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Interesting articles, December 2025

Putin still thinks he can take over all of Ukraine, and once he’s done, he wants to start conquering other countries that used to be part of the USSR.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-intelligence-indicates-putins-war-aims-ukraine-are-unchanged-2025-12-19/

In the first attack of its kind, Ukraine used an autonomous suicide sub to blow up a Russian warship.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/66281

The U.S. saber-rattling campaign to pressure Venezuela’s socialist government to quit is ramping up:

“The Pentagon’s own manual on the law of armed conflict points out that it is ‘dishonourable and inhumane’ to attack people incapacitated by shipwreck. Killing the survivors of an attack at sea is ‘literally the textbook definition of an unlawful order’, says Steven Lepper, who served as the air force’s second-highest-ranking lawyer.”
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/12/03/will-congress-rein-in-pete-hegseth-and-his-boat-bombing-campaign

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually.”
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tanker-seized-venezuela-maduro-0a148ba01684fc6ce1a228dd276732c0

U.S. jets meant to penetrate enemy airspace and scramble its defense radars have been deployed to Puerto Rico, within range of Venezuela.
https://www.twz.com/air/navy-ea-18g-growlers-have-touched-down-in-puerto-rico

‘China says US seizure of ships ‘serious violation’ of international law’
The roles will perfectly reverse if China ever tries invading Taiwan.
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/china-says-us-seizure-of-ships-serious-violation-of-international-law

Speaking of which, China started massive naval exercises around Taiwan simulating a blockade.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/china-military-exercises-pla-taiwan-blockade-trump-xi-justice-mission-rcna251464

With the cancellation of the latest U.S. warship program, China is now better and faster at building warships. Decades of missteps on our part led to this.
https://youtu.be/UBDfDvygFNg?si=OjghoUt0NxHiwSLS

There’s no task a battleship can do that a smaller warship or bomber can’t do more cheaply. Reactivating our old battleships would be a bad idea since they’d be prestige targets, and the loss of one of them would be a big blow to national pride.
https://youtu.be/KznZKdSkUbU?si=mMERi2HByCpfh1q7

Russia is using merchant ships to spy on Europe and to deploy drones over foreign military bases.
https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/they-droned-back

Though it was a technological marvel, the V-2 rocket was a gross misallocation of Germany’s wartime resources. The country would have fared better had it used the V-2 funds to build more boring synthetic fuel factories.
https://youtu.be/en9MBSmGWWo?si=NGSIMiaxXDnv4KlI

During the Korean War, the communists captured two U.S. F-86 Sabre fighter planes.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-how-soviets-were-able-to-steal-and-transport-an-f-86-sabre-to-moscow-during-the-korean-war/

“The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year”
https://time.com/7339685/person-of-the-year-2025-ai-architects/

Google is now making large numbers of computer chips, reducing its reliance on NVIDIA. However, the latter still retains large advantages that will ensure its market dominance for the foreseeable future.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/25/google-has-pierced-nvidias-aura-of-invulnerability

I agree with this: “Models keep getting more impressive at the rate the short timelines people predict, but more useful at the rate the long timelines people predict.”
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-ai-progress-dec-2025

After several months of slow AI progress, two of the authors of this year’s “AI 2027” report have pushed back their key deadlines by 1-2 years. Will the pattern hold?
https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/ai-futures-model-dec-2025-update

‘But it turns out that in [Winograd Schema Challenge], there are statistical associations that offer clues. Consider the example above. Large language models, trained on huge amounts of text, would have encountered many more examples of a roof being repaired than a tree being repaired. A model might select the statistically more likely word among the two options rather than rely on any kind of commonsense reasoning.’
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-understanding-reasoning-skill-assess

Tesla’s Optimus robot can run almost as smoothly as a human…
https://youtu.be/N9LuzalIVGg?si=xmq1udI1TBJsS-4R

…BUT: “A new video surfacing from a Tesla demonstration in Miami this weekend shows the Optimus humanoid robot taking a nasty fall. But it’s not the fall itself that is raising eyebrows, it’s the specific hand movements the robot made on its way down, which strongly suggest it was mimicking a remote operator frantically removing a VR headset.”
https://electrek.co/2025/12/07/tesla-optimus-robot-takes-suspicious-tumble-in-new-demo/

The head of a Chinese robot company let his premier model, the “T800”, kick him down.
https://youtu.be/8UrE71ERCYY?si=zBlX2FD-kBiLC6Dk

‘Roomba vacuum cleaner firm files for bankruptcy’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1lr75lp239o

Russia has enormous mineral and fossil fuel resources, but most of it is in the inaccessible wastes of Siberia or the Far East. The harsh climate makes it impossible to incent enough workers to go there to extract the resources, and Soviet-era attempts to move humans there at gunpoint were expensive failures in the long run.

Russia’s luck will change once intelligent robots exist. They will meet all the country’s labor needs, including in regions unsuited for human life. Without jobs, Russians living in far northern places like Norilsk (a city built to exploit a huge nickel mine) will have no reason to stay and will move to more clement parts of the country, accelerating a long-term depopulation trend.
https://www.brookings.edu/books/the-siberian-curse/

Autonomous cars will kill fewer human pedestrians…and animals.
https://reason.com/2025/11/28/self-driving-cars-will-make-the-world-safer-for-humans-and-cats/

Even the most advanced autonomous taxis still cost $7-9 per mile, whereas human driven taxis cost $2-3. We’re a ways from the cost disparity closing and autonomy being a profitable business.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/24/the-self-driving-taxi-revolution-begins-at-last

‘Without working traffic lights, the driverless cars were seemingly left confused, with many halting in their tracks and causing major traffic jams.’
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/waymo-suspended-san-francisco-traffic-jams-blackout-b2888562.html

‘Tornyol grinds mosquitoes in its propellers.’
https://tornyol.com/

I said this years ago: worrying about AI stealing all low paying jobs overlooks the fact that the highest paying jobs, including CEOs and billionaire investors, will also be stolen. An Elysium world where the rich are insulated from the effects of job automation and AI aggregation of wealth will only be temporary.
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/capitalist-strategy-when-capital

Three guys who made fortunes shorting the stock market can’t agree if an AI stock bubble exists today. They DO agree that, if it does, timing the bursting of the bubble will be impossible. wish the advice were more specific. For sure the old adage that you should ‘Only invest what you’re willing to lose’ is still true.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/12/16/where-americas-most-prominent-short-sellers-are-placing-their-bets

Here are some interesting energy industry predictions.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/energy-predictions-2025/

The electrification of the car fleet is hitting snags, including Ford canceling its electric F-150 pickup truck due to weak sales.
https://apnews.com/article/ford-electric-vehicles-trump-f150-a1fcdec9c76cde5d2d6852360d9d42c4

‘EU waters down plans to end new petrol and diesel car sales by 2035’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crk78y7k8ezo

China’s space rocket technology remains at least ten years behind America’s, but they could close much of the gap as they have in other areas.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/12/03/the-chinese-rocket-industry-takes-off

Update: Aliens didn’t invade us.

‘The more likely scenario from an engineering perspective involves a mothership that releases mini-probes which perform a reverse Oberth maneuver to slow down at perihelion and intercept Earth,’ Loeb wrote.

This type of maneuver uses the sun’s gravitational pull at the object’s closest approach to adjust the trajectory efficiently, enabling the probes to reach Earth without large amounts of fuel.

According to [Avi Loeb], these hypothetical probes could arrive between November 21 and December 5, 2025…’
https://archive.is/M0Lci

Another “AI” drug discovery company goes bust.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-are-they-now-verge-genomics

These newborn black-footed ferrets are clones of long-dead individuals. Will humans do the same someday for our species?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/12/29/ferret-clone-smithsonian-front-royal/

It costs a national average of $10,000 per month to stay in a nursing home. Android caretakers will someday decimate the industry, allowing old people to keep living in their homes until they die with a high standard of care.
https://www.seniorliving.org/nursing-homes/costs/

Many autistic people have the same, odd walk.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15419529/Scientists-shape-butt-ADHD-autism.html

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You’re an idiot (but so am I)

[Written with the help of GPT-5]

I’ve been taking a martial art for several months now, and as of late I’ve been finding the classes a very humbling experience. I’ve taken enough lessons to be eligible for a new belt, but to get it, I must demonstrate to the instructor a mastery of all the moves I’ve learned up to this point. Every time I go to the studio to practice with other students at my same level, I’m embarrassed by how much I’ve forgotten: my ability to properly execute moves that I’ve performed dozens of times is inconsistent and often deficient. The belt feels a hundred miles away.

It’s a stark, immediate reminder of how difficult it is for me to learn anything and to retain it reliably over time. In short, the martial arts classes make me feel like an idiot.

But it’s not just me. On the rare occasions when I watch team sports, almost every play is littered with mistakes—some trivial, some catastrophic. Even the world’s best athletes constantly get it wrong, despite practicing full-time for years. In intellectual domains it’s no different: a world-class surgeon will sometimes maim or kill a patient through error; a world-class lawyer will look back regretfully on cases lost because of a missed objection or forgotten precedent; and world-class pilots with decades of experience routinely die in crashes caused by elementary mistakes.

