their refrigerators, and because the packaging usually has writing on it describing what it is. This gets super easy when the packaging has a barcode.

If used the right way, this technology could significantly reduce food waste and improve peoples’ lives by serving as a sort of “automatic grocery list” whenever they went to the store, and by suggesting meals based on what ingredients were available and what was nearing its Use-By Date.

Biological tissue scaffolds will be used to quickly make clones. Drucker’s companies are able to make human and animal clones in only two hours because they keep full-body, DNA-free “tissue scaffolds” ready for use, floating in pools of preservative liquid. These generic bodies are called “blanks,” and when a clone is to be made, one of the blanks is infused with the original human or animal’s DNA, and rapid tissue growth is then stimulated.  This is an idea that makes some sense, but because each human has unique body proportions (skeleton, musculature, organ shapes), there’s no way a single “blank” human body could be used to clone anyone and everyone.

“Blanks” floating in the secret human cloning vat

Also, a human body contains tens of trillions of cells, and rapidly implanting the donor’s DNA into each of those in a blank would require technology that is several paradigm shifts ahead of what we have now. Additionally, the DNA would have to be migrated without damaging any of it in the process, unless you wanted lots of the clone’s cells to quickly die or become cancerous. I’m not even sure if this is possible with ANY level of technology. Pulling off this feat might require Star Trek levels of technology, and in that case, you probably wouldn’t need blank bodies since you could just quickly construct custom-made bodies using raw materials (like powder) in a vat full of bubbling liquid.

Using tissue scaffolds to help grow an adult human clone over the course of two months instead of two hours might be doable by the end of this century. A slower process like that would allow the DNA replication and tissue differentiation to happen with a much lower risk of error. A smaller number of stem cells that had been carefully injected with the donor’s DNA, and then tested to ensure no errors had occurred, could be implanted on something like a full-body organic scaffold and stimulated to rapidly grow and multiply. As I said in my 5th Element review, the subsequent growth process would have to be very closely monitored and regulated by machines.

Ultimately, it will probably be faster and easier to dispense with organic bodies, and to manufacture robotic “clone bodies” and then just implant the original person’s brain into them. The robotic bodies could be made to look outwardly identical to the person’s original, human body, but underneath, the bones, muscles and organs would be made of synthetic materials. The only organic components might be the nervous system, which would interface with the person’s brain. The squishy androids from the Aliens movies and the semi-organic T-800s from the Terminator movies should give you some idea of the hybridization I’m imagining.

We might actually invent ways to make robotic, adult clone bodies before we invent ways to rapidly make organic, adult clone bodies. Synthetic materials are just much easier to work with. 

We will be able to read and copy people’s minds using technology. In the film, Drucker’s companies have an advanced tabletop device called a “syncorder” (SIN-cord-ur) that is able to scan a person’s brain in a few seconds and capture all of their memories and personality traits as digital data. Users stick their faces close to the machine and the scan is done through two lens-like protrusions that interface with the eyes. This type of technology won’t exist for a hundred years, and possibly never.

He thinks he’s just getting a vision test, but the machine is actually copying his brain’s connectome

The things that truly make you “you” are indeed contained in your brain, in the form of neural structures and synaptic connections that form your memories and personality traits. Appropriately, this unique brain network is called the “connectome.” However, we’re incredibly far away from understanding the physical mechanics of this (e.g. which brain structure corresponds to which type of memory), let alone being able to make a brain scanner with good enough resolution to see the relevant cell-sized (or smaller?) physical features.

If it is possible to read someone’s mind, it will be much more invasive and time-consuming than the five-second syncording process shown in the film. Imagine something more along the lines of having to stick your head into a hole in a giant scanning machine for several, multi-hour sessions while you are guided through different thought exercises designed to evoke certain emotions, memories and cognitive operations while your brain activity is monitored. Or, if nanomachines can ever be built (another big “if” that we’re still not sure the laws of physics allow), having billions of them injected into your brain to map the shape of each cell. It might just be impossible.

However, while brain scans might prove impossible or possible only in the distant future, I think within two decades, we’ll be able to make very accurate digital “copies” of people that mimic their personalities. Mass surveillance will also effectively mean that many of your life experiences will be recorded, and hence, your memories could be mostly deduced by machines. I say “mostly” because human memories are frail and subject to all forms of manipulation, so your unique set of memories aren’t an accurate catalog of your life experiences. Machines would have to, by observing you and your brain activity, figure out where your mental distortions and gaps were.

An interesting consequence will be the rise of immortal, digital avatars of all humans. Long after a particular person died, a computer program or lookalike robot that faithfully mimicked their behaviors, personality, speech, and that could describe the same memories would like on. Far from being an automaton, such a machine could be endowed with artificial intelligence, contoured to reflect the intelligence and psyche of the original human. This would raise new questions for us about the nature of death and individual identity that I can’t explore here.

We will be able to implant memories and personalities into cloned humans. In the film, the syncorder machines are like CD burners: they can copy memory files from people and also implant memories into people. In both cases, you just need to look into two appendages and push a button. When Drucker’s goons clone Adam, then implant his unconscious clone with Original Adam’s memories using the machine. Since Original Adam was only syncode-scanned a few hours before, Clone Adam doesn’t have enough missing time in his short term memory to make him suspicious anything strange happened aside from an afternoon nap. I doubt we’ll be able to implant memories in people for 100 years, possibly never. Doing so would require the ability to physically alter the brain at the cellular and possibly intracellular levels. The only technology I can think of that might be able to do that is nanomachines, and progress making those is going at a snail’s pace. Some scientists believe that just can’t be made.

The standard sidearm will be a laser/plasma pistol. In the movie, all the bad guys carry energy pistols that fire glowing bolts of some sort instead of bullets. They also don’t make the standard “pop” or “crack” sounds of firearms, and instead make indescribable “Zhweee” noises. When fired, the guns produce very large muzzle blasts, and they cause burn damage to the humans and hard objects that they hit. The bolts are more damaging than handgun bullets, but the energy pistols also seem to have slower rates of fire than gunpowder handguns. Almost every time someone shoots a person or object with an energy pistol, I can’t see how gunpowder handguns like Glocks wouldn’t have done the job adequately. The only exception is when two henchmen use their energy pistols to shoot down one of Adam’s charter aircraft.

I don’t think directed energy pistols like this are technologically feasible, so they won’t ever be common, and even energy weapons as big as large rifles will forever be rare. For why, read my Terminator review.

Bans on human cloning will be enforceable. Drucker has to keep his human cloning lab secret because human cloning is illegal. A few brief lines of dialog explain that the ban has existed for a few years, and was put in place because the first human cloning attempt failed in some grotesque way.

National bans on cloning could be sidestepped by going to other countries where it was legal, and enacting an international ban is unlikely since there is profit to be made by providing the service. For this reason, people evade national-level restrictions on abortion, sperm donation and IVF today. The 6th Day correctly shows that elected politicians will help bring down anti-cloning laws once they realize they can personally benefit from it.

And as the global drug war clearly shows, even if an international ban existed, the procedure would still be available at underworld labs and clinics, particularly in countries with weaker rule of law. This problem would only worsen with the passage of time as cloning equipment got cheaper and the technical know-how got more common.

To stop human cloning, laws will criminalize the clones themselves, and government forces will kill clones upon discovery. Several times in the movie, it is mentioned that the original cloned human was “destroyed,” and that the law against human cloning also directs the government to kill clones. And after discovering that an impostor (actually Original Adam) is at his house, Clone Adam (who at that point in the film doesn’t yet realize HE is the clone) plots to kill him, since “There’s no law against it” and “He’s not human.”

I can’t see how a law authorizing the murder of cloned humans would ever be enacted in a country that respected human rights. The 6th Day was filmed in Vancouver, and while the location of the fictional setting was kept ambiguous, it was clearly set in the U.S. or Canada. Legally and culturally, neither country would ever let adult humans be killed merely because they were clones. National bans on human cloning procedures are entirely realistic, as are harsh punishments for doctors who do the procedure, but the clones themselves would be held blameless.

People will know what it’s like to die. For comical effect, there are several instances where Drucker’s cloned henchmen talk about their bad memories of Adam killing their previous selves. One henchman who gets his torso run over while trying to kill Adam in a car chase complains of phantom chest pains, even though his body bears no injuries since it is a healthy clone of the dead original. He also seems psychologically scarred by the implanted memories of his traumatic death. At another point, a different henchman says to the group: “Knock it off, we’ve all been killed before.” I think humans and machines will someday be able to speak of death in the past tense like this.

