541–550 of 1001 posts
Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026.
Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all sorts of losses before energy hits fuel.
Drone tech is going to get tiny. It’ll have microphones and cameras and it’ll probably be untraceable. It’ll spy on you arbitrarily and the equivalent of 4chan will have access to it in abundance. You will never again have any form of privacy unless you buy expensive countermeasures for your home and office. Fortunately deepfakes will be so good you can blame it all on that.
Yes, I watched some drone light-show/fireworks displays recently, and thought, 'wait till the drones are the size of flies, these shows will be happening in restaurants, bars, in your living room'. Imagine walking into a room full of fireflies that move around you as you walk, etc.
Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like. This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes,…
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Really? To me it seems to show up in every discussion about the general economy these days.
The FED printing money? All I hear is everyone blaming everything/everyone but the FED as far as inflation goes.
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> there is going to be a significant generation gap in intelligence Have you thought about the obvious implication that embryo selection with polygenic scoring could be used to lower the gap between genetically privileged types of people you describe and the average couple deciding to apply to procedure? What's needed: an egalitarian policy & infrastructure allowing any couple to improve the genetic basis of their pr…
If we're going to allow this on the basis that rich people will share it with the global poor, allowing the poor to use it in ways they choose to decrease inequality. then ok, hard to argue with that. First though I'd like to see some more resource-sharing of this nature and scale from the rich. Let's see a pilot program or something because I don't see all that much global-scale sharing of the technologies that can…
Yes, we do this. We did this with smallpox vaccination, we’re doing it with polio vaccines, HIV drugs, water purification systems, mobile phone network infrastructure, nets that are treated to protect from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Sometimes people in rich countries go out of their way to invent technology that gives us no benefit but provides tremendous benefit to people in poorer countries, such as Norman Borlaug’s work. The global poor have become less poor to a much greater degree than the global rich have gotten richer.
WWIV started, WWIII was the global war on terror. WWIV will be between major powers again. Better bring a hat!
The end of the US/NATO hegemony / The rise of a BRICS equilibrium
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"If the audience is supposed to accept that genetic determinism is true in Gattaca, then no amount of Vincent's hard work should make Vincent a hero. He's just a fraud. If the audience is not supposed to believe that in the world of Gattaca genetic determinism is true (that is, it's false), then it should be interpreted as a story of discrimination, and a story of the underdog's heroic hard work overcoming the negati…
It's not that you cannot use Genetic information to accurately predict certain aspects of someone's future... It's that genetic information tells you nothing about human will, and human will can overcome a lot.
Nuclear war. It has fallen out of favor to talk about this as a serious possibility, but the world is in many ways closer to nuclear armageddon right now than it has been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.
This was the answer, pre-Ukraine already. That war doesn't move the needle that much, as NATO/Russia escalation is far from the only nuclear war threat -- there's also mistakes by any party, India/Pakistan, North Korea, China, etc.
Not only is this orders of magnitude more impactful than the other conflicts, but perhaps even more concerning is what in the world the endgame might be? By effectively throwing its entire influence into this war, the US has now effectively staked that influence on the outcome of the war. And it's the exact same situation for Russia. The two most nuclear armed nations are now in a conflict that is a must-win for both of them.
IMO this conflict ending up going nuclear is still highly improbable, but highly improbable is far closer to nuclear war than we've ever been.
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This is one of the reasons we moved from California to Ireland. People thought it was weird in 2013. Less so now.
They were telling us Manhattan would be underwater by now 20 years ago.
IPCC, see summary of Q3.9 on p9 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar3/syr/