Over the last three weeks, arsonists ignited calamitous wildfires in California and Greece, and the U.S. government granted permission for a company called “Defense Distributed” to sell electronic blueprints over the internet that people can use to make 3D-printed, untraceable guns. While each of those developments is disconcerting on its own, together they point to something even more disturbing on the horizon–the advent of 3D-printed, untraceable, aerial attack drones.
If it can carry a cardboard box, it can carry a bomb of equal weight.
This future weapon concept is simple (and for that reason, inevitable): Imagine a quadrotor Amazon package-carrying drone, but made entirely from 3D-printed components and generic circuit boards, assembled in a garage by following YouTube tutorial videos, carrying a small weapons payload like an incendiary bomb or nail bomb instead of an Amazon cardboard box, and loaded with better sensors and AI than we have today, allowing it to follow complex instructions and execute multi-step attack missions. Such a weapon could be made today with difficulty and at high cost, but could be made in about ten years easily and cheaply enough to put it within reach of terrorists and lone criminals. Thanks to better AI and sensors, the drones of the near future would be able to fly below radar, to take circuitous attack routes that avoided places were humans would see or hear them, and to drop their firebombs at night. One person with a nondescript van could drive around a large area (like all of northern California, or the eastern half of Greece), launch his drone every night on a carefully designed “bombing run,” recover it after a few hours, and then drive to a new location. Targets could be easily identified by looking at publicly available wildfire risk maps.
And if the drone failed to return, it would be of little consequence to the criminal who launched it because he could cheaply make a replacement, and because the lost drone would lack any identifying features that the police could use to trace its origins. The police would only find that the drone was based on a freely available internet file that millions of people had downloaded. Additionally, the criminal could program his drone to “commit suicide” during a mission if capture were imminent, maybe by flying into a nearby body of water or activating a simple self-destruct device. Any data in its computer chips would be destroyed, leaving nothing for computer forensicists.
These weaponized aerial drones could also drop small explosives instead of incendiaries, which they’d use to damage structures, vehicles or infrastructure, or to kill people at crowded events. Less dramatically, the drones could be used for vandalism and mischief, like dropping a brick onto the windshield of the neighborhood grouch’s car late at night. The military applications are obvious.
The barriers to making attack drones will only lower as time passes. Ten years from now, a malevolent person would still need to expend significant time and effort on such a project. Eventually, it might be as simple as vocalizing to your robot butler that you want him to build a drone. “Go use my Bitcoins to anonymously order whatever parts you need and then put the parts together.” It’s frightening to think about what might happen when anyone can commit destructive crimes remotely, and the financial and psychological costs of bad behavior get trivially low.
Frankly, I don’t see how homemade attack drones like these could be effectively banned. The relevant tech trends conspire to make the drones an inevitable development, and it won’t be long before they have super-empowered people who have terroristic or criminal intent. We’ll probably know when this dangerous new era has arrived when a drone is used in an attempted or successful assassination of an important person, like a world leader or member of the “1%.”
The only effective defense against small, weaponized drones would be a greatly expanded government surveillance apparatus (perhaps including its own fleet of drones for putting out wildfires or attacking bad guy drones), which is arguably a worse fate. Regardless, the threat will only be mitigated by more machines and more technology, which is in line with the broader trend for humans to become increasingly dependent upon technology for survival. At some point in the distant future, non-augmented humans like us will be outnumbered and will be the weak link in the chain.
According to virtual wind tunnel simulations, the fighter craft from Star Wars have poor aerodynamics. Yes, it doesn’t matter when they’re flying through the vacuum of space, but what about all the times they’ve been shown flying in a planet’s atmosphere? https://youtu.be/PilQTjw1Qis
I think nuclear missiles will be common space weapons. Newton’s Third Law would also make it hard to shoot projectile weapons since it would nudge your ship in the opposite direction. There would also probably be “effective speed limits” on how fast the space ship would travel, since burning up 51% of your fuel to charge headlong at the enemy will mean certain death for you if you are pointed towards the depths of space. https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-realistic-space-battleship-look-like
Facebook has abandoned its project to use high-endurance flying drones to broadcast internet to poor parts of the world. However, Google’s counterpart, which uses high-altitude balloons, is still going strong. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44624702
Just think: In only about five years, there will be A.I.s that can debate politics with humans on Facebook, never tiring, never taking offense, and replying instantly to anything you write. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132
The criminal who just committed a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper was hard to fingerprint at the police station and he refused to give his name, so the police took a photo of him and quickly identified him by uploading it to the Maryland Image Repository System (or MIRS), “which includes over ten million photos drawn from known offenders and the state’s entire driver’s license database.” https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/29/17518364/facial-recognition-police-identify-capital-gazette-shooter
If you want an idea of how radically we could improve humans through genetic engineering, read articles like this and then consider that IQ is at least 50% genetic. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44668452
Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, but as a child scored a mere 124 on an IQ test (smarter than average, but not genius-level). It’s possible that the disappointing score simply owed to the fact that there was too low a ceiling to the difficulty of the math questions. https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html
Gerontologists in Italy have found that the mortality rate hits 50% once a person turns 105, and stays at that level indefinitely, suggesting that the ultimate limit on human lifespan is unknown. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3
In the distant future, there will be a single database with the genomes of quadrillions of different organisms, including DNA from all humans. If paired with something like a cloning lab, it could create any organism in the database from scratch. It reminds me of a combination of the “Universal Constructor” from the Deus Ex video game and the use of organic “blanks” in The 6th Day movie to rapidly make human clones. https://qz.com/1315829/the-dna-of-all-the-animals-on-earth-will-be-recorded-in-an-enormous-new-genetics-project/
Old photos that have turned black with age can be restored using an x-ray scanner. Someday, we’ll be able to use more advanced techniques to restore/upgrade old film footage and photos to perfect clarity. They’ll do highly accurate and natural-looking colorizations of black and white photos. https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/new-technique-brings-secrets-out-of-old-daguerreotypes/
“If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.” This same thought occurred to me a few years ago. Communists shouldn’t get too excited though, since the same AI-powered mass surveillance system would also keenly understand the abilities of each human and could track whether they put in an honest day’s work or not, which would in turn affect the AI’s decisions about how “fair shares” of the day’s wealth should be allocated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/05/03/end-of-capitalism/
If you’re only counting animals that might have consciousness and can probably feel pain, daily births are in the billions per day. Since those species’ populations are mostly steady-state (neither growing nor declining overall), then the same number of deaths must happen each day. Many of those deaths are agonizing because they owe to untreated injuries, disease, or slaughter at the hands of unskilled humans. There’s a fringe coalition of transhumanists, altruists, and animal rights advocates who think it is humanity’s ultimate mission to use technology to end this cycle of suffering, possibly by capturing all wild animals and putting them in something like The Matrix. All humans would also go vegetarian or switch to lab-grown meats. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44412495
‘The Summit’s theoretical peak speed is 200 petaflops, or 200,000 teraflops. To put that in human terms, approximately 6.3 billion people would all have to make a calculation at the same time, every second, for an entire year, to match what Summit can do in just one second. ‘ That is probably not true. We don’t know how much computation the human brain does, but the best guesses converge on the “tens of petaflops” realm, plus or minus one order of magnitude. So what this milestone really means is that, for $400-600 million, we can now build a supercomputer with the same raw processing power as 1-10 human brains. That sounds pretty snicker-worthy until you remember the cost-performance of supercomputers improves by an order of magnitude every 5-7 years. So using a conservative extrapolation, a supercomputer with the same power as 1-10 human brains should cost single-digit millions of dollars by 2033, putting them within reach of midsized businesses and second-tier college Computer Science departments. Big entities like militaries, spy agencies and Google will collectively have tens or hundreds of thousands of them. If we haven’t built an artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2040, it won’t be thanks to deficient or costly computer hardware. It will be because we don’t know how to properly arrange the hardware to support intelligent thought and because of a failure to develop the software of intelligence. https://qz.com/1301510/the-us-has-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-again-the-200-petaflop-summit/ https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-the-cost-of-computing/
Assuming a constant 3% inflation rate, $1 million in the year 2120 will only be worth $50,000 in today’s money. Being a “millionaire” in the future will be meaningless, and the title will probably fall out of use. (Similarly, it wasn’t long ago that having a $100,000 income was a huge deal.) But given that central banks support price inflation because it’s a sneaky way of cutting wages without making human workers mad, will inflation stop once machines take over the economy? https://www.officialdata.org/2018-dollars-in-2120?amount=50000&future_pct=0.03
Here’s an old episode of the Joe Rogan show where he debates a very skilled tech skeptic named “Bruce Damer” who pours a lot of cold water on his optimism. Start watching about halfway through. https://youtu.be/SSf2bVpibmw
My idea for “solar Venetian blinds” was commercialized by a company called “SolarGaps” a few months before I wrote my blog entry. Dang it! An overlooked advantage of having an all-knowing AI is that it would warn you up front if your big idea had already been thought of by someone else. Humanity could use its energies much more efficiently without wasting time reinventing the wheel. https://youtu.be/whrroUUWCYo
Last night, I had the misfortune to “watch” this movie, though I put that in quotation marks since I spent most of the two hours looking at Internet stuff on my tablet. Even just listening to it and glancing at it, the film was clearly horrible, so I won’t waste time writing a detailed review, and I’ll keep this short and only touch on the important points. Suffice it to say, this was another strike-out for the Wachowskis.
