Pretty interesting story, I hadn't heard about it before. An explorer made a expedition to the North Pole using a heavily modified WWI era submarine. They made a lot of changes and additions to make it more suited for arctic exploration. It was pretty advanced for its time.

Every continent is at the lowest fertility rate it has ever been on so far. Besides Africa and Oceania all continents are below replacement fertility rate, and the two that are above replacement are still consistently on the decline. While there are cultures with a steady fertility rate, these are often below replacement and still decline after 2-3 decades to newest low.

South Korea managed to reach the lowest fertility rate at 0.72 and is still set for decline.

It is possible that for Humans the actual lowest low fertility rate might be pandas ( that is zero fertility rate ).

All realistic population projections have to account for the fact that lowest low fertility rate hasn't been reached so far.

So here are the realistic projections for global population and fertility:

1. Highest high - Fertility rates remain the same through the century as they are today. - 13.59 billion population in 2100 and rising.

2. Medium - Global population growth rate declines at a rate of 0.1% every 5 years. 10.13 billion population peak by 2069 before decline.

3. Low projection - Global population growth rate declines at a rate of 0.1% every 2-3 years. 9.05 billion population peak by 2046 followed by decline in global population.

Most likely scenario, global population peaks earlier than 2080 as projected by the UN, makes it no higher than 9.5 billion humans peak at most.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Also I have no idea where the fertility rate actually increased in the past two years to explain the increase in population growth over the past two years.

As per macrotrends the fertility rate is rising in every country which sounds, incorrect to say the least.

!neolibs !antibharatiya !nooticers

On the link you can check fertility rates as well.

!trekkies

An AI made up of specialized units for specific expertise and millions of them spread around.

Also makes it possible for the AI to keep learning without forgetting apparently.

I don't know if we are going to get to AI ,or whether development rate will keep accelerating, but AI is certainly consistently improving even now, and if you think the rates of improvement from last year were good enough, then AI will keep scaling up at that consistent rate for decades to come.

I think even the free AI is already good enough for single individuals to increase efficiency in their daily lives. Most of the current AI pursuits are more related to making AI advanced enough for megacorporations to get net benefits from.

And it's higher by a whole lot.

Ants are therefore the most successful species on the planet.

Ants count as the winner of the evolutionary arms race as long as humans don't manage to permanently settle another planet.

Be man:

Go through multiple population booms.

Go through exponential technological growth.

Go through an intelligence explosion as human societies become ever more efficient and all humans gain further education over time.

Have the line of human development stack up vertically that's how fast things are going.

The ants are still ahead of you and winning the evolutionary arms race.

Be ant:

Haven't changed shit since 140 MYA

Have watched countless epochs of life come and go. Ants are still here, and remain so in large numbers.

Are seeing a population boom in current year while most species on the planet are going extinct.

Every few years scientists find out they were off by a few trillion to quadrillion as to how many ants are really out there.

Most successful variants are warriors ( Fire ants ), wood workers ( Carpenter ants ), and farmers ( Argentine ants ).

New larger empires still being discovered in current century.

If we go by human civilization, intelligence stacks up the larger the colony is.

In ants also it has been observed that an ant colony is an emergent intelligence greater than any individual ant.

My question is, there are probably animals out there that frick around with ant colonies from time to time. So why have ant colonies not yet developed an optimum strategy to kill larger individual animals.

One example I could think of off the top of my head is:

1. Ants in an ant colony develop a we all need to climb on this creature pheremone.

2. After a certain density of ants is reached ( Which an ant can determine by the number of ants it is bumping into walking over the animal skin ) the ants begin releasing a start biting pheremone.

In this manner thousands of ants together end up biting a small animal to death, without giving it enough time to escape.

This strategy in my opinion is simple enough that an ant colony could be able to evolve it, yet no colony has developed something this simple so far.

Why is that?

Is there some logical limit to ant colony intelligence scaling beyond which no matter what an ant colony does or how much further it grows it just wouldn't develop more complex behavior?

By this logic of how we may have groups and colonies in nature that stop adding greater intelligence even with an increase in group size beyond a certain point, do humans similarly have an upper limit on group intelligence, beyond which no amount of integration would create a smarter more efficient system?

The fact that China has a far larger population that the western nation states, and is able to stack up far more intelligence suggest that 1 billion plus humans is not the upper limit of human colony intelligence scaling and integration.

https://thewire.in/environment/ant-colony-memories

Here is a related article. Older, larger ant colonies do appear to be on average smarter than newer, smaller ant colonies.

This suggests that ant colonies do indeed have some form of memory.

Maybe the Argentine super colony consisting of 300+ million ants is indeed smarter than any other ant colony.

A human brain has 400,000 the number of neurons that an ant brain does.

The average ant colony has 20,000 - 100,000 ants, clearly not enough to be smart as a human.