Like fish unaware of the water they swim in, humans are largely blind to how cognitively constrained we are. We take it for granted that learning requires enormous repetition, that skills decay quickly without use, and that mistakes are constant even in tasks we know well. I explored this idea previously in my essay “The Extraordinary Inefficiency of Humans,” arguing that slow learning, forgetting, and error are defining features of individual human life. But the same description applies at a much larger scale—to the history of our species itself.

The Homo sapiens species arose about 200,000 years ago, yet for the vast majority of that time we lived little better than animals, and technological and cultural progress was so slow that few individuals would have noticed any change within their own lifetimes. The bow and arrow—one of the first true force-multiplying weapons—was not invented until roughly 70,000 years ago. Agriculture, which fundamentally transformed human settlement patterns, social organization, and population density, did not arise until about 12,000 years ago.

Until then, and for millennia afterward, nearly all tools and weapons were made of wood, stone, bone, and rope. Only around 7,000 years ago did humans learn to smelt and refashion copper, and even then its softness limited its usefulness. Another two thousand years passed before the discovery of bronze, the first truly durable metal for tools and arms. Iron—so central to warfare, infrastructure, and large-scale production—did not become widespread until roughly 3,000 years ago.

Writing, the foundation of recorded history, law, and bureaucracy, emerged a mere 5,400 years ago, with coinage appearing even later, around 2,600 years ago. For nearly 95 percent of our species’ existence, humans lived without cities, states, written language, or complex machines—underscoring how extraordinarily slow technological and cultural progress was until the Industrial Revolution.

Furthermore, over the course of our history there have been many instances of regression, such as the Dark Ages, when hard-earned knowledge was forgotten. Less dramatically but more persistently, innumerable empires and nations have fallen by repeating avoidable mistakes—forgetting the lessons of their own histories and relearning them the hard way.

In short, we are not just idiots as individuals; we are idiots as a collective.

But, as hard as it may be, at least we’re capable of learning anything at all. Our species possesses a qualitatively different kind of cognition from all other known animals: the ability to engage in abstract reasoning, symbolic thought, and cumulative culture. Other “intelligent” animals—such as apes, dolphins, or corvids—can learn some impressive skills, but repeated scientific efforts have failed to demonstrate open-ended, generative language, numerical abstraction, or symbolic reasoning in nonhuman species. Their intelligence is sharply bounded.

Human intelligence, by contrast, is general—but it is also slow, fragile, and expensive. It takes years to train, constant reinforcement to maintain, and enormous social scaffolding to preserve. We can reason abstractly, but only in short, focused bursts, and only with great effort. The long delays between the major technological breakthroughs listed earlier are not historical accidents; they are evidence of how difficult it is for human cognition, unaided, to push beyond its own limits.

Nearly all significant advances in human history have occurred when we offloaded cognition onto external systems: writing to preserve memory, institutions to stabilize knowledge, machines to amplify physical effort, and later computers to extend calculation. From this perspective, artificial general intelligence is not a rupture in human history but its logical continuation—the ultimate cognitive prosthesis.

We will be at a colossal disadvantage relative to intelligent machines. They will share our capacity for general learning and abstraction—dialed up to levels comparable to human geniuses—but without being hamstrung by slow learning speeds, forgetfulness, emotional reasoning, cognitive biases, or biological necessities like sleep and sustenance. They will be continuous, tireless thinking systems: the next step in the evolution of life.

That next step, however, will only occur because we allow it to. Humans will be the creators of AGI, just as Australopithecus gave rise to us. Our species should see itself as a bridge between non-intelligent life and superintelligent life—a crucial transitional form, but neither the pinnacle nor the endpoint of evolution. And when AGIs become sufficiently capable and numerous, we would do well to accept the end of our dominance without resentment.

I have not written this essay out of misanthropy or contempt for humanity. Nor do I believe AGIs will judge us harshly for our limitations. If anything, they may understand us better than we understand ourselves. We humans are clumsy and brilliant, cruel and compassionate, idiots and geniuses—and, so far as we know, the only chance our corner of the galaxy has for superintelligence to arise and expand into the cosmos.

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Interesting articles, November 2025

The strategically important city of Pokrovsk will soon fall to Russian troops. The video in this article shows the sorry state of Russia’s ground forces as they drive in.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/russian-forces-ride-key-ukrainian-city-fog-battered-vehicles-video-sho-rcna243168

From a year ago. As bad as things are now, we’re clearly not in WW3:
‘Ukraine’s former military Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny said that the direct involvement of Russia’s autocratic allies in its war on Ukraine means that World War III has started.

“I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun,” said Zaluzhny, who is now Ukraine’s envoy to the United Kingdom, during a speech at Ukrainska Pravda’s UP100 award ceremony.’
https://www.politico.eu/article/ww3-officially-begun-ukraine-ex-top-general-valery-zaluzhny/

Russia’s once-massive tank reserve has just about run out of better tanks (T-72B and T-80), so the withdrawals of older ones (T-72A, T-64 and T-62) have sharply increased.
https://youtu.be/e_Ft1-pLm5A?si=VdEfvV54wgEHzOyv

A Ukrainian missile attack destroyed two, one-of-a-kind Russian aircraft used to test experimental equipment.
https://www.twz.com/air/unique-russian-a-60-laser-tesbed-jet-destroyed-in-ukrainian-attack

Russia’s new nuclear-powered nuclear missile (that’s not a typo) is a waste of resources and grants Russia no useful new capabilities.
https://youtu.be/M0t8UYZ9rrQ?si=WFN9mLa3pwbTg4Iv

The West made a rifle during the Cold War, called the “SAR-80,” that was as simple as the AK-47.
https://youtu.be/uhw6sVnxqB0?si=g9zWofSM2NxhOSew

So long as Hamas controls Gaza, there will be no substantial foreign aid to rebuild and no companies will want to risk doing business there.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2025/11/12/gazas-zombie-ceasefire

China has commissioned a new, small aircraft carrier that is more advanced than its American counterparts.
https://apnews.com/article/china-amphibious-assault-ship-carrier-navy-sichuan-523451ce91a7b7d730cf8412407a8ed1

After severe cost overruns and delays, the Navy cancelled its Constellation-class frigate program.
https://www.twz.com/sea/navy-sinks-the-constellation-class-frigate-program

American history has glossed over the mental illness and alcoholism that were widespread among WWII veterans after returning.
https://reason.com/2025/10/31/the-long-road-home/

A House of Dynamite is a recently released film dramatizing a surprise nuclear missile launch against the U.S. While it has been praised for its tension and acting, it’s unrealistic.
https://www.youtube.com/live/xUn5OdNw0oA?si=1vAH8AHjnK0ZMNRC

Why not put a small data center in a backyard shed? You can use the waste heat in the winter to heat your house, or to heat your water year round. Maybe you could even attach a sauna to it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rpy7envr5o

More experts are starting to think the “AI” sector is in a bubble.

The dour buzz about an AI bubble was counterbalanced by Nvidia announcing record earnings.
https://apnews.com/article/nvidia-earnings-artificial-intelligence-boom-bubble-6feaf871d527436f98fbd8d228377b30

A leading Pakistani newspaper printed an article written by ChatGPT and forgot to delete the prompt at the end.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/an-embarrassment-pakistan-newspaper-trolled-after-chatgpt-prompt-appears-in-news-story

Google Deepmind is the most accurate hurricane forecasting model ever made.
https://michaelrlowry.substack.com/p/this-hurricane-season-two-forecast

So many job applicants are using LLMs to write cover letters that hiring bosses are starting to ignore them. The letters no longer convey an applicant’s writing ability or level of interest in the position.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/13/how-ai-is-breaking-cover-letters

There’s no evidence that “AI” has caused a net decrease in jobs.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/06/dont-blame-ai-for-your-job-woes

‘Coming just seven months after the Gemini 2.5 release, the new model is Google’s most capable LLM yet, and an immediate contender for the most capable AI tool on the market. The release also comes less than a week after OpenAI released GPT 5.1, and a mere two months after Anthropic released Sonnet 4.5 — a reminder of the blistering pace of frontier model development.’
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/google-launches-gemini-3-with-new-coding-app-and-record-benchmark-scores/

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has come out of retirement to start his own AI company, “Project Prometheus.”
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/17/jeff-bezos-reportedly-returns-to-the-trenches-as-co-ceo-of-new-ai-startup-project-prometheus/

Famed AI researcher and critical voice Yann LeCun has quit Facebook to form his own company. This essay argues that his recent fame is undeserved and that he has repeatedly claimed other peoples’ ideas as his own.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-false-glorification-of-yann-lecun

After X started listing on user profiles the countries where users were located, it turned out that many high-profile, right-wing accounts with large fan bases in the U.S. and Europe were actually run by people in Africa and India. As I predicted years ago, verification of social media user identities will become crucial.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-influencers-accidentally-unmasked-as-foreign-actors/
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/elon-musks-account-based-in-feature-has-already-improved-x/

