Thoughts on the automation of all jobs
Plus: The equivalent of Moore's Law for AI
Hey futurists!
On Sunday, the power went out. I fell asleep. I guess I'd been behind on sleep. When I woke up, the power was still out but the sun was still up, so I read books. It was blissful. I was like, "Is this what the world was like before electricity?" I could imagine how it could be boring, but it was at least relaxing. Eventually, the power came back on and I was right back to worrying about, how am I going to 5x-10x my productivity using AI tools?
Ok, last time I promised you all I'd have some thoughts on AI automating jobs. Here goes.
If AI automates all jobs, then all humans who currently survive on labor income (directly or indirectly -- many people such as children don't participate in the labor market, but survive based on income from others who do) will have to find a non-labor source of income.
This can be ownership in a business -- and if the income is not passive, when it is automated by AI the person can retain the income produced by the AI. It could be a franchise rather than a new venture. It can be partial ownership of a business in the form of stocks, which can pay dividends or appreciate in value. There's countless additional variations such as real estate investment trusts (REITs), mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). "Private equity" can do something analogous to this with non-publicly traded stocks, from what I understand. There's also being a venture capitalist.
There's all kind s of online businesses including content creation (YouTube, podcasts, newsletters), affiliate marketing, advertising revenue from blogs/websites, online course sales, or other content that can be delivered as ebooks, etc, software sales (all those mobile apps you pay a few dollars for), online subscription services, dropshipping businesses (all those ads you see of Chinese goods you can order through a website you never heard of instead of Amazon, etc -- we'll see how much of this continues with tariffs), print-on-demand t-shirts and other merchandise, vending machines in the physical world (or laundromats, the stereotype of Asian immigrants). I hear people own so much junk these days that self-storage facilities are a pretty lucrative business.
Non-business assets such as commodities can appreciate in value. "Collectibles" such as art can be considered a variation on commodities trading.
There's active trading of stocks, bonds, forex (currency exchanges), and there's option contracts on stocks, commodities, bonds, forex, and so on. For the truly daring there's cryptocurrency trading. Some cryptocurrencies you can make money by staking.
There's interest income from bonds, private loans, peer-to-peer lending, and so on. There's high-yield savings accounts and annuities and so on.
There renting or leasing physical assets -- real estate (including Airbnb!), farmland, cars, boats, planes, farm equipment, machinery, etc. One can receive payments for the extraction of minerals, oil, gas, or timber from land if one is the owner of the land.
There's royalties and all manner of "intellectual property" licensing. There's royalties from music, films, TV, books, photography, art, patents, trademarks, software, brand identity, designs, and more. Semiconductor companies license "IP cores" -- everything from microprocessor architectures to memory and peripheral controllers.
The thing is, when we talk about labor income going away, people always start talking about universal basic income (UBI). Is it really necessary to have UBI, or can we just get all of humanity surviving on non-labor sources of income? There seem to be quite a lot of them so it ought to be possible to get everyone on non-labor income -- or not?
The reason I think the answer is that most people will fail to make the transition from labor income to non-labor income is that there is a "gotcha": all non-labor income requires some form of "property". And that property has be be valuable to be income-generating.
I realize we're stretching the word "property" a bit here to include some non-physical things like a brand identity. But the vast majority of humans own little in the way of property -- physical or intellectual or brand identity or anything else. For the vast majority of humans, their time and ability to trade that time for work is the thing that enables them to get the money they need to survive.
Let's put some numbers on this. The US federal government puts the official poverty line at $15,650 per year per person. Let's suppose one can reliable generate 10% above the inflation level from assets. Most people actually can't do this, but never mind that for now. (Most people can't actually survive on $15,650 per year, either, but never mind that, also, for now.) That means the necessary assets to own must be valued at $156,500 per person.
I don't think UBI will ever happen, but I know lots of you will tell me that it will, that it may be politically infeasible at this moment but that will change once the unemployment rate hits a certain threshold. Actually the number to watch isn't the unemployment rate, it's the total labor force participation rate -- because when people go back to school or go into some training program or do anything but actively look for work, they are not counted in the unemployment rate. The total labor force participation rate peaked in the year 2000 -- in the dot-com bubble -- right before the dot-com bust.
