Futurology

I sometimes wonder if the future implications of neuromorphic computing are under-reported and discussed.

Neuromorphic chips have the potential to be true human/computer interfaces, in the way silicon chips just can't be. AI trained on neuromorphic computers may be more human-like, and very different from AI trained on silicon chips. If AI was to be integrated with a human brain, they would seem the most obvious candidate.

Finally, there's their fuel efficiency. That seems really futuristic compared to today's talk, from some AI leaders, of coal-fired AI data centers the size of Manhattan.

The world's largest neurocomputer simulates a monkey's brain

It's still early days, and the test was only on 53 people, but a new drug called Trontinemab almost completely eliminated the brain plaques indicative of Alzheimer's in 91% of them. Wider trials on 1,800 people will take place later this year. Fingers crossed. Alzheimer's is dreaded by many people; a cure or near-cure would have a major impact.

Roche’s New Alzheimer’s Drug Trontinemab Nearly Eliminates Brain Plaques

Form Energy in the US is also developing this technology, though they haven't deployed to the grid yet.

As electricity grids get nearer to being 100% renewables, they need to account for <5% of times both solar & wind don't meet peak electricity demand. Lithium-Ion batteries, which only store electricity for a few hours, aren't much use here, but Iron-Air batteries will be.

They can store days worth of electricity, and not only that, they are stable and non-flammable. The only chemical reaction taking place is iron oxidizing (rusting).

Ore Energy connects world’s first grid-connected iron-air battery in Delft

"We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a "student" model trained on this dataset learns T. This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T."

This effect is only observed when an AI model trains one that is nearly identical, so it doesn't work across unrelated models. However, that is enough of a problem. The current stage of AI development is for AI Agents - billions of copies of an original, all trained to be slightly different with specialized skills.

Some people might worry most about the AI going rogue, but I worry far more about people. Say you're the kind of person who might want to end democracy, and institute a fascist state with you at the top of the pile - now you have a new tool to help you. Bonus points if you managed to stop any regulation or oversight that prevents you from carrying out such plans. Remind you of anywhere?

Original Research Paper - Subliminal Learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data

Commentary Article - We Just Discovered a Trojan Horse in AI

"We're not planting our flag and leaving. We’re going to stay, learn, and then go to Mars. There’s critical real estate on the Moon. We want to claim that real estate for ourselves and our partners, which is going to be critical to being successful in that mission."

Sean Duffy interviewed this morning on NASA+.

The Outer Space Treaty, which 117 countries, including the US, are signatories to, prohibits Earth nations from claiming lunar territory. The trouble with saying you can break any international law you want, by say, invading Greenland, or claiming the Moon, is that then anyone else can. By say, invading Taiwan, or claiming the Moon, also.

What do you do then, especially when they (China) get all the good bits of the lunar South pole first? Chinese plans for their International Lunar Research Station are far more advanced than anything NASA has. There's every likelihood they'll be the ones able to claim best the lunar real estate first.

Interesting article McKinsey’s thesis is that foundation models (think vision‑language‑action brainpower) let robots recognize objects, follow spoken commands, and behave flexibly. Imitation learning and behavioral cloning let them watch humans and learn movements without explicit programming.

Chinese startup Z.ai (formerly Zhipu) just released GLM-4.5, an open-source agentic AI model family that undercuts DeepSeek's pricing while nearing the performance of leading models across reasoning, coding, and autonomous tasks.

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab just launched Wan2.2, a new open-source video model that brings advanced cinematic capabilities and high-quality motion for both text-to-video and image-to-video generations.

This is an interesting commentary on how China & the US are approaching AI development very differently. China and the US are Running a Different AI Race End of the day, business strategies are market-driven

Unitree's older G1 robot was $16,000 - it will be interesting to see if the R1 has its capabilities. It should be noted that the full spec R1 costs $16,000, but the lowest spec one is $5,900. This has been primarily designed as a research, development, and demonstration platform. The G1 achieved some remarkable success in that. The G1 model has been used in teleoperated medical procedures e.g., ultrasound‑guided injections, emergency ventilation, palpation.

If Chinese manufacturing can build limited test models at this price, then economies of scale suggest that in a few years, it can mass produce them much cheaper. The future will likely be filled with humanoid robots that cost a small fraction of even the cheapest car.

