Tag Archives: technological progress

2025 Science (with a capital S!) breakthrough of the year

Does Science with a capital S speak for science? I don’t know, science, or nature or Nature might have something to say about that. Small-s science, after all, is just a way of asking questions and trying to strengthen our confidence in what we think we know about nature. Despite all that, the magazine/publishing conglomerate known as Science nominates candidates for scientific breakthrough of the year and then chooses one. This year’s winner is renewable energy.

This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year…

China’s mighty industrial engine is the driver. After years of patiently nurturing the sector through subsidies, China now dominates global production of renewable energy technologies. It makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match.

The article makes the point that this progress is not really a technological breakthrough, but rather a successful scaling up of technology invented during the space race half a century ago. Materials science does offer some possibilities for breakthroughs on the near horizon:

Solar cells today are made of crystalline silicon, but another kind of crystal, perovskites, can be layered in tandem with silicon to make cells that gain efficiency by capturing more colors of light. Material advances are enabling wind turbine blades to get longer and harvest more energy, while designs for floating turbines could vastly expand the offshore areas in which they could be deployed. And the giant lithium-ion batteries now used to store energy when sunshine and wind falter could one day give way to other chemistries. Vanadium flow batteries and sodium batteries could be cheaper; zinc-air batteries could hold far more energy.

And there you go – an agenda for research and development that the U.S. could get behind, or better yet, cooperate internationally on a win-win basis.

Meanwhile the nominees that were not chosen were:

  • Gene-editing to cure rare diseases in human babies and adults
  • New antibiotics effective against antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, which continues to evolve
  • A breakthrough in understanding how cancer can spread through the nervous system
  • Advances in telescopes
  • DNA reconstruction of early humans
  • Large language models conducting math and scientific experiments on their own – In 2025 this was done with thorny math problems, chemical and drug development. The article notes that AI agents did not really live up to their hype overall in 2025.
  • Stuff involving subatomic particles. Honestly, this stuff is interesting but it’s hard for us normals to draw straight lines to how it might eventually affect our daily lives. Of course this doesn’t mean it won’t, it just means a lot of twists and turns as it works its way through the worlds of science and technology over time.
  • Genetically engineered organs grown in pigs and transplanted to people (successfully, at least for a period of months which seems to be much longer than these particular people were expected to live without the experimental transplants.). Are these pig organs or human organs grown in pigs? At some point it doesn’t matter.
  • Advances in heat-resistant rice

The article makes a parting shot at the U.S. government under Trump, for just intentionally shooting our entire scientific development pipeline in the foot. These were not the actions of a patriot, if I need to remind anyone.

what’s new with fusion?

One thing that’s new, according to the New York Times, is massive investment in R&D by the government of China. Meanwhile in the U.S., it’s more about startups and public-private partnerships. In at least one anecdotal case mentioned in the article, top scientists from China who have been based at top U.S. universities for decades are choosing to go home. The article suggests that American firms are often the first to achieve breakthroughs, but the Chinese system is better at scaling and commercializing them.

It seems like there is an opportunity to cooperate for the greater good here, no? That is not the way the political winds are blowing at the moment, of course. At least in this case, if our countries aren’t actually cooperating, they are not competing to weaponize the technology first. This technology was weaponized more than half a century ago, of course, and the quest ever since has been to learn how to control it for peaceful purposes. Of course, the joke is always that commercial fusion is two decades away, no matter what decade we are currently in. This article declines to give a clear time table for widespread commercialization, but it talks about a “pilot plant in the 2030s and 2040s”, so yep the rolling two decade projection seems to be holding.

BBC: 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century

BBC has a list called The 25 most powerful ideas of the 21st century (so far), picked by the world’s top thinkers. They don’t spell out science or technology in the title, but I don’t see any grand philosophical or literary analysis here. It’s not exactly clear if the list is in any order, other than maybe grouped loosely by topic. I’m just going to list a few I found interesting below, in categories:

  • Medicine: stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, genome sequencing, a cure for HIV*, the HPV vaccine, contraception apps [what we used to call “the rhythm method and were cautioned not to use, but the apps now make it accurate], tissue engineering [this is growing body parts from a sample of human DNA for implant back into that same person – the article says ears, trachea, and bone have been used in patients, while kidneys and hearts are still at the research stage], psychedelic therapy
  • Environment: global warming and continuing carbon emissions, attribution analysis
  • (Information) Technology: large language models, robots that can do chemistry experiments
  • (Other) Technology: self-repairing materials
  • Physics/Cosmology: dark matter, the Higgs boson, the James Webb telescope, exoplanets, gravitational waves

* The HIV cure deserves some extra discussion. HIV can be cured, at least in some people sometimes, by transplanting bone marrow from a naturally HIV-resistant person. A bone marrow transplant is such a big deal that it would not be ethical to do it for people whose only problem is HIV(!) because other effective treatments are available. It is done for people with terminal leukemia when no other treatments are available. A few of these people have HIV, and it has been shown that their HIV can be cured. So we need to keep working on applying some of the other technologies to an HIV vaccine and/or cure.