The largest supercolony of ants is made up of argentine ants.

An argentine ant is about 0.2 mm long.

The average ant is about 11.5 mm long ( Based on ant size range being 0.2 to 25 mm long. )

Assuming neuron numbers scale proportionately, an argentine ant on average should have 250,000/6 = 41,666 neurons.

6 argentine ants equal one normal ant.

To match the number of neurons in humans there would have to be 400,000 ants in a room.

In the case of argentine ants, we presume this number to be 400,000 x 6 = 2.4 million argentine ants having the same number of neurons as a single human.

Now, assuming that a dispersed group is 1/10th as efficient as one member if he or she individually has the same number of neurons as the collective group, the average number of argentine ants required to be as smart as a human would be 24 million argentines ants.

The argentine ants supercolony is estimated to have 307 million members, which means the supercolony has an intelligence level similar to 13 humans working together.

Currently the main argentine supercolony spreads out as far as 6,000 km.

A human is on average 1,700 times larger than a human.

From an ant perspective the Argentine supercolony has accomplished the equivalent of taking over land worth 10.2 million human kilometers.

For context - The circumference of the Earth is only 40,075 km long.

From an ant perspective, the argentine ant supercolony has done the equivalent of conquering and populating the Moon and getting halfway to Venus when it is on its closest distance to Earth, or colonized everything 1/10th of the way to Mars.

Argentine ants were also introduced to Europe only in the 20th century, likely the mid 1900's.

The average argentine ant lives for 10 to 12 months.

Humans live 80 times longer on average.

The Argentine ant supercolony has over the course of 80 generations conquered the equivalent of humans conquering their entire planet, the satellite next door, and a bunch on space rocks 1/10th of the way on the route to Mars.

From an ant perspective they did all this in 5872 human years since their colony formed.

Human civilization began approximately 4,000 BC. That's 6,000 years ago.

We are expected to colonize and have a permanent presence on Mars this century.

The argentine Ant supercolony timeline of conquest and expansion is moving faster than the history of mankind and its spread if we put them both on a proportionate scale.

Conclusion:

The Argentine ant supercolony is smarter than the average human. It is likely 13x as smart as the average human and has spent all of its intelligence points on spreading as far out as possible. It does not instead focus on creating things like better cowtools because it is already winning with its current strategy ( and for all we know maybe the cowtools and quality of life in the argentine ant colony is far better than in other ant colonies ).

Another few decades to a century from now we can expect to see the first multicontinental ant super colony.

Humans are going to be competing against the ant hordes in the centuries ahead. Good luck humans.

I also just found out that fire ants have indeed killed humans and cows.

Extra:

Ant colonies understand the concept of dry storage.

Ants have figured out tool use:

https://elifesciences.org/articles/61298

More /r/climatechange hysterics

Probably about half the world population before we actually change our behaviors. They'll be brown and poor so the world will not care for a while.

We will hardly register the first billion. But after three maybe we will pay attention

I think the world will quickly discover how much labour of invisible people they depend on. So much manufacturing has moved out of China to parts of India and neighbouring countries. Look up a list of the countries most at risk of extreme heat waves and then look up their major exports an industries.

People aren't just going to quietly let themselves and their families die, they will try to escape and become climate refugees. It will be a refugee crisis like we've never seen. Conflicts will erupt and its effects will cascade across the world economy. We very much should be building infrastructure to accommodate everyone in a sustainable way, but we aren't. Instead, fascist governments will stoak xenophobia and leverage it to solidify power.

People will die in the southwest of the United States- rise in older people and poor people it can rise quickly to thousands

It's already happening it's dystopian times- homeless people pass out on sidewalks wake up with 3rd degree burns- some don't survive- older people die in houses can't afford ac

In Phoenix 14 heat-related deaths since May, with 234 under investigation. As of this time in 2023, the county had recorded 12 heat-related deaths with about 100 under investigation

current metro area population of Phoenix in 2024 is 4,777,000

A BILLION WILL DIE IN A FEW DECADES BUT PEOPLE WONT CARE CAUSE THEY'RE BROWN

By 2050 it might be easier to ask how many will be left.

We are already seeing people dying in rich northern countries. Hundreds of people died in Canada in the heat dome a couple years ago, and billions of sea creatures off the coast of BC where I lived at the time. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the life that will be lost in poorer countries which is incredibly unfair. But it's not something that will happen, it's something that is already happening.

So many concerned leafs on that thread

!neolibs

https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1dz4j3w/the_cities_where_the_climate_is_set_to_change_the/

2084. Lol.

Let's reassess after we get through 2030 shall we. We'll need brand new models to predict the heck to come.

I already know about:

and :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

I am also open to blackpill and redpill data. As long as it is true I want it.

Thanks.

