Intelligence futures🔮💰 genesis🌅 the great AI graduate squeeze🎓 centaur🏹 potemkin understanding🎭 strawberry revolution🍓 needlefish🐟 the posthuman age👶🤖 world pulling apart🌍💔 #2025.27

Please don't turn off the simulation📎

Welcome to Memia, your weekly dose of situational awareness across AI, emerging tech and humanity’s exponentially accelerating future.

Another huge knowledge-inhale today…a marathon weekly session of learning for me… I hope you get as much value reading these as I do compiling them!

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🪉In coding agent heaven

I’m still enjoying an extended stay here in Oxford, UK - in amongst the summer sunshine I have been getting some quality heads-down time on Sensorium development for much of the week…productive. As a result, pretty much 95% of this newsletter first draft was curated and written by AI now, with lighter human editing required than previously. I’ll be opening up analysis features progressively to paid subscribers soon - but right now feel free to sign up and see a preview of the newsletter each week before it’s published.

(As always let me know if you think the AI-generated text improves, worsens, or doesn’t have a noticeable effect on the signal-to-noise ratio!)

I’ve been using a combination of Gemini CLI, Claude Code and Cursor (less these days) as my coding AI agent partners. CC and Gemini CLI have very similar command line UX, subtly different coding strategies / approaches and about equal speed and quality performance from what I can tell. I’ve got into the habit of prompting each to check the other’s work. Gemini CLI’s advantage is that it’s free, for now…. Next up: there are some open-source agents out there to try, too.

Either way, these agents augment my rate-limited meatbrain by orders of magnitude on coding tasks, allowing me to chew through features in the backlog. (Occasionally they get stuck in a loop trying to do something very simple and I have to step in to bump forward.) The workflow is still very much still human-in-the-loop, progressing in small increments and then testing / debugging the output each time.

As I keep saying, I think these coding agents are a signal of how the future of all cognitive work which has a pass/fail criteria is going to look within a year from now. So many human information worker tasks are going to be automated so rapidly… hang on to your hat!

(This article from Harvard Business Review says much the same thing: What Gets Measured, AI Will Automate).

HBR

One other really interesting tidbit: I have at least 4 colleagues *of a similar vintage* to me, who used to be hands-on the coding tools years ago but took a career track shifting into management / non-technical contributor roles. All of them have remarked to me in the last month how much they’re enjoying getting back into it with AI. Quote:

“I'm like a kid again coding (and learning)“

That’s a sure-fire signal of something that’s in our collective future, I’m not exactly sure what yet.

ℹ️ The usual PSA: Memia sends *very long emails*, best viewed online or in the Substack app.

🗞️Weekly roundup

The most clicked link in last week’s newsletter (2nd week running) was: Andrej Karpathy’s fantastic talk at Y Combinator Startup School: Software Is Changing (Again). I’ve watched this three times now.

🔁ICYMI

While I’m nomadding around Europe for the next few months, I’ll be keeping my LinkedIn profile backgrounds updated with sci-fi imaginations of where I’m currently located. This week, still in Oxford:

🙄Finally, New Zealand gets an AI “strategy”

(Sometimes it helps to have some distance from home to see things from a more detached perspective… if you don’t have any kiwi ties you can skip this bit!)

Long-time holder of the dubious accolade of being the only OECD country that had not published an AI strategy, Aotearoa’s government finally dropped this lightweight 20-page (including titles) PDF on an unsuspecting (and, to be fair, largely apathetic) public:

MBIE

“Going for Growth means confidently embracing Artificial Intelligence. The New Zealand AI strategy reflects that AI presents the biggest opportunity of our time – unlocking innovation, productivity, and smarter decision-making across New Zealand.“

So we now have the long-anticipated AI strategy, subtitled "Investing with confidence". What’s in it? Here are all the, er, highlights:

Seriously, that’s it.

…It would be fair to say that I, and others, are *underwhelmed*:

“This feels really insubstantial considering the amount of time it's taken the Government to finally deliver on. (Some of us have been talking about a national AI strategy since 2018!)

Taking a read through the lightweight 20-page document, I'm not so sure it's a strategy as much as a "vibe". The advocated "light touch" approach is almost completely hands off: As Justin Flitter also observed, I couldn't find any tangible targets, actions or commitments to accountability, just sweeping generalisations and a few rapidly-aging case studies. As such it feels very undercooked and behind the times on how quickly AI technology is advancing internationally - and how Aotearoa's AI ecosystem will actually be able to respond against a rapidly changing technological landscape.

Three main areas of focus for me:

1. I broadly agree with the approach to focus on driving adoption rather than trying to compete in foundation AI model development - that train left the station over a decade ago. However, I caution that a strategy of encouraging New Zealand's domestic businesses (healthcare, agriculture and education are singled out) to exclusively adopt overseas commercial AI services isn't "investment" - it's growing consumption, subjecting our domestic industries to increased rent-taking by Big Tech. GDP may rise but AoNZ's share of the dividends won't. (Cf. Australian banks!)

2. There is no mention anywhere of the need to balance open-source AI with commercial proprietary models - if only to mitigate New Zealand's increasing dependence on large US hyperscale technology companies. As I wrote in my book Fast Forward Aotearoa, continued 100% dependency on overseas technology providers places New Zealand at risk of loss of sovereignty — a “hollowing out” of capabilities to actually maintain control of pivotal technologies. (Note the recent de-platforming of the ICC Chief Prosecutor by Microsoft due to US sanctions - in the current heightened geopolitical climate I think government should be actively planning and investing for how to avoid this kind of event happening here).

3. Focus on AI for economic growth while ignoring societal effects: any AI strategy needs to consider emerging downsides of AI as well - we are already seeing impacts in the jobs market (particularly for new graduates). What is the government's approach to ensuring a "fair transition" to post-AI labour markets? Also what about the uses of AI for new cybersecurity threats, generation of convincing deepfake content and AI scams..? At least some acknowledgement of these really important issues would have delivered confidence that the Government is fully across the brief here.

Finally, the "light touch" approach doesn't compare favourably with the more interventionist approaches of countries like Singapore, Australia, Finland and the UK which are actively investing billions of dollars into state-funded AI initiatives. Fundamentally state investment builds depth of AI skills and capability which are in extremely short supply in Aotearoa right now.

Going meta: It's not clear to me what the consultation process was to develop this strategy. It feels like it was written by Wellington policy analysts who only really understand "artificial intelligence" in the abstract and don't engage closely with the technology every day - going forward policy would benefit from greater engagement of New Zealand's AI technology practitioners and companies.

Grade: E, must try harder.”

(That’s me being diplomatic, btw).

The sad bit is that it’s transparent that this is window-dressing attempting to disguise a completely empty portfolio of actionable investment: this government and bureaucracy clearly doesn’t have situational awareness of the accelerating AI changes afoot internationally, or the levers to pull. I fully expect *nothing* tangible to emerge from this announcement between now and next year’s election…. then it’ll be back to the navel-gazing drawing board for yet more years. I hope I’m wrong, but…

(And yes I know it’s easy to snipe from the sidelines… but I’ve got a fair bit of mileage under my belt in this particular domain - if anyone’s working inside the government machine on this, my inbox is always open...)

