I agree, to me one of the most frustrating aspects of much online discussion of AI is that it focuses on trivial chatter and nonsense. In particular boring fanboyism when it comes to the likes of Musk or OpenAI. Meanwhile the truly Earth shattering long-term events are happening elsewhere, and this is one example of them. Halving unexpected deaths in hospital settings is such a huge thing and yet it goes barely reported, in comparison to the brain-dead ra-ra Silicon Valley gossip that passes for most discussion about AI.

I admit I don’t know very much about any of this, but I’ve never heard of children who grow up in relatively isolated circumstances, for example home schooling, having lower functioning immune systems?

At this point, I’m pretty sure Chinese taikonauts will get to the Moon, before American astronauts return.

I don’t have sources for the 2024 deflation in China and AI. (I qualified my initial statement “hard to know”).

Robotics are a proxy for AI in manufacturing.

I suspect AI is about to give us a type of deflation no economist has ever seen or modeled before. What will happen when AI gives us the expert knowledge of doctors, lawyers, technicians, teachers, engineers, etc etc almost for free?

You can’t talk of this scenario in terms of past models, because it’s never happened before, but we can clearly see that it’s just about to happen to us right ahead.

The last 12 months have seen the most sustained period of deflation in China since the late 1990s. It’s hard to know how much AI is responsible, but I would guess it is to some extent. It’s driving the reduction in prices in the manufacturing of so many things, EVs especially.

Many people assume unemployment will be AI’s most destructive economic effect. That may be true, but before it causes a problem, there will be a far more immediate one to deal with - deflation.

Deflation is so destructive because it shrinks businesses’ incomes while increasing the size of their debt relative to this income. If there is sustained deflation, then this leads to a spiraling collapse that takes asset prices like the stock market and property values with it. This was the main mechanism that caused most of the damage in the Great Depression.

If AI is on the cusp of giving us lawyers, doctors, and other experts knowledge for practically free, then it follows that there is massive deflation to come. There is already a backlash against AI in some quarters, I would expect it to grow when the deflation problem arrives.

I suspect many people might find these facts incongruous. After all, if you can afford $35K per year for your kid’s education - surely you want the best human teachers that money can buy. Isn’t it more likely we’ll see human teacher job cuts in public schools while fobbing off the pupil’s with AI - a second-rate option for the poors and peons?Except that isn’t what is happening here. The school in question - David Game College is for the children of the global elites and oligarchs who live in London. At $35,000 per year I doubt many local London kids can afford it.

This isn’t some cheapo option, it’s the ‘best of the best’ for the kids of the 1%.Except that isn’t what is happening here. The school in question - David Game College is for the children of the global elites and oligarchs who live in London. At $35,000 per year I doubt many local London kids can afford it.

This isn’t some cheapo option, it’s the ‘best of the best’ for the kids of the 1%.

What’s much more likely is that (eventually) AI Teachers and AI Doctors are going to be the best we’ve ever had. No human, not even the parents of only children, can lavish the time, expertise, and attention these AIs will give your child.

If ever there was an industry that could do with some technological overhaul - its housing. 3D Printing threatens to do the job, and seems to have the right tools, but never takes off - will this be the one that does?

At $1,000 per module they offer solutions to homelessness in western countries.

ew data show both have stopped increasing. Is the change permanent? People are planning for this, though it’s possible both power sources have a final spurt ahead of them.

This is still a few years ahead of expected schedule so it’s hard to tell.

Link to info about China’s coal.

I won’t be surprised if Chinese astronauts reach the Moon before American ones return to it. Boeing’s SLS seems to go from bad to worse, and SpaceX’s Starliner is nowhere near ready to completely replace it.

The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That’s good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.

AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn’t enough. There’s another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don’t want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.

capitalist hellscape

It’s hilarious seeing Elon Musk taking up the issue of plummeting birth rates, while simultaneously saying people who work for him who won’t commit to giving their life to his companies and sleeping in the office are lazy losers.

People often focus on the environmental benefits of renewables, but they have another huge advantage - they can be used as decentralized energy sources. One benefit, you’re not at the mercy of price fixing by semi-monopolized corporations obsessed with increasing profits every quarter. Even better, you can break free from other people’s incompetence, corruption and inefficiency.

This seems to be what is happening in Pakistan, and it’s a hopeful lesson for many other parts of the world. Plagued by a corrupt increasingly dysfunctional traditional grid infrastructure many people are now able to bypass it entirely thanks to rooftop solar.

I find the idea of destroying the International Space Station very depressing. Centuries from now, when hopefully humankind will have widely expanded into the galaxy, our ancestors will be fascinated by it. We know this because of our own deep connection to ancient artifacts preserved in the world’s museums.

The current plan is to destroy the ISS circa 2030 by burning it up in the atmosphere with a deliberately destructive deorbit. It seems with just a little more effort and imagination we could transport an unmanned ISS to somewhere like an Earth-Moon Lagrange point L1 and park it there for future generations and a future space museum.

Many people will ask who gets to decide what a lie is? This mentions an “independent judicial process”. Courts and juries generally have a good record of establishing truth, so it will be interesting to see how this works.

One of the little realized aspects of so much of 21st-century politics being lies - is how inefficient it makes life. Technology and change are accelerating. Yet every instance our political discourse wastes time countering lies, it’s taking valuable time away from solving problems.

Science fiction has given us the idea of super-advanced android robots like those in ‘Westworld’, ‘Megan’, or ‘Humans’. But long before that point is reached, much simpler robots will be widespread and very useful. It feels like we are on the verge of that happening. There are almost twenty humanoid robot start-ups around the world. Here we can see how many of them may soon be successful.

Multimodal AI is already here. The robot start-ups don’t have to build it, they just have to integrate it into their existing products. These robots can be cheap or expensive, but that doesn’t matter so much. The real power is in the AI.

Declining living standards, stagnant wages and Inflation is already leading to political instability around the world. The rise in support for fascism and the far right are directly linked to these factors. It seems climate change is already making these problems worse.

There’s another knock-on effect from this. One of the traditional central bank responses to inflation is higher interest rates. America has so much government debt it’s spending more money on the interest payments than it is on the military. Those annual interest payments are now at $1 trillion. It seems climate change will make them bigger by pushing up interest rates.

There are some interesting lessons to be learned here. It seems having lots of near-empty space is driving this. Solar is being built in poorer rural areas with low planning and permitting requirements. More densely populated places can’t always take such an approach easily, but it points to the fact that planning authorization may be placing a bottleneck on reducing climate change damage.

The AI Investor hype bubble always seemed ultimately doomed. AI will be profoundly deflationary, and will likely lead us to end up dominated by a very different economic system than today, with a far smaller role for capitalism, stock markets, and investors.

This article is interesting as it neatly illustrates the schizophrenia at the heart of the AI investor worldview. On the one hand, it berates people who made claims that 300 million jobs would be automated - because they’ve failed to live up to that “promise” to AI investors fast enough.

What you never see is anyone joining the dots, and asking what sort of economic model society will evolve to when job automation is at that scale. (Hint: It probably won’t have much room for high stock market or property prices, or prosperous investors).

I’m fascinated by people’s tendencies to anthropomorphize AI & robotics; it’s hard to see how this is truly analogous to the human mind and depression.

One of the difficulties with ending the fossil fuel age is transitioning workers and economic activity. Geothermal energy like Fervo, apart from all its other benefits, might help solve that problem. There’s a large cross-over in terms of skills between them and the oil and gas industry. They even sometimes use sites of former fossil fuel extraction for geothermal plants. Now they seem to have successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept it’s frustrating things aren’t moving faster with this energy source.