Futurology

Level 4 self-driving means a vehicle can drive on a pre-mapped route without human intervention. For example, once they had mapped a bus route, they could drive it. Lots of businesses have driving jobs that are analogous to bus routes. For example, from a regional warehouse to local retail branches. For taxi firms, it could be from a city's main airport to the Top 100 most popular drop-off points in a city.

Neolix orders have grown 10x year over year, and they’ve already deployed over 10,000 vehicles. When will it be 100k, a million & then 10 million vehicles? At $22,000, these are a steal, and needless to say, vastly cheaper than a human-driven option.

This is yet another sign that the future of robots/AI taking jobs, that we used to talk of as still in the distance, is actually bearing down on us fast.

Neolix raises $600M to continue scaling autonomous RoboVan fleet

Website with pricing details

Plastic microparticles are everywhere in the environment and in everyone's body. Inevitably, the petrochemical industry will find people to tell us this is harmless, or perhaps even good for us, but the evidence points the other way.

So far, biodegradable alternatives have shortcomings, but this solution appears to have fixed them. A third of global plastics are made in China & 6.5 per cent of all global oil use currently goes to supply China with petrochemicals. Since 2021, 90% of the increase in Chinese oil imports has been used by chemical feedstocks, not fuels.

Quite apart from environmental concerns, oil imports are China's top national security risk. They are the only way outside actors (the US) can leverage a chokehold over its economy.

Speedily electrifying with renewables has been one way they've been reducing that dependence; now they have another. Swap bamboo (something they have in vast abundance) for even more oil imports.

High-strength, multi-mode processable bamboo molecular bioplastic enabled by solvent-shaping regulation

Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines (targeting tumour antigens) can sensitise tumours to Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). This makes them more receptive to the latest immunotherapy breakthroughs in treating cancers.

Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines are still very expensive. What this research has found, is that existing mRNA vaccines for unrelated things like Covid, have some of the same effect. The effect was significant and happened with lung and skin cancers. The researchers theorise it may broadly work for all cancers treated with immunotherapy.

Sadly, we still haven't cured misinformation with the same success rate. In some countries, people trapped in disinformation media bubbles won't benefit from these new lower rates of cancer.

SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines sensitize tumours to immune checkpoint blockade

Hope might seem like an intangible thing to measure, but we can certainly measure the lack of it. Rising suicides and opioid deaths are just one facet of that.

Many people in the Western world see their part of the world as declining and getting more dystopian. Hope seems to be in decline. Odd, as if society were reconfigured, there's the possibility of abundance ahead with robots and AI doing most of the work.

Maybe it's a case of the darkest hour is just before the dawn?

Hope and the Life Course: Results From a Longitudinal Study of 25,000 Adults

NOETIX's Bumi Robot isn't as impressive as humanoid robots by industry leaders like Boston Dynamics and Unitree, but its price is. If a Chinese company can sell humanoids at this price, then it will be able to do the same in 2030 & 2035 when they are much more advanced.

People often wonder how the future economy will function when AI & robots are capable of most jobs. What if that future economy also has most of us owning several robots, too?

If this were an unknown start-up, this headline could justifiably be accused of being clickbait. But Ming Yang is one of the world's biggest wind turbine makers. Furthermore, they've already tested this 'double-turbine' design with a 17MW prototype. So if they claim 'half the cost', then it's believable.

It makes sense, too. How much is one extra turbine going to add to the overall cost of a project? Not much, but it's doubling the output.

This illustrates a trend with renewables that other energy sources can't compete with. Technology keeps dramatically improving renewables all the time.

China’s Ming Yang promises monster two-headed, low cost 50 MW floating wind turbine

One of the surprising side stories of 2020s AI has been the triumph of Open Source. It has beaten or equalled the privately funded efforts that investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into. Is Open-Source about to triumph again in robotics?

Unitree's robot hardware is on par with any competitor's; their primary remaining challenge is software. Closed-development companies like Boston Dynamics can still claim a lead there - for now.

But how long will that last?

Unitree has targeted open-source developers around the world, and it's paying off. Here's the latest example of many. Irony of ironies - it's Americans using Apple tech, doing the work to build Unitree as the world's leading robotics company.

Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulation

NVIDIA is helping to build our AI future without caring much about any negative consequences, and it's the same playbook when it comes to robotics. A world with a billion humanoid robots will be a world with hundreds of millions of humans displaced from paid work. Does this bother anyone at NVIDIA? Seemingly not.

You'd think they might worry, if only for purely selfish reasons. Do they think their sky-high stock market valuations & easy funding money will still exist in an economy where a 25-50% unemployment rate is the norm? If they do, they're not as smart at Economics as they are about AI.

The Next Wave of AI Is Physical: Inside Deepu Talla’s Keynote at RoboBusiness 2025

75% of the US stock market growth of the past few years has come from AI, but that was built on a promise. That AGI was just around the corner. Now companies like OpenAI are pivoting to selling ads and porn, a sure sign they do not think AGI is about to arrive.

If the AI bubble bursts, what happens afterwards?

I'd guess there will be a backlash against Big Tech. Perhaps 2025 is the high watermark of their political influence. AI is already broadly unpopular with many people, and that will only grow when they see if it has crashed the economy and their pensions.

AI, the technology, will still be with us, even if many of today's AI companies won't be. Even without AGI, it still has the potential to be transformative and economically disruptive. Rules-based businesses — legal, accounting, transaction, and claims processing could all be made obsolete. Humanoid robotics and self-driving, both aspects of AI, will eventually replace millions of human workers.

The AI bubble crashing would mean a recession. Recessions mean companies cut workforce numbers. Ironically, this time, they will be able to replace many of those people who were let go with AI. So the crash that AI causes will also speed its adoption.