Tag Archives: technological progress

August 2024

Obviously, there were plenty of goings-on in the U.S. presidential election campaign in August. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, and everybody else is talking about it, so I’ll give it a rest here.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: 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?

Most hopeful story: 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.

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

those lagging electric vehicle sales

Since I happen to be in Thailand, here are a couple excerpts from an article about lower than expected electric vehicle sales in Thailand. I am not trying to pick on Thailand or even comment on Thai government policy, but merely give a local example of what seems to be a global trend.

Thailand on Friday signalled it was hedging its bets over its previous all-out commitment to EV cars. Instead, in a new policy announcement, the kingdom is focusing on hybrid vehicle production or HEVs…

…there is a growing realisation that the EV industry, which is capital-intensive and does not support the country’s critical automotive parts industry, has been a mixed blessing.

“We are experiencing an EV oversupply as plenty of EVs imported from China over the past two years inventories,” he explained. At the same time, he confirmed that there are presently 490,000 unsold EV cars in storage. That is 63% of all vehicles produced in Thailand over the last 12 months. In the meantime, EV vehicle sales remain a relatively small percentage of overall car sales in the kingdom. In June, vehicles for the domestic market produced in Thailand were only 34,522 units. A huge drop of 43.08%. This is a catastrophic outcome by all accounts.

Anecdotally, just from moving about the country a bit, I don’t see charging infrastructure. And this echoes what I see in (my small corner of) the United States. We haven’t built the infrastructure to support electric vehicles, and we haven’t made the policy changes like adjustments to the gas tax which funds much of our highway maintenance. So we blame problems caused by a lack of planning and implementation on the technology itself.

But there is something else here. There are winners and losers with electric vehicles. The winners are all of us and our children’s lungs, plus our water and air. But these are diffuse benefits, and politically speaking it is concentrated interests that move the political system. Big business interests like the oil and automotive industries. The reference to “car parts” is telling here. Electric vehicles are superior because they have fewer complex parts and require less maintenance and service. Just like shutting down any sprawling, inefficient, polluting Soviet industry, what is good for society means some loss of jobs and profits for a minority, and that minority has some political clout. So when we hear that electric vehicles are “not catching on”, we can ask how much of this is propaganda driven by big business interests who will lose money if they do catch on.

Nonetheless, I think the hype bubble may have burst but the technology is here and here to stay. It may take a decade or two to really take over rather than exploding onto the scene the way some expected.

AI and protein research

Here is a story in MIT News about AI doing experiments on proteins, with drug development and gene therapy implications. This seems like the clearest application of AI at the moment – anything where there is a formula to be figured out and a large number of combinations to be tried. I can definitely see this accelerating scientific and technological progress, although the efficiency to me seems to be more in the “automation” part than the “intelligence” part.

what’s new with super-sonic flight

NASA and Lockheed Martin claim to have a prototype supersonic jet whose sonic boom sounds “like a car door slamming heard from inside”. This could open the door to commercial supersonic flight over populated areas. Well, we don’t even have commercial super-sonic flight over the oceans at the moment, which would be helpful to long-haul travelers. The article doesn’t say when this might happen, but it doesn’t sounds soon. The article does mention that there is at least one other company working on a supersonic passenger jet which “it hopes” could be “in the air” (for testing presumably?) “later this year”.

AI “coscientist”

The idea of computers and robots greatly accelerating the rate of progress in chemical and drug research is not science fiction.

Autonomous chemical research with large language models

Transformer-based large language models are making significant strides in various fields, such as natural language processing1,2,3,4,5, biology6,7, chemistry8,9,10 and computer programming11,12. Here, we show the development and capabilities of Coscientist, an artificial intelligence system driven by GPT-4 that autonomously designs, plans and performs complex experiments by incorporating large language models empowered by tools such as internet and documentation search, code execution and experimental automation. Coscientist showcases its potential for accelerating research across six diverse tasks, including the successful reaction optimization of palladium-catalysed cross-couplings, while exhibiting advanced capabilities for (semi-)autonomous experimental design and execution. Our findings demonstrate the versatility, efficacy and explainability of artificial intelligence systems like Coscientist in advancing research.

Nature

It seems to me that the speed limit here is not anything imposed by the computers and robots, but your ability to measure progress and give the computers and robots feedback. With chemicals, you could tell the robots to find a combination of compounds that will do XYZ, where XYZ is something you can measure like an amount of energy or a color. With drugs, your issue could be how to test the results to see if they are working. If you test them on a computer model, your ability to measure depends on how good the computer model is. Let’s say you wanted to breed a super-intelligent mouse. There should be ways to measure the intelligence of a mouse. So you could take 100 mice test them all, find the two smartest and create a new batch of 100 embryos from the smartest male and female (or maybe at some point gender is no longer a limitation?). Now you have to wait for those 100 embryos to grow up to the point you can repeat the process. The limiting step here would be how long it takes the mice to develop to the point they can be tested. If they could somehow be tested at the embyro stage, maybe you could create a thousand generations of mouse directed mouse evolution in a matter of hours or days? Well, then, you can let the super-intelligent mice design the next round of robots.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution horizon scan