…and the reality.
Plot: The human race originated elsewhere in the galaxy and became space-faring millions of years ago. A vast empire was created and (unbeknownst to us) came to encompass the Earth. 200,000 years ago, the super-advanced space humans seeded Earth with human life so our planet could be a giant farm (reminiscent of what the Machines were doing in the Wachowskis’ other, vastly better film, The Matrix). Once Earth achieved 21st century levels of population and technology, the space humans planned to come back, kill all the Earth humans, and harvest our corpses to extract our life forces, which could be preserved, bottled, and sold as age-reversing beverages to other space humans. I’m being completely serious. The space humans have in fact done this mass farming process many times before on other planets throughout the galaxy, and the bottled life force industry is a major part of the space economy.
Mila Kunis is a lowly Earth-born human who doesn’t know about any of that at the start of the movie. She is poor and has a job cleaning toilets. The only thing unique about her is that her first name is “Jupiter” (the space humans also have a secret base on the planet Jupiter, hidden beneath the clouds). However, thanks to a huge coincidence, it turns out her genetic code is identical to the code of a space human queen who died. Counting up all the space humans, Earth humans, and primitive humans living on other farm planets, there are so many humans that the amount of possible genetic variability given the limited size of our genome has been “maxed out,” and genetic duplicates who are unrelated to each other are being born. Statistically speaking, this would indeed happen, but the human population would need to be in the quadrillions.
The space humans find out about Mila somehow, and the dead space queen’s feuding rich and powerful children start sending teams of armed aliens to kidnap her. Cue fight scenes with laser guns, aliens flying through the air, space ships, and all that schlock. It was pretty bad.
Analysis: Turning to the technologies that the advanced space humans had, here are my thoughts on whether we Earth humans might someday also attain them.
A multi-thousand year old lady
Humans will look young and old at the same time. The space humans achieved medical immortality long ago thanks to the bottles of liquid life force. Periodically drinking the liquid or dunk oneself into a bathtub full of it would cause the signs of old age disappear from one’s body, truly restoring it to a more youthful state. The key space human characters who are fighting over Mila Kunis are tens of thousands of years old due to long-term use of the elixir. However, they appear to have strange mixes of youthful and elderly traits.
I believe that technology (and not the consumption of the “life force” of other humans) will someday grant us medical immortality and the ability to reverse the aging process. Human beings are just machines (albeit very complex ones made of organic matter), and like any other machine, in principle periodic repairs could keep any human alive indefinitely. The techniques and technologies that we use in the future to fix our bodies will be primitive and ugly at first, but over time will become more sophisticated and finessed. I can envision a window of time starting maybe 100 years from now when life extension therapies are in wide use, and treated people have mixes of young and old traits. For example, you might see people in their 90s who have unusually good complexions thanks to mechanical hearts, and unnaturally thick heads of colored hair thanks to cloned, implanted hair follicles, but in every other respect, they would look like old people. Better technologies created later on will allow full body rejuvenation, meaning young/old mixes will probably disappear in the long run.
Part of the floor is in “transparent mode.”
Floors will be able to turn transparent. There is a scene on one of the space ships where one of the evil space humans is trying to force Mila Kunis to marry him to finish the final step in his evil plan. When she refuses, he pushes a button on a remote control or something, and the floor that they’re standing on turns transparent like glass, so Mila can look down and see that her Earth human family is being held prisoner in a torture chamber one level below them. “Either marry me, or they die!” he then bellows.
This is actually an entirely plausible technology that could be created in the near future with massive OLED screens and multitudes of tiny cameras (basically, you’d be watching a live surveillance camera feed of the building level below you, but displayed on a screen covering your entire floor), or with nano-engineered building materials that can turn transparent or opaque depending on whether or not electric current is being passed through them (Google “electric glass” or “switchable glass” plus the keyword “bathroom”). Note that the Wachowskis also showcased this type of technology in the movie Cloud Atlas, but it was used to make walls transparent instead of floors.
A swarm of tiny flying drones, not from the movie, but from real life. They can be programmed to fly in formation and to swarm into certain shapes.
Humans will be able to mind-control insects. There’s a scene early in the movie, shortly after Mila Kunis realizes that space humans are after her, when she seeks refuge at Sean Bean’s house. Sean Bean is actually a space human who lives on a farm somewhere in the Midwest, in an old house that is covered with beehives jutting out of all the exterior and interior walls. Bees fly all over the place, but they don’t sting Sean Bean because he has some kind of mental control over them. The shelves and tables throughout the house are covered in jars full of honey, meaning he probably makes money by selling them. Sean Bean served in the space human military before some kind of falling out with his commanders, which also resulted in him secretly moving to Earth to do beekeeping. As if this whole setup weren’t absurd enough, when the bees form a cloud around Mila, Sean says something like “Bees can sense human royalty,” so their behavior serves as proof that she’s genetically identical to the dead space human queen.
As I said in my Starship Troopers review, there’s no scientific proof that human or animal telepathy exists, but cybernetic brain implants could give rise to essentially the same ability through science. Theoretically, a human with a brain implant could wirelessly transmit his thoughts to a bee that also had a brain implant, and those thoughts would control its movements and actions. However, in light of the tediousness of installing implants into the pinprick-sized brains of bees or other insects, and of the lack of any useful applications for the technology, I doubt it will ever interest anyone but a few scientists doing proof of concept experiments.
It would be cheaper, easier and better to build purpose-built machines like bee-sized flying drones for this rather than to jerry-rig animals. Flying drones are constantly shrinking in size, and there’s no reason to think it won’t eventually be possible to make them indistinguishable from insects. Eventually there will be swarms of flying robot insects that can coordinate their movements and actions, and humans will be able to control them just as they can control simpler flying drones today. Eventually, technology could allow humans to control them by thought alone, as I’ve described.