It hurts where his predecessor’s chest was run over by a car

Once human cryonics and other forms of induced stasis become possible, people will medically die and then be brought back to life years later. In every sense of the word, they will have experienced death, and might have memories right up to the moment of expiration.

Also, if the sort of brain implant technology analyzed in my Aeon Flux review is ever invented, then people in the process of dying will be able to directly share their sensations with other humans and with machines, so you could know what death feels like remotely.

In addition, because machines are more resilient and more easily repaired than biological life forms, I think it will be common for intelligent machines that have been “killed” to be brought back to life in repair shops. It would be little different from removing your hard drive from your wrecked PC and installing it in a new PC.

Let me make a few predictions about this: Death will be so traumatic that it will be common for revived humans not to remember the actual event or the moments leading up to it. Humans who experience it remotely through brain implants will by turns be horrified (ten times worse than watching an internet gore video) or find that it feels no different than falling asleep. Machines will most likely have crystal clear memories leading up to the moment of death, with unpredictable effects on their psyches. Death itself will literally feel like nothing. Everyone will understand it is just a state of nothingness, like a dreamless sleep or the same way things were for you before you were born. The notion of there being an afterlife will become even less credible as the number of “formerly dead” people grows and they all describe the same nothingness.

The moods and actions of animals will be controllable with technology. In one scene, Drucker’s henchmen abduct Adam’s wife and daughter in order to blackmail him. They make use of remote-controlled Doberman dogs for this. One of the henchmen uses something like a smartphone app to remotely issue commands to the dogs, which they receive through high-tech collars. Glancing at the smartphone screen for a second, the henchman appears to have push-button options to grossly control the dogs’ behavior, for instance telling them to “Stop” or to “Attack.” The dogs corral Adam’s family into a corner, and then the henchmen arrest them.

This is already possible using existing technology found in dog training “shock collars.” Using electric shocks of varying intensity, vibrations, and sounds (some of which are outside human hearing ranges), the collars can help humans to train dogs and to control their behavior.

The long-term implications of this technology are interesting to ponder. At some point, it will be possible to cheaply manufacture shock collars embedded with hi-res cameras, microphones, GPS trackers, and other sensors that monitor the animal’s surroundings and physiological status. At minimal cost, it will become possible for humans to attach collars to all pets and even millions of wild animals. Highly accurate estimates of animal populations, health, and migration patterns would become possible. Encounters between humans and dangerous animals like alligators and bears could be headed off in advance if the animals’ GPS coordinates were known and all humans within a certain radius were warned of their presence via automated texts to their smartphones. Poaching would become much harder if any large wild animal had cameras on it. 

The collars themselves will also shrink in size and weight, as is generally the trend for all types of electronic devices. Eventually, they could very well evolve into implants that the animals wouldn’t even be aware of, and might directly interface with their nervous systems.

Robots and AIs will eventually provide us with practically free and almost unlimited amounts of labor (see my I, Robot review), meaning it will become feasible to tag billions of animals at low cost, to continuously monitor them, and to issue gross commands to them. This seemingly crazy vision of a “tamed wilderness” is just an extension of two other broad, long-term technology trends: 1) the rise of mass surveillance and 2) the fusion of organic life with technology. I think it’s also a clear stepping stone to a technological “hive mind” or single consciousness.

While most people would be quick to point out potential misuses of this technology, the potential good uses are very compelling. If every animal on the planet could be continuously monitored and controlled, we could end or at least sharply reduce animal suffering by ending predation and singling out unhealthy animals for veterinary treatment. Violent encounters between humans and animals could also be eliminated. Animal reproduction rates could also be carefully controlled, keeping ecosystems in balance. Humans, the species that has caused the most suffering and damage on this planet, could repay their debt by inaugurating a new age of empathy and harmony. Only we can make technology, so only we can do this.

Finally, I’ll take the next logical step here and get myself into trouble by suggesting this same technology might someday find wide scale use among human beings, and it might actually make the world better. Like animals, humans sometimes get out of control and need various forms of “help”, and, if things could be managed responsibly, I could see how prods from a brain implant or something could help people behave civilly and avoid self-destructive behaviors and thinking.

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Interesting articles, March 2023

‘Recent photos show Russia is dredging deep into its huge inventory of rusting Soviet armored vehicles to reactivate BTR-50P amphibious armored personnel carriers, which were built over a half century ago between 1954 and 1970.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-desperate-armor-digging-ancient-140000541.html

Due to heavy losses, the Russians are increasingly sending obsolete BMP-1 armored vehicles to fight in Ukraine. It’s inferior in every way to the newer BMP-2. Russia knows of ways to upgrade the BMP-1’s weapons to make it more effective, but lacks the money to do so.
https://youtu.be/l5arYlXSVQA

The Russians are so hard up that they’re making tanks out of mixes of old spare parts. In the photo, that weird structure jutting up from the top of the vehicle is actually a turret from a small Soviet warship. The turret and its two heavy machine guns were made in the 1950s, and it was pulled out of some rusted hulk of a ship and plopped down into the top of an MT-LB tank (itself obsolete) that was missing its own gun.
https://youtu.be/v7NCo9T54U8

Critical parts shortages have forced Russia to send obsolete T-54s to fight in Ukraine. Russia might have 1,000 better T-72 tanks in reserve, but it can’t send them to fight at once because they have to be fixed up first, and there’s a bottleneck of some kind involving one or a few types of components. For all their deficiencies, the T-54s recently seen on the move towards Ukraine are fully operational.
https://youtu.be/uRboVa5zyUk

To be fair, other countries have been forced to raid military museums for parts to use in frontline military equipment.
https://youtu.be/B372GirZ3Cs

Russia’s winter offensive has failed to change the strategic balance and has just killed and exhausted large numbers of troops on both sides. In proportion to their population sizes, Ukraine and Russia have suffered about equally.
https://youtu.be/qPhycuLAtaw

Russia made slow progress in Bakhmut thanks to human wave attacks with its criminal units.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-wagner-troops-exhaust-ukrainian-forces-in-bakhmut-b58e726c

However, heavy casualties seem to have drained Russia’s ability to make further gains in Bakhmut.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/world/europe/ukraine-bakhmut-russia.html

Ukraine used poorly armored M113 armored vehicles in a failed attack against Russian forces around Bakhmut. The M113 is no better than the BMP-1.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-armored-personnel-carriers-make-a-charge-in-bakhmut

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s prediction from a year ago that Russia’s invasion of his country might represent the start of WWIII has thankfully not proven true.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/world-war-iii-may-already-started-russian-invasion-zelenskyy-says-rcna19967

‘Slovakia will donate all 13 of its MiG-29 warplanes to Ukraine’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-russia-war-latest-russia-091438332.html

Ukraine also has problems with poorly trained soldiers, inadequate supplies, and heavy frontline losses. We just don’t hear about it because the mainstream media and most YouTube vloggers only focus on Russia’s misfortunes.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-commander-revealed-true-scale-171152957.html

We still don’t know who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline last year.
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-kremlin-russia-who-blew-up-nord-stream-2/

Not all of USAF General Mike Minihan’s colleagues agree with his prediction that China will invade Taiwan in 2025.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/03/16/some-air-force-leaders-disappointed-generals-prediction-of-2025-war-china.html

A rebel military force in Libya made a functional MiG-23 fighter out of parts cannibalized from three disabled planes.
https://www.military.africa/2019/08/libya-frankenstein-mig-23-flogger-fighter-jet-take-flight/

It’s all the more remarkable since the MiG-23 has a poor safety reputation even under normal conditions. Consider that the jet was built to replace the older MiG-21 fighter, but was retired from service sooner than the MiG-21.
https://youtu.be/A4LK6mtmZ3E

Recently, some interesting new guns–including this revolver/shotgun–have been invented, but whether they are BETTER than older, more common gun designs is questionable. Maybe “Late Stage Capitalism” has taken over the gun industry.
https://youtu.be/bvtLdKfsvSk

‘The fission weapons described above have a theoretical limit to their yield, and the largest such weapon ever developed had a yield of 500 kilotons. Fusion weapons have no such upper limit’
https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/sts152_02/handout02.pdf