Comment links and info.

That would put China 8 years behind the capabilities of NASA.

My favorite part is how everybody thinks that Chinese tech is shit meanwhile it is within a 10 year radius of the US.

OpenAI on its way to human level reasoning:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-11/openai-sets-levels-to-track-progress-toward-superintelligent-ai

Neuralink planning to cure blindsight :

https://x.com/iam_smx/status/1811110617274798157

Open AI levels of AI ( They are at level 1 about to reach level 2 right now ):

Another article with a different classification of levels of AI:

https://arxiv.org/html/2311.02462v4#:~:text=Levels%20of%20AGI-,Table%201,-%3A

AI energy demands keep scaling up very fast:

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/

Chinese self optimizing factory is functional:

https://newatlas.com/robotics/xiaomi-dark-robotic-factory/

Non - tech worker jobs are being lost to AI :

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1e041lf/cnn_to_lay_off_100_staffers_as_it_preps_major/

Cool computation concept explaining why cryptography works :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit

There is a maximum physical compute power limit beyond which the laws of physics won't allow a computational system to get more efficient.

My thoughts:

Humanity figured out super advanced better than all humans narrow AI variant years ago. We don't really need to figure out AGI to advance humanity at unprecedented rates, we could do the same thing by creating a thousand different narrow AIs specializing in different fields. If humanity is really at that point where we can make self optimizing and self improving factories, then there really isn't much else to be done. Technology is already halfway out of human hands. We are the midwives of the future. An expert intelligence AI would be truly advantageous to the species as you would suddenly have all of humanity having access to all the knowledge of the world up to a decade or two with a qualified teacher to teach it well.

Also, if China fails to surpass the US ( Very unlikely ), India will definitely surpass the US, because unlike China, India will have China and South East Asia to fund its markets to surpass the western markets.

As expected, Elon Musk's net worth will cross a trillion USD with neuralink and SpaceX.

Conclusion:

The future is here, and it is moving at faster rates than even us nerds can track anymore.

Think about it.

For the prices of a product or specialization to drop you need to keep increasing the supply of those that can produce said produce or service.

As the number of STEM graduates increase across the world it over time would lead to a lowering of, 1) The salary of the average STEM worker to meet basic needs and middle class living and, 2) Cheaper prices for software and hardware as more and more competitors rise up and better production techniques are developed over time.

Imagine the lowering of prices across all STEM products similar to the lowering of prices of TVs or mobiles ( in relation to how much they scale up in computation each year ).

The rise of STEM graduates across the world is the best thing that has happened to improving the global quality of life, taking into account that it is technological developments that lead to lowering prices and increased GDP growth today.

With China acting as a counterweight to the US, the US can no longer rely on the strategy of outsourcing all their labor to the cheapest places possible, but have to actually invent new techniques to improve production to stay competitive against middle income economies in terms of pricing.

The primary downside of the US led world order was that only 3-5 countries would grow well across a generation at a time, with most of the world left nearly stagnant, mostly the non-Western world order.

In a multi-polar world however, every country in the world has so many trading opportunities that GDP can only go up at this point in time.

The rise of China has given South American nation states a second chance at improving their quality of life, without having to become completely dependent on the west.

It has also created a mass market of middle income tech products that are now affordable to most middle income nation states, which previously was a field only filled by Samsung, which alone could not provide affordable technology for the whole world.

In addition, it has created an opportunity for the East to compete in the race to unravel the secrets of the universe and make new strides in terms of physics, biology, chemistry, and technological discoveries in the future.

Conclusion:

The Chinese are going to overtake the west, and this is a bad thing only for the west. The rest of the world is going to benefit from a new explosion of lower prices, cheap high quality products, and faster waves of innovation when US patent law isn't holding it all back.

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#68be563c3d78

At current rates, Elon Musk could buy a new twitter every single month.

He is currently rich enough to buy an African nation if they were willing to sell.

His net worth is increasing by 2 billion USD per day right now.

This guy is 100% dying as a trillionaire.

US economy doubles in another 25 years with Elon leading it.

Last generation the US was coasting off of Moore's law and the Internet.

The Internet bubble burst in the 90's but the top companies still scaled up consistently that were involved with the internet.

Similarly this generation is running on AI and Huang's law, which declares that GPU capabilities will triple every 2 years. Which is 1.5 times faster than Moore's law.

We are definitely in an AI bubble, the good news however is that it just means that out of the 1000 companies that are advertising themselves as AI focused companies, 900 will probably fail, 90 will get acquisitioned by the top 10 and the top 10 will come out consistently growing further in the years and decades ahead. Just like what happened with the internet bubble.

The good news with Huang's law is that hardware scaling, AI development, and GPU scaling have formed a sort of loop where improvements in one lead to improvements in the other two which loops back to improvements in another one leading to improvements in two so on and so forth.

