Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

what’s next for (incremental improvement of commercial) AI

We normals are hearing in the media that the large language model approach to AI has run its course, that further scaling it up is prohibitive in terms of energy, and that there is an AI-hype-driven financial bubble ready to pop any moment. According to at least one blogger though, the big breakthrough happening right now is having these models “reason” internally before they give an answer.

Two of those leading engineers are: Julian Schrittwieser who helped teach AlphaGo how to play Go at a level never witnessed in human history and is now a lead researcher at Anthropic. And Łukasz Kaiser, who whilst at Google Brain, co‑authored the paper that launched the architecture now driving every major released model on “Attention is all you need”…

Kaiser, for his part, corrects time horizons. The category of work that still belongs unquestioned to humans is shrinking. He states, with a deep belief, that these AI systems will be able to do any labor task currently performed on a computer within a timeframe of five years! …

The question is not whether machines will pass some imagined threshold in the future, but what it means that they have already crossed thresholds we still debate as hypothetical. A society reacts to what it believes is true, not to what is true. When the prevailing public understanding is delayed by years, institutions are, by definition, operating in a prior decade.

We can model technological progress as a series of sequential, overlaid S-curves that have to overlap in just such a way to produce continuous exponential growth. At least some insiders are still thinking in terms of keeping this S-curve going, in a competition between companies and countries. And when we see a new technology break through into widespread public, commercial use, it has already been going in the lab for awhile. That used to be measured in decades, now it is months if these optimist insider voices are to be believed.

https://onepercentrule.substack.com/p/is-ai-on-a-new-trajectory

November 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.

Most hopeful story: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.

forecasting extinction risk

I agree with this article that it doesn’t make sense to start protecting species only after they become rare and threatened. Forecasting which ones will become rare and threatened in the future could make sense. Of course, serious efforts to protect, create, and connect habitats would make the most sense. The method I am familiar with, which is appeals to me most, is the geographically-based metapopulation method of Ilka Hansky. But there are some others mentioned here that are new to me, or at least unfamiliar names for concepts I might have come across.

Forecasting extinction risk for future-proof conservation decisions

Conservation prioritisation emphasises currently threatened species, but there are strong arguments for complementary, more proactive approaches based on forecasting future extinction risk for unthreatened species. Forecasting methods vary in the timescale of extinction risk estimation and include established methods such as Population Viability Analysis (PVA) and Early Warning Systems, and emerging ‘Over-the-Horizon’ (OTH) methods. We develop a framework that integrates extinction risk assessment across timescales and outlines tradeoffs between shorter- and longer-term extinction prevention goals. This framework facilitates use of extinction risk forecasting in decision-theoretic conservation prioritisation that explicitly considers alternative time horizons for extinction prevention. Considering extinction risk on extended timescales offers a future-proof approach to conservation planning that may prevent more extinctions than focusing exclusively on currently threatened species.

2025 gardening books

Here is a roundup of recent gardening books from the Joe Gardener Podcast. I like to do a gardening book around January each year so this will give me some new ones to think about. Yes, you can accuse me of being mostly an armchair gardener if you want. I have a garden but I take a mostly laissez-faire approach, especially this past year when work, school, family, and life have conspired to take up 150% of my available time (outside of sleep and eating, two things I never skimp on.) Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • How Can I Help – a new one on ecological gardening from Doug Tallamy
  • Nature’s Action Guide by Sarah Jayne – sounds kind of similar actually
  • Several books on seed saving, a topic I have always been interested in.
  • Fruit Tree Pruning: The Science and Art of Cultivating Healthy Fruit Trees by Susan Poizner – I have two fruit trees. They grow a significant amount of Asian pears and persimmons each year. This makes the neighborhood squirrels very happy.
  • The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener by Eliot Coleman – a classic. I used to have a copy when I was young and thought I might grow up to live on a piece of land and have some time on my hands. Which I remember asking a bookstore to order for me before Amazon or even the internet existed.
  • Plant Grow Harvest Repeat by Meg McAndrews Cowden – “the book on succession planting”
  • The Vegetable Gardening Book: Your Complete Guide to Growing an Edible Organic Garden from Seed to Harvest by Joe Lamp’l – the podcast guy
  • Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden by Jessica Walliser – pretty self-explanatory right?

ASCE 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure

The American Society of Civil Engineers (of which I am a member) has released their every-four-years assessment of U.S. infrastructure. Why every four years? Once per presidential cycle I assume, and maybe they aim for about a year after the election to avoid being overly political? Because the goal here is to influence policy and keep the taps flowing with money for infrastructure projects that engineers will work on. It’s a lobbying group and it’s a big business, but nonetheless they try to be objective and infrastructure investment is needed.