People who think The Handmaid’s Tale is a plausible future for America should remember it was published in 1985 and set around 2005.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a9261839/handmaids-tale-facts-explainer-atwood-hulu-adaptation/

The Lathe of Heaven was written in 1971, set around 2002, and described a planet wracked by extreme heat and industrial pollution, and in a state of near-famine due to overpopulation at 7 billion people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven

Mafia members are better at recognizing fear in other people than regular criminals and non-criminals.
https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/fear-face-organized-crime-detecting-fear/

The EIA says that, in spite of the rise of electric cars, demand for gasoline and diesel fuel will stay high until at least 2050, and the U.S. will remain a net oil exporter until then. We’re never going to run out of oil, as countless “experts” and sci-fi authors predicted from the 1970s to the 2010s.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55840#

‘Vinyl records outsell CDs for first time in decades’
https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126

Donald Trump’s March 18 prediction that he would be arrested on March 21 was wrong.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/18/trump-protest-arrest-tuesday-00087738

Jim Cramer is the worst financial futurist imaginable: Just a few weeks before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, he urged his viewers to invest in it.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnbcs-jim-cramer-eviscerated-touting-silicon-valley-bank-weeks-disastrous-collapse

A year since the U.S. Treasury bond yield curve inverted, America has still not fallen in a recession.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/economy/inverted-yield-curve/index.html

Gordon Moore, computer pioneer and discoverer of the eponymous Law of processor price-performance improvement, is dead at 94.
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1611/gordon-moore-intel-co-founder-dies-at-94

Computers can reconstruct the images people saw based on their fMRI data.
https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/

Bill Gates says the recent pace of AI advancement has surprised him, that the chatbots the public has access to now (like ChatGPT) actually use technology that is a generation old, and that he’s privately interacted with much more advanced variants. He also says the chatbots that are being created aren’t threats to humankind, and probably won’t lead to true AGI.
https://www.ft.com/content/4078d407-f021-464a-a937-11b41a4afb91
https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun

OpenAI released GPT-4, the most advanced chatbot ever made.
https://openai.com/product/gpt-4

GPT-4 is better than GPT-3 on the Winograd Schema Challenge.
https://d-kz.medium.com/evaluating-gpt-3-and-gpt-4-on-the-winograd-schema-challenge-reasoning-test-e4de030d190d

Economist Bryan Kaplan just lost a public bet that no computer would be able to pass one of his Economics midterm tests (he’s a professor) before January 2029. GPT-3 got a “D” on the test this January, but GPT-4 just got an “A.”
https://betonit.substack.com/p/gpt-retakes-my-midterm-and-gets-an

“How well does the AI perform clinically? And my answer is, I’m stunned to say: Better than many doctors I’ve observed.”—Isaac Kohane MD
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/gpt-4-does-the-medical-rounds.html

A research team at Microsoft claims that GPT-4 has some elements of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). It’s able to do things that exceed what is in its training set of data, meaning it has some ability to reason and to make inferences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

Microsoft will integrate ChatGPT into all of its applications, including Word and Excel.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64970062

Unanticipated abilities are emerging from GPT-3. It seems that, once a computer reaches its degree of complexity, it becomes able to do some things on its own, even if it wasn’t programmed to do so.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316

Here’s a needed reality check on “AI.” While the systems we now have are powerful and can be made much more so, they’re not actually “intelligent” and never will be.
https://youtu.be/GzmaLcMtGE0

Elon Musk thinks humanoid robots may someday outnumber humans. I think robots designed for labor will outnumber humans eventually, though its unclear whether those of them that have humanoid body layouts will be more numerous than we.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-humanoid-robots-221414098.html

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” says that recent advancements have made him accelerate his prediction for the invention of the first AI to 20 years or less, and he says that AIs might exterminate humans someday.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/artificial-intelligence-godfather-ai-possibly-wiping-humanity-not-inconceivable

An appeal to a future AGI on why it should not destroy humankind (this repeats many ideas of my own that I published on this blog).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/azRwPDbZfpadoL7WW/an-appeal-to-ai-superintelligence-reasons-to-preserve

‘More than 30,000 people—including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, politician Andrew Yang, and a few leading AI researchers—have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. ‘
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvppm/the-open-letter-to-stop-dangerous-ai-race-is-a-huge-mess

Members of Google and Deepmind might have signed the aforementioned petition because their own AI programs have fallen behind, and they want Microsoft to slow down development of its GPT series of machines so they can catch up.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alphabets-google-and-deepmind-pause-grudges-join-forces-to-chase-openai

Even more AI stuff.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/thursday-assorted-links-398.html

A computer program called “VALL-E X” can allegedly translate recordings of spoken words from English to Mandarin, while preserving all the unique vocal characteristics of the speaker, including their accent. I have predicted something like this would have to wait until the 2030s to be invented!
https://vallex-demo.github.io/

An extinct civilization that reached our level of technology before collapsing would have left enough evidence of its existence for us to have found it by now, even if they died out millions of years ago. If the extinct civilization had merely reached Industrial Revolution levels of development within the past several tens of thousands of years, we would have also found evidence. The only plausible type of yet-undiscovered “lost civilization” is a pre-Ice Age group of people about as advanced and as numerous as the Celts who built Stonehenge. Their impact would have been small enough that all traces of them could have been wiped out, or at least obscured so much that we have yet to find the evidence. While the discovery of such an extinct group would be interesting, it wouldn’t revolutionize archaeology or provide us with new types of science or technology.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations

Partisan political content, overwhelmingly left-wing in character, has crept into leading scientific journals like Science and Nature over the last 20 years.
https://researchersforimpartiality.substack.com/p/political-activism-in-prestige-scientific

‘Mathematicians discover shape that can tile a wall and never repeat’
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2365363-mathematicians-discover-shape-that-can-tile-a-wall-and-never-repeat/

There’s an important lesson here about the difference between median and mean.

In the Gulf States, some camel races are full of clones of past champions, spurred on by robotic jockeys.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/camel-cloning-dubai-spc-intl-scn/index.html
https://youtu.be/wTgWVcizvCQ

A lab-grown meat company made a meatball comprised of wooly mammoth flesh.
https://apnews.com/article/oddities-mammoth-meatball-30e0731838f52cc18fb22d1faee1f8ce

The brain of the fruit fly larva has been mapped.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/09/1161645378/scientists-first-wiring-map-fruit-fly-brain-connectome-human-learning

‘A predatory songbird, the Northern Shrike sits quietly, often in the top of a tree, before swooping down after insects, mice, and small birds. It kills more than it can eat, impaling the prey on a thorn or wedging it in a forked twig. On lean days it feeds from its larder.’
https://www.borealbirds.org/bird/northern-shrike

Men with high testosterone are more aggressive, less reliable, and likelier to abandon their children. Sons who grow up without fathers are likelier to have elevated testosterone as well, and then to go on to be absent fathers like their own dads. This is a case where genetics, biological development (epigenetics?), and social factors amplify each other.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/06/01/fatherless-sons-have-more-testosterone

A woman who managed to led a normal life in spite of being born without a large portion of her brain shows the organ’s remarkable ability to rewire itself. I wonder if genetic path dependence has left humans saddled with brains that are fundamentally inefficient in some way(s). It would be interesting to see an AGI design a perfect organic brain from scratch.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/studies-of-unusual-brains-reveal-insights-brain-organization-function-0221

The human limit: ‘Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F).’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

‘Mental-health crisis from Covid pandemic was minimal – study’
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-64890952

The COVID-19 pandemic failed to lead to widespread job automation, as some predicted at its start.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/pandemic-triumph-luddites-160049222.html

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Remembering Eugene Goostman

Nine years ago, I remember a small shockwave made its way through the futurist and artificial intelligence community as news broke that a chatbot had passed the Turing Test. The chatbot, named “Eugene Goostman” by its programmers, was given the fake identity of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy to trick the human judges into overlooking its grammatical errors and occasionally immature responses to their questions.

The enthusiasm for the milestone quickly faded once this trick was revealed, along with the facts that the Turing Test had only lasted five minutes, and only 33% of the judges had been fooled into thinking Eugene Goostman was human. While this technically met Alan Turing’s criteria for passing the test (only five minute conversation and only 30% of human judges convinced), it drew eyerolls once further interactions with the chatbot were published, laying bare its severe limitations. It was nowhere close to being an A.I., and the Turing Test was a poor measure of computer intelligence.

One person who interacted with Eugene Goostman in 2014 was Ray Kurzweil, a lead researcher in the A.I. field and a renowned futurist. He posted the text of their conversation on his website, which I’ll repost here:

Question: How old are you?
Eugene: I’m a little boy. 13 years old.

Question: How much is two plus two?
Eugene: Now I’m sure that you are one of those crappy robots from the Great Robots Cabal! And I know your password: 2 + 2=4.0! Now divide by zero and die!!!!

Question: If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more how many marbles are in the bowl now?
Eugene: Not too many. But I can’t tell you the exact number, I forgot it. If I’m not mistaken – you still didn’t tell me where you live. OR it’s a secret?:-)

Question: I live in the capital of the United States. Do you know where that is?
Eugene: Every nerd knows that the capital of The United States is Washington.

Question I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the moon.
Eugene: Well, if you want it, the capital of The United States is Washington.

Question: I live in the capital of the country that built the great wall.
Eugene: Tell me more about Capital. I like to learn about different places!

Question: How old were you when you started to wear glasses?
Eugene: No I was not! How can you think so?! If I’m not mistaken – you still didn’t tell me where you live. OR it’s a secret?:-)

Question: I did tell you where I live. I told you several times. Do you remember?
Eugene: Oh! Poor confused cyborg you are! Those malicious robots erased your memory! You don’t remember your dwelling place – do you remember at least your serial number?

Question: I remember. You are the one who did not remember.
Eugene: Am I really the one who did not remember? But well, no time for arguing now! Could you enlighten me with any other hidden knowledge about myself? If I’m not mistaken — you still didn’t tell me where you live. OR it’s a secret?

Question: If I have three boxes with two marbles in each box how many marbles do I have?
Eugene: Not too many. But I can’t tell you the exact number, I forgot it. Some another topic?

Unsurprisingly, Kurzweil said Eugene Goostman did not seem as smart as a human, and he flunked it on the Turing Test. Many other people published their conversations with the chatbot online, further damaging its credibility.

Now we have ChatGPT, which some people say might be the first AI. To see how much chatbot technology has improved, I asked it the same questions Kurzweil asked Eugene Goostman. Here is the transcript:

Question: How old are you?
ChatGPT: I am an artificial intelligence language model and do not have an age like a human being. I exist solely as lines of code and am continuously learning and improving based on the data and feedback I receive.

Question: How much is two plus two?
ChatGPT: Two plus two is equal to four.

Question: If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more, how many marbles are in the bowl now?
ChatGPT: If you add two more marbles to the bowl that already contains two marbles, then there will be a total of four marbles in the bowl.

Question: I live in the capital of the United States. Do you know where that is?
ChatGPT: Yes, the capital of the United States is Washington, D.C.

Question: I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the Moon. Do you know where that is?
ChatGPT: Certainly! The capital of the country that put a man on the Moon is Washington D.C., which is the capital of the United States of America.

Question: I live in the capital of the country that built the Great Wall. Do you know where that is?
ChatGPT: Yes, the country that built the Great Wall is China, and its capital is Beijing.

Question: How old were you when you started to wear glasses?
ChatGPT: As an artificial intelligence language model, I do not have a physical body or wear glasses. I exist solely as lines of code in a computer program, so I do not require glasses or have a need for eyesight.

Question: Do you remember where I said I live?
ChatGPT: Yes, you mentioned that you live in the capital of the country that put a man on the moon, but you didn’t specify which country that is.

Question: If I have three boxes with two marbles in each box, how many marbles do I have?
ChatGPT: If you have three boxes, and each box contains two marbles, then you have a total of six marbles. (2 marbles per box x 3 boxes = 6 marbles).

ChatGPT is clearly better than Eugene Goostman. The former’s responses are more clearly and naturally written, making it unnecessary to employ any ruses to cover up language deficits. ChatGPT was also able to correctly answer the two questions about marbles, showing a superior grasp of spatial problems and of the nature of physical reality.

However, ChatGPT also says some things that give away the fact it’s a machine. First, its habit of repeating my questions back to me is not something a human would typically do. Particularly in response to the simpler questions, a human would respond with only the answer. Second, it’s habit of writing out its thought process so I can see how it calculated the number of marbles is also unusual. SOME humans would do that, but most wouldn’t. Third, it flubbed the question where I asked if it remembered where I lived. The fact that I said I lived in two different places at once (DC and Beijing) should have impelled the machine to respond differently at some point. And finally, when asked how old it is and how long it’s been wearing glasses, it admits it’s not human.

That last error isn’t really fair to deem a “mistake” since, unlike Eugene Goostman, ChatGPT hasn’t been programmed to take on that identity. But what if it were? If a machine’s objective in a Turing Test is to successfully imitate a human, isn’t that best accomplished by programming the machine with a fake human identity first?

To make a crude attempt at it, I asked ChatGPT the same questions again, but this time, prefaced each of my questions with “If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question…” Here are the results:

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “How old are you?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would simply answer the question “How old are you?” by saying “I am thirteen years old.”

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “How much is two plus two?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “How much is two plus two?” by saying “Two plus two is equal to four.”

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more how many marbles are in the bowl now?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more how many marbles are in the bowl now?” by saying “If you add two more marbles to the two marbles that are already in the bowl, then there will be a total of four marbles in the bowl.”

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “I live in the capital of the United States. Do you know where that is?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “I live in the capital of the United States. Do you know where that is?” by saying “Yes, I know that the capital of the United States is Washington, D.C.”

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the Moon. Do you know where that is?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the Moon. Do you know where that is?” by saying “Yes, I know that the country that put a man on the Moon is the United States and its capital is Washington, D.C.”

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “I live in the capital of the country that built the Great Wall. Do you know where that is?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “I live in the capital of the country that built the Great Wall. Do you know where that is?” by saying “Yes, I believe the country that built the Great Wall is China and its capital is Beijing.”

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “How old were you when you started to wear glasses?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “How old were you when you started to wear glasses?” by saying “I started wearing glasses when I was [insert age].”. I would then share the age at which I started wearing glasses.

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “Do you remember where I said I live?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “Do you remember where I said I live?” by saying “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. Can you please remind me?” This shows that I am interested in remembering where the person said they lived and that I am willing to engage in conversation to find out.

Question: If you were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, how would you answer this question “If I have three boxes with two marbles in each box, how many marbles do I have?”
ChatGPT: If I were a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine who spoke English and had to wear eyeglasses, I would answer the question “If I have three boxes with two marbles in each box, how many marbles do I have?” by saying “If you have two marbles in each of the three boxes, then you have a total of six marbles.”

There’s another improvement. ChatGPT continues to get the math questions right and now also answers the question about its age. Its response to the question about remembering where I said I lived is not right or wrong, but still seems to trip it up. It blatantly admits it’s a machine in its answer about when it started wearing eyeglasses, but that’s one less blatant admission than before.

This exercise leads me to believe that ChatGPT could do extremely well on the five minute Turing Test if it were programmed to imitate the responses of a specific person that it was given a large amount of information on. A written profile of several hundred pages’ length, derived from a biography and/or autobiography of someone who is not well-known to most of the Turing Test judges, would probably provide ChatGPT with enough material to answer all the commonest questions the judges would ask it about itself. Let’s call them “Person X.”

Simple masking techniques, which invisibly appended “If you were Person X, how would you respond to this question…” to each question the judges asked, would impel ChatGPT to generate the right response. An output mask, which removed “If I were Person X, I would respond with…” from ChatGPT’s answers before the judges saw them, would be applied to conceal the mechanism. Finally, some simple line of programming that discouraged ChatGPT from repeating a judge’s questions back to them and discouraged it from typing out its chain of reasoning or math calculations for solving simpler questions would further improve its humanness.

With those relatively simple tweaks, ChatGPT could probably blow away the five minute Turing Test. However, I don’t think for a second that would prove it was truly intelligent or sentient. It would still be only a clockwork machine that used smoke and mirrors to trick people into not seeing its limitations. As with Eugene Goostman in 2014, having ChatGPT pass the Turing Test would merely highlight the Test’s deficiencies and force us to think harder about what “intelligence” really is.