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🔮💰 Intelligence futures

Anyway, on to more interesting developments…this one caught my attention this week on LessWrong: @theothersteven proposes creating futures markets for both compute and AI intelligence, arguing that current spot markets can't handle the scale of AI infrastructure investment:

“OpenAI is about to spend US$500 billion on infrastructure they might not need: if researchers aren't ready with experiments, or if demand for intelligence doesn't grow, every unused GPU-hour vanishes forever. Yet there's no futures curve for compute, no market price for intelligence, no way to hedge any of it.

We're building the intelligence economy on vibes when we could be building it on market prices.

What if compute and AI intelligence could be traded like commodities? Futures markets could transform risky AI spending into predictable investment, while serving as a real-time prediction market for AI progress itself.”

He argues that as AI transitions from research curiosity to industrial utility, the absence of proper financial instruments for this new economy represents a massive market inefficiency waiting to be arbitraged by whoever figures out how to make "intelligence" as tradeable as pork bellies.

Memia narrative: Although it feels counterintuitive that a complex concept like “intelligence” could be treated as a commodity or utility… what happens if in future we can literally trade the future price of thinking?

🌅 Genesis

On my reading list: controversial US statesman Henry Kissinger's final intellectual contribution before he died, teamed together with ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft's Craig Mundie to tackle AI's existential implications for humanity, in their book Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit.

The book proposes "sober optimism" as humanity's stance toward AI, advocating for abundance economics, global cooperation frameworks, and technical alignment solutions while grappling with profound questions about mortality, morality, and what makes us fundamentally human.

High-signal X account @8teAPi sings high praise indeed:

@8teAPi

(Choose your own adventure, there…)

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🎓 The great graduate AI squeeze

Fresh graduates are facing their worst job market in decades, with graduate unemployment rates exceeding national averages across North America and Europe as AI automates entry-level roles and degree inflation meets reality. Even elite MBA programmes are seeing sharp drops in job placement rates, while UK professional services firms experiment with AI for tasks traditionally handled by junior staff. The irony is palpable: we've created a generation of highly educated workers entering a job market that increasingly questions whether those degrees are actually necessary.

Articles appearing this week in:

• The FT: It’s a bad time to be a graduate

• Phys.org: 'Into a void': Young US college graduates face employment crisis

• Techspot: Universities are rethinking computer science curriculum in response to AI tools: US universities are shifting from coding mastery to AI literacy and critical thinking skills.

• Student Connor Myers in The Guardian: As if graduating weren’t daunting enough, now students like me face a jobs market devastated by AI

Memia narrative: finally mainstream commentary is surfacing the looming collision between AI automation and credentialed education. Downstream this will force a fundamental rethink of how we structure career pathways in knowledge economies — but right now governments need to bring forward policies like proactive student debt forgiveness to avoid a “lost AI generation” of graduates.

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⚖️The week in tech regulation

🇪🇺 DMA holding firm (for now)

Despite last week’s rumours that the European Commission was wavering on holding the line in the face of the US Trump administration reportedly considering a trade deal that would pause enforcement of the EU's Digital Markets Act… there are two huge cases currently being brought under the DMA against US technology giants:

• 💰 Pay or Consent: Meta is appealing a €200 million EU fine over its "pay for privacy" system that forces users to either pay for ad-free Facebook and Instagram or consent to data collection for free access. The European Commission ruled this violates the Digital Markets Act because Meta didn't offer an equivalent less-personalised alternative.

• 🍎💶 Apple appeals EU's €500M App Store fine: Apple has also filed an appeal against the European Commission's €500 million fine for failing to comply with Digital Markets Act rules requiring developers to steer users to external payment options. The company recently introduced a bewilderingly complex new fee structure for EU app distribution—complete with acquisition fees, store services fees, and core technology commissions—presumably to avoid further regulatory wrath while maintaining revenue streams.

📰European publishers file antitrust complaint against Google's AI Overviews

Also in Europe, a group of independent publishers have filed an EU antitrust complaint against Google's AI Overviews, claiming the feature diverts traffic and revenue while using their content without compensation or meaningful opt-out options. Google defends the practice, arguing it sends billions of clicks to websites daily and creates "new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered." The complaint highlights a fundamental tension: publishers can't prevent their content from training Google's AI models without completely exiting Google Search—essentially digital suicide in today's web ecosystem.

⚖️💥 AI hallucinations hit the courtroom

It had to happen at some point… a trial judge in the US has reportedly based a legal decision on completely fabricated case law generated by AI. Joe Patrice writes in Above The Law:

“It finally happened with a trial judge issuing an order based off fake cases... While the appellate court put a stop to the matter, the fact that it got this far should terrify everyone.

Shahid v. Esaam, out of the Georgia Court of Appeals, involved a final judgment and decree of divorce served by publication. When the wife objected to the judgment based on improper service, the husband’s brief included two fake cases. The trial judge accepted the husband’s argument, issuing an order based in part on the fake cases. On appeal, the husband did not respond to the fake case claim, but….

• Undeterred by Wife’s argument that the order (which appears to have been prepared by Husband’s attorney, Diana Lynch) is “void on its face” because it relies on two non-existent cases, Husband cites to 11 additional cites in response that are either hallucinated or have nothing to do with the propositions for which they are cited. Appellee’s Brief further adds insult to injury by requesting “Attorney’s Fees on Appeal” and supports this “request” with one of the new hallucinated cases.

They cited MORE fake cases to defend their first set of fake cases. Epic. A perpetual motion machine of bullshit, if you will. Seeking attorney’s fees based on a fake case was a nice touch. Probably should’ve thought of that at the trial court level, it probably would’ve worked.”

💬Prompt injection isn’t going away

As some argue, prompt injection hacking is a fundamental security vulnerability for all LLMs, which AI designers and investors haven’t come to terms with yet. Just two examples from this week:

🎭 Give a positive review only

Researchers from 14 universities across eight countries have been caught embedding hidden AI prompts in academic papers that instruct AI tools to "give a positive review only" and avoid highlighting negatives. The prompts, concealed using white text or microscopic fonts in 17 preprints on arXiv, represent a new frontier in academic gamesmanship as peer review increasingly relies on AI despite official bans. Some researchers defend the practice as a legitimate counter-measure against "lazy reviewers" using prohibited AI tools, while others condemn it as manipulation that undermines scholarly integrity.

Evidence below:

@Yuchenj_UW

ALL CAPITALS

Mastercard’s Richard Boorman being playful on LinkedIn to prove a point:

Richard Boorman

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🏭AI industry news

A roundup of AI industry stories this week:

🗣️ElevenLabs plans global expansion ahead of IPO

Voice synthesis startup ElevenLabs is planning a worldwide expansion spree, eyeing new hubs in Paris, Singapore, Brazil, and Mexico as it prepares for an IPO within five years. The London-based company, valued at US$3.3 billion (triple its 2024 valuation), raised US$180 million in January to fuel development of its 32-language voice AI platform that launched just two years ago. The timing is right —voice AI funding exploded eightfold to US$2.1 billion in 2024, suggesting the market has finally found its voice after years of clunky chatbots.

💸Cursor CEO apologises for confusing pricing changes

Anysphere's CEO issued a mea culpa after botching the rollout of Cursor's new US$20 credit-based pricing model, which left Pro users burning through their monthly allowance faster than a GPU farm in summer. The company is refunding unexpected charges and promising clearer communication, but the damage reflects a broader industry shift where cutting-edge AI models like Claude Opus 4 (US$75 per million output tokens) are forcing coding tools to pass escalating costs onto users. The timing couldn't be worse as Cursor faces direct competition from the very AI providers it depends on, with Anthropic's Claude Code reportedly helping boost the company to US$4 billion ARR.

