Panos for Progress: Thoughts and Selections

Data centers need a lot of power. Nuclear energy has been reinvigorated to support the growing demand for power. Both data centers and power plants need a lot of water for cooling and other purposes. Let's build them side by side and float them in the ocean past the horizon of major coastal cities. Make it a trifecta by having a desalination plant option; these are also power hungry. I proposed some of these in 2010 , as part of my platform for Mayor of Honolulu, to enhance the infrastructure resilience for one million people in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Five years later, a group from MIT and other researchers launched an initiative to add substance to this concept ... Floating on the deep sea . Nowadays the concept is gaining production scale : "Samsung Heavy Industries is pioneering floating nuclear power plants (FNPP) by developing barges equipped with compact molten salt reactors (CMSR) or Small Modular Reactors (SMR)." The floating infrastructure proposals ...

Of course Sergei Brin and Google are almost synonymous, but I was intrigued by the fact that quite a few other Russian named people are associated with Goggle, so I decided to ask three prominent AI tools about publicly listed Google associates with Russian names. None of the tools was very forthcoming with a list, so I used three questions which I list below along with the free version of each of the three AI tools that I consulted. The results were a mixed bag and the success rate was about 50%. Claude corrected me that Anguelov whom I know as a Waymo engineer, is actually Bulgarian. Gemini came up with a person named Alan Russian! 1. Can you list publicly known Russian named associates at Google? 2. How about Dragomir Anguelov? 3. Any one else? Click the image of the table to see a large, clear version.

"This is not another social media. This is not another smartphone. This is something altogether different. Titanic things, beyond everyone’s grasp, are happening." This is a concluding quote from a portion of Dean W. Ball's (of Hyperdimensional ) take on the current status of AI.  Read it below and and then think about it for a minute. All the expected vast change in the next couple of years will be managed by the same politicians (worldwide) that "handled" Covid, Haiti, Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, etc. There is no effective large-scale crisis management, and Trump's governance is a global crisis. That's the scary part... so much potential for mayhem. Novus Ordo Seclorum--Reflections on DeepSeek by Dean W Ball "I predicted that a Chinese lab would credibly replicate OpenAI’s o1 model within a few months in my first analysis of o1 back in September. For me, this was priced in. But it was not priced in for many others, and I did not remotely anticipa...

Definition : Self-driving labs combine robotics, AI and advanced computing to design, make, test and analyze potential new materials in a loop guided by AI that learns from the experiments it has run and makes decisions about what to do next. Importance : It currently takes 20 years and $100 million on average to go from the discovery of a new material to high-volume advanced manufacturing of it. Self-driving labs could accelerate the process 100 to 1,000 times, potentially bringing a 10-plus-year operation down to less than a few months and cutting the cost from $100 million to less than $1 million. Only a few : This is a fairly embryonic concept. The list of countries with the trifecta of AI, robotics and advanced computing capabilities is small. Source: AXIOS Science, Aug. 08, 2024.

The current AI models are just the appetizer. AI capabilities will soon accelerate at an unfathomable rate, making today’s tech look like Stone Age tools - Emad Mostaque, former CEO of Stability AI This prophecy is likely true and it means that the talent, knowledge and experience of accomplished individuals will become tertiary. Mediocre persons who delve into AI tools will be better at getting to the top by harnessing the global talent, knowledge and experience. For those who see the glass half full, it'll be a world of opportunities for new winners and new losers. My guess is that in the next several years society will make a giant leap forward, mostly in science, medicine, research (see self-driving labs), industrial processes and management ... although many AI discoveries and proposed methods or actions may be too expensive, impractical or politically unacceptable to realize. However, soon enough, millions of idiots and powerful bad actors, including domestic and self-center...