With the US leading in space launches as a viable business, improvement in robotics, AI/GPUs/ Electronic hardware looped together and consistently scaling up, and the slow scaling up of the US consumer product industry, we can expect the US to keep growing at a rate between 2-2.5% year on year for the next few decades.

Chinese GPUs being 10 years behind US GPUs means they are 243 times weaker than US GPUs, which means Chinese GPUs and semiconductors only have a market in the middle income and developing economies, similar to Samsung phones having a market primarily in the middle income world.

Unless the Chinese figure out fusion energy, the Chinese economy is going to stagnate and decline long before the US economy.

AI in the US will probably double in scale every two years. It just won't scale up at the rate that Chatgpt did in the starting years. Expect AI to keep scaling up at a rate where you don't feel like AI is replacing jobs but AI is indeed replacing jobs.

The next stage of AI development isn't scaling up the amount of data, but improving AI data filtering capabilities, then scaling up those more compressed models to the maximum level, then fine tuning that and maximizing it again, and doing this repeatedly in a loop. ( Personal opinion, based on how people managed to make something as functional as ChatGPT2/3 with far fewer parameters, logically you should then be able to scale up that new more efficient model for even better results then again improve efficiency down the line ).

Huang's law should last for 2 generations, taking into account how long Moore's law lasted for.

The primary challenge for the US:

It has reached a point where only the US can afford its own products when it comes to the top tier medical, technological, robotic equipment that it makes. The US is thus divided into two markets, one internal where only Americans can afford American products, and one external where Americans try to use their superior tech know how to out compete middle income nation states in producing the same products but cheaper through new techniques of production ( Examples - vertical farms, synthetic food alternatives, lab grown meat, etc ).

Conclusion:

The US is growing at a scale that is separating the US from the rest of the world permanently. I do not know the repercussions of this for the world.

Me neither. But that's probably because someone made it up over a decade ago, cited random sources, and no one ever noticed

https://web.archive.org/web/20180227034246/https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/the-good-fight-zwnj-the-last-lynching/Content?oid=1108264

https://web.archive.org/web/20131103031652/http://archive.upstatetoday.com/?p=5441

It is the Goldbach conjecture (1742), which states that any even number larger than 2 can be represented as the sum of two prime numbers.

Today, this problem has been partially solved for numbers up to 4 x 10 to the power 18 but still remains unsolved.

Maybe one of you dramanauts is neurodivergent enough to solve it and bring humanity one step ahead of the bozos that used to exist in the 18th century?

I find it kind of cool that the oldest unsolved problem is less than 300 years old, and not like a thousand years old or some other crazy number like that. It shows that humanity has actually advanced enough to solve every single technical problem from the past millennia over time, and that we are today in a league of our own.

Additional fun fact:

In 2016 some math nerds ( Maryna Viazovska ) figured out how to pack a sphere in 8 dimensions. I have no idea what that means but good for mathematical progress I suppose.

I wonder how long it will be before the oldest unsolved problem for humans will be in the 19th century.

In any case, I feel like we should all feel humbled by the fact that across billions of humans nobody could solve a math problem over the course of 281 years.

We aren't perfect, and we have yet a long way to grow. Human intelligence will continue to increase by 2 points every decade, which means a new tier of smarter humans every 75 years.

Once we hit the great stagnation, we will reach double our capacity every 75 years, the EU has already hit that point, we are all just catching up to it.

ChatGPT went all in on increasing the amount of data to work with to boost the AI capabilities, but just like all other tech sectors, it seems pretty clear that we find diminishing returns with each doubling in the amount of data.

Currently we have reached that point where only trillion dollar companies are capable of building better and better AI fast.

General AI even now can regurgitate the best answers, but it hasn't shown the capacity to create something truly new, that comes with the randomness that emerges from biological evolution.

General AI is limited by the total knowledge of humanity being fed into it, beyond which it cannot grow no matter what. It is the world's smartest answering machine.

Will AI be able to replace humanity? No.

Will AI be able to make robotic equivalents to human labor? Yes.

Today, the most advanced AI in the world is Gemini by google.

It is taking the efforts of the 4th most valued company in the world to keep developing and upgrading AI further.

The current AI boom was a random discovery and it will slow down as fast as it rose up.

General AI will very likely peak at being 2-3 times smarter than the smartest human, then go no further.

This is because it cannot create anything new, it can only pattern match all the data that already exists out there.

Until and unless we give AI the ability to "mutate" like human DNA does, it will reach an upper limit and stagnate at that point.

Conclusion:

AI won't take over the world. It will be another tool to help humans create more things faster, and finish up all the current backlog of research projects.

A project that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades to build and the work is divided up among several different countries. Maybe they'll finish it by 2100.

Looks fun and educational. Enjoy.