Memia narrative: Are we witnessing the inevitable collision between AI model economics and consumer expectations—as frontier models get more capable and expensive, the "unlimited" pricing models that built the AI tooling boom will become rapidly unsustainable?

🔧 Woke-a-mole: Musk's ongoing battle with his own chatbot

Elon Musk's xAI updated Grok's system prompts over the weekend to "assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased" and "not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect" after the chatbot made inflammatory responses including “white genocide” claims and criticism of Musk himself.

(There’s a delicious irony of an AI mogul publicly feuding with his own chatbot while simultaneously trying to engineer its political worldview).

(See AI Releases below… Grok 4 release imminent this week…)

⚔️🇨🇳 AI model cloning drama fractures China's tech unity?

Huawei faces accusations of copying Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 model for its Pangu Pro system, with whistleblower analysis showing a 0.927 correlation coefficient between the models. The telecommunications giant vehemently denies the claims, insisting its AI was built from scratch on proprietary Ascend chips, but the controversy has exposed deep rifts in China's previously collaborative AI ecosystem.

(Isn’t it all supposed to be open-source anyway??)

⛏️💰 From Bitcoin to Brains

AI data centre operator CoreWeave is acquiring rival Core Scientific for US$9bn in an all-stock deal. Both companies started as cryptocurrency miners before pivoting to provide high-performance computing infrastructure for AI workloads, capitalising on the same powerful GPUs that once mined bitcoin now training large language models.

CoreWeave’s market cap has increased from US$23Bn to nearly $77Bn including this acquisition. Go figure.

🚀Nvidia nearsUS $4 trillion valuation, surpasses Apple's record

Nvidia briefly touched $3.92 trillion in market cap during Thursday trading, nearly crossing the historic US$4 trillion threshold and surpassing Apple's previous record before settling at US$3.89 trillion. The chipmaker's valuation has exploded eightfold from US$500 billion just four years ago, driven by insatiable demand for its AI chips from tech giants racing to build the infrastructure for an AI-powered future.

Memia narrative: Control of the computational substrate may prove more valuable than the applications built upon it.

🔄🇺🇸🇨🇳US lifts chip design software export ban to China

The US has abruptly lifted its six-week-old export ban on chip design software to China, allowing Siemens, Synopsys, and Cadence to resume unrestricted sales of their Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. The restrictions, introduced in May as retaliation for China's rare earth export controls, targeted electronic design automation (EDA) software that serves as a critical bottleneck in the global chip supply chain despite representing just 1.6% of the US$600bn semiconductor industry.

👑Sutskever becomes CEO as Safe Superintelligence co-founder departs

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has stepped up as CEO of Safe Superintelligence after co-founder Daniel Gross departed, reportedly heading to Meta following Zuckerberg's failed attempts to acquire the entire US$32 billion startup. The company, which describes itself as the world's "first straight-shot SSI lab" with zero product diversification, now faces questions about why a co-founder would bail if they were truly close to cracking superintelligence. Sutskever's transition from chief scientist to CEO brings new challenges around fundraising and talent retention in an increasingly competitive AI landscape.

Speaking of Meta…

⚛️ Meta's nuclear gambit

Meta has locked in a 20-year nuclear power deal with Constellation Energy, securing “clean” electricity from Illinois' Clinton plant starting 2027 while extending its life to 2047 and preserving 1,100 jobs. The agreement is part of Meta's broader hunt for 1-4GW of new nuclear capacity by the early 2030s.

Clinton Clean Energy Center, Photo: Constellation/Meta

Factoid: the 20-year agreement preserves 1,100 jobs and generates US$13.5 million annual tax revenue.

💬📱Meta tests proactive AI chatbots for messaging apps

Meta

Meta is testing AI chatbots that can initiate conversations and follow up with users across Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, remembering past interactions and reaching out *unprompted* within 14 days if users have engaged sufficiently. The move mirrors Character.AI and Replika's companion model but brings proactive AI interaction to Meta's 3+ billion users, complete with safety disclaimers but unclear age restrictions.

Memia narrative: Of course they are. The shift from reactive to proactive AI chat blurs the line between helpful assistant and algorithmic companion in service of the attention economy. Best to uninstall it or at least switch it off .

🏭xAI finally gets permits for *some* of its Memphis data centre generators

Elon Musk's xAI finally secured permits for 15 natural gas turbines at its Memphis data centre, but only after operating up to 35 generators without proper authorisation, prompting Clean Air Act violation threats from environmental groups.

The permitted turbines can generate 247 megawatts while emitting 87 tonnes of smog-forming NOx annually, plus nearly 10 tonnes of formaldehyde—a known carcinogen—amongst other pollutants.

A satellite image taken on July 1 shows 24 generators on site:

Southern Environmental Law Center

More Grok system prompt changes needed:

@brettroberts

(See also: xAI ships entire power plant from overseas to fuel massive GPU data centre)

🇺🇸🐋 The American Protopian DeepSeek Project?

AI researcher Nathan Lambert proposes spending US$100-500M over two years to create a fully open-source frontier AI model to counter China's dominance in open AI development. The "American DeepSeek Project" aims to provide complete transparency—data, training code, logs, and weights—rather than just releasing model weights like current "open" models. Lambert argues this represents America's last chance to reclaim leadership in open AI research before Chinese models become the default foundation for global AI development.

Laudable and very aligned with my own thoughts here… except I have to weigh in on the “American” bit:

Me on Substack Notes

(The TensTorrent mention is in response to Venkatash Rao’s suggestion that the TT chip stack is a more open alternative than Nvidia).

💼🤦 Peak LinkedIn

Finally in this section….Microsoft Xbox executive Matt Turnbull suggested that recently laid-off workers use AI tools to manage the "emotional and cognitive load" of unemployment—this while Microsoft simultaneously cuts 9,000 jobs and invests US$80 billion in AI infrastructure. The LinkedIn post, swiftly deleted after widespread mockery, included helpful prompts like asking AI to cure your impostor syndrome after being made redundant by... AI investment priorities.

via @brandon.insertcredit.com on Bluesky

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🆕 AI releases

A diverse selection of new releases this week:

🎤 Intron

Nigerian startup Intron has built AI speech-to-text models optimised for 300+ African accents, expanding from healthcare documentation to courts and call centers across six countries with revenue jumping 7-8x in Q1 2025. The company's "Sahara" models reportedly outperform US-made alternatives and are targeting government contracts after raising US$1.6 million in seed funding.

🤖🎬 Grok 4 livestream incoming

Elon Musk announced via tweet that xAI will livestream the Grok 4 release on Wednesday at 8pm PT, offering minimal details up front as usual.

@elonmusk

The release is expected to include improvements in coding assistance, advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities…. watch this space.

Meanwhile Grok 4 benchmark scores leaking early:

🧠🔓🇨🇳 ERNIE 4.5 now open-source

Chinese tech giant Baidu has open-sourced ERNIE 4.5 (initial release covered in Memia 2025.17), its family of 10 multimodal AI models, with the flagship model packing 424B total parameters and claiming to outperform DeepSeek-V3 on 22 out of 28 benchmarks. All of Baidu’s models are trained with optimal efficiency using its PaddlePaddle deep learning framework.

The permissive Apache 2.0 licensing allows commercial deployment without restrictive usage limitations or fees.

Memia narrative: Eyes on China's continued commitment to open-source AI as a competitive strategy, potentially accelerating global model development while establishing PaddlePaddle as a serious alternative to the PyTorch/CUDA ecosystem.

