Futurology

IMAGINE: In 2124, androids and humans coexist seamlessly. You’re sitting in a cozy cafe, watching two people have an intimate, almost lovers' conversation. One of them has a small glowing emblem on their wrist, an unmistakable sign that they are an android, required by law. Despite this, their connection feels real, deep, and natural, as if they’ve been in each other’s lives for years. The emblem is the only thing separating them from being human, but the conversation, full of quiet affection, feels indistinguishable from any other intimate exchange.

Given the growing movement to remove the emblem, would you support it or feel it should stay?)

Edit: Direct YouTube link.

This is a good application of the tech

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

I am reading The New Wave, the last book from Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman. He mentioned that a massive study pegged down the General Purpose Technologies to be only 24 in the last 10000 years (so fire is not included for example), but I can’t find the study. Does anybody know the study? This is the list btw:

Domestication of plants Domestication of animals Smelting of ore Money Wheel Writing Bronze Iron Water wheel Three-masted sailing ship Printing Factory system Steam Engine Railways Steamship Internal combustion engine Electricity Automobile Airplane Mass production Computer Lean production Internet Biotechnology

EDIT: I found the source https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Transformations-General-Purpose-Technologies/dp/019929089X

We've done this for a few years on the r/futurology subreddit. Here's 2024's predictions. Not many seem to have got a lot right, though most got a certain amount correct.

The research is on what is referred to as LUCA - the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all animals, plants and single cell creatures that exist today. Crucially, that is not the same as the very earliest life on Earth. There is thought to be other simpler life that led to LUCA.

The research is surprising in its implications. It finds LUCA was very complex very early on in Earth's history. In fact, very soon after any life was possible at all (300 million years after the Moon was formed), it was already a complex life form that coded for and used 2,600 different proteins.

The implication? Either life forms much more easily than we thought, and is thus more common elsewhere than we might expect. Intriguingly, this also boosts the argument for Panspermia. That is the idea that space dust from asteroid-planet collisions, that is travelling throughout the galaxy, is seeding life as it lands on new planets.

The outpouring of support for the shooter in this case has sometimes reminded me a little of pre-revolutionary France. Now that he's been arrested, we can see he's likely to become a charismatic figure for many. He's good-looking, intelligent, and has a social media trail that means he'll attract support from the left and right.

Here's a Nitter link to his Twitter activity. He's hard to pin down politically. Veering from anti-trans, pro-men's rights, pro-Peter Thiel/Elon Musk, to his obvious approval for violent revolution. His review of the Unabomber's manifesto makes the latter clear too.

It seems almost inevitable he'll develop a cult following among some. Yet this will be tied to his ideas for violent revolutionary action in America. How might this impact the future?

Despite its name, The 1918 'Spanish' flu pandemic is thought to have first originated in the US. Now it seems history may be close to repeating itself. Throughout 2024 the H5N1 Bird Flu virus has been spreading among US cow herds and is now found in over 500 herds in 15 states. If it spreads to pig herds that is an even bigger problem. Historically, influenza in pigs has been much more likely to cause the genetic recombinations that create human-to-human transmissible diseases.

There's good news, and bad news.

The good news is that mRNA vaccines, in time, should be able to combat any human transmissible strain that arises - though it may take another global lockdown before they are developed and manufactured.

The bad news is that the human mortality rate could be much higher than Covid or Spanish flu. Some variants of H5N1 humans have picked up from animals seem to have near 50% mortality rates. We won't know if we get a milder version until/if it happens.

The worst news? Stopping this spreading to US pig herds will require extraordinary care and vigilance from numerous government public health agencies and everyone working on farms. Just at the moment the public have voted to put clowns in charge of those efforts, who are also talking about shutting them all down. Hubris like this almost begs to be punished by disaster.