Futurology

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

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

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

"These days, when entrepreneurs pitch at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, there’s a high chance their startups are running on Chinese models. “I’d say there’s an 80% chance they’re using a Chinese open-source model,” notes Martin Casado, a partner at a16z."

If the AI bubble is going to burst, you've got to wonder how many of today's AI stars like OpenAI will survive it. Are they already yesterday's people, and the future is leaner, cheaper, and built on free open-source AI? If 80% of new American start-ups are choosing Chinese open-source, you can bet that figure rises to near 100% for the rest of the world.

Silicon Valley thought they were soon going to get an AI unicorn, another world-conquering Google or Meta. Maybe, one day. For now, it looks like Chinese Open-Source AI may be the model about to spread all over the world.

China is quietly upstaging America with its open models

Numerous studies in the past two years show that CRISPR-based interventions can correct mutations and restore cellular and behavioral function in mouse models of brain diseases. Diseases caused by mutations in genes associated with brain functions - like alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC), Huntington’s disease, and Friedreich’s ataxia- have seen major improvements in mice that have had their brains gene edited.

This raises a fascinating possibility - what if this gene editing could go beyond correcting diseases? What if you could get an IQ boost of 20-30 points? For obvious reasons, this would be huge for people on a personal level, but it would also have political effects. What would society be like if everyone were 30 IQ points smarter?

Brain editing now ‘closer to reality’: the gene-altering tools tackling deadly disorders: Stunning results in mice herald gene-editing advances for neurological diseases.

I'd never heard of Graphene-Mediated Optical Stimulation before this. Basically, it takes advantage of graphene’s knack for turning light into tiny electrical nudges that neurons actually respond to. Since graphene is literally just a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, it’s very good at absorbing light and then spitting out these subtle signals that coax neurons into growing, branching, and wiring themselves together. In the lab, this sped up the way brain organoids formed sturdy little networks.

They hooked one of these graphene-stimulated organoids up to a robot. When the robot ran into an obstacle, it shot a signal over to the organoid, which fired back a neural response in under 50 milliseconds that told the robot to change course.

These brain organoids would be a natural candidate for interfacing with our brain, as they're made from the same thing. It's interesting to wonder if we could fuse robotics extensions with our brains this way?

New Graphene Technology Matures Brain Organoids Faster, May Unlock Neurodegenerative Insights

New research pushes back the data of the earliest Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) to 4.09–4.33 billion years ago, a mere few hundred million years after Earth formed. Furthermore, that life was complex too; perhaps having ~2,600 proteins and a primitive immune system. Implying it existed in a biological community (perhaps on another planet), and did not arise on Earth as an isolated primitive lifeform.

There's more support for the idea that microorganisms may be very widespread throughout the galaxy. Researchers now think there is a vast biome extending as far as 8km down from the Earth's surface. These microbes may have lifetimes of thousands or even millions of years, and don't need sunlight or oxygen.

This vastly expands the number and type of exoplanets that may harbor life, and this makes Panspermia via asteroid ejecta even more likely as an explanation for how life came to Earth.

One of the central assumptions of our current search for alien life is that if we find it, it must have independently arisen in that location. Even in places as nearby as Mars. Should we change our assumptions? Assume Mars did, and probably still does have life, and that we were both seeded from elsewhere?

Life happened fast It’s time to rethink how we study life’s origins. It emerged far earlier, and far quicker, than we once thought possible

The Pursuit of Life Where It Seems Unimaginable

China has now surpassed the US for the number of clinical trials per year, and they're 50-100% faster there, too. U.S. and other Western pharmaceutical firms increasingly license innovative drugs from China; In 2025, deals valued from China accounted for about one-third of big pharma licensing agreements.

The U.S. biotech ecosystem has long been driven by NIH-backed R&D, but that has recently been radically cut. Will this be another case where Trump delivers a win for China? Destroying something at home for right-wing ideological reasons, just to let China swoop in to collect the prize. In this case becoming number 1 in global pharmaceuticals?

Outside America, the rest of the world is a winner here. Chinese industrialisation is driving global deflation and cheaper goods in transport, energy, and computing. It will be great if we can add biotech and pharmaceuticals to that list.

China’s Biotech Is Cheaper and Faster

Africa is the big loser in the current system, as the Mercator map makes it look far smaller than it really is. Europe and Russia would look far smaller (their true size) in a corrected map. Brazil is also a beneficiary with a corrected map; it looks far bigger in reality than the Mercator map represents it.

The campaign seems to be going places. The World Bank says it is phasing out the use of the Mercator map, and various UN bodies are looking at doing the same.

African Union joins calls to end use of Mercator map that shrinks continent’s size

It's worth remembering that 20 years ago in 2005, renewables were just 1% of global electricity capacity. Interesting that coal will finally start declining, but gas hasn't yet. Even though coal power use will increase in the US, its decline in China & the EU is bigger, so coal declines overall.

The IEA forecast renewables to be 50% of global capacity by 2030, but they have always underestimated and been too conservative with predictions, so that may happen sooner. There are still huge economies-of-scale price decreases ahead for renewables. By 2030-35 as renewables approaches 80% will anybody be building new power plants of any other type?

IEA: Renewables will be world’s top power source ‘by 2026’

"is designed with a focus on companionship, according to EngineAI. Equipped with a large language model, it supports intelligent interaction and includes high-fidelity speakers and dual high-definition cameras for voice conversation and gesture recognition."

EngineAI's SA02 is much like a dozen or more 2025 humanoid robots currently being developed around the world. It's mastered moving around with agility, and you can talk to it via an LLM AI. Can it do much more? We'll see. Most 2025 humanoid robots are still taking baby steps when it comes to being useful workers, that can do simple tasks like folding laundry.

But has EngineAI spotted a gap in the market by focusing on companionship? Hundreds of thousands of people already have AI boyfriends and girlfriends. This will provide the identical AI, while also giving those AI friends real 3D bodies. Question - if you're truly in love with your AI boy/girlfriend, would you spend the extra money to give them a body?

Video of the robot

EngineAI to launch SA02, a $5,500 humanoid robot aimed at young people