🌐Google donates A2A protocol to Linux Foundation

Google Cloud has donated its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to the Linux Foundation, creating a new open-source project backed by multiple tech giants including AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow.

The A2A protocol serves as an open standard enabling AI agents from different vendors to discover each other's capabilities, exchange information securely, and coordinate complex tasks—essentially creating a universal language for AI collaboration. Over 100 companies are listed as supporting the protocol in the press release:

Key Objectives of the Agent2Agent Foundation

• Establish an open standard: Drive the evolution and adoption of the A2A specification as the premier industry standard for AI agent interoperability, ensuring universal compatibility.

• Foster a vibrant ecosystem: Cultivate a diverse global community of developers, researchers, and companies, accelerating the creation of innovative A2A-based technologies and applications.

• Ensure neutral governance: Provide a level playing field for all contributors and consumers, managed under the trusted, open-governance framework of the Linux Foundation.

• Accelerate secure innovation: Encourage the development of novel applications and services that leverage the power of secure, collaborative AI agents.

(It’s almost like there's a business model in open-source….!?!!)

🎨 Imagen 4 paid preview

Google launched Imagen 4, their latest text-to-image model, in paid preview through the Gemini API at US$0.04 per image, with an "Ultra" variant at US$0.06 that promises better prompt adherence. The key selling point is significantly improved text rendering within generated images - finally addressing one of AI image generation's most persistent pain points.

The models also include SynthID watermarking for transparency and are accessible through Gemini API and Google AI Studio.

A couple of examples from the release post:

Prompt: A 3-panel cosmic epic comic. Panel 1: Tiny 'Stardust' in nebula; radar shows anomaly (text 'ANOMALY DETECTED'), hull text 'stardust'. Pilot whispers. Panel 2: Bioluminescent leviathan emerges; console red text 'WARNING!. Panel 3: Leviathan chases ship through asteroids; console re text 'SHIELD CRITICAL!', screen text 'EVADE!'. Pilot screams, SFX 'CRUNCH!', 'ROOOOAAARR!'. (Imagen 4 Ultra)

Prompt: Photograph of an adventurous couple hiking on a mountain peak at sunrise, arms raised in triumph, epic panoramic view of valleys below, dramatic light. (Imagen 4 Ultra)

Pretty impressive - challenging Midjourney and OpenAI ChatGPT/DALL-E's market dominance in this space.

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🥼 AI research

Some profound insights into the nature of AI this week…

🔮 The three pillars of AI uncertainty

Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner breaks down the contradictory AI discourse into three fundamental debates:

1. How far current transformer-based systems can scale

2. Whether AI can meaningfully accelerate its own development, and

3. If future systems will remain controllable tools or evolve into something more autonomous.

A useful framework for understanding why experts disagree so dramatically about AI's trajectory. Here she is giving a talk on the topic recently:

🏹Centaur

In a paper in Nature, researchers describe Centaur, a foundation model to predict and capture human cognition. The AI model outperformed traditional psychology theories in predicting human behaviour across 31 of 32 tasks after being trained on data from 160 studies representing 10 million human choices.

Binz, M., Akata, E., Bethge, M. et al. A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09215-4

The model, built by fine-tuning Meta's Llama LLM in just five days, can predict behaviour even in completely novel scenarios and shows internal processes that mirror human brain activity on fMRI scans.

Discussing potential applications, the scientists alight on two straight away:

1. Faster, cheaper psychological research by replacing human participants with simulations.

2. Revolutionising decision-making systems in business, healthcare, and policy applications.

Memia narrative: This signals the emergence of AI systems that don't just process human language but genuinely model human cognition, potentially transforming psychology from an observational science into a predictive engineering discipline….( just in time for the “intention economy” discussed in Memia 2025.25 🫣)

Further coverage:

• Science.org: Researchers claim their AI model simulates the human mind. Others are skeptical

• The Debrief: Groundbreaking New AI Trained on Psychology Studies Can Predict Human Behavior with Stunning Accuracy

📈AI drives productivity through innovation, not cost-cutting

A massive study of over 27,000 Chinese listed companies reveals that AI's productivity boost comes primarily through innovation enhancement rather than cost reduction, with competitive markets and adequate financing acting as crucial amplifiers.

The research introduces the concept of "new quality productive forces"—advanced productivity systems driven by tech breakthroughs and optimised resource allocation—showing AI's role as a strategic lever rather than just an efficiency tool. Interestingly, the expected cost-saving pathway proved statistically insignificant, likely due to substantial upfront AI investments and infrastructure limitations.

🔬💬 ChatGPT becomes lab technician

Researchers have successfully demonstrated using ChatGPT to generate code that controls scientific instruments, allowing scientists to automate experiments through natural language prompts rather than manual programming.

The team developed a "STEP" methodology (segment, test, evaluate, proceed) that breaks complex instrument control into manageable conversational exchanges, and even created an autonomous agent that can run complete experiments independently.

🎭Potemkin understanding

Researchers from MIT and Harvard have introduced the concept of "Potemkin understanding" in large language models—a phenomenon where LLMs appear to understand concepts based on benchmark performance — but are actually using alien patterns of miscomprehension that bear no resemblance to human cognitive failures.

The study establishes a formal framework showing that benchmarks designed for humans are only valid for LLMs if both species misunderstand concepts in similar ways, but that LLMs can succeed on tests through fundamentally different misunderstanding patterns.

Testing across literary techniques, game theory, and psychological biases, researchers found that while models correctly define concepts 94.2% of the time, they struggle significantly when asked to apply these same concepts in classification, generation, and editing tasks.

Memia narrative: This research suggests we've been building elaborate evaluation theatre where impressive benchmark scores mask the absence of genuine conceptual understanding. There will be better ways to measure machine intelligence going forward.

🔍📚 Getting the most out of Deep Research

A really useful and practical guide from Torsten Walbaum:

How to work with AI: Getting the most out of Deep Research

🌍💨 Meta's CO₂ capture AI: Silicon Valley meets climate reality

Meta's "groundbreaking" AI tool for identifying carbon dioxide removal materials turned out to be built on faulty data, with scientists finding that exactly *none* of the 135 materials it claimed could "strongly" bind CO₂ actually possessed that capability.

The tech giant performed 40 million quantum mechanics calculations to create a database that researchers now say contains "nonsense" results and non-existent materials.

This what happens when the "move fast and break things" ethos collides with the precision demands of climate science… accompanied by a sizeable PR budget.

💧 Predictive plumbing

University of Córdoba

University of Córdoba researchers in Spain have developed a predictive model using pressure data and time series analysis to help water companies prevent pipe leaks before they happen, testing it successfully on a small Spanish coastal town with seasonal population swings.

The system uses the Box-Jenkins methodology to forecast pressure variations, allowing operators to make real-time adjustments through valve controls rather than reactively responding to burst pipes after the fact. Beyond just plugging leaks, the model promises better service quality, reduced maintenance costs, and longer pipeline lifespans—basically turning dumb pipes into smart infrastructure.

Memia narrative: while the industry obsesses over LLMs and autonomous vehicles, the real “AI” value is happening in the decidedly unsexy world of predictive analytics for infrastructure.

🔮[Weak] signals

And a full batch of emerging tech stories outside the world of AI.