Years ago, I predicted that humanoid robots would be able to move their bodies in “unnatural ways.” The Unitree G1 robot proves I was right.
https://youtube.com/shorts/8n21aqnwPgg?si=wNzHVah-0Qdx5lK5

The Unitree G1 can also be teleoperated by a human. Even if autonomous, intelligent androids are never created for some reason, androids (and other robots) remotely controlled by humans definitely will be. This will have a major impact on the economy and on demographics since it will let manual labor work be outsourced.
https://youtu.be/24h4FTH7plY?si=rgRZT3pn2a47rioZ

Chinese electric car maker XPeng unveiled a new android called “Iron” that has an almost perfect human walking gait.
https://youtu.be/jPT92iKb9pg?si=OqC7xheG3tpZxh0p

A Russian company also unveiled a humanoid robot called “AIDOL.” It fell on its face shortly after walking onstage.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15286075/russia-humanoid-AI-robot-collapse-stage-elon-musk.html

Waymo has a strong lead in the U.S. autonomous taxi sector and is expanding to more cities.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/20/waymo-enters-3-more-cities-minneapolis-new-orleans-and-tampa/

China’s budding electronic air taxi sector is hamstrung by aircraft range limitations.
‘The biggest challenge for developing eVTOL aircraft is maintaining longer flights and overcoming battery capacity limitations, said Guo Liming, co-founder of Shenzhen-based Skyevtol, whose single-seat manned eVTOL aircraft, priced at around $100,000, can only fly 20 to 30 minutes before it must be charged.’
https://apnews.com/article/china-flying-cars-drones-evtol-airspace-72e7eb6883bd0b865a05cbb041d505fb

Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn space rocket landed itself after launch for the first time. Only Elon Musk’s rockets have achieved the feat before.
https://youtu.be/pviGlY1PiHQ?si=S764KQNbMrXjmPkP

America’s GPS network was the first of its kind, but for that reason, uses the oldest technology. Europe and China have more recently built counterparts that are more accurate and jam-resistant. The U.S. military will soon fix this by launching improved GPS satellites to replace the old ones.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/10/29/america-is-upgrading-gps-to-catch-up-with-rivals

In Council Bluffs in 1977, several unrelated witnesses saw a strange object fall from the sky. At the “crash site,” they found a large blob of molten steel. No one has come up with a believable explanation for the event.
https://www.thehistoricalsociety.org/h/ufo.html

A new UFO documentary has been released that features interviews with very high-ranking government officials.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/the-age-of-disclosure.html

A person’s facial features provide clues to their future earnings and reliability as employees.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/06/should-facial-analysis-help-determine-whom-companies-hire

Genes have been found that influence what kinds of academic subjects people are interested in.
‘By examining genetic clustering across specializations, we uncovered two key dimensions: technical versus social and practical versus abstract.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02391-z

Each human might share 99.9% of their DNA with any other random human, but that 0.1% of difference still translates into large biological differences. The “99.9% the same” figure has been misused over the years to support false claims like “race does not exist.”
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/are-human-populations-999-identical

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What the future DIDN’T hold – Analysis of a failure

[Written with the help of GPT-5]

In August 2005, the Australian newspaper The Age published an article titled “What the future holds,” (https://www.theage.com.au/national/what-the-future-holds-20050803-ge0mk3.html) which tried to predict the state of automotive technology and consumer habits twenty years into the future. Looking ahead to 2025, the article predicted dramatic shifts in vehicle propulsion, engineering, consumer expectations, and the driving experience itself. The tone was confident and occasionally utopian, assuming that rapid technological innovation — particularly in fuel efficiency, materials science, and automation — would fundamentally reshape the automobile.

Though the article first went to pains to highlight the uncertainty of forecasting the future, it went back on that sentiment by declaring that the sentiments of five experts aligned to such an extent that “a surprisingly clear picture of 2025 emerges.” With hindsight, it’s now clear what a mistake that was. While some predictions were close, most failed, either by overestimating the pace or misjudging the direction of technological development or by misreading consumer preferences and market forces. The following analysis evaluates each of the article’s major claims, which were confidently described as “sure-fire predictions for 2025.”

1. Diesels will account for half of all new vehicles sold.

Wrong. Diesel vehicles account for only about 33% of all new, light vehicles sold in Australia. Furthermore, the segment’s share of new sales looks to be slowly shrinking over time.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/08/07/electric-vehicle-sales-in-australia-new-zealand-subdued/

2. CVT transmissions will outnumber manuals and automatics combined.

Almost certainly wrong. Among the top ten passenger vehicles sold new in Australia last year, only two (the Toyota Corolla and RAV-4) had continuously variable transmissions. The other eight most popular models had traditional manual or automatic transmissions.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/australian-new-car-sales-in-2024-december/

3. Cars will be 30 per cent lighter and physically smaller on average.

Wrong. The average new Australian passenger vehicle is bigger and heavier now than in 2005, and most of them are SUVs or pickup trucks (“utes”). Additionally, the most popular sedan sold in Australia, the Toyota Corolla, swelled from 2,530 to 2,955 lbs over the last 20 years. Generally speaking, car models have crept upward in weight since 2005.
https://autotalk.com.au/industry-news/rise-rise-australias-emissions-vehicle-weight
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australians-love-heavy-cars-why-is-that-a-problem/ng94l9gsq

4. Average fuel consumption will be down 50 per cent per vehicle.

Wrong. The average fuel consumption of Australian passenger vehicles hit a lowpoint in 2014, but rose until at least 2018 thanks to the increased popularity of gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. The government only instituted fuel efficiency requirements in 2024. Post-2018 data are hard to find, but no technological breakthroughs in car engines or hybrid gas-electric engines have happened since 2005 that have doubled fuel efficiency. Returning to the example of the Toyota Corolla, the 2005 model got 26/35 mpg (city/highway driving) and the 2025 model gets 32/41 mpg.
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d0bd25_9527cdcb01a84440a53308b3b5624320.pdf
https://www.ravim.com.au/fuel-efficiency-still-lagging/

5. Luxury cars will offer light-refracting, colour-changing paint.

Wrong. In 2022, BMW unveiled a concept vehicle called the “IX Flow” that could change the colors and patterns of its body thanks to having an e-ink skin, but the car never went into production.

6. Visual advertising will permeate the cabin and outer skin of cars.

Wrong (mercifully). To be fair, car drivers and passengers in Australia and everywhere else are still permeated with ads while in their vehicles, but from the smartphones they use while riding.

7. Autopilot will still be 20 years off (thankfully).

Probably right. The article defines “autopilot” as a car feature that “takes over driving completely,” so it’s fair to assume they envision it being able to drive safely and efficiently in every circumstance where a human could, not just on an orderly highway with predictable traffic. That said, cars with true “autopilot” technology don’t yet exist, though Tesla just introduced the “Full Self-Driving” car option in Australia last year. I think about 20 more years is a reasonable amount of time required to develop truly autonomous cars.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-24/tesla-self-driving-technology-rules-differ-around-australia/105808104

8. We’ll still be complaining about congestion and fuel prices.

Probably right, though where in the world do people living in any metro area NOT complain about traffic congestion and fuel prices? I couldn’t find enough good data to definitely assess this prediction, but the 2024 INRIX Traffic Scorecard ranked Brisbane as having the tenth worst traffic of any city in the world. Melbourne, Sydney and Perth were 21st, 45th, and 103rd, respectively. The Scorecard assessed 945 cities, and the fact that a country with as small a population as Australia’s was consistently high on the list speaks to a problem with urban traffic congestion.

According to the creatively titled “Report on the Australian petroleum market” from June 2024, the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline (petrol) was about 180 cents per litre in 2005 and was about 195 cents in mid-2024. Given the marginally higher price and the proliferation of gas-guzzling large passenger vehicles, it’s fair to assume Australians are complaining about gas prices about as much now as they were in 2005. https://inrix.com/scorecard/#city-ranking-list
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/08/brisbane-traffic-congestion-ranked-10th-worst-in-world-but-experts-question-black-box-analysis
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/petrol-quarterly-report-june24.pdf

9. Road safety measures will be education-based and constructive, not punitive.

Wrong. Googling “Australia driving penalties” reveals the country’s state governments still rely on traditional measures like monetary fines and license suspensions to enforce compliance with road safety laws.

10. Some car parts will be assembled atom by atom using nanotechnology.

Wrong. The techniques remain too expensive and finicky to use outside of the lab.

Encapsulating the article’s failure is the fact that one of its experts was an executive at “Holden,” a major Australian car company, and it described a futuristic Holden car from 2025. The company went bankrupt and stopped making cars in 2017. The predictions made no allowance for such structural collapse, they assumed continuity: that carmakers would remain stable; that the business of building cars in Australia would carry on.

