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:

Where we’ll end up living as the planet burns

From 2022:

While nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is no way to adapt. People will have to move to survive.

Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. This migration has already begun…

Link (3,200 words): https://time.com/6209432/climate-change-where-we-will-live/.

And good news from Fix the News (more details for this week at https://fixthenews.com/p/ftn-309-colours-of-the-moon-wash):

Billions of people have gained clean water, sanitation and hygiene in the last nine years. That’s not a typo – that’s billions, with a B. An astonishing new data dump from the WHO and UNICEF showing that between 2015 and 2024 humanity recorded one of the fastest expansions of basic welfare of all time: 961 million people gained safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation, and 1.5 billion gained access to basic hygiene services, while the number of unserved fell by nearly 900 million. Coverage has risen to 74%, 58% and 80% respectively, while open defecation has dropped by 429 million people. Together, these figures represent an historic advance in human health and dignity.

Plus a pic from my collection:

Does the stock market know something we don’t?

According to textbook economics, the stock market’s value reflects what are known as “fundamentals.” An individual company’s current stock price is derived from that firm’s future-earnings potential, and is thus rooted in hard indicators such as profits and market share…

The fundamentals story held up well until the 2008 financial crisis. Within six months of the U.S. banking system’s collapse, the market fell by 46 percent. In response, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost zero and pushed money back into the economy by purchasing trillions of dollars in securities from financial institutions… For most of the 2010s, corporate earnings were modest, GDP and productivity growth were low, and the labor market remained weaker than it had been before the crisis. In other words, the fundamentals were not great. Yet the stock market soared. From 2010 to 2019, it tripled in value.

More than half of the S&P 500’s total growth in 2023 and 2024 was driven by the so-called Magnificent Seven companies: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. During those two years alone, Tesla’s value rose by 286 percent, Meta’s by 355 percent, and Nvidia’s by 861 percent. The biggest firms have always been responsible for a disproportionate share of the market’s growth, but never had the gains been so acutely concentrated.

So what the heck is going on?

Thanks to a series of regulatory changes in the late 2000s and early 2010s, about half of fund assets are now held in “passive funds.”… The most common type of passive fund purchases a tiny share of every single stock in an index, such as the S&P 500, proportional to its size.

We have a positive feedback loop here, friends. “Positive” does not mean “good,” it means “self-reinforcing.” A negative feedback loop tends to suppress its own growth: for example, a thermostat raises the heat if the temperature is too low, or raises the A/C if the temperature is too high. An example of a positive feedback loop is a microphone that’s too close to the speakers: it picks up music or speech, plus the sound from the speakers, and feeds that to the speakers, which get louder, and repeat until screech. Unregulated positive feedback loops always end in disaster.

As the “Magnificent Seven” become larger parts of the Fortune 500, passive funds buy more. Which makes the Seven larger, so passive funds buy more. Repeat until… well, I don’t know what will happen. But it will probably be unpleasant.

Full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/08/stock-market-theories/683780/ (2,000 words). If that does not work, try: https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/does-the-stock-market-know-something-we-dont/.

And good news from Fix the News: Sometimes no news really is good news!

Oil tanker spills have nearly vanished since the 1970s. Half a century ago, spills released an average of 314,000 tonnes of oil into the ocean each year. However, better ship design, stricter regulation, and faster response capacity have turned once-routine disasters into rare events; today, the figure is below 10,000, less than one-thirtieth of its former level. Our World in Data

Plus a pic from my collection:

Are we better off than we were a millennium ago?

In my opinion, we’re living in a Golden Age, especially regarding healthcare. But these numbers are pretty astounding: global GDP in the year 1 was around $248 billion, in 1001 around $285 billion (up about 15%), in 1993 around $62 trillion (up around 24,876%). It’s routine to build massive civilian infrastructure: roads, hospitals, schools, bridges, and not just out of wood or stone anymore…

Here’s one article with a graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-run:

This article has some more detail: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-gdp-per-capita-worldwide/: “In 1990, 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty, which was 36% of the world’s population at the time. Over the last 30 years, the number has been steadily decreasing — by 2030, an estimated 479 million people will be living in extreme poverty, which according to UN population estimates, will represent only 6% of the population.”

This is a growth rate of world GDP of 87% in the 120 years 1700-1820; 311% in another hundred years from 1820-1920; and 2,390% in 103 years from 1920-2023. What will just the next 25 years present to us?

