The U.S. and Israel have assembled a massive air and naval strike force in the Middle East and have attacked Iran. The fighting is ongoing as of this writing.
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-attack-02-28-26-hnk-intl
https://www.twz.com/news-features/final-pieces-moving-into-place-for-potential-attack-on-iran
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/in-a-first-u-s-deploys-combat-jets-to-israel-for-potential-wartime-mission-in-iran-c739d870
Here’s incredible footage of an intercepted Iranian missile crashing to the ground in Qatar.
https://youtu.be/VDk5cPwTPKY?si=M5yNX_1UMz4BsMeW
‘Iran strikes threaten to deplete US weapons supplies — and put American troops at risk’
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/25/iran-weapons-trump-troops-defense-00797801
Colombia has a large population of recently discharged soldiers who have become mercenaries in Ukraine and other conflict zones because they can’t find jobs at home.
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2026/02/04/why-so-many-colombians-fight-in-foreign-wars
‘Russia killed opposition leader Alexei Navalny using dart frog toxin, UK says’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk4lz4e3eo
A Norwegian scientist built one of the hypothesized microwave weapons responsible for “Havana syndrome,” fired it at his head, and now has the syndrome. The U.S. government also secretly bought a similar microwave weapon on the black market from an undisclosed country and found Russian components inside of it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/14/havana-syndrome-cia-norway-experiment/
The expiration of the New START treaty between Russia and America will free the U.S. to quickly beef up its nuclear arsenal.
https://www.twz.com/air/usaf-ready-to-make-all-b-52s-nuclear-capable-load-icbms-with-multiple-warheads-if-directed
One reason the U.S. has so many nuclear weapons is it must be prepared for a war where Russia and China are both against us, and our allies offer little help. Now that China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, the U.S. will need to do the same. The 40-year trend of nuclear disarmament is over.
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/02/03/america-risks-a-nuclear-arms-race-with-china
Russia is using an intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine that it illegally developed 10 years ago. During his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because U.S. intelligence had discovered Russia had the treaty-banned missile. It can carry conventional or nuclear warheads.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-images-indicate-russia-used-missile-heart-nuclear-pact-collapse-2026-02-26/
Early Soviet warships were low-tech and full of design flaws.
https://youtu.be/1CWLrpYGKVE?si=v_MxRhIH1iF8J_kc
A Chinese video generator has made waves after it was used to make a real-looking CGI clip of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting in a movie. It’s yet another milestone on the road to personalized entertainment content.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/mpa-cease-and-desist-bytedance-seedance-2-0-1236510957/
Here’s an incredible Seedance 2 CGI video of Neo and Agent Smith fighting.
https://youtu.be/c00ZNn9v01o?si=UIBMePPDAzSeuplM
Elon Musk is in legal trouble in France for allowing Grok to undress images of people (mostly women).
https://apnews.com/article/france-x-investigation-seach-elon-musk-1116be84d84201011219086ecfd4e0bc
‘It is impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from METR’s Long Tasks benchmark — in particular once one realizes that its numerous flaws are probably compounding in unpredictable ways.’
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/against-the-metr-graph-coding-capabilities-software-jobs-task-ai
A few X posts about AI:
McKinsey agrees with me that AI will make capitalism more efficient and cutthroat than ever.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-automation-curve-in-agentic-commerce
The Atlas robot can now do somersaults. I like that they showed some of the outtakes.
https://youtu.be/UNorxwlZlFk?si=MFEt7uM72a4iU1Ik
“An LLM-controlled robot dog saw us press its shutdown button, and the LLM rewrote the robot’s code so it could stay on.”
https://palisaderesearch.org/blog/shutdown-resistance-on-robots
The 2026 Spring Festival Gala by China Media Group featured an incredible, choreographed robot dance performance.
https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo?si=37YQ1QT8YhE5_B_g
Rodney Brooks issues his yearly technology predictions. He says LLMs will not lead to AGI, and that the LLM era of what I call “Fake AI” will last at least 10 more years. Also, humanoid robots have also been oversold the the media and are still too dangerous and limited for use in the real world.