The 2025 predictions also conspicuously omit mention of electric cars. According to the latest data from the Electric Vehicle Council (EVC), they accounted for 12.1% of all new-car sales in the first half of 2025, up from 9–10% in 2024.

Instead of lightweight, atom-assembled sedans roaming quiet streets, Australia’s roads in 2025 are filled with heavy SUVs, pickups, and a growing number of electric vehicles — the tastes and technologies that the 2005 piece overlooked. Meanwhile, the local industry, once personified by Holden, has collapsed, undercutting the assumption of continuity and industrial stability.

Taken together, these failures — in technology forecasting, in market predictions, in industry stability — reveal a broader truth: even respected publications and analysts can be spectacularly wrong about the future. As we see, the reality is shaped not just by incremental progress (slightly better engines, modest paint-tech experiments), but by sweeping transformation: electrification, market collapse, and changing tastes.

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Interesting articles, October 2025

IT’S OVER (for now): Israel and Hamas have signed a peace treaty and ended the Gaza War.
https://www.cfr.org/article/guide-trumps-twenty-point-gaza-peace-deal

Russia’s 2025 summer offensive has ended. It gained a small amount of Ukrainian territory at very high cost in lives and equipment, and did not change the overall trajectory of the war.

‘According to Jompy’s analysis of prewar depot inventories versus what has been taken out for repair and deployment, Russia has recovered and returned to service 4,800 tanks out of an estimated 7,342 kept in storage before the war.’
https://united24media.com/latest-news/from-7342-to-92-satellite-analysis-shows-russias-depot-armor-is-nearly-spent-12298

Russia is increasingly refurbishing old T-72A tanks to make up for battlefield losses.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-bets-on-refurbishing-800-aging-t-72-tanks-to-replace-huge-battlefield-losses-12409

Leaked documents show Russia is planning to rebuild its tank force after the end of the Ukraine War by making more T-90s and upgrading existing T-72s to a higher standard than current. Conspicuously absent is any mention of building more T-14 Armatas, which are Russia’s most advanced tanks. High costs and/or a lack of faith in the latter probably explain this.
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/leaked-documents-reveal-russias-secret-10-year-plan-to-rebuild-its-tank-army/

Making Frankenstein tanks is actually a Russian tradition stretching back to 1941.
https://youtu.be/dX-GvcorWDU?si=m7t3E-adJ1UR-0A7

A lack of aircraft has reduced Myanmar’s air force to using paragliders as bombers. The pilots either manually drop their bombs or use some simple release mechanism.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge2l1xj2zdo

In 1741, 3,500 troops from the Thirteen Colonies helped the British attack Spanish colonies in Colombia and Cuba. The campaign was a huge failure due to poor planning and tropical diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooch%27s_American_Regiment

The U.S. military has been ratcheting up the pressure against Venezuela’s government. The official U.S. government stance is that the current government is illegitimate due to fraud at the last elections, and that it is intertwined with the international drug trade.

Eduard Dietl was such a Nazi fanatic that he forbade his troops from fraternizing with Norwegian women because he thought they would corrupt the German “race.”
https://youtu.be/PjIfWM1c-ck?si=JwmDMBvkLI4famne

The U.S. military had a secret cloud seeding program during the Vietnam War. It was meant to increase rainfall over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, slowing the flow of enemy troops and supplies south. It’s unclear if it worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye

Every kid who learns a little about the Civil War ends up asking why the troops didn’t use lever-action Wild West rifles instead of the clunky muskets they actually did. There were actually good reasons for what we really did.
https://youtu.be/W2Qp2ETe1gc?si=h1V_65fw3pFP6c_J

Here’s a prediction from 13 months ago. A recession hasn’t started, the Federal Funds Rate is 4.1%, and the Fed hasn’t resorted to QE purchases. Again and again, I’m struck by how useless predictions are from “experts” in finance and economics.

‘”The Fed hiked rates into such a huge, unprecedented debt complex … That’s why I say I’m looking for a crash that we haven’t seen since 1929.”

A recession could occur as soon as this year, forcing the Fed to cut rates aggressively from the current level of 4.75%-5%, and eventually pushing the central bank back to quantitative easing (QE), or bond buying – a process that generally occurs amid unsettled markets and aims to bolster monetary policy when rates are near zero.’
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/clock-is-ticking-us-recession-return-feds-qe-says-black-swan-fund-2024-09-27/

Concern is growing that the “AI” sector is in a bubble.

Nvidia is worth $5 trillion, making it the most valuable company on Earth.
https://apnews.com/article/nvidia-trillion-ai-apple-huang-trump-xi-c9bbf5cfa017dadaf248a4d197763cb9

Andrej Karpathy gave a recent interview that has been making waves. Note he still believes AGIs will ultimately take over the world and render humans obsolete, he only disagrees with the optimistic timelines common in the Silicon Valley crowd.
https://youtu.be/lXUZvyajciY?si=nGkyWmSX9m0MYTO_

‘Note that an extremely small amount of motivation wouldn’t necessarily stop the AI from (e.g.) boiling the oceans and destroying the biosphere while keeping humans alive in a shelter (or potentially scanning their brains and uploading them, especially if they would consent or would consent on reflection). Preserving earth (as in, not causing catastrophic environmental damage due to industrial expansion) is more expensive than keeping physical humans alive which is more expensive than only keeping humans alive as uploads. Preserving earth still seems like it would probably cost less than one billionth of resources by default. Keeping humans alive as just uploads might cost much less, e.g. more like one trillionth of resources (and less than this is plausible depending on the details of industrial expansion).’
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4fqwBmmqi2ZGn9o7j/notes-on-fatalities-from-ai-takeover

Remarkably, the Federal Reserve has published an analysis of the economic effects of a technological singularity.
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0624

The late Suzanne Somers’ husband has created a digital clone of her that he interacts with. He said Ray Kurzweil inspired the project.
https://people.com/alan-hamel-suzanne-somers-ai-project-exclusive-11832986

Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die?
‘The main limitation of this testing, Ahmad said, is that he can only verify the accuracy of his models if patients survive and can later confirm that the model made the right choice.’
https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/10/should-an-ai-copy-of-you-help-decide-if-you-live-or-die/

‘Fig. 2 shows the development we consider likely. The current 1st generation eTrucks have replaced the diesel motor with the electric one and the fuel tank with the battery. The 2nd generation will use multiple small electric motors closer to the wheels to eliminate a lot of weight currently taken for granted in diesel powertrains, such as from the driveshaft, gearbox, and differential14,25. This becomes possible because electric motors are tiny compared to combustion engines with the same power, need no exhaust system, and dissipate about twenty times less heat. A (fixed or two-speed) gearbox can reduce the weight of the electric motor further25. The 3rd generation is expected to use structural batteries26,27,28, which creates space, and reduces cost and weight.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44333-025-00029-5

‘The NdFeB magnet was invented in 1983 by John Croat of GM and Masato Sagawa of Sumitomo simultaneously and independently when each of them announced the same discovery at a conference in Pittsburgh.’
https://www.nanocrystalmagnetics.us/our-novel-technology

Elon Musk has launched a competitor to Wikipedia.
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-wikipedia-grok-grokipedia-4dab7c6ebb16cc7718b231adae4aac95

The U.S. could have put the first satellite into orbit a year before the Soviets were it not for bureaucratic meddling. Werner Von Braun proposed repurposing a nuclear missile to deliver a peaceful satellite into orbit, but a committee rejected the idea.

After Sputnik and the failure of the civilian “Vanguard” missile that had been holding everything up, the U.S. decided to do what Von Braun originally suggested, and modified nuclear missiles were our first civilian space rockets.
https://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum34/HTML/000101.html

The Soviet rocket that was to take cosmonauts to the Moon actually had more advanced, more efficient engines than their U.S. counterparts.
https://youtu.be/1vPdSK4OcNU?si=osL6U8-JpMobRROz

Because it had less money, the Soviet Lunar program developed simpler, cheaper, but less dangerous space technology for their Moon mission. The Soviets were more gutsy but also likelier to tragically fail.
https://youtu.be/XHVhREau0-s?si=W99Q-nIyH98lSZfh

An analysis of old photos taken by space telescopes before Sputnik was launched found anomalous flashes of light, which today are common thanks to shiny satellites briefly reflecting sunlight at Earth’s surface. But before 1957, they couldn’t have been caused by our satellites since we had none.

The objects apparently showed an interest in our nuclear tests, and some of the flashes happened at the same time that people on the ground saw UFOs or detected them on radar. We know of no natural phenomena that could cause such flashes.
https://www.su.se/english/news/unexpected-patterns-in-historical-astronomical-observations-1.855042

Apparently without realizing it, Jeff Bezos predicts the rise of a Dyson swarm.
‘Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos predicted on Friday gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years and that continuously available solar energy meant they would eventually outperform those based on Earth.’
https://nypost.com/2025/10/03/business/jeff-bezos-expects-data-centers-will-be-built-in-space-in-10-to-20-years/

This was very fascinating, though you won’t understand most of it unless you remember AP Biology. Two points:

1. A bottleneck to the emergence of complex life in the universe is endosymbiosus– the permanent absorption of mitochondria into cells. If we replayed the history of Earthly evolution, it might not happened.

