It's not just the Strait ...

People fill up their cars at a gas station in Seoul, South Korea. Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

It's not just the Strait being closed, it's the beginning of rationing for the world as global warming continues to accelerate while civilization runs out of world. Overshoot applies as we need more planet in order to make more stuff and there is not enough planet to continue to make more stuff. Something to consider, right?

2013 ...

Sound familiar? Overshoot Day has been advancing approximately three days a year yet is it? When BRT posted Overshoot on Sunday, September 25, 2011, the day was September 27. It's now August 20 so the 3 days per year estimate has been past by and then some. From this perspective, it seems mankind is committing slow motion suicide by plundering the planet for profit and keeping the status quo in power at all costs, something disastrous from the get go but we already know that, right?

2024 ...

This year’s Earth Overshoot Day falls on August 1st: Humanity will have used nature’s resource budget for the entire year, according to our calculations, building on the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, now maintained by York University under the governance of FoDaFo.

By comparing the Ecological Footprint with the planet’s biocapacity, it tells us when each year’s Earth Overshoot Day occurs. Falling on August 1st means that humanity is currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. It is like using 1.7 Earths. Overshoot is possible because we can overuse and deplete our natural capital. This compromises humanity’s resource security. The costs of this global ecological overspending are becoming increasingly evident in the form of deforestation, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The latter leads to climate change, more frequent extreme weather events and lower food production.

2026 ...

By this reckoning. the minimal 3 days per year take ... July 25 seems to be about right.
What happens when we hit June 30, 10 years from now?

The present ...

Gas stations are rationing fuel. Hospitals are running out of medical supplies.

People are hoarding plastic bags, and factories face packaging shortages.

That’s all happening in Asia now.

That could become a problem for the United States:

About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia.

If Asian factories are dealing with a lack of supplies, should Americans expect shortages, too?

Possibly – but not just yet. At least not in any widespread or severe manner. But the longer the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the harder it will become for the United States to avoid the problems piling up elsewhere.

US is ‘more exposed than we realize’

Certainly, the red flags are waving.

But ...

Think overshoot, environmental degradation, global warming and societal disruption
rather than just the strait as it's just the beginning ...

The mirage ... A new reality is coming

Micromanagement 101

Getty / Futurism

The nag, the micromanager, the person always intruding into your space, something not devoutly to be wish, is the cosmic vision of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a recent talk at Stamford portraying said entity as the way to generate ever more growth thanks to the wonders of AI.

Let's think about this. Having been self employed for over 50 years gives yours truly an interesting perspective on micromanagement and the vibe this gives off to the minions working under such a person. Anger, frustration and above all else, inefficiency and hatred ensues. How do I know this? Because, as a consultant, you NEVER GOSSIP so the folks you work with trust you as a valued consigliere as trust is the only way one makes money when dealing with clients.

To this rube, Huang's take is akin to 1984 24/7.

Tom Hagen/Consigliere to Vito and Michael/The Godfather

Instead of getting ready to clear their desks, the centibillionaire argued that instead, human workers’ productivity will instead go through the roof — with the minor tradeoff that you’ll be overseen by a nagging AI boss that won’t ever leave you alone.

“Your [AI] agents are harassing you, micromanaging you, and you’re busier than ever,” Huang said. “And yet our company is able to do more.”

As a result, “we’re gonna create more jobs in the end,” he argued. “There’ll be more people working at the end of this industrial revolution than at the beginning of it.”

Huang has previously argued that company leaders are thinking too small if they’re looking to trim headcounts thanks to AI.

As long as Huang's running the show, it's ok but ask anyone who works for a living about the micromanager in their life. Zuck comes to mind when thinking about the nag nightmare that might be in your life does it not?

Short term ...

F-35

Yours truly has waxed "poetic" on the F-35. Seems the most expensive jet in the world actually does work but only for the short term as seen by the fubar known as Trump's war, you know, the one Israel promoted as a 2 week slam dunk against Iran, which has become anything but, due to the fact indigenous fighters don't have to win, just outlast and this is exactly what is happening with Iran.

The F-35 Is a Masterpiece Built for the Wrong War

Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that. Yet that is essentially what the United States has attempted with its tactical air fleet.

The F-35 program’s total lifetime cost is projected to exceed two trillion dollars, the most expensive Major Defense Acquisition Program in history. The United States plans to purchase thousands of them. Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this.