The “letter grades” thing is kind of a gimmick, but an effective one I think for getting headlines and communicating with the media and the political class. Then there is more detailed information that interested people, or hopefully people who might be drafting future legislation, can dig into. What is most interesting to me personally is the references.

Anyway, to summarize, the Biden infrastructure spending is slowly working its way through the system and this has resulted in some improvement. I think this is Biden’s true positive legacy, whether he eventually gets any credit for it or not. But the report comes across as pleading for the country to sustain the slightly increased momentum created by the Biden-era funding bill. In my ideal world, infrastructure wouldn’t be funded by One Big Bill once a generation, but continuously as it is needed. And the way for the federal and state governments to do it, I have always thought, would be in a counter-cyclical manner during recessions. Planning should be regional in nature, with local projects that are consistent with long-term planning goals ready to go as funding becomes available. Some funding should be local, because the local community needs skin in the game. Federal and state governments could then match this local investment at a higher or lower level depending on what is happening in the economy. And there needs to be money for the full life cycle including maintenance/repair/upgrade/replacement, not just for new construction. And that is my personal broken-record infrastructure rant from this one civil engineer, thank you for listening.

environmental economics, behavioral economics, and [E]cological [E]conomics

The journal Ecological Economics has as long article on the history of…ecological economics, which it invented. I started through the article a bit skeptical, and became absorbed. They are now trying to figure out how behavioral economics fits in. There is a ton of interesting stuff here, and I am not sure I can even begin to summarize it.

The basic tenet in Ecological Economics (EE) is eloquently stated in the seminal paper by (Røpke, 2004, p. 296): “the human economy is embedded in nature, and economic processes are also always natural processes”. The field gained formal recognition with the founding of the International Society for Ecological Economics in 1988, followed by the launch of the journal Ecological Economics in 1989 and the first international conference in 1990 (Røpke, 2004). It emerged after several unsuccessful attempts to make environmental economics more grounded in physical reality and less constrained by its rigid methodological assumptions. In response to this rigidity, the scholars who founded the EE society and journal opted for openness: any opinion or method could in principle be considered, debated and possibly dismissed only ex post. This stance reflects EE’s commitment to methodological pluralism (Norgaard, 1989), rooted in the belief that no single approach can adequately capture the full complexity of socio-ecological challenges.

That’s the beginning. It goes on like that for a long time. Note that “environmental economics”, which essentially extends the logic of traditional economics to properly deal with external costs and benefits, is not good enough according to the founders of ecological economics. Essentially, we need to acknowledge that the human economy is embedded in the natural world, not the other way around. Behavioral economics extends traditional economics to account for how real individuals (humans, firms) reach conclusions and make decisions, which falls short of pure rationality. The ecological economics crowd says this focus on individual decisions was the breakthrough that allowed behavioral economics to break through into the field of traditional economics. But this is also not good enough because our decisions and actions as a society are more than just the sum of decisions and actions by all the individual actors. That’s my take-home summary, but the article puts it much better backed by evidence and academic studies. Worth a read.

RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS

Anybody who says renewable energy is a drag on the economy or a hoax is either misinformed or lying. Below are the numbers, from Financial Times.

https://www.ft.com/content/d0c25a97-cb18-4e7d-aeb3-8f5a93b9b2c1

The fossil fuel industry is fighting for its life through propaganda and bribery of public officials (which is legal in the United States). They can’t win in the end, but they may be able to obscure the truth from at least the U.S. public for a few more decades, which may take our entire planetary civilization down with them.

Project Censored’s State of the Free Press

Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 is out. They sell this only as a hard copy book as far as I can tell. It’s a good cause in my view, should you choose to invest. I don’t want the hard copy cluttering up my already bursting house however. The summary on Google Books gives a few clues as to what is in there.

Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 includes: Project Censored director Mickey Huff’s Foreword, where he writes about the history and continued relevance of the Project, and why media literacy and press freedoms are more important than ever, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary; editors Shealeigh Voitl, Andy Lee Roth, and Mickey Huff introduction to this year’s book, discussing the siege on public knowledge in the age of Trump 2.0, envisioning an interconnected and imaginative resistance to censorship; a Déjà vu News chapter, which updates on previous year’s top stories, including how a Monsanto “intelligence center” targeted journalists and activists, journalist Abby Martin’s challenge to Georgia’s BDS “gag law,” and the Justice Department’s secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rules; a Junk Food News section that spans from Snow White and actress Gal Gadot, to Drake versus Kendrick and the gutting of public education, not to mention Elon Musk’s chain saws, Cybertrucks, and creeping fascism, surveying the dubious reporting that’s Making America Junky Again; John Collins of Weave News discusses the Long Shadow of News Abuse in the case of Elise Stefanik, Israel, and Antisemitism; Media Democracy in Action, featuring inspiring contributions by Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, Maya Schenwar and Lara Witt of the Movement Media Alliance, Joe Lauria of Consortium News, Lauren Harper with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Jodi Rave Spotted Bear of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance; and Shealeigh Voitl and Reagan Haynie’s zine-style guide to infographics equips social media users with the tools to responsibly evaluate the content they see online and become empowered media makers.

