Category: Technology

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.

Welcome to the Internet

By Bo Burnham. Pretty funny and pretty on-target: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU. 4 min 40 seconds. Lyrics: https://genius.com/Bo-burnham-welcome-to-the-internet-lyrics.

Welcome to the internet! Have a look around.
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found.
We’ve got mountains of content, some better, some worse.
If none of it’s of interest to you, you’d be the first.

And as a bonus, one item from dozens in the latest Future Crunch weekly newsletter:

Last year China more than doubled its solar capacity and increased wind capacity by 66%. This year is going to be all about storage. The country currently has 210 GW of pumped storage and 100 GW of batteries either in operation, under construction, or contracted. That’s going to take a huge chunk out of coal and gas.

One gigawatt is enough energy to power about 750,000 homes. And doubling its solar capacity in one year? Wow!

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.)

Printing replacement organs

In the United States, there are 106,800 men, women and children on the national organ transplant waiting list as of March 8, 2023, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. However, living donors provide only around 6,000 organs per year on average, and there are about 8,000 deceased donors annually who each provide 3.5 organs on average.

Currently, if one of your important organs stops working or is too damaged, your choices suck: get a transplant, or die. And transplantation means someone has to give up an organ, or has to be dead (and yet still have the needed organ and that in good shape, and a reasonable match for blood type, antibodies, and HLA). 3D printing has spread into the area of printing biological materials. If we can print replacement organs, the donor and donor-match problems go away:

What if doctors could just print a kidney, using cells from the patient, instead of having to find a donor match and hope the patient’s body doesn’t reject the transplanted kidney?

The soonest that could happen is in a decade, thanks to 3D organ bioprinting, said Jennifer Lewis, a professor at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Organ bioprinting is the use of 3D-printing technologies to assemble multiple cell types, growth factors and biomaterials in a layer-by-layer fashion to produce bioartificial organs that ideally imitate their natural counterparts

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/health/3d-printed-organs-bioprinting-life-itself-wellness-scn/index.html. About 1,500 words.



Inside the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer

From 2021, so the chip shortage may be over by now, but this is still fascinating:

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips—otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips—that power our phones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators and more. Its clients include Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia… The $550 billion firm today controls more than half the global market for made-to-order chips and has an even tighter stranglehold on the most advanced processors, with more than 90% of market share by some estimates.

TSMC’s success in cornering this vital market has become a geostrategic migraine. The Pentagon is pressing the Biden Administration to invest more in advanced chipmaking, so its missiles and fighter jets are not dependent on a self-ruling island that China’s strongman President Xi Jinping believes is a breakaway province and has repeatedly threatened to invade. More immediately, a global chip shortage has impacted a staggering 169 industries, according to Goldman Sachs analysis, from steel and ready-mix concrete to air-conditioning units and breweries. Most drastically, automakers across America, Japan and Europe were forced to slow and even halt production, meaning 3.9 million fewer cars will roll into world showrooms this year than last.

TSMC’s dominance is such that its chief rivals are not companies but governments.

How did TMSC get there? How does the Chinese government’s feelings about Taiwan affect them (and therefore the rest of the world)? How is the United States dealing with a crucial technology monopoly that it does not own?

Making chips is so unbelievably complex and specialized that diversifying the location of fabs will make it more difficult to maintain quality. The transistor in a 3-nm node is just 1/20,000th the width of a human hair. Were you to enlarge a foot-long wafer of semiconductor to the size of the continental U.S., the required patterning for these chips would still be only the width of a thumbnail.

Full article (about 3,400 words): https://time.com/6102879/semiconductor-chip-shortage-tsmc/. Also see Making chips: 20,000,000,000,000 parts: https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/2021/12/17/making-chips-20000000000000-parts/.

Lawsuits against fossil fuel industry

In 2005, I was the lead counsel on behalf of the US in one of the biggest corporate accountability legal actions ever filed. That trial proved that the tobacco industry knew it was selling and marketing a harmful product, that it had funded denial of public health science, and had used deceptive advertising and PR to protect assets instead of protecting consumers.

Today, the fossil fuel industry finds itself in the same precarious legal position as the tobacco industry did in the late 1990s. The behaviour and goals of the tobacco and petroleum industries are pretty similar – and there are many similarities in their liabilities.

Both industries lied to the public and regulators about what they knew about the harms of their products. Both lied about when they knew it. And like the tobacco industry while I was in public service, the deceptive advertising and PR of the fossil fuel industry is now under intense legal scrutiny.

And the tide is beginning to turn. More than 1,800 lawsuits have been filed over climate liability worldwide.

Full article (890 words): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/05/us-lawsuit-big-tobacco-big-oil-fossil-fuel-companies

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:

Renewables cheaper than coal plants

This article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/30/new-york-might-take-second-swing-electrification/) covers several environmental issues, but the part that really caught my eye was:

99% of U.S. coal plants pricier to run than renewables, analysis finds

A coal plant in Delta, Utah, in June. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

Nearly all coal plants in the United States are more expensive to operate than renewable energy projects that could replace them, according to an analysis.

The report by Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy firm, looked at the cost of running the country’s remaining 210 coal plants in 2021. 

For 99 percent of the coal plants, it would be cheaper to build and operate a new wind or solar project, the analysis found. That marks a major increase from 2019, when the firm first conducted the analysis and found that 62 percent of existing coal capacity was uneconomic compared to new renewables.

Replacing the 210 coal plants with wind and solar would create cost savings large enough to finance the addition of nearly 150 gigawatts of battery storage, increasing the reliability of the new renewables, the analysis concluded.

The report’s authors acknowledged that many communities depend on coal plants for jobs and tax revenue. But they noted that clean energy projects would also create jobs and economic growth, and that the Inflation Reduction Act offers additional tax credits to developers of clean energy projects in communities historically reliant on fossil fuels.

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/.