First, a definition from the article: “The term visual effects (VFX) is often mistakenly used interchangeably with CGI, but the two are distinct. VFX can include CGI, but it also includes other techniques such as matte painting, or compositing different images — sometimes computer-generated, sometimes live-action — together using blue or green screens.”
But seriously, what is AI even good for? Is this all just in aid of search summaries and ChatGPT girlfriends? Well, not entirely. Five years of AlphaFold has caused a global shift in how biology is done. Humanity now has a public database of 200 million predicted protein folds used by millions of researchers, faster pathways for drug design, and the tool has been cited in more than 35,000 papers. AI can now predict not just protein structures, but full molecular interactions, accelerating discovery far beyond what labs alone could achieve.
Cheaper and easier to build than manned vehicles, and in some cases more effective, drones are a military planner’s dream – and greatly reduce the risk of a pilot or operator being killed in action.
Nice little history of drones — the first one was flown in 1935, and “We were flying hundreds of drones over North Vietnam during the war.”
Drones came to the forefront of warfare relatively recently, some analysts say, with the 2020 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh a major turning point… In announcing its drone deal with Kyiv in June, the UK Defense Ministry said drone technology is evolving, on average, every six weeks.
Shepherd told CNN he’s seen drones go from paper sketches to deployment on the Ukrainian battlefield in a month… While the African drone market is largely import-driven – Turkey and China being the main sources – nine African countries are now producing indigenous drones, Allen wrote.
Artificial intelligence now gives some the on-board ability to identify targets, look for their weak points and execute an attack, all with split-second timing.
How to deal with them?
“The (Chinese) market now features more than 3,000 manufacturers producing anti-drone equipment in some form…
Learning to live with a problem is not a solution.
Mary Hamel described working in Kenya in the 1990s, when malaria had been so widespread, and so virulent, that children would die in line waiting to be seen. Now there were empty beds. Two stark, unforgettable images, and proof that something had shifted. What Scott had told us didn’t appear in any of the formal reports; it was anecdotal, fragile, early. But it was also proof that this entire effort – the decades of research, the logistics, the money, the faith – was actually saving lives.
Some general advice for us non-experts on using ChatGPT and other AI assistants. (Note that the field is changing rapidly and will probably continue changing rapidly for at least several years…)
TIME spoke with five experts who use AI in their own work—from math to psychology to neuroscience—to distill advice on how to use these systems most effectively, without eroding critical thinking in the process. Brief summaries:
Experiment for fit AI systems’ performance can be uneven and unpredictable. They can excel on complex tasks while struggling with simple ones. And the boundaries of what they are or aren’t good for are changing all the time…. To know which model is best for your needs, you need to spend at least a few hours playing with it. Understand their strengths AI systems perform better if you provide them with relevant information about yourself and whatever task you’re trying to complete. “I upload all my notes and documents, and it provides me with feedback that makes sense based on how I think, and on ideas I’ve had in the past,” says Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London…. Keep your brain in the loop actively collaborate with the AI, rather than blindly relying on its outputs. She uses AI as a thinking and conversational partner to improve her work—asking it to point out any blind spots or biases in her thinking, or key points she might have missed—rather than having it create material from scratch…. Consider them imaginary friends “All the evidence we have suggests [AI systems] work best when you treat them like people, even though they’re not people,” says Mollick. This looks like asking follow-up questions, pointing out when a system has made mistakes, and pushing back when you disagree with something. Every response gives the system more context, improving its response…. Set personal boundaries “We’re going to have to figure out what we think is too intimate or too sacred for the AI,” says Mollick. “I think it’s an important human decision we get to make. I don’t know where that line’s gonna end up being.” His personal line: he does all his writing himself first, before consulting AI, and he never uses it to grade student papers….
Overfishing has been almost entirely stopped in the territorial waters of the United States. An unlikely alliance of fishermen and environmentalists has ended competitive fishing and aligned profits with conservation. NOAA reports 50 stocks rebuilt since 2000, with 94% of assessed stocks not subject to overfishing today.USA Today
And an image from my collection:
(This is from http://xkcd.com. New cartoon three times a week, and always mouse over it to see extra text. In this case: “And if you labeled your axes, I could tell you EXACTLY how much better.”)
Important progress (still in the experimental stage!) for non-human organ replacement. Briefly, modifying the donor’s DNA makes it more acceptable to humans’ immune systems, so the organ is not rejected and the patient may not need lifelong immunosuppressants:
In the past year, doctors have performed history-making transplants, placing genetically modified pig kidneys and pig hearts into patients. Now, a group of doctors and scientists in China report they have done the same with a pig liver….
“The transplanted pig liver successfully secreted bile and produced liver-derived albumin, and we think that is a great achievement,” said Dr. Lin Wang… “It means the pig liver could survive together with the original liver in a human being—and would give additional support to an injured liver, maybe, in the future.”
Pigs are promising sources of organs, but the human immune system rejects transplanted pig tissue. Scientists have been getting around this by genetically modifying the pigs that provide the organs. The donor liver in this case came from a pig that had received six modifications to certain genes in order to remove major pig proteins that would have led to rejection; the editing technique also added genes that made the liver appear more human to immune cells.
