The U.S. working-age population would be shrinking right now if not for immigrants and the children of immigrants. This will continue until at least 2035.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/
East Asia will have to import 275m people between the ages of 15 and 64 by 2030 to keep its working age population stable.
http://econ.st/2jT5FYx
But will demand for immigrant workers slacken once we have robot workers? Ben Goertzel thinks “toddler-level AGI” will be invented by 2030, followed by the Singularity.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html
Skip the first 15 minutes. Greg Brockman believes deep learning isn’t close to hitting the limits of what it can do, and its capabilities will continue radically improving thanks to better, faster hardware. By the end of 2018, he thinks machines will be able to generate artificial audio and video (like imitations of human voices and totally fake video footage) that humans won’t be able to distinguish from reality. Within five years, he thinks a breakthrough will happen in robotics, making them much more capable and practical for use.
https://twimlai.com/twiml-talk-74-towards-artificial-general-intelligence-greg-brockman/
Google claims it can already convincingly fake human voices.
https://qz.com/1165775/googles-voice-generating-ai-is-now-indistinguishable-from-humans/
A timely counterpoint to bellicose declarations that “machines will never replace humans” and “human judgement will always be needed,” etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/washington-wreck-positive-train-control/548744/
Self-driving cars might offer people free taxi rides in the future, so long as passengers are willing to endure sales pitches from various corporate sponsors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/self-driving-cars-free-future/548945/
The typical American thinks his personal odds of losing work to machines are 30%, while everyone else’s odds average out to 49%.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/04/automation-in-everyday-life/#many-americans-expect-a-number-of-professions-to-be-dominated-by-machines-within-their-lifetimes-but-relatively-few-expect-their-own-jobs-or-professions-to-be-impacted
When asked individually, Americans say that they would not feel threatened by the discovery of non-intelligent aliens and it would not shake their religious beliefs, but they assume that would not be true for everyone else. ‘That may be because “most Americans tend to think, on any desirable trait or ability, that they’re better than the average person.”‘
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/04/how-will-humanity-react-to-alien-life-psychologists-have-some-predictions/
An article appeared on the front page of the NYT exposing a secret Pentagon program devoted to studying UFOs. It has evidence of UFOs doing impossible aerial maneuvers and anomalous physical materials recovered at UFO land/crash sites. As of the date of me writing this blog post, the Pentagon has not denied anything in the story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html
Videos leaked from that UFO program’s trove, showing a 2004 encounter between U.S. fighter planes and a strange object off the coast of California. The pilots could see it with their eyes and it also showed up on their visioning sensors.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-delonge-takes-alien-research-215651746.html\
Humans are genetically programmed to believe bad news over good news, and are likelier to remember bad things. In opinion polls, this expresses itself as overestimation of metrics like the crime rate, incidence of terrorism, and incidence of poor health.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42329014
Of course, sometimes the conventional wisdom that the world is getting worse is true: People with lower IQs and people who are overweight are breeding faster than everyone else.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21732803-it-does-however-no-longer-seem-favour-braininess-data-half-million
‘This may be the most powerful gene-manipulation toolkit that has yet been described, and you can expect to see a lot of work on it in the coming months as other groups give it a shakedown. ‘
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/08/crispr-the-latest-edition
The first two “gay genes” have been identified. By themselves, they don’t automatically make men gay, but they’re more common in gays.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2155810-what-do-the-new-gay-genes-tell-us-about-sexual-orientation/
The FDA will make it easier for companies to sell DNA testing kits directly to Americans.
https://gizmodo.com/the-fda-just-made-it-a-lot-easier-for-dna-health-tests-1820216695
The FDA has approved a new wearable medical device: The Kardiaband EKG, which can be attached to an Apple Watch to detect abnormal heart activity with high accuracy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5138101/FDA-approves-Apple-Watchs-medical-device-accessory.html
‘..So perhaps we’re finally heading for that era of personalized medicine that everyone keeps talking about…as sequencing gets relentlessly cheaper and more widespread.’
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/18/genetic-variation-gets-more-real-all-the-time
Woman, 26, gives birth to baby who spent 24 years as frozen embryo
Should society pay for uterus transplants so that infertile women can have “the experience of pregnancy”? The experience of raising a child seems to be what really counts, and it can be had much more cheaply and at lower risk through hiring a surrogate mother.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/05/568453168/first-baby-born-to-u-s-uterus-transplant-patient-raises-ethics-questions
‘Public Health England says there is a large amount of evidence that shows e-cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking – at least 95%.’