In general, some dates to keep in mind are:
Life expectancy (in the US) peaked in the year 2014, life expectancy for people without college degrees peaked in 2010, the total labor force participation rate peaked in 2000, and the fertility rate peaked in 1971. Actually the 1971 date is global -- in the US, because there was this "baby boom" phenomena" immediately following WWII, the fertility rate actually peaked earlier, in 1957. But 1971 seems to be the earliest date the decline that we're seeing worldwide in fertility first became noticeable, and the place where it first became noticable was Japan.
So, my hypothesis is as follows: When machines maximally *complement* human beings, you get a boost in all these things: you get a boost in fertility, a boost in employment, a boost in life expectancy. When machines *compete against* human beings, you see declines in all these things: first you see a decline in fertility, then a decline in employment -- but that shows up in the total labor force participation rate, not the unemployment rate -- and then a decline in life expectancy.
Europe saw a fertility boom in 1300s -- which contributed to the European populations moving to the Americas in the couple hundred of years that followed -- due to a bunch of agricultural "inventions" in Europe, including: the 3-field system of crop rotation (one part spring, one part autumn, one part left fallow), heavy plows and the moldboard plow (actually invented in China and migrated to Europe) that enabled crops to be grown in less fertile soil, horse collars and harnesses and horseshoes, watermills and windmills for grinding grain and other mechanical processes, selective breeding of livestock and plant crops, irrigation and drainage techniques, improved composting, and iron tools for reaping and threshing that replaced weaker and less durable wooden tools.
This was later followed during the industrial revolution with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation, exploding the availability of synthetic fertilizer, the invention of chemical pesticides, breeding of especially high-yield grains and rice, and mechanized irrigation.
Now we find ourselves in a situation where, despite all these inventions, fertility is declining everywhere in the world, and in many places is already below replacement rate. I've heard that in South Korea, in 3 generations, the population will be about 5% of what it is today. And now we see total labor force participation going down and the ultimate of all measurements of human well-being, life expectancy, also going down -- though not everywhere (yet?). It's interesting that technology complemented humanity throughout the agricultural and industrial revolutions and it was only the invention of electronic brains where we start to see competition showing up in the form of declining fertility. And it shows up early than you might expect -- in 1971. You could, though, attribute that to something else like the invention of birth control.
I considered bringing other measures into the discussion, such returns on capital vs returns on labor, but those may be cyclical and not tied to technological advancement. Employment and life expectancy have seen cyclical ups and downs over the course of history. Cause-and-effect is not as clear-cut as one might like. Nonetheless, my prediction is that as the AI revolution takes over the world, we'll simply see a continuation of trends already underway: fertility will continue going down, the total labor force participation rate will continue going down, and life expectancy will continue going down. I don't expect universal basic income (UBI) or any other "magic" to save humanity from this progression.
I know there are currently a variety of government welfare programs, and there are people who survive on that income. So it's not totally outlandish to see this as a mode of survival that people could occupy. I just have a hard time seeing how it can scale up to the numbers required, if it really happens that the labor market gets automated away completely. We're already in a situation where the US federal government is paying more in interest payments on the debt than the military, and the national debt is still going up. What's the solution, Elon Musk and his chainsaw? To have UBI, we'd have to increase the outflow of capital and thus the debt -- and interest on the debt -- even more. How does the math work on this? I don't think it does.
It's interesting how Ray Kurzweil so accurately and presciently nailed the exponential growth of information technology -- yet was so profoundly wrong on everything outside that domain. He predicted, for example, exponential growth in computer display technology and that by 2010, we'd all have glasses that project images directly onto our retinas with lasers -- that didn't happen. I saw an interview of him on YouTube last week and he was saying the same things that he always says -- that we'll "merge with machines" and it'll be a utopia, that technology makes everything cheaper and cheaper and life gets better and better -- so obviously wrong as I've described above yet Kurzweil seems stuck like a broken record on his old ways of thinking.
