Chinese companies often get accused of copying Western technology, so it's unusual to hear the CEO of such a major Western company bucking that assumption by calling on Western companies to copy China.

What Jim Farley is saying about cars is equally true about 21st century energy infrastructure. There is no doubt that China is the global leader in innovation there too.

Meanwhile in many Western countries, debate still centers around persuading some people that the energy transition to renewables is real and the age of fossil fuels can't end quickly enough. Hostility to renewables, EVs and the energy transition gives China the edge.

Next up we can expect China to race ahead in robotics.

If you are an optimist or even a glass-half-full kind of person, sometimes it can be hard to miss the good news among all the doom and gloom that social media promotes. The story of our energy transition to renewables is surely good news. Chiefly because it will help us alleviate climate change, but there is another under-reported and under-appreciated aspect of the energy transition.

As energy production becomes decentralized and in the hands of individuals and small communities it smashes the power of centralized top-heavy states, authoritarians, and autocrats.

Some people have nightmare visions of the future where humans are reduced to powerless serfs. However if you can live in a world where you can generate your own energy off-grid, and AI can provide for many of your other needs, perhaps with robotics helping with local and personal food production - then who the hell is going to want to be a serf-slave in some horrible Hollywood sci-fi dystopia that we know from movies?

Yes, it's an odd statement. The authors are all Harvard scientists, and I have checked what they post on Twitter, they aren't anti vaccine cranks. Though one of them, Al Ozonoff, does try to engage with such people. Perhaps this is a concession in a similar vein of outreach. The Hill is a conservative news website. Perhaps they felt they had to get their own dubious science a mention, and that was the price of publication for the Harvard scientists?

I agree, to me one of the most frustrating aspects of much online discussion of AI is that it focuses on trivial chatter and nonsense. In particular boring fanboyism when it comes to the likes of Musk or OpenAI. Meanwhile the truly Earth shattering long-term events are happening elsewhere, and this is one example of them. Halving unexpected deaths in hospital settings is such a huge thing and yet it goes barely reported, in comparison to the brain-dead ra-ra Silicon Valley gossip that passes for most discussion about AI.

As ever he has got so many interesting things to say. He makes a connection here between the first two centuries after the introduction of the printing press in Europe, and how artificial intelligence is due to affect us very soon. Contrary to the optimistic interpretation that the printing press led directly to The Enlightenment (which was true eventually) for the first two centuries it just led to the medieval version of clickbait, with people consuming content that led to religious intolerance and witch hunts.

Yes, it was an odd example to give. I guess a better example would be if the passengers were talking about how hot they were, and the car just lowered the air con temperature without asking them.

I admit I don't know very much about any of this, but I've never heard of children who grow up in relatively isolated circumstances, for example home schooling, having lower functioning immune systems?

At this point, I'm pretty sure Chinese taikonauts will get to the Moon, before American astronauts return.

I don't mean to diminish people's fears and anxieties because they are extremely real, but I think it's worth considering other outlooks.  For example, look at how quickly the world changed in March 2020 in response to COVID-19. Isn't there something hopeful about that? Doesn't it suggest that the world can adapt to sudden change far more quickly than we expected?

Sometimes I wonder if some people are too apocalyptic in their ideas especially if they come from a product in an apocalyptic Christian background.  if you look at thousands of years of European history isn't the lesson to take away that revolution and change happen all the time, but eventually, progress is what people settle into and things work out in the end.

I realize that is the most hopeful interpretation of events, and perhaps too hopeful, but I'm optimistically natured and that's what I try to stick to.

I feel like we are heading to a post-work future where eventually AI and robotics will do most of the work and that will be a good thing. In the meantime, I'm sure there will be a lot of pain and revolution to get to that point.

Even in rich Western countries tens of millions of people rely on driving, delivery and taxi jobs. When people realize they are disappearing forever we'll be one step closer to that future.

I don't have sources for the 2024 deflation in China and AI. (I qualified my initial statement "hard to know").

Robotics are a proxy for AI in manufacturing.

I suspect AI is about to give us a type of deflation no economist has ever seen or modeled before. What will happen when AI gives us the expert knowledge of doctors, lawyers, technicians, teachers, engineers, etc etc almost for free?

You can't talk of this scenario in terms of past models, because it's never happened before, but we can clearly see that it's just about to happen to us right ahead.

The last 12 months have seen the most sustained period of deflation in China since the late 1990s. It's hard to know how much AI is responsible, but I would guess it is to some extent. It's driving the reduction in prices in the manufacturing of so many things, EVs especially.

