Lugh

NASA's plans are up in the air once again. The latest plans, yet to be approved by Congress, seek to ditch the SLS/Artemis plans for the Moon, and instead focus on sending people to Mars. That suits SpaceX's agenda, and would send NASA's money their way.

This will make it certain the first human base on the Moon will be Chinese. That is planned for the early 2030's and in recent days the Chinese have spoken more about its location. They are mapping the lunar south pole for water, but still haven't found the ideal spot, but that the 2026 Chang'e-7 mission might narrow it down further.

Hollywood's love of dystopian sci-fi has a lot to answer for, as it has shaped many people's ideas about the future very negatively. One of the most persistent of those ideas is that robots will only be owned by the 1%, who will use them to subjugate everyone else.

Reality is shaping up to be different. Free, open-source AI is the equal of anything privately controlled. Robotics too looks like it is following a similar trajectory. The Berkeley Humanoid Lite is built with off-the-shelf and 3D-printed components and costs just $5,000.

Contrary to doomerist fantasies, with decentralized renewable energy, and open-source AI & robotics - it seems hard to believe the 1% will own everything in the future.

One of the distortions of AI commentary is that so much of its focus is on Venture Capitalism. Because many people are incentivized to talk about where the big money is flowing, they ignore outside their bubble. Meanwhile, often the really significant things happen elsewhere.

With AI that 'really significant' thing - is that free open-source AI is the global future, far more than the VC darlings like OpenAI. Not that the people pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the likes of OpenAI are likely to admit that.

There are more signs of this as recently as this week. Yet again, free open-source AI (in this the Qwen3 family from Alibaba) is not only equalling the best of the investor-funded AI, they are bettering it in some metrics.

The VC's thinking is that one of their bets will make big & generate trillions in revenue, but it seems hard to believe when all over the world people can pick up what you're trying to sell for free.

Waymo's peer-reviewed study in Traffic Injury Prevention, PDF, 58 pages found its self-driving cars safely drove 56.7 million miles across four U.S. cities without a human safety driver. With 80-90% level reduction for different types of accidents.

56.7 million miles is a tiny fraction of the overall US miles driven, only about 0.002%. Current self-driving AI wouldn't be as good for all road types and conditions. But it will get there, the only question is when. When it does that 80-90% reduction in accidents means 34,000 lives saved in the US, and hundreds of thousands globally - every single year.

The day is going to come where the public conversation is going to be about banning human driving, like no-seatbelts and indoor smoking before it. I've a suspicion the same people who said losing a few hundred thousand lives to 'herd immunity' will be telling us that those 34,000 dead a year are a price worth paying, so they don't have to change anything about their lives or routines.