More Links for May

mmm... links

1. Zeno Power got some govt money to build a satellite. recall these are the folks pursuing RPS— radioisotope power systems, i.e nuclear decay batteries. doing satellites first makes sense, since RPS have been used there for decades. but Zeno has greater ambitions, hoping for applications in moon bases & terrestrial things like off-grid facilities, perpetual-flight drones, maritime etc

2. youtube art video showing off the 'Jizai arms', a robotic arm backpack. i'm optimistic about robotic exoskeletons & related things like this. the benefits are potentially huge, from increased productivity in construction, injury reduction, military applications, to of course disability & old-age mobility. i do always note that the power storage issue is underrated, & might prevent us from achieving the scifi vision of ubiquitous mobile robotics. being tied to a power cable is a serious constraint. but even relatively stationary robot arms with computer vision could automate many tasks, if they get cheap & good enough

3. widely shared, but this post on megaproject hydro terraforming is great (creating canals etc to build new lakes & water systems, to green arid regions). twitter thread here

4. Therecraft, another drone delivery startup. i think if i can get my tacocopter i will die happy…

5. ...but if that’s not in the cards, then perhaps small parcel delivery via an underground system of tubes is the next-best thing. hard to say how real this is, but apparently Wendy’s is interested. you know what they say about America: there's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza burger delivery

6. fascinating piece on African warlordism & the high level of managerial competence that some display, particularly in Sudan. amusing, although one shouldn't forget that Hemedti is clearly a horrible person who’s causing a massive amount of misery, death & pain. (World Politics Review). via @whyvert. see also this excellent overview of the war & Sudanese history (London Review of Books)

7. enjoyed this Alex Tabarrok post on how Germany's capacity to substitute away from Russian gas was underestimated. but note also this evidence that higher energy prices in Europe due to war caused an increase in mortality. i can't say i have complete confidence in the causal inference here, but it's interesting. cheap, abundant energy is good, as is an energy system that's resilient to geopolitical turmoil (Economist)

8. solid Matt Yglesias piece on parking regulation. all obviously correct. imagine not being Shoup-pilled (Bloomberg)

9. Pterodynamics, pursuing a novel eVTOL drone design with 'transwings' that fold out after takeoff. short video here. i have no idea if this represents a real improvement. you already have similar things like Osprey’s tilt-rotor design, which seems simpler. but who knows!

10. some increasing murmurs about semaglutide possibly having broader utility for addiction & compulsive behaviour generally. seems good! (Atlantic)

11. Michael Kofman piece on Ukraine war stuff (FA)

12. crispr-edited GMO mustard greens are now in production in USA, i guess they taste better

13. and apparently some GMO babies have been born in UK using a small amount of DNA from a third person, to correct a mitochondrial condition. i want a glorious transhuman future, & i fully expect genetic ‘gaybies’ and multi-parent children to happen, probably in my lifetime. you think our social conservative-vs-liberal culturewar is bad? just wait

14. enjoyed this Tyler Cowen piece speculating about the future of global immigration, where low fertility results in a shortage of young workers & some countries being better positioned to bid for them due to pre-existing cultural & immigrant patterns (Bloomberg)

15. and somewhat related, see this Palladium piece about fertility & population decline. i don't agree that a "collective" cultural response towards higher fertility is impossible. & while i do agree that govt subsidies like paid leave & child benefits are not sufficient, imo they are part of the broader solution, if only as a byproduct of the underlying cultural response. opposing them is misguided & bizarre, if you claim to want to solve the issue. i think most ppl who want to increase TFR but oppose subsidies are basically showing that their other political ideological commitments (say against welfare, or taxation) are dominating. & to be fair, i'm likely guilty of this as well, since i'd support these subsidies regardless of their fertility effects, on the grounds of poverty reduction & providing a more equal floor of material wellbeing for all children. but in any case, i completely support the author’s main point about small communities being a fruitful path for discovering social forms that combine sustainable fertility with modern civilization’s benefits. let a thousand cultures bloom. i'm just more optimistic about the capacity for the ‘mainstream’ mass culture to adopt solutions that work. liberalism excels at adapting & absorbing good ideas

16. Brian Potter reviews Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick―or Keep You Well. i've posted a bunch on this topic & my sense is that it's becoming a "hot" new thing within a certain wonk sphere. seems important, surprisingly neglected, & incredibly tractable. many technologies already exist to improve indoor environmental conditions. air quality is the most obvious thing, overlapping heavily with pandemic defense. but sound & light are important too, as well as material offgassing & degradation. i will read this book and report back

17. interesting Noah Smith post on "Cold War 2" i.e US vs China

18. several AI links i’ll group together:

• Tim Lee argues for AI safety optimism. the physical world is slow & cumbersome, & the robotics isn't there yet to allow an ASI to become fully unreliant on humans for physical infrastructure maintenance. these are fine points & some ppl do forget about them. but i think Lee misses a very basic point, about how an AI might ‘accidentally’ destroy humanity even if this results in its ultimate destruction, simply because its goals weren’t specified well or whatever. the idea of an emergent self-preservation drive paired with perfect rationality/planning is compelling. but it’s nowhere near guaranteed. there’s a whole range of plausible outcomes that are basically just “catastrophic self-defeating mistake”

