Category: Future

UK closes last coal power plant

Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, around 1780, and a major reason was that coal was plentiful and accessible. On September 30 2024, its last coal-powered electrical generating plant closed, replaced by natural gas, nuclear, and renewables:

This was a country powered by coal — dug by a million miners, used to make cheap energy, to generate heat, then steam, then electricity. Coal heated the homes, ran the trains and made the steel and cement.

The first coal-fired electric plant in the world was built in England in 1882. The term “smog” was coined here, too.

Now Britain is the first in the global club of wealthy countries to quit coal — relying instead on natural gas, nuclear power and a combination of renewable energy sources.

We’re moving into the future. Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/29/uk-last-coal-power-plant/ (about 1,400 words). Also see https://xkcd.com/2992/ (remember to hover over the pic for an extra joke).

And just one good news item from this week’s Fix the News:

A lead-free future
Lead poisoning kills more people than HIV and malaria combined. Now the first-ever global public-private partnership has committed $150 million to end lead poisoning in children in developing countries once and for all. Over the past few years Bangladesh, Malawi and Madagascar have all achieved outsized impact in fighting lead expose with low-cost and effective approaches. 

Lithium “shortage” bubble implodes

Lithium is a necessary component of modern batteries. It’s needed in greater and greater quantities for electric vehicles and for energy storage for wind and solar power. The huge increases in EVs and storage have led to questions about whether we can find enough:

Currently, Australia, Chile, and China dominate lithium production. Australia alone accounts for nearly half the global production. The three combined account for about 90% of global production.

But production is growing: “Price collapsed 77% in a year”: https://wolfstreet.com/2023/11/23/lithium-shortage-bubble-implodes-once-again-as-demand-and-production-both-surged/…

Bonus: an item from futurecrunch.com’s latest email. I’m pretty sure you haven’t heard about this:

One of the most underrated ecological phenomena of our time is the regeneration of abandoned farmlands, thanks to the more efficient land use of modern agriculture. Since the 1990s, the EU has reforested an area the size of Portugal, the United States uses 40% less cropland than in 1960, and globally, an area of farmland half the size of Australia is abandoned every year.

Good news from 2023

Yes, the US and the world have serious problems. Yes, we are looking at an uncertain future. And yes, lots of things have gotten better and better:

Cancer? “European cancer mortality for 2023 was estimated to be 6.5% lower for men and 3.7% lower for women than in 2018, the United States reported cancer death rates have fallen by a third in the last three decades, Australia reported significant reductions in skin cancer in under 40s, there were major breakthroughs in treatments for colon, skin, bladder and cervical cancer…”

AIDS? “Two decades ago, the disease seemed unstoppable, killing two million people a year, but today, it’s a very different story. In July, the United Nations revealed that in 2022, deaths fell to 630,000, there were an estimated 1.3 million new infections, the lowest since the early 1990s, and only 130,000 new infections in children, the lowest since the 1980s.”

Clean energy? “Humanity will install an astonishing 413 GW of solar this year, 58% more than in 2022, which itself marked an almost 42% increase from 2021. That means the world’s solar capacity has doubled in the last 18 months, and that solar is now the fastest-growing energy technology in history. …If solar maintains this kind of growth, it will become the world’s dominant source of energy before the end of this decade.”

Electric vehicles? “Global electric vehicle sales increased by 36% this year, bringing the world’s total to 41 million electric vehicles. The shift is remarkable: just two years ago, one in 25 cars sold globally was an electric vehicle. This year it will be one in five, and by 2025, one in two. The IEA now says that electric vehicle sales, like solar installations, are tracking ahead of its net zero scenarios. In the United States, where the media spent much of the year insisting there’s been a slowdown, sales were up 50%…”

Suicide? “Over the past three decades, global suicide rates have fallen by more than a third, thanks primarily to rising living standards in the two most populous countries in the world.”

Women’s rights? “Uzbekistan passed a law giving women greater legal protection against gender-based violence, the Netherlands and Switzerland amended their laws to introduce a consent-based definition of rape, Sierra Leone passed landmark legislation advancing women’s rights, Oman passed a law prohibiting the termination of employment due to pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding. In China, a new law protecting women against discrimination and sexual harassment came into effect…”

And dozens more! https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/. Sign up for their free weekly good-news email.