As a final musing, if you're thinking, humans will just go back to surviving the old-fashioned way, by subsistence farming, in the modern world, going back to what I said earlier and the need to own property for non-labor income, even in the case of subsistence farming, where you don't need monetary *income* to trade for food at the grocery store, you still need the actual farmland as property.
There are some communities like the Amish that survive in this mode. It's not impossible. But it does require owning the farmland. It's hard to see the majority of people switching to "off-grid living" and becoming their own farmer. Perhaps, though, in 500 years, we'll see a world with an advanced economy where all the economic activity is AI agents trading with each other, and humans survive outside that economy as subsistence farmers, much as how other wildlife on this planet survives outside the human economy right now. Humans will become "just another species" that survives in a subsistence mode while AI agents run the planet.
So that's how I see the situation. I've been sitting on the OpenAI universal basic income experiment research paper for about 9 and a half months now and still haven't said anything to you all about it. Mainly that's just because of time -- it's 147 pages. My impression skimming it over is that they expected their UBI experiment to show a lot of benefits and improvements in the lives of the recipients, but in actuality, it didn't have much effect.
So there you have it. Sorry if this sounds rambly. I'm under a lot of time pressure, like most of us. I heard John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that his grandkids would work 15 hours a week. lol, so wrong. Modern-day predictors of techno-utopia like Kurzweil have to be regarded with the same skepticism.
Do I sound like a "doomer"? Well, I guess it's important to keep in mind, all this is predicated on the assumption AI will automate all work. We're clearly not at that point yet. Language models, for all their wonders, still can't do all language tasks -- I'm a software developer, and LLMs can't take over my job -- not yet, anyway. I guess they have succeeded at obsoleting translators who work with written text. Diffusion models haven't entirely obsoleted artists yet, though I guess they have for what we call commercial "stock art". And these models have so not been useful in robotics.
We're still a long way from a robot that can clean a hotel room. Robotics and the ability to interact with the physical world lags behind purely abstract mental tasks like generating language or generating images.
Let's take an intermission and watch some entertaining videos.
What will happen when people don't have money to buy things because all jobs have been automated? Won't the economy collapse without consumers with money to buy things? According to this video, already, right now, the wealthiest 10% of households by income already account for more than 50% of consumer spending. Let me say that again. Already, right now, half off all *consumer* purchases are made by only 10% of the population.
So businesses are already shifting their product and service offerings from "the masses" to "cater exclusively to other businesses or wealthy asset owners who make their income from investment returns rather than exchanging their hours for dollars." This trend has been increasing since the 90s, and especially since about 2020.
Obviously if you're still exchanging your hours for dollars, you need to get out of that position.
In the future, we'll also have a lot of AI agents as consumers. Already, as I've commented before, already we have AI agents making trading decisions on the stock market. Any entity with enough intelligence can make trading decisions can make trades just like humans, so it's not hard to imagine an economic system where most of the products and services are produced by AI and most of the buyers and consumers of those products and services are also AI. There's nothing in the laws of physics that dictates humans must remain in the loop.
Sounds depressing? Modern life is designed to break you:
But you can become a millionaire in 2025 by watching this video:
She actually says, if you want to make it up to "billionaire" status, you need to be a psychopath. Never thought I'd hear anyone say out loud you need to be a psychopath to be a billionaire, and even less thought that anyone might say that's a good thing. Boggles.
This video says "Learn To Code" failed, and the failure had nothing to do with AI -- it's all the normal cycle of interest rates, supply and demand (supply of programmers vs demand) cycles, and so on. Really? I'm not convinced. Nobody is saying the decline of jobs for language translators is just going through a normal supply-and-demand cycle, and that jobs for human translators will go up in the future. Why does anyone think it will be any different for programmers? But I'm including this just so you all know, I'm including the point of view I don't agree with so you all can evaluate the information and make up your own minds.
Getting back to the topic at hand, David Shapiro is making a series of "Post-Labor Economics" lectures. Here's lecture 1, "Better, Faster, Cheaper, Safer".
He predicts jobs for humans:
- Where there is a regulatory and legal requirement. Sometimes there is a necessity of having a human to pin responsibility on because of laws written before the advent of AI. Lawyers, doctors, architects perhaps.
