May 2025 – Militant Futurist

‘Mr Trump paused all military deliveries to Ukraine after a row with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. But he has since grown frustrated with Vladimir Putin’s refusal to commit to a ceasefire and has withdrawn from formal peace negotiations.’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/05/04/russia-ukraine-zelensky-putin-war-latest-news529/

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-drones-missiles-b34e72f0856b0f19219076463cce0414

Trump’s warmth towards Putin has yielded no significant concessions from the latter. Trump might be starting to understand why the Ukraine War defies easy resolution.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trump-putin.html

A new front in asymmetric warfare: Russian secret agents burned down a large shopping mall in Poland last year.
https://apnews.com/article/poland-russia-420187f5755036f6f61c65122c11348f

Russia’s vast stockpile of Cold War-era self-propelled artillery has either been destroyed or is engaged in Ukraine. The artillery pieces that remain at bases deep inside of Russia are probably so worn-out that they’re not worth fixing up for field use.
https://youtu.be/iUbrWvCs3M8?si=p-gMpo9_2_61gjPj

If the Ukraine War ended today, with Ukraine effectively ceding its territory that is under Russian control, many Russians would consider it a defeat for their side.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/world/europe/russian-troops-peace-putin.html

Large parts of the Ukraine frontline are ensnared in leftover fiber optic cables left behind by drones from both sides.
https://youtube.com/shorts/wcMZWRJL_m4?si=FwioNXzTgxF1H1Wx

An Israeli airstrike killed the head of Hamas, Mohammed Sinwar. He took over the organization after its former head and his older brother, Yahya Sinwar, died at Israeli hands last October. The final minutes of Yahya’s life famously included a confrontation with an Israeli reconnaissance drone that flew into his wrecked house.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/g-s1-69314/mohammed-sinwar-killed-hamas-gaza-netanyahu-israel

After billions of R&D dollars spent and only 80 vehicles manufactured, the U.S. Army has cancelled its M10 Booker light tank.
https://www.forcesnews.com/news/light-tank-isnt-why-us-armys-m10-booker-ended-being-shelved

America’s warships are too expensive because the Navy keeps demanding they be able to do too many things.
https://www.rebuilding.tech/posts/reforming-naval-shipbuilding

A new North Korean warship tipped on its side and nearly sank during a botched launching ceremony. Kim Jong-un was present and ordered several officials arrested for the mistake.
https://www.twz.com/air/aftermath-of-disastrous-north-korean-frigate-launch-seen-in-satellite-image

‘Kurdish PKK ends 40-year Turkey insurgency, bringing hope of regional stability’
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kurdish-pkk-dissolves-after-decades-struggle-with-turkey-news-agency-close-2025-05-12/

India and Pakistan traded barbs this month in a series of cross-border skirmishes, though neither side proved willing to escalate.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/14/world/asia/india-pakistan-attack-damage-satellite-images.html

One of Pakistan’s Chinese-made fighter planes probably shot down one or two Indian fighters on Wednesday. The Chinese plane, the “J-10”, is similar to an American F-16.
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/global-militaries-study-india-pakistan-fighter-jet-battle-2025-05-08/

Two Chinese-made air-to-air missiles were recovered on the ground in India, largely intact.
https://www.twz.com/air/parts-of-a-pakistani-pl-15e-air-to-air-missile-came-down-relatively-intact-in-india-after-air-battle

Over 100 fighter planes were in the air at once, and the confrontation lasted over an hour.
https://youtu.be/aHY8t_SABC8?si=WCO33H-bAKmmkPok

Sudanese government forces probably used poison gas against rebels during the ongoing civil war.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwynkdyk14zo

Killer drone warfare has come to Haiti.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/haiti-fact-of-the-day-the-future-comes-to-haiti-first.html

‘Civil War Brought to Life: Haunting Photos Reawakened After 160 Years’
https://youtu.be/XksHYzSwI-o?si=0RU3Q-GZFhdRzTSo

‘The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/business/first-driverless-semis-started-regular-routes

For the first time in the 22-year history of the app, Google’s searches have declined in number. The reason? Chatbots.
https://www.platformer.news/safari-search-decline-apple-google/