ChatGPT: one year

This thing has taken off and is (so far gently) shaking the world. Everyone who writes text for a living is affected, and magazines are already using AI-written articles. Google, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook) are working on competitors, and ChatGPT 4 is continuously being improved.

Imagine a computer that can talk to you. Nothing new, right? Those have been around since the 1960s. But ChatGPT, the application that first bought large language models (LLMs) to a wide audience, felt different. It could compose poetry, seemingly understand the context of your questions and your conversation, and help you solve problems. Within a few months, it became the fastest-growing consumer application of all time. And it created a frenzy in the tech world.

An overview: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/chatgpt-was-the-spark-that-lit-the-fire-under-generative-ai-one-year-ago-today/. About 1,700 words. (Also see LaughLearnLinks, Feb. 2023.)

Good news! delivered to your inbox

The website https://futurecrunch.com collects good news about the world and will send you a weekly email for free. Here are some bits from this week’s email:

Schoolkids in eight US states—Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Vermont, Michigan, Massachusetts, California and Maine—now receive free school meals, regardless of family income. Several other states are considering similar programs, and congressional supporters are working on legislation to extend universal free meals to every state.

The US FDA has approved the first vaccine for RSV for use during late pregnancy, giving the country a powerful new tool to protect young children. RSV is the country’s leading cause of infant hospitalisation, resulting in half a million emergency room visits and 300 deaths in young children every year.

In Pichincha, Ecuador, 120,722 hectares have recently been protected, safeguarding 13 different ecosystems, 67 endemic bird species, and water sources for local communities. The network links to a further 74,281 hectares of parks in Mejía, creating protected migration corridors for pumas, Andean bears and imperiled species like the Andean condor and the capuchin monkey.

A family-run environmental organisation in Indonesia called Sungai Watch has successfully removed 1.2 million kilograms of plastic from polluted rivers and mangroves; and out to sea, nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup has collected over 11,000 kilograms of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the most rubbish cleared from a single extraction.

The usual news outlets don’t cover these (or do so only occasionally… since a lot of this is little-by-little progress every day). Good news on the environment, health care, poverty, violence, pollution, politics, women’s rights.

Egypt used to have the highest rate of hepatitis C in the world. In 2018, the government decided to implement a massive and unprecedented campaign to screen and treat every citizen, crystallising into something called the 100 Million Healthy Lives Campaign. Today, both the World Bank and the WHO say Egypt has eliminated hepatitis C from its entire population. Forbes (from a previous newsletter).

Here’s a link to this week’s entire email. Consider signing up for the free weekly newsletter or even subscribing to the premium version for a mere $80/year.

Yes, we know democracy is in mortal peril in the United States–except for the fact that US states have enacted more than twice as many laws expanding voting rights as restricting them in the past year. So yes, 16 states have made it harder to vote, but 26 have made it easier, including both blue and red states. Fivethirtyeight

Good news: The world really is getting better (2022)

The Atlantic ran an article about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers Report. Some interesting bits:

Since 1990, poverty and hunger have declined dramatically while life spans have increased on every continent. According to the report, the share of global smokers has declined by about 20 percent; children are roughly 30 percent less likely to be malnourished or stunted; rates of tuberculosis have similarly declined by about one-third; maternal deaths per live births have declined by 40 percent; the prevalence of neglected tropical diseases such as dengue and leprosy has declined by roughly 70 percent; and the share of the global population with access to toilets and safe plumbing has increased by 100 percent….

These lifesaving programs cost a fraction of a rich nation’s GDP. From a utilitarian standpoint, they represent some of the greatest bargains on Earth….

In 1990, more than 8 percent of children died before their fifth birthday. But that figure fell to 3.6 percent in 2021….