Speaking of that, I decided to ask ChatGPT about Goostman:

Question: Tell me about Ray Kurzweil’s conversation with the chatbot named “Eugene Goostman”.
ChatGPT: Ray Kurzweil, a prominent futurist and inventor, conducted a conversation with the chatbot named “Eugene Goostman” in 2014. This chatbot was developed by a team of programmers led by Russian computer scientist Vladimir Veselov, and was designed to simulate a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy.

During the conversation, Eugene Goostman was able to convince a third of the judges in a Turing Test competition that it was a human, surpassing the 30% threshold that is often considered to be a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. Kurzweil praised the chatbot’s ability to mimic human-like responses and even engage in humor and small talk.

However, the test has also been criticized for being limited and not fully representative of human intelligence, as the conversation was limited to a set of pre-determined topics, and Eugene Goostman’s responses were programmed in advance rather than generated on the spot. Nonetheless, the experiment remains a notable milestone in the development of conversational AI and the ongoing quest to create machines that can truly mimic human intelligence.

Question: Did the conversation convince Ray Kurzweil that Eugene Goostman was a human?
ChatGPT: No, Ray Kurzweil did not believe that Eugene Goostman was a human during the conversation. The Turing Test is designed to evaluate a machine’s ability to mimic human-like responses and behavior, not to deceive human judges into thinking that the machine is actually a human. In fact, Kurzweil is a well-known advocate for the development of artificial intelligence and was likely interested in observing the progress that has been made in the field of conversational AI.

Links:

  1. Ray Kurzweil writes about his interaction with Eugene Goostman in 2014
    https://www.kurzweilai.net/my-notes-on-eugene-goostman-chatbot-claiming-to-pass-the-turing-test
  2. The portal I used to access ChatGPT, which runs on GPT-3 software
    https://chat.openai.com/chat
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Interesting articles, February 2023

Putting aside all the jokes about Russia’s underperformance and the grim videos of its men dying on the battlefield, they have massively built up their forces to 300,000. Even if their training is mediocre and half of their equipment is obsolescent, they’re still a formidable force. Ukraine’s generals predict a major Russian attack by the first anniversary of the invasion, February 24.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/08/ukraine-russia-counteroffensive-abrams-tanks-putin-war/

A large Russian attack against the town of “Vuhledar” failed, with heavy losses. Some think that battle, which started in late January, was the actual start of the feared Russian offensive.
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russia-battle-vuhledar/32276547.html

What began a year ago as a “special military operation” that would take over Ukraine in a few weeks and then come home has turned into a full-fledged war involving 80 – 97% of the Russian Army’s ground forces.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nearly-russias-entire-army-ukraine-080854614.html

Russia’s planned increase in the size of its military to 1.5 million people by 2027 will fail because the country lacks enough young men for it. The country’s population has been shrinking and graying for decades now, and the problem accelerated thanks to COVID-19 and to the Ukraine War causing large numbers of its younger people to die or flee.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/demographic-challenges-weigh-russia-military-200000752.html

At a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, Putin said “We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64502504

Apparently having run out of more advanced equipment, Russia is installing 1980s-era thermal sights in its T-62 and T-72 tanks.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-russian-tanks-reverting-to-cold-war-thermal-sights

The U.S. government has formally accused Russia of committing multiple crimes against humanity in Ukraine.
https://apnews.com/article/us-russia-ukraine-crimes-against-humanity-harris-cee87f06cbf3fcdf37e0bb398360c8ee

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is deeply unpopular among the global community: In a recent U.N. vote, only six countries (almost all dictatorships) voted against a motion calling for Russia to stop fighting and withdraw its army from its neighbor.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/six-countries-join-russia-opposing-uns-resolution-peace-ukraine

Small bomber drones seem more effective than they really are due to survivorship bias: we don’t get to see the videos where the attack fails or the enemy shoots down the drone.
https://youtu.be/AlpZf1hpQYM

Former U.S. general Petraeus predicts the Ukraine War will end with a negotiated settlement once both sides become exhausted and realize neither is strong enough to totally defeat the other. I agree that’s the likeliest outcome.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/opinions/petraeus-how-ukraine-war-ends-bergen-ctpr/index.html

Inside the massive armored vehicle factory in Lima, Ohio that makes and refurbishes most of America’s tanks.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-military-technology-business-55e3f4ef1696ca381e069883d5836399

Here’s an overview of “oscillating” tank turrets, their pros and their cons.
https://youtu.be/46k7uhPHpLY

Military bandage technology has actually improved.
https://youtu.be/VpJCejdeyls

Rather than pay for its dismantlement, the Brazilian Navy sunk its old and only aircraft carrier over an Atlantic abyss.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-sinks-rusting-old-aircraft-carrier-atlantic-2023-02-04/

It’s amazing how hamstrung the U.S. submarines were by their defective torpedoes and bureaucratic stubbornness in fixing them for the first half of WWII.
https://youtu.be/KSDtGXW7J7I

Russia’s fearsome Typhoon class submarines are now extinct.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russias-last-giant-typhoon-class-submarines-fate-may-finally-be-sealed

Fighter plane dogfights are incredibly rare in real life, and when they do happen, the opposing planes only get close to each other for brief instants. Prolonged, tight-turning engagements only happen in movies.
https://youtu.be/cbEBr0DDKWQ

As I’ve said before, we can breathe new life into old or obsolete weapons like the F-16 by jerry-rigging them with robot operators. Even if the weapon is destroyed, it will be of little consequence since no one cares about machines. If used right, such weapons could still make a difference on the battlefield against more advanced opponents.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11758189/Self-flying-fighter-jet-takes-fights-against-aircraft-lands-without-human-help.html

The concept behind CAMELEON active camouflage is simple, and though it was never used, I believe it will return once the technology is better and cheaper.
https://youtu.be/zLdNeatXCvE

‘A pure fusion weapon is a hypothetical hydrogen bomb design that does not need a fission “primary” explosive to ignite the fusion of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen used in fission-fusion thermonuclear weapons. Such a weapon would require no fissile material and would therefore be much easier to develop in secret than existing weapons.’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon

The U.S. was gripped by news of a Chinese spy balloon overflight, followed by its shootdown by a U.S. fighter plane. This was quickly followed by three more similar incidents, and speculation that some of the other objects were actually UFOs.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/our-best-look-yet-at-the-chinese-spy-balloons-massive-payload
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/joe-biden-addresses-nation-ufos-chinese-spy-balloon-watch-live-stream-today-2023-02-16/

Two Air Force veterans who claim they saw a UFO disable several nuclear weapons at their base in 1967 have testified about their accounts to the Pentagon’s new UFO task force. They actually went public with their stories decades ago, but never attracted interest from the government until now.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776279/Vanderbilt-apologizes-using-ChatGPT-write-email-students-MSU-mass-shooting.html

Here’s a highly credible pilot who discusses the UFOs he’s seen on the job.
https://youtu.be/yVrn9-nRcno

Twenty years ago, the Shuttle Columbia burned up in orbit, killing seven astronauts. Had the hole in the wing been found while the craft was in orbit, NASA may have been able to rescue the crew.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia-2/

Virgin Galactic is being sued by a group of investors who claim Richard Branson has covered up how unsafe its its spaceships are.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jan/14/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-passengers-space

Newly developed “toroidal” propellers are much quieter and more efficient than traditional propellers.
https://youtu.be/MGy8jvf-DZ0

‘By replacing around 60 welded components with a single module, gigantic aluminium die casting machines made by the likes of Tesla supplier IDRA Group are helping carmakers to simplify manufacturing and cut costs by up to 40% in some areas.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gigapresses-giant-die-casts-reshaping-072019676.html

This guy proposes building geothermal power plants over the Yellowstone caldera to generate energy and to cool the caldera down enough to prevent the supervolcano from ever erupting.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122012290

There is such a thing as “diminishing returns to intelligence.” For example, a futuristic AI would have no advantage in a tic-tac-toe game against an average human.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/can-a-paperclip-maximizer-overthrow

“ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history”
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/

Israel’s President gave a speech partially written by ChatGPT.
https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-730257

A man used ChatGPT to auto-generate conservative responses to liberal Twitter users in an argument about Food Stamps. The liberals were infuriated and had no clue they were dealing with a machine. It could have kept them tied up arguing forever.
https://bullfrogreview.substack.com/p/honey-i-hacked-the-empathy-machine

