π Faster, Please! Week in Review #50
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
β People are freaking out about AI. Will we do any better with the (AI-powered) Biotech Revolution?β From Hollywood studios to West Coast ports, automation fears are sweeping through the US economy
Best of 5QQ
β π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ technology reporter Timothy B. Lee on AI
β 5 Quick Questions for ... βuber-geographerβ Joel Kotkin about the future of American cities
β 5 Quick Questions for β¦ federal science funding analyst Matt HourihanBest of the pod
β A conversation with Fusion Industry Association CEO Andrew Holland
Essay Highlights
𧬠People are freaking out about AI. Will we do any better with the (AI-powered) Biotech Revolution?
Humanity could be on the verge of a radical reduction in human suffering. Indeed, one can easily see the potential combinatorial impact of Next Big Things on each other. Biotech is aided by machine learning, such as with drug discovery. A nuclear-powered future means we wonβt worry about how much energy Large Language Models or other AI applications use. Some drugs might be more easily researched in orbital labs. A self-reinforcing cluster of innovation, a tidal wave of progress. Yet the hand-wringing backlash to GenAI β from worries about mass technological unemployment to human extinction β makes me wonder about how our society, soaking for decades in anti-tech catastrophism, will handle the Biotechnology Age. Clear-headed thinking β not lightweight culture war thinking β about problems and potential solutions will be required so as to minimize the chances of alarmist actions that slow the sort of progress that we all can agree on, progress that reduces human suffering and perhaps recognizably extends our healthspan while also still leaving us recognizably human.
π€ From Hollywood studios to West Coast ports, automation fears are sweeping through the US economy
Hollywood creative types and dockworkers at the nearby Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles may not seem to have much in common. But both groups have been involved in labor strikes where automation of one sort or another has been a key issue of contention between union members and their employers. Writers and actors fear AI-generated scripts (and eventually, perhaps, entire films) due to recent advances in generative AI, while longshoremen see an ongoing threat to good-paying jobs from robots: automated cranes and self-driving vehicles. Technological progress has always brought big changes for workers, some of it unpleasant. The US economy and its workers need to be more productive. We more AI and more robots. We needs more technology that automates and more technology that complements and creates. Most of all, we need more imagination about how technology will benefit our lives.
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ technology reporter Timothy B. Lee on AI
Timothy Lee is a reporter who has written about technology, economics, and public policy for more than a decade. Before launching Understanding AI, he wrote for the Washington Post, Vox.com, and Ars Technica.
Why don't you think AI is going to kill all of us?
The main reason is that the physical world is very complicated. Right now, there just are not enough robots and other mechanisms for internet-based intelligence to have big impacts on the physical world. I think there are a couple exceptions to that. Certainly if we screwed up and connected nuclear missiles to the internet, you could imagine then some rogue AI or some form of power using nuclear weapons to kill us all. I've heard scenarios where maybe AI helps somebody create a new killer virus that then is synthesized and kills everybody. I don't think that's impossible. But I think the kind of solution to that is to regulate labs that are used for biology and to be very careful with nuclear missiles. A lot of people are worried about a more general situation where the AI becomes so powerful that it βtakes over the world.β
I just don't see how that would happen because it's actually pretty difficult. The example I like to look at is times when hackers have tried to cause carnage in the real world. One of the best examples is in Ukraine. In 2015 during the conflict there, Russian hackers tried to shut down part of the Ukrainian electrical grid, and they succeeded in doing that. But then the engineers running that system went in and bypassed the computer and turned the system back on. It was a few hours of disruption; it wasn't like an existential threat to Ukraine. There really are very few examples where hackers or people on the internet have caused big physical problems, because the physical world is complicated and pretty robust.
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for ... βuber-geographerβ Joel Kotkin about the future of American cities
Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California, and Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute. Recently, he and the American Enterprise Instituteβs Ryan Streeter co-edited The Future of Cities, which features an introduction and conclusion written by Kotkin.
Which cities in this country are working well?