Bee-like robot drones would have agricultural uses as crop pollinators and pest killers, and they could also perform mass surveillance and have law enforcement and military uses. Human brain implants would have a variety of uses, such as enhancing intelligence and the senses. As I said in my last Personal Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think human brain implants will be common before 2100. Insect-sized robots will be invented much sooner since they’ll need less sophisticated technology and won’t be delayed by the FDA approval process (brain implants will probably be categorized as medical devices).
ALIENS! Don’t ask what’s going on. I assure you it is completely stupid.
Humans and aliens will work together. The space humans have created a galactic empire that encompasses some non-human aliens. Some of them look like the stereotypical big-headed gray aliens, and they try to abduct Mila Kunis at the start of the movie. (There are also androids and human-animal hybrids in the movie, but whatever.) Other aliens are seen walking around inside space ships and cities on other planets, and the space humans appear at ease with them.
I think intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, and if we survive long enough to explore deep space, we will probably encounter them, or we will at least spot them at long range with our telescopes. However, I also believe we’ll discover that things unfold in the same basic order across the galaxy, with primitive organic life automatically arising on planets where the right natural conditions exist, an intelligent organic species evolving on a minority of those planets, followed by a minority of those planets being taken over by intelligent artificial life forms that the intelligent organic species invents, followed by the artificial life forms being the most successful at developing better technologies and colonizing space. We will find that the most powerful and most advanced alien species are basically machines (I say “basically” because they might be so advanced that they have characteristics that are not stereotypically mechanical).
Liberated from the slowness and imprecision of biological evolution, intelligent machines could rapidly re-engineer themselves to adapt to space and to other planets. Since some forms are inherently more functional than others (e.g. – tires work better when they’re shaped like circles instead of rectangles, regardless of what planet you’re on), convergent evolution would happen among artificial life forms that were spacefaring and free to do what they wanted. If our future civilization discovered aliens of equal or greater sophistication, we’d probably find many major similarities between our machines, though the organic life forms from their home planet would be quite different and incompatible with ours.
Instead of the Star Trek vision of the future where space exploration proceeds with humans calling the shots, and technology is still “dumb,” I think the reverse will be true, and our role will be more akin to that of a pet dog brought along by its human family on a road trip. The dog is not in charge, didn’t plan the trip, and is very stupid compared to the humans. The humans brought it along for sentimental reasons only. The dog has no real role to play on the trip and can’t exercise any control over what happens. Some small amount of resources (space in the car, money for dog food, space for misc. supplies like a lease and food/water bowls) is devoted to ensuring the dog’s comfort, but orders of magnitude more are devoted to supporting the human family (gas money, hotel fees, restaurant budget). After many hours locked in its pet carrier cage, the dog is able to get out when the car arrives at its destination. It is a strange, alien environment that the dog has trouble interpreting, but which the humans mundanely understand is just a beach. While at the beach, the human family and the dog all sit in the sand next to a different human family, who have brought along their pet cat. The dog is astounded as he has never seen a cat before, and vice versa. The two animals sniff each other while their human owners talk in their inscrutable, high-level language, exchanging more ideas in a few seconds than either the dog or cat could learn in a lifetime. Any attempt by the animals to fight with each other is quickly broken up by the humans, with no offense taken. The trip eventually ends, the dog gets packed back in the pet carrier, and the whole group heads back home. Does the dog want to stay at the beach or go back home? No one bothers to ask.
This is certainly not a romantic vision of future space exploration, but I think it’s likely an accurate one. Just as we will lose control over the Earth with time, it stands to reason we will lose control over space, and it further stands to reason we will encounter alien civilizations where the same course of events has played out, resulting in the same order of things.
Genetic copies of people become common. As mentioned, the plot revolves around the fact that Mila Kunis is a genetic doppelganger for a dead alien space queen, so all the queen’s evil kids want to kidnap her. Yes, as diverse as the human race is, there are limits to how many unique human individuals are allowable given all the different permutations of genes made possible by our genome. Also, keep in mind that not every gene affects observable physical traits, so two people could be externally identical even if a small fraction of their genes were different. But statistically speaking, the human population would need to be in the quadrillions for our species to have exhausted all of its possible genetic variability and for unrelated people to share the same genome (or even 99% of the same genome).
I doubt the human population will ever get that high, and I think what would muck things up well before then would be the introduction of novel genes into our species through genetic engineering, which would increase the amount of potential species diversity. However, genetic copies of people will become more common for an entirely different reason: cloning. Once the technology becomes available, some people will start cloning themselves, or dead loved ones, or other people they’re obsessed with (Angelina Jolie, Hitler, Einstein) and whose DNA they’ve obtained.
[This draft has been sitting unfinished for almost a year, and on this lazy Sunday afternoon, I’ve finally gotten around to polishing it off and publishing it.]
Imagine driving a car down a highway at 60 mph for three hours and only seeing this.
A year ago, I spent a week in the Dakotas and Nebraska, marking my first visit to all of those places. During my many hours spent driving on the highway in my rental car and surveying the landscape, several (odd) things crossed my mind, which surprisingly enough, merit posting on this sci-tech blog.
First, let me say that for people like myself who live in urban or suburban environments, the emptiness of rural Dakota and Nebraska is profound and has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Agricultural areas that are close enough to DC region that I’ve taken road trips through them–such as rural Ohio and Indiana–are on an entirely higher plane of density (in terms of human population and infrastructure). The Great Plains and the Midwest definitely ain’t the same thing. My trip last year thus reset my baseline about what counts as “empty” or “rural” (and I suspect trekking across Alaska would cause yet another redefinition).
The emptiness of the Dakotas is also understandable after you spend time there: there’s just nothing there to keep your interest. The terrain is monotonous (mostly flat or with low, undulating hills going out to every horizon), there’s little wildlife and few trees, and extreme weather is common. It reminded me that not every place dominated by nature is equally interesting or aesthetically pleasing. If I had to choose a “wild” place to live as hermit or nature-loving hippie, I’d pick a mountainous locale that offered good hikes and a variety of wildlife for watching, fishing and hunting, or a spot along a coastline. Being in the middle of a literal sea of grass gets old very fast.
This is something to bear in mind when contemplating how the population will redistribute in the future if teleworking gets even more common and/or if machines render many people permanently unemployed. Without jobs keeping them tethered to cities and their surrounding suburbs, I think tens of millions of people will move to rural areas known for their natural beauty and to charming small towns (it might be helpful to map where wealthy retired people move to in large numbers). However, there are a limited number of such places, so the same problems we see today in metro areas like congestion, (relative) overpopulation, high real estate prices, and the gentrification-driven transformation of “genuine” towns into “boutique” towns would recur. Given the choice to live anywhere, almost no one would pick a little house in the prairie, but competition would be savage for plots of land in places like Silverthorne, CO or Sedona, AZ. The more verdant and mountainous part of western South Dakota near the Black Hills could also grow.
Time magazine mapped the 25 most popular destinations for retired Americans who move across state lines.
Once farms are fully automated or can be operated remotely (visualize a guy sitting in an office cubicle, using his computer to control a “drone farm combine” from 1,000 miles away), vast stretches of flat, boring land in places like the Dakotas could become completely devoid of humans. Instead of being a new phenomenon, it would just mark the endpoint of several generations-long trends in America related to agricultural automation, depopulation of rural counties thanks to low birth rates and young people moving to more interesting places like cities, and the dying out of “farm country culture” and “small town culture.”