https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2026-january-01/
‘Amazon shelves Blue Jay warehouse robot’
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/amazon-shelves-blue-jay-warehouse-robot
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey just laid off 40% of his staff at his new tech company, “Block,” because AI made them redundant.
https://apnews.com/article/block-dorsey-layoffs-ai-jobs-18e00a0b278977b0a87893f55e3db7bb
The “AI 2027” report was published last April and predicted AGI would be created by 2028. Now that a whole nine months have passed, the authors have been able to compare actual tech developments with what they predicted, and unsurprisingly, things are moving slower than they hoped, so they have bumped their date for the rise of AGI to “mid-2028 to mid-2030.” I think it’s wise to accept the upper bound.
I wonder if, after another nine months of slower-than-hoped tech progress, they will push back their big prediction again. Ultimately, and in spite of its apparently rigorous methodology, the “AI 2027” report might turn out to have been useless.
https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/grading-ai-2027s-2025-predictions
A wonderful essay that contains ideas I’ve written about on this blog: “Post-AGI Economics As If Nothing Ever Happens”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fL7g3fuMQLssbHd6Y/post-agi-economics-as-if-nothing-ever-happens
This essay, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, predicted dire economic impacts from AI by 2028, and actually caused a measurable drop in global stock markets. It’s funny because all of the essay’s core ideas are predictions I made years ago, and shared here. If only more people listened to me!
https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
Here’s are two counterpoints to the essay:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/is-there-an-aggregate-demand-problem-in-an-agi-world.html
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/02/25/a-viral-research-note-on-ai-gets-its-economics-wrong
Sam Altman made a controversial yet entirely factual statement that downplayed the energy requirements of data centers by pointing out the vast energy required to support one human into adulthood. This is a very good point. As Noam Chomsky famously observed and other scientists expanded upon, the human brain comes hardwired with many algorithms for intelligent thinking that only came into existence over tens of millennia of evolution. In fact, it probably actually the product of millions of years of evolution that began with our pre-human ancestors first diverging from other mammals.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/931074852795152
Elon Musk is making huge, risky bets on household robots, autonomous taxis, near-term sharp improvement in AI, and data centers in space. He’s having to marshal all of his already vast resources to give it a shot.
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/02/04/elon-musk-is-betting-his-business-empire-on-ai
Anthropic is refusing the Department of War’s demand to let it use its AI systems for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. I like how the head of the company acknowledges that the U.S. will SOMEDAY need a fully autonomous army to defend itself. As in every other realm of endeavor (business, art, whatever), AGI and robots will render humans obsolete, and any organization that wants to stay competitive will need to switch to machines. His important caveat is that the machines aren’t smart enough to do it yet, and so can’t be trusted.
‘Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.’
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
‘Pennsylvania State Police were stymied in their investigation into the violent rape of a woman in 2016 on a remote cul-de-sac outside Milton, a small community in the center of the state. With no clear leads, police obtained a warrant directing Google to disclose accounts that searched for the victim’s name or address over the week when she was attacked.’
https://apnews.com/article/google-reverse-keyword-search-privacy-c5a0bc6f3790213f92e78aae720d2379
‘Women were significantly more likely to focus on areas where danger could lurk, including unlit areas, potential hiding spots and places where they might be trapped, often off to the side of their path.’
https://www.deseret.com/2024/2/7/24065126/byu-study-gender-difference-night-time-walking-jogging-vigilance/
‘There is an unfortunate bias against attractive people. It stems from the belief that their looks allow them to glide through life and provides them with opportunities that average-looking people don’t have. The doctors I knew were always curious when meeting a good-looking sales rep: Is there any substance behind the pretty face?’
https://medicalsalestraining.com/the-risk-and-myth-of-the-good-looking-sales-rep-in-medical-sales/
More evidence that marijuana inflames some kinds of latent mental illnesses.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/21/nx-s1-5719338/cannabis-marijuana-weed-teens-psychosis-jama
A small advance towards being able to freeze and thaw out human brains without destroying them has been made.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.28.702375v1