In fast-moving current events as I write on April 4, 2026…I have nothing left to say about the stoopid war in Iran and our stooopid war criminal “leaders” who chose this path. I tell my children “stupid” is a bad word that nice people don’t use, and I don’t use it lightly here. I just hope when I am reviewing April 2026 a month from now at least the part where human beings are dying daily from shooting and blowing up is over.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The idea of the lone psychopath developing a bioweapon in their garage with AI assistance is very scary. I outlined some proposals out there for how to deal with this issue, but none are really completely satisfying. Of course, nuclear proliferation is always a close runner-up.
Most hopeful story: I took my first Waymo rides in the Phoenix area in March, and I observed Waymo being tested in Philadelphia. I would like to live in a society where transportation is oriented around walking, cycling and other very light personal vehicles, and public transportation. But given that the U.S. is unequivocally not headed in that direction, I think autonomous vehicles are going to be a win for safety, mobility, and the environment in most U.S. cities.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I finally got around to reading The Singularity is Nearer. Kurzweil is very big on cultured meat, vertical farming, 3D printing, and generally using computer simulation to super-charge scientific and technical progress in many areas. Then there are his weird ideas about nanobots in our brains allowing us to upload our brains to the internet sometime in the 2030s – sounds crazy at first, but I could sit down and name a few things that sounded crazy a decade ago and are now commonplace. I mused about when the robots are coming now that we seemingly have their AI brains ready for transplant. I mused about the seeming paradox that AI is increasing demand for dirty fossil fuel energy and its attendant impacts while also representing some possibility of a longer-term solution to those problems. It seems like slowing down the deployment of AI is not on the table, so the important question becomes how long is “longer-term” – if measured in single digit years, we just may pull through, but if measured in multiple decades, we may be sunk. Anyway, I brainstormed a list of specific areas of research AI may be able to boost: incremental improvement and deployment of today’s solar, wind, battery, electrification, and electric grid technology; fusion power; safer, more cost-effective and scalable fission power; space-based solar technology; cutting edge materials science and energy storage technology; and fundamental research into the mysteries of the universe, which also comes with attendant risks.