Category Archives: Web Article Review

March 2026 in Review

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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.

more on augmented reality glasses

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In China, you can rent them to try out. Students are using them to cheat on tests (surely teachers will catch on to this soon?). They are still expensive and heavy at the moment.

The glasses scan the questions and display answers on the lens. “Any subject that I may fail at,” she said, requesting the use of a pseudonym so she could speak freely. Some schoolmates have rented her glasses to use in exams.

AI-powered smart glasses have become a multibillion-dollar industry. The glasses, priced from $270 to more than $1,000, are generally equipped with cameras and audio features, powered by large language models. Those with screens can display text or images with augmented reality effects…

Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recently connected Rokid glasses with ChatGPT 5.2. A tester wearing the glasses scored in the top five in a class of over 100 students. The research group is also developing systems that help teachers detect AI glasses, Zili Meng, an assistant professor at the university, told Rest of World. 

deflation and oil price shocks

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In fast-moving current events as I write on March 22, 2026, the insane, illegal war of aggression started by the US in Iran (okay, maybe started by Israel, but it was the choice of the US and our mad leader to enable it) continues to escalate. We have talk of ground troops. We have talk of intentionally targeting civilian water infrastructure, which is a massive and unambiguous violation of international law not to mention common morality. There has been idle speculation at least about the use of nuclear weapons. I hope there will not have been a nuclear exchange by the time you read this. If the world is going to get past this moment and move on to a path leading back toward eventual normalcy, this has to end and the people who caused it have to be held accountable. And now, back to regularly scheduled programming…

This article suggests that the oil price shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 played a role in snapping Japan out of decades of deflation, and that the current shock caused by the Iran war could do the same for China.

Recently I posted a contrarian analysis suggesting that China’s deflation is not a true recession, but rather evidence of a sudden acceleration in manufacturing productivity. This article presents the more conventional picture:

Since the country’s COVID-19 reopening in late 2022, a manufacturing glut and sluggish consumer demand have led to intense price wars that eroded company profits and slowed wage growth.

Where am I going with all this? I don’t know yet – it is something I am struggling to understand.

Will autonomous vehicles increase congestion?

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Yes, autonomous vehicles will increase vehicle miles traveled by about 6% according to at least one set of serious researchers. They say this might not sound like much, but it will be enough to exceed capacity and cause massive traffic jams. Now, I’m sure these are serious transportation researchers who have thought about all the things I mention below, but I’ll mention them anyway:

  • Autonomous vehicles shouldn’t need to maintain the same “safe following distance” human drivers are supposed to maintain, which is based on slow human reaction times. So the autonomous vehicles should be able to travel closer together (from front to back) than human drivers at a given speed, and do this safely.
  • They also should be able to travel closer together from side to side. Our standard 12-foot travel lanes allow a lot of space for human drivers to weave wildly and unpredictably from side to side, which of course we do. Keep your arms, legs, heads, and pets inside the vehicle at all times, please!
  • Most vehicles are parked most of the time, so that much more space is required for vehicle storage than for moving vehicles. Not only this, but enormous amounts of empty space are required between parked vehicles for human drivers to maneuver the vehicles in and out of storage. Computers drivers will need much less space for maneuvering and will be infinitely patient.

So put all this together and I think that even if VMT increases, the amount of physical space required for vehicles could be massively reduced. This could be a big win for people, cities, and the environment. If VMT increases because people are able to get around more easily and cheaply, including the elderly, disabled, and parents pushing strollers, in all kinds of weather, this is a win for quality of life. I don’t see artificially restricting mobility as a win for people. I shouldn’t even have to say that reducing death and injury caused by vehicles by a factor of 10 or more is a moral and quality of life win.

Now, I am worried about urban and suburban sprawl getting even worse as it gets easier to get around. I am worried about air pollution and climate change. Add in augmented and virtual reality, and we might also come to care less and less over time what our cities look like to unaugmented eyes. I love compact, walking, cycling, and public transportation oriented urban form. One of the downsides of this form in the past has been a lack of green open space, but massively reduce the amount of space required for parking, and it will open up a lot of space in cities that we will then have choices of what to do with. So it really comes down to policy choices, and different places are going to make different choices, but I don’t see the technology itself as the root problem.