This journal does an annual “horizon scan” of of emerging topics and issues. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • “bio-batteries” – “DNA-enabled biobattery technology uses a set of enzymes coupled to DNA to degrade organic compounds, releasing electrons and generating electricity…Such batteries could theoretically supply power densities in orders of magnitude greater than widely used lithium-ion batteries”. There are also new processes for extracting lithium more sustainably from waste materials. So there is some hope that the resource and waste limitations to scaling up renewable energy can be solved. Thermophotovoltaic cells are a third energy storage technology mentioned.
  • more practical methods of converting human urine to fertilizer – This might not sound like a big deal, but our coastal waters are being choked by nutrients both from treated wastewater and from farm runoff, while the nutrients in the farm runoff are derived from fossil fuels in the case of nitrogen or a mined from finite geological resources in the case of phosphate. Reprocessing urine into fertilizer is almost a no-brainer. And the technology has been known for awhile. The problem has been waste taboos which seem to be extremely ingrained in our psyches. I really want this one to be overcome, but as a wastewater industry insider I have become more cynical about this one over time. Genetic engineering of crops to help them take up nitrogen directly from the atmosphere (which peas and beans can do naturally, but most crops can’t) is also mentioned.
  • A particular pathogen that infects amphibians may be spreading to new areas.
  • European countries are considering new policy/legal frameworks for biodiversity reporting and conservation. This might sound boring, but we have gotten there with conventional pollution and we are getting there with greenhouse gases and renewable energy, while land use and conversation have mostly been left out to date.
  • Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to try to accelerate drug, chemical, and pesticide research.
  • trash reefs – New ecosystems may actually develop and adapt around ocean garbage patches.

ESA getting serious about space-based solar

The idea of space-based solar has been around for awhile, but the European Space Agency appears to be getting more serious about it.

The Sun’s energy can be collected much more efficiently in space because there is neither night nor clouds. The idea has been around for more than 50 years, but it has been too difficult and too expensive to implement, until maybe now.

The game-changer has been the plummeting cost of launches, thanks to reusable rockets and other innovations developed by the private sector. But there have also been advances in robotic construction in space and the development of technology to wirelessly beam electricity from space to Earth.

BBC

Different sources say this could be commercially valuable in around a decade to maybe 2040. Even sooner with massive public investment, say companies who are hoping for massive public investment in their companies. Obvious Bond villain Elon Musk could not be reached for comment.

you can charge electric vehicles while they are driving

As the title of the post says, you can charge electric vehicles while they are on the move.

The solar panels are on one side of the facility’s service road and will ship power up the hill to the maintenance and trades area. That pad also has the generator; a system for converting direct current from the solar panels to alternating current for the buildings and street lights; a system for capturing radiant heat from the generator; and an IT setup to keep everything running…

Utah State’s ASPIRE center will begin installing a 50-meter demonstration section at its Logan, Utah, test track in the next two weeks, said Tallis Blalack, the center’s director. Working with California wireless provider Electreon, the center intends to install a one-mile electrified section of road surface in central Detroit next year in conjunction with the University of Michigan.

The center also is working with another provider to design a segment of electrified highway for Disney World in Florida over the next four years. 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I like this idea because there is a lot of real estate out there along highways, and installing solar panels that can charge vehicles as they go by would seem to make a lot of sense. Maybe this could also replace some or all of the gas tax revenue we are going to lose as we convert to solar. The money could be plowed back in to road maintenance and safety upgrades.

bathroom cleaning robots

Just a quick note on my business plan to invent bathroom cleaning robots. As soon as I invent a truly effective and inexpensive bathroom cleaning robot, everybody in the world will buy one and I will be the richest person in the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had a recent article called Why household robot servants are a lot harder to build than robotic vacuums and automated warehouse workers. Granted, cleaning a bathroom is really hard on a human body, especially one that is getting older. But why would you assume a robot that looks or acts like a human would be the way to do this. I picture something more like a swarm of ants that can pick up individual pieces of yuck, drop them in a pile somewhere, and then go back to their charger pad. Or maybe spiders. Too creepy? Well, just make them look like little seashells or something not creepy. Why is this so hard?

You could also approach the problem from the other end – designing bathrooms and kitchens that are more appropriate and accessible for robots. Come to think of it, bathrooms and kitchens are not all that appropriate and accessible for humans as it is. This whole thing could use a rethink. All surfaces should be completely impermeable and able to be hosed down. Instead of moving dishes from dishwashers, to sinks, to cabinets, and back again five times a day, all these things should just be one thing. You put dirty dishes in a cabinet, shut the door, open the door next morning, and you have clean dry dishes. Every dish would go in the same spot every time, and robots could handle this. Robots could also reorder peanut butter when the jar is half full, and eggs when they are half gone. For that matter, packaging could be completed redesigned to make more sense for robots as well as humans. Packaging is a big part of our environmental and waste problems in our so-called modern world.

Paraphrasing a cartoon I saw making fun of Elon Musk (but can’t seem to find again), “I come up with the brilliant ideas, and all I ask you idiots to do is make them happen!”