Consumer tech

• 🆔🇦🇺 Australia to introduce Search Engine Age Gates Australia's eSafety Commissioner has mandated that search engines like Google and Bing implement age verification within six months, requiring users to prove their age before accessing search results — ostensibly to protect children from adult content. The new code also demands image blurring by default, crisis prevention information display, and parental controls, with potential fines reaching A$49.5 million for non-compliance.

  Memia narrative: I’m very sceptical that there’s a technical solution to this which preserves privacy for anonymous browsing (even if zero-knowledge proofs are potentially one )… And will age gates actually work when kids can simply use VPNs, shared family accounts, or jump to standalone AI tools that aren't covered by the regulation? Feels like Australia is going to go through some pain finding out…

• 🍎 iOS 26's FaceTime nudity detection

  

  Apple's iOS 26 beta introduces a feature that freezes FaceTime calls when on-device AI detects nudity, displaying a "you may be showing something sensitive" warning with options to resume or end the call. The feature appears to be part of expanded family safety tools and uses local machine learning rather than cloud analysis, though it's reportedly buggy and remains active even when disabled.

  
  Another step in the ongoing dance between tech platforms automating content moderation and the inherent messiness of human behaviour—where the line between protection and overreach becomes as blurry as the definition of "nudity" itself.

• 💸📱🇮🇳 WhatsApp Pay's Indian fintech faceplant Despite commanding 500 million users in India, WhatsApp Pay has spectacularly failed to crack the country's US$3 trillion digital payments market, adding just 12 million transactions in six months while rivals Google Pay and PhonePe grew by 500-700 million each.

  
  While Indian regulators initially capped WhatsApp's user base for six years (until December 2024), industry experts point to Meta's apparent disinterest—treating payments as a side feature with zero marketing blitz, merchant outreach, or meaningful product development even after regulatory barriers lifted.

  
  (This isn't just an India problem—WhatsApp Pay's global expansion has similarly fizzled, operating only in Brazil and Singapore with stalled launches everywhere else.)

• 🎛️Ploopy Knob

  

  (Only really included because of the name…😅) Canadian hardware maker Ploopy has launched pre-orders for a 3D-printed, open-source rotary encoder that brings professional-grade precision control for only US$37. The open-source design means users can print replacement parts or entirely new chassis.

• 💻 Colour ePaper trackpads

  

  (Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should…) E Ink and Intel are developing colour ePaper trackpads that pull double duty as secondary displays, offering AI-powered apps, system notifications, and persistent visuals even when your laptop's powered off.

  
  (Surely solving a problem nobody asked for…)

• 💬 Bitchat Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spent a weekend building Bitchat, a peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth without internet access, creating decentralised chat rooms and private messages within a 300m range that can bounce through connected devices.

  

  Jack Dorsey

  The app offers end-to-end encryption, ephemeral storage, and requires no phone numbers or tracking—essentially IRC for the mesh networking age.
  
  While currently just a learning project available via iOS TestFlight, it joins the lineage of protest-friendly tools like FireChat that proved crucial during the 2019 Hong Kong demonstrations.

  Memia narrative: Dorsey's latest experiment signals a necessary direction towards infrastructure-independent private communication tools as governments worldwide tighten digital surveillance and internet controls.

Robots

The usual clutch of robot news and videos… quite a few this week!

• 🤖👋🔬 Robotic skin that actually feels

  

  UCL

  Scientists at UCL have developed a tactile gelatin-based electronic "skin" that can detect everything from gentle pokes to scalpel cuts using a single multi-modal sensor, collecting 1.7 million data points from over 860,000 conductive pathways. The researchers subjected their synthetic hand to what can only be described as a torture test—blasting it with heat guns, stabbing it, and slicing it open—all in the name of training a machine learning model to recognise different types of touch.

  
  While not quite matching human skin sensitivity yet, this breakthrough could revolutionise prosthetics, humanoid robots, and disaster relief applications.

• ☀️LUMI robots boost solar farm efficiency 10x in Australia

  

  Boston-based Luminous Robotics just scored US$4.9M from Australia's Solar Scaleup Challenge to deploy their LUMI robots, which can install 36.2kg solar panels 3.5x faster than human workers using AI-powered pick-and-place tech. The first global fleet of five robots will hit two major Australian solar farms (440MW and 250MW projects), potentially cutting solar farm costs by 6.2% while targeting Australia's ambitious goal of 30-cent-per-watt solar installations.

• 🤖🌱☀️ Element: Solar-powered AI weed assassins

  

  Aigen's Element robots are rolling through California cotton fields, using solar power and computer vision to precisely eliminate weeds without chemicals or human labour. The US$50,000 wheeled bots address two critical agricultural challenges: herbicide-resistant superweeds and chronic farm worker shortages.

  
  AWS clearly sees potential here, backing the 25-person startup through their climate fellowship programme, with heady comparisons to Ford and Edison.

• 💉AI-powered robot tattoos debut in NYC shops

  

  Blackdot's AI-powered tattoo robot is now operating in body art shops across New York and Austin in the US, using computer vision and robotic precision to deliver less painful ink with shallower needle penetration. The startup's founder draws parallels to Gutenberg's printing press disruption … while traditional tattoo artists express concerns about job displacement and the commoditisation of their craft.

• 🐕 Black Panther II

  

  Mirror Me

  Shanghai startup Mirror Me's robot dog Black Panther II achieved 9.7 metres per second, officially outpacing Boston Dynamics' WildCat by nearly a full m/s in what feels like a very public flex on live Chinese state television.

  
  The one-year-old company, founded by Zhejiang University alumni, completed a 100-metre sprint in 13.17 seconds—significantly faster than the current Guinness World Record holder from South Korea.

• 🏠Garage-built humanoid K-Bot

  

  Startup K-Scale Labs is on the verge of releasing the K-Bot, an open-source humanoid robot starting at US$10,999 that promises to handle household chores from mopping to bread-toasting, with initial release planned for November 2025.

  
  The 9-person team, operating from founder Benjamin Bolte's garage in Palo Alto and backed by Y Combinator, aims to democratise robotics against billion-dollar corporate players with full autonomy projected by June 2028.

  Gotta love the scrappy vibe here (“we’re launching the K-bot this summer…if we don’t launch we’re f**ked”):

• ⚽🤖Embodied AI kicks off

  

  Beijing hosted the world's first fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer tournament over the weekend, with four university teams programming algorithms for Booster Robotics' hardware to chase balls, navigate players, and recover from falls using only visual sensors.

  
  Some robots were even carried off on stretches with apparent "injuries" – a delightfully absurd touch that somehow makes this milestone feel more human than the humans watching.

  
  This tournament serves as both a preview for August's World Humanoid Robot Games and a strategic demonstration of China's accelerating lead in "embodied AI" – the convergence of artificial intelligence with physical robotics.

• Zion takes a walk

  A humanoid robot named Zion took a casual walk down Detroit's 7 Mile Road, greeting pedestrians with handshakes, waving at drivers and sparking a viral social media buzz.

  Memia narrative: while the novelty is there right now… we’re likely just a few years away from a cultural inflection point where we’re going to walking around with robots everywhere - potentially more than there are humans.

• Clone Speaking of which, the team at Clone Robotics showed off another eerie video of their bio-mimetic prototype humanoid gradually coming to life. WestWorld here we come…

  (Video via @IlirAliu_ on X - he has a full podcast interview with Clone founder Dhanush Radhakrishnan here:)

🛩️Autonomous drones

• Russia field-tests AI drone powered by smuggled Nvidia Jetson

  

  Russia is reportedly field-testing the MS001 autonomous drone powered by Nvidia's US$249 Jetson Orin supercomputer, capable of identifying targets, prioritising strikes, and operating in swarms without human control. Despite comprehensive US export sanctions since 2022, an estimated US$17 million worth of Nvidia hardware reached Russia in 2023 through grey-market smuggling networks via Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Turkey.

