Lugh

Swiss Re is one of the world's largest insurance companies - do you think they usually lie about such things?

It's important to understand logic, biases and how to evaluate information sources to avoid conspiracy theory thinking.

AI is already better than human drivers in China/US. It won't be long before it masters the more challenging environments. I suspect the humans will adapt to its predictability in places with crazier driving.

I'm surprised. Surely if they can make robotaxis work at scale, its a solid business where you can extract 5-10% profit from revenue? Seems like they were "almost" there.

Interesting supposition. The multiverse is just a hypothesis, there's no proof the concept is real, so this idea is more in the realm of metaphysics than real science. Still, humanity doesn't understand the quantum world yet, and it is building tech that utilizes it.

On the opposite end of the scale is dark energy & dark matter, which shows we don't really understand the universe at the macro scale either, yet we've been existing in it for millenia. Whatever is real, is just as real as it ever was, whether we understand it or not.

So perhaps this extra computational power is coming from "somewhere" we don't understand. If you thought AGI was scary, AGI powered by computing coming from a mysterious unknown "somewhere" sounds even more troubling.

Turmoil and transition seem to be mid 2020s themes, so maybe it's just getting harder to predict things, even with a short 1 year outlook.

• AI: AI agents working together to execute complex tasks will be a prominent theme. AI will advance its abilities on narrow tasks with narrow training data, but it's hallucination problem with generalist tasks will remain unsolved. The western world's two biggest economies, the EU & US, will diverge further on AI regulation, as the US becomes more deregulated. AI's unpopularity with the American public will likely grow.

• ROBOTICS: Thanks to AI advances, robotics made significant advances in 2024. There may be a 'breakout' consumer robot in 2025, perhaps a humanoid one. The roboticisation of global manufacturing will be a political topic.

• ECONOMY: Political turmoil in the US, or trade wars, may spark a recession or stock market downturn. The rapid expansion of robo-taxis in China could see protests from human taxi drivers. The global fossil fuel industry will turn to Trump's America to try to slow the inevitable transition to a decarbonized future. Creative industry job losses to AI will start to be considered significant.

• ENERGY: The global switch to renewables continues unabated. Chinese coal use may peak. Petroleum company BP expects peak oil demand in 2025 at 102 million barrels per day, though others predict peak demand will be later in the decade. Chinese manufacturers will debut sodium-ion batteries that will be seen as viable alternatives to lithium batteries. ICE car sales will decline in more countries as a growing number of people choose EVs.

• SPACE: If he can stay in favor long enough, Elon Musk may succeed in getting NASA downgraded at SpaceX's expense. Current space telescopes seem on the brink of fundamental discoveries in cosmology (dark matter/energy), and the search for alien life on exoplanets. Either topic could have a huge breakthrough in 2025. A Chinese company will successfully deploy a reusable rocket that will soon be in commercial service.

• HEALTH & MEDICINE: Fingers crossed the world avoids a H5N1-originated influenza pandemic. More countries will talk of government-funded mass availability of Ozempic type drugs. AI-Doctors will become more mainstream.

• POLITICS: We seem to be in a time of transition, as numerous features of the 'old' world are fading. Multipolar blocks strengthen. BRICS becomes stronger under Chinese leadership. The EU is forced to contemplate becoming a defense pact, as the US under Trump disengages from NATO. Trump's presidency is bad news for Ukraine, and the Palestinians, who will probably experience more vigorous attempts at ethnic cleansing.

I know some people don't like political/societal discussions about the future, but paradoxically ignoring this aspect of the future is being political too. I can never separate the technological from the political, so my way of thinking about both is always connected.

I don't spend much time at the DailyMail site, I find its worldview depressing and ugly, but I sometimes check out the comments as a proxy for right-wing thought among everyday people. Its striking how supportive the comments there are for this guy, and what he's done.

It's another way this moment reminds of the French Revolution. The Trump/Musk brigade has sold their victory as a revolutionary victory for the alt-right, yet revolutions have a habit of spawning further revolution, that the original people lose control of.

Worth noting, the DM comments section is reliably and rabidly pro-MAGA on everything, yet here they are supporting this guy's violent revolutionary actions.

Without doing the math, that means they’ve broken several barriers in solar panel development,

I'm borrowing this from elsewhere, but someone has done the math and says it works out.

The typical daily driven distance is only around 50 km or 30 miles, EV consumption is around 4 mpkWh so that's sound 7.5 kWh to recover in LA it's 9 hours average sunshine per day. So we need to collect solar energy at a rate of 830 W.

At 25% it's 3.4 kW solar radiation.

Solar intensity in LA is only around 300 W/m2

So you need 11 m2 coverage.

The paint thickness they reference here is 5 micrometers, a tenth of the thickness of human hair. If covering a car with this is enough to power an average day's journey in sunny climates, why not paint everything with it? Buildings, garden walls, etc?

Our near future lives may be both energy rich and energy independent. As the meme says, 'Petro-states hate this one simple trick …'

I'd guess people will make many different variants of AGI. The evil sociopathic people (who always seem to rise to the top in human hierarchies) will certainly want an AGI in their image.

Over and over again human societies seem to fall to these people - the eternal battle between democracy and autocracy being one example.

Will we have competing/warring AGI's? Maybe we'll have to.

It will be interesting to see how soon this spreads outside of the US and China. Globally, most other Level 4 efforts seem to be centered on buses and transit. Some European carmakers have the tech, but as yet seem uninterested in the taxi business. Knowing how Europe operates, many rules and regulations for this will ultimately be done at the EU level, though that doesn't stop any EU country going ahead with what it wants now.

I wonder how many cities worldwide will have robotaxi services by the end of 2025.