Are we forgetting about robots? (or Brute’, where are you when we need you?)

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In fast-moving current events as I write on March 15, 2026, the illegal, unauthorized by any legislative body international or domestic, unprovoked US sneak attack on Iran continues to rage. I’ll leave further commentary to others except to say that, in totally unrelated news here on this Ides of March, remember it was SENATORS who had the guts to stab Caesar and try to save the Republic (which didn’t work all that well in the end.)]

Here are a couple headlines we could classify as “things China is doing well”.

China’s Clean Energy Push Has Made It Less Vulnerable to Energy Shocks, Including the Iran War [Is this not obvious? The US could be focusing on ramping up proven technology like electrification of all buildings and transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and battery technology while also funding “moon shot” R&D in areas like materials science and nuclear fusion. We could also be using fission energy and, I hate to say it, domestic fossil fuel production as a bridge to get us over the hump while we scale up in these other areas. If the whole world were doing this we wouldn’t be so dependent on boats moving liquefied dinosaur turds through one little war-torn (by choice of the fools claiming to lead the US government) inlet.]

How China’s AI-Powered Robots Could Reshape the Global Order [Now that disembodied AI has became mainstream, the next somewhat obvious step is to get the AI brains into robots.]

how did nuclear weapons proliferate to Israel?

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I always had a vague notion that “Israel got nuclear weapons from France”. That is sort of true but not the whole story, according to this article by Kevin Kirk in Naked Capitalism. Now, I have to state for the record that Mr. Kirk sounds knowledgeable and confident to me, but he does not give a lot of references or cite many sources of his information. I will note a few cases where he does. Here is the story he tells:

  • France wanted access to scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and later moved to Israel. These scientists were given access to French nuclear sites and data in return for their help in building the French nuclear program.
  • In 1956 France built a heavy water reactor for Israel at Dimona. They also supplied the uranium-separation technology needed to fuel the reactor. A heavy water reactor can be used for civilian power generation, but can also turn uranium into plutonium.
  • A heavy water reactor also needs a substance called…heavy water. In the mid-1960s, the French government got cold feet about supplying more nuclear materials to Israel. The UK took over and supplied the heavy water, uranium and plutonium. Argentina, South Africa, and Belgium ALSO supplied some nuclear material to Israel. In South Africa’s case, it was part of a civilian power agreement that included weapons inspections, however the weapons inspections part of the agreement was never fully implemented. In the Belgian case, Israeli operatives essentially hijacked the material in a Dr. Evil-style act of high seas piracy. The US is far from blameless – nuclear material was stolen from a classified site near Pittsburgh, FBI/CIA investigations pointed to Israel, and the administration chose to cover this up. Most of this is backed up by declassified documents.
  • At some point (no year given in the article), Israel conducted an atmospheric nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa.
  • Under Eisenhower, the US looked the other way or even actively covered up all this activity. However, JFK openly tried to impose weapons inspections on Israel. Mr. Kirk never uses words like “Israel killed JFK”, but he implies it. I can certainly see a point of view where losing a nuclear deterrent could be seen as an existential threat, and therefore worth killing to prevent. I would just note that several parties had motive, means, and opportunity to kill JFK. Under the Johnson administration, weapons inspections took place, but always on a schedule announced well in advance, and with negotiated agreement as to areas of the site weapons inspectors would not try to access. Later US administrations have maintained a doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” where they just don’t comment on Israel’s nuclear program. Much of this is based on recently declassified documents.
  • Israel today is believed to have 100+ nuclear warheads (different numbers from different sources; but this is still A LOT for a small country – the US and Russia have a few thousand each, while China has about 600 and the UK and France have 200-300 each). Israel has the “nuclear triad” consisting of nuclear bombers, German-supplied nuclear submarines, and long-range nuclear missiles capable of hitting pretty much anywhere in the world supplied by…the French.

The idea of “atoms for peace” (originally promoted by Eisenhower), in which countries would be given civilian nuclear energy technology in exchange for agreeing to a strict weapons inspection regime, is appealing to me. But you can see where it breaks down when geopolitical intrigue applies. It’s probably better to get renewable energy ramped up around the world (particularly water-scarce yet sunny countries) and keep pressing towards peaceful fusion technology. And keep pressing towards nuclear arms control before something happens that all of us humans are going to regret as long as our species is around.