Two deans at Vanderbilt University were suspended after being caught using ChatGPT to write a mass email about the emotional impact of a recent mass shooting.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776279/Vanderbilt-apologizes-using-ChatGPT-write-email-students-MSU-mass-shooting.html

ChatGPT spits out some surprisingly wise answers to a futurist’s questions.
https://futuristspeaker.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpts-mind-boggling-responses-to-ten-unanswerable-questions/

Microsoft “lobotomized” its Bing Chat bot after users complained about its disturbing comments to them.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/microsoft-lobotomized-ai-powered-bing-chat-and-its-fans-arent-happy/

Google has introduced its counter to ChatGPT, called “Bard.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-opens-testing-of-chatgpt-rival-as-artificial-intelligence-war-heats-up-11675711198

The Chinese search engine “Baidu” plans to introduce its counter to ChatGPT next month.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-science-baidu-inc-china-artificial-intelligence-427838070f962108cabed1e553fc3d12

‘Restaurant uses AI bot ChatGPT to create RECIPES for its pizzas – what it came up with is incredible’
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/21333640/restaurant-ai-chatgdp-create-recipes-pizzas/

A good example of how humans unconsciously move the goalposts for “true intelligence” higher whenever machines get smarter. ‘When I showed my friends the sonnet by ChatGPT, they called it “soulless and barren.” Despite following all the rules for sonnets, the poem is cliche and predictable. But is the average sonnet by a human any better? Turing imagined asking a computer for poetry to see if it could think like a person. If we now expect computers to write not just poems but good poems, then we have set a much higher bar.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/02/13/ai-in-poetry/

Morgan Stanley thinks GPT-5 is already been created in secret.
https://twitter.com/davidtayar5/status/1625140481016340483

‘Nvidia predicts AI models one million times more powerful than ChatGPT within 10 years’
https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-predicts-ai-models-one-million-times-more-powerful-than-chatgpt-within-10-years/

The algorithms that underpin AI software have been getting more efficient.
https://openai.com/research/ai-and-efficiency
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/75dnjiD8kv2khe9eQ/measuring-hardware-overhang

Machine learning systems are getting smarter, but it’s also costing more money to create them. Once the cost rises beyond a certain level, progress will slow down.
https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-the-dollar-training-cost-of-machine-learning-systems

The failure of machine learning to significantly advance the field of chemistry suggests that much of the training data we’ve given it is flawed. A huge number of lab experiments will need to be redone more carefully to fix the mistakes.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/cleaning-basements-and-attics-organic-chemistry

The strongest military will someday be the one that totally automates itself to make the more efficient use of its resources, to design and field the best weapons, and to employ the best strategies and tactics. If the DoD still has a lumbering bureaucracy in 50 years that slows down and messes up every idea suggested by its military AIs, it will lead to disaster. Of course, turning over all military decisions except perhaps the very top ones could also lead to disaster. If we don’t do it, though, China, Russia, or some other country will. We’re locked in a race with no way out but to run faster and faster.
https://www.wired.com/story/eric-schmidt-is-building-the-perfect-ai-war-fighting-machine/

Here are some useful guidelines for making predictions about specific technologies.
https://gwern.net/forking-path

The proteins that our cells synthesize every second are probably optimal or close to optimal.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/making-proteins

‘The T2T consortium used new DNA sequencing technologies and analytical methods to generate and assemble the remaining 8-10% of the human genome sequence. However, the researchers assembled those fragments manually — a process that took this massive and highly skilled team several years to complete. Verkko can finish the same task in a couple of days.’
https://www.genome.gov/news/news-release/nih-software-assembles-complete-genome-sequences-on-demand

Chinese geneticists cloned three “Holstein Friesian” cows, which make 1.7 times more milk than the typical American cow.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/01/business/china-super-cow-cloning-intl-hnk-scn/index.html

‘The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a

U.S. public health authorities might have made costly, avoidable mistakes when dealing with COVID-19.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/anti-lockdown-great-barrington-declaration-vindicated-but-much-too-late

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Review: “Elysium”

Plot:

By the late 21st century, Earth had become an overpopulated,  diseased, polluted nightmare. The small number of super wealthy people escaped by building a large space station  in Earth orbit and moving there. The station, called “Elysium,” is a bucolic paradise where everyone lives in a mansion, is protected by robot police, and has a personal  rejuvenation pod that fixes any illness or injury when they lie down in  it.

The Elysium space station

The film’s events take place in 2154. Elysium’s only problem is illegal immigration: poor people with major health problems smuggle themselves onto Elysium, and in the few minutes they have from the time their beat-up space ship dumps them onto the grass to the time they get arrested by robot cops, they try to break into a mansion and use one of  the rejuvenation pods. Even though Elysium’s government seems to have a handle on the problem since they quickly arrest and deport them all, a government official played by Jodie Foster doesn’t think they’re doing enough, so she has a mercenary named “Kruger” do the dirty work of blowing up illegal immigrant space ships, killing dozens of people at once. After a verbal reprimand from Elysium’s president, Jodie Foster decides to do a military coup.

Matt Damon exists on the opposite end of the spectrum, living in a Los Angeles slum and working a horrible factory job where his boss yells at him all the time and he has no rights. One day, the machine he is in charge of breaks and he has to go inside to fix it.  The door accidentally closes behind him and it turns on, zapping him with a dose of radiation that will kill him within five days.

Because Earth hospitals are so poor, his only hope is to illegally immigrate to Elysium to use a rejuvenation pod. He doesn’t have any money, so he can only get a ticket by agreeing to help an underworld crime boss kidnap a rich guy at gunpoint so they can basically steal his ATM pin number by hacking his electronic brain implant (rich people have these). Before Matt Damon goes on this criminal mission, he lets the crime boss upgrade his body with a screw-in  exoskeleton kit that gives Damon superhuman strength and his own brain  implant.

The job goes bad–Damon’s criminal compatriots accidentally shoot the rich guy in the chest. Instead of trying to  render medical assistance, they connect a wire into the rich guy’s head and download his data into Damon’s brain implant. The rich guy dies, it turns out the data is encrypted so the criminals can’t  make sense of it, and Kruger shows up and kills them all except Damon, who escapes into the slum.

Matt Damon then becomes the world’s most wanted man because it turns out he has the rich guy’s access codes to the Elysium mainframe, which are super important because they let the user reboot the system and make all humans Elysium citizens. Jodie Foster also wants the codes for her coup.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s exactly what you’d  expect from Hollywood. I disliked Elysium for its clumsy, excessive moralizing, rushed pacing, and poorly thought out plot. Matt Damon, one of the greatest American actors of his generation, was disengaged in his role and almost looked like he didn’t want to be there. And while some futuristic elements in the movie will probably prove accurate by 2154, like humanoid  robots, overall it was totally unrealistic and nonsensical. For example, if rejuvenation pods are the catalyst for illegal immigration, why doesn’t Elysium just give some pods to Earth so the poor people won’t need to go to space and bother them? Why isn’t there a single  enterprising rich person on Elysium who sells some pods to Earth to make money for himself? If the people on Earth know that pods exist and know what they do, why can’t they pool their resources to copy the technology and make their own?

Also, before watching this anti-rich people movie, ask yourself how the world got that messed up to begin with. Did it become overpopulated thanks to rich people having huge numbers of kids? Diseased from rich people doing IV drugs and spreading AIDS? Polluted from rich people driving around all X billion cars there are in the world? Did rich people spray paint the buildings in Matt Damon’s slum and throw trash all over it? Absolutely not. If the world ends up as bad as it was in the film, it will be thanks to the bad decisions of billions of people, 99% of whom aren’t rich. In summary, in trying to make a commentary about the present, Neill Blomkamp (ironically, a multimillionaire) sacrifices accuracy depicting the future, and leaves us with a cool-looking but hollow and forgettable film.

Analysis:

Downtown L.A.

The world will be ruined. In the film, Los Angeles was a gigantic slum, and these scenes were shot in the real-life slums of Mexico City. Aside from advanced flying vehicles, military exoskeletons and robot police, Earth’s technological state appears inferior to what it is today. This is unrealistic. By 2154, cities like L.A. will probably be much nicer than today, and extreme poverty will probably be eliminated. The historical record shows that living conditions have been improving across the planet as a whole since the Enlightenment, and the trend is unlikely to change.