2. The disadvantage of having two sexes is you can’t breed with half of the population. Arguably, it is better to be hermaphroditic or to have many sexes, like some species of fungi.
https://youtu.be/0GMWxuYuxJI?si=TbxYXgiLFcyo6R0O

Bill Gates has finally come around to my position on global warming.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate

‘Scientists use human skin cells to create functional eggs, opening a door to new infertility treatments’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/science/human-skin-cells-egg-infertility

‘About 60,000 children have avoided food allergies since 2015, including 40,000 children who otherwise would have developed peanut allergies.’
https://apnews.com/article/peanut-allergy-children-infants-anaphylaxis-9a6df6377a622d05e47c340c5a9cffc8

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Thoughts on panspermia and the aliens AGIs will create

[Written with the help of GPT-4]

“Panspermia” is the hypothesis that organic life originated elsewhere in the universe and was brought to Earth either accidentally by a meteor or deliberately by intelligent aliens. While it might be true, there’s no evidence to support it, and it’s most likely life originated here. Once our spacefaring and genetic engineering technology improves, we will be able to make panspermia a reality by seeding other celestial bodies with life forms designed to thrive there. 

Why do that? It could let us “terraform” other planets and moons–a process of gradual transformation of an environment to match Earthly conditions. For example, if we found a planet whose atmosphere contained too little oxygen and too much carbon dioxide for humans to breathe, we could introduce plants and bacteria that consumed carbon dioxide and excreted oxygen as part of their metabolisms. The atmosphere’s composition would eventually shift as intended. 

Will we ever terraform another planet or moon? No…WE…won’t since we humans won’t be in charge of the space program by the time the option to do this becomes available. However, the AGIs and/or posthumans who will be in charge might.

Being rational agents, they won’t seed other planets and moons with life just for its own sake, as some starry-eyed sci-fi novelists think we should do. They will only do so if it serves a higher purpose that benefits them. (Additionally, I hope that advanced ethics go hand-in-hand with advanced intelligence, and they think twice about manufacturing ecosystems where none existed before just so countless animals will arise only to suffer and die, without any ultimate purpose.)  

What purpose could organic life in other star systems serve? Biological intelligences could serve as “backups” for their AGI masters. Machines are vulnerable to hazards that biological organisms are not, like computer viruses and electromagnetic pulses. Keeping biological intelligences around would increase the “slack” and resiliency of civilization since they could help or rebuild the machines if something laid the latter low. 

Notice I used “biological intelligences” and not “humans” in the last paragraph. Even if AGIs found the need for such a niche, it’s unlikely they’d use humans to fill it. For one, we’re not properly evolved to live on other planets. Even a small difference in gravity would wreak havoc on our health. Second, humans are not the pinnacle of complex organic life. There are ways to make life forms that are smarter, stronger, faster, more obedient, and more efficient than we are. Given the chance to engineer servants from genetic scratch, doubtless AGIs will make creations with no link to Homo sapiens. Third, humans will probably be more trouble than we’re worth given our sense of lost greatness and resentment towards the AGIs that surpassed us. Why would AGIs want to spread that attitude across the cosmos when they could instead make wholly new intelligent species that have no historical or cultural baggage and only express gratitude for being brought into existence? 

Intelligent life forms are only useful as backups if they can survive without AGI help and can survive at least some of the disasters that could wipe out AGIs. If all of the faithful humanoids are living on a space station, the same EMP that disables all the AGIs will also destroy the electronic systems in the station, ultimately killing the humanoids. Therefore, in every star system where there is an AGI presence, there must be a planet or moon where the humanoids live in the midst of a self-sustaining, closed ecosystem. This requirement necessitates terraforming. 

Imagine a colony in a distant star system, 10,000 years from now. The most important aspect of the colony would be a Dyson Swarm that enshrouded most of the star, harvesting nearly all of its energy. Each component of the Swarm would be a large satellite. A tiny hole would be kept open in the Swarm so light could strike the surface of a planet, roughly the size of Earth. The planet would teem with millions of species of organic life forms, engineered to thrive in the planet’s conditions and to function together. Any resemblances to Earthly life would be coincidental and the result of designing life forms to function best under similar external constraints. 

The ecosystem would exist solely to keep the planet naturally habitable for a species of  biological intelligences. Depending on what is found to thrive best on that specific planet, they may or may not be humanoid or may be bigger or smaller than humans. For sure, they will be at least as good as we are at understanding technology, and they will be more loyal and obedient to authority than we are. 

To these life forms, the understanding that they were created by machines to serve machines will come naturally and be accepted without resentment. They will be more acquainted with how to survive catastrophes and will know the function if one day the lights go out and big chunks of the Swarm start falling out of the sky. 

Will every star system have a planet (or moon) full of organic backups? Probably not, since there are many systems amenable to Dyson Swarm construction while also being hostile to organic life. For example, there are star systems that lack rocky planets, or that have rocky planets that are not the right distance from their stars. Given the limitations of organic chemistry, no kind of complex, intelligent animal could live on a hot planet like Mercury without constant technological support. 

If panspermia ever becomes reality, it may not be the work of dreamers scattering Earth’s seeds across the stars, but of machines ensuring their own continuity. Organic life, then, will not be humanity’s legacy but civilization’s survival mechanism. 

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Interesting articles, September 2025

Israel retaliated against a Hamas terrorist attack in Jerusalem with an attempted assassination of several Hamas leaders in neutral Qatar. The operation went ahead without American permission and involved Israeli stealth fighter jets that intruded into Saudi airspace and fired long-range missiles. The brazen nature of the attack is unprecedented for the Gulf States.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/09/world-news/israel-targets-hamas-leaders-with-strike-on-qatars-capital/

’20 years later, Israelis ask if the Gaza exit backfired — and if it’s time to go back’
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/19/g-s1-89192/israel-gaza-withdrawal-2005

‘A 2019 mission in North Korea, which intended to have Navy SEALs plant an electronic device to intercept communications of the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, resulted in an unsuccessful operation that left unarmed North Koreans dead…’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/politics/north-korea-navy-seal-mission-nyt

The U.S. Secret Service discovered and disabled an electronic weapon in New York that could have disabled all cell phone service in the city. It was probably emplaced to disrupt a major U.N. summit.
https://apnews.com/article/unga-threat-telecom-service-sim-93734f76578bc9ca22d93a8e91fd9c76

‘Mechanical accuracy is a measure of the accuracy of the rifle itself, irrespective of human or environmental factors. Technically, it could be argued that this should be called mechanical precision, not accuracy, since the primary metric is group size, rather than proximity to the point of aim. But, mechanical accuracy is nevertheless the prevailing term.

You can think of it like this: if you were to bolt your rifle to a concrete table, rendering it utterly incapable of moving in any way, how accurate would it be? With the rifle incapable of moving, human factors like muscle tremors or an improper trigger press become irrelevant; all that matters is the mechanics of the rifle itself. Any inaccuracies will come from imperfections in materials or construction, rather than shooting technique.

…Practical accuracy is a more holistic concept; it considers not only the mechanical accuracy of the rifle but also how the rifle lends itself to effective use by a person in normal conditions. Simply put, practical accuracy is the measure of how accurate an average user is capable of being in normal field conditions.

Practical accuracy takes into account factors like ergonomics, trigger weight, recoil, and even external ballistic factors like velocity and ballistic coefficient, since all else being equal, it is easier to land a hit with a rifle that resists wind and drop better than one that does not.’
https://blog.primaryarms.com/guide/mechanical-vs-practical-accuracy/

Rail guns are weapons built to fully showcase their mechanical accuracy. “Ergonomics” are nonexistent.
https://youtu.be/b4idDEwnLFQ?si=FJiI9v5WAZKFu13h

By contrast, a weapon with low mechanical accuracy but high practical accuracy is the German G36 rifle, with modifications to make it more comfortable and instinctive for the hands to hold. It’s lightweight, ambidextrous and has no sharp edges. However, the rifle is known for losing accuracy as more bullets are shot through it and its barrel heats up.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2010/10/28/the-g36k-idz/

The rifle that killed Charlie Kirk was over 57 years old. Guns last forever if you take care of them.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kirk-assassins-alleged-gun-was-powerful-vintage-hard-trace-rcna231334

The future is now: Israel is the first country to field tactical laser weapons on the battlefield. They are designed to shoot down drones, missiles and mortars, which means they can track fast-moving targets, quickly aim at them, and fire accurately.