Google is embedding its own chatbot into its search function.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw77qwd117o

Google just released an incredible video generation app called “Veo 3.” The CGI footage is almost perfectly lifelike.
https://youtu.be/McFChYae6p8?si=E9SIEfVbKumiyCoZ

Among other things, Veo 3 can make fake news broadcasts that look authentic.
https://youtu.be/Qn4SP5Z2wOY?si=SCWZ_do6sKObt70M

I’m reminded of this scene from the awesome 2011 game Deus Ex – Human Revolution, where the hero discovers that the world’s #1 news anchor, “Eliza,” is actually an AI, all her broadcasts have been hyper-realistic CGI footage, and she has been biasing the news to influence public opinion to further the agendas of sinister people. Things aren’t turning out EXACTLY like this, but there are creepy similarities now thanks to narrow AI chatbots on social media and elsewhere and to advanced CGI video generators becoming available to everyone. The game is set in 2027.
https://youtu.be/dUtpE8avcMg?si=Ojvu_WG0y–nk02X

‘Two years ago, prompt engineering was one of the buzziest jobs in tech, fetching salaries of up to $200,000 on the promise of becoming any company’s “AI Whisperer.”

Now, the role is basically obsolete thanks to the breakneck speed of AI development and companies’ own maturity in terms of understanding how to use the technology.

The concept of prompt engineers was to have an expert crafting the exact right inputs to generate the best responses out of large language models. But today, AI models are much better at intuiting user intent and they can ask follow-up questions when they’re unclear on it. ‘
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hottest-ai-job-of-2023-is-already-obsolete-1961b054

ChatGPT’s new o3 model has an extraordinary ability to correctly guess a location based on a photograph of it. It’s better at this than the best humans (yes, this has been a competitive game among nerds for several years).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius

LLMs can diagnose health problems better than human doctors.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10849

Based on improvements in AI performance, it is conservative to predict they will be able to finish high-level projects better than all but the very best humans within 10 years.
https://www.tobyord.com/writing/half-life

In this remarkable response, Claude 4 explains why its mental architecture leads it to making some kinds of mistakes that a human never would.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/why-llms-make-certain-mistakes.html

‘So what would it be like to interact with a “bigger brain”? Inside, that brain might effectively use many more words and concepts than we know. But presumably it could generate at least a rough (“explain-like-I’m-5”) approximation that we’d be able to understand. There might well be all sorts of abstractions and “higher-order constructs” that we are basically blind to. And, yes, one is reminded of something like a dog listening to a human conversation about philosophy—and catching only the occasional “sit” or “fetch” word.’
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/05/what-if-we-had-bigger-brains-imagining-minds-beyond-ours/

Tesla’s Optimus robot can now dance better than most humans.
https://youtu.be/T-NCFSEHTnM?si=HkOGK1YHonkatuyA

A remarkable, four-legged robot that can play badminton against humans has been built.
https://youtu.be/zYuxOVQXVt8?si=843-MlLKblPPZJOA

The first American Pope was sworn in. He chose the moniker “Leo XIV” to draw a parallel with Pope Leo XIII, who ruled from 1878 to 1903 and is known for preaching against the excesses of capitalism during a time of rapid industrialization. The new Pope expressed the same concern about AI today undermining the dignity and financial stability of humans.
https://apnews.com/article/pope-leo-vision-papacy-artificial-intelligence-36d29e37a11620b594b9b7c0574cc358

Most of the people who bought the Apple Vision Pro VR glasses a year ago don’t use them anymore. The technology still isn’t ready for mass adoption.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/they-paid-3-500-for-apples-vision-pro-a-year-later-it-still-hurts-496de341

A recent blackout in Spain and Portugal shows the perils of overreliance on solar power.
https://reason.com/2025/05/13/spains-grid-collapsed-in-5-seconds-the-u-s-could-be-next/

The “Thatcher Effect” shows how strongly hardwired the human brain is to recognizing faces and noticing their smallest details, and how rigidly structured that ability is.
https://youtu.be/NnDBHhRLyBo?si=63aUn6BvFLIUpBFL

