⤴⤵ Up Wing/Down Wing #12

A curated selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the week that was

⤴ Up Wing Things

🔬 The first framework for fully automatic scientific discovery has enabled AI models to conduct research independently and convey their findings. One big obstacle for artificial general intelligence is developing the capability to conduct scientific research. Now comes The AI Scientist, which creates new research ideas, performs the experiments, writes a full scientific paper, and then runs a simulated review process. It seems possible this process can develop ideas in an open-ended fashion, acting like the human scientific community. “We demonstrate its versatility by applying it to three distinct subfields of machine learning: diffusion modeling, transformer-based language modeling, and learning dynamics. Each idea is implemented and developed into a full paper at a cost of less than $15 per paper.” (Arxiv.org)

⚡ Advancements being made in fusion power could spark the next Industrial Revolution. TAE Technologies, founded in the 90s with the intention of developing fusion power, inspired a collection of 200 companies, called the Fusion Cluster, to begin work on supplying their national grid with electricity by the 2040s. Before that’s achieved, fusion-adjacent technology has proved useful in other areas, such as propulsion, medical applications, industrial imaging, and nuclear waste handling. Thanks to work done by companies like Shine Technologies and Tokamak Energy, we are able to prematurely benefit from the installation of this tech. (The Guardian)

🚗 Waymo has implemented self-driving taxis in several American cities, with slow but steady progress. As of January 2024, more than seven million miles with no drivers were racked up in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. The company has its eyes on Austin in 2024 and New York City, the latter only with human safety drivers. In the long term, Waymo is aiming for most driving to be done by computers, not humans. (Bismarck Analysis)

📈 Ordinary citizens in the Western world are richer and more equal than ever before. A tide has turned and expansion of asset ownership among everyday citizens, driven by the rise of homeownership and pension savings, was made possible by democracy, educational reforms, labor laws, and technological advancements that have raised everyone’s income.

Today, the populations of Europe and the United States are substantially richer in terms of real purchasing-power wealth than ever before. We define wealth as the value of all assets, such as homes, bank deposits, stocks and pension funds, less all debts, mainly mortgages. When counting wealth among all adults, data show that its value has increased more than threefold since 1980, and nearly 10 times over the past century. Since much of this wealth growth has occurred in the types of assets that ordinary people hold – homes and pension savings – wealth has also become more equally distributed over time. Wealth inequality has decreased dramatically over the past century and, despite the recent years’ emergence of super-rich entrepreneurs, wealth concentration has remained at its historically low levels in Europe and has increased mainly in the US. (Aeon Essays)