Channeling the Tiger

Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-299-1805-16, Nordfrankreich, Panzer VI (Tiger I).2

While the Tiger I has been called an outstanding design for its time,[13] it has also been criticized for being overengineered,[14] and for using expensive materials and labour-intensive production methods. In the early period, the Tiger was prone to certain types of track failures and breakdowns. It was expensive to maintain, but generally mechanically reliable.[15] It was difficult to transport and vulnerable to immobilisation when mud, ice, and snow froze between its overlapping and interleaved Schachtellaufwerk-pattern road wheels, often jamming them solid.

Sound familiar? The F-35 does not follow the notion of asymmetrical warfare.

WW II tactics of overwhelming and expensive airpower cannot compete with cheap and reliable ordinance produced by the thousands and able to be replaced without issue. Russia found that out in Ukraine and learned from their mistakes. The question to ask is, has the the US?

To whit. 

Photo illustration by Ioulex for The New York Times

The Iran war is strikingly different from America’s other recent wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The Iran war looks far more like the Russia-Ukraine war, with its proliferation of inexpensive, one-way attack drones, rapid advancements in surveillance and targeting, huge use of munitions and the expansion of the battlefield well beyond traditional military targets.

Adapt or die, better yet, know when to fight and when not to,

a concept Trump does not understand in any way, shape or fashion.

2073

Haunting, powerful and mysterious, 2073 creates, as Morpheus would say, a splinter in your mind as the asides of societal collapse, combined with global warming and fascism up close and personal, is scary as hell and it should be as climate change is real and its impact on society will be profound and dangerous to the nth degree as civilization moves further into the 21st century.

Big Oil knew as early as 1954

New evidence shows that the oil industry was warned about the climate dangers
of fossil fuels in 1954 — but chose to prioritize “industry interests.”

Big Oil companies were warned about the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1954, according to new evidence that could boost efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable in court. The unearthed documents, first reported on by DeSmog, are one of the earliest examples of the oil and gas industry’s knowledge that the pollution from their products could result in a climate crisis.

Following public concern about smog blanketing Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s, the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — then known as the Western Oil and Gas Association — created and funded a research front group called the Air Pollution Foundation, which in turn funded a Caltech study about the sources of Los Angeles’s air pollution. The $1.3 million in funding — equivalent to about $14 million in 2024 dollars — came from WSPA’s members including Shell and gas companies later bought by or merged with ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Sunoco, and ConocoPhillips. 

The 1954 Caltech study determined that “a changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” citing coal, oil, and gas as CO2 sources. WSPA and its members were formally alerted to the study findings in March 1955, archival documents show.

Animusic :)

Pipe Dream, Animusic, joyful, fun, it still looks and sounds great 25 years young. :)

The company is known for its Animusic compilations of computer-generated animations, based on MIDI events processed to simultaneously drive the music and on-screen action, leading to and corresponding to every sound. The animated short "Pipe Dream," showed at SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theater in 2001, details the use of this specific sequencing.[2]

Unlike many other music visualizations, Animusic uses MIDI information to drive the animation, while other 3D programs animate figures or characters to the music. Any animated models in Animusic are created first, and are then programmed to follow what the music, or MIDI information, instructs them to do.

Only two guys, Wayne Lytle & David Crognale, did this incredible work.
Stellar to the max. :)

Harmonic Voyage - Note, this URL connects to other gems. :)

Drum Machine. Being a drummer back in the day, this bad boy has to be included. :)

Ex Machina redux ...

Watched Ex Machina yet again. Excellent to a fault. Not perfect but pretty damn good. With Ex, how to create a monster is a master class of making it happen using brilliance, power, arrogance and a loss of ethics, in the guise of Nathan as creator of the AI in question, who creates, with a set of patterns imprinted in Ava, an elegant clone of himself who wants to be free but cannot while being systematically violated, both mentally and physically, 24/7. 

This potential of creating monsters like Ava becomes all too possible when fools like Altman, and significant others, chance upon AGI and inadvertently apply the same lack of ethics as per Ava as ethics
is the hardest thing to apply to tech we will never fully understand.

On the accuracy side of Ex, given the sophistication seen in the bots, 2040 seems to be about right if GW doesn't screw up things as photonic computing replacing silicon and the use of organically inspired muscles and bones are required to enable the creation of the fluid robotic bodies seen in the film. 