- "Statutory" positions like judges.
- "Experience economy" -- face painters at fairs. Who among you are are ready to embark on a new career as a face painter at fairs?
- "Meaning makers" -- even though we can have philosophical conversations with AI, we want humans to help us sort out existential questions (so he says), and
- Jobs based on trust. Sales and negotiation. So if you're such a good salesperson that you have a rolodex of clients who trust you, and you're able to engender new trust in new clients, you're safe from AI.
He goes on to ramble about the "lump of labor fallacy" and asserts that "human demand is infinite". This has always seemed completely wrong to me. What makes most people happy is (according to research I have read), close-knit personal relationships. People don't need an infinite amount of material products.
Having said that, I know there are billionaires who fight viciously hard for billions more. It seems like, for some sociopathic people, once not only basic needs, but luxury is achieved (beyond a certain income level, you can't eat any better, and you can't travel any better, and you can't live in 30 homes at the same time -- you can only be in 1 place at a time, etc), the focus changes from acquiring stuff (or experiences) to controlling *people* -- in other words, the focus becomes attaining political power. And some people do indeed seem genuinely insatiable in their thurst for political power.
But you can go ahead and watch his video and consider his argument. He goes on to say this supposed "infinite demand" doesn't have to be supplied by humans, it can be supplied by AI.
One thing I like is his straightforward explanation for why work hours haven't gone down. I heard John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that his grandkids would work 15 hours a week. But there is a "per-employee" overhead cost for a business. So it makes more sense for a business to hire the minimum number of employees and work them as hard as possible. The simple fact of there being a "per-employee" overhead cost automatically results in that outcome.
Alrighty, let's wrap that up and get started with the latest round of news bits. (More soon.)
AI
1. AI systems are increasing exponentially, and one measure of this is the comparison with how long it takes a highly skilled human to perform a task vs whether an AI is capable of performing the task, which was studied by METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research). One of those researchers is Sydney Von Arx, who is interviewed here. So if you want to put a face to the name (though she is just one member of the team that did the research), here you go. She confirms that they found that every 7 months, AI models are able to do tasks that take a skilled human twice as much time, with a 50% probability of success. She says the team tried really hard to falsify this, and to prove to themselves that it was real only if it really stood up to scrutiny. She says it does and she is a believer in this trend.
So over time, AIs will be capable of performing tasks that take humans more and more time, from seconds to days to years, and that time measurement that it takes the human will continue to double every 7 months.
I commented on this research previously -- I estimated that by the 11th of November, 2032, AI systems would be able to perform tasks that take humans 1 year. That's what you get when you extrapolate this out into the future (and calculate with more precision than is justified).
The research I shared with you all previously is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14499
2. Agent2Agent is a protocol from Google so that agents can talk to each other and work together, even if they are made by different companies (who might otherwise be competitors). This actually happened back on April 9 but I just found out about it today.
"The Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol facilitates communication between independent AI agents. Here are the core concepts:"
"Agent Card: A public metadata file describing an agent's capabilities, skills, endpoint URL, and authentication requirements. Clients use this for discovery."
"A2A Server: An agent exposing an HTTP endpoint that implements the A2A protocol methods. It receives requests and manages task execution."
"A2A Client: An application or another agent that consumes A2A services. It sends requests (like tasks/send) to an A2A Server's URL."
"Task: The central unit of work. A client initiates a task by sending a message (tasks/send or tasks/sendSubscribe). Tasks have unique IDs and progress through states (submitted, working, input-required, completed, failed, canceled)."
"Message: Represents communication turns between the client (role: 'user') and the agent (role: 'agent'). Messages contain Parts."
"Part: The fundamental content unit within a Message or Artifact. Can be TextPart, FilePart (with inline bytes or a URI), or DataPart (for structured JSON, e.g., forms)."
"Artifact: Represents outputs generated by the agent during a task (e.g., generated files, final structured data). Artifacts also contain Parts."
"Streaming: For long-running tasks, servers supporting the streaming capability can use tasks/sendSubscribe. The client receives Server-Sent Events (SSE) containing TaskStatusUpdateEvent or TaskArtifactUpdateEvent messages, providing real-time progress."