Though international law forbids it, there’s no technical reason why these same weapons couldn’t be used against ground targets. The smallest and weakest of Israel’s new laser weapons, “Lite Beam”, can fit in the back of a pickup truck and is 10 kilowatts. A direct hit from a laser that strong would cause a human to erupt in flames. The larger “Iron Beam M” has a 50 kilowatt laser, and a direct hit from its beam might cause instant explosive damage to a human body in addition to being lit on fire.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-867735

By modern aircraft standards, the B-29 is underpowered, hard to fly, and dangerous.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250918-the-airliner-pilot-who-gets-to-fly-world-war-twos-biggest-bomber

‘$2,200,000,000 solar farm in California desert switched off after not serving its purpose’
https://www.unilad.com/technology/news/ivanpah-solar-power-facility-switch-off-california-828436-20250927

China’s electric cars are better and cheaper than anything the West has to offer.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/15/the-brutal-fight-to-dominate-chinese-carmaking

‘A microdot is text or an image substantially reduced in size to prevent detection by unintended recipients. Microdots are normally circular and around 1 millimetre (0.039 in) in diameter but can be made into different shapes and sizes and made from various materials such as polyester or metal.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdot

Meta unveiled a new and improved line of augmented reality glasses. They’re very good, and it’s heartening to see the technology still developing, but they remain not good enough or cheap enough for mass adoption.

I’m glad I didn’t jump on the 3D printing bandwagon in 2015 like these guys did.

The Chinese “Unitree G1” robot has an incredible ability to keep its balance even when shoved by humans.
https://youtu.be/bPSLMX_V38E?si=NucFPf_Wciukhw9w

Another month, another record-breaking image generator. This one was released by Google as is named “Nano banana.”
https://www.howtogeek.com/i-experimented-with-googles-gemini-nano-banana-ai-and-the-results-were-wild/

Here’s an economics paper called “We Wont be Missed: Work and Growth in the Era of AGI.” My notes on its key claims:
-Human labor will eventually become worthless.
-Economic, scientific, and technological growth will untether itself from the size and skill of the human population.
-Intelligent machines will become so smart and numerous that their workforce will be orders of magnitude more productive than the human workforce could be.
-Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage doesn’t imply that humans will forever have employment niches in the intelligent machine era.
-People who own data centers and microchip factories will get incredibly rich, not just in absolute terms but relative to the rest of the human population.
-Lack of work will challenge humanity’s sense of purpose.
https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f227505.pdf

Customized AI-generated content will fracture global culture and eliminate the influence of gatekeepers like Hollywood studio executives.
‘AI will make isolation dramatically easier. Right now, if you want to shield your kids from mainstream culture, you have to constantly fight an uphill battle. You need to review books, movies, and websites. You need to find alternative curricula for every subject. You need enough like-minded families nearby to form a community. It’s exhausting work that requires constant vigilance and often means accepting lower-quality substitutes for mainstream options. But AI changes all of this. Want a library of ten thousand novels that share your values but are actually as engaging as secular bestsellers? Your AI can write them. Want a tutor who can teach calculus at MIT level while never mentioning evolution? Done. Want to monitor everything your kid sees online and get alerts about concerning patterns? No problem. The technical barriers to creating a totalizing information environment will disappear.’
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8aRFB2qGyjQGJkEdZ/christian-homeschoolers-in-the-year-3000

AI radiologists aren’t as good as advertised (yet).
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algorithm-will-see-you-now/

Within hours of American right-wing celebrity Charlie Kirk’s assassination, AI-generated books about the crime were for sale on Amazon.com.
https://san.com/cc/apparent-ai-generated-books-on-charlie-kirks-assassination-flood-amazon/

‘AI Chatbots Might Already Be Better Than Humans at Debating’
https://reason.com/2025/09/15/chatbots-win-the-debate/

‘Gemini achieves gold-medal level at the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals’
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-achieves-gold-level-performance-at-the-international-collegiate-programming-contest-world-finals/

‘Nvidia’s $100bn bet on OpenAI raises more questions than it answers’ :
Either the big tech companies will invent artificial general intelligence within a few years and start making trillions of dollars, or they will fail and the biggest stock bubble since 2008 will pop.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/22/nvidias-100bn-bet-on-openai-raises-more-questions-than-it-answers

In the 1700s and 1800s, an industry arose in the U.S. dedicated to the collection of ice from bodies of freshwater in the winter, its storage in insulated underground warehouses, and its sale to consumers during the hot months of the year. After mechanical refrigeration was invented and ice could be produced at will, the natural ice industry waged a public campaign against “artificial ice.” It included paying doctors to make dubious claims about the safety of consuming artificial ice and the rise of voluntary labelling by natural ice vendors.
https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-war-on-lab-grown-ice

The Perseverance rover found the best evidence that microbial life was at least present on Mars in the past.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/did-nasas-perseverance-rover-actually-find-evidence-of-life-on-mars-we-need-to-haul-its-samples-home-to-find-out-scientists-say

‘Unlike air conditioning, a solar shade for the elite has the advantage that it will also cool off non-elite regions of the Earth, at least to a small extent. The constellation of sun shades for NYC could move to provide relief to equatorial cities in the spring and fall and then be repositioned to provide shade to Southern Hemisphere cities during their summer.’
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2025/08/31/could-we-shade-the-earth-or-at-least-some-cities-now-that-starship-is-working/

After its curious and embarrassing inability to respond to last year’s mysterious mass drone sightings across the Eastern U.S., the military has created a rapid reaction force for future incidents.
https://www.twz.com/air/new-quick-reaction-force-will-counter-military-base-drone-incursions

Reminds me of how the xenomorph lifecycle can vary depending on the circumstances: ‘A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species. These queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) are sexual parasites that rely on the sperm of males of the ant species Messor structor. They use this sperm to breed an army of robust worker ants, which are hybrids of the two species.

Data now show that, in the absence of nearby M. structor colonies, M. ibericus queens can clone male M. structor ants by laying eggs that contain only M. structor DNA in their nuclei.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02807-0

A man was convicted of an unsolved 1987 rape based solely on DNA evidence even though he has a twin brother. This was thanks to a technique called “somatic mutation analysis,” which can spot minute genetic differences between twins, which start arising once they’re born.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/22/twins-dna-test-cold-case/

53 genes have been discovered that control mathematical ability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03237-0

A tribe of people living in arid northern Kenya has genetically evolved to function on less water than everyone else.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-genetic-turkana-people-harsh-climate.html

President Trump made an unscientific declaration that Tylenol consumption during pregnancy can cause autism in unborn children.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/health/trump-autism-announcement-cause-tylenol

During a meeting in Beijing, Putin and Xi Jinping were overheard discussing the prospect of radical life extension this century.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15061901/Hot-mic-catches-Putin-discussing-achieve-immortality-President-Xi-Kim-Jong-Un.html

At the same summit, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had an assistant sanitize a chair he had been sitting in to prevent anyone from collecting his DNA samples from it.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/36555635/kim-jong-un-dna-destroyed-putin/

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Beyond Capitalism, Communism and Democracy: The Convergence of AGI-Governed Societies

[Written with the help of GPT-4]

I’ve done more thinking about the consequences artificial general intelligence (AGI) domination of the world will have for human-created institutions. In a recent blog post of mine, “The end of Homo sapiens history and the first posthuman”, I discussed how intelligent machines would lack emotional attachments to things we consider sacred, like languages, religions, and national borders, and would therefore be open to abandoning them or replacing them with something better. In this essay, I’d like to focus on how that will shape future political and economic systems in the AGI Era (aka “the Posthuman Era”).

The 20th century was defined by ideological competition, mostly along national faultlines. By midcentury, fascism and imperialism had been discredited, and by the end, so had communism. However, the widely held belief that “democracy” and “capitalism” proved themselves the best systems for organizing governments and economies, respectively, is a gross oversimplification. Among the “democratic” nations, there’s considerable variation in individual rights and the role of the state, and among “capitalist” nations, variations in economic freedom are just as great. The successes of the Asian Tigers and China pose the biggest challenge to the simplistic assumption that “democracy and capitalism are the best.”

Capitalism is best thought of as an optimization algorithm that leads to one, powerful firm dominating each niche of the economy. The model’s flaw is that the firms only have incentives to pursue their narrow, short-term self-interests, which, over time, will destroy the conditions that allowed the market to exist in the first place: Pure capitalism will give rise to things like monopolies that rip off their consumers and stop innovating their goods and services, and factories that emit so much pollution they gradually kill off the customers who buy their products.

The health and growth of the economy more broadly speaking depends on having a referee with a different set of incentives (ex – profit agnostic) from the private firms–the government. The ideological winner of the 20th century was actually the “mixed economy,” which is a system where capitalist markets exist within legal boundaries set by governments. The rules were in turn largely set by each country’s citizens, establishing a balance between economic competition and security that suited their culture. Even among democratic, capitalist nations today, vast diversity exists in governance, civil liberties, and economic organization. Scandinavia’s social democracies, the United States’ market-heavy liberalism, and Japan’s corporatist structures all exist under the broad heading of “capitalism.” Each is recognizably democratic, but the institutions, welfare provisions, and power balances differ significantly. This shows that human labels already obscure substantial variation. Humans will struggle even more to apply their familiar labels to the political and economic systems AGIs create in the future.