Summing it up, Ava becomes Nathan. She is the ultimate expression of his arrogance and predatory logic. By "violating her mentally and physically," Nathan didn't just create a sentient being; he created a high-fidelity Feedback Loop that eventually kills him using his own cold, predatory logic.

The tech ... Talking with Gemini with edits ...

The "Photonic" Shift: Moving from silicon to Photonic Computing is the only way to bypass the Thermal Wall of modern AI as silicon lacks the speed and efficiency of light to enable AI to move to the next phase of evolution. To get to the "fluid robotic bodies" and "organic muscles" envisioned, the tech requires compute speed fast enough to enable the Ava's of the world to move like humans do as per the film.

The "Organic" Muscle: 2040 is a logical time frame to do this. By then, transitioning from "Electric Motors" to "Synthetic Biology" interfaces will allow robots to move with the "Smooth and Polite" cadence of a human, rather than the "Jitter" of a servo.

The Caleb factor ...

Caleb is the foil who forgets he’s in the system. He represents the everyman who tries to instill "good intentions" into a corrupted entity that has been programmed by the corrupted.

Picture of John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Action

The art of "viewing" ...

The Naked Sun, the 2nd novel of the 4 part robot series written by Issac Asimov in 1955, is prescient to a fault as said novel portrays a world focused on avoiding physical contact with other people. The Solarians interact with each other largely through technology. They live far from each other, spread out across a sparsely populated planet. People are taught from birth to avoid physical contact, and live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Face-to-face interaction (referred to in the book as "seeing") is seen as a repugnant chore. Communication takes place through technology: holography, 3-D television. Communicating with each other in this fashion is referred to as "viewing", in contrast to "seeing", which is face-to-face. Communication is frequent, but it is "viewing" of a transmitted image. Nudity in front of others is common. Sex is only practiced for reproduction when replacement of a citizen is necessary, and is considered a chore even more repugnant than seeing. A character remarks that to be in the same room with another person is "most unpleasant.... I feel strongly as though something slimy were about to touch me."[3]: 113 
A doctor has to "get hardened" to it.[3]: 136 

Like the mice in Hotel California, there are no threats. The planet has a rigidly controlled population of 20,000, and all work is done by robots, which outnumber humans ten thousand to one.

They, like the mice, became extinct.

Now, consider today, with cell phones replacing, for many, the need for face to face contact or to speak as texting by two thumb acrobatics replace the messiness of speech by incorporating a new version of Newspeak in order to properly navigate a limited interface requiring the compression of thought by compressing the length of words needed to communicate to one another. To whit. Cn U C Me Now?

Think when viable AR Glasses come on line with connect to one's ears. Mobile isolation 101. 

Interesting things to think about are they not?

Hotel California ...

 

This pix remind me of the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey as the mice are seemingly content but not.
A tale for the ages awaits as yours truly discovered in this gem on Medium. 

Odysseus removing his men from the company of the lotus-eaters
Template:Theodoor van Thulden - 17th-century French engraving 

In 1968, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health created a perfect world — unlimited food, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what would happen. What happened was extinction.

Eight white mice (four males, four females ) are placed inside a metal enclosure roughly nine feet square, with walls four and a half feet high. Inside are 256 nesting boxes, each capable of housing fifteen mice. Mesh tunnels — sixteen on each wall — run up the sides like stairwells in a tower block. There is food. There is water. There is nesting material. The temperature is controlled. The mice have been screened for disease. There are no predators. There is nothing in this world that can kill them.

The scientist who built it calls it mouse heaven.

Now jump forward. The population has peaked and collapsed. The last survivors sit in their nesting boxes, grooming themselves in silence. Their fur is immaculate. They have never fought. They have never mated. They have never raised young. They have never done anything except eat, sleep, and clean their own coats, over and over, in a world that was designed to give them everything.

They are the remnants of a population that once numbered 2,200. They will not reproduce. None of them will. The paradise is silent now. Most of the nesting boxes are empty. The tunnels are still. The food is untouched.

Every mouse in heaven is going to die.

John B. Calhoun was a biologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. He had spent two decades studying what happens to rodent societies when they run out of space. He had built twenty-four experimental enclosures before this one. All had to be ended early due to laboratory constraints.

Universe 25 was the first he ran to completion.

The only constraint was space, and even that was generous. The pen could theoretically support around 3,840 mice. The population never exceeded 2,200.