Many people assume unemployment will be AI's most destructive economic effect. That may be true, but before it causes a problem, there will be a far more immediate one to deal with - deflation.

Deflation is so destructive because it shrinks businesses' incomes while increasing the size of their debt relative to this income. If there is sustained deflation, then this leads to a spiraling collapse that takes asset prices like the stock market and property values with it. This was the main mechanism that caused most of the damage in the Great Depression.

If AI is on the cusp of giving us lawyers, doctors, and other experts knowledge for practically free, then it follows that there is massive deflation to come. There is already a backlash against AI in some quarters, I would expect it to grow when the deflation problem arrives.

I suspect many people might find these facts incongruous. After all, if you can afford $35K per year for your kid's education - surely you want the best human teachers that money can buy. Isn't it more likely we'll see human teacher job cuts in public schools while fobbing off the pupil's with AI - a second-rate option for the poors and peons?Except that isn't what is happening here. The school in question - David Game College is for the children of the global elites and oligarchs who live in London. At $35,000 per year I doubt many local London kids can afford it.

This isn't some cheapo option, it's the 'best of the best' for the kids of the 1%.Except that isn't what is happening here. The school in question - David Game College is for the children of the global elites and oligarchs who live in London. At $35,000 per year I doubt many local London kids can afford it.

This isn't some cheapo option, it's the 'best of the best' for the kids of the 1%.

What's much more likely is that (eventually) AI Teachers and AI Doctors are going to be the best we've ever had. No human, not even the parents of only children, can lavish the time, expertise, and attention these AIs will give your child.

If ever there was an industry that could do with some technological overhaul - its housing. 3D Printing threatens to do the job, and seems to have the right tools, but never takes off - will this be the one that does?

At $1,000 per module they offer solutions to homelessness in western countries.

ew data show both have stopped increasing. Is the change permanent? People are planning for this, though it's possible both power sources have a final spurt ahead of them.

This is still a few years ahead of expected schedule so it's hard to tell.

Link to info about China's coal.

When might it integrate Lemmy?

I won't be surprised if Chinese astronauts reach the Moon before American ones return to it. Boeing's SLS seems to go from bad to worse, and SpaceX's Starliner is nowhere near ready to completely replace it.

Last month, Alphabet announced it would invest a fresh $5 billion in its autonomous vehicle unit, which first began as “project chauffeur” at Google in 2009. Jeyachandran told CNBC that the capital will be used mostly for scaling,

That should buy quite a few new robotaxis.

The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That's good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.

AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn't enough. There's another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don't want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.

capitalist hellscape

It's hilarious seeing Elon Musk taking up the issue of plummeting birth rates, while simultaneously saying people who work for him who won't commit to giving their life to his companies and sleeping in the office are lazy losers.

People often focus on the environmental benefits of renewables, but they have another huge advantage - they can be used as decentralized energy sources. One benefit, you're not at the mercy of price fixing by semi-monopolized corporations obsessed with increasing profits every quarter. Even better, you can break free from other people's incompetence, corruption and inefficiency.

This seems to be what is happening in Pakistan, and it's a hopeful lesson for many other parts of the world. Plagued by a corrupt increasingly dysfunctional traditional grid infrastructure many people are now able to bypass it entirely thanks to rooftop solar.

I find the idea of destroying the International Space Station very depressing. Centuries from now, when hopefully humankind will have widely expanded into the galaxy, our ancestors will be fascinated by it. We know this because of our own deep connection to ancient artifacts preserved in the world's museums.

The current plan is to destroy the ISS circa 2030 by burning it up in the atmosphere with a deliberately destructive deorbit. It seems with just a little more effort and imagination we could transport an unmanned ISS to somewhere like an Earth-Moon Lagrange point L1 and park it there for future generations and a future space museum.

For sure. Though I think by definition the word "lie" implies the intent. Anything accidental is just getting your facts wrong.

Many people will ask who gets to decide what a lie is? This mentions an "independent judicial process". Courts and juries generally have a good record of establishing truth, so it will be interesting to see how this works.

One of the little realized aspects of so much of 21st-century politics being lies - is how inefficient it makes life. Technology and change are accelerating. Yet every instance our political discourse wastes time countering lies, it's taking valuable time away from solving problems.

I'm fascinated by people's tendencies to anthropomorphize AI & robotics; it's hard to see how this is truly analogous to the human mind and depression.

Yes. I don't think enough people realise the significances of this fact. Unlike us, AI will never peak; it will always relentlessly get better.