I want to just briefly talk about the contraceptive apps. I might have heard about that but didn’t realize it had been so rigorously studied and FDA-approved. It seems so simple and yet a breakthrough, which I find heartening. I find this heartening because I would like to see our society eventually move on from the abortion debate, and the way to move on in my view is to improve technology, access and knowledge about birth control while reducing stigma. This seems to me to accomplish all those objectives without a major scientific breakthrough being required. (I am under no illusions about the politics – if technology solves an issue, people who need an issue to suit their political purposes will find or manufacture another issue.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the “military-digital complex”

The first time I heard this term was in this post from Naked Capitalism, but it sounds right. The article focuses on Palantir and an “alliance” between the US government and tech companies (particularly Palantir) and the Israeli government and tech companies. Palantir does indeed seem sinister. The events in Xinjiang were the first time I had heard of the idea of “social credit scores” to track and control large masses of people, and the events in Gaza take this concept to a new level of (I’m just going to say it) abhorrent violence and immorality.

I read a book once, and I can’t remember or find the title, making the point that these systems for ranking and controlling people go back to at least the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. If you think about it, the religious authorities of the time would have been the only ones (in their society I mean) with access to the technology and skills needed, such as paper, quills, ink, and literacy. Move on to Tsar, Gestapo, Stasi, and J. Edgar Hoover, and similar ends were accomplished with typewriters and file folders. So it was probably inevitable that modern computerized database technology, and now machine learning technology, would take this to a new level.

And these technologies have many peaceful democratic and economic uses, so we would not want to put this genie back in the bottle even if we could. I also think that as cyber- and bio-weapons of mass destruction become increasingly accessible and dispersed in many more hands, this kind of surveillance will become necessary to manage these risks, which are existential. So the only real options here are to have political controls on the misuse of these technology in democratic societies, and to have updated and strengthened international institutions akin to the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons control regimes of the past. At the moment, of course, it seems we are going down a dark path of increasingly sinister domestic surveillance with weakening democratic controls, along with weakening international controls. And I don’t know that governments focused on misusing these technologies to oppress their own citizens are going to be the ones most effective at also using them to manage the existential risks.

The International Atomic Energy Agency does in fact have a new(ish) AI-powered surveillance system called MOSAIC designed by…Palantir.

The Palantir, of course, was a crystal ball that figures in the Lord of the Rings. Created by the wise elves, who sure were somewhat elitist and mildly racist, but had the best interests of us common humans at heart overall. But the Palantir fell into the wrong hands and was misused by the forces of darkness. Only wizards and hobbits can save us now.

Is the AI bubble bursting?

Apparently trying to answer this question is consuming a lot of bandwidth in the financial, tech, and even geopolitical arenas right now. Here is one answer from Larry Johnson, whose politics and past statements I do not necessarily endorse. Just to very briefly summarize his article: YES.

A few insights of my own:

  • The AI “hype bubble” has almost certainly reached a commanding height, and will pop at some point. This will probably be felt in stock market index valuations, which are dominated by a handful of large tech companies at the moment. In my lifetime now covering half a century, we have seen this cycle first with the personal computer itself and then with the internet. In both cases, the expectation that these technologies would super-charge economic growth in a few years did not happen, and led to financial market declines. Both technologies have in fact transformed the economy drastically, it just took a few decades rather than years. Things do seem to be happening faster this time around, I admit.
  • When it comes to stock market crashes, there is usually some precipitating event like the Asian financial crisis in 1997 or U.S. derivative bubble in 2007. The combination of technology bubble bursting and external financial shock seems to be particularly powerful. In fact, when I look back, I think I can argue the forward progress of the U.S. halted around that 1997 (financial crisis) to 2000 (Bush v. Gore) to 2001 to 2003 (9/11 attacks and Iraq invasion) period, and went into outright decline between the 2007 financial crisis and 2020 Covid crisis.
  • Apparently some in Silicon Valley thought the artificial general intelligence singularity was so near when the LLMs first came out, and that US tech companies were so far ahead of international peers, that it justified huge short-term investments in order to gain a first mover advantage that would then be insurmountable. This particular bubble seems to be popping at the moment, with AGI clearly not here right now, and perhaps a loose, emerging consensus that LLMs are a useful technology but not a likely path to AGI. So companies may have over-invested in infrastructure that will hurt some of them badly in the short term, while possibly benefitting us all in the longer term (think about 19th century railroads for a fairly obvious analogy).