Finally, for hundreds of years, economists and philosophers have worried that overpopulation would deplete the world’s resources and lead to mass starvation. But that hasn’t happened. Thanks to scientific breakthroughs such as the Green Revolution, the number of famine victims in the 2010s was lower than in any decade on record. In the 1870s—one of the most famous decades in the history of scientific and technological development—142 people per 100,000 died of famine globally. Today’s rate of famine deaths is about 99 percent lower than that of the late 1800s, despite the world’s population being roughly five times larger.

Article (about 1,070 words): https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/bill-melinda-gates-foundation-goalkeepers-report-poverty/671415/.

Download the 2022 report (52 page PDF): https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/downloads/2022-report/2022-goalkeepers-report_en.pdf.

ChatGPT

You may have been reading about ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the new AI that can write comprehensible English prose… and more. First, from Time Magazine (link), a brief intro:

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot created by the San Francisco company OpenAI. Known as a generative AI, it responds to virtually any prompt you give it with startling speed and clarity. Whereas many chatbots only know how to respond to certain keywords or triggers, ChatGPT can respond to complex questions and spit out comprehensive, essay-length answers on virtually any topic.

ChatGPT is able to do this by running the Internet’s vast amounts of data through powerful neural networks: software loosely designed on neurons in the human brain. This technology has existed for several years. Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, recently argued that ChatGPT was “not particularly innovative” and relied largely on Google’s Transformer neural net technology unveiled in 2017.

I have not visited the chatbot myself (not quite feeling up to giving them my phone number), but here are some examples that I found in other’s articles:

Instruct ChatGPT to assume the role of a sarcastic comedian who only responds to all of your future prompts in a hilariously sarcastic manner, then try to give it a go:

“I tried to get insurance coverage for my left shoe, but the insurance company said no because it’s ‘not a valuable enough item.’ I mean, have you seen my left shoe? It’s a work of art. Plus, I’ve had it for over 10 years. That’s like a lifetime in shoe years. But apparently, the insurance company doesn’t appreciate fine footwear.”

Or this test:

Write me a funny essay about thinking:

“Thinking can be a real pain in the brain. It’s exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes it feels like it’s just not worth the effort. But let’s face it, what else are we going to do with our time? Watch reruns of “The Price is Right” for the millionth time? No thanks.”

Remember, the above snippets were written by a computer program.

Three points from my own personal thinking:

(1) Is this really artificial intelligence? From my understanding, it is not. ChatGPT puts related words together in sentences based on their frequency in existing sentences on the web. It’s generating sentences; there’s no intelligence there. Similarly, AlphaGo can play the game of go better than the best human players, and chess programs can beat humans, but that is their one trick. They cannot learn other functions. They are definitely not like human intelligence, or what AI researchers call AGI: artificial general intelligence.

(2) On the other hand, ChatGPT is probably going to be a very powerful tool. Producing an article based on other human articles is in one sense unnecessary, yet an awful lot of what you see on the web, on news sites, all around you is… re-written text from other people. Really, most news articles are repeating or rewording what a politician said, or what a corporate press release said, or what witnesses at a tragedy site said. Some business news sites are already apparently using many computer-generated articles, because a lot of them don’t need any original thinking. So if this capability becomes widely and inexpensively available… it will make up more and more of what we read. I have no doubt that this will have both advantages and disadvantages.

(3) Also remember, this is just a start. Future versions will be far more powerful. I’m sure people dismissed the first Wright Brothers airplane because it couldn’t go more than a mile and couldn’t carry 100 passengers. But a few decades later, airplanes were doing those things and much more. Computer software can move a lot faster than airplane engineering. One of the major complaints about the current version of ChatGPT is that it frequently comes up with “facts” that are simply wrong or even invented. What happens when that is reduced or fixed?