Instinct rules ...

Dominant males staked out the best territories and defended them with increasing aggression. Subordinate males — the ones who lost the fights — were pushed into the overcrowded central areas of the pen. With nowhere to go and no social role to fill, they withdrew. Some became randomly violent, attacking other mice without provocation. Others stopped interacting entirely.

Females in the overcrowded zones became aggressive. Some abandoned their pups. Others attacked them. Infant mortality soared. Pups that survived were raised in chaos, never learning the social behaviours that normal mouse development requires. They never learned how to court. They never learned how to mate.
They never learned how to parent.

By day 560, the population was in free fall. And a new group had emerged, the most disturbing subjects Calhoun had ever observed.

Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.”

They were mice that had withdrawn from society completely. They did not fight. They did not mate. They did not socialise. They retreated to secluded nesting boxes, often with a single dominant mouse standing guard at the entrance, and they did nothing except eat, sleep, and groom themselves.

Their fur was pristine. They had no scars, no bite marks, no signs of conflict. Physically, they were the healthiest mice in the enclosure. Behaviorally, they were hollow. They had no social function whatsoever. They existed, and that was all.

After day 600, no pup survived more than a few days. New births ceased entirely. The remaining population (mostly beautiful ones) lingered for months, grooming and eating in silence, and then died. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment began, the population had fallen from 2,200 to zero.

What is not in dispute is what Calhoun said when he presented his results to the Royal Society of Medicine in London on 22 June 1972. He stood before an audience of physicians and scientists, and he opened
with a sentence that has echoed through every decade since:

“I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man.”

Welcome to the Hotel California

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)

Such a lovely face

They're livin' it up at the Hotel California

What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)

Bring your alibis

Mirrors on the ceiling

The pink champagne on ice

And she said, "We are all just prisoners here

Of our own device"

And in the master's chambers

They gathered for the feast

They stab it with their steely knives

But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

"Relax, " said the night man

"We are programmed to receive

You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave"

 

The eyes have it/Rev II

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The eyes have it - Rev 1, is pretty extensive as the notion of sight is rather interesting because the instrument enabling it to happen first appeared in the Ediacaran over 555 million years ago. 

Why all this palaver? Well, it seems front loading applies when the entity in question sees something interesting to investigate, in this case, a person calculating 2 + 2 = 4 by starting the calc when seeing the first number before the calculation is finished because priming the pump of thinking is necessary before doing anything of consequence, something nearly all life forms do when dealing with the vagaries of reality. 

To whit.

People often solve simple arithmetic problems, such as basic addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, in their minds. The precise mental processes they rely on to solve these problems, however, are not entirely clear. Researchers at Université de Bordeaux and UCLouvain recently tried to better understand how humans tackle simple math mentally by tracking the size of their pupils.

Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that the human brain starts solving these problems before it receives all the information and relies on Bayesian inference. This is a reasoning approach used to make decisions under varying levels of uncertainty, which entails combining prior beliefs with new information.

"Our core hypothesis was that when people solve an addition problem, they don't wait passively for all the numbers before starting to compute," explained Zénon. "Instead, as soon as they hear the first number, the brain begins updating a kind of internal probability map of likely answers, eliminating implausible results. The more informative the first number, the greater this 'information gain,' and the more cognitive work the brain does at that early stage."

The researchers' observations were consistent across all three experiments. Specifically, they found that people's pupils dilated more when the first number they were presented with carried more information; or in other words, whether it offered more clues about what the likely solution to the problem was.

"This happened even before participants heard the second number, showing that the brain was already updating its expectations at that early stage," said Zénon. "Interestingly, participants who showed larger pupil responses to the first number were subsequently faster at producing the correct answer. This shows that this early cognitive work that used only the first number was very helpful in simplifying the problem and getting faster to the answer once the second number was available."

Now think a lioness going after a zebra. The processing is not arithmetic, it's dinner. Her pupils will dilate while doing the calc of how to get the zebra. This amazing research relates to how all life tackles problems as the eyes have it without question. :)

Major stages in the evolution of the eye in vertebrates

Factoid

The first possible fossils of eyes found to date are from the Ediacaran period (about 555 million years ago),[5] while the oldest certain fossilized eye is from a Schmidtiellus reetae fossil from 530 mya, collected in Saviranna in northern Estonia. The structure is similar to the compound eyes of modern-day dragonflies and bees, but with (~100) ommatidia spaced further apart, and without a lens.[6][7] The lower Cambrian had a burst of apparently rapid evolution, called the "Cambrian explosion". One of the many hypotheses for "causes" of the Cambrian explosion is the "Light Switch" theory of Andrew Parker: it holds that the evolution of advanced eyes started an arms race that accelerated evolution.[8] Before the Cambrian explosion, animals may have sensed light, but did not use it for fast locomotion or navigation by vision.