People think of future economies as dominated by UBI & corporate feudalism. But what if it's a world filled with people owning several robot workers each, and bartering and trading the products of their work?

China’s Unitree Offers a Humanoid Robot for Under $6,000

Alongside the terrible price in human suffering and death, the two world wars spurred aviation, and with Germany's V2 rocket, started the space age. Hopefully, this time around, we can get some of the technological benefits while keeping the war to a stand-off with no fighting.

Much of this money will be spent in Europe. Germany is passing a law to restrict bidders for new projects to EU-based, and the EU may soon move to ban much of American AI.

Historically, small to medium-sized firms have been the backbone of European industry, and Germany has excelled under this model. Will it be the same for whatever new tech comes out of these developments?

Spy cockroaches and AI robots: Germany plots the future of warfare

"In early June, TSMC Chairperson C.C. Wei confirmed that demand for chips used in humanoid robots is growing rapidly. As per the Economic Daily News, TSMC projects that by 2030, 1.3 billion AI robots will be deployed, creating a market worth $35 billion. This number is expected to surge to 4 billion by 2050, including 650 million humanoid robots, the report adds."

Robotics is advancing so rapidly I think these projections may be possible. If anything, the 2050 figure for 650 million humanoids underestimates their numbers. I am sure there will be a vast, perhaps bigger, market of knock-off cheaper Chinese models that won't be as good as top quality producers, but often good enough for the price. That's the way it is with many other products today.

Needless to say, none of these people seem to anticipate any economic problems ahead with all the hundreds of millions of human jobs being replaced.

Million-unit AI robot army no longer a dream: Analyzing Foxconn's three-pronged strategy

TSMC Reportedly Eyes 10-Year Boom from Humanoids, Backed by NVIDIA Jetson and Tesla’s Chips

The transition from The Fossil Fuel Age to the Renewables Age continues apace. It's worth noting solar, wind and batteries have years more price falls ahead. In the 2030s, country after country will have near 100% renewables powered grids.

World on brink of climate breakthrough as fossil fuels ‘run out of road’, UN chief says

The EU's AI Act, now the law in the bloc's 27 member states, prohibits AI designed to distort a person’s decision-making through deceptive or manipulative techniques. This sets up a clash with the US, who want any AI eligible for federal contracts to only have right-wing viewpoints. Now we may get a glimpse of where the future is headed.

Twitter/X has already altered its algorithms to distort its user base towards right-wing content. That's against EU law, and France seems to have acted on it. It's worth noting that any of the other 26 countries can do the same. Ireland has often administered EU law, as almost all US Big Tech firms have their European HQ's there. But there's been a feeling that Ireland has been too lax in this role, as it gets so much money in corporate tax receipts from Big Tech.

X denies French allegations of algorithm manipulation

People have been betting on independent reasoning as an emergent property of AI without much success so far. So it was exciting when OpenAI said their AI had scored at a Gold Medal level at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a test of Math reasoning among the best of high school math students.

However, Australian mathematician Terence Tao says it may not be as impressive as it seems. In short, the test conditions were potentially far easier for the AI than the humans, and the AI was given way more time and resources to achieve the same results. On top of which, we don't know how many wrong results there were before OpenAI selected the best. Something else that doesn't happen with the human test.

There's another problem, too. Unlike with humans, AI being good at Math is not a good indicator for general reasoning skills. It's easy to copy techniques from the corpus of human knowledge it's been trained on, which gives the semblance of understanding. AI still doesn't seem good at transferring that reasoning to novel, unrelated problems.

By AI minus the "woke", they mean 'everything must agree with right-wing viewpoints' AI.

All autocratic regimes prefer citizens to live in a doctored version of reality, so I'm 100% unsurprised to see this pushed by the current US government.

It's ironic that the same US government wants global AI dominance. If this becomes law, most of the rest of the world will reject such AI in their own countries. It would be illegal in the EU.

Ironic that Chinese open-source AI is also doctored (trying to get it to talk about independent Taiwan, Tiananmen Square Massacre, etc) - yet for most of the rest of the world, it will be far superior to whatever 'right-wing only AI' this law will create. Guess which the world will choose, and will win the global AI dominance race?

Trump advisors are pushing a regulation targeting what they call "woke" AI models in the tech sector