There’s a negative correlation between IQ score and violent behavior.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30058504/

The exoplanet that, last month, was claimed to have the strongest evidence of extraterrestrial life of all is actually probably barren.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/30/life-signs-planet-k2-18b-exoplanet/83879481007/

A photo of an alleged UFO hovering over the ground was dramatically presented to Congress during a hearing yesterday. In under 24 hours, an internet sleuth debunked it–it’s just a photo of two circular farms in eastern Colorado.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14672283/shocking-truth-ufo-image-released-pentagon-whistleblower.html

‘A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor, typically at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), putting them in the bathyal or abyssal zones.^[1] On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades.’
If we created artificial whale falls by dumping weighed down organic waste into the deep ocean, we’d be kind of like advanced aliens seeing barren planets with life just to see what arises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall

‘New RSV vaccine, treatment linked to dramatic fall in baby hospitalizations’
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/05/baby-hospitalizations-from-rsv-fell-up-to-71-with-new-vaccine-treatment/

‘A promising genetic treatment tailor-made for a baby born with a rare disorder’
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/15/nx-s1-5389620/gene-editing-treatment-crispr-inherited

New drugs have sharply raised survival rates for people with skin cancer.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2407417

Bird flu continues to mutate and to spread among mammals. The jump to humans gets more likely every day.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq0900

‘In a cohort study of French children, those born later in the year within the same grade were more likely to start speech therapy.’
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2834366

‘In basketball, baseball and ice hockey, players born in the first quarter of their selection year — the cutoff for which age-group teams are picked, which is normally the school year — are overrepresented both in youth and professional sports. In soccer, players born in the first quarter of their selection year are overrepresented throughout major leagues in Europe and South America.

This phenomenon, called the relative age effect, impacts almost every sport. It has been demonstrated in both men’s and women’s sports, although the effect seems to be less pronounced in women’s sports.’
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-affect-who-goes-pro-and-who-becomes-a-star/

I recently read a bummer AI-doom essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky (not that this narrows it down) titled “The Sun is Big, But Superintelligences Will Not Spare Earth a Little Sunlight.” In it, he argues that humans will someday be of so little use to AGIs that they will probably exterminate us to free up resources that they could put to better us doing machine things. They’ll go so far as to build a Dyson sphere around the Sun, diverting all its energy toward their own computational needs and plunging Earth into freezing darkness.

Yudkowsky must have just finished a really funny movie that left him in good spirits because he suggested there could be alternative to our doom: Humanity might be spared–just barely–an with each person rationed exactly enough energy to remain alive.

He writes:

“A human being runs on 100 watts. Without even compressing humanity at all, 800GW, a fraction of the sunlight falling on Earth alone, would suffice to go on operating our living flesh, if Something wanted to do that to us.”

His math checks out: Humans use chemical energy from food they consume, but it’s possible to convert that into equivalent units of electricity. An adult human continuously consumes the same amount of energy as an appliance that draws 100 watts of electricity (think of an old, incandescent 100 watt light bulb or of a modern phone charger that is actively charging up a smartphone). That translates into 2,400 watt-hours (2.4 kWh) of electricity consumption per day. Multiplying those figures by eight billion humans yields a species-wide continuous consumption of 800 GW of electricity and a daily consumption of 19.2 TWh of electricity.

To grasp how much that is, consider the following:

In 2021, China’s electric grid produced about 23.4 TWh per day.
Earth continuously receives 173,000,000 GW of solar power.

Mindful of these figures, Yudkowsky’s original calculation suggests it would be much more efficient to fully enclose the Sun in a Dyson sphere, plunging Earth into darkness, and to transmit a fraction of the electricity that would have otherwise reached Earth to the surface where it could essentially “feed” a population of eight billion humans. The other 99.9995% (yes, I actually calculated it) of the sunlight blocked from hitting Earth would be used for intelligent machine stuff, like doing Big Bang computer simulations or building billions of space ships to fight aliens.