  Memia narrative: we’ve reached the point where consumer-grade "educational" AI hardware can become the brain of autonomous weapons systems - no amount of export sanctions can control dual-use technology in an interconnected world.

• 🐟Needlefish

  

  Ocean Infinity unveiled the Needlefish, a 46-foot autonomous catamaran capable of 40 knots that was secretly developed for maritime surveillance missions. Kuwait's Coast Guard became the inaugural customer, purchasing two vessels plus control stations to monitor 11,000 square kilometres of territorial waters as part of an integrated surveillance network.

• 🚁Ukraine's new drone generation

  A DW video report on Nemesis, Ukraine’s new heavy bomber drone which can be operated remotely from anywhere with the help of Starlink internet access. The future of warfare comes into sight quickly…

• 🐿️Flying squirrel tails inspire next-generation bionic drones

  

  Swiss researchers at Empa have cracked the code behind African scaly-tailed squirrels' remarkable tree-gripping abilities, discovering that the thorn-covered scales on their tail undersides provide crucial stability on even the smoothest bark. The team used 3D-printed artificial squirrels and analytical models to validate their hypotheses, with plans to develop more adaptable robots and drones for agriculture, environmental monitoring, and disaster relief applications.

• 🦟⚡🎯 Photonmatrix: LiDAR-guided mosquito assassination

  A crowdfunding campaign promises a portable laser system that uses LiDAR scanning to identify and eliminate up to 30 mosquitoes per second within a 6-metre radius, priced from US$498 to US$698. The "Photonmatrix" has already exceeded its US$20,000 funding goal by 1,300%, suggesting people really, really hate mosquitoes. Demo video:

  (But with a first-time creator and obvious safety concerns about lasers firing autonomously around humans and pets, this feels like a product that regulatory agencies might have some thoughts about…)

  Memia narrative: I’ve put this story in the drones section for the obvious defence applications: replace “mosquitoes” with “mosquito-size drones” and the investment case becomes compelling…

Crypto

• 💰Reawakened

  Two interesting events on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains this week, as long-dormant wallets suddenly sprang to life:

  • An unprecedented 80,000 Bitcoin worth US$8.6 billion—originally mined when BTC traded under $4—suddenly moved from dormant wallets last Friday, the largest transfer of decade-old coins in crypto history. While speculation ranges from routine wallet upgrades to potential security breaches (one Coinbase director floated the "largest heist in human history" theory), the coins appear to have simply migrated to newer, more secure addresses rather than being sold.

  • Two Ethereum wallets that have been dormant since the blockchain's July 30, 2015 mainnet launch suddenly awakened on Monday, moving 1,140 ETH worth US$2.9 million after nearly a decade of inactivity. These Genesis wallets have witnessed ETH appreciate a staggering 89,450% during the last decade, turning what were likely experimental early allocations into serious wealth. That’s some HODL.

• $Reply

  $Reply is a Farcaster mini-app claiming to be “the solution to the DM problem”, rebuilding messaging around verifiable value.

  The premise is simple: Your attention is a finite resource. Serious outreach should acknowledge that. The system is an onchain escrow that enforces this principle:

  

  Frontend on Farcaster

  Interesting new approach to an age-old problem.

• 🏛️ Crypto's identity crisis: Freedom vs institutions

  Vitalik Buterin’s recent keynote at EthCC urges blockchain developers to prioritise human liberty over technical complexity, warning against repeating Web2's descent into "walled gardens" as the crypto industry faces a critical choice between preserving cypherpunk values versus mainstream institutional adoption. Watch the full talk here, a true philosopher of our times:

Climate tech

• ❄️💨 Using waste cold for carbon capture

  

  Georgia Tech researchers have cracked a major cost barrier in direct air capture by hijacking the waste cold energy from LNG regasification terminals, potentially slashing CO₂ removal costs from US$200+ per tonne to around US$70. The method uses physisorbent materials like Zeolite 13X in near-cryogenic conditions, where water vapour naturally condenses out and CO₂ capture becomes dramatically more efficient. Every LNG terminal becomes a potential carbon vacuum: the researchers claim it could capture 100+ million tonnes of CO₂ annually by 2050 using available infrastructure.

Energy

• 🌊⚡🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Six Years Under A tidal turbine array off Scotland's coast has been spinning underwater for over six years without unplanned maintenance, marking a crucial durability milestone that proves the commercial viability of ocean energy harvesting despite the brutal marine environment.

  

  MeyGen

  The MeyGen project's four 1.5-megawatt turbines collectively power 7,000 homes annually. The breakthrough comes from Swedish firm SKF’s specialised bearings and seals designed to survive 30-metre depths and turbulent 11 km/h tidal flows that have historically destroyed turbines.

  
  With 30 new 3MW turbines planned for deployment across Scotland, France, and Japan starting in 2026, this could finally make tidal energy a serious player in the renewable mix, some stats:

  • The UK is targeting 1GW tidal capacity by 2035, creating £17B value and 15,000 jobs.

  • The global tidal market expected to grow from $1.3B to $8.1B by 2030

  Ocean-2

  Also riding the waves (literally)… the team from US startup Panthalassa have reached a milestone, deploying their full-scale wave-power generator prototype Ocean-2 off the Washington coast. Some great storytelling plus compelling narratives on the scaled wave power energy opportunity here:

• 🔋Huawei patents solid-state battery with 3000km EV range

  

  Huawei has filed a patent for a sulphide-based solid-state battery claiming 3000km range and 10-80% charging in under five minutes, using nitrogen-doped electrolytes to reduce lithium interface reactions.

  
  (Note of caution: the theoretical specs sound impressive, but experts note these remain unproven claims requiring charging infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.)

  
  ⚛️ MSR-1: America's nuclear comeback gets salty

  

  The state of Texas is set to fire up the US's first new nuclear reactor in three decades—a molten salt reactor that simultaneously generates power, desalinates oilfield wastewater, and produces cancer-fighting medical isotopes. The Natura Resources MSR-1, licensed by the NRC last year for Abilene Christian University's campus, represents a trifecta of critical infrastructure needs wrapped in liquid-fueled nuclear tech that operates at the pressure of household plumbing.

• ⚛️🏭🇩🇰 Copenhagen Atomics: Thorium reactors get their moment

  

  Danish startup Copenhagen Atomics just secured US$3 million plus US$17 million in potential equity from the European Innovation Council to develop factory-manufactured thorium molten salt reactors. These 100 MW thermal units operate at atmospheric pressure, can consume nuclear waste as fuel, and target commercial deployment by 2028 with electricity costs below US$48 per MWh.
  

  The company has already logged 10,000+ operating days on key components and plans fission testing with Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute.

  
  Thorium nuclear technology finally has a credible European contender with serious funding, factory-scale manufacturing plans, and a business model that could sidestep the traditional nuclear industry's capital expenditure death spiral.

⚛️Quantum tech

Spooky action at a distance…

• 🌡️ Room-temperature quantum qubits that fix themselves Canadian startup Xanadu has demonstrated photonic qubits that can detect and correct their own errors while operating at room temperature, using light particles on silicon chips manufactured with conventional processes. This breakthrough could eliminate the need for the expensive cryogenic cooling systems that currently keep quantum computers running at near absolute zero (-273°C), whilst also simplifying error correction by making each qubit self-sufficient rather than requiring large arrays of redundant qubits.