Rural counties lost considerable population in the last decade.
This transition would be sad in some ways, but probably beneficial on balance. Not a day goes by anymore without an article appearing in a major newspaper about the epidemic of suicide, drug abuse (especially opioids and prescription pills), and despair in rural America. Clearly, something is wrong.
During my trip, I drove through several remote, decaying towns–where half the structures looked abandoned and where old, badly rusted vehicles were scattered everywhere–and some settlements that were mere clusters of trailers near the highway. It made no sense to me for people to live in visible poverty, hours away from the nearest city and its cultural, educational and employment opportunities, beyond commuting range to any jobs, and in the midst of a monotonous landscape. What did the people do with their time? How much did their remoteness undermine their access to police and medical help during emergencies? How much extra money and manpower did the local governments have to spend extending those services, as well as utilities like electricity, to them?
It made even less sense to me for people to live in such places, when I found that the same countryside vistas, quiet, and feeling of isolation could be had by living 30 minutes outside a small or medium-sized city in Dakota or Nebraska. (If you don’t believe me, set out from Bismarck, ND in a car in any direction, drive for 30 minutes, doing the last ten minutes on a randomly chosen country road, and then stop and see where you are.) I think the government should fund programs to voluntarily relocate people from economically depressed small towns to metro areas (participants would have their moving expenses paid for and would be linked with affordable new homes in metro areas and entry-level jobs, but their old homes would be torn down and the land rezoned for non-residential use and or “re-wilded”) Though this is an admittedly controversial belief, bear in mind that there’s a precedent for it: During the Great Depression, a small federal agency was created called the “Resettlement Administration,” and one of the things it did was use federal money to buy poor farms in the Dust Bowl region so the suffering farmers could move elsewhere. The land was then put under the oversight of experts in forestry and soil erosion, repairing the ecological damage done by inappropriate farming practices.
But government action might not be needed to realize this scenario. I can imagine a future farm in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota, that is still owned by the same family that was granted the land in the 1800s, even though the family’s members no longer live there. The ones that do take an active role in farming live in nice, suburban houses in Bismarck, where they use telepresence virtual reality technology to remotely control machines on their farm. The machines are mostly automated, but occasionally have mechanical problems or face situations their programming leaves them unprepared for, requiring human intervention. They only have to physically visit the farm once every few weeks. Sometimes the men of the family also go there for bird hunting, to fish in the creek, and to hold family reunions in the farmhouse they remember from their childhood. I could imagine similar setups for cattle ranchers, who would entrust the herding of their cattle to different kinds of drones, which would operate autonomously most of the time and, at the flick of a switch, be remotely controllable by a human anywhere on the planet.
Another thing that struck me during my trip was that, even if people were sparse in the countryside, EVIDENCE of people was almost constantly apparent. By that I mean manmade things, like roads, power lines, buildings (farm-related sheds and shelters), radio antennas, planes flying overhead, and fences. There were lots and lots and lots of wire fences, hemming in the roads on both sides to keep cattle from freely wandering.
The presence of so much land-based infrastructure, even in places most people would call “the middle of nowhere,” hit home for me how easy it will be someday to create a national mass surveillance network. Once sensors inevitably get dirt cheap and robots can install and maintain them at low cost, there’s little reason they couldn’t be placed everywhere, even in remote parts of the Great Plains. The easiest way to do it would be to install sensor clusters (cameras, microphones, air pressure sensors, wind sensors) on power line poles. The mounting points are already there, they could be mounted high to provide long-distance views, and they’d have access to electricity. Since power lines usually parallel roads, maintenance bots would have easy access to them, and they’d be able to monitor movements of people and cargo since most everything travels via roads.
Even one sensor on every tenth pole along the highways I traversed would be good enough: the cameras would be within line of sight of each other and could see everything for miles around given the flat topography and lack of obstructions. If they detected anything in the distance they couldn’t identify, they could cue drones to investigate and could plug the surveillance gaps while being even fewer in number and more diffuse than the fixed place sensor network. Americans probably would never agree to install a mass surveillance system like this for the purpose of spying on themselves, but it might get started for innocuous reasons, like improved weather forecasting, air traffic monitoring, or wildlife monitoring.
One beneficial applications for all these technologies would be the safe reintroduction of herds of wild animals to the Great Plains. The sensor network and drones could track and shepherd them across the vast private ranches, keeping them a safe distance from the cattle, and corralling them from one fence gate to another. (Yes, being stuck in a rental car for hours while driving across a plain landscape [pun intended] will lead my mind to conjure such things.)
OK, returning to reality a little, I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of solar panels and wind turbines in the Dakotas and Nebraska. The region is well-known for being windy, and it’s actually slightly sunnier than the Mid-Atlantic, which where I’m from. But strangely, even though land costs more here, solar panels are much more common sights. If anything, I’d imagine people living in the Great Plains would welcome wind turbines as a break from the visual monotony of the natural landscape, and if I’m wrong and they don’t want to look at them, it wouldn’t be hard to find an empty valley just over the horizon for them. The large swaths of open land–including poor-quality land that was clearly unsuited for agriculture–also lend themselves to building utility-scale solar farms, yet I saw none.
Having said so many negative and strange things about my visit to the Dakotas and Nebraska, let me conclude that it was actually a good trip, nothing bad happened to me, and the people of the Great Plains struck me as very decent folk. It’s not my intention to insult anyone with my observations or speculations about how the region could improve in the future, and I hope anyone from rural America can appreciate the insights of a lifelong suburbanite like me.
