December 17: Robots, Crypto

Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator

Why It’s Still a Scientific Mystery How Some Live Past 100—and How to Crack It



US NAVY USES LASER WEAPON TO DESTROY “FLOATING TARGET” THE GOAL IS TO FEND OFF "BOMB-LADEN DRONE BOATS."
NASA BRAGS THAT ITS PROBE OFFICIALLY TOUCHED THE SUN THE PROBE'S DATA GIVES NASA INSIGHT INTO PREVIOUSLY UNOBSERVABLE PHENOMENA.
Princeton Researchers Create Terrifying VR Simulation of Nuke Attack to Train US Officials "You walk into that simulation and come out a changed person."
FURIOUS AT THE CONCEPT OF PAYING TAXES, ELON MUSK LASHES OUT AT ELIZABETH WARREN "PLEASE DON’T CALL THE MANAGER ON ME, SENATOR KAREN."
Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator
Why It’s Still a Scientific Mystery How Some Live Past 100—and How to Crack It
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty and the Ways to End it.

December 15: AI, Elon Musk

These Maps Reveal the Profound Progress and Peril of Modern Civilization Bacteria and viruses are still our greatest enemy. Humanity started winning the war on bacteria and viruses about 100 years ago with the rise of antibiotics and penicillin. But we are overusing them, giving rise to antibiotic resistance. Specialists fear we are approaching a post-antibiotic era, and this would be terrifying, costing hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars in losses.

The rise of the anti-vax movement is a more dangerous threat than many fully appreciate.

............. Digital and wireless technologies are reconfiguring and rewiring our politics, economics, and sense of belonging. ........... the map on the US military footprint includes over 800 bases and 200,000 active personnel in over 177 countries ......... the map on China’s Belt and Road Initiative shows the terrestrial and marine investments that include over 2,600 projects spanning over 100 countries

How DeepMind’s AI Helped Crack Two Mathematical Puzzles That Stumped Humans for Decades With his telescope, Galileo gathered a vast trove of observations on celestial objects. With his mind, he found patterns in that universe of data, creating theories on motion and mechanics that paved the way for modern science. .........

Using AI, DeepMind just gave mathematicians a new telescope.

.......... Math isn’t just about numbers or algebra or geometry. It peeks into fundamental rules that may guide how our world works. .......... math tries to find patterns in data. Take one example: gravity. By examining how things fall—and on the shoulders of giants including Galileo—Isaac Newton took those observations, found patterns in them, and distilled those patterns into an equation. While that may sound boring, without that process we wouldn’t have flights, rockets, or space travel. ............ One thing AI is exceptionally good at is finding patterns in vast amounts of data ....... “I was just blown away by how powerful this stuff is,” said Williamson. “I think I spent basically a year in the darkness just feeling the computers knew something that I didn’t.” .......... DeepMind has been steadily proving that machine learning isn’t just for games and play, but has a multitude of practical uses From solving core biological principles to predicting gene expression with AI, and now aiding mathematicians in their quest to find new theorems, AI is increasingly bolstering advancements in science.

This Robot Tunnels Through Solid Rock by Blasting It With a Jet of Superheated Gas Petra is aiming to hollow out tunnels 20 to 60 inches in diameter to bury utilities. ......... costs five times more to bury lines as opposed to stringing them pole-to-pole above-ground and up to 20 times as much when the buried lines need to travel through hard rock. .......... Abrams said the company think their tech could reduce costs by 50 to 80 percent. ......... Swifty breaks rock into small pieces with a jet of gas heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and uses a vacuum to clear the shattered remains from the tunnel. ..........

besides practical and safety benefits, wouldn’t it be just lovely to hide the mess of cables electrifying the planet

Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator



Time: Elon Musk The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops. ......... having previously advised that at least half his tweets were “made on a porcelain throne.” After an interval—21 minutes, if you must know—an update: “Splish splash.” .......

“But you know, not all jokes land.”

.......... His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history ........... “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk” .......... 2021 was the year of Elon Unbound ........ and amid Musk’s sale of 10% of his Tesla stock, a process that roiled markets, cost him billions and should produce enough tax revenue to fund the Commerce Department for a year ........ A few short years ago, Musk was roundly mocked as a crazy con artist on the verge of going broke. Now this shy South African with Asperger’s syndrome, who escaped a brutal childhood and overcame personal tragedy, bends governments and industry to the force of his ambition. ............. “He was raised in a tough environment and born with a very special brain,” says Antonio Gracias, Musk’s close friend of two decades, who has held seats on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people in that situation don’t come out of it. Some small percentage come out of it with the ability he has to make great decisions under extraordinary pressure and the never-ending drive to change the course of humanity.” ............. The feds are probing Tesla’s Autopilot software, which has been involved in an alarming number of crashes with parked emergency vehicles, resulting in injuries and death. The company’s expansion in China required cozying up to its repressive autocrats. ...........

Former associates have described Musk as petty, cruel and petulant, particularly when frustrated or challenged.