So there is somewhat of a race here – will we start to see significant economic benefits of these new technologies before some external shocker hits us? This is the luck of the draw. It seems luck has not been on our side for the last 25 years or so. Perhaps we’re due.

what’s the story with Musk brain implants?

Well, Musk himself has not volunteered for invasive brain surgery as far as we know. But some people do in fact have small electrodes implanted in their brains. I learned from Startalk that this has legitimate medical uses. If a person has brain cancer and would die without brain surgery to remove a portion of the brain, surgeons will implant these electrodes and monitor the brain’s signals for a period of time to understand exactly which part of the brain needs to be removed, and to do that as safely as possible. The ethics of this are pretty clear. Technologically, the next step after this invasive form of brain monitoring is to advance non-invasive brain monitoring technologies, which exist but are currently not as good. And after that, still in the realm of science fiction for now, would come the injectable nanobots that can connect your brain to the internet. According to Ray Kurzweil, that fabulous science fiction future is scheduled to arrive in 2029.

Now back to Musk and Neuralink. A person who had the technology installed about 18 months ago has chosen to speak publicly. The person was paralyzed after an accident, and this has given him the ability to do many things he would otherwise not be able to do.

a Neuralink-made robotic surgery device implanted the chip and connected tiny threads with more than 1,000 electrodes to the neurons in his brain. Now the device can measure electrical activity, process signals, then translate those signals into commands to a digital device. In layman’s speak, the BCI, or brain-computer interface, allows Arbaugh to control a computer with his mind. As a result, Arbaugh can do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body…

When Arbaugh became Participant 1—or “P1” as he is often referred to by Neuralink employees and subsequent study participants—he joined a list of about 80 people to ever receive such a device. Brain chip interfaces have been a focus of neurological study for more than 50 years, and a dozen companies in the U.S. and China have been conducting limited human trials since 1998.

But becoming the first patient to get a Neuralink implant, in particular, is its own right of passage. For one, Neuralink’s device has threads with more than 1,000 electrodes, giving the device a much higher connectivity rate than most of the BCIs currently being studied in humans in the market. But Neuralink also places its electrodes in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement—a more invasive approach than competitors like Synchron or Precision Neuroscience, which also have ongoing studies of multiple patients. Neuralink’s device is also wireless, versus competitors like Blackrock Neurotech that require a wired connection from the implant through the skull to an external receiver for signal capture and decoding (Blackrock Neurotech sells a wireless processor that has been used for research).

So there you have it. This brain control (as in brain controlling something other than a human body part) technology is farther along than us laymen not paying attention might have thought.

what’s new in shipbuilding?

We hear that the United States is woefully behind China and other Asian countries, and maybe even Europe, in ship-building. So is it labor cost, labor skill, outdated technology, or some combination that is causing this? Here are a few things being tried at the Philadelphia shipyard, which has recently partnered with a South Korean firm:

The facility builds one and a half ships a year; Hanwha plans to outfit it with “smart yard technology” to speed up manufacturing so it can churn out as many as 10 ships annually and raise sales tenfold, to over $4 billion a year by 2035.

Hanwha’s subsidiary Hanwha Ocean is among the largest shipbuilders in South Korea. Its yard in the country’s southwest produces 40 ships a year…

At the shipyard, Hanwha is bringing in technology from its Korean facilities, including computer-aided design, welding robots and virtual-reality training models. Under a model it calls “cobots,” robots work alongside workers like computer-aided manufacturing and design coordinator Kyle Pernell, with human workers in charge of operating, repairing and programming the robots.

This article is positive, but I remember seeing another article saying that this facility is having trouble finding U.S. workers who are, well, trainable and willing to do this work.

Kurzweil’s Singularity is Nearer

Well what do you know, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer came out in 2024 and I somehow didn’t notice. I still tell young people who ask that the original book is a drop-everything-must-read. The question is whether I would tell them to drop the original and read this one first. (As much as I love interacting with Gen Z, the idea of many of them reading two complete books seems like a stretch…) I’ll definitely read this one and compare when I get a chance and see. Of course they also need to read How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life. And probably Manufacturing Consent, which in 1988 might be the best explanation we have of the propaganda techniques we all seem to be falling for here in 2025.

what’s new with humanoid robots?

ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, and Claude may have helped me speed up some computer-based work tasks over the past year or so, but they still can’t clean my bathroom. This is what I really want to see to believe the robot era has really arrived. This article reads like a press release, but Nvidia says it has an “open-source, pretrained but customizable foundation model that’s designed to expedite the development and capabilities of humanoid robots”. So that’s something, but I am not hopeful it will be cleaning my bathroom or doing my dishes in 2025.