An ocean buoy detected a 78 foot high wave south of New Zealand, making it the largest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. As the number and density of automated sensors like buoys, weather stations, and drones grow, so will data and film footage of extraordinarily rare occurrences and life forms. In 20 years, you’ll be able to ask your computer to “Show me everything weird that happened today” and spend the next several hours watching video clips from around the world, including places devoid of humans. https://newatlas.com/record-wave-southern-ocean/54602/
“Ocado” is a British grocery store chain that has no brick-and-mortar retail stores and only does home deliveries. Their food warehouses, where groceries are stored and packaged, are heavily automated and use hundreds of robots. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43968495
It will also probably be easy to program autonomous vehicles to drive in ways that use as little fuel as possible. Many human truck drivers have a hard time keeping up these habits because they require near-constant focus and patience. Moreover, since machines don’t need to sleep, autonomous trucks could structure their routes in such a way that they were mostly on the roads during non-peak hours, like the middle of the night, meaning fewer traffic jams for everybody and less wasted gas. http://www.fleetowner.com/fuel_economy/fuel-economy-0701
One of the NYT’s auto experts thinks gas-powered cars will be obsoleted by fast-recharging electric cars within five years, and sales of both will sharply shift to reflect this. Without giving a deadline for autonomous cars, he drops a lot of hints it will take substantially longer than five years to become mature and ubiquitous. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/personaltech/electric-self-driving-flying-cars.html
Will America’s new “Right to Try” policy that allows terminally ill people to take drugs still in Phase II clinical trials help much? Probably not, and not just because only 10% of drugs prove themselves effective during Phase II. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/25/federal-right-to-try
A meta-analysis of fMRI studies that “proved” male and female brains operate differently suggests they might have been flawed, and researchers might have failed to publish null findings. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23976-1
America’s early school start times are awful for students and their parents. As early as 1913, the practice’s ill effects on sleep, learning and quality of life were noted. Why do we do it anymore? https://schoolstarttime.org/early-school-start-times/
“[Intelligence] is a spectrum of abilities since there are many different goals you can have, so it makes no sense to quantify something’s intelligence by just one number [like an IQ score]. To see how ridiculous that would be, just imagine if I told you that athletic ability could be quantified by a single number, the ‘Athletic Quotient,” and whatever athlete had the highest ‘AQ’ would win all the gold medals in the Olympics.” https://youtu.be/p9eLpRbRk4c
And in classic fashion, the Navy is dumping its worn-out, excess F/A-18C and D Hornets (note the lack of “Super”) on the Marine Corps. The Navy has 270 of these older fighter planes and will give the Marines 136 of them, mostly to be cannibalized for spare parts. The Navy’s final 134 Hornets will probably be transferred in the future as it gets more Super Hornets and F-35C’s. http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19040/navy-to-slash-legacy-f-a-18-hornet-fleet-to-prop-up-beleaguered-usmc-squadrons
In 1872, English writer Samuel Butler published the book Erehwon. In it, the main character visits a futuristic, closed society that banned machines because they were improving too fast and people feared they would become smarter than humans and take over. Butler was inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and by the rapid industrialization he saw in England over his lifetime. It’s the earliest example of the the “robot uprising” trope I’ve seen. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm
A few bummer remarks about the state of artificial intelligence. FIRST: ‘The current ways of trying to represent the nervous system…[are little better than] what we had 50 years ago.’ –Marvin Minsky, 2013 https://youtu.be/3PdxQbOvAlI
SECOND: ‘Over the next 30 years, we’re not going to see Commander Data…there is an A.I. bubble right now and people are making a fundamental error on estimating how good A.I. is going to be [and] how quickly.’ –Rodney Brooks, 2017 https://youtu.be/ig1qaqyMIXc
Google’s “Duplex Assistant” can perfectly imitate humans during brief phone calls. I think machines will pass the Turing Test within 11 years, and shortly thereafter, we won’t be able to tell the difference between human speakers and CGI versions of them: we’ll be able to make machines that can speak using a real human being’s voice, to intelligently carry on conversations with other humans, and to even answer questions and put forth topics of conversation as the imitated human would. https://youtu.be/ijwHj2HaOT0
Non-invasive, wearable sensors that monitor muscle and nerve activity can be used to accurately represent a person’s physical movements in a virtual reality avatar. The demo video is incredible. https://youtu.be/5Z5aZK2C3ew
If you’re reading this blog, then you probably know who Ray Kurzweil is and what he thinks the future will be like. And if you don’t, then SHAME ON YOU! Kurzweil is one of the world’s greatest living futurists (though several of his predictions have failed), he’s influenced my own thinking, and if you know little or nothing about him, stop right now and go read his Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil).
Kurzweil’s perfusion and fame as a futurist have made him the subject of many “accuracy analyses” of predictions whose deadlines have come and gone. In spite of how crowded the field is, I think there is a narrow area where I could be of use: tracking his predictions about the future of solar power.
On this topic, Kurzweil is quite bold: He thinks that solar power is growing exponentially, so it will supply 100% of the WORLD’S (not just America’s) ENERGY (not just ELECTRICITY) within 15 years. Additionally, his predictions are unambiguous in their wording and deadlines, rendering them highly amenable to objective evaluation. For better or worse, he won’t be able to talk his way out of this, as he has several times in the past through written rebuttals of unfavorable analyses.
The U.S. generates huge amounts of ENERGY, only a small fraction of which is ELECTRICITY, a lot of it gets wasted, and the remainder gets to end users.
I’m starting this blog entry to keep a running tally of all of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions regarding when the world will get 100% of its energy from solar power. The table below this will serve as a quick summary of the key data points in those predictions, while the written paragraphs below it will cite their exact wordings. Note that his deadline for 100% solar power has fluctuated over the last 13 years from 2025 to 2033, and I suspect it will continue to do so (Kurzweil will probably do something like bump it up by ~1 year every 2 years). His statements about the number of exponential “doublings” left until solar power supplies 100% of humanity’s energy also barely withstands arithmetic scrutiny (If solar power’s electricity output is doubling every two years, then why did he say it was 8 doublings away from 100% in 2011, but then say it was still 8 doublings away in 2013? Since two years had passed between the predictions, shouldn’t it have been down to 7 doublings in 2013?).
This blog entry will be updated as Kurzweil inevitably makes new predictions about this topic, so stay tuned!
Date of prediction
# of "doublings" left until 100% solar energy
Year when 100% of energy will be solar
2024/3/12
?
2034***
2016/4/19
?
2036**
2016/3/30
6
2028
2014/6/10
5*
2026 (low) - 2028 (high)*
2013/4/23
8
2029 (low) - 2033 (high)
2011/2/16
8
2027 (low) or 2031 (high)
2010/3/16
?
2028
2008/4/13
?
2028
2008/2/19
?
2028
2005/12/23
?
2025
2005/10/25
?
2030
* Kurzweil’s June 10, 2014 prediction is based on the observation that, at that point in time, solar and wind together produced 4% of America’s energy.
**Kurzweil’s April 19, 2016 prediction pertained to “solar and other renewables” and his wording suggested the 100% milestone would be reached in less than 20 years.
***In his March 12, 2024 interview, Kurzweil first said the prediction pertained only to “solar,” but added a few minutes later that the energy mix would merely be 100% “renewable,” which included wind power.
March 12, 2024
“[Solar power technology is on] an exponential curve. And if you look at the curve, we’ll be getting 100% of all the energy we need in ten years.
…We’re gonna go to all renewable energy–wind and sun–within ten years.”
April 19, 2016 [republished on Kurzweil’s website on December 20, 2018]
What about our energy and food needs?
“Certainly within 20 years we’ll be meeting all our energy requirements through solar and other renewables. We’re awash in energy—10,000 times more than we need, from the sun—and we’re going to move to these renewables not just because we’re concerned about the impact on the environment but because it will be cheaper and more economic.”
Turning his attention to solar, Kurzweil said four years ago Google founder Larry Page and he were asked by the National Academy of Engineering to study emerging energy technologies. The men selected solar due to its exponential growth. Kurzweil said solar has been around for over 25 years, and its market share has doubled every two years.
“In 2012, solar panels were producing 0.5% of the world’s energy supply. Some people dismissed it, saying, ‘It’s a nice thing to do, but at a half percent, it’s a fringe player. That’s not going to solve the problem,’” Kurzweil said. “They were ignoring the exponential growth just as they ignored the exponential growth of the Internet and genome project. Half a percent is only eight doublings away from 100%.
“Now it is four years later, [and solar] has doubled twice again. Now solar panels produce 2% of the world’s energy, right on schedule. People dismiss it, ‘2%. Nice, but a fringe player.’ That ignores the exponential growth, which means it is only six doublings or [12] years from 100%.”
“We’re now…at 4% [of global energy needs being supplied by solar and wind power]. Maybe five doublings from 100% at two years each, that’s gonna be on the order of a decade from now. The use of energy is growing a little bit so maybe it’ll be 12 or 14 years.”
April 23, 2013
“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he has predicted. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100% of our energy needs in 20 years.”
Since around one-third of that 104GW installed capacity is in Germany and China is only really getting going, Kurzweil’s forecasts don’t look too far-fetched.
Despite these glitches (or S curves) on his graph, Kurzweill still believes that a “doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets 100% of the world’s energy needs.”
That takes us to about 2027, close to his predictions in 2008.
“Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly — we are only a few years away from parity. And then it’s going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don’t care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
So right now it’s at half a percent of the world’s energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world’s energy needs. So that’s 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we’ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.” [Kurzweil said.]