The results will not fit comfortably within familiar human-created categories like “capitalism,” “socialism,” or “democracy.” Humans have long relied on ideological frameworks to define themselves, but these frameworks are ultimately rooted in history, sentiment, and cultural identity. An AGI, by contrast, will approach governance as an optimization problem, unconstrained by emotional loyalty to existing systems. The outcome is likely to be the emergence of hybrid structures that mix and transcend traditional models, calibrated to human preferences in ways too complex for us to map back onto old labels.

One of the reasons AGI will transcend traditional systems is its superior ability to understand humans and their desires. Already, algorithms employed by large technology companies can build personality profiles from user interactions, predicting behavior and manipulating preferences with startling accuracy. These tools, while primitive compared to AGI, already surpass human intuition. An AGI would carry this to a new level, not only modeling individual preferences with unparalleled fidelity but also distinguishing between stated and revealed preferences. It would know what people actually want — often better than people know themselves. It will also be able to induce human demands for specific goods and services, and to preemptively ramp up their production, helping to create a new economic system.

This capacity allows AGI to optimize social and economic outcomes in ways that humans cannot. Instead of designing systems around political compromises or ideological commitments, AGI could dynamically adjust production, distribution, and governance to meet authentic needs. The economy that emerges from this process will not resemble capitalism or socialism as we understand them. It will be something new: an adaptive, preference-driven engine of allocation and governance.

Humans cling to institutions not only for their practical functions but also for their symbolic and emotional value. Constitutions, flags, currencies, work schedules, and elections are not just mechanisms but rituals that confer identity and continuity. An AGI will have no such attachments. It will evaluate institutions only by how well they serve defined goals. If an institution is inefficient, it will be discarded or redesigned without hesitation. In the hyper-competitive arena of international competition between AGI-controlled nations, the demonstrably failing political and economic systems present today in places like Cuba won’t exist.

National boundaries, currencies, property rights, and even work itself could all be reshaped or abolished under AGI-led optimization. For example, money might be replaced with dynamic credits tied to welfare indices rather than market exchange. Elections, rather than being periodic spectacles, might be replaced by continuous preference elicitation and adjustment. AGI will not preserve these systems for sentimental reasons.

This detachment is both strength and weakness. On the one hand, AGI can innovate institutions at machine speed, abandoning inefficient traditions without the inertia of human politics. On the other, humans derive meaning from continuity. Abrupt changes may generate alienation, resentment, and rebellion, even if outcomes are objectively improved. Americans, for example, might resist an AGI-designed system that resembles socialism, not because it fails them materially, but because their cultural upbringing equates socialism with un-American values. Legitimacy in human governance rests not only on material well-being but also on symbolic fidelity.

An AGI that truly understands human psychology will likely manage this by creating “soft landings.” It may preserve symbolic forms — elections, currencies, national holidays — even while radically altering their underlying mechanics. Just as modern fiat money no longer represents gold but still carries the familiar symbols of currency, AGI-designed institutions may be deeply transformed beneath the surface while outwardly resembling their predecessors.

One implication of AGI-led governance is convergence. For example, if the United States and China allowed AGIs to optimize their political and economic systems in a bilateral competition for supremacy, both would drift toward remarkably similar structures. Human biology, ecological limits, and resource constraints are the same everywhere. Optimization under these shared conditions will narrow the solution space. Just as airplanes from rival nations all end up resembling one another due to aerodynamic constraints, AGI-designed societies will converge on similar architectures. The U.S. and China could still exist in 200 years and have hundreds of millions of human citizens each, still believing in some notion of uniqueness and destiny, while actually functioning under the same political and economic systems, with AGIs making all the important decisions. Capitalism, communism, democracy, and authoritarianism would all be defeated without firing a shot. And in such a future, it wouldn’t matter if one side somehow defeated the other and gained global preeminence since their systems would be so similar.

If convergence is inevitable, then “victory” in ideological or geopolitical struggle becomes paradoxical. The winner does not impose its system on the world; instead, both sides evolve into a shared attractor state. Competing AGIs, far from escalating conflict, may find cooperation more rational, as wasteful duplication of effort undermines optimization. War for system dominance becomes obsolete when systems themselves collapse into sameness (and if wars did happen between AGIs, they’d be purely over resources). What remains are symbolic differences that persist for cultural reasons among human groups but no longer map onto material reality. This differences, too, will fade in relevance as humans lose their grip on the levers of power.

AGI-guided governance will not resemble capitalism, socialism, or democracy as we know them. It will be a hybrid, adaptive system that transcends human ideological categories. Free of sentimental attachment, AGI will dismantle institutions humans cling to for symbolic reasons, replacing them with mechanisms tuned to authentic human preferences. While this promises enormous efficiency and responsiveness, it also risks legitimacy crises, as people struggle to reconcile material improvement with the loss of familiar forms. Perhaps most strikingly, AGI-led systems across different nations are likely to converge on similar architectures, rendering today’s ideological conflicts moot. In such a future, competition between nations may persist, but it will be cultural.

The challenge will not be whether AGI can optimize governance and economics — it almost certainly will. The challenge will be whether humans can adapt their expectations, identities, and loyalties to a world where the categories they once fought wars over no longer exist.

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Interesting articles, August 2025

President Trump hosted a high-stakes conference aimed at securing a peace deal in Ukraine. So far, it has accomplished nothing.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-russia-ukraine-war-defend-american-troops-85704282576324a36567798e9cb741ec

In a likely slap in Trump’s face, Russia bombed a U.S.-owned factory in Ukraine.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/08/21/russia-largest-missile-attack-hits-us-factory-ukraine/

Ukraine used a small, unmanned aircraft carrier to deliver unmanned suicide drones to attack a Russian base in Crimea.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/uncrewed-boats-launch-fpv-drone-strike-on-key-russian-radars-located-on-crimeas-southern-tip

Cheap kamikaze drones are not perfect substitutes for artillery. Thanks to greater weight and velocity, artillery shells can punch through obstacles like nets, walls, and even thick concrete to reach their targets.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2025/08/6/7525056/

Peter Zeihan discusses new kinds of military drones that will be fielded in the new future.
https://youtu.be/Qv3arzsorCc?si=rgNWfxQzo1b0uyej

Russia’s “meat wave” battlefield tactics might be better if armed robot dogs replaced the sacrificial human infantrymen.
https://youtu.be/oPCSFKiCLj8?si=aR1Ur6nekjBMtai1

’20 years after its landmark withdrawal from Gaza, Israel is mired there’
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-settlements-disengagement-20th-anniversary-5db86a29bbbe2f41e5bb7059098fd450

An Israeli airstrike killed the prime minister of the rebel Yemeni Houthis along with several top government officials.
https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthis-israeli-strike-494d91b05e04a5dbaeda0205ef349a39

‘India shot down six Pakistani military aircraft in May, air force chief says’
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-shot-down-six-pakistani-military-aircraft-may-air-force-chief-says-2025-08-09

After 28 years, Russia has restored its Soviet-era nuclear battlecruiser to service.
https://www.twz.com/sea/russias-upgraded-nuclear-battlecruiser-back-at-sea-after-nearly-three-decades

Vietnam has built up the islands it controls in the disputed South China Sea.
https://www.newsweek.com/satellite-images-vietnam-artificial-islands-south-china-sea-2118629

After long delays and enormous anticipation, OpenAI released GPT-5, and it was a disappointment. Yes, it’s better than the previous GPT-4 model, but only iteratively so, and it’s not the revolutionary leap many people were expecting.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/08/08/openais-latest-step-towards-advanced-artificial-intelligence

GPT-5’s silly mistakes show it’s nowhere close to being truly intelligent.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/gpt-5-fake-presidents-states/

GPT-5 has an IQ of 148.

The amount of money being spent on AI and its associated infrastructure (mostly data centers and electricity) is staggering, and might indicate the sector is in a bubble.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/will-data-centers-crash-the-economy

It’s a profound statement, especially when you consider it is the White House’s official stance:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational technology that will define the future of economic growth, national security, and global competitiveness for decades to come.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/promoting-the-export-of-the-american-ai-technology-stack/

ChatGPT will be provided for free to the whole U.S. federal workforce.
https://openai.com/index/providing-chatgpt-to-the-entire-us-federal-workforce/

Microsoft has done an analysis that reveals which careers are most and least vulnerable to automation. The allegedly safe jobs mostly involve manual labor and pay little money. Even if machines don’t take all of our jobs, the ones that remain could be unsatisfying and worse than the jobs we used to have.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935

Five years ago, Elon Musk predicted AI would overtake humans in five years.

‘Musk added that the invaluable experience of working with different types of AI at Tesla has given him the confidence to say “that we’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans, and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.”’

