Trends in Ecology and Evolution Horizon Scan

Trends in Ecology and Evolution has released their annual horizon scan. Here is their list of issues:

  • Greater biological risks from nocturnal, near-surface level ozone
  • Metal and non-metal organic frameworks
  • Macroalgae as a new source of critical rare earth elements
  • Emerging techniques for remediating per- and polyfluoroalkyl contamination
  • Adhesive trichome hair mimics as alternatives to pesticides
  • Synthetic gene drives in plants
  • Light evaporating water without heat
  • Low emission cement recycling
  • Impacts of near-magma geothermal drilling
  • Compounded effects of water quality and quantity on human and natural systems
  • European laws and unintended challenges for wood production
  • Record Antarctic sea ice lows across the continent could lead to large-scale ecosystem alterations
  • Faster than predicted melting of Thwaites glacier
  • Anthropogenic impacts on seabed carbon stores
  • Potential alteration of ocean processes by offshore wind energy infrastructure

There are at least three issues here having to do with feedback loops and tipping points: melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores. When we look back, is 2024 going to be the year tipping points were passed and runaway feedback loops got out of control? I don’t know, but we should behave as if it is since the consequences are so dire. Then if we actually have a few more years or even decades before the historical climate system is truly irretrievable, so much the better and we will have gotten ahead of the curve. What do we actually have in the United States – inaction and brainless, asinine slogans like “drill baby drill!”.

And then there’s the water situation. It’s just not great, particularly with the amount of nitrogen we are continuing to dump into the ocean.

The Coming Wave

Bill Gates is starting to pump out some end-of-year book recommendations, and he identifies The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman as his “favorite book about AI”. Here are a few quotes (from the Gates article):

…what sets his book apart from others is Mustafa’s insight that AI is only one part of an unprecedented convergence of scientific breakthroughs. Gene editing, DNA synthesis, and other advances in biotechnology are racing forward in parallel. As the title suggests, these changes are building like a wave far out at sea—invisible to many but gathering force. Each would be game-changing on its own; together, they’re poised to reshape every aspect of society…

In my conversations about AI, I often highlight three main risks we need to consider. First is the rapid pace of economic disruption. AI could fundamentally transform the nature of work itself and affect jobs across most industries, including white-collar roles that have traditionally been safe from automation. Second is the control problem, or the difficulty of ensuring that AI systems remain aligned with human values and interests as they become more advanced. The third risk is that when a bad actor has access to AI, they become more powerful—and more capable of conducting cyber-attacks, creating biological weapons, even compromising national security…

So how do we achieve containment in this new reality? …he lays out an agenda that’s appropriately ambitious for the scale of the challenge—ranging from technical solutions (like building an emergency off switch for AI systems) to sweeping institutional changes, including new global treaties, modernized regulatory frameworks, and historic cooperation among governments, companies, and scientists.

When it comes to AI, economic productivity, and job loss, it seems obvious that the answer is to take a portion of the economic value added by AI and reinvest it in services and benefits for the people adversely affected. Easy peasy right? And politically very difficult, at least in the U.S. “Value added tax” and “universal basic services and/or income” are words you could use to describe such programs, but we need to come up with better words and strategies if we are going to successfully describe these concepts to voters and neutralize the powerful interests who so far have been successful obstacles to these practical, somewhat obvious policies. The advantage of a VAT is the broadest possible tax base pays it in small increments over time rather than all at once, and therefore it is resented much less than filing an income tax return. If AI can truly increase economic productivity, then phasing in a VAT over time as productivity increases could be a way to increase quality of life for the greatest number of people possible. Throw in some automated counter-cyclical infrastructure spending along with the usual monetary policy adjustments, and you might have something. AI itself might be able to manage a system like this effectively in a way that is truly win-win for everyone.

It’s hard to be optimistic at this point in history about “historic cooperation among governments, companies, and scientists”. Still, maybe we have hit rock bottom on this and the coming trend will be up at some point.

The discussion of biological weapons and bad actors is chilling. Think of the ideologies that lead people to rationalize mass suicide and mass murder of civilians in events like 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing. The people who perpetrated those acts would certainly have used nuclear weapons if they had them handy. They will use biological weapons in the future if they can get their hands on them, and as the article points out it will be easier to get their hands on them and much harder to detect who has their hands on what. I don’t have an answer on this other than surveillance. Surveillance of AI, by AI perhaps? It sounds dystopian, but maybe that is what is needed – AI designed to be pro-human and pro-social looking for that needle in a haystack which is bad humans using bad AI to try to do something really terrible.

pandemic flu preppers

A major pandemic flu is coming…someday. Today? Tomorrow? Within the next four years while the United States government is staffed (I am not going to use the word “led”) by fools? Within the next 20 years? Nobody knows. Let’s hope it’s not the H5N1 “Captain Trips” variant. Anyway, the CDC was allowed to put out some useful educational information as recently as 2017, and there are lots of preppers out there talking about stocking up on camp stoves and what-not. One suggestion is to “give the gift of preparedness” during the holiday season. Not a bad idea, even if the people you were giving the gift of preparedness happened to think you were insane.

co-living – dormitories for grownups

Co-living “refers to buildings in which residents have their own lockable living and sleeping space but share a kitchen and other facilities”, according to smartcitiesdive.com. This would seem to make sense as an affordable housing option, but apparently is often prohibited by zoning.

These types of arrangements could also be set up by employers. In Asia, I get the sense that one reason unemployment and labor rates can both be low at the same time is that employers provide dormitories for workers who want or need them. It might not be glamorous, but if a relatively low-paying job comes with room and board, that could solve a number of economic and social issues that we don’t really seem to have much of an answer to here in the “western” world.

November 2024 in Review

November was a bit of a lean month for me folks, but here it is.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Ugh, the U.S. election. I don’t really want to talk or think too much more about it. What’s really frightening to me is the celebration of irrationality. With incompetent, irrational clowns and fools now in charge of everything, any crises or emergencies that arise are not going to be dealt with rationally, competently, or at all. And this is how an emergency can turn into a system failure. Let’s hope we can muddle through four years without a major acute crisis of some kind, but that is hard to do.

Most hopeful story: In a nation of 350 million odd people, there have to be some talented potential leaders for us to choose between in future elections, right? Or is it clowns and fools all the way down? Sorry folks, this is how I feel.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: You can charge moving electric vehicles using charging coils embedded in roads.

is the Chinese government suppression of Uyghurs real?

Max Blumenthal says the Uyghur suppression is based on a very small number of unreliable sources. Well, I first read about it in Der Spiegel, I think, and it has also been covered by the Guardian. My understanding is that it is a somewhat sinister use of technology to track large numbers of people, identify and preempt potential Islamic extremism. The Chinese government officials probably think it is justified to head off the potential for violence, and yet it probably meets the UN definition of cultural genocide. So I don’t have a verdict here, but I certainly don’t think it is made up. I do suspect we will see heavy surveillance and tracking regimes like this popping up elsewhere in the future, such as Gaza for instance.

why “free-flow” car sharing isn’t working in the U.S.

This article describes several attempts to create “free flow” car sharing services, where you can pick up and leave a car anywhere within a certain zone. This is in contrast to Zipcar’s “fixed model” where you have to leave the car where you found it. The article says the free flow model isn’t working well because the people it benefits most are lower-income people who do not otherwise have easy access to private or public transportation. But this market just does not have enough demand to cover the cost. This model is working well outside the U.S., and the article suggests one reason it does not work in the U.S. is the massive subsidies we have in place for private vehicle ownership with massive public funding for roads and parking. The car-highway-oil-sprawl industry propaganda is so entrenched that we can’t see these massive subsidies hidden in plain site. Take your red pills, people!

In October I passed the “car ownership free for 20 years” mark, which I am very proud of. I made it to the milestone through the stroller and car seat years, which was sometimes difficult. But I will say I have a Zipcar membership which I rarely use, and there are really two reasons. First is living in a walkable, public transportation oriented community. I simply don’t need a car most of the time, and I suspect the people who might currently be interested in car sharing are also the ones who value public transportation. But second, ride hailing has just gotten so convenient and it is much cheaper compared to Zipcar, so I really only use Zipcar if I am hauling something. It occurs to me that once cars can drive themselves (okay, they can now, but once the various institutional/legal/policy barriers are sorted) there will be less distinction between the two models, and car sharing will eventually go away. Public agencies can subsidize ride hailing if they want to, and I am actually concerned this will put downward pressure on the demand for traditional public transportation (buses, trains) and lead to doubling down on our poor low-density land use choices.

electric vehicle charging coils in roads

Yes, you can charge vehicles when they are moving, and there are already pilot projects in Detroit and at UCLA (and almost certainly abroad), according to this article. Installing more of these could be great because we might stop whining about how we can’t have nice electric vehicles because the charging infrastructure takes up too much space or takes too long. If solar panels along the road provide at least some of the power, you can start to imagine this providing a revenue stream to help maintain the roads, thus negating the argument that we can’t have nice things because only taxes on gasoline can be used to maintain the roads.

sidewalks

Sidewalks are important. Besides being (obviously?) part of the transportation system (because the purpose of a transportation system is to move people and goods from point A to point B, NOT to move your private motor vehicle from point A to point B), we can put trees in them, manage water and pollution in them, move water/electricity/gas/communications under them and over them, conduct business and engage in social interactions in them. In engineering lingo, they are part of the “public right of way” along with the street. This is why most U.S. cities recognize that they are a critical part of the urban public infrastructure…wait, what? They don’t? They pretend they are private property and put the onus on private property owners to keep them in a state that provides all these public amenities. The article I link to here compares sidewalk policy in U.S. cities and concludes that some are better than others.

October 2024 in Review

Only half way through November – here is an “October in Review” post.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: When it comes to the #1 climate change impact on ordinary people, it’s the food stupid. (Dear reader, I’m not calling you stupid, and I don’t consider myself stupid, but somehow we individually intelligent humans are all managing to be stupid together.) This is the shit that is probably going to hit the fan first while we are shouting stupid slogans like “drill baby drill” (okay, if you are cheering when you hear a politician shout that you might not be stupid, but you are at least uninformed.)

Most hopeful story: AI, at least in theory, should be able to help us manage physical assets like buildings and infrastructure more efficiently. Humans still need to have some up-front vision of what we would like our infrastructure systems to look like in the long term, but then AI should be able to help us make optimal repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions that nudge the system toward the vision over time as individual components wear out.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Some explanations proposed for the very high cost of building infrastructure in the U.S. are (1) lack of competition in the construction industry and (2) political fragmentation leading to many relatively small agencies doing many relatively small projects. Some logical solutions then are to encourage the formation of more firms in the U.S., allow foreign firms and foreign workers to compete (hardly consistent with the current political climate!), and consolidate projects into a smaller number of much larger ones where economies of scale can be realized. There is some tension though between scale and competition, because the larger and more complex a project gets, the fewer bidders it will tend to attract who are willing to take the risk.