I think a lot of it depends on how you define βcity.β If you define a city as your traditional central business district that would attract people from all over, that's going to be problematic. I think they're going to have to become, as H.G. Wells said, predominantly βplaces of concourse and rendezvous.β (He was only right 120 years ago!) But I think there are other kinds of cities. I think the neighborhood city has a good future: neighborhoods like Flatbush in New York, Noe Valley in San Francisco. These places have managed to survive and they are in many ways great places to live, particularly if you don't have kids. I think those will do well.
I remember I was teaching at an architecture school, and all the kids wanted to design some museum downtown. And I said, βThe real future is going to be in places like the Woodlands, Valencia, Restonβ: these communities which are in suburban form, but they have many of the urban functions. If you go to the Woodlands, for instance, there are more people commuting into the Woodlands, which is outside of Houston, than people leaving and going somewhere else. Irvine has one of the highest rates of people working at home, one of the highest rates of people working in the city that they live in. And it provides them with many of the things, in terms of food, in terms of entertainment, in terms of parks, that people want.
We are, as a people, really good at reinventing things. If we just allow it to happen, we could reinvent cities by letting them become more decentralized. And then we have some really phenomenal ways of building cities anew. We kind of forget that cities have gone through many changes. A citizen of Florence in 1600 would not even recognize Manchester in 1850 as a city. It was something different. And we have to embrace the fact that something different is going to happen.
It's going to be driven by technology; it's going to be driven by the market, and most importantly it's going to be driven by what people want. And one of the great divides in this country is the cognitive elite, if you want to call, which wants people to take the bus to work and live in congested, crowded areas. And people vote with their feet. They want to go somewhere else. And so we've got this political class that wants A and the populace that wants B. And I think that's going to be an interesting conflict in the years ahead.
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ federal science funding analyst Matt Hourihan
Matt Hourihan is associate director of R&D and Advanced Industry with the Federation of American Scientists.
Before the recent budget deal between the White House and congressional Republicans, it seemed doubtful whether the CHIPS and Science Act would even receive the funding it was promised. Where do things stand now? Can you put the current funding gap in context?
Beyond the mandatory $54 billion for semiconductors and wireless innovation, CHIPS and Science authorized a multi-year funding ramp-up for the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science, and NIST, along with a clutch of other activities in energy R&D and regional innovation. This has all mostly been underfunded from the jump. For the research agencies, the FY 2023 omnibus provided some boosts, but those increases were still short of the authorized level for research agencies by about $3 billion excluding earmarks. The FY 2024 White House request continued to undershoot the targets. Now with the discretionary caps, it vastly limits federal ability to pursue the tech priorities established in CHIPS. We can already see the effect in the new House energy bill, which flat-funded or cut several basic and applied research offices at the Department of Energy.
Best of the pod
π A conversation with Fusion Industry Association CEO Andrew Holland
Andrew Holland is chief executive officer at the Fusion Industry Association.
Whether itβs on the regulatory side or the funding side, what should government ideally be doing right now?
Three key things. Number one is the regulation. Because fusion is a nuclear technology, it is going to be regulated in the United States by the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We've been engaged in a processβI've spent a lot of time on thisβwith the NRC in public that we've been contending that because fusion is so different from nuclear fissionβjust physically different, like you cannot have a meltdown, there is no long-lived radioactive waste, the fuel is isotopes of hydrogen or other not-dangerous fuelsβso because of the physical differences, fusion should not be regulated in the same way that nuclear fission power plants are. And over a multi-year process, we convinced them. And the commission, a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats, five members, voted unanimously in April to regulate fusion separately from nuclear fission. It will be regulated like a medical isotope facility, an accelerator. This is a really important thing because it allows a lot more innovation. It should keep costs down. It doesn't mean there's no regulation, it just means it's regulated in the appropriate manner. That's number one.
Number two is the public-private partnerships that I talked about. I think it is important that our companies have access to the public programs, have access to the national labs. The researchers have been doing this for a long time, so to be able to work with themβideally with government dollars, the government dollars would pay at least part of it.
And then number three is, we have to make sure we're not asking for special subsidies, but we have to make sure that fusion gets the same subsidies as all the other clean-energy technologies. Fusion just needs a level playing field. We think we'll compete just as well as any other technology.