Lugh

SpaceX talk big, but they're no so great with achieving measurable objectives. They're already behind schedule with even successfully getting Starship off Earth, less mind getting it to the lunar surface and successfully back from there.

Not saying they won't do it eventually, but its hard to have confidence in their blowhard claims.

China and the US are trying two very different approaches to space exploration. The US has placed its bets on the private sector leading the way. That has to happen eventually with the space economy, but is it ready to take the lead this early? SpaceX talks big, but it has a formidable list of hurdles to achieve before being capable of regular crewed lunar landings.

Meanwhile, China is sticking with the familiar state-led approach, where the government shepherds and supports the private sector. They've been remarkably consistent with announcing future plans with dates and schedules, and methodically achieving them.

China's space ambitions rarely get examined in Western media, but they're very ambitious. It's their stated goal to be a pre-eminent space power. Not only that, they make no secret of the details of their plan; they spell it all out. Here's another piece of those plans falling into place. The first part of their deep space communications network, and the first part of the lunar base-Earth communication system.

I'm not surprised. There's a big difference between AI's cheerleaders and the general population.

NVIDIA, along with many other big tech companies are investors in Figure AI's humanoid robot, which seems to have taken the lead from Boston Dynamics in having the world's most advanced humanoid robot.

What the development of AI is showing us is that no one has "the lead" for very long. Free open-source AI is only months behind the leaders, who acknowledge they have no moat. There's every reason to think robotics will be the same. Especially as there are so many people around the world working on the tech (see list below).

I think a more interesting question for the near future is who will get to manufacture and sell the first humanoid robots to sell in their millions? I suspect the answer to that question will be a Chinese company.

Humanoid Robots in development

LimX Dynamics

1X's NEO

Boston Dynamics ATLAS

Tesla's Optimus

Agility Robotics

Xiaomi's CyberOne

Apptronik Apollo

Ubtech's Walker S

Figure's Figure 1

Fourier Intelligence's GR-1

Sanctuary's Phoenix

Unitree Robotics' H1

XPENG's PX5

It's so hard to predict, I can't tell. The reason I think it will be smoother than many people think, is how quickly the world reacted to Covid in March 2020.

I also suspect the first crisis that will force action won't directly be unemployment itself, but some financial crisis stemming from it. If entire categories of jobs become permanently unemployable such as TV or movie production with Sora, or driving jobs with self-driving cars, then all of a sudden all the unpayable mortgages these people have are a crisis for the banks holding them. This was what precipitated the 2008 financial crisis

Once upon a time, there was a meme-like response to concerns about technological unemployment. Displaced people could just 'learn to code'. What people didn't anticipate was that coders would be displaced first, but here we are.

I'm an optimist about the AI future. I suspect we'll adapt to new economic models quicker and more smoothly than many suspect. But right now, many people don't even realize this train has already left the station, and we're all on it, whether we like it or not.

Our education system is a case in point. Junior/starter software roles are about to disappear forever. Yet all over the world, there are people in training/education preparing for them. You can say the same about lawyers also to some extent. At some point, society has to wake up to the fact that more and more of the job education/training it's currently providing is just wasting the time and money of everyone involved.

These use perovskite solar cells, a technology that promises extreme cheapness, but has problems with stability and efficiency. Research labs all over the world are working to overcome those problems, and this is a demonstration of that work in action.

The cheapness of renewables today is already an extinction-level event for the nuclear industry - what happens when solar is only half today's cost? ICE cars and their gasoline are next for extinction.

Today the average cost in the US of home solar installation is $12,700. China is making decent EVs for about the same cost. When solar halves, it means you'll be able to buy an EV car plus a lifetime of free fuel, for less than the cost of most gasoline cars.

The day is coming when general-purpose humanoid robots will be able to do all the physical work any human can do. The only question is when. Looking at this demo, you've got to wonder - is that day sooner than we might think?

In the Western world a typical annual minimum wage job is in the range of $30,000 per year. Robots like this will be expensive to start with, but even if they cost $60K, they'll pay for themselves in 2 years if they are replacing a human worker. No doubt China will quickly get on the case making them even cheaper.

Submission Statement

The irony of this article is that Dharmesh Thakker, the head of Battery Ventures, never joins the economic dots. Venture capital firms only have other people's money to invest, because there are other people with jobs spending money, thus generating savings, pensions, and income to invest.

You rarely see journalists in business publications asking questions that arise from this line of thought. Yet the economic logic of shredding the human workforce is recession and deflation; bad news for VC firms.

So this is a roundabout way of saying the Israelis were about to add famine to their list of war crimes.

It is understandable that people spend more time with their worries and fears about AI, but research like this reminds us that there is another side to things. AI can also deliver cheap low cost education that can be deployed at scale all over the world, that is a huge dramatic improvement in people's lives.

These insights are courtesy of journalist Benjamin Carlson, the author of the linked piece.

Here are 6 things McLuhan got right about our world.

1. We live most of the time outside our bodies. "When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body," he says here in 1977. "You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you." By spending most of our time online, we relate to the world not as creatures of flesh and blood—but as floating images.

2. Our identities are porous. When we relate to one another as massless images, instantaneously around the world, we detach from our private selves, and are submerged in other people's cares, concerns, histories. The electronic age "has deprived people, really, of their private identity," he says. "Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light."

3. Social media is changing us neurologically and psychologically. "The medium is the message," his most famous dictum, says the most important change wrought by any new technology is not its content, but its form. In other words, when it comes to substantively impacting the human species, it’s not what’s said on social media that matters. What matters is that social media is part of our lives.

4. AI makes job specialization irrelevant. With the rise of automation, McLuhan predicted: work and leisure become intermixed. information is monetized; self-employment rises; and retraining repeatedly for new roles becomes the new norm for our careers.

5. In the global village, we all are gossips and snoops. As geographic limits break down, our curiosity about others' dramas runs rampant. "The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business," McLuhan says. "The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life."

6. AI makes—and remakes—information just for you. For better or worse, we no longer live in the same world of facts. Facts are presented a la carte and personalized. When you need to know something, "you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs and your problems," McLuhan says. "And they at once Xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on the bookshelf."