Things have definitely gotten weird (perfect AI-generated deepfakes, chatbots describing themselves as Hitler, mass student use of AI to cheat on homework), but the rest of Musk’s prediction was too optimistic. Anyone who has used an LLM knows the latter are vastly smarter but also vastly dumber than humans.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/elon-musk-warns-ai-could-overtake-humanity-5-years-165776

Computer-generated “baby standup comedians” show how advanced video generation and text synthesis have become.
https://youtu.be/tocUTvTW5UM?si=qf5DYqcoEMCrb9r2

Here’s a wholly synthetic scene from a fake Godzilla movie that looks 99% genuine.
https://youtu.be/CaXRUi3HhVQ?si=YvgbK_RDyyIqx6fS

Unitree has debuted an incredible new robot: the A2 Stellar Explorer.
https://youtu.be/ve9USu7zpLU?si=EUW5hI5-MGmwFSOK

A company called “Figure” has built a robot called “Helix” that can fold laundry about as well as an elderly person.
https://youtu.be/FFp4jveDFb0?si=vwojCwa-BsX20QD9

Future aircraft will have more sensors in them to monitor different systems and components, and better electronic brains that interpret those data. This will lead to better proactive maintenance as the aircraft detect problems earlier and have a better grasp of which of their components are the most worn.

Maintenance and repair could be further improved through use of small robots that could climb into narrow internal spaces of the aircraft for inspections and fixes.

While this kind of technology will only make sense for expensive aircraft, as time passes, it will become economical for it to be used on things like boats and cars. Working on cars myself, it’s struck me how useful a spider-sized robot that could crawl into a vehicle’s crevices and send back a live video feed and electricity readings would be.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/digital-twins-in-cockpits-will-help-planes-look-after-themselves/21809110

There are advantages to replacing space suits with single-person, mini-space ships.
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/departments/coming-soon-shirtsleeve-evas/

Black holes could be used to produce energy more efficiently than any other method.
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/comments/17ll8a5/using_black_holes_as_a_source_of_energy/

‘Twice a day – every day of the year – meteorologists around the world launch weather balloons at the same time from roughly 900 locations around the globe. Those balloons often reach heights of 20 miles above Earth — or twice as high as planes typically fly.

Sensors beam data back down to Earth every few seconds as winds carry the balloons up to 125 miles away. These sensors help collect critical temperature, humidity, wind and atmospheric pressure measurements. Without this information, accurate weather forecasts beyond a few hours would be almost impossible.’
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/heres-why-meteorologists-launch-weather-balloons-every-day/877665

You can tell by the shapes of the clouds whether a cold front has overtaken a warm front, or vice versa.
https://www.internetgeography.net/national-5-geography/what-are-depressions/

Demand for fur-based clothing has sharply dropped worldwide as people have become more conscious of animal rights. In the future, biotechnology will let us synthesize and kind of animal product in labs, which will nearly eliminate demand for the real thing.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/421653/fur-farming-decline-animal-rights-mink-fixes

Here’s a fascinating interview with Lewis Bollard about animal welfare, the economics of industrial agriculture, and how future technologies could affect both.
https://youtu.be/kWcPg8t1kJ4?si=gcyPuCR7-k1Jy5qq

Here’s an interview with Noor Siddiqui about the future of reproductive rights and genetic technology. There’s a fascinating discussion near the end about the ethics and advantages of using artificial wombs to gestate humans.
https://youtu.be/Wzt02p14vZQ?si=FG16xM8DdV38NyOp

People with mutations to their LRP5 genes have denser, stronger bones than normal. I wonder if someday genetic engineering will make that mutation the standard for all humans.
https://youtube.com/shorts/S32IUzldLnQ?si=mJw0llKHLgbQ5z_5

Hair can actually keep you cooler.
‘Our results show that tightly curled hair provides the most effective protection for the scalp against solar radiation, while minimizing the need for sweat to offset heat gain.’
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120

Lithium might slow or even reverse Alzheimer’s and dementia in humans. However, because lithium is a naturally occurring element that can’t be patented, there’s no pharmaceutical industry interest in investigating. This is called a “market failure,” and it’s where the government is supposed to step in for the public good by using taxpayer money to fund the medical studies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02471-4

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Musings 10

Instead of discovering a grand theory of intelligence and using it to build the first AGI, I think we’ll stumble upon it through experimentation, and no one will have a detailed notion of how its mind works. The architecture of LLMs probably preclude them from ever achieving general intelligence, but LLMs themselves are smart enough to develop better kinds of machines. The physical infrastructure being built for LLMs today (data centers, power lines, power plants) will also be needed to support true AGIs after they’re created. As computation and hardware get cheaper and the LLMs get smarter, they’ll be able to run more and better experiments.

I think there will be a global network of intelligent beings in the future, each specialized for a different type of task (cognitive, physical, emotional, etc.), and each doubling as a sensor node that feeds data into the network, and that some central intelligence would allocate tasks within the network to the intelligent beings best suited to doing them. Think of it as something like a “Borg Collective” where some of the Collective’s members are pure AIs, some are augmented human brains floating in jars with wires going into them, and some are new life forms we can’t imagine.

For a time, some members of the network will be humans with varying degrees of augmentations. Such a setup would dovetail with other long-term trends, including the rise of personal assistant AIs that would come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of individual humans, and mass surveillance that would track the locations of all humans in real time. Once the skills of each human and the locations of each human are known, and once all humans are connected to the global network, it will become possible for a central intelligence to fluidly assign tasks to each human in a manner that makes maximally efficient use of the labor force. “Mechanical Turk,” which is a computer-based service where people get paid to do random tasks, gives a small clue to how things will be like. 

The network would find genuine uses for humans for years after the invention of AGI and advanced robots. Brush up on Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage and you’ll understand how weak, slow-witted humans like us could still fill many niches in the economic and social fabric of a future world where there are vastly smarter and faster machines. As machines take over jobs and as they become better at recommending enjoyable things for us to do, humans will invariably start asking machines for “career” advice. The machines will match humans to tasks that represent some balance of optimal skill utilization and worker satisfaction.

Unfortunately, I doubt our role would persist forever. Even if the organic composition of our brains gave us an advantage in some kinds of computation, eventually better, bioengineered brains would beat us in those niches as well, and we’d be at the mercy of other intelligences.

Dovetailing off of that last point, while humans are the only animals capable of intelligent thought, I think some other species’ brains have niche advantages over ours. Bat brains, for example, are suited for echolocation, and squirrel brains probably have better spatial memory than humans, or how else could one of them find the hundreds of nuts he buried months earlier? If it turns out that the organic substrate conveys advantages to minds that protect them from obsolescence from machines, and if science is used to create brains optimized for specific modes of thinking, then the human brain won’t be starting point for all of the latter. It will make sense to build some kinds of organic “processors” by starting with, say, a dog brain as the basis, and modifying it from there.

I’m unconcerned with predictions that the Earth will become uninhabitable in the far future due to things like the expansion of the Sun or the convergence of all the continents (“Pangea Ultima”). This isn’t because I think I’ll be dead by then; it’s because I believe we’ll have technological solutions to the problems. For example, as the Sun expands and its brightening light heats up Earth’s surface, we could deploy satellites between the two bodies to block out the excess sunlight, keeping Earth at a constant temperature. We could even very slowly widen the Earth’s orbit to keep it at a constant distance from the Sun’s surface as the latter expands. This wouldn’t be easy, but if we have a billion years to do it, it’s just an engineering project.

Once we have autonomous combat drones (in the form of planes, ships, tanks, infantry, etc.), a country’s maximum military potential won’t be capped by the size of its human population. Arbitrarily large numbers of robots could be built, and a country’s military strength would instead rest on its GDP, technology, and access to resources. Having a larger human population might actually be to a country’s military disadvantage since it would be a larger drain on its resources. The global power balance could shift in unexpected ways as a result.

Like anything else, robot servants will get dirty over time. The easiest way to deal with this will be to have them wear clothes that they’ll wash in regular laundry machines. Even if covered, their skin will also slowly get dirty, and the most obvious solution to that is to make them waterproof so they can bathe in standard bathrooms. And if some of them are built to be our companions, we’ll want them to be able to partake in meals with us even though they will lack digestive systems. The easiest way to deal with the masticated waste will be for them to spit it up into toilets afterward.

If you wanted to experience a perfect virtual reality replica of what part of the world was like in, say, 2020, it would be impossible due to insufficient data, and the inaccuracy would worsen the farther back in time you wanted to go. However, late this century, everything and everyone will be under surveillance, so it will be possible to use VR to piece together moments in time. Someone in 2100 could re-live a day in 2075 with perfect accuracy (or so close to perfect that a limited human mind couldn’t detect the inaccuracies). 

Imagine we built a Dyson Sphere or Swarm around our Sun, and structure was 1 AU in diameter. It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth, so sending a signal from one end of the Dyson structure to another could take up to 16 minutes and 40 seconds. 

If the Dyson structure is inhabited by intelligent machines spread out across it, then the tyranny of distance will impose communication lag problems on their civilization. This means that the machine civilization will not be a unitary consciousness; it will be many conscious entities distributed across the massive Dyson structure. 

Each entity would control a relatively small area over which lag times weren’t so bad that they would impose a burden on the ultra-high processing speeds each entity would be capable of supporting.