• Luke Muehlhauser suggests some concrete govt policies

• and Sam Hammond also with an AI policy agenda. see too these followup comments on his substack

• good EconTalk episode with Tyler Cowen. nothing new if you read MR. but i for one have mostly stopped listening to EconTalk after being a hardcore fan for many years, so it's always fun to check back in periodically

• really nice Shakoist post on AI, family, and living with uncertainty

• fun roon blog post imagining various scifi futures

19. update on US wastewater surveillance for covid etc tracking. it developed in a haphazard way during the pandemic, & i am glad ppl are working to develop a more organized, comprehensive system. i'd hope you could expand it to track all kinds of pathogens, & combine it with other disease surveillance systems to get a really good defense against future pandemics, endemic disease waves, & bioweapons (NYT)

20. quite good essay about the evolution of Francis Fukuyama. it's become a meme that nobody writing about Fukuyama correctly describes his End of History argument. but this does a good job. it closely matches how i talk about it, emphasizing the importance placed on technology, especially the potential for military & transhumanist innovation to disrupt the political-economic stability benefits of liberal democracy

21. Austin Vernon made a substack, mostly just to link to his existing blog. but this initial post does have some good short comments on battery cargo ships, arguing that they can help prepare a possible transition to nuclear shipping

22. David Chapman clarifies some stuff about his stage theory. not to be too arrogant but this didn’t cause me to update my understanding from the original post at all

23. excellent Shawn Regan post on California wildfire & water policy. we here at the Link Nexus fully support PERC and the free market environmentalist principles they advocate for

24. good piece on robotic solar installation. anti-solar ppl sometimes talk about how shitty the installation jobs are, compared to e.g nuclear. set aside whether this is actually a good line of attack (in my opinion the main purpose of energy technology is to generate cost-effective useful energy services, not provide jobs). technological innovation tends to eliminate shitty jobs, & solar robotics is a great example. i've said it before, but the final state of solar is probably something like an erthos-style material-light approach, where robots just unroll lightweight panel surfaces & fix them down rapidly

25. long Robert Work piece on US marine corps reorganization. i've followed this a bit, & from my amateur perspective the new strategy seems sensible (becoming a nimble forward-deployed yet distributed anti-China AIPAC force). prior to this new direction i think more & more people were struggling to describe why the marines existed as a distinct branch from the army. the public choice cynic in me would say this reorg is merely an effort by the marines bureaucracy to survive, & carve out a new niche that preserves jobs & money flows. but i think the incentives are actually pretty well aligned here. regardless of the reformers’ motivations, they are trying to steer it in a genuinely more useful direction. it's actually funny there's been so much pushback from incumbent blob elements. you could view the debate as being between myopic incumbents who don't want to change, vs more far-sighted blobbers who understand that sustainably preserving rents & defending autonomy from the army means making some changes

26. tbh i didn't read it (too cringe), but feel obligated to share this piece on internet rationalism & the tpot/postrat twitter clusters (The New Atlantis)

27. interesting piece on some efforts to improve cryopreservation of transplant organs, to increase their 'shelf-life'. would be nice. there are other dimensions of this issue that are also important & plausibly easier to improve on, such as market & policy reforms to increase the efficiency & depth of the organ transplant system, faster air travel & logistics etc. & of course '3d-printed' or fully synthetic organs are the dream

28. article about public housing agencies’ use of advanced video surveillance & computer vision. it's written with a strong bias, so read adversarially. i support the use of more stuff like this, including facial recognition. crime is bad, & if we can use new surveillance (& sousveillance) technologies to reduce crime, that's probably good. but i also have libertarian instincts, & i won't deny that some of this creeps me out. my views on this are not fully formed. these technologies are changing rapidly, and (at least in the US) very new. my views will depend on how things evolve in practice. but as of now i think the govt should keep an open view. if police forces or public agencies want to use advanced surveillance, they should do it. if clear govt abuses emerge, then we should try to curb that while preserving the benefits of the technology, before implementing major restrictions. so far i've not seen anything too concerning. the article describes public housing authorities using surveillance footage to keep residents safe, but also using it as evidence to help evict residents who are stealing from laundry rooms, trashing hallways & breaking rules... okay lol. i'll also say that public housing is perhaps not the best approach to providing housing to poor people in general, if only because these kinds of micromanagement issues necessarily get politicized. if agencies want to play it safe & reduce political risk by ditching new tech, that seems fine too. as the technology improves, more private housing providers will surely adopt it & prove out its usefulness more fully (WaPo)

books

Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution by Jonathan Adler (ed). an academic anthology, with different authors for each chapter. most were not incredibly gripping— some covered ground that’s basically obvious if you know anything about libertarian & liberal political philosophy, while others were dry discussions of environmental law. but a few chapters were decent. one by John Thrasher about innovation & economic dynamism as a theory of environmental protection & improvement was excellent. it drew from Gerald Gaus’ work (who’s awesome, RIP) & public choice theory generally. but overall i do not recommend

Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming. don’t ask me why i read this book. my expectations were not high going in, but it still failed to meet them. it was a slog, and by the end i was mostly skimming. the book is just a bunch of random personal essay-style vignettes. no real systematic argument or analysis whatsoever. the author just poasts about going to parties. total shit, i learned nothing, do not recommend.