Some facts and figures on how birds die

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This article on a site called ZME Science has some facts and figures on how many birds are killed (in the U.S., I think) by wind turbines compared to other causes.

  • wind turbines: 140,000-680,000 birds per year; 0.3 – 0.4 birds per GW-hr of power production
  • power lines: 12-64 million birds per year [Daddy, how can the birds sit on the power lines without being electrocuted? Well, I guess the answer is that the ones you see on the power lines are the ones that didn’t get electrocuted.]
  • vehicle collisions: 89 million – 340 million birds per year
  • glass buildings: 1 billion birds per year [well, the article says “up to almost”. Rounding is fine with me, but they are oddly precise on some numbers and willing to round on others.]
  • cats: 1.3 billion – 4 billion birds per year [I happen to like cats just fine, but if you consider yourself a friend of animals in general it is really kind of immoral and hypocritical to have an unsupervised outdoor cat.]
  • fossil fuels: 5.2 birds per GW-hr of power produced “through habitat destruction, mercury poisoning, and acid rain” [presumably, the study referenced here followed some pretty different methods than the ones that looked at birds running into stuff and getting disemboweled by cat claws. But still, you can say this is an order of magnitude more than the wind turbines per unit of energy supplied, controlling for the fact that fossil fuels are supplying more energy in an absolute sense.]

There are some things you can do to make the wind turbines less bad for birds. But really, it’s the cats and the cars and just the general wanton destruction/displacement of nature by our civilization. Now I’ve depressed myself, as I often do.

teacher vs. chatbot?

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This article is about an English teacher trying to figure out how to cope with AI in and out of the classroom. The main ideas seem to be just in-class writing assignments and discussions. This is high school (I think), and one thing that might surprise an older reader is the idea that the teacher spends a significant amount of time reading out loud to students, and also giving them time to read themselves in class. I am not surprised because I see the teachers of my own children in middle school doing this.

I’ve thought about trying my hand at teaching, at some point. I may or may not ever do that, but if so I will have to think about how to use AI in an engineering classroom. I don’t have all the answers of course, but this is a bold new frontier so neither does anyone else. Here is my first attempt at a brainstorming list:

  • In-class writing assignments,
  • Paper and pencil tests (or portions of a test – maybe if there is a 2-3 hour chunk of time to take a test, you have the first hour to do the paper and pencil part, hand that in, and get the second part where you are allowed to at least use a spreadsheet program. Or if the class period is only an hour, you could give a test over two days)
  • Journaling – I’ve always thought that reading and writing needs to be a part of what students do, even in STEM fields. In my own classes, teachers have tended to spend almost all the time focused on doing math problems. The problems are critical and I plan to come back to them. But I learn by reading and writing first and foremost, and there are others like me. So my idea is to have short reading assignments and ask students to summarize key points in a few bullets or sentences to show that they did the reading. Then, crucially, I would ask them to relate the reading to a relevant outside reference – kudos for a peer reviewed article, but could also be a relevant news or magazine article, or even a Wikipedia page. Now, obviously students are going to use AI for this, and that is okay. There would have to be classroom discussion related to it, and points given for being able to discuss what they wrote intelligently.
  • Okay, now to those problems, homework assignments, and/or take-home exams. These have always been the beating heart of engineering education. This is the struggle and the hard work of relating theory to problem solving, resulting in deep understanding. This is also where students benefit from individualized feedback from teachers and collaboration with peers. They are going to interact with AI here, and I see no real alternative other than classifying AI as not cheating. In fact, this is where you may want to actually encourage them to experiment and openly share what effective techniques they found that they think enhanced their learning. You have to give some points for the homework, otherwise all but the most-disciplined students will not make the significant effort needed for learning. But most of the points should probably be given for doing supervised in-class assignments that are similar to the homework.
  • There’s another problem here though – distance learning has become pretty common, particularly in graduate school. And that throws a monkey wrench into the whole in-person thing. It is potentially unfair if some students are in-person and some are virtual – are you going to surveil students on-camera the whole time and try to ascertain if they are cheating? This is a tough one and I don’t have all the answers.
  • Then there is the traditional “term paper” or “research paper”. This is a traditional cornerstone, but students are just going to use AI for it. Asking them to present their results and asking them personalized questions is part of the answer here, but that doesn’t really help them with feedback on their writing. The in-class writing assignments have to be part of the answer here. But again, in terms of out-of-class-writing, I think you have to classify the use of AI as not cheating and actually encourage them to experiment and share what they thought was effective.