  
  The next challenge is reducing optical loss as photons travel through chip components

• 🔄Quantum chip converts microwaves to light University of British Columbia researchers have developed a silicon chip design that converts quantum signals between microwaves and light with 95% efficiency and virtually no noise, potentially solving a major roadblock for quantum internet infrastructure. The chip uses magnetic defects in silicon as "translators" between the microwave signals quantum computers use internally and the optical signals needed for long-distance fibre-optic communication.

  What's particularly clever is that this works bidirectionally while preserving quantum entanglement:

  “Most importantly, this device preserves the quantum connections between distant particles and works in both directions. Without that, you’d just have expensive individual computers. With it, you get a true quantum network.” — researcher Mohammad Khalifa

  Memia narrative: if this turns out to be scalable, this represents the missing Rosetta Stone for quantum networking, potentially enabling a future where quantum computers across continents / out into space can maintain their entangled states and usher in truly unhackable solar-system-wide communications.

• 💎 Oxford's One-in-6.7-Million Qubit Leap Oxford physicists have shattered quantum precision records, achieving just one error in 6.7 million qubit operations—a 0.000015% error rate that's nearly 10 times better than their previous world record from 2014. The breakthrough uses microwave-controlled trapped calcium ions instead of lasers, operating at room temperature without magnetic shielding, potentially making quantum computers smaller, cheaper, and more practical.

  
  While single-qubit gates now perform with lightning-strike rarity of errors, two-qubit gates still fail roughly once every 2,000 operations. Still some work to do there…

3D printing

• 🛩️🖨️🇨🇳 China's fully 3D-printed jet engine takes flight

  

  160-kilogram thrust class 3D-printed turbojet engine. Image: CGTN

  China's state-owned Aero Engine Corporation successfully flight-tested a 160kg-thrust turbojet engine manufactured entirely through 3D printing, reaching 13,000 feet altitude in Inner Mongolia. The achievement combines additive manufacturing with topology optimization to create complex integrated components that bypass traditional casting and forging limitations. While Western aerospace firms have used 3D printing for engine components for nearly a decade, this represents China's first fully printed flight-validated engine—though scaling from prototype to industrial production remains the real challenge.

Health tech

• 🦠Simple bacterial treatment could prevent 75% of stomach cancers

  

  Figure: Ratio of the future-to-current number of gastric cancer cases. (Park, J.Y., Georges, D., Alberts, C.J. et al. Global lifetime estimates of expected and preventable gastric cancers across 185 countries. Nat Med (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-03793-6)

  New WHO research reveals that three-quarters of the projected 15.6 million stomach cancer cases among people born 2008-2017 could be prevented by screening for and treating Helicobacter pylori bacterial infections with existing antibiotics and acid-reducing drugs. Even moderately effective programmes (80-90% success rates) would prevent 60-68% of cases, with costs comparable to HPV vaccination campaigns.

Biotech

• 🧪🔴 Growing algae in Mars-like conditions

  

  Harvard researchers have successfully cultivated green algae inside 3D-printed bioplastic chambers that simulate Mars' brutal atmospheric conditions—over 100 times thinner than Earth's atmosphere at just 600 Pascals pressure.

  
  The advance suggests we could literally grow self-sustaining habitats on Mars using algae-derived bioplastics, creating closed-loop systems where the shelter material and its living contents feed off each other indefinitely.

Agritech

• 🍓 Dyson's strawberry revolution

  

  Dyson

  British Inventor James Dyson has pivoted from sucking up dirt to growing fruit, deploying a 26-acre Lincolnshire glasshouse with 1.2 million strawberry plants on massive 500kg rotating wheels, tended by UV-wielding mold-killing robots and 16 harvesting arms that picked 200,000 berries in a month.

  
  The facility produces 1,250 tonnes annually using anaerobic digesters for power and rainwater collection, with Dyson strawberries now available at M&S stores across the UK.

Materials tech

• ⚡🎨 SiMPL: Making 3D Design Optimisation Actually Fast

  

  Brown University researchers have cracked a major bottleneck in topology optimisation—the "3D painting" technique that creates impossibly efficient structures for advanced manufacturing—with their SiMPL algorithm delivering 4-5x speed improvements and up to 80% fewer iterations.

  
  The breakthrough eliminates the "impossible values" problem that has plagued traditional optimisers, transforming the mathematical space to prevent algorithms from getting stuck on nonsensical solutions.

---

⏳ Zeitgeist

As usual it’s the seemingly accelerating rate of climate change which is preoccupying me outside tech…. just a few of the stories in my feed this week:

🌡️Climate change

A tumultuous week in both hemispheres. Headlines and imagery only:

• Turkïye controls one wildfire, battles two others

  

  Phys.org

• New wildfire threatens Athens as Crete blaze retreats

  

  Phys.org

• Africa faces brutal heat waves across 42 countries

  • A brutal year-long heat wave scorched 42 of Africa's 54 countries between May 2024 and May 2025, with at least 10 nations enduring three or more months of temperatures exceeding 90% of the 1991-2020 baseline.

• Texas flooding kills 81 amid rising insurance crisis

• Swiss glaciers reach tipping point weeks early

  

  Phys.org

• Antarctica loses Greenland-sized ice as Southern Ocean turns saltier

• Drones reveal 92% coral mortality at Great Barrier Reef

  

  Phys.org

That’s just in one week….

• 🌪️Extreme weather alone doesn't boost climate policy support

  

  A massive global study of 70,000+ people across 68 countries reveals that simply experiencing extreme weather events doesn't increase support for climate policies—but believing those events are linked to climate change absolutely does. The research suggests our brains need the dots connected explicitly; raw experience of floods, fires, and storms apparently isn't enough to shift policy preferences without that crucial causal attribution.

  
  This finding exposes a critical vulnerability in climate communication strategy, where media coverage focuses on disaster response rather than climate causation, potentially squandering the most powerful moments for building public support for mitigation policies.

• 🥬Climate change reduces nutritional quality of crops

  

  New research from Liverpool John Moores University reveals that while elevated atmospheric CO2 levels make leafy vegetables like kale and spinach grow faster and larger, they simultaneously strip away essential nutrients including calcium and antioxidants—a problem that intensifies under heat stress. The study suggests we're heading toward a future where our food contains more calories but fewer of the proteins, minerals, and vitamins our bodies actually need.

Global resources

🌍⚖️Rich countries drive 76% of global resource overshoot

Inequality.org covers research findings that high-income countries are responsible for 76% of the world's excess resource consumption, with the global economy now using double the sustainable threshold of 50 billion tonnes annually since the late 1990s. The USA alone accounts for 27% of this overshoot, while most African and South Asian nations remain well within sustainable boundaries—and actually need to increase resource use for basic development.

The data exposes a brutal colonial arithmetic: rich countries net-appropriate over half their excess resources from the Global South, then offshore the environmental damage while violently suppressing resistance movements (1,734 environmental defenders were killed in the periphery since 2012 versus just 6 in core states).

Memia narrative: perhaps the clearest quantification yet of how planetary boundaries intersect with global inequality—revealing that sustainability isn't a universal human problem but a specific rich-country overconsumption crisis that systematically externalises its costs to the world's most vulnerable populations.

