Futurology

We've done this for a few years on the r/futurology subreddit. Here's 2024's predictions. Not many seem to have got a lot right, though most got a certain amount correct.

The research is on what is referred to as LUCA - the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all animals, plants and single cell creatures that exist today. Crucially, that is not the same as the very earliest life on Earth. There is thought to be other simpler life that led to LUCA.

The research is surprising in its implications. It finds LUCA was very complex very early on in Earth's history. In fact, very soon after any life was possible at all (300 million years after the Moon was formed), it was already a complex life form that coded for and used 2,600 different proteins.

The implication? Either life forms much more easily than we thought, and is thus more common elsewhere than we might expect. Intriguingly, this also boosts the argument for Panspermia. That is the idea that space dust from asteroid-planet collisions, that is travelling throughout the galaxy, is seeding life as it lands on new planets.

The outpouring of support for the shooter in this case has sometimes reminded me a little of pre-revolutionary France. Now that he's been arrested, we can see he's likely to become a charismatic figure for many. He's good-looking, intelligent, and has a social media trail that means he'll attract support from the left and right.

Here's a Nitter link to his Twitter activity. He's hard to pin down politically. Veering from anti-trans, pro-men's rights, pro-Peter Thiel/Elon Musk, to his obvious approval for violent revolution. His review of the Unabomber's manifesto makes the latter clear too.

It seems almost inevitable he'll develop a cult following among some. Yet this will be tied to his ideas for violent revolutionary action in America. How might this impact the future?

Despite its name, The 1918 'Spanish' flu pandemic is thought to have first originated in the US. Now it seems history may be close to repeating itself. Throughout 2024 the H5N1 Bird Flu virus has been spreading among US cow herds and is now found in over 500 herds in 15 states. If it spreads to pig herds that is an even bigger problem. Historically, influenza in pigs has been much more likely to cause the genetic recombinations that create human-to-human transmissible diseases.

There's good news, and bad news.

The good news is that mRNA vaccines, in time, should be able to combat any human transmissible strain that arises - though it may take another global lockdown before they are developed and manufactured.

The bad news is that the human mortality rate could be much higher than Covid or Spanish flu. Some variants of H5N1 humans have picked up from animals seem to have near 50% mortality rates. We won't know if we get a milder version until/if it happens.

The worst news? Stopping this spreading to US pig herds will require extraordinary care and vigilance from numerous government public health agencies and everyone working on farms. Just at the moment the public have voted to put clowns in charge of those efforts, who are also talking about shutting them all down. Hubris like this almost begs to be punished by disaster.

In May 2023 Google famously said “We Have No Moat And Neither Does OpenAI”. By that they meant they have no future protected business model to justify the tens of billions they are all burning through every month developing AI. Maybe it's even worse - even when they start to build the tiniest of moats, China drains it dry.

Here we see more evidence for that proposition, Tencent's HunyuanVideo, the equal of leading western AI video generation models. Tencent released HunyuanVideo’s open weights and code, making the model readily available for both researchers and commercial uses.

Where will all this end? Many people think AI funding is currently at the irrational exuberance end-of-bubble phase. Will this make it 'too big to fail' when it does? Will we see future public bailouts in the 100's of billions for AI companies?