People may react similarly to his solar use forecast, he notes. However, since information technology is doubling every two years, our knowledge about and capability to utilize solar energy is “only eight doublings away from meeting 100% of our energy needs,” explains Kurzweil. Not only the U.S., but also countries like Germany, China, and Israel are actively pursuing solar energy systems.
“Take energy. Today, 70 percent of it comes from fossil fuels, a 19th-century technology. But if we could capture just one ten-thousandth of the sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet 100 percent of the world’s energy needs using this renewable and environmentally friendly source. We can’t do that now because solar panels rely on old technology, making them expensive, inefficient, heavy and hard to install. But a new generation of panels based on nanotechnology (which manipulates matter at the level of molecules) is starting to overcome these obstacles. The tipping point at which energy from solar panels will actually be less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away. The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to meet all our energy needs within 20 years.”
“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” [Kurzweil] said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”
“To take energy, for example, I talk about how within 20 years we could have nanoengineered solar panels which would capture enough sunlight to meet all of our energy needs. If we captured 1 percent of 1 percent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, we could meet all of our energy needs in a renewable fashion. Now we can’t do that today ’cause solar panels right now are an old industrial technology. But using new nanoengineered techniques, you’ll see actually significant progress in the next five years, but over 20 years we’ll actually be able to meet all of our needs with these kinds of renewable energy technologies and that store them in nanoengineered fuel cells.” [Kurzweil said.]
“This will mean that by the mid 2020s we will be able to meet our energy needs using very inexpensive nanotechnology-based solar panels that will capture the energy in 0.03 per cent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, which is all we need to meet our projected energy needs in 2030.”
The predictions that Kurzweil’ made about solar power before 2005 are few, and don’t mention “doubling times” or give any future dates by which X% of global energy needs will be met with solar.
Alien telescopes could see from very long distances that the Earth had all the chemical ingredients for organic life. In fact, anyone in our galaxy who has pointed a big telescope at us in the last 500 million years would have seen a habitable, blue planet. Even if it’s impossible to exceed light speed, you’d think someone would have come to Earth by now… https://youtu.be/4-ugewmyK30?t=1m18s
The theory that advanced aliens might seed the galaxy–including our own Solar System–with hidden surveillance devices was first advanced as early as 1948. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe
Since there are 687 days in a Martian year, there would have to be about 23 months if you wanted to keep the months an average of 30 days long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar
Four years after a young Chinese couple died in a car accident, one of their parents used leftover frozen embryos from the couples’ IVF treatment to conceive a grandchild in a surrogate mother. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43724395
Cloning could be used to bring back extinct animals and dead humans. ‘In 1996, scientists used 277 cloned embryos to get one successful Dolly. “Now if you do cloned cattle, you can transfer 100 cattle cloned embryos and get about 10–20 cloned animals born,” says Tian. “That’s an amazing change.”’ http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-the-increasingly-realistic-prospect-of-extinct-animal-zoos
Women really are “the fairer sex”: though the genes for blonde hair are equally common in Caucasian males and females, they’re much more likely to be phenotypically expressed in the females. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43782751
Soliciting “loyal communists” to donate sperm might actually have a scientific basis, since it is known that political views are influenced by brain structure and are partly heritable. Also note that the 19% acceptance rate at Chinese sperm banks is actually far higher than the rates at American sperm banks. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/asia/china-sperm-communist-party.html
The “Golden State Killer,” who murdered 12 people and raped 51, was finally found when the police clandestinely submitted a DNA sample from one of his crime scenes to a private genealogy company and got a match. While this raises concerns about genetic privacy, the tactic doesn’t seem to have been illegal. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43916830
Transsexual women (e.g. – people who were born male, but who later came to gender-identify as female) will be able to run in the Boston Marathon as women. https://apnews.com/33f30c4a20ec4ab582b8f87ba262f351
The U.S. is now using guided, air-to-ground missiles that are the size of two baguettes attached end-to-end. As sensors and computer chips get cheaper and better, we’ll someday have guided bullets that fire out of conventional rifles. http://www.janes.com/article/79453/usmc-deploys-apkws-on-f-a-18-hornet
‘Sometime in the 1980’s the advanced sector, beginning with the U.S., will collapse into a new Dark Age — perhaps in a matter of weeks — after breakdowns in energy, transit and communications systems intensify each other. The population will be halved, decentralized, exposed to a new barbarism. ‘ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roberto-vacca/the-coming-dark-age/
A ketamine nasal spray (“esketamine”) has proven highly effective at treating depression in human trials, but some scientists worry it could invite the same addiction and abuse as opioid pills have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/20/nasal-spray-of-party-drug-shows-promise-as-fast-acting-antidepressant-researchers-say/
A large fraction of English people believe baseless claims that things like microwave ovens, genetically modified foods, and drinking from plastic water bottles cause cancer. I suspect the prevalence of these beliefs is similar among Americans. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43895514
The notion that pharmaceuticals companies have “miracle cures” for diseases that they’re “holding back” from the public because it profits them to do so makes no sense when you consider that many of the big guys working at those companies and their families still get those same diseases and die from them. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/europe/ian-wilmut-parkinsons-dolly-sheep.html
‘Overall, the real killers in drug discovery stem from – to put it mildly – our incomplete understanding of biology.’
When we’re able to build computer simulations of human brains, we should also be able to build simulations of human bodies, and rapidly discover new drugs by basically injecting random compounds into the simulation and seeing what happens. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/04/03/new-chemistry-and-its-limits
A Yale research team “restored circulation to” 100 – 200 pig brains obtained from slaughterhouses and discovered that some of their cells survived for up to 36 hours. Before anyone jumps the bioethics gun, they should wait for all the details about the experiments to come out, as this is perfect fodder for media misrepresentation. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611007/researchers-are-keeping-pig-brains-alive-outside-the-body/
Aubrey de Grey took a break from his day job researching human immortality to remind us he’s a genius and not simply a nutcase. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf
Having live-in servants and full-time maids used to be common in America thanks to a former abundance of very cheap labor and to necessity: in the days before dishwashing machines, laundry machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and shrink-wrapped meat, even middle-class families often found themselves forced to hire servants to do their basic household chores. Robot butlers will simply be reinventions of a very old, common practice. https://www.economist.com/node/21541717
Ready Player One’s trailers stacked on giant racks would actually be an expensive way to house poor people. In reality, a dystopian Columbus, OH would be full of Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings that all looked alike. https://youtu.be/kjS0QPfl_9k
A few nights ago, I watched the film End of Evangelion, which Netflix recommended I rent based on how I had rated similar films. “Evangelion” is the name of a famous Japanese sci-fi anime from the 1990s, and the film is actually the final two episodes of the series (there’s a break in the middle where credits roll, and then you see the intro for the second episode). Hence, the totally literal title of the film, End of Evangelion.
Unfortunately, the content of the film was just as abstract to me as its title was straightforward, both due to the fact that the director made a deliberate (and controversial) effort to leave it open to interpretation, and because I had no clue who the characters were or what the back story was since I had never watched any Evangelion episodes. For any fans of the series, I hope you appreciate my ignorance and puzzled perspective for what it is.
Nonetheless, I figured out that Evangelion is essentially the same thing as Power Rangers: A powerful, alien force is trying to take over the world, and it’s up to a team of hormone-raging teenagers to get in their giant, humanoid battle robots and fight off the latest space monster each week. Evangelion gets deeper than Power Rangers though, thanks to adult-level subplots about scorned romance and people going crazy, and to weird religious themes and recurrent female nudity.