.......... “He is a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people,” says his brother and business partner Kimbal Musk. ......... The vast expanse of human misery can seem an afterthought to a man with his eyes on Mars. ....... If Tesla delivers on its pledges, it has the potential to strike a major blow against global warming. The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past, before America stagnated and stopped producing anything but rules, restrictions, limits, obstacles and Facebook. ............ the Mars Society, who met Musk in 2001, when the young, newly minted dot-com millionaire sent a large unsolicited check to the organization .............. he is an asset to the human race because he defines a great deed as something that is great for humanity .......... This was the year we emerged from the hundred-year plague only to find there was no normal to go back to, a year that felt like the cusp of a brave or terrifying new world, with nobody in charge and everything up for renegotiation—from how we work and travel to what we find meaning in and cherish. ..........

Musk has a soft handshake and an even voice that expresses exasperation, joy and breathtaking ambition in the same quiet register.

......... “And the next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there. Sort of like a futuristic Noah’s ark. We’ll bring more than two, though—it’s a little weird if there’s only two.” ........... The company proceeded to create the Falcon 9 and then the Falcon Heavy, which has three clusters of nine engines. Clustering engines was previously considered a bad idea because of the number of moving parts that can go explosively wrong—one of many assumptions Musk upended. ............. For the Dragon, Musk swept away old-school instrument panels and replaced them with three oversize touch screens. There’s no control stick; the spacecraft’s attitude, orbit and re-entry engines are all governed by the screens. Astronaut Doug Hurley, commander of the first crewed Dragon flight, worried the screens would delay reaction times, but SpaceX solved this by making Dragon an automated ship. “There’s no plans to do any more manual flying, certainly on the NASA missions,” Hurley says, “unless there’s a need for it from a systems failure kind of scenario.” ............ Over Thanksgiving,

Musk emailed employees

that Starship’s new Raptor engine was facing a “production crisis” that could bankrupt SpaceX if it did not achieve a “Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.” ............ “If lobbying & lawyers could get u to orbit, Bezos would be on Pluto,” he tweeted. In November, the federal claims court ruled in Musk’s favor. ........... “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years” ...... We have had little use for the moon since landing there 50 years ago. ....... “I have real doubts about the viability of a large settlement on Mars,” says John Logsdon, founder of Space Policy Institute.

“What would people do there to earn a living? What would be the basis of a Mars economy?”

............... Electric cars, like homemade rockets, were a graveyard of well-intentioned investment before Musk

barreled into an industry in which he had no academic training

. ............ A $465 million federal loan in 2010 helped prop up Tesla at a crucial juncture, and its customers have benefitted from hefty tax incentives. ......... During the 2008 financial crisis, cash was so tight the company came within days of missing payroll. With a dwindling fortune, Musk borrowed $20 million from SpaceX to loan the company, cajoled another $20 million out of investors and raised the price of the company’s debut sports car to survive. ........... Musk spent much of April 2018 sleeping on the factory floor as he tried to iron out assembly-line issues ........ “He would wake up, look at the monitors on the wall and go chase the constraint” .......... For Musk’s 47th birthday that June, he briefly paused for a bite of grocery-store cake, then went back to the paint-shop tunnel. ......... Tesla sent a software update that enabled the car to make farting noises on command. (“Please put ‘invented car fart’ on my gravestone,” Musk tweeted.) ........ “We don’t spend any money on advertising,” notes Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm. “His ability to communicate with a very wide range of people globally through social media, I think, has been a huge asset to the company—you know, by and large.” .......... “I remember when he had zero followers,” Lee recalls.

“He’s probably the most viral social influencer ever.”

............. Today, thanks in large part to Musk’s pace-setting, auto companies from VW to Nissan are jostling to invest billions in electric vehicles. Their about-face is driven less by altruism than by a dawning realization that Musk is eating their lunch. “Musk and Tesla forced the change,” says Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Cox Automotive. “He proved that there was a market for EVs.” ......... That has made Musk arguably

the biggest private contributor to the fight against climate change

. Had the 800,000 Teslas sold in the last year been gas-powered cars, they would have emitted more than 40 million metric tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes—equivalent to the annual emissions of Finland. ........ The Boring Co., which Musk started in 2016, put forward a plan to alleviate urban congestion by building miles of underground tunnels to whisk cars along at more than 100 m.p.h., but critics say plain old subways would be more efficient and equitable. ......... Tesla’s Autopilot system, which has been involved in 11 crashes with parked emergency vehicles since 2018, leaving 17 people injured and one dead. ......... Musk has been accused of overstating and misrepresenting the system’s abilities, starting with the name: despite the promises of an imminent driverless future, Tesla drivers still have to keep their hands on the wheel. ...........

the new system’s name, “Full Self-Driving,” is irresponsible.

.......... Ford and GM’s combined market cap is less than a fifth of Tesla’s, even though they together sold three and a half times as many vehicles. ....... Tesla’s gains have inspired investors to pour billions of dollars into EV startups like Rivian and Fisker. One rival, Lucid Motors, is run by a former Tesla engineer who helped create the Model S. The Lucid Air sedan was recently named the MotorTrend Car of the Year. Ford and GM have pumped money into thwarting Tesla’s expansion into pickup trucks, the most profitable segment of the domestic market. .............. “If somebody makes better cars than we do, and they then sell more cars than we do, I think that’s totally fine,” he says. “Our intent with Tesla was always that we would serve as an example to the car industry and hope that they also make electric cars, so that we can accelerate the transition to sustainable technology.” ..............

