Futurology Today

"The trade-off is profound: by socializing the infrastructure of abundance, we eliminate the need for centralized economic control and bureaucracy. "

This is an interesting essay, though I don't agree with it all. For a start, bureaucracies are not all bad. The countries with the highest standards of living all have well-oiled bureaucracies. But it's interesting to see how other people think.

This is a paper which argues that the true path to a safe, dependable AI system is to take what we've learned from meditation and Buddhism and apply it to AI systems: "Robust alignment strategies need to focus on developing an intrinsic, self-reflective adaptability that is constitutively embedded within the system’s world model, rather than using brittle top-down rules", the authors write.

Contemplative Artificial Intelligence - PDF 37 pages

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/27557483

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

Rocket launches may dominate headlines, but the true bottleneck in space exploration lies not in reaching low Earth orbit (LEO), but in venturing beyond it. From LEO to the Moon or Mars, spacecraft still require costly kick stages or oversized boosters. A decades-old idea known as the skyhook could change that equation.

A skyhook is a rotating orbital tether: essentially, a long, strong cable that swings a spacecraft from one orbit to another, much like a sling. Unlike the space elevator concept, a skyhook looks much more buildable with current technology. By lowering the cost of Earth/Moon & interplanetary transport, skyhooks and related tether technologies could help make space travel beyond LEO economically feasible. The linked interview with Marcus Landgraf, from ESA, connects this to breaking resource limitations and enabling prosperity through space expansion.

How Close Are We To Building A Practical Skyhook? Youtube Interview with Dr. Marcus Landgraf, ESA Human and Robotic Exploration Programme)

In the 12 months to April 2025, 6,100 Irish people emigrated to America. But the figure for Americans emigrating to Ireland was a third higher, at 9,600. The fact that this number has suddenly jumped by 96% suggests it might not be a permanent trend, but while it lasts, it might be a significant one, especially for Ireland.

3 million Americans hold an Irish passport, and 10s of millions more are eligible for one. Add to that, Italian passports are easy to obtain for Americans with Italian ancestry. An Irish or Italian passport is an EU passport, meaning you can work, start a business, and reside freely anywhere in the EU as an EU citizen. Even after Brexit, Ireland and the UK allow each other's citizens to work and reside freely in each other's countries, too.

Might the centuries-long trend of European-American emigrant traffic be about to reverse, too?

96% jump in number of people coming from the US to live in Ireland

"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."

One of the most depressing of human biases is to hyperfocus on bad news, to the exclusion of positive things. 'If it bleeds, it leads, ' as the TV news shows say. Even in the social media age, where TV news is fading in importance, the same instincts predominate.

The results? People think the state of the world is much worse than it is. Not just that, they think they are powerless to change things for the better.

Meanwhile, groups of people like UNICEF and WHO, often dismissed as irrelevant do-gooders, go about making the world a better place. If the numbers given access to basic water and sanitation can jump this much in 9 years, then giving it to nearly 100% of people is in our future, and maybe sooner than we think.

1 in 4 people globally still lack access to safe drinking water – WHO, UNICEF

Baidu Apollo launches 6th-gen robotaxi with 60% lower cost

According to Wikipedia, as of 2021, Waymo estimated its vehicle cost was around US $180,000.

Each robotmart vehicle has 10 lockers, each with a capacity to carry 22Kg (50 pounds) from a local retailer to a customer for a flat fee of $3. The vehicles are Level 4 self-driving. That same level of self-driving has now allowed self-driving trucks to master highway driving. We've already got ports that are almost 100% automated, Europe's largest port, Rotterdam, being a prime example.

Almost all the functional pieces of a 100%-robot global logistics chain are here and working; every step from the factory of origin to the end customer. The last few areas where humans need to load/unload, or pack/unpack, will soon be mastered by robots, too.

Robomart unveils new delivery robot with $3 flat fee to challenge DoorDash, Uber Eats

Top of the list of fastest growing cities is Gwagwalada in Nigeria, a place I'd never heard of. It's in Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, 45 kilometers southwest of Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, and its growth is related to that proximity.

China and Africa are becoming ever more closely bound. China is now the single largest financier of African infrastructure. China is almost every single African country's top trading partner. An estimated 1-2 million Chinese people have moved to Africa. Chinese technology is already shaping the African continent, with solar panels and smartphones leading imports. No doubt Chinese AI & Chinese robotics will be a big part of Africa's future, too.

10 fastest growing cities in the world (2025 population trends)

I read a lot of biographies. They're a genre of writing that relies heavily on people's former habit of letter writing. For many people from the 19th and 20th centuries, much of what we know about their lives comes from their preserved letters. Letter writing is now becoming extinct, and with it that literary tradition. If you can't even post a letter, surely it's the very end of it.

Yes, future biography writers will have social media posts and online writing to mine for material. There's vastly more of it than the preserved letters in the world's libraries. But there's an intimacy about letters that online writing rarely has.

Other countries will now be facing the decision Denmark has just made. If delivering letters is a permanent loss-making venture, when do you pull the plug?

Denmark to shutdown post office, end delivery of physical mails

It seems America and the rest of the world may look very different in the 2030s.

The rest of the world living in the future with EVs and cheap renewable energy. America in some strange steampunk version of the future, where energy is expensive, everyone still drives huge gasoline cars, and power stations still belch smoke from coal.

Cheap Chinese EVs that cost <$20k and run on cheap renewable electricity, frequently from home solar, will likely be rapidly becoming the global norm in the 2030s. I wonder if the fossil fuel industry has home solar in its sights, too? They have all the American politicians in their pockets that they need to ban it in the US.

Trump says U.S. will not approve solar or wind power projects

Trump administration halts work on an almost-finished wind farm