I finished another round of revision with my hobby sci fi manuscript.
130k words.
I’ve got a professional editor looking at it now for the next round to get an adult in the room.
Things like getting a new smart tv set properly, or maintaining stable WiFi for devices throughout a home at all times, are still nontrivial tasks in the year 2025.
There’s often some friction, some gadget failing for no apparent reason, etc.
So I think we’re safe from the robot overlords for a little while more.
A mosque and church right next to each other.
GM
Throughout 2025 I’m going to keep posting exclusive content here on Nostr.
I would say it’s my New Year’s resolution but that implies difficulty or effort, whereas this is just something I like doing. Feels right.
This is where the Suez Canal meets the Mediterranean Sea.
Canal on the right, sea on the left. By extension, it’s also the coastal boundary between Africa and Asia.
Anyway, gm.
Almost all the chatter on crypto twitter is about meme coins now.
Basically the narratives ran out and reached their final, most transparent form.
Got enough billboards?
Gm.
The human brain runs on something like 20 watts of power. Less than a lightbulb. How many calculations it can do per second is partially unknown, but based on various estimates over the years the processing power is generally believed to be something like one exaflop per second. Some estimates are lower in the petaflops, while others are some orders of magnitude higher. Obviously “software” matters too, not just raw processing ability. The programming of the processor ensures that the processing capability is used efficiently rather than wasted.
The top superconductors crossed the exaflop level within the past few years. However, they run on like 20 megawatts of power; a million times more power than the human brain. They’re extremely large and energy intensive.
As a result, datacenter processing capability reaches something akin to the processing capability of a human brain well before that level of ability can be installed in a human-sized robot with similar energy consumption levels as a human.
Now, robots can offload some of their processing to datacenters, but still at a relatively high cost per calculation for a while, and at the general bandwidth limit of whatever the best wireless rate is in a region at any given time.
For some calculation types, of course computers passed humans long ago. A basic math calculator, for example, beats the best humans at calculating mathematical formulas. But when we talk about human brain “calculations” what it means is that the brain is taking in enormous amounts of information (all five senses at high fidelity, plus other indirect senses like acceleration/balance and other inputs), calculating it to make sense of it, calculating all sorts of things to interact with the environment, and simultaneously running the processes related to sapient thought and general problem solving.
As a result, it’s far easier to get a robot to work on an assembly line more efficiently than a human, or to calculate an insane number of protein folding tests, and things like that, than it is for a robot to be able to operate as effectively as a human in the real world with countless unexpected hazards.
For example, imagine a hypothetical robot handyman. It can drive out to your house and fix any residential electrical, plumbing, or hvac issue, or help with various miscellaneous things (fix drywall, get something out of a tree, carry stuff out of your attic, etc), and then drive back to the station. This is a shockingly hard problem. First they need extremely advanced mechanical bodies. Second they need processors strong enough and cheap enough to safely operate in 3D space with all sorts of unexpected things happening around them (compared to a highly controlled manufacturing floor), now all of these skills, and interact with language.
So, AI can start helping us offload certain types of white collar remote work and expand medical breakthroughs before it can replace human level in-field skilled physical labor. And it can start helping with specific in-field tasks that require less programming, like a robot dog or robot butler to watch your property or come with the owner around town, listen to owner commands and carry some of them out, and follow basic rules when left alone, well before it can fully replace a human for many in-field things.
Anyway, that’s a general framework or napkin math to help think through the order of impacts that AI can have as it goes up orders of magnitude in power and efficiency in the coming years.
A lot of people look down on blue collar work, which I think is misguided. Especially for skilled blue collar work (and most type of work does benefit from skill/experience).
Basically, there’s a popular notion that it’s objectively better to be a CEO than a plumber, or an engineer than a barber, and that’s pretty off base. So it’s not that they criticize blue collar work in any overt way; it’s that they assume that that people in “lower” jobs would all want to be in “higher” roles if they had the choice. A technician would want to be an engineer. A janitor would want to be a CEO.
There are a lot of studies on job happiness and one of the most consistent correlations is that people are happier when they get more immediate feedback. Like if you cut people’s hair or fix mechanical issues or wire up electronic boxes, you often resolve things in minutes, hours, days, or weeks depending the specific task, and with progress along the way, so you get that quick feedback loop where you see the positive results of your work quickly and tangibly. Nothing lingers, unclear and vague.
And for those jobs, often when you’re outside of work hours, you’re truly out. You don’t have to think about it. You can fully devote your focus elsewhere. There’s not some major thing hanging over your head, other than sometimes financial stress or indirect things.