Top stories from 2025 (which I might have reported on last year) are posted for free here. Below are a handful that caught my eye. My own thoughts in brackets.

  • #12. PFAS, Other Toxic Chemicals Found in Products Meant to Keep Us Safe [Yes, it’s everywhere, and it’s disturbing. I don’t want to downplay it, but I kind of figure it is just one chemical (technically a family of chemicals) we have put a spotlight on. Kind of like we did with the Covid-19 virus. We don’t know much about all the different chemicals and viruses impacting us all at the same time, and how they interact with each other. We should work on this, but at the same time remember that we are mostly not dying of horrible, easily prevented infections and injuries that took out our ancestors at much younger ages than we succumb to cancers and brain diseases that may or may not be linked to these chemicals and viruses.]
  • #9. Antarctic Ice Sheets Approaching Tipping Point, Studies Find [I don’t think this is underreported, just ignored.]
  • #8. Underreported, Often Deadly Abuses of Police Authority US police kill “nearly four people per day” on average. This is disturbing. 1500 people per year. Compare to the order of magnitude of gun violence more broadly, car crashes (with each other and unprotected pedestrians and people using light forms of transportation), suicides and drug overdoses. 1500 additional deaths don’t make any of these other tragedies better, of course, and in some cases these happen because the police are the last line of defense in a society that has failed to solve so many social, health and economic problems.
  • #3. Indigenous Communities in the US Underfunded and Exploited by Federal and State Governments [With all the other social problems, the plight of Native Americans remains one of the most disturbing and shameful situations in the country. And in my view, a cautionary tale of trying to use policy to (helpfully) target an ethnic group. Much better to raise revenue and provide benefits to the masses, which will disproportionately help the most disadvantaged groups, while also helping everyone else and building the broad political support necessary to sustain the programs. Call this “socialism” if you want, but it just means efficiently deploying our society’s ample wealth to make sure everyone have the basics. This might not work on the scale of a city, btw, it needs to be society-wide.]

AI-mediated transportation asset management

This article is called “Cities and states are turning to AI to improve road safety“. Basically the concept is to pay private vehicle owners to install dashboard cameras which take video of street conditions and feed it into a central database. What makes it “AI” seems to be computer-assisted analysis of the videos.

This all makes sense to me, although I wonder if you just put this technology on all the public fleet vehicles out there (buses, police cars, fire trucks, public works vehicles, maybe partner with utility companies) if that would be enough.

I do like the idea of focusing more on the infrastructure itself when it comes to safety, rather than vehicles and their drivers which is essentially blaming the victim. With gradual advent of autonomous vehicles, I see a shift in attitudes towards zero tolerance of deaths and injuries. Early on, my thought was that this was unfair because human-controlled vehicles cause so many deaths and injuries and we tend to think of these as inevitable. But as I have thought about it more, the public has essentially zero tolerance for deaths and injuries on any form of public transportation, whether trains, buses, or planes. It is time we held motor vehicles and the infrastructure they are traveling on to this same standard, and the trend seems to be in that direction.

The other positive trend here is a core principle of asset management itself. We all know infrastructure is expensive and difficult to build and maintain, but it does wear out and need to be repaired and eventually replaced. Each time you do a repair or a replacement, you have a chance to upgrade at low or sometimes no extra cost. Any single piece of infrastructure lasts a long time, but there are always things wearing out here and there throughout the system. So if you have a solid vision of where you want to go and you make those repair/replace/upgrade decisions consistent with it, small changes can add up to big system change over time, and this can be done cost-effectively. We don’t need “AI” to do this necessarily, but if calling it AI helps us get over the psychological hurdle to actually make it happen, let’s go for it!

Culdesac Tempe

This is basically just a real estate development with no parking. It’s on a light rail line, and the main idea seems to be to embrace micromobility (bikes, scooters, autonomous taxis) for people to get around. It doesn’t seem hugely pathbreaking to me, but I think what might make it seem pathbreaking to suburban Americans is that the bikes, scooters, human beings, and cars are not in conflict with each other. This is so simple, and yet so pathbreaking. It’s also pathbreaking because it’s in greater Phoenix. We assume this can’t be done in American cities because when we choose to devote most of our space to car maneuvering and car storage, there is not also room for the bikes, scooters, and human beings.