Futurology

"employing 1,000 robots at its plant.……..operated at full capacity in two-shift rotations since June 2024. One thousand people work each shift."

Humans plateau in their capabilities, robots don't. The AI that gives them their abilities gets inexorably better and better.

Car manufacturing employs 3 million people in the EU, and 1 million in the US. Xiaomi’s car factory can't make it any clearer what the future is going to be - soon most of this work can be done by robots.

When will our public discourse reflect this? Most politicians talk as if none of this is happening.

China's Xiaomi takes on Tesla, armed with 1,000 EV factory robots

Quite apart from the blatant corruption, if SpaceX's biggest problem is that its rockets keep exploding, how is an AI that you have deliberately designed to give wrong answers supposed to fix things?

Thanks to gutting NASA and science budgets, space is another area where the US will soon cede the top spot to China. They have fully developed plans for a lunar base, deep space exploration, and will likely be the next to have humans on the Moon.

BTW - to anyone who tries to argue this isn't outright corruption, via diverting and siphoning taxpayers money, I have NFTs and memecoins for a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to interest you in.

SpaceX to invest $2 billion in Musk's xAI startup, WSJ reports

If you tend towards conspiracy theory-type thinking, you might wonder if the Chinese government is directing its AI sector to use open-source AI to undermine US AI efforts. If they aren't, is it just a coincidence that this is what is happening?

Two things seem inevitable to me if the trend of Chinese open-source AI equalling Western efforts keeps up. A) - It will eventually bankrupt the Western AI companies and their investors, as the hundreds of billions poured into them will never be realized in profits. B) The 21st century will be built on Chinese AI, as it will be what most of the world uses.

The former seems more dramatic in the short term, but the latter is what will be more significant in the long term.

Moonshot AI just released Kimi K2: China is not so behind in Agentic AI either it would seem.

The new law will allow consumers to install solar in their homes without the need to connect to the grid; however, more needs to be done.

"Regulations and standards governing electrical devices haven’t kept pace with the development of the technology, and they lack essential approvals required for adoption, including compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories. Nothing about the bill Ward wrote changes that."

The fossil fuel industry has the current US administration in its pocket. Once they see they have leverage with national requirements like this, expect them to exploit the situation with delays and blocking tactics.

But it will only work for so long. They can't hide what is happening in the rest of the world, and more and more Americans will be wondering why they can't have the cheap energy everyone else is enjoying.

Balcony solar took off in Germany. Why not the US?

China operates the world's only commercial maglev train. It connects Shanghai Airport and the city center, and reaches top speeds of 430 km/h. China is also testing a near-vacuum-tube train which claims it may achieve speeds of up to 1,000 km/h in the future.

Interestingly this project aims to demonstrate 800 km/h later in 2025. That speed is almost as fast as the cruising speed of commercial airliners.

Will it need special rail tracks? This is the Japanese test maglev train passing people at 500 km/hr.

400 mph in 7 seconds: China’s maglev breaks speed barriers with new record