Now, obviously jobs with more complexity and compensation and scale give people other benefits. More material comfort and safety, more power to impact the world at scale, more public prestige, etc. and for some people that’s important for happiness, and for others it is not. And the cost is that it’s generally highly competitive, rarely if ever turns off, and usually comes with much slower and more vague feedback loops in terms of seeing or feeling whether your work is making things better or not.
There was a time in my life where wiring up electronic boxes was really satisfying. Each project had a practical purpose but then also was kind of an artform since I wanted it to look neat for aesthetic and maintainability purposes. I would work on these things like a bonsai enthusiast would sculpt bonsai. And then eventually I would design larger systems and have technicians wire them instead, but for some of the foundational starting points I’d still set up the initial core pieces to get it started right. I wasn’t thrilled when I realistically had to give that up when I moved into management for a while.
I have a housekeeper clean my house every couple weeks. She’s a true pro; she used to clean high-end hotels for years and now works for herself cleaning houses. When we travel, she can let herself in and clean our place, since we trust her.
She doesn’t speak much English, but her daughter does, and that daughter recently graduated college.
Notably, she consistently sings while she cleans. She could listen to music or podcasts but doesn’t. She just sings every time she cleans. I can tell she’s generally in a state of flow while cleaning. She’s good at what she does, and it’s kind of a meditative experience involving repetition but also experience to do it properly and efficiently and then a satisfying conclusion of leaving things better than how they were found. Turning chaos to order.
Last year she was hit by a truck while driving, and had to be out of work for a few months to recover. When she came back, we just back-paid her the normal rate for those few months as though she cleaned on schedule, so she wouldn’t have any income gap from us. Full pay despite a work gap. She was shocked when we did that. We weren’t sure her financial situation (I assume it’s pretty good actually based on her rate), but basically we just treated the situation as though she were salaried with benefits even though she works on a per-job basis. Because skilled, trustworthy, and happy people are hard to come by and worth helping and maintaining connections with.
If I were to guess, I honestly think she is a happier person than I am on a day to day basis. It’s not that I’m unhappy; it’s that I think whatever percentage I might be on the subjective mood scale, she is visibly higher. I experience a state of flow in my work, and my type of work gives me a more frequent state of flow than other work I could do, but I think her work gives her an even higher ratio of flow.
Anyway, my point is that optionality is important. While it’s true that some jobs suck and some jobs are awesome, and financial security matters a lot, for the most part it’s more about how suited you are for a particular type of work at a particular phase in your life. And you’re not defined by your work; it’s just one facet of who you are among several facets.
Find what gives you a good state of flow, pays your bills, lets you save a surplus, and lets you express yourself in one way or another.
Writing a sci fi manuscript, and continuing to fine tune it, made me do a ton of extra research on current trends in AI, biotech, material science, and VR. Like a big refresh.
Not because the text focuses in detail on this tech (it doesn’t), but rather so that I have a general idea of what technologies are likely to come before or after other ones, to create what seems (at least to me) a reasonably coherent future world (with one big unrealistic extra thing I threw in there for fun).
There are a lot of different path dependencies or “alternate timelines” for how the world could look in say 2030, 2040, 2050, and so on. So no sci fi vision can be said to fully predict things. And for example, we don’t fault the movie Blade Runner for not accurately predicting what 2019 would be like in 1982.
But my goal is to be “well-considered.” Plausible. Or at least, plausible in the places where I am intending to be the most plausible.
For example if I read a space opera set 500 years in the future and AI is nowhere to be found, or minimally so, I am distracted by this unless given a plausible explanation. The explanation of “the author didn’t think about it” isn’t good enough, at least for something that big.
What technologies do you expect to surprise to the upside or downside in the next few decades?
My husband and I flew back from Dubai to Cairo today, on Christmas.
When we got home, my mother in law and father in law (who are Muslim) had a surprise waiting for us: a Christmas tree set up in our wing of the home.
They took the time to decorate it themselves, too. The whole place feels so festive now. People can be so cool and thoughtful.
Anyway, GM and Merry Christmas.
My mom was like “oh you’ll be in Dubai during Christmas, so you won’t see many Christmas trees. What a shame.”
Meanwhile Dubai:
Dubai Global Village is this big festival that has shops and food from different countries/continents of the world.
The Americas one just cuts to the chase and is like “Steaks and Butter.” That’s our heritage.
This hyper-modern mosque design.
Usually when I see tall buildings I’m like “meh.”
This one, however, feels even bigger in person.
An amoeba is more complex than any machine that humans have thus far made.