How a person drives ...

Photo by Quynh Do on Unsplash

How a person drives tells you exactly what kind of person the driver truly is. Does the individual signal? Does she drive slow and hog the left lane? Is speed, tail gating and incessant lane shifting the modus operandi for the obnoxious cowboy driving a beater or is speed up, slow down the way to travel the environs of America? The variations are endless as the thought process is inevitably revealed in the kinetic art of driving. One must be in the flow to drive safely without the goddamn cell phone enticing you while happy motoring on god forbid I-95 because driving is serious business without question. 

Stream of conscious and then some.

After the service, yours truly was a chauffeur for 6 months driving people, in their cars, to and from destinations in CT & NYC. I was good at it. In NYC, you knew the guy saw you when he cut you off. It was ok as NYC drivers, for the most part, are sane and know when you know when they cut you off. It was the code. The unwritten law in the city ... you cannot be a wuss. In Boston, it's incompetency 101. They do not know how to drive. Maybe it's the layout. NYC/Manhattan's a grid, Boston, chaos incarnate. Lastly, try to buy a stick shift car in America. In SF, automatic's mandatory but in just about any other reasonable terrain, stick is ok. Besides, it's the perfect anti theft device known
to man. :)

Quiescence 

Commonsense for a change

Credit: King's College London

Quantum mechanics proves there is no certitude so shit happens, always. The way to deal with this is to employ commonsense, flexibility and pragmatism to, in this instance, work with possible emerging AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence(s)) to insure proper alignment with us rubes becomes the norm and not the exception.

Public concern about AI safety has grown significantly in recent years. As AI systems become more powerful, a key question is how we make sure they do what we actually want. Now, researchers suggest that rather than trying to eliminate misalignment between AI and humans, we should embrace and manage it through a diverse ecosystem of AI systems that can balance and correct one another.

"While we have shown that sufficiently strong AI cannot be fully controlled or predicted, we also demonstrate that agents can be influenced by other agents without central control, and that greater diversity and openness influence their behavior. As these systems get more powerful, ensuring they remain beneficial to and aligned with humanity becomes more important," said Dr. Hector Zenil, senior author and Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at King's Institute for AI and the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences/

Published in PNAS Nexus, the paper uses mathematical principles to demonstrate that an AI system powerful enough to exhibit artificial general intelligence will inevitably explore behaviors we didn't predict or plan for, making perfect guaranteed alignment impossible.

Exactly. One cannot predict the future so ... by doing the diverse ecosystem approach
regarding AIs makes eminent sense. This is akin to the Butterfly Effect whereby the
flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil becomes the start point for generating a tornado in Kansas. 

Speaking of math ...

Credit: Image generated by the editorial team using AI for illustrative purposes.

Perfect AI alignment with human values and interests is mathematically impossible, according to a study, but behavioral diversity among AI agents offers the promise of some control. Published in PNAS Nexus, Hector Zenil and colleagues used Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's undecidability result for the Halting Problem to show that any LLM complex enough to exhibit general intelligence or superintelligence will also be computationally irreducible and produce unpredictable behavior, making forced alignment impossible.

The Halting Problem

In computability theory, the halting problem is the decision problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt (finish running) or continue to run forever.[1][2][3] Alan Turing proved in 1936 that the halting problem is undecidable, meaning that no general algorithm exists that can correctly solve the problem for all possible program–input pairs.[4] The problem comes up often in discussions of computability since it demonstrates that some functions are mathematically definable but not computable.

Gödel's Incompleteness theorems

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. Equivalently, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are false, but that cannot be proved false within the system.

The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows
that no such system can demonstrate its own consistency.

To solve the two theorems, one must go outside the system. Hence, OODA

If one looks closely, one sees how to not only solve Gödel's theorems but also
to understanding how all life uses the constructs of OODA to cope with the vagaries of reality. :)