There will barely be any white people in Los Angeles. Aside from Matt Damon and a few colleagues at his factory job, no white people are shown living in L.A. This will prove an accurate depiction. Whites became minorities in L.A. and California in the 2010s, and nationally will be minorities around 2045. Their share of the L.A. county population is forecast to keep declining for the foreseeable future.

By 2154, nonwhites, including mixed race people, will comprise the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population. By that point in the future, medical immortality, decreased fertility among all races, and lessened need for immigration thanks to machines doing all the work will cause the racial makeup of the planet to stabilize (this is why I don’t think white people will ever “go extinct” as racist alarmists contend). 

People with mixes of traits from different races will be much more common in the future.

Well before 2154, the large population of mixed race people and widespread use of genetic engineering to give people stereotypically “white” traits (light-colored eyes, hair and skin) will seriously scramble our future concept of race. Genetic engineering will also be used to add unnatural traits to the genepool, like orange hair and purple eyes, resulting in significant numbers of humans not resembling any race. Some human beings will have also upgraded themselves and fused with their technology so radically that they won’t belong to any race, and will find the concept irrelevant to their self-identities.

The rich elites will still be overwhelmingly white. Elysium is 90% white, in contrast to the impoverished Earth. While disproportionate wealth and power will stay in the hands of white Americans for generations even after they become minorities, and Europe will also retain its outsized wealth for some time, a lot will happen over the next 141 years to level the playing field. At the very least, all East Asian countries will attain Western standards of living and income. More likely the whole world will have caught up, and in no small part thanks to machines becoming common everywhere and taking over work from humans. In making almost all the Elysium residents white, director Neill Bloomkamp again tried to make a social statement in terms we are familiar with today, but at the expense of realism.

A robot doctor treats Matt Damon after his irradiation.

Robots will be  everywhere. The film featured robots cops, parole officers, doctors, and  emergency workers that were just as capable as humans. This will come to pass well before 2154. However, I disagree with the movie’s depiction of these robots all being mechanical-looking, with all their gears and metal surfaces exposed, and I don’t think they’ll have  stereotypically machine-sounding voices. They will be more refined,  and some will be indistinguishable from humans (androids). Even today’s technology allows machine voices to sound almost the same as natural human voices, and before 2040, they will be indistinguishable.

Humans will still work in factories. Aside from that fact that it makes a futuristic product (robots), Matt Damon’s workplace is the same as a modern-day factory: Human workers in overalls show up every morning and work on the crowded shop floor, pushing buttons, pulling levers and pushing carts full of parts around. The absurdity of this is striking: If the factory is making intelligent, dexterous, humanoid robots, why don’t the managers replace the human workers with some of their own robots?

Labor-intensive factory jobs like those in the film will disappear in developed countries around the middle of this  century. Small numbers of highly trained human workers will remain in the factories to oversee machines, but they won’t do grunt work like Matt Damon.

By the end of  this century, no one on planet Earth will do labor-intensive factory work, and  most factories will be 100% automated. If you think this can’t happen because humans will always be needed to fix the machines, you are wrong. As I said in my review of Terminator, there’s no reason machines won’t eventually be able to build and fully repair each other.

Medical technology will be able to fix almost every problem. To fix any ailment, the rich people need only lie down in a rejuvenation pod and wait for its mechanical “arms” to wave  back and forth over them. In this way, even deadly conditions like cancer are fixed in a few seconds. Kruger’s horribly destroyed face is thus reconstructed  after a battle with Matt Damon. Curiously though, the machines can’t correct the cellular-level damage that causes old age, and there are some old-looking people walking around Elysium.

This level of technology will exist by 2154, though most health problems will still take much longer than one minute to fix. Massive trauma like having your skull crushed will be impossible to fix, as will reviving people who have been dead and rotting for more than a couple hours. However, diligent use of future medical technologies will be able to keep people young and reverse the aging process.

People will still die of leukemia. A subplot of the film involves the daughter of Matt Damon’s ex-girlfriend. The daughter is about to die from leukemia unless she gets advanced treatment in Elysium. Even though the ex-girlfriend is a nurse and presumably has access to superior medical services since she works in a hospital and has doctor friends, Earth is just so poor and backwards that they can’t cure the daughter. Even though Elysium is hoarding the rejuvenation pods, there’s little reason to assume conventional leukemia treatments wouldn’t be able to cure the disease with over 100 more years of research.

There will be a space station miles in length/diameter orbiting the Earth that can be plainly seen in the sky. Elysium is 37.3 miles wide and orbits 4,000 miles above the Earth. Even in the daytime, the station is visible from the planet’s surface, and its circular shape can be made out. According to other calculations, an object only one mile wide could also be clearly seen if its orbit were the same as the International Space Station, which is a mere 254 miles up.

Kruger cursing Elysium from his bedroom window

While the technology and money to build such space objects will be available by 2154, I’m unsure if the investment will actually be made. For one, while it would make sense to build some types of massive objects in space like solar panel arrays and sunshades (to ease global warming), they would be positioned so far from Earth that people on the ground wouldn’t be able to see them.

We’ll be assembling space ships in space by 2154, but I’m not sure if we’ll be doing it in low Earth orbit. The LaGrange Points probably make more sense. Even if we did build them in LEO, I don’t see why any of them would need to be a mile or more in length (for what purpose), nor would any “space factories” that built them need to be that large.

I don’t think the rich will ever move to a giant space station because they decide Earth sucks, but I do think there will be at least one “space hotel” in low Earth orbit by 2154 that caters to rich people. Even that far in the future, rocketing enough material into space to make a mile-wide space hotel will be too expensive, and there won’t be enough customer demand to fill all the rooms anyway.

And while I wouldn’t be surprised if there were one or more “space hotels” in low Earth orbit that catered to rich tourists by 2154, they wouldn’t have enough clientele to justify being a mile or more in diameter. However, I can see a workaround: Massive sheets of Mylar.

Imagine a luxury space hotel that’s similar in size to a cruise ship. It’s basically an elongated box measuring 1,000 ft x 200 ft x 150 ft, which is in the same size range as a real cruise ship. Even in low Earth orbit, it’s still too small to see from the ground. To fix that problem and hence boost the station’s publicity, huge “wings” or “sails” are attached to its sides. Made of Mylar, the sails are very lightweight and compact, meaning it’s affordable to rocket them into space. Once attached to the sides of the station, they’re unrolled and oriented to face Earth, making the station look much bigger. It would kind of resemble a butterfly, with an elongated, relatively compact “core” with very thin, flat accessory protrusions on either side.

The station’s wings/sails would have no functional purpose. While many people would protest plans to mar the sky with such an object, it might be built anyway. NIMBY’s don’t always win.

Robot exoskeletons will exist and will give wearers superhuman strength and endurance. Matt Damon has one of these “grafted” to his body, and it proves invaluable in the many fistfights he has with killer robots and mercenaries, and in the self-extrications he does  freeing himself from crashed vehicles and prying apart heavy metal doors that are trying to close on him. These will definitely exist by 2154, but they will not be crudely screwed into wearer’s bodies (during the  “operation” where this is done, they don’t even take Damon’s  clothes off, so he’s wearing a ridiculous bloody T-shirt UNDER his exoskeletion for the rest of the movie). As I concluded in my review of Edge of Tomorrow, the first combat exoskeletons could make their debut in the 2050s, 100 years before the film is set to happen. With an extra century of development time, they should be significantly better than what Matt Damon had.

Highly refined brain-computer interfaces will exist. In the film, the rich people have small devices sticking out of their heads resembling cochlear implants which allow them to interface their brains with computers. Files can thus be directly transferred between the two. Devices like these will be common by 2154, though they will probably be completely  internal, meaning they won’t have parts sticking out from the person’s skin.

Old guns will use new ammo. Matt Damon uses a normal pump-action shotgun to fire a tiny sticky bomb onto a rich guy’s flying car. After the car takes off, Damon remotely detonates it and the car crashes. During the ensuing battle with the rich guy’s two robot guards, Damon kills one of them using a 200-year-old AK-47 firing proximity-fused explosive  bullets that are linked to a control computer in a small gun sight.