"Push Notifications: Servers supporting pushNotifications can proactively send task updates to a client-provided webhook URL, configured via tasks/pushNotification/set."
"Typical Flow:"
"Discovery: Client fetches the Agent Card from the server's well-known URL."
"Initiation: Client sends a tasks/send or tasks/sendSubscribe request containing the initial user message and a unique Task ID."
"Processing:"
"(Streaming): Server sends SSE events (status updates, artifacts) as the task progresses."
"(Non-Streaming): Server processes the task synchronously and returns the final Task object in the response."
"Interaction (Optional): If the task enters input-required, the client sends subsequent messages using the same Task ID via tasks/send or tasks/sendSubscribe."
"Completion: The task eventually reaches a terminal state (completed, failed, canceled)."
The whole entire "protocol" is simply a single JSON file. You can go and look at it. It has defined sections for things like "AgentAuthentication", "AgentCapabilities", "AgentCard", "AgentProvider", "AgentSkill", "Artifact", a whole bunch of standard messages ("CancelTaskResponse" etc), "TextPart", "FilePart", "DataPart", etc.
https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/
3. Claude Code best practices.
Claude Code is an "agentic coding" system from Anthropic. It's also mandatory for me for work. So I have to learn all this.
"Create CLAUDE.md files", "Tune your CLAUDE.md files: "Your CLAUDE.md files become part of Claude's prompts, so they should be refined like any frequently used prompt", "Curate Claude's list of allowed tools", "If using GitHub, install the gh CLI", "Give Claude more tools", "Use Claude with MCP", "Explore, plan, code, commit", "Write tests, commit; code, iterate, commit", "Write code, screenshot result, iterate", "Safe YOLO mode: "Instead of supervising Claude, you can use claude --dangerously-skip-permissions to bypass all permission checks and let Claude work uninterrupted until completion"...
"Use Claude for codebase Q&A", "Use Claude to interact with git", "Use Claude to interact with GitHub", "Use Claude to work with Jupyter notebooks"...
"Be specific in your instructions", "Give Claude images and diagrams", "Mention files you want Claude to look at or work on", "Give Claude URLs alongside your prompts for Claude to fetch and read", "Course correct early and often: you'll get better results by being an active collaborator and guiding Claude's approach", "Use /clear to keep context focused", "Use checklists and scratchpads for complex workflows", "Pass data into Claude", "Use headless mode to automate your infra", "Use Claude for issue triage", "Use Claude as a linter"...
"Have one Claude write code; use another Claude to verify", "Have multiple checkouts of your repo", "Use git worktrees", "Use headless mode with a custom harness"...
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices
4. "Commenters on the popular subreddit r/changemymind found out last weekend that they've been majorly duped for months. University of Zurich researchers set out to 'investigate the persuasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural online environments' by unleashing bots pretending to be a trauma counselor, a 'Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter,' and a sexual assault survivor on unwitting posters."
"Reddit's Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee says the company is considering legal action over the 'improper and highly unethical experiment' that is 'deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level.' The researchers have been banned from Reddit. The University of Zurich told 404 Media that it is investigating the experiment's methods and will not be publishing its results."
Not publishing its results... yet we already know, "commenters on the popular subreddit r/changemymind" were "majorly duped for months". Obviously this means the Turing Test has been spectacularly passed.
If you've been having any doubt as to whether the Turing Test has been passed, you should have none now.
The models used, in case you were wondering, were OpenAI GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-405B.
Also, unethical? Isn't the purpose of AI from this point onward to imitate and surpass (and displace in the job market) humans?
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/657978/reddit-ai-experiment-banned
5. Several tortured phrases in published scientific papers "indicate AI use and occur when large language models try to find synonyms for common phrases. In Anurag Awasthi's paper, 'linear regression' became 'straight relapse,' and 'error rate' became 'blunder rate,' among others."
Bwahaha.
