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.

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 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.

Some people seem to expect SpaceX to work miracles. It has formidable problems to solve before using a Starliner to land astronauts on the Moon. The capability of refuelling Starliner in space, landing on the Moon, refueling there and taking off from it may take to the 2030s to solve.

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.

I suspect we are going to see more measures like this. Prices are continually falling for rooftop solar+battery systems, and as every year goes by it becomes feasible for more and more people to generate much of their electricity at home. Climate change will exacerbate the trend too, as home setups are an obvious insurance measure as hurricanes and flooding worsen and degrade national infrastructure.

In the 2030s & 40s much of today’s fossil fuel infrastructure will become stranded investments that some people will want compensation for. If fully paid for, that bill could run to trillions of dollars globally. Choices will have to be made. Nationalization of some legacy energy companies might make more sense if they can no longer survive in a free market system.

n the 1960s, the famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted the effects of TV on society. Now it seems we are rapidly transitioning to the post-TV age.

At TV’s height of influence in the late 20th century, it shaped country’s cultures, history, and those country’s citizen’s national identity, and politics. It still does for the old. People often worry about the bad side of the post-TV social media world. Those problems are real, but it has its good sides too. It’s decentralized, and content creation is now in the hands of the many, not the rich, elite few. That means the ability to shape identities, national narratives, and political realities is becoming more decentralized too.

LLMs seem to be rapidly evolving robotics AI. Looking at Figure right now, it seems general purpose robots capable of most unskilled work (cleaning, warehouses, etc) can’t be far off.