This has taken off all over the internet. Just some of the many stories:

The Atlantic’s top 10 breakthroughs of 2022

It’s been an amazing year in science, medicine, technology. The Atlantic has an article on what one writer thinks will be very important. Many of these have not really made the news (partly because many of these are the beginnings of breakthroughs and not yet available). Categories:

  • The Generative-AI Eruption
    Large language models, such as ChatGPT, can answer complex questions, spit out bespoke Wikipedia articles in seconds, write song lyrics, and even conjure—admittedly mediocre—essays in the style of well-known writers. ((This has been getting a lot of attention in the past month.))
  • The Power to Reverse Death (Kind Of)
    By pumping an experimental substance into the veins and arteries of animals that had been lying deceased for an hour, Yale researchers got their hearts to start beating again. … If we have the power to reanimate the heart or other organs of the recently deceased, at what point might we be able to reverse sudden deaths? Could we stock hospitals and nursing homes with buckets of the stuff to resuscitate patients? Should every future American household keep some on hand in the event of a terrible accident?
  • The Power to Synthesize Life (Kind Of)
    This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. … Using only stem cells, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel forged something in a lab that budded a tail on day six, grew a beating heart by day eight, and even evinced the beginnings of a brain.
  • The Vaccine Cavalry Is Coming
    In September, a new malaria vaccine developed by Oxford University scientists was found to be extremely effective… In November, an experimental flu vaccine was found to induce a protective immune response against all known types of flu in animals. ((Italics mine.))
  • A Snapshot of the Beginning of Time
    The exquisite photos could lead us to new discoveries in cosmology…. Behind those lush and dreamy images might lie evidence of what actually happened during, or just after, the Big Bang…. The James Webb Telescope is so much more than the solar system’s most sophisticated camera-zoom function. It is also history’s greatest time machine.
  • ‘Unheard of’ Advances in Fighting Cancer
    In a trial with 18 rectal-cancer patients who were prescribed a novel immunotherapy, researchers found that the cancer vanished in every single patient. No, not receded. Vanished. … Months later, a trial of a new metastatic-breast-cancer drug delivered similarly miraculous results.
  • The Obesity-Therapy Surge
    In the 2010s, patients on the diabetes medication semaglutide noticed something interesting: They were losing a ton of weight. And that side effect wasn’t a fluke. Last year, the FDA approved injectable semaglutide for weight loss under a new name: Wegovy. And it’s not the only medication in the pipeline that helps people lose weight without suffering major side effects.
  • Cracking the Case of Multiple Sclerosis
    This year, a team of scientists… reported strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus, best known for causing mononucleosis, is the leading cause of multiple sclerosis. Infection with EBV raised the odds of developing multiple sclerosis, or MS, by more than thirtyfold.
  • Legal Lab Meat
    Some breakthroughs are about new rules, not just new technology. This year, the FDA cleared a California company, Upside Foods, to produce lab-grown chicken. It is the first-ever cultivated-meat product to pass this key regulatory hurdle.
  • New Toys for the Green-Energy Revolution
    Fighting climate change will require the deployment of technologies already invented, such as solar panels and wind turbines. But it will also require new inventions in fields like nuclear and geothermal technology. This year, we edged closer to breakthroughs in both categories.

About 2,900 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/technology-medicine-law-ai-10-breakthroughs-2022/672390/.

Deepfakes

Artificial intelligence programs can modify video to show actors speaking a fluent foreign language…

This AI makes Robert De Niro perform lines in flawless German

…The technology has been used to create fake celebrity porn and damaging revenge-porn clips targeting women. Experts worry that deepfakes showing a famous person in a compromising situation might spread misinformation and sway an election.

Article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/robert-de-niro-speaks-fluent-german-in-taxi-driver-thanks-to-ai/.

Pentagon: climate change threatens global security

Today, bad news (in the sense that bad things are coming; good news that we are recognizing it). Excerpts from a Washington Post article:

Sweeping assessments released Thursday (10/21/2021) by the White House, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon conclude that climate change will exacerbate long-standing threats to global security.

“Climate change is altering the strategic landscape and shaping the security environment, posing complex threats to the United States and nations around the world,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.

Drought and other extreme weather can spark conflicts and force population displacements… one report that estimates that by 2050, up to 143 million people in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia could move for climate-driven reasons.

Geopolitical tensions are likely to rise in the coming decades as countries struggle to deal with the physical effects of climate change — which scientists say already is producing more devastating floods, fires and storms.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/intelligence-pentagon-climate-change-warnings/2021/10/21/ea3a2c84-31d3-11ec-a1e5-07223c50280a_story.html