Musk’s mother was a model and his father was a monster.

........... “From the time he was 3, we used to call him that—Genius Boy.” .......... In 1999, Compaq bought the company and Musk netted $22 million for his share. For his next act, Musk decided to reimagine the global banking system. His company, X.com, eventually became part of PayPal, which was purchased by eBay in 2002. Musk came away with about $180 million. ......... If PayPal had “just executed the product plan I wrote in July 2000,” he told a podcast last year, it could have put the entire banking industry out of business. .......... A globetrotting engineer named Jim Cantrell lent Musk his college rocketry textbooks, which Musk devoured, and agreed to take him to Russia, where Musk hoped to buy an old Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile and turn it into a rocket launcher. ........

“He did not come across as credible,” Cantrell recalls. “It was, ‘Who is this charlatan? This guy’s crazy; he’s not going to make a rocket.’”

.......... Energy storage had always been the biggest stumbling block—a conventional battery would have to be so big and heavy that the car would expend most of its power hauling its own weight around. .......... A few months later, Musk pledged $6.5 million to a lithium-ion car startup called Tesla, becoming its largest investor and eventually taking it over. ........... “I saw plenty of examples of people that had enormous wealth, and were entirely cautious,” Straubel says. “In Elon, there was this complete opposite mindset.” ........... The last successful startup in the American automotive industry, Chrysler, was founded in 1925. “I said, ‘Just choose one: solar or cars or rockets,’” Maye Musk recalls. “Obviously, he didn’t listen.” ............ Tesla had taken deposits of up to $60,000 from over 1,000 EV enthusiasts but had yet to deliver more than a few sample vehicles. An automotive blog was running a regular “Tesla Death Watch” feature. ............. Kimbal Musk recalls. “I remember him calling me in October and asking me if I had any money.

I had no money—everything was gone, except for about $1 million I was saving to survive the recession. I wired it to him to put into Tesla. I told him, If everything goes to hell, at least we’ll be in hell together.”

............... Then, finally, the fourth rocket made a successful launch. And two days before Christmas, NASA made the shocking decision to award SpaceX $1.6 billion for 12 flights to the ISS. ................. Musk has been known to discuss his emotions as frankly and analytically as he does thrust-to-payload ratios .............

and announced on Saturday Night Live that he has Asperger’s, an autism-spectrum disorder. Musk uttered this intimate disclosure so awkwardly that many viewers took it as a joke

. ............... As Justine later told it, Elon abandoned her to tend to his companies as she spiraled into depression inside an L.A. mansion that became a gilded cage. ......... He and Riley were married, then divorced, then remarried, then divorced again in 2016. ............ Grimes recently released a new song, “Player of Games”: “Sail away to the cold expanse of space,” she sings. “Even love couldn’t keep you in your place/ But can’t you love me like that?” .................. Musk explains the split as a matter of logistics. “Grimes and I are, I’d say, probably semi-separated,” Musk tells TIME in Texas. “We weren’t seeing each other that much, and I think this is to some degree a long-term thing, because what she needs to do is mostly in L.A. or touring, and my work is mostly in remote locations like this.” He says they are still good friends and he does not have a new girlfriend.

“This place is basically like a technology monastery, you know. There are some women here, but not many. And it’s remote.”

................ “He would be happier with a partner,” says Kimbal.

“But he’s also a very hard person to be partnered with.”

............ Having pledged on Twitter this year that he would no longer own a residence, Musk has sold off his seven houses and considers his primary home a rental near the Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas. ........... In the future Musk envisions, no one tells you what to do. Robots perform all the labor, and goods and services are abundant, so people only work because they want to. “There’s, like, plenty for everyone, essentially,” he says. ............ So you have the freedom to do whatever you’d like to do, provided it does not cause harm to others.” ........ He has an ardent following in some of the nastier precincts of the far right, but Musk claims that when he tweeted “Take the red pill” last year, he had no idea that “red-pilling” was a right-wing dog whistle: “I was just referring to The Matrix,” the movie from which the meme derives. .............. he rejects the idea that the size of his fortune constitutes a policy problem in and of itself, or that he is morally obligated to pay some share of it in taxes .......... Musk and many others in his tax bracket paid no individual federal taxes as recently as 2018 because they had no income, only assets ............ In October, Senate Democrats considered imposing a “billionaires’ tax” on wealth. When Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tweeted in support of it, Musk responded with a vulgar insult of Wyden’s appearance in his profile photo. ............ You want those who are managing capital to be good stewards of capital. And I think the government is inherently not a good steward of capital.” ............. “Great leaders become incapable of hearing criticism,” he says. “Why did Napoleon fail in Russia? Because every time before, he had succeeded. Plenty of French generals were saying, ‘Why don’t we just take Poland and be good?’ But every time in the past, the people who urged caution had been wrong.”