Futurology Today

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There are others, but Waymo in the US and Badiu's Apollo Go in China, now seem ready for take-off with robo-taxis. From now on the only constraints to growth will be how quick they can deploy new vehicles to new markets. When this explosive growth is finished, there will be tens of millions of robo-taxis in every town and city on planet Earth.

The real revolution will be the global displacement of tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of human driver jobs. We are rushing headlong into this future without anyone preparing for it, yet it's going to happen whether people like it or not, and it's heading straight for us.

IMAGINE: In 2124, androids and humans coexist seamlessly. You’re sitting in a cozy cafe, watching two people have an intimate, almost lovers' conversation. One of them has a small glowing emblem on their wrist, an unmistakable sign that they are an android, required by law. Despite this, their connection feels real, deep, and natural, as if they’ve been in each other’s lives for years. The emblem is the only thing separating them from being human, but the conversation, full of quiet affection, feels indistinguishable from any other intimate exchange.

Given the growing movement to remove the emblem, would you support it or feel it should stay?)

Edit: Direct YouTube link.

This is a good application of the tech

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

I am reading The New Wave, the last book from Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman. He mentioned that a massive study pegged down the General Purpose Technologies to be only 24 in the last 10000 years (so fire is not included for example), but I can’t find the study. Does anybody know the study? This is the list btw:

Domestication of plants Domestication of animals Smelting of ore Money Wheel Writing Bronze Iron Water wheel Three-masted sailing ship Printing Factory system Steam Engine Railways Steamship Internal combustion engine Electricity Automobile Airplane Mass production Computer Lean production Internet Biotechnology

EDIT: I found the source https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Transformations-General-Purpose-Technologies/dp/019929089X

Intramotev is a St. Louis-based company founded in 2020 to develop autonomous, zero-emission rail solutions that decrease railway costs and promote environmental responsibility across a longstanding yet dated freight segment plagued by diesel pollution.

Today, the company shared video footage of its TugVolt battery electric railcar retrofit deployed at a calcium mine in Michigan.

TugVolt can be controlled from a smartphone and decouple from the consist (the group of railcars as a whole), and operate independently for first—and last-mile legs of trips on existing freight lines.

We've done this for a few years on the r/futurology subreddit. Here's 2024's predictions. Not many seem to have got a lot right, though most got a certain amount correct.

The research is on what is referred to as LUCA - the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all animals, plants and single cell creatures that exist today. Crucially, that is not the same as the very earliest life on Earth. There is thought to be other simpler life that led to LUCA.

The research is surprising in its implications. It finds LUCA was very complex very early on in Earth's history. In fact, very soon after any life was possible at all (300 million years after the Moon was formed), it was already a complex life form that coded for and used 2,600 different proteins.

The implication? Either life forms much more easily than we thought, and is thus more common elsewhere than we might expect. Intriguingly, this also boosts the argument for Panspermia. That is the idea that space dust from asteroid-planet collisions, that is travelling throughout the galaxy, is seeding life as it lands on new planets.