Lugh

capitalist hellscape

It's hilarious seeing Elon Musk taking up the issue of plummeting birth rates, while simultaneously saying people who work for him who won't commit to giving their life to his companies and sleeping in the office are lazy losers.

People often focus on the environmental benefits of renewables, but they have another huge advantage - they can be used as decentralized energy sources. One benefit, you're not at the mercy of price fixing by semi-monopolized corporations obsessed with increasing profits every quarter. Even better, you can break free from other people's incompetence, corruption and inefficiency.

This seems to be what is happening in Pakistan, and it's a hopeful lesson for many other parts of the world. Plagued by a corrupt increasingly dysfunctional traditional grid infrastructure many people are now able to bypass it entirely thanks to rooftop solar.

I find the idea of destroying the International Space Station very depressing. Centuries from now, when hopefully humankind will have widely expanded into the galaxy, our ancestors will be fascinated by it. We know this because of our own deep connection to ancient artifacts preserved in the world's museums.

The current plan is to destroy the ISS circa 2030 by burning it up in the atmosphere with a deliberately destructive deorbit. It seems with just a little more effort and imagination we could transport an unmanned ISS to somewhere like an Earth-Moon Lagrange point L1 and park it there for future generations and a future space museum.

I suspect we are going to see more measures like this. Prices are continually falling for rooftop solar+battery systems, and as every year goes by it becomes feasible for more and more people to generate much of their electricity at home. Climate change will exacerbate the trend too, as home setups are an obvious insurance measure as hurricanes and flooding worsen and degrade national infrastructure.

In the 2030s & 40s much of today's fossil fuel infrastructure will become stranded investments that some people will want compensation for. If fully paid for, that bill could run to trillions of dollars globally. Choices will have to be made. Nationalization of some legacy energy companies might make more sense if they can no longer survive in a free market system.

n the 1960s, the famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted the effects of TV on society. Now it seems we are rapidly transitioning to the post-TV age.

At TV's height of influence in the late 20th century, it shaped country's cultures, history, and those country's citizen's national identity, and politics. It still does for the old. People often worry about the bad side of the post-TV social media world. Those problems are real, but it has its good sides too. It's decentralized, and content creation is now in the hands of the many, not the rich, elite few. That means the ability to shape identities, national narratives, and political realities is becoming more decentralized too.

LLMs seem to be rapidly evolving robotics AI. Looking at Figure right now, it seems general purpose robots capable of most unskilled work (cleaning, warehouses, etc) can't be far off.

There's a huge amount of humanoid robots in development around the world. Here's a list I compiled from another post (and I probably missed several).

LimX Dynamics

1X's NEO

Astribot S1

Tesla's Optimus

Agility Robotics

Xiaomi's CyberOne

Apptronik Apollo

Ubtech's Walker S

Figure's Figure 1

Fourier Intelligence's GR-1

Sanctuary's Phoenix

Unitree Robotics' H1

XPENG's PX5

Germany, like several other European countries with proportional representation voting systems, frequently has its Green Party in power. It's interesting that laws around NIMBYism were changed to overrule objections that were blocking people from doing this.

The more decentralized power generation gets, the more it's an issue for the owners of the electricity grid. It will be interesting to see how Germany deals with this.

The crux of this idea is that if the speed of light severely limits two-way communication, why not get around that problem by sending the AI to them so they can talk to it, and not need back and forth communication to learn about us.

Needless to say, readers of 'The Three Body Problem' will have mostly negative thoughts on this idea, but to me it poses a question. What if there are other alien civilizations doing this already - how would we spot them?

For sure. Though I think by definition the word "lie" implies the intent. Anything accidental is just getting your facts wrong.

Many people will ask who gets to decide what a lie is? This mentions an "independent judicial process". Courts and juries generally have a good record of establishing truth, so it will be interesting to see how this works.

One of the little realized aspects of so much of 21st-century politics being lies - is how inefficient it makes life. Technology and change are accelerating. Yet every instance our political discourse wastes time countering lies, it's taking valuable time away from solving problems.

They are pretty grainy images, but its amazing to think we are able to look at another solar system 12 light years away. It's worth noting that space agencies around the world are ramping up efforts to get more detailed data about solar systems and their exoplanets within 100 light-years of Earth. Estimates vary, but that is thought to include 12,000 - 15,000 solar systems. Presumably, the exoplanet tally will be 100,000. If microbial life is widespread in the Universe, it seems a near-certainty it will have to be in some of these.