This vision is stark, but strangely logical. AGIs get all the energy they want, but without the downsides of destroying the human race, and we get an existence that is not quite as sucky as you’d imagine (but I’ll get to that later). In a previous essay of mine, “Why the Machines Might Not Exterminate Us,” I argued that AGIs could have multiple reasons not to destroy our species even after vastly surpassing us. These include:

It’s unethical.
The unique aspects of human cognition could be valuable to them.
Aliens or God might punish them for killing us.
Human consciousness might be unique enough to be worth preserving.
The systemic value of diversity and “slack.”

The fifth point—preserving diversity to maintain antifragility—deserves special attention. For a brilliant exploration of this idea, I highly recommend Scott Alexander’s “Studies on Slack.”

AGIs might recognize that keeping biologically-based minds around—despite their inefficiency—adds long-term resilience. A system optimized to the hilt is often brittle, and biological intelligences could serve as backups, immune to EMPs or computer viruses, and offering other advantages we can’t even imagine. If unforeseen challenges arise—solar flares, algorithmic failures, black swans—humans might offer a last-resort solution.

But here’s the weird part Yudkowsky makes salient: AGIs could preserve humanity and still plunge Earth into darkness.

Without sunlight, Earth’s surface would freeze, photosynthesis would cease, and most life would die. But with enough time and preparation, humanity could survive this and even thrive. Imagine the world rebuilt into a network of insulated, artificially lit megastructures—somewhere between Las Vegas hotels and arcologies. Food could be grown in domed farms or bioreactors. Environments for animals could be simulated indoors, perhaps so large that they preserve entire ecosystem. And even without sunlight and solar power, several energy sources would remain, including geothermal, nuclear, and fossil fuels (note that the downsides of the latter would cease to exist since a lack of sunlight would eliminate the greenhouse effect, and moving the population into sealed habitats would protect us from the noxious gas byproducts of fossil fuel combustion).

A shopping mall partly converted into an apartment complex is a simple model for how humans could live in sealed habitats.

As Yudkowsky’s calculations make clear, without any kind of magic or technological breakthroughs, we could produce enough energy to support the whole human race, plus many animal species. And if our AGI overlords beamed down just 0.1% of the “solar endowment” that their Dyson structure intercepted before it would have hit Earth, each person’s energy allotment would be off the charts.

There is no physics barrier to any of this: the only barriers would be building the infrastructure and bearing the costs. However, for AGIs that are so advanced they have the ability to encase the Sun in a Dyson structure, covering the Earth’s surface in habitats will be chump change.

And now the idea gets stranger—and more beautiful.

If AGIs accept that diversity adds value through systemic slack, they may actively promote cultural, biological, and cognitive variety well beyond what it currently us. There’s nothing special about the number or kinds of races, languages, or ways of thinking humanity will possess at the moment the Sun is blotted out and everyone has to move into arcologies–AGIs could conclude that more diversity is optimal for their purposes. With Earth’s surface enclosed in isolated habitats separated from each other by inhospitable terrain, AGIs could reshape the planet into a patchwork of experiments in civilization. Imagine:

Cities practicing real communism or reinvented feudalism.
Enclaves where Indigenous American cultures flourish free of colonial legacy.
New languages designed to expand cognition.
Genetically modified humans and post-humans with radically different sensory systems or social structures.
Entirely new intelligent species, biologically or synthetically evolved.

Each habitat could be a testbed for ideas and minds that serve as creative engines—or fail safely. With full-immersion virtual reality, even stranger societies could emerge.

And if this model works on Earth, why not replicate it elsewhere? Mars, Europa, Titan—each seeded with experimental intelligences, some human-descended, some not. Perhaps in A.D. 3284, the hive-minded, click-speaking hobgoblins of Europa will be the ones who save the solar system from Dyson instability.

Final Thoughts

Yudkowsky’s argument is sobering: AGIs may not leave us sunlight. But if they recognize the systemic value of preserving biological minds—not just for sentiment, but for antifragile robustness—they might choose not just to preserve us, but to cultivate us, turning Earth into a living museum, incubator, and think tank.

In this vision, humanity doesn’t just survive in the shadows—we thrive in an AI-guided garden of endless diversity.

Month: May 2025

Interesting articles, May 2025

AGIs Blacked Out the Sun and All I Got Was This Heated Habitat

Final Thoughts