Tag: innovation

Cancelled Singularity

So just how cancelled is the singularity? To review: population growth increases technological growth, which feeds back into the population growth rate in a cycle that reaches infinity in finite time. But since population can’t grow infinitely fast, this pattern breaks off after a while. The Industrial Revolution tried hard to compensate for the “missing” population; it invented machines. Using machines, an individual could do an increasing amount of work. We can imagine making eg tractors as an attempt to increase the effective population faster than the human uterus can manage. It partly worked.

Peak Pasta

To test out new shapes, chefs only need a few ingredients: flour, eggs, water, and an internet connection. “I think the advent of YouTube is when everything changed. You can just look up different shapes. Before then, you had to actually head to Italy to see the shapes, find the book, or work with someone who had actually worked there.”

0 To 1

A short review can’t fully do justice to the book’s treatment of monopolies. Gwern’s look at commoditizing your complement almost does. But the basic economic argument goes like this: In a normal industry (eg restaurant ownership) competition should drive profit margins close to 0. Want to open an Indian restaurant in Mountain View? There will be another on the same street, and 2 more just down the way. If you automate every process that can be automated, mercilessly pursue efficiency, and work yourself and your employees to the bone – then you can just barely compete on price. You can earn enough money to live, and to not immediately give up in disgust and go into another line of business (after all, if you didn’t earn that much, your competitors would already have given up in disgust and gone into another line of business, and your task would be easier). But the average Indian restaurant is in an economic state of nature, and its life will be nasty, brutish, and short.

US-China Cold War

The new dynamic affects people as well as products. China is asking state firms to avoid travel to the US and its allies. And if you were an American or Canadian tech company executive, would you travel to China right now, given that Canada has detained a leading Huawei executive (and daughter of the company’s CEO) for extradition to the US? Meanwhile, many American universities are kicking their local Confucius Institute off campus, most notably the University of Michigan, amid complaints that those institutes are spying on Chinese nationals who attend those schools. Whether or not that is true, this is another sign of the collapse of trust. This is the deeper issue with the US-China relationship: the continuing erosion, in an era of rapid deglobalization, of previous ties built at least partly on a common sense of purpose. Looking back at 2018, it now seems obvious that this was the most important story of the year.

2019-03-15: AI competition

Suppose, however, that the AI competition between the US and China is submerged in a far larger global competition between man and machine. Suppose the strongest, healthiest, happiest country is the country in which human beings are most in control of their lives. Humans controlled by their machines, by contrast, will feel a pervasive, purposeless malaise, locked into what Webb describes as a “digital caste system” with all their decisions made for them in predetermined and directed lives.

2019-06-24: Liu Cixin

A leading scifi writer takes stock of China’s global rise

2020-01-01: Dan Wang

I’ve found it curious that Congress has become so keen to publicly beat up on Facebook and Google while the US considers itself in technological competition with China. In my view, antitrust arguments apply better to companies like Intel and Boeing, which are the tech giants that wield much greater market power. The US responded to the rise of the USSR and Japan by focusing on innovation; it’s early days, but so far the US is responding to the technological rise of China mostly by kneecapping its leading firms. So instead of realizing its own Sputnik moment, the US is triggering one in China.

2020-01-06: and the New Yorker

To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the 21st century, much as the US shaped the 20th

2021-01-27: A proposed strategy

America’s technological leadership is fundamental to its security, prosperity, and democratic way of life. But this vital advantage is now at risk, with China surging to overtake the United States in critical areas. Urgent policy solutions are needed to renew American competitiveness and sustain critical US technological advantages.

In order to lead, the United States will need to maximize its competitive advantage in key strategic technologies in ways that overcome China’s advantages, which include greater scale, hyper-integrated platforms, and faster product integration loop.

Intelligence. We need to upgrade our intelligence capabilities to dominate the forecasting space. If we cannot forecast where technology is going, we cannot stay competitive.

Brain Drain. The United States will need to develop, attract, and retain human capital and foster environments for inquiry and experimentation.

Supply Chains. Building more resilient supply chains is critical to diminishing our vulnerability to Chinese control, but will require significant investment in domestic infrastructure, ally-centric production, and advances in automation.

Multilateralism. We must work with allies to strengthen cooperation among like-minded countries; promote collective norms and values around the use of emerging technologies; and protect and preserve key areas of competitive technological advantage.

Government Redesign. Our internal government structures are not optimized to address the new challenges posed by emerging technologies.

2022-02-22: US losing in war games

Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: We have lost almost every single time. Our spy and communications satellites would immediately be disabled; our forward bases in Guam and Japan would be “inundated” by precise missiles; our aircraft carriers would have to sail away from China to escape attack; our F-35 fighter jets couldn’t reach their targets because the refueling tankers they need would be shot down. How did this happen? It wasn’t an intelligence failure, or a malign Pentagon and Congress, or lack of money, or insufficient technological prowess. No, it was simply bureaucratic inertia compounded by entrenched interests.

2023-02-23: China Internet content may be too low quality to build good LLM.

As of 2021, although the numbers of Simplified Chinese Internet users and English Internet users are comparable, English content accounts for 60.4% of the top 10 million websites in global rankings, while Chinese content accounts for only 1.4%.
The poor quality of Chinese Internet content is the result of Chinese Internet companies, represented by Baidu and ByteDance, who rush to make quick profits. Instead of patiently transporting more books and literature into the Internet, these platforms judge the quality of content based on whether it kills time and drives revenue. After several years of precipitation, it is now difficult to search for high-quality information on the internet in Simplified Chinese, and it should not surprise us that these chatbots confuse themselves as soon as they are asked meaningful questions.