One of the difficulties with ending the fossil fuel age is transitioning workers and economic activity. Geothermal energy like Fervo, apart from all its other benefits, might help solve that problem. There's a large cross-over in terms of skills between them and the oil and gas industry. They even sometimes use sites of former fossil fuel extraction for geothermal plants. Now they seem to have successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept it's frustrating things aren't moving faster with this energy source.

It makes sense China dominates manufacturing standards; it's the world's biggest manufacturer. It seems an odd thing for the article writer to get worked up over.

Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) is very similar to human contractors getting paid by the hour.

As this allows for clearer image resolution of smaller planets around the nearest stars, I wonder will it do the same for their atmospheric composition? It seems that will be the key to first detecting alien life elsewhere in the universe. I've a sneaking suspicion that if any life (or its remains) are found on Mars or Europa, it will have been seeded from Earth, and not have arisen independently.

The usual caveats apply to results from testing in mice; it might not be safe in humans, and it's generally years of clinical trials before any human treatment becomes available.

That said, I wonder why humanity doesn't put much more effort into research like this. The birth rate is rapidly diminishing in most Western countries. The 21st century will be, for the first time in human history, the century of the old. Historically that has meant burden, but it needn't be if research like this leads to the results it promises.

It's important to note that the only people arguing that solar energy and food production are incompatible are involved in disinformation campaigns against renewable energy. I see it being used a lot in talking points to muddy issues.

There are some interesting ideas in this essay, but I'm struck by how much it underestimates the effects of technology, and their implications on the economy.

Does it have to drop packages from 3 meters off the ground? I'd rather it landed and gently deposit them. Even so, this won't suit all users - what if you're not in, or in an apartment? Guess it works for people with fenced back gardens. Still, its the future of delivery. These things can get work arounds.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge made a groundbreaking discovery: regulatory T cells, a type of white blood cell, form a unified large population that travels throughout the body to locate and mend damaged tissue. This challenges the conventional belief that these cells are divided into various specialized groups confined to specific areas of the body. The implications of this finding are significant for the treatment of numerous diseases, as nearly all illnesses and injuries activate the body's immune response.

It's also interesting they have tested a treatment based on this insight in mice and it has worked. That said, clinical trials can take years before human treatments become available.

I'm fascinated to see how powerful open-source AI has become. The implications of its growth run counter to so many dystopian narratives for the future that imagine everything owned by corporations and people reduced to serfdom.

As robotics are essentially 3D AI, the implications hold true for this field too. Here we see more evidence of this in action. Stanford University is the 3rd major effort in as many months to announce an open-source humanoid robot. The other two are UBTech/Xiaomi, and the French grouping of HuggingFace/Pollen Robotics.

I think it is overwhelmingly more likely that future robots will be cheap, and widely available than the dystopian 'corporations own everything' scenario. Yet few people factor this in. Robots will be economic engines of production. What does it mean for ideas like UBI if robot ownership is decentralized and widely dispersed?

Singapore has a population of 5.6 million people and is only 12 times the size of Manhattan Island. Understandably they have little room for agriculture, particularly the land intensive agriculture that producing animals for food requires. Mostly they import that from Malaysia, which is next door.

I wonder if there are government officials in Singapore encouraging all of this with a view to food security? I often wonder the same with China and their efforts to accelerate renewables. That reduces one of their biggest vulnerabilities, that if there is ever a conflict over Taiwan that they might be militarily blockaded.

OP makes an interesting point here, that though current AI is geared to making things more efficient, it's not necessarily as good at making them better. I agree with the general insight. Though I find his worldview a bit limited, why is it only interesting to talk about this in terms of what businesses do?

how these robots probably will be used for military purposes as well.

Yes, and not to mention what non-state actors will be able to do with this technology. I'm sure there will be a day in the future when a terrorist attack is carried out by hacked robots.

Despite all that I'm an optimist. I think reducing things like medical expertise to near zero cost will be such a huge boon to humanity, and I suspect most of this robotics power will be relatively decentralized. I don't really believe in dystopian narratives where corporate overlords own the world and the rest of us are reduced to serfs.

In fairness the rethinkx people are doing a better job than most in drawing attention to this issue.

However, I still think the term cowardice is merited, and not just for them.

We constantly hear Silicon Valley types talk about disruption like this, but they’re always afraid to follow through with logical conclusions. I think it's because they know the only two choices are some sort of socialism, or chaos.

It makes them frauds as well as cowards. On the one hand taking billions from private investors for AI; with the other hand creating a world where the stock market probably won’t exist, or will survive only as a shrunken relic.