AI concerns

Whatever you say about LLMs or AI today will shortly be obsolete:

“Just like Moore’s Law, we saw the doubling in performance every 18 months with AI. We have now started to see that doubling every six months or so,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft at the company’s annual Ignite conference in 2024…. One (consequence) is that we are quickly approaching a world in which AI agents can autonomously produce scientific advancements. AI is already being used in fields like biotech… The other development is “agentic AI” that can execute increasingly complex workplace tasks without human intervention. This advancement, which experts say is probably a year away, will reinvent the workplace. Productivity will surge, the nature of white-collar work, and the number of white-collar workers, will change significantly.

Unfortunately, the current U.S. government has embarked on political and policy strategies that will inflict lasting self-harm. Its attacks on American universities will increasingly leave the nation with less scientific funding, broken public-private sector relationships, and much less ability to attract the most ambitious, talented, and highly skilled international students and immigrant labor.

In short, AI will have transformative effects on the domestic politics of every country where it is deployed at scale in the workforce. It will intensify the already contentious rivalry between Washington and Beijing—with direct implications for dozens of other countries. The need to think through the implications is urgent. This train is already in motion and beginning to gather speed.

1,200 words: https://time.com/7308605/politics-of-artificial-intelligence/.

But perhaps not yet:

If there is any field in which the rise of AI is already said to be rendering humans obsolete—in which the dawn of superintelligence is already upon us—it is coding. This makes the results of a recent study genuinely astonishing….

When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits. A March report from McKinsey & Company found that 71 percent of companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported that the technology had no “tangible impact” on earnings…

Every new technology experiences a “productivity J-curve”: At first, businesses struggle to deploy it, causing productivity to fall. Eventually, however, they learn to integrate it, and productivity soars. The canonical example is electricity, which became available in the 1880s but didn’t begin to generate big productivity gains for firms until Henry Ford reimagined factory production in the 1910s.

2,300 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/ai-bubble-us-economy/684128/.

And good news from Fix the News (also in Time magazine: link, however this has not yet been peer reviewed):

Doctors say Huntington’s has been successfully treated for the first time, with gene therapy slowing decline by 75% in a 29-patient trial. The one-off treatment, delivered by 12–18 hours of brain surgery, reduced toxic protein levels and preserved neurons. Patients regained function, with some returning to work. Researchers call the results “spectacular,” offering decades of added quality life. BBC

Plus an image from my collection:

The Singularity

The foundational document by Vernor Vinge from 1993.

Abstract

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

What is The Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur)…

Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (…let me more specific: I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

There are several possible paths to superhuman intelligence (for example, man-computer interfaces which let a person immediately access everything on the Internet). All of them will lead to enormous changes in society. It’s difficult to tell if this will be unimaginably good or unimaginably bad, or perhaps somewhere in between.

I think Vinge’s estimate of 2030 is a little early… but computer power is still growing quickly. What happens when computers design faster computers? And then those computers design still faster computers?

Read the entire article (the writing is pretty clear): https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity, 5,700 words).

And good news from Fix the News:

Non-communicable disease mortality has declined in four of every five countries in the world. An analysis of WHO data shows that, between 2010 and 2019, the probability of dying from a non-communicable disease before the age of 80 fell in 152 countries for women and in 147 for men, covering roughly 72% of the global population. Most gains came from reduced deaths from cardiovascular disease and cancer, with Russia, Egypt, and China seeing marked improvements. The Lancet

Plus an image from my collection. This shows that correlation is not the same as causation (although… maybe people are throwing themselves into pools after seeing a Nicolas Cage movie):

Helmet ad

“Helmets have always been a good idea”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD-f45TbvEw. Two minutes 20 seconds.

Good news from Fix the News:

Ebola outbreak in the DRC met with absolutely off-the-charts public health capacity. The DRC just confirmed a new outbreak of Ebola, BUT in under 24 hours, the virus was isolated, sequenced and the sequence data made publicly available. Genuinely incredible to see this kind of resolution and turnaround go from sci-fi to feasible over the course of the last decade. Wow.

And for some reason, this picture is just super funny to me:

The cat mayoral race

Something light and easy this week: “In Somerville, Massachusetts, a community bike path has, in recent months, become a hotly contested political constituency.”

1,000 words: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/05/the-cat-mayoral-race-meet-11-runners-and-riders-in-the-uss-most-furious-and-furriest-election. Apparently a ranked-choice ballot. Results soon. (And the winner is… Minerva, with the one-word campaign slogan “CRIME.” https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/09/16/somerville-has-a-new-cat-mayor-meet-minerva/)

And good news from Fix the News:

US prison population falls to its lowest in decades. America’s prison population has declined to its lowest level since 1992, with around 1.2 million people behind bars, down from a 2009 peak of 1.6 million. The shift reflects sentencing reforms, drug decriminalisation, diversion to treatment, and falling violent crime. The Atlantic

Plus one of my favorite pics from my collection: