Tag Archives: biotechnology

February 2026 in Review

2025 in Review

Opening Thoughts

Now is the time on the show when I summarize my monthly wrap-up posts and try to draw some conclusions.

2025 Post Roundup

Most frightening and/or depressing story of each month:

JANUARY: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.
FEBRUARY: Donald Shoup died in February. He was a pioneer in parking economics, which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but his clear explanations really helped me see the light of what walkable, livable, healthy and low environmental impact cities can potentially be. What they can’t be is low-density and automobile-oriented. I put this in the depressing category both because I am sad at his passing, and because I do not see these trends going in the right direction.
MARCH: The U.S. might be headed for recession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competent advice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
APRIL: Maybe an irreversible methane tipping point is happening. This could be the scariest thing out there short of nuclear war.
MAY: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.
JUNE: The science on how bad a nuclear winter would actually be gets updated from time to time. It never gets any better!
JULY: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.
AUGUST: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
SEPTEMBER: We are most likely on a path to the AMOC tipping point. I distinguished between the tipping point, which is when collapse becomes inevitable, and the actual collapse itself. These are separated in time, which means the tipping point may only be called in retrospect when it is too late to prevent the collapse. This is why being “on the path to the tipping point” is important, because we can still do something.
OCTOBER: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
NOVEMBER: 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.
DECEMBER: Global progress on poverty reduction stalled around 2020. Gains in Asia are offset by losses in Africa. Meanwhile, gains in crop yields may have plateaued and are expected to decline as climate change drives increasingly extreme weather.

Most hopeful story of each month:

JANUARY: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).
FEBRUARY: The fool in the White House and the devils whispering in his ear can weaken enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, but they can’t actually make laws go away. They can try to ignore them, and then we will see how effective our court system and third party legal action can be at activating the checks and balances we are supposed to have. The other potential players are congress and widespread public action, and these do not seem to be active at the moment.
MARCH: Trump seems to have some anti-nuclear (weapons) instincts. We will see if his actions bear any relation to his words.
APRIL: 3-30-300 is a nice, simple idea. “you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.” Sure, you have to figure out some details and make some sustained effort over time to implement simple ideas. Still, not rocket science. Combined with the “15 minute city”, this is a pretty good urban planning philosophy that should be communicable.
MAY: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.
JUNE: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.
JULY: The Great Lakes states, provinces, and cities may be the best climate havens North America has to offer.
AUGUST: No matter what impression we are being given in the U.S., economic forces continue to push towards renewable energy and electrification worldwide.
SEPTEMBER: Spain has been so successful at rolling out solar power that the price of solar power has “collapsed”. I’ve been beating a drum lately that economic incentives have tipped in favor of renewable energy worldwide and this fact is being largely hidden from us in the US by propaganda.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: 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.
DECEMBER: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.

Most interesting story of each month, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

JANUARY: AI agents – coming soon to a computer near you.
FEBRUARY: I continued to follow the emergence of AI agents in February. Outside the bananas state of U.S. and global geopolitics, this is one of the biggest things going on, or at least a big change playing out quickly. Even a “singularity watch” item – I’m going to give a 5% chance this is the start of the singularity. Hopefully not the Terminator version. But has anyone noticed we now have Starlink and Stargate – these even sound like Skynet. We already had Operation Warp Speed of course. What puzzles me is that conservatives usually don’t like science fiction because they lack imagination. So either somebody is a science fiction fan, or more likely they have these words in the backs of their minds from indirect exposure to science fiction, and now they think they thought of them.
MARCH: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
APRIL: I made what I would consider a “common sense” trade policy proposal. “I generally support…free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders.”
MAY: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.
JUNE: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.
JULY: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.
AUGUST: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
SEPTEMBER: Brain-machine interfaces have been quietly advancing behind the scenes.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: 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.
DECEMBER: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.

Brilliant(?) Synthesis

The world is slowly bending the curve on emissions and energy. One theme that emerges is the clear arrival of economically viable renewable energy technology. All the international treaty-making and policy hand-wringing might have accelerated us toward this point, but it is now technology and markets that are finally in the driver’s seat. I was surprised to learn that peak emissions have already occurred in the U.S. and other developed countries. Emissions are still high and growing in developing and middle income countries including China and India. This makes sense – for all we hear about China being so advanced, their levels of income, consumption, and pollution at the individual level are still catching up to western countries. This is both good for them and terrifying for the world because China and India (add Indonesia, Brazil, others here if you want to) have such vast populations that their impact is going to dwarf anything the rest of the world does going forward. They are going through the same transition that the US, UK, Germany, Japan, or whatever western countries you want to name went through, just later in history, on a vaster scale, and when our planet’s ability to absorb the impact is mostly used up. So this is how China can simultaneously be the world leader on clean technology and the world’s largest creator of world-destroying pollution. Now, we want Africa to eventually develop and lift another 1.5 (headed to 3!) billion people out of poverty, but clearly we have to find lower-impact ways to develop if our civilization is going to survive.

But we could end up calling 2025 as the tipping point to disaster in retrospect. Getting over that technology and cost-effectiveness hump is nice, but it may still be too little too late to avoid disaster. An important concept I discovered/reminded myself about in 2025 is that a tipping point is not the point where a system changes drastically, but the point where that change becomes inevitable. As such, we may call the tipping point only in retrospect. The gradual increases in heat and sea level – overlaid with extreme events like heat waves, floods, fires, and storms – may have put us on a path towards unavoidable destruction of our food supply and our urban areas. That’s my elevator pitch for how climate change is hitting home – climate change is coming for our food and it’s coming for our houses. Add to the trends and extreme events the possibility that we have crossed a threshold leading to runaway methane releases and major shifts in ocean circulation patterns. We may look back and determine that the 2020s were when these outcomes became inevitable due to our failure to act quickly enough or on a broad enough scale. And if we decide the 2020s or mid-2020s are when this outcome became inevitable, why not pick 2025 as a nice round number when the climate shit hit the fan?

Earth’s ecosystems are past the tipping point. Yesterday’s environmentalism has sort of evolved to focus almost fully on climate change, but intertwined with the climate crisis is the destruction and destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems, from the oceans to tropical forests. It is hard to make that elevator pitch that draws a straight line from ecosystem and biodiversity collapse to human wellbeing. A reliable food supply is certainly part of it, and yet our industrial food system is somewhat decoupled from natural ecosystems. To me this is a moral failing of our species and civilization, and it is just deeply sad. While there still might be a theoretical possibility to head off the worst possible damage to our climate, the damage to our ecosystems cannot be reversed at this point. Of course, this does not mean we should give up. We can always take action to make the outcome less bad than it could have been. We have a moral responsibility to do so, but I do not see much public or political energy directed at this issue. And maybe it makes sense to focus on the relatively simple to understand issue and relatively straightforward solutions (which is not to say easy!) to greenhouse gas emissions. Getting emissions under control is certainly necessary to protect ecosystems though not sufficient.

While we are focused on emerging artificial intelligence technology, biotechnology has matured all around us. We are hearing that artificial intelligence may be a bubble waiting to pop in the near term, a promising boost to productivity that will raise all boats in the medium term, and either a ticket to utopia or an existential threat in the (somewhat?) long(er?) term. But while so much attention is focused on this emerging technology, biotechnology has sort of matured and arrived fully all around us. We can now edit the genes of embryonic and adult humans, grow genetically engineered human body parts in pigs and then implant them back in humans, and genetically engineer vaccines. In agriculture, genetic technology has some promise to overcome the downward pressure on our food supply caused by global heating and extreme weather. The fact that all this technology is available doesn’t mean it will automatically applied morally or that it will be accessible evenly across countries and demographic groups, of course. Biotechnology is improving many of our lives and has potential to improve all human lives, but reaching that potential and managing the risks is going to vary depending on where you are and who you are.

It’s crystal clear the United States is in decline. The child poverty metric (13% in 2023) alone is damning. The state of Native Americans. Entrenched resistance to rational energy, transportation, housing, trade, and immigration policies with solid evidence of success in leading countries elsewhere in the world. Active, intentional weakening of Civil Rights Act enforcement. Corruption and propaganda (as I write this on January 4, it appears the US has invaded a sovereign UN nation-state to make it safe for US-headquartered multinational oil companies, who bankroll our elections). Intentionally destroying our research and development system which got us to the level of prosperity we enjoy today. The ineffectiveness of our legislative branch. We’re lucky at the moment that the stock market and incomes of top earners are allowing our economy to keep bumping along. If there is a financial panic or some external shock, I can envision the country going into a tailspin the current clowns and amateurs in charge will not be able to competently manage. Let’s hope we are lucky enough to bumble through the next three years without a major crisis, and then able to get better leadership in place. Chillingly, I probably said something like this in January 2018, and we only made it to the two year mark.

Whither war and peace? The stories that have come out about Israel using algorithms to target suspected Hamas associates and their families are chilling to me. As the use of big data and artificial intelligence becomes more and more widespread in all aspects of our economy and lives, this is one cautionary tale of how it can be used by governments in immoral ways. I see the technology as neutral, but we clearly need safeguards on how it is applied in the worlds of surveillance, social control, and outright war. We also had several examples of direct military confrontations between nuclear-armed nation-states in 2025 – India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, the U.S. and Iran; and by proxy the U.S. and western Europe vs. Russia. This is clearly very risky for the future of the whole world. I would also note that in all these cases except the Russia one, the supposed liberal democracy appears to be the more aggressive party. (The U.S. has also illegally invaded Venezuela as I write this.) So the parliamentary and presidential democratic systems we have in place are not acting as safeguards against cross-border aggression like we might have hoped they would. Luckily none of these conflicts seemed to come close to a nuclear exchange in 2025, but we can’t continue to rely on luck. We need renewed respect for sovereignty as a bedrock principle. We need to reverse the recent expansion of nuclear arsenals, and we need new talks and treaties on arms control and non-proliferation. And we need to get serious about the risks of biological and AI-powered cyberwarfare.

Closing Thoughts

December 2025 in Review

bacteriophages

This article is about “AI designed viruses”, but what seems more important to me is progress on the idea of genetically engineered bacteriophages, or viruses that can infect and potentially kill bacteria. Antibiotics seem to have entered a state of diminishing returns (i.e., technological progress is falling short of evolution in some really scary bacteria). Bacteriophages seem promising as the next phase, where you can inject someone with a virus that will infect the specific bacterium causing a problem while not damaging any other healthy cells or beneficial bacteria.

August 2025 in Review

Good bye summer 2025!

Most frightening and/or depressing story: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.

Most hopeful story: No matter what impression we are being given in the U.S., economic forces continue to push towards renewable energy and electrification worldwide.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.

babies with three parents

This is basically what it sounds like. The chromosomes come from two people (still referred to as a “mother” and “father” at this point in history) and the mitochondria come from a third (female) person. The egg is implanted in the (first) female who brings the baby to term and gives birth, but I suppose there is no reason this has to be the case. The purpose (at this point in history) is to avoid certain rare genetic diseases, and this has worked effectively and produced healthy babies.

Mitochondrial donation treatment, or MDT, aims to prevent children from inheriting mutated mitochondria. The procedure involves fertilising the mother’s egg with the father’s sperm and then transferring the genetic material from the nucleus into a fertilised healthy donor egg that has had its own nucleus removed. This creates a fertilised egg with a full set of chromosomes from the parents, but healthy mitochondria from the donor. The egg is then implanted into the womb to establish a pregnancy.

I have no moral objection to this. Reproduction was always inevitably going to get higher tech over time. The problem is more that wealthy people will have access and others won’t, unless or except in places where governments make other choices.

Ozempic vs. drug and alcohol abuse

This journal article suggests GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic) are effective in reducing opioid and alcohol abuse.

The association between glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and/or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist prescriptions and substance-related outcomes in patients with opioid and alcohol use disorders: A real-world data analysis

Prescriptions of glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and/or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists appear to be associated with lower rates of opioid overdose and alcohol intoxication in patients with opioid use disorder and alcohol use disorder. The protective effects are consistent across various subgroups, including patients with comorbid type 2 diabetes and obesity.

2024 in Review

Intro

What I do here is list all the posts I picked each month as most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting. Then I attempt some kind of synthesis and analysis of this information. You can drill down to my “month in review” posts, from there to individual posts, and from there to source articles if you have the time and inclination.

Post Roundup

Most frightening and/or depressing stories

JANUARY: 2023 was “a year of war“, and so far 2024 is not looking better. Those diplomatic grand bargains you always hear about seem to be getting less grand. And the drumbeat for a U.S. attack on Iran got louder.
FEBRUARY: The war on terror continues, and the propaganda umbrella has expanded to cover attacks on any group labeled as “Iran-backed”. Fentanyl gets an honorable mention, but affects mostly the poor and miserable whereas the war on terror threatens to immolate us all.
MARCH: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the original gruesome attack, it is getting harder.
APRIL: Peter Turchin’s description of a “wealth pump” leading to stagnation and political instability seems to fit the United States pretty well at this moment. The IMF shows that global productivity has been slowing since the US-caused financial crisis in 2008. In Turchin’s model, our November election will be a struggle between elites and counter-elites who both represent the wealthy and powerful. That sounds about right, but I still say it is a struggle between competence and incompetence, and competence is a minimum thing we need to survive in a dangerous world. In early April I thought things were trending painfully slowly, but clearly, in Biden’s direction. As I write this in early May I am no longer convinced of that.
MAY: What a modern nuclear bomb would do to a large modern city. Do we already know this intellectually? Sure. Do we constantly need to be reminded and remind our elected leaders that this is absolutely unthinkable and must be avoided at any cost? Apparently.
JUNE: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.
JULY: Joe Biden’s depressing decline in the international spotlight, and our failed political system that could let such a thing happen. Not much more I can say about it that has not been said. The “election trifecta” – non-partisan, single ballot primaries; ranked-choice general elections; and non-partisan redistricting – is one promising proposal for improving this system.
AUGUST: Human extinction, and our dysfunctional political system’s seeming lack of concern and even active ramping up the risk. We have forgotten how horrible it was last time (and the only time) nuclear weapons were used on cities. Is there any story that could be more frightening and/or depressing to a human?
SEPTEMBER: There is nothing on Earth more frightening than nuclear weapons. China has scrapped its “minimal deterrent” nuclear doctrine in favor of massively scaling up their arsenal to compete with the also ramping up U.S. and Russian arsenals. They do still have an official “no first strike” policy. The U.S. by contrast has an arrogant foreign policy.
OCTOBER: 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.)
NOVEMBER: 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.
DECEMBER: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful stories

JANUARY: According to Bill Gates, some bright spots in the world today include gains in administering vaccines to children around the world, a shift toward greater public acceptance of nuclear power, and maybe getting a bit closer to the dream of fusion power. He pontificates about AI, and my personal sense is it is still too soon, but AI does hold some promise for speeding up scientific progress.
FEBRUARY: The people who are in charge of the USA’s nuclear weapons still believe in the ideals behind the founding of the country, at least more than the rest of us. Okay, this is lean times for hope, but seriously this at least buys us time to figure some stuff out.
MARCH: Yes, there are some fun native (North American) wildflowers you can grow from bulbs. Let’s give the environmental and geopolitical doom and gloom a rest for a moment and cultivate our gardens.
APRIL: Some tweaks to U.S. trade policy might be able to significantly ease the “border crisis” and create a broad political coalition of bigots, big business, and people who buy things in stores.
MAY: The U.S. might manage to connect two large cities with true high speed rail, relatively soon and relatively cost effectively. The trick is that there is not much between these cities other than flat desert. The route will mostly follow an existing highway, and we should think about doing this more as autonomous vehicles very gradually start to reduce demand on our highways in coming decades.
JUNE: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.
JULY: A universal flu vaccine may be close, the same technology might work for other diseases like Covid, HIV, and tuberculosis.
AUGUST: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.
SEPTEMBER: AI should be able to improve traffic management in cities, although early ideas on this front are not very creative.
OCTOBER: 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.
NOVEMBER: 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.
DECEMBER: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both

JANUARY: The return of super-sonic commercial flight is inching closer.
FEBRUARY: I am not a great chef by any means, but all hail recipe websites, however pesky they may be, for helping me make edible food.
MARCH: I looked into Belarus, and now I am just a little bit less ignorant, which is nice.
APRIL: If the singularity is in fact near, our worries about a productivity slow down are almost over, and our new worries will be about boredom in our new lives of leisure. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to count on this happening in the very near future, and therefore stop trying to solve the problems we have at the moment. This would be one of those “nice to have” problems. If it does in fact materialize, the places to be will be the ones that manage to shut down Peter Turchin’s wealth pump and spread the newfound wealth, rather than the places where a chosen few live god-like existences while leaving the masses in squalor.
MAY: Drone deliveries make some sense, but what we really need is infrastructure on the ground that lets all sorts of slow, light-weight vehicles zip around in our cities efficiently and safely. And this means separating them completely from those fast, heavy vehicles designed for highway travel.
JUNE: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.
JULY: Maybe we could replace congress with AI agents working tirelessly on behalf of us voters. Or maybe we could just have AI agents tirelessly paying attention to what the humans we have elected are doing, and communicating in both directions.
AUGUST: I did some musing about electric vehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.
SEPTEMBER: Countries around the world update their constitutions about every 20 years on average. They have organized, legal processes for doing this spelled out in the constitutions themselves. The U.S. constitution is considered the world’s most difficult constitution to update and modernize.
OCTOBER: 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.
NOVEMBER: You can charge moving electric vehicles using charging coils embedded in roads.
DECEMBER: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.

Synthesis

Nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. The massive silver lining here is that, as I write this, there has been no use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945. Let’s hope it stays that way, forever and ever. But the expansion of nuclear arsenals among the existing powers, the open discussion of proliferation to new state actors, and the erosion of treaties and taboos on use of nuclear weapons are all deeply concerning. I find the hypersonic missiles particularly disturbing. These are being used in active, hot wars between nuclear powers – between Russia and NATO’s proxy Ukraine, and between Israel and Iran. We also hear that China has developed these weapons. Missiles are scary to begin with, but what is very, very scary is that these seem to be nuclear capable missiles and they are being actively used in hot wars between nuclear powers right now. If there are only a few minutes of warning when they are incoming, and they effectively can’t be pre-empted or intercepted, how does anyone know for sure that they are not nuclear armed before they hit their targets? So far, it seems like all sides are waiting for missiles to hit before we confirm they are not nuclear missiles. What if a state actor decides they can’t afford to wait and see and considers a pre-emptive strike? China and Iran have no-first-strike policies. The United States does not, and here is a fun fact – the SOVIET UNION had a no-first-strike policy, but modern Russia does not. Just to heap a little more sunshine on this topic, the rapid collapse of Syria, an aspiring nuclear power at one point, made me wonder if something similar could happen in Pakistan. And there is always the prospect of nuclear terrorism, particularly frightening when combined with extremist ideologies that glorify suicide and mass killing of civilians. It is easy to imagine horrible scenarios for all mankind on this one – but again, it is a risk that hasn’t materialized and can be managed. And it actually seems like a simpler, more tractable problem to me than complicated scenarios like climate change. Nuclear weapons are in the hands of relatively few leaders, and there is plenty of precedent for what arms control treaties and risk reduction measures can look like. Courageous leaders can step up on this issue – where are you guys?

Climate change. Let’s continue my little happy pep talk on existential threats. The climate change crisis is biting our civilization right now, and not only that, we are in the middle of it, not the beginning, and it is accelerating every day. This is the physical and socioeconomic reality, while our human civilization’s perception of reality let alone willingness and ability to act lag far behind. This is starting to feel like a story that will not and cannot end well. It is starting to bite our cities in the form of floods and fires, and this is well before relentless sea level rise really starts to bite in a significant way. Another place it will gradually start to bite harder, if it has not already, is food prices and eventually the physical food supply. As much as we have whined about food prices here in the U.S., the rise has been much worse in developing countries. And everything I just said is about the slow, steady, but relentless changes in the climate we have been experiencing and have to expect we will keep experiencing, at a minimum. The small piece of good news here is that if we took action immediately, we would start to see improvement in the trends immediately, rather than having to wait for some lag period to pass. My understanding of this has changed in the past year, and this is something positive. BUT what if rapid, sudden changes are in store? Some of the most terrifying articles I highlighted in 2024 have to do with tipping points, also known as runaway trains. We know about the accelerating melting glaciers and ice sheets, and how a sudden collapse of ice could lead to catastrophic and sudden sea level rise. We are seeing sudden rises in atmospheric methane concentrations – there seems to be some chance that this is the beginning of a feedback loop where frozen soil and seafloor sediments release methane bubbles as they thaw, which leads to more warming, which leads to more thawing, which leads to more warming and so on in a catastrophic exponential feedback loop that can’t be stopped on any time scale meaningful to humans. I hope we are not looking back a few years from now and concluding 2024 was the year that kicked this off. Now for some very small positive words – no matter how long our human political leaders dither and delay and fail, it is never too late to take actions that will make the outcome less bad than it could have been. Think about the reverse – if you were going to purposely try to make the situation as bad a possible, you could do things that would make it worse (like take all energy production back to coal). So past failure is never an excuse to stop trying, it is truly never too late to do better, even if our lack of effective action to date has closed off certain positive outcomes forever.

Bird flu. Continuing the doom and gloom theme, a major pandemic with a high mortality rate is clearly another existential threat we face. It could come from a natural source, a laboratory accident, or an intentional act. The risk of the latter will grow as biotechnology continues to progress and, unlike nuclear weapons, becomes more accessible to the masses. It’s like a major flood or earthquake. It will happen sooner or later. There are things we can do to limit the damage and to recover more quickly when it does happen, and we are probably not doing enough. The current strain of bird flu is concerning as it continues to devastate wild and domestic birds around the world, has spread extensively to domestic cows, there are some reports it has spread to pigs, and it has spread to some humans supposedly through direct contact with animals. Now having said all that, 2025 is probably not the year we get a devastating pandemic flu. Every year is probably not the year, because this is a low probability event in any given year that becomes highly probable over a long period of time. So the thing to do is stay calm and prepare. I actually have some hope that the vaccine technology that was rapidly scaled up and commercialized during Covid-19 will help us when the pandemic flu does hit. Let’s hope it’s not this year or any time during the next four years when we cannot expect to have competent leadership in the United States.

Artificial Intelligence. I suppose I have to say something about it. Well, I can’t recall in my lifetime any technology exploding exponentially into widespread commercial and public use in just over a year from its first announcement. You could almost describe it as…a singularity? Well not quite, but an ongoing exponential growth with no end in site, which is how a singularity would begin. Now, the downside is the sudden, massive, and completely unexpected energy demand this is causing, to the point that recently retired nuclear plants are being turned back on. I joked that AI might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox, where every civilization in the cosmos advanced enough to develop this technology wipes itself out by fouling its own nest when it tries to generate the energy required. I don’t believe this though – given that it’s easy to imagine an alternate history where nuclear fission based energy was scaled up in a serious way, and/or space based solar energy was scaled up in a serious way, and fusion based energy looking at least somewhat plausible, it does not seem like a foregone conclusion that we humans here on Earth had to foul our nest. This does not mean there is hope for us, it just means that there might be hope in a galaxy far, far away or in a billion of them too far away for us to see.

AI Agents. Now, as we foul our nest over the next few decades, there is the question of where AI goes in the next few months and years. And one big thing, I think, that is going to change our lives pretty quick is AI agents. We don’t really have AI going out and actively engaging in communications and transactions on our behalf on a large scale yet. But this has to be happening behind the scenes, and it has to happen in an obvious public way pretty soon. Imagine if I asked an AI to keep track of what one of my elected representatives is doing each day, read and summarize legislation they vote for or against, and just explain it to me in an easily digestible way for five minutes a day. Now imagine my AI is talking to my representative’s AI, and everyone else’s AIs are doing that, and giving the AI a summary of what all these AIs are thinking. That sounds pretty democratic right? But now imagine AIs from companies and governments are trying to manipulate all of us to buy things and believe things and do things they want us to do. Now imagine ALL THESE AIs ARE TALKING AND TRANSACTING WITH EACH OTHER, ALL THE TIME, AND THEY NEVER GET TIRED OR NEED A BREAK. It gets dizzying pretty quick.

Competing Feedback Loops. AI has definitely increased my personal productivity in writing computer programs and communicating the results in the past year. This must be happening on a large scale, at least it certain types of jobs. On the other hand, the IMF tells us worldwide productivity has slowed down since the 2009 financial crisis and was made worse by the Covid-19 crisis. There are also continuing headwinds like aging populations and falling fertility rates in many developed countries. How can both these things be true, an acceleration of productivity and a slowdown of productivity? The way I think about it, they are competing feedback loops, kind of like the faucet in your bathtub being on while at the same time there is no drain plug. Whether your tub is filling up or draining down depends on the relative strength of the positive and negative feedback loops. And unlike your bathtub, both are changing in time and subject to random shocks. So it could go either way – civilization could be going down the drain, the technological singularity might be imminent, or the two could be close to balance so it seems like nothing is happening for a long time, until one of them gets the upper hand. These are not the only feedback loops of course – the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises are also in the mix and since these are negative, we have to really hope that AI faucet is wide open, or find a stopper for the drain, or some combination of the two. We don’t have many world leaders working on the stopper thing right now, many are trying to drill baby drill an even bigger hole.

Biotechnology. AI seems likely to accelerate the progress of biotechnology, leading toward both medical breakthroughs (universal vaccines, cures for cancer and diabetes) and increasing risks of accidents and terrorism. Its hard to predict when these things will hit the news – progress is slow and steady for a long time, and then a technology will seem to burst onto the public scene all at once. Sometimes there is a big hype bubble that reaches a peak and seems to explode, and then while the public assumes the technology is dead, the slow and steady progress toward widespread commercialization resumes and eventually takes hold of the entire system. And then we shrug, forget the past, and assume we knew it was coming all along.

Electric Vehicles and Autonomous Vehicles. The U.S. government might be throwing up some headwinds to technological progress (i.e., doing their best to usher in a dark age not a “golden age”), but the global socioeconomic and scientific systems that drive technological progress are much too big to be constrained by the U.S. government. While many in the U.S. may have the impression that the electric vehicle revolution has stalled, it is forging ahead in Asia and around the world. China is building cars for $10,000, and nobody else (Japan, Korea, or Tesla let alone Detroit) can figure out how to compete with this. I suspect one driver of the protectionist impulse in the U.S. is fear that we have no chance of competing, so our government is willing to imprison us in a bubble of outdated technology at uncompetitive prices, and if they can’t outright restrict information about the outside world from getting in, they will use propaganda to distort that information so we don’t understand what we are missing. It’s like the Soviet Union, or worse, North Korea. We are certainly not as far behind as the Soviet Union or North Korea relative to our peers yet, but this is the path we are headed down. Similarly to electric vehicles, we are hearing from our media that autonomous vehicle technology has stalled or under-delivered or is risky (it’s not, by any rational measure compared to the massive death and suffering caused by human-driven vehicles). But this technology has in fact arrived, just arrived unevenly in certain cities in the U.S. and around the world, and our government policy is slowing its spread for example with policies that do not allow autonomous vehicles on highways. These two technologies – electric and autonomous vehicles – have to combine and reinforce each other sooner or later, and this will change a lot of things about how our cities and infrastructure are configured in the future. It’s hard to give a timetable, but I bet if you go to a leading edge city in China, Korea, or Japan a decade from now these technologies will be everywhere and it will seem like science fiction to a U.S. traveler who has been kept in the dark about the state of the outside world as our once world-leading country has stagnated.

Inequality and the Wealth Pump. I hadn’t heard the term “wealth pump” before reading Peter Turchin in 2024, but it rings true. Wealth and income inequality is just the elephant in the room behind the 2024 U.S. election and many other geopolitical trends around the world. It is getting worse in the U.S., and it is not going to get better as long as the wealthy and powerful are able to continue rigging the rules of the system more and more in their favor. The pain of the masses is very real. And Donald Trump may have found rhetoric that taps into this pain, but his administration is certainly not going to make the situation better. But nor has the Democratic Party shown any signs of making the situation better. They may tinker with some marginal policy changes that slow the trend (for example, the short-lived increase in tax credits to offset childcare expenses, some steps to slow the rise of prescription drug prices) but do not reverse it (for example, creating real childcare, education, and health care benefits that reach the vast majority of working citizens). Bernie Sanders is the only U.S. politician who has spoken authentically to the people about these issues in recent memory, and he reached a lot of people although not quite enough when the established Democratic Party did everything they could to sabotage him. There is also the problem of half a century of very effective anti-tax propaganda that is very hard to overcome. But still, I believe Bernie showed us the way. The Democrats need to embrace the man and his policies, and find him a true protege or several to choose from who are able to speak with his authenticity and maybe a bit more youth and charisma. Trump is all but guaranteed to fuck up massively over the next four years, so the question is will the Democrats let his propaganda machine convince us to blame scapegoats or will they be ready?

Government of the Fools, By the Fools, For the Fools, and Where’s Waldo? Before January 20, 2025 it was clear to me that the U.S. will be governed by fools and amateurs for the next four years. And this alone is sad because it will lead to our continued stagnation and at least relative decline while peer countries are moving into the future. It is also dangerous because the nation might be able to muddle through while there is nothing unusual going on, but fools, amateurs and clowns are not going to prepare or respond effectively to emergencies, disasters, and unexpected events. Four years is a long enough time that some unexpected events should be expected. We can only hope they are not too far out in the tails. But as I write this on January 23, 2025, it seems even worse. Trump is a fool, but a very powerful and dangerous fool, and at least some of the people whispering in his ear are evil cruel-hearted psychopaths, sadists, and outright devils. I don’t think Trump is Hitler, because Hitler believed in things (evil, twisted things) whereas I think Trump is a pure psychopath who believes in nothing and is willing to say or do anything he thinks will increase his own power. But who are the Heydrichs, Himmlers, and Goebbels among his supporters? I am not sure, but whoever they are they are hiding in plain site in a crowd of clowns and fools where they are hard to pick out. It’s time to play a little Where’s Waldo.

Welcome to 2025!

And that is all the sunshine and light I have to offer you here in this January 2025. If you are a human being reading this in close to real time, happy 2025 and may it be better than expected, which is not a high bar at all! If you are an alien archaeologist reading this in the far future, I hope it helps you make sense of the rubble of our civilization. If you are a transhuman reading it after the singularity in the near future (I heard October 2029 according to Ray Kurzweil’s latest prediction?), I hope you are laughing that the problems that seemed so dire to me in January 2025 had solutions just around the corner!

December 2024 in Review

In December I reviewed a number of “best of” posts by others, so this is really a roundup of roundups.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful story: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.

what’s new with a universal flu vaccine

This article in technologynetworks.com (which is new to me) says a universal flu vaccine could be here within five years.

Researchers reported that six of 11 nonhuman primates inoculated against the virus that circulated a century ago — the 1918 flu — survived exposure to one of the deadliest viruses in the world today, H5N1. In contrast, a control group of six unvaccinated nonhuman primates exposed to the H5N1 virus succumbed to the disease.

Sacha said he believes the platform “absolutely” could be useful against other mutating viruses, including SARS-CoV-2…

This approach harnesses a vaccine platform previously developed by scientists at OHSU to fight HIV and tuberculosis, and, in fact, is already being used in a clinical trial against HIV.

I feel sorry for the 11 monkeys (chimps?) who gave their lives for this research. But getting rid of flu, Covid, HIV and tuberculosis certainly sounds pretty good. I’m a little confused about why H5N1 is so lethal in these monkeys – is this the same virus causing mild symptoms and no deaths (so far) in cows and a few humans?

Future Yada Yada Yada

in which I explore the imminent collapse of civilization, the fabulous science fiction future, and points in between