Well, that was just some stream-of-consciousness drivel, wasn’t it? For me, writing and thinking are inseparable. I had some thoughts on this topic in the back of my mind, but now that I have tried to articulate them (without the use of AI), they are more fully formed than they were before I did that. If I were going to think about this more right now, I might ask AI to help me find some more articles and blogs on the subject.

What can we do about garage bioweapons?

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Ever since I read Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, probably some time in the early 2000s, I’ve been concerned about the idea that biotechnology will eventually be available to amateurs. And a few amateurs will be psychopaths or suicide terrorists willing to take down civilization along with themselves. My only real idea for preventing this has been heavy duty government surveillance, somehow tempered by political institutions that keep the government itself from being evil. And of course, we don’t think we want this surveillance, and I don’t really want it, but I haven’t seen clear alternatives.

Here are some suggestions by others. I am not sure if I am convinced, but these are ideas worth thinking about. First, Amodei from Anthropic in his recent TLDR essay The Adolescense of Technology (where he tries to pull a Bill Joy and doesn’t quite pull it off, in my view.) You have to keep in mind that although he seems to be motivated by ethical views, heavy government surveillance is not in the interest of private companies, so his suggestions tend toward self-regulation by industry. Anyway, his suggestions are:

  • “AI companies can put guardrails on their models to prevent them from helping to produce bioweapons.”
  • “transparency requirements,27 which help society measure, monitor, and collectively defend against risks without disrupting economic activity in a heavy-handed way” – this would be government regulation, but it would constrain all competitors equally
  • “try to develop defenses against biological attacks themselves. This could include monitoring and tracking for early detection, investments in air purification R&D (such as far-UVC disinfection), rapid vaccine development that can respond and adapt to an attack, better personal protective equipment (PPE),28 and treatments or vaccinations for some of the most likely biological agents.” – One imagines scientists using AI extensively to develop these defenses, or possibly “AI scientists” developing them with some human mediation.

Now, here is an article from Big Think called How to deter biothreats in the age of gene synthesis. What they come up with is to screen all orders of biological materials (like DNA) from the companies that make and sell them to researchers. Screen the orders, screen the customers themselves, and screen for particularly dangerous DNA sequences.

This has to be done internationally, which adds to the difficulty. Even if it is done effectively by most countries most of the time, you will have enterprising countries and criminal organizations out there setting up a black market, just like you do with drugs and nuclear materials. Because it will be profitable to do so. The more effective the clamp down, the higher the risk and potential profit becomes (which is why the war on drugs has not and probably cannot be won, other than by massive and intrusive surveillance of individuals which most people in most countries agree they don’t want. Drugs are a tragedy for addicts and for people caught up in all the violence fueled by the black market created by their prohibition. But they aren’t going to spread like fires through uninvolved and unprepared populations and cause the extinction of our species. Which is why I wonder if accepting some level of intrusive surveillance on individuals is the least evil option as the technology gets more accessible and more dangerous all the time.

Nonetheless, it is probably good to take an “all of the above” approach. If I were feeling optimistic I might say perhaps the existential nature of the threat will prompt some international cooperation and formation of some more functional institutions for cooperation than we have seen over the past decade or so. But maybe it will take some sort of near miss or partially contained disaster for this to happen. (Covid-19 was not bad enough, apparently.)

Let’s close with a few quotes from Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, which anyone who has not read must drop what they are doing and read now:

The 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them…

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

Joy’s proposed solutions included “relinquishment” of certain technologies we all agree are too dangerous (as we have, to some extent up until now, with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons at the nation-state level) and strong protections for whistleblowers in the scientific and technical communities.