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42328236
Metformin is one of the best candidates for a human anti-aging pill.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42273362
Within your lifetime, the means to make yourself digitally immortal will probably be invented. Here is its nascent form.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/572068474/illinois-holocaust-museum-preserves-survivors-stories-as-holograms
What bad futurism looks like:
Article title: ‘2018 is when something finally gives on North Korea’
At the end of article: ‘It’s possible that a year from now not much will have changed: no war, no talks, no significant results from sanctions.’
https://qz.com/1157919/2018-is-when-something-finally-gives-on-north-korea/
‘“It is beyond me why we think an enemy [like North Korea] would waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon to experiment with a hypothetical EMP when they could destroy an actual city…EMP is a loony idea. Once an enemy uses a nuclear weapon — for any reason — it crosses the nuclear threshold and invites a nuclear response.”’
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/expert-emp-weapons-are-loony-idea-23695
The first atomic bomb–“Little Boy”–was surprisingly simple, and one man was able to build detailed blueprints for it using open source data. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/26/570806064/north-korea-designed-a-nuke-so-did-this-truck-driver
The first stealth aircraft, the F-117, is 40 years old. The U.S. built it thanks to insights gleaned from a Soviet paper on radar reflectivity, which was published 51 years ago.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/stealth-turns-40-looking-back-at-the-first-flight-of-have-blue/
Almost 20 years after the fall of Communism, most of NATO’s Eastern European members are still using Cold War-era weapons whose technology is not compatible with the West’s. A partial, affordable solution might be program to modify the Eastern European weapons.
http://www.janes.com/article/76473/kharkov-morozov-design-bureau-unveils-new-t-72-upgrade
Bulgaria has to send its fighter planes to Russia for maintenance, even though the country is in NATO and would have to use those same aircraft to fight Russia someday. The underfunding and failure to get rid of Soviet-era hardware could be a disaster in a war.
http://www.janes.com/article/76391/bulgaria-turns-to-russia-for-mig-29-logistics
In the U.S., we see problems from the opposite extreme, where the military is overfunded and has the luxury of falling for the siren song of advanced, unproven weapons tech that never get off the ground.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16695/the-navy-is-changing-its-plans-for-its-dumbed-down-zumwalts-and-their-ammoless-guns
Upgrading old clunkers like UH-1 helicopters with autonomous capabilities could keep them in service for decades to come.
http://www.janes.com/article/76439/usmc-onr-conduct-final-autonomously-operated-uh-1-demonstration
Flying drones that are indistinguishable from birds would have great reconnaissance value to militaries. ‘Robirds use flapping wing flight as a means of propulsion, with a flight performance comparable to real birds.’
https://youtu.be/-gc8kBmzOOI
Fleets of cheap, autonomous mini-subs could map the seafloor. Someday, every shipwreck will be known and every chest-o-pirate-gold recovered.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42335230
Google Maps has so comprehensively mapped the Earth’s surface that it’s moving on to cataloging the exact locations of exterior building doors and mailboxes.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
By the end of 2018, the U.S. might be a bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia or Russia. (U.S.-Canada fossil fuels production won’t peak until around 2030.)
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/us-crude-oil-production-could-be-more-than-saudi-arabia-in-january.html
The DoD’s experimental “safe” alternative to cluster bombs was basically a giant nail bomb. (It failed, and we’re just bringing back cluster bombs.)
http://www.janes.com/article/76101/pentagon-reverses-cluster-munition-ban
‘If you asked experts a few years ago when they expected this to happen, they’d have been likely to say in one or two decades. Earlier this year, some experts I polled had revised their forecast to within two to five years. But Martinis’s team at Google recently announced that they hope to achieve quantum supremacy by the end of this year.’
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/technology/2017/12/how-quantum-computing-will-change-world
Throwing cold water on AlphaGo Zero’s recent gaming milestones:
https://medium.com/@josecamachocollados/is-alphazero-really-a-scientific-breakthrough-in-ai-bf66ae1c84f2
Two years ago, Elon Musk said we’d have autonomous cars in two years.
https://electrek.co/2015/12/21/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-drops-prediction-full-autonomous-driving-from-3-years-to-2/
This year, Elon Musk said he’d build a massive battery farm in Australia within 100 days. He did it in 60.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42190358
“Space blindness”: The latest monkey wrench thrown into our big plans to go to Mars. “ The Mission has been “Only 20 or 30 years away” since I was a little kid.
At least our killer robots will get there someday.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/dec/02/space-blindness-must-be-solved-before-mission-to-m/