But enough with that, and on to my analysis of how well End of Evangelion depicts the future (the series was technically set in the future as it was filmed in the 90s but took place in 2015).
Giant, humanoid battle robots will exist. These were clearly an important element to the series. It looked like each teenager had their own designated battle robot, and they piloted them from internal cockpits that were either in the robot heads or upper torsos. They would get into frenzied rages inside the cockpits, and would use hand joysticks and buttons to move around their robots and kill enemies. In End of Evangelion, the preferred mode of combat was to beat up enemy robots and helicopters with bare hands and feet, or giant swords and spears. All the robots were hundreds of feet tall. While I don’t think it would be impossible to build giant robots like this, I think they would be a poor use of resources and therefore would never be constructed.
A giant combat robot clutching a spear-like weapon
The problem with giant, humanoid battle robots is that they’re huge targets that everyone can see from a hundred miles away–or even from space. Old fashioned fighter planes, artillery guns, and nuclear missiles could see them and hit them from long distances, out of range of the robots’ own weapons. Another problem with giant robots is there’s no way to hide if you get in trouble, unless maybe you can dive into a large body of water or into a deep, jagged canyon. Giant humanoid robots would be top heavy and unsteady on their two feet, which would be major problems. Just imagine how well you’d make out if you were sitting on the very top branch of a 200-foot tall redwood tree, and then a logger cut it at the base, and you had to endure a (seemingly) slow tip-over that ended with your top branch slamming into the ground at high velocity. Not pretty, and it’s exactly what would happen to you inside your cockpit every time your robot tripped or got knocked on its back by an alien. So human pilots won’t do. The bipedal layouts of the robots would also make their legs and feet major weak points, which enemies would surely target and be able to cripple using relatively weak weapons. Note that these same problems with poor concealment, top-heaviness, and vulnerable drive systems would also apply to smaller bipedal robots, like the “AT-ST” from Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. This might also help explain why no military has tried to build armored vehicles that walk on legs instead of roll on wheels. Finally, the use of giant robots for combat might also be unethical given the high risk of collateral damage caused by the robot accidentally stepping on people or falling on them. I imagine you’d feel pretty guilty if an alien body-slammed you and your giant robot into a skyscraper full of thousands of people.
Destroyed robots will come back to life.End of Evangelion’s pivotal battle happens when the good guy base is attacked by the Japanese military, which hitherto had been their friends. The Japanese military has nine of its own giant humanoid battle robots, but they’re piloted by computers instead of humans. Caught off guard, the best the good guys can muster forth is one of their own combat robots, piloted by a redheaded teen chick who is in need of bipolar medication. Redhead uses karate and a giant spear to beat/chop up all the enemy robots, and then her own robot runs out of power. Unfortunately for her, the seemingly dead enemy robots slowly start twitching back to life, and they get up–in spite of severed limbs and other visible damage–and kill her and her helpless robot. This is actually realistic. Not only will future military machines be able to keep fighting in spite of enormous amounts of damage, but it will be possible to fix them–perhaps without leaving the battlefield–even if they’ve suffered “fatal” damage.
As a precedent, it was common practice in WWII for armies to fix their destroyed tanks and to return them to service as fast as possible, with new crews. After all, tanks are large, expensive pieces of machinery, and it makes no economic sense to abandon them if they can be repaired. Tanks that had been incapacitated and defeated in combat had the burn marks scrubbed off, the dead bodies and body parts inside of them removed, the damaged systems identified and fixed, and any holes made by enemy weapons patched with liquid metal or welded-on sheets of armor. As WWII progressed, tanks that had gone through multiple “restorations” and multiple dead human crews became common sights.
A U.S. tank that was disabled by several German artillery rounds. The holes could be patched by repair crews and the tanks sent back into action.
Feigning death to either wait until the enemy goes away, or to get the enemy to lower his guard, come near you, and open himself to your surprise attack will also probably be common tactics for combat machines. This is because it’s much easier to pretend you’re dead if you don’t have externally detectable life signs (e.g. – chest movements from breathing), and it’s easier to risk a feigned death sneak attack on an enemy if you are a machine who fears nothing. In WWII, the Japanese soldiers were viewed as fanatics because they used tactics like this to ambush unsuspecting American troops (usually the “corpse” would suddenly wake up as you were walking by and detonate a grenade). It terrified and demoralized the Americans and forced them to laboriously shoot or bayonet every seemingly dead enemy soldier they passed, “just to be sure.”
A technological Singularity could happen so abruptly that you wouldn’t understand what was happening. Right after redhead dies, another of the teens gets his battle robot online and goes out to fight the Japanese military robots. When he sees his dead comrade, he has a mental breakdown because he had a crush on her. At that moment, the enemy battle robots grab his robot, levitate him far above the Earth, and start some type of “crucifixion” ceremony. The teen is the only person who can initiate a global transcendence event, and the enemy robots have been programmed to help him along. For some reason, killing his girl in front of him and rendering him distraught was also needed in order to ensure he would make “the right decision” regarding the transcendence. All of this was part of some incredibly complicated plan formulated by a secret cabal that only now–at the end–is revealed to be pulling all the strings. Yes. Ridiculous. Anyhow, we hear the teen’s rush of thoughts at this critical moment, and partly because he wants to end the suffering inherent to life, he decides to send out an energy pulse that travels across the whole planet, causing every human and animal to instantly burst into pools of red goo, which contain the souls and “essences” of each living being. The pools of liquid all run together, and Earth’s seas become red with them. Humans and all Earthly life transcend into a new form, where thoughts and feelings are directly shared, and there is no more suffering. Without ever using the term, this ending sequence of End of Evangelion depicts a possible future event called the “technological Singularity,” often shortened to “the Singularity.”
The “Red Goo Scenario”?
While there are many different theories about what form a Singularity could take, most thinkers believe it will happen thanks to machines achieving superhuman levels of intelligence. The reasoning is that, once machines get smart enough, humans wouldn’t be able to grasp the former’s thinking anymore or to anticipate their actions, and the machines would be capable of suddenly doing anything, like taking over the Earth, exterminating all humans, or elevating the human race to a superior state of being. Some believe that machines will achieve this level of intelligence and power very abruptly, so whatever changes they decide to make will happen without notice from the perspective of slow-thinking humans. A Singularity could be as abrupt and as life-changing to you as having an energy wavefront suddenly sweep over you from behind while you’re eating your breakfast waffles, converting you into a puddle of conscious, psychic, red liquid. Moreover, a future scenario where a superpowered entity (whether a distraught teenager or a superintelligent machine) decides to pursue a benign mandate like ending human suffering and then starts doing confusing and even scary things to achieve its goals is plausible. We simply don’t know how an AI with an IQ of 1,000 would act. For the record though, I think a Singularity is unlikely, and changes to technology and our way of life will happen slowly enough for humans to keep up and to have some influence over the course of events. In the far future–perhaps 150 years from now–I think the technology will exist to elevate humans like us to a higher state of being where suffering as we know it would be eliminated and thoughts and feelings could be directly shared, but we’ll get to that point gradually, with each necessary advancement setting the stage for the next.