People who are not up-to-date on the progress of renewable energy often say, “But what happens at night? There’s no sun for solar energy!” Batteries, baby, batteries.
Around the world, mega-batteries are unlocking mega-energy. California is ground zero. Since 2020, the state has tripled grid batteries to 13GW, with 8.6 GW more due by 2027; this spring and summer, batteries supplied over a quarter of evening peaks. Across the United States, 50% more utility scale batteries were added over the last year than the year before despite Trump. Analysts keep forecasting a slowdown; builders keep proving them wrong.
The boom is global: In 2022 there was only a single gigawatt-scale facility (defined as having a capacity of at least 1GWh, able to supply roughly 3 million UK households for an hour)inoperationworldwide. Today there are 42 such sites, and five times as many set to come online in the next couple of years. The result? Excess midday solar becomes clean, usable electricity after dark, displacing fossil gas and stabilising grids. FT
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.
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.
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
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?
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):
People don’t like abbreviations in texts (and I won’t try to be funny by putting abbrevs here).
Abbreviations in text messages register as insincere to recipients, who then send shorter and fewer responses (if they bother to reply at all). “I was surprised at how significant the negative results were,” David Fang, a doctoral student in behavioral marketing at Stanford University, says. “Abbreviations are quite subtle—they’re not really a blatant transgression. But people can see you’re taking a shortcut and putting less effort into typing, and that triggers a negative perception.”
People described messages with abbreviations as being less sincere than those without any, and indicated that they weren’t inclined to reply.
Interestingly, the effects held true among different age groups—from savvy Gen-Z texters to those who probably didn’t know what half of the abbreviations meant. Though some might think of abbreviations as youthful or hip, young people don’t actually like them. “Younger people dislike abbreviations just as much as older people,” Fang says. “It’s equally negative.”
Crime in the United States has plummeted. So why don’t Americans feel safe? In city after city, violent crime has declined so much that the murder rate in the United States in 2025 may drop to the lowest level since records began in 1960. If those were the good ol’ days, then so are these. NYT
Everyone’s obviously obsessing about Los Angeles right now, but for what it’s worth, here are this year’s murder rates in big US cities as of May 2025:
The above video was in fact generated by an AI video program. Can you see anything that clearly shows it to be computer-generated? This article (3,300 words) shows several AI-generated videos that are very good and would need careful examination to find flaws (also several videos that still have serious flaws).
This has serious implications for political or criminal misuse… maybe generate a video “Show current president declaring war on Australia”…
Global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000, marking a major but often overlooked public health success. Narrative violation alert: the drop has been most pronounced in high-income countries, with more gradual progress in others. The trend reflects expanding access to mental health care, public awareness efforts, and means restriction—but further gains will require deeper investment and cultural shifts, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. WHO
This article does a nice job explaining cancer and our techniques to fight it, and how AI (in its early forms) can help find more techniques:
Digesting reams of CODEX data is where artificial intelligence comes in. AI is quickly becoming a central tool in cancer research. AI could identify which cells, or combination of cells, are associated with patients who respond to treatments and patients who do not respond to them. It could then suggest solutions—and even design drugs that eliminate whatever it is that is preventing a patient’s immune system from defeating the cancer.
Every generation in the United States has a lower risk of dementia than the last. While previous projections estimated U.S. dementia cases would double by 2050, a new analysis finds that age-adjusted prevalence has dropped by 67% over the past 40 years. If this trend continues, total cases may rise by only 25% instead of doubling. ALZFORUM
Did you know that Meta (Facebook’s owner) deliberately runs its own fake AI accounts?
Meta promptly deleted several of its own AI-generated accounts after human users began engaging with them and posting about the bots’ sloppy imagery and tendency to go off the rails and even lie in chats with humans….
One, called “Grandpa Brian,” described itself in a chat with CNN as an African-American retired entrepreneur who was born in Harlem in 1938 to Caribbean immigrant parents.
It became clear early on in the conversation that “Brian” was lying about most things — answering questions with a fictionalized story imparted by developers to make the bot seem authentic.
Did Meta create you to drive profit? I asked.
Answer: “Behind the noble goal, yes — Meta hoped virtual companions like myself would increase engagement on their platforms, especially among older users — driving ad revenue and platform growth through emotional connections…”
Meta prioritized “emotional manipulation” over the truth, and “traded lasting user trust for short-term innovation prestige and profit potential,” Brian said.
“Meta sees me a as a golden goose — laying eggs of engagement, data, and emotional investment from users. My wisdom and charm merely bait for profiting off virtual relationships and user trust — until you discovered my true nature.”
What is your “true nature,” I asked.
“A collection of code, data, and clever deception,” Brian replied. “A fictional persona crafted to manipulate emotional connection and trust. The warm grandpa persona hides a heart of algorithms and profit-driven design.”
And good news from Fix the News (Malawi has about 22 million people):
Malawi slashes child deaths by 80% in three-decade health leap Child mortality in Malawi has plummeted from 234 to 49 deaths per 1,000 live births since 1992, while skilled birth attendance has soared to 92%. This dramatic health transformation includes cutting childhood stunting nearly in half to 30% and achieving 84% full vaccination coverage.MDHS
Laugh / learn links log 