And good news from Fix the News:

Check out fur’s fall from grace: a $40 billion industry gutted in a decade. In 2014, fur farms killed over 140 million animals. By 2024, that number was down to 20.5 million. The collapse came fast: Gucci’s 2017 fur-free pledge set off a luxury brand exodus, COVID-19 outbreaks on mink farms shut down operations across Europe, and sanctions and crackdowns hit demand in Russia and China. Vox says it’s the greatest animal welfare victory of the 21st century.

And an image from my collection:

Internet enshittification

Two years ago, a Canadian writer named Cory Doctorow coined the phrase “enshittification” to describe the decay of online platforms. The word immediately set the Internet ablaze, as it captured the growing malaise regarding how almost everything about the web seemed to be getting worse.

“It’s my theory explaining how the Internet was colonized by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters, and what we can do about it… We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”

Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.

Ars Technica covered several areas of enshittification:

Smart TVs
Google’s voice assistant
The Portable Document Format (PDFs)
Televised sports
Google search
Email AI tools (Google again)
Windows
Web discourse

2,800 words: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/.

But! Good news from Fix the News:

Poland repeals its last anti-LGBT+ resolutions. In 2019 and 2020, over 100 local authorities around Poland adopted sometimes-thinly-veiled anti-LGBT+ resolutions, declaring themselves free of “LGBT ideology” or pledging to “protect children from moral corruption.” Last week, the last of those declarations was revoked after the EU threatened to deny those regions funding, marking the end of Poland’s so-called ‘LGBT-free zones.’ Human Rights Watch.

Also, an image from my collection:

Murders are down nationwide

In 2024, murders fell by at least 14% across the U.S., according to analyses by the data firm AH Datalytics and the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. Official data from the FBI goes only through 2023 but shows similar drops. Early analyses from AH Datalytics suggest the drop will be even bigger in 2025.

In Detroit, for instance, city officials say the number of homicides is at its lowest since 1965, and Police Chief Todd Bettison says that has led to a huge difference for his officers.

“They’re not drinking from a fire hose,” he says….

Crime analysts have zeroed in on what they say is a primary driver of the rise and subsequent decline: the COVID-19 pandemic.

900 words: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5448852/murders-down-nationwide-covid. And Baltimore (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/07/04/baltimore-gun-violence-homicides/, 1,000 words):

As of July 1, 68 people in Baltimore had died by homicide this year, the fewest during the first six months of the year in more than five decades. It marks a nearly 23 percent decrease compared with the first half of 2024. Shootings where nobody was killed have also fallen by nearly 20 percent compared with the same time period last year. The falling statistics, mirroring a national drop in violent crime, follow years of similar declines.

Government spending makes a difference:

All of a sudden, there were a lot of young people — who are more likely to commit crimes than older people — at home, with little to do. And, Roman says, a vital support system was ripped away: public services. Between March and May of 2020, the country’s local government workforce shrank by nearly 10%.

And good news from Fix the News:

Global progress on trachoma elimination is one of the best things you’ve never heard about. The number of people afflicted worldwide has fallen from 2.8 million in 2016 to 1.2 million in 2025. The pool of those at risk is shrinking fast too, falling from 192 million in 2015 to 102 million in 2025. In the last 12 months alone, seven countries have eliminated the disease altogether. It’s one of the most amazing global health stories on Earth, and you will not find it anywhere except deep inside technical WHO reports.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5448852/murders-down-nationwide-covid

Best ways to spot a liar

Also, the worst ways:

Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance…

“There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.”… The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.

Better:

Shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.

Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:

Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.

Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.

Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work.

Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. Geoffrey Bird at University College London and colleagues recently set up a game in which subjects had to reveal true or false statements about themselves. They were also asked to judge each other’s credibility. It turned out that people who were better at telling fibs could also detect others’ tall tales, perhaps because they recognised the tricks.

Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.

The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses.

About 1,700 words: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150906-the-best-and-worst-ways-to-spot-a-liar.

And good news from Fix the News:

New York’s six month old congestion pricing scheme has produced perhaps the fastest ever environmental improvement of any policy in US history… and it’s also making money.Congestion pricing revenue is on track to reach $500 million this year, “allowing upgrades to the subway, the purchase of several hundred new electric buses and improvements to regional rail.” Guardian