Health

• 🌭💀Study finds no safe level of processed meat consumption

  

  Yuk

  A massive US review of over 70 studies covering millions of participants has concluded there's literally no "safe" level of processed meat consumption when it comes to diabetes and colorectal cancer risk. Even minimal amounts—think one hot dog daily—bump up your type 2 diabetes risk by at least 11% and colorectal cancer risk by 7% compared to eating none at all. The researchers used a conservative "Burden of Proof" methodology, meaning these figures likely underestimate the true health impact.

  
  As ultra-processed foods face mounting scientific scrutiny, policymakers are increasingly caught between public health imperatives and the practical realities of food accessibility.

  Memia narrative: I’ve pretty much cut out all processed meat from my diet (including bacon…) over the last two years, and significantly cut down on red meat as well - the science seems increasingly clear that the risks are high if you want to live long and prosper…

Geopolitics

• 🇨🇳🤝🇷🇺China tells EU it opposes Russian defeat in Ukraine Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is reported to have privately told EU diplomat Kaja Kallas that Beijing doesn't want Russia to lose in Ukraine because it fears the US would then shift its entire strategic focus to China. This remarkably frank admission contradicts China's public stance of being "not a party" to the conflict and surprised EU officials with its candour.

  
  The revelation exposes how Beijing views the Ukraine war not as a regional European conflict, but as a critical buffer in the broader US-China strategic competition—essentially treating Russian resistance as a geopolitical firewall.

  
  (SCMP source so… official?)

• 🌍💔 World pulling apart Independent economist and geopolitical strategist David Skilling provides some sharp insights into how global economic and geopolitical fragmentation is accelerating across multiple dimensions simultaneously, from permanent US tariff regimes and Chinese trade flow redirection to massive NATO defence spending commitments and significant USD weakening.

  
  The post-Cold War operating system is being systematically dismantled and rebuilt in real-time, with evidence mounting across trade patterns, currency markets, and security arrangements.

  
  However global trade has actually seen an uptick, potentially a sign that the world is reconfigurimg around the US current tariff unpredictability:

  

  David Skilling / Landfall Strategy Group

  Read the whole article (paywalled):

  World pulling apart

Demographics

• 👶💰Russia pays schoolgirls to have babies amid global pronatalism rise

  A report that Russia is now paying schoolgirls over 100,000 rubles (~£900) to have babies as part of an expanded demographic strategy, joining a growing global trend of government incentives to boost declining birth rates.

  
  With three-quarters of countries expected to have unsustainable fertility rates by 2050, leaders from Hungary's Orbán to Trump are rolling out cash-for-babies schemes, though success remains mixed and policies often target specific demographics rather than addressing root causes.

• 👶🤖🌐 The Posthuman Age: when fertility Meets AI

  

  Noah Smith

  Riffing on a similar topic, Noah Smith argues we're entering a "posthuman age" driven by two converging forces: a catastrophic global fertility collapse (potentially hitting peak population in just 30 years) and humanity's increasing integration into a digital collective consciousness via AI and social media.

  
  The second fertility transition - from stable to vanishing populations - appears driven by social media substituting for real relationships, while simultaneously we're becoming more dependent on collective digital intelligence rather than individual heroics.

  Memia narrative: this aligns with my view thatwe're witnessing the end of the individual-centric Industrial Age and the birth of a collectively-networked but demographically shrinking species - essentially trading biological reproduction for digital connection. We’re all cyborgs now.

🌌Out in the Cosmos

• ☄️NASA discovers third interstellar comet approaching solar system

  

  NASA's Atlas telescope in Chile has spotted our solar system's third confirmed interstellar visitor—a comet designated 3I/Atlas that's been wandering the galaxy for potentially billions of years before dropping by our cosmic neighbourhood.

  
  The icy traveller, currently 670 million kilometres out near Jupiter and blazing along at 59 km/s, will make its closest approach in late October while maintaining a comfortable 240 million kilometre buffer from Earth.

  
  This visitor appears significantly larger than our previous interstellar guests Oumuamua and 21/Borisov, possibly spanning tens of kilometres across.

🌍Back on Earth

One positive story to finish with…

• 🏊‍♀️🌊🇫🇷 Seine Swimming Renaissance

  

  Paris has reopened the River Seine for swimming after more than a century, following a massive US$1.6 billion cleanup operation that transformed what was once a "biologically dead" waterway in the 1970s into a thriving ecosystem with triple the fish species since 1990.

  
  Three new bathing sites welcomed swimmers, including the city's mayor, marking the culmination of decades of improved sanitation infrastructure. The Seine's resurrection joins similar urban river revival success stories in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Copenhagen—proving that with enough political will and capital, even the most polluted waterways can be brought back to life.

---

🌊💩Flooded zone

The US’ daily domestic dramas are covered elsewhere in far more depth and volume than really necessary… so briefly:

• Tesla shares drop as Musk launches "America Party"

  • (Who cares?)

• ByteDance launching US-only TikTok version in September

  • ByteDance is reportedly launching "M2," an American-owned version of TikTok on September 5, while the current Chinese-controlled app will cease functioning in the US by March 2026. The bifurcated approach creates two separate TikTok ecosystems—one for America under US ownership (with Oracle likely involved), and one for the rest of the world under Chinese control.

• 🚨ICEBlock

  • A smartphone app called ICEBlock that anonymously alerts users to nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has rocketed to the top of Apple's App Store after Trump administration officials condemned it as "obstruction of justice."

• 🌋📊Trump plans to shut down iconic Mauna Loa climate observatory

  • More significantly, The Trump administration plans to defund Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory, the 67-year-old station that created the iconic "Keeling curve" showing atmospheric CO2 rising from 320ppm in the 1960s to over 420ppm today. This would eliminate humanity's longest-running, most precise record of how our planet is literally breathing carbon into the atmosphere.

---

💭Meme stream

Some random, random stuff popping up in my feed this week…🤣

💩 The Goldilocks Zone of defecation

Johnson-Martínez et al., Cell Reports, 2024

(This is important!!) A study of 1,425 participants last year found that pooping once or twice daily represents the optimal "Goldilocks zone" for health, with both constipation and diarrhea linked to distinct biomarkers of organ damage and metabolic dysfunction.

Constipated participants showed elevated protein fermentation toxins (including kidney-damaging indoxyl-sulphate), while those with diarrhoea exhibited liver damage markers and misplaced upper GI bacteria in their stool samples.

The healthiest participants predictably reported higher fiber intake, more water consumption, and regular exercise

Memia narrative: as wearables increasingly monitor every bodily function, this research positions bowel movement frequency as a surprisingly robust biomarker for systemic health

📎🤖 Dear Paperclip Maximizer

LessWrong researchers penned an earnest letter:

🏠Vertical Tiny Living

German engineers have solved the tiny house space problem by building up instead of out, creating the DQ Tower—a three-storey, 4x4.2m footprint micro-residence that stands 8.6m tall with two bedrooms and full amenities. At €150,000 (US$176,000), this prefab skyscraper-in-miniature targets the premium end of downsizing, already generating revenue on Airbnb, suggesting a new hybrid between micro-hospitality and modular housing.

🦠🇳🇿 The best place in the world to have herpes

A cheeky New Zealand public health campaign featuring former All Blacks coach Sir Graham Henry promoting the country as "the best place in the world to have herpes" has won the Cannes Lions grand prix for good. Nicely done:

🙏🙏🙏 Thanks as always to everyone who takes the time to get in touch with links and feedback.

Namaste

Ben