6. Aurora Driver has begun commercial operations. Aurora Driver is the eighteen-wheeler truck driving AI from Aurora Innovation. The first driverless truck delivery trip was on April 26th, between Dallas and Houston.
https://aurora.tech/newsroom/aurora-delivers-my-ride-in-the-first-self-driving-commercial-truck
7. AI-powered work simulations. Hmm. That's an idea.
"Break free from traditional interviews. HireOS creates immersive work environments that reveal true talent through real challenges, not rehearsed answers."
Quantum Magnetic Navigation
8. A "quantum navigation system" more accurate that GPS and jam-proof has been announced. Although unlike the last "quantum navigation system" I told you all about, this one doesn't use Bose-Einstein condensate to measure acceleration like a gyroscopic accelerometer. This one claims to use the earth's magnetic field, to measure out such tiny variations in the earth's magnetic field that becomes "like a magnetic fingerprint" that can be mapped out.
But wait, you may be thinking, if it's that sensitive, wouldn't it pick up all kinds of magnetic fields just from the inside of the aircraft (or seacraft)? If you guessed they claim to filter out that "electromagnetic noise" with AI, you win.
But how does it work? Well, here's what they say.
"Magnetic-anomaly navigation relies on the fact that the Earth's magnetic field possesses small amounts of local variation ('anomalies') that are geographically distinct. These anomalies are stable in time and have been mapped for various purposes, including resource exploration. With an appropriate sensor capable of detecting these anomalies, and an available reference map, it is possible to infer positional information to both improve on inertial navigation systems positioning and provide bounded accuracy indefinitely."
"The magnetic field that is measured is composed of several parts. There is the core Earth field, which is described by a time-dependent model such as the International Geomagnetic Reference Field, and has a scalar magnitude of approximately 25,000 -- 65,000 nanotesla (nT). On top of this there are anomalies that arise from crustal geology and are stable in time. These variations are on the order of 10 nT -- 100 nT over a few kilometers and are what is used for Magnetic-anomaly navigation. Global anomaly maps have been produced, such as the Earth Magnetic Anomaly Grid Version 3 or the World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map, and can in principle be used for navigation. These are well-supplemented by higher-resolution maps developed by the geophysical surveying sector or defense agencies. Finally there are time-dependent effects such diurnal ionospheric variation ( approximately 100 nT) and space weather arising predominantly from solar activity (up to 1000s of nT during solar events)."
"The Q-CTRL magnetometers are scalar optically pumped magnetometers based on optical detection of atomic spin precession using a vapor cell containing rubidium atoms in a buffer gas."
Ok, so from what I can tell, what this means is that electrons have "spin" and this "spin" undergoes "precession", like the wobbling of a top, in the presence of a magnetic field. Someone clever figured out that if you use the right atoms (rubidium -- it's always rubidium, as Angelia Collier likes to say -- but why? I don't know) and "pump" them with pulses of laser light at exactly the right frequency, you can get them to reveal their precession, and thus reveal the magnetic field that is generating that precession.
"All photodetectors and light sources are integrated into the sensor head, along with vapor cell heaters. We have produced variants with pump and probe beams in both orthogonal and co-linear geometries; performance is comparable other than the modest increase in size associated with the orthogonal optical configuration."
"Vapor cell heaters" they say. I get the impression you're not freezing this down to a few degrees above absolute zero, like with a Bose-Einstein condensate.
"The map engine includes core and anomaly field modelling, map levelling, upward and downward continuation, and prediction of temporal effects such as the diurnal variation and space weather. The navigation-and-map-matching engine includes platform denoising, statistical filters, and navigation algorithms."
"Our approach to magnetic denoising is augmented by a physics-driven model used to learn the platform's magnetic behavior and how it corrupts the external Earth field. This is performed by solving (and adaptively updating in real-time) a set of coefficients that provide a model of the vehicle's magnetic field."
"The algorithm initially has no knowledge of the detailed magnetic characteristics of the vehicle, other than plausible physical assumptions that are true for any vehicle. It rapidly learns the platform characteristics as the navigational mission begins, and this training is continuously refined."