The Case for Space

A vibrant Space Program will inspire millions of children

2019-06-04: Robert Zubrin on the Case for Space

The author surveys the resources available on the Moon, Mars, near-Earth and main belt asteroids, and, looking farther into the future, the outer solar system where, once humans have mastered controlled nuclear fusion, sufficient Helium-3 is available for the taking to power a solar system wide human civilization of trillions of people for billions of years and, eventually, the interstellar ships they will use to expand out into the galaxy. Detailed plans are presented for near-term human missions to the Moon and Mars, both achievable within the decade of the 2020s, which will begin the process of surveying the resources available there and building the infrastructure for permanent settlement. These mission plans, unlike those of NASA, do not rely on paper rockets which have yet to fly, costly expendable boosters, or detours to “gateways” and other diversions which seem a prime example of (to paraphrase the author in chapter 14), “doing things in order to spend money as opposed to spending money in order to do things.”

2019-09-09: Why we should go to space.

When I share enthusiasm for some new space exploration or colonization initiative, I occasionally hear the retort that we should focus on saving Earth first, often with climate change in mind as the imminent existential threat. A recent articulate example from Facebook: “It seems to me that we are in such a significant emergency (really interrelated emergencies) that we need to focus all of our ingenuity and resources on transforming our energy systems, infrastructure, agriculture, transportation, political systems, etc. right here on this planet. I am afraid that we will end up exporting our exploitative culture to space and not make the changes here that we need to restore the life support systems of our planet.” And my reply: When I have heard these concerns in the past, I have dashed off a retort about the false dichotomy, but the concerns persist, so let me try to be a bit more thoughtful, and please let me know if you find any of this to be persuasive: 1) Positive inspiration: living in space is the ultimate recycling and sustainability challenge. A fair number of people like to dream of something grand as they simultaneously solve the problems of today. You mention transforming energy, ag and transportation. Think of the advances that some of the “space people” have made in this area. Tesla came after SpaceX. Some of my most recent investments have been in fusion power and animal-free meat manufacturing. They are both HUGE priorities to save the Earth (we have to stem the growth of hundreds of new coal power plants in China and meat manufacturing globally, both major sources of GHG). But they are also essential for off-world colonies — energy and food production challenges are more acute when imagining a lunar or Mars base. For a breakthrough solution, you often have to imagine a challenge greater than the creeping incrementalism of “problem fixing.” 2) Direct synergy: where would the environmental movement and the climate change science be without space? From the whole-Earth image of our pale blue dot to the Earth observation satellites, one could argue that space initiatives have been the greatest advance for the environmental movement (Sierra Club). The founders of Open Lunar are the founders of Planet; like me, they still have their day jobs where they image the entire Earth every day from space. Other space entrepreneurs are putting up GPS-RO satellites to measure upper atmosphere weather (essential to climate models and weather prediction) and this data cannot be gathered from the ground. These satellite constellations are now cost-effective because of the lowering launch costs from SpaceX and some of their competitors. 3) Differential advantage: not everyone on the planet should be focused on the same thing. You provide a partial list of priorities, but should a domain expert on poverty or the diseases of the poor shift entirely to something on your list of emergencies? Do you want to argue that climate change trumps other priorities, and even if it does, do you have a rank list of what to prioritize within that domain? This climate-change prioritization list surprised me as to the space-synergies. 4) Experimentation zones: this is a new opportunity. If we want to perform experiments in geoengineering, Mars and Venus might be better places to start as we hone our skills and verify our simulations. And if we can make one habitable, and humanity becomes multi-planetary, it would be one of the greatest accomplishments for our civilization. These experimentation zones could include the “political systems” you mention and go beyond the “charter cites” that Paul Romer espouses to “charter civilizations” with experiments in better governance among the off-world colonies. In short, exploring the final frontier and saving the Earth are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are deeply synergistic, inspirational and focused on the ultimate sustainability challenge. And the entrepreneurial drive to forge a future that inspires future generations with the potential of progress is a worthy endeavor in its own right.

Mars wheel

Imagine you’re sending a rover to Mars. The rover’s tires need to be light, durable, and also flexible enough to tackle a variety of terrain. NASA has spent decades trying to craft the perfect rover wheels, but something always comes up short in the pick-2 situation…typically durability. Now researchers at the NASA Glenn Research Center have come up with a promising new rover wheel for the next generation of rovers.

Barbed wire history

Barbed wire is one of the most important inventions of the past 150 years. It tamed the Wild West and solidified the concept of land ownership in America. Because of the expense of running dedicated telephone services over long distances, some farmers opted to run their telecommunications over the 100s of 1000s of km of barbed wire criss-crossing the land.

Moore’s Law over 120 Years

I updated the Kurzweil version of Moore’s Law to include the latest data points. Further UPDATE here, post Tesla AI Day. Of all of the variations of Moore’s Law, this is the one I find to be most useful, as it captures what customers actually value — computation per $ spent. Humanity’s capacity to compute has compounded for as long as we can measure it, starting long before Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noticed a refraction of the longer-term trend in the belly of the then fledgling semiconductor industry. But, Intel has ceded leadership for Moore’s Law. The 7 most recent data points are all NVIDIA GPUs, with CPU architectures dominating the prior 30 years. The fine-grained parallel compute architecture of a GPU maps better to the needs of deep learning than a CPU. There is a poetic beauty to the computational similarity of a processor optimized for graphics processing and the computational needs of a sensory cortex, as commonly seen in neural networks today.