During WWII, the British and Americans were able to accurately estimate how many tanks the Germans were making by analyzing the serial numbers on destroyed German tanks they found on the battlefield. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Photos from the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 15 years on. It’s remarkable seeing the hodgepodge of camouflage colors and styles our troops wore during the invasion. In spite of being the world’s best-funded military, apparently there was a widespread shortage of khaki clothing in the run-up to our big invasion of a desert country whose landscape is dominated by shades of brown. https://qz.com/1232700/iraq-war-anniversary-photos-of-the-iraq-invasion-15-years-ago/
China demonstrates an add-on kit that allows its 1960s-vintage Type 59 tanks to be remote-operated. I doubt the technology is well-developed, though it does make me wonder if obsolete military gear could be given new leases on life if they were remote-controlled or robot-operated. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/21/china-testing-unmanned-tank/
If we switch to machine armies, social cohesion could weaken since nations would no longer have large institutions (militaries) for indoctrinating their human citizens and infusing them with patriotism and loyalty. If humans no longer died in wars, populations would slowly lose national myths of shared sacrifice and heroism that underpin their national identities. http://warisboring.com/what-happens-to-us-when-robots-fight-our-wars/
After being fed data on 12.4 million chemical reactions, a deep learning neural network program was able to correctly create reagent and synthesis steps for other chemical compounds. Human judges couldn’t tell the machine’s work from that of human chemists, meaning a “Turing Test” of sorts was passed. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03977-w
‘Arranging two layers of atom-thick graphene so that the pattern of their carbon atoms is offset by an angle of 1.1º makes the material a superconductor.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02773-w
SETI’s senior astronomer thinks that advanced aliens have gravitational microlensing telescopes that can see the signals sent out by your TV remote control from light years away. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23738
One of the declassified UFO videos released by the NY Times last December could have just been a fighter plane in the distance, flying with its afterburners on. https://youtu.be/oO5dP3sF2sw
Stephen Spielberg is skeptical of virtual reality’s potential as a filmmaking tool because it would be much harder to keep viewers focused on the action. I agree there’s less value-add than some people assume: If you were watching “The Matrix” in V.R., what would be the benefit of being able to turn away from a fight scene and look at the brick wall behind you? https://www.apnews.com/afd5a41e2cb14fc0ab5521fa548e38ae/Q&A:-Spielberg-likes-VR,-but-not-necessarily-for-filmmaking
By the time Africa is ready to industrialize through cheap factory labor and export-driven trade, it might be too late since rich countries will have robots that work even cheaper. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43459138
…when it came to subjects outside of his expertise?
That is the question. I ask it because, in the aftermath of Stephen Hawking’s death, I’ve seen several news articles about alarmist predictions he made towards the end of his life. This article is actually one of the less sensational ones I read: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961
Stephen Hawking was literally a genius and one of the world’s greatest minds, but his education and professional expertise were in theoretical physics and cosmology (the study of how our universe was created and how it evolved). Moreover, his most important contributions pertained to black holes, an interesting yet extremely esoteric subject. Put simply, though Stephen Hawking was unquestionably brilliant, his brilliance was narrowly focused and didn’t equip him to make pronouncements about topics like global warming and killer robots. While everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, I disliked how Hawking’s opinions always carried special weight and attracted public attention, even when those opinions were about things far outside his expertise.
As I said in my past blog entry Rules for good futurism, predictions always be analyzed systematically, and the first step in the analysis is to ensure that the person who made the prediction actually has relevant academic or professional credentials. In several instances, Hawking failed this basic test.
In 2017, he predicted:
“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s [decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement] could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”
Stephen Hawking had no education in climatology and contributed nothing to the field. Moreover, his words suggest that he may not even have understood the Paris Climate Agreement, which has been criticized as weak to the point of being almost meaningless (countries can make up whatever pollution goals they want–including goals to increase their emissions–and there’s no punishment for failing to meet them). To that end, consider that even though President Trump effectively withdrew the U.S. from the Agreement in mid-2017, U.S. carbon emissions for that year still fell, whereas China–one of the Agreement’s signatories–saw its carbon emissions grow. Both of those trends are continuing well into 2018.
Hawking’s gloomy vision of a Venus-like future Earth is also unsupported by reputable climate models. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimates of future global warming fall well below 250 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit), and there is still considerable doubt over whether the catastrophic climate “tipping points” Hawking appears to be referencing exist, and if so, whether we are nearing any of them. Finally, Venus’ sulfuric acid rain was caused by volcanic activity, and not by global warming. Even if the Earth gets much hotter in the future, that won’t make volcanoes erupt more.
Stephen Hawking also made predictions about intelligent aliens in 2010:
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans…We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”
Though Stephen Hawking spent his life studying “space stuff” like black holes and the expansion of the universe, that left him scarcely better-equipped than an average person to speculate about aliens. While it’s possible that advanced aliens could come here with hostile intent, his apparent certainty in this outcome–made clear through his use of the definite “would be”–is unsupported by any facts. We have no clue what advanced aliens would be like, so we can’t even assign gross probabilities to how they would behave towards us (hostile, helpful, indifferent).
While I agree with Hawking that we should err on the side of caution and minimize humanity’s “leakage” of radio signals into space to hide from any hostile aliens that might be listening, I think it’s very important to realize that this is just a prudent course of action any person would settle upon if they thought hard about the problem. Stephen Hawking’s superior intellect did not let him go any farther, and the insight didn’t become any more valid once he made it known he shared it. To be clear, Hawking was not the first to advocate such a cautious course of action: three years before his aforementioned prediction, an American diplomat and science writer named “Michael Michaud” said the same thing in his book Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials. I suspect the idea actually predates Michaud by many years, but I didn’t have enough time to research its origins further.
In 2014, Hawking also shared thoughts about home-grown threats to humanity, in the form of hostile A.I.:
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
Again, Stephen Hawking’s prediction is nothing new, nor does he appear credentialed to speak on this matter with real authority. The idea of a robot uprising destroying the human race dates back to the famous 1920 Czech play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the theory that intelligent machines could enter a cycle of runaway self-improvement was first postulated by the British mathematician I.J. Good in 1965, and the observation that computers are getting smarter at a faster rate than humans are should be obvious to anyone who compares their cell phone to the one they had ten years ago. There’s nothing insightful about Hawking restating a few, closely related ideas that have been embedded in the popular consciousness in one way or another for decades (mostly thanks to science fiction films).
And even though Stephen Hawking famously used computers and a robotic wheelchair to overcome his speech- and motor impairments, he had no experience working on artificial intelligence, which is a sub-field of computer science (his education was instead in physics and math). Similarly, I depend on my car for daily transportation and am proficient at using it, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about automotive engineering.
And in 2016, he issued this dire (depending on your time horizon I guess) warning:
“I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet…Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”
From past comments, it’s likely Hawking saw extreme climate change, nuclear or biological war, alien invasion, hostile A.I. uprising, and extinction-level natural events like asteroid impacts as the potential causes of that epic “disaster,” but he never explained how he calculated that one or more of them would happen for sure by his 1,000 to 10,000 year deadline, meaning his prediction runs afoul of another step in my analysis: “Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data.” In truth, the probabilities of any of those misfortunes happening are unknown, making a future risk assessment impossible. For example, it’s entirely likely that a planet- or even continent-killing asteroid isn’t on course to hit Earth for another 20,000 years, by which time we’ll have space weapons that can easily deflect it.
In closing, Stephen Hawking’s discoveries in theoretical physics and cosmology changed our view of the universe itself, but his doomsday predictions added nothing new. Let me be clear: I didn’t write this to denigrate Hawking or to make myself sound smarter than he was, but rather, I wrote it as a reminder that no one knows everything, and future predictions should always be carefully scrutinized, regardless of how famous, smart, or seemingly benevolent the person making them may be. As a scientist, I think he would have actually appreciated these precepts, even if they worked against him in the handful of instances I’ve highlighted.