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/australia-firm-gps-less-navigation-system
The previous quantum intertial navigation system that uses Bose-Einstein condensate:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/accelerometer-quantum-bose-einstein
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
9. Footage of fiber-optic drones from the war in Ukraine. Fiber optic drones spool out a fiber optic cable behind them. They cannot be jammed with radio signal jamming. They can fly behind mountains and houses and fly very low out of the line-of-sight generally required for radio communications. They can sit turned off on the side of a road and take off when targets arrive. This video has footage from both Ukrainian and Russian fiber-optic first-person-view (FPV) drones. Because they can't be jammed, if one is flying towards you, you're pretty much going to die. The path to escape with the best odds is to dive into thick brush, where the drone's fiber optic cable will get tangled. Much of Ukraine is open space without thick brush, or you could be in a vehicle. If you manage to escape one drone, there might be more. Usually multiple drones are used in the same attack.
Geopolitics
10. Europeans are willing to rely on their own aircraft instead of the US-made F-35, even though their own options are "a major and indisputable step down in capability", but why?
What is actually happening is America's allies are losing faith in Washington and the whole US-led "defense industrial realm" -- says Simon Whistler or whichever member of his research team wrote this script.
"We'll just quote Prime Minister Carney's remarks to government leaders on the 27th of March."
"The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperations, is over. The United States, and particularly the Administration of Donald Trump, has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada as a 51st state over the last several months, something that's led to a reinvigoration of Canadian nationalism in opposition to the idea on a level not seen in generations. Not only that, but America has hit Canada, one of its closest allies and trading partners, with major tariffs against Canada's oil and manufacturing industries -- the two cornerstones of its export economy. Those tariffs followed a much longer will-he/won't-he."
"To trust the US as a defender of Canada in this moment appears to simply be a bridge too far. In Europe, rising distrust of Washington is tied closely to Trump's approach to Ukraine, derided across much of the continent as both a betrayal of Kiev and a naïve, utterly foolish decision to place any level of trust in Vladimir Putin. But in late February Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy was berated in what appeared to be a planned rhetorical ambush by both Trump and US Vice President JD Vance. American leaders' conduct was widely seen as a betrayal of Ukraine by European NATO members. A few weeks later survey across NATO nations showed that just half of all Poles, 45% of Germans, and barely a third of Brits believed that the US would actually honor its commitment to collective defense under the NATO alliance and come to defend a fellow NATO member if it were attacked. Only one in three Canadians in the same survey believed American Article 5 commitments to be credible."
"American demands that European nations hike their defense spending have been taken quite poorly owing to the fact that most European nations are already stepping up spending, suggesting that Washington's new demands either suggest the US isn't paying attention or is looking for pretext not to defend Europe when the time comes. Trump's coziness with unsavory figures and autocrats from Putin to Xi to Erdogan certainly haven't endeared him to European leadership. And nor have his outright threats to take the Danish territory of Greenland by force. America's diminishing credibility extends even beyond NATO. On the campaign trail in 2024 Trump refused to firmly commit to America's long-standing vow to defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion."
Cybersecurity
11. The Trump Administration's Signal got hacked. So it looks like what happened here, is, because there is a requirement for government communications to be archived for historical record, the Trump Administration wasn't using the standard version of Signal, and on May 4th, some journalist took a photo of Mike Walz using his phone and people saw that he was using a modified version of Signal called TeleMessage. Some hacker figured out where TeleMessage was sending messages to be archived, which was an Amazon Web Services (AWS) server, which they were able to hack, allegedly quite easily, and gain access to the archive, in unencrypted form. You have to wonder, if some hacker was able to do that, and do it that easily, maybe they weren't the first? Maybe the server got hacked by Russia, North Korea, or Tokelau? Also, TeleMessage was not even made by a US company, it was made by an Israeli company. A non-US company was trusted to archive US government communications.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/05/signal-telemessage-hack-trump-waltz.html
3D Printing
12. 3D-printed Starbucks. In Brownsville, Texas. Rumored to be opening on April 28. Today is May 17th. Is it open?
https://newatlas.com/architecture/3d-printed-starbucks-texas/
This is what I wrote my policy proposal for. Have a look at my stack. We will 100% need some sort of UBI to support the tax base.