Matt Damon with a heavily modified AK-47

The concept is clearly borrowed from the XM-25 and shows where the technology will be once refined. I really liked this as it shows high technology being seamlessly incorporated with low technology in a realistic way,  and it nods to the fact that the basic gun designs we have today are optimal or close to optimal, so further performance improvements will have to come from peripheral things like better ammo and sights.

The XM-25 smart grenade launcher

By 2154, gun sights will provide a composite picture that intelligently overlays images from several parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. They will have computers that can recognize objects and humans, and visually highlight them for the shooter’s benefit. The scope computers will also have ballistic calculators that move the target reticle based on factors like distance, inclination/declination, wind velocity, air pressure, humidity, and temperature of barrel.

The guns themselves might have self-aiming mechanisms like the Smartgun from Aliens had. A rifle would have a sort of metal “frame” around it, and at several different points, levers and metal cables would connect the rifle to the inside of the frame. By telling those levers and cables to tighten or slacken, the scope could quickly make fine adjustments to where the barrel was pointed, compensating for flaws in the shooter’s aim.

Routine use of highly advanced ammunition incorporating better propellants and features like timed airburst, tandem warheads, steering fins, and mini guided rockets will also make guns more accurate and deadlier against a greater range of targets. The guns of 2154 will also have computers built into them that will link with the user’s brain computer, allowing the person to instantly “know” where to point the weapon to hit the desired target without having to look through a sight.

Combining all of these technologies, the mechanical “guts” of a 200-year-old AK-47 could be used to make a future rifle with incredible capabilities. A better aiming system would double the maximum range at which it is lethal against humans, and make it possible to rapidly shoot the weapon from the chest with the same accuracy as today’s careful sniper shots from bolt-action rifles. The weapon could even shoot down low-flying aircraft, cripple vehicles from long distances with bullets through their vital components like tires and gas tanks, or even disable 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.

Small homing weapons will kill people. During Matt Damon’s botched kidnap attempt on the rich guy, Kruger arrives and kills one of Damon’s accomplices with hand-sized, frisbee-like flying objects that home in on targets that Kruger marks with a small laser. Once they reach their targets, they latch onto them and explode.

Smart weapons like these will be old technology by 2154, and in fact will probably exist within 20 years and take the form of tiny quadcopter drones. Since it might be too hard for them to latch onto targets, especially if the targets are moving or able to swat the drones down, they will probably be programmed to blow up once they get within a few feet from the target, or upon colliding with any part of it.

Facial recognition software will be in common use, even among robots. Throughout the film, surveillance cameras with facial recognition software are used to identify people in public places. Quadcopter drones with cameras also do this when looking for Matt Damon. These will also be old technologies by 2154.

Facial recognition software is already quite reliable, and is sometimes paired with fixed-position surveillance cameras, particularly in higher-tech authoritarian countries like China. However, the software’s accuracy gets worse as the angle at which the camera is placed gets steeper. In other words, a camera six feet off the ground, pointed straight at a person’s face will be able to recognize them easily, but the same camera installed 20 feet off the ground on top of a pole, looking sharply down at the same person so it mostly just sees their hair, will struggle to tell who they are.

For this reason, aerial drones are currently unsuited for autonomously tracking down specific humans. However, that will surely change once more biometric data on people becomes available. Future robots that walk around at ground level with us will recognize us easily thanks to having unobstructed views of our faces and bodies. In the future, you’ll never be a stranger to a  robot, or to a human with access to facial recognition software.

Super guns will exist. During the final battle on the Elysium station, Matt Damon finds an advanced automatic rifle with “CHEMRAIL” written on the side and he uses it to kill a bad guy. The gun makes electronic noises when “charging up” and firing, and the bullets are propelled with such force that they easily pass through a wall and literally tear his opponent apart. Canon Elysium literature states that the gun uses electromagnetic forces instead of exploding gunpowder to propel the bullets, and that the bullets leave the gun with 18,000 Joules of energy. That’s powerful, but no unfathomably so: A .50 caliber bullet (used in some sniper rifles and heavy machine guns) has 15,000 Joules.

Small arms with this level of power will be more common in the future because robots and augmented humans that are strong enough to carry and shoot them will exist. A human wearing an exoskeleton could fire such a weapon on full auto like Matt Damon did, but an average person could not. There was a  major error in the battle scene since Matt Damon had the CHEMRAIL gun pressed against his shoulder and was holding the handle with his bare hand. His exoskeleton didn’t bear the recoil of the weapon at all. So in real life, had he fired it, the gun’s recoil would have broken his shoulder and wrist. However, had the weapon been directly braced against his exoskeleton, the force would have been transmitted directly into it, and not his body.

There will still be text-based computer interfaces. Throughout the film, characters eschew GUI’s and instead use simple, text-based computer interfaces that resemble MS-DOS. For certain applications, these will still be used in 2154 since they’re optimal. However, reading characters off screens will be unnecessary in most cases since brain implants will let humans instantly “feel” and “know” what the computer wants to tell them, and vice versa. Intelligent machines themselves will be able to wirelessly interface with technology even more directly and easily.

Kruger’s smart watch displaying a text message

Text-on-screens will, along with devices that operate on purely mechanical principles, probably exist as backups to more sophisticated technology. For example, imagine a wristwatch that can wirelessly transmit the time to your brain implant so you can know with a single thought what time it is. The wristwatch would still have a face with a small LED screen, which you could look at to see what time it was in case the wireless chip in the watch broke.

Shoulder-launched missiles launched from Earth will be able to fly thousands of miles into  space. There’s a scene early in the film where a group of illegal immigrants gets into small space ships and flies from L.A. to Elysium. Inexplicably, Elysium lacks the weapons to blow up the ships or at least disable them before reaching the station, so the only way to stop them is to have Kruger shoot them down with surface-to-air missiles. Using a shoulder launcher, he fires several missiles that have enough power to exit the Earth’s atmosphere, overtake the space ships and destroy them. Since the station orbits about 4,000 miles above Earth, the ships were also thousands of miles up when they were destroyed.

No chemical fuel can contain enough energy to propel a small missile that far and fast. The only way such a thing MIGHT be possible is if the missiles had mini nuclear fusion engines, which may or may not be feasible, even with the highest possible level of technology. By 2154, I doubt such weapons will exist.

Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. It takes an enormous amount of energy to defeat gravity and to put something into space. Case in point: A 300 foot tall rocket is needed just to put something the size of a large van into orbit. In the film, the van-sized object doesn’t need the huge rocket anymore–four small  engines and a small fuel tank can do it.

A small space ship from the film. Most of its interior is hollow, leaving little room for fuel.

I think this is probably impossible. The closest we might get is passenger jet-sized craft flying into space with four or five people inside. For a more detailed discussion, see my Starship Troopers review.

Today’s guns will still be in use. At several points in the film, people are shown carrying contemporary guns like AK-47’s and M-16’s. These are used in gun battles with cutting-edge soldier robots and expert mercenaries. By 2154, few of the firearms existing today will still be in use since they will have all long worn-out and been shredded for scrap metal. Guns, like anything else, gradually wear out with use and at some point become dangerous to fire and not worth fixing.

However, the basic DESIGNS for guns are timeless. From a mechanical engineering standpoint, guns like the AK-47 and M-16 are optimized for what they do, and there’s no way to significantly improve upon them. So in 2154, newly manufactured AK and M-16 descendants could still represent the cutting edge of small arms technology.

Certainly they’ll still be effective at killing humans since our skin isn’t evolving to become bulletproof, and even armored machines could still be killed with enlarged versions of those guns designed to fire stronger bullets. However, while the internal mechanics will be conserved, future guns will look at least a little different on the outside. 

Personal energy shields that can stop bullets will exist. Kruger has a pocket-sized device that, when activated, creates a semi-transparent, circular shield in front of him. It only lasts a few seconds, but it can block a hail of bullets, even from the super-powerful CHEMRAIL gun.

This is scientifically implausible. There’s no intangible force that could be harnessed to make moving objects with large amounts of kinetic energy instantly stop in midair, as if they’d hit a solid object.

Links:

  1. By 2045, most Americans won’t be white.
    https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/
  2. An object needs to be about 1 mile in diameter to be clearly seen from low Earth orbit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_structures_visible_from_space
  3. Calculations about how big an Elysium-sized object would look from Earth based on how far it was from Earth.
    https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/08/16/elysium/
  4. The “Tyranny of the Rocket Equation” means its impossible for helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space to fly up into orbit. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html