Nuclear powered AI☢️ explosive technology supply chains💣💥 WFH vs "culture"🏢 non-linear climate change📈 worldwide energy matrix🌐 mouthpad👅 drones swarming🐝 5D eternity crystal💎 #2024.38
Nuclear powered AI☢️ explosive technology supply chains💣💥 WFH vs "culture"🏢 non-linear climate change📈 worldwide energy matrix🌐 mouthpad👅 drones swarming🐝 5D eternity crystal💎 #2024.38
In-person offices are obsolete twentieth-century technology
Welcome to this week's Memia scan across emerging tech and the exponentially accelerating future. As always, thanks for reading!
ยินดีต้อนรับสู่ประเทศไทย
🌴 This week’s nomadic missive comes from ประเทศไทย Thailand, in the natural surroundings of Khao Lak (“Main Mountain“), a cluster of small villages just up the coast from Phuket. I’m spending a few days visiting my friend and Kiwi entrepreneur Henry who — in addition to running his AoNZ-based Enterprise XR business Corvecto from here — is helping to grow a digital-nomad-friendly local ecosystem of accommodation, cafes and coworking spaces… highly recommended spot to visit!
Plus, the internet is FAST here.1
Beyond VR co-CEO Jessica Manins enjoyed her recent work-cation here as well…
ℹ️PSA: Memia sends *very long emails*, best viewed online or in the Substack app.
🗞️Weekly roundup
The most clicked link in last week’s newsletter was: Perplexity’s new Discover Feed. Watch closely how this develops in the next few months…
🎙️NotebookLM revisited
Last week I sped over the release of Google’s NotebookLM podcast creation feature… worth another look, it’s pretty amazing. Here are a couple of examples of completely AI-generated podcast conversations, created just from uploading one or more PDFs:
This could be viewed as a party trick - a nicely refined prompt generates the text conversation… and then Google’s very impressive voice engine creates the rest. But it’s also another sign of how quickly multimedia content creation is being automated and democratised rapidly… in just a few months this feature could be integrated into Google Workspace.
I had a go: here’s last week’s Memia newsletter discussed as an 11 minute podcast… took less than 2 mins to generate from the PDF upload. The conversational speech sounds so realistic (currently only an experimental release and only works in American English) - and the script accurately picks out the key insights and sums things up really well - 100%. Actually mindblowing.🤯
🔙 ICYMI
Speaking of voice AI…. I was quoted in an article in last week’s NZ Herald discussing the implications for contact centre automation in Australia and New Zealand: AI could take thousands of call centre jobs at ASB’s Australian parent. How about here? Journo Chris Keall quite rightly abridged my comments in the article but here they are for the record:
“There's emerging evidence that AI-driven voice- and chatbot- interfaces, powered by frontier LLMs such as OpenAI GPT-4o (and now o1 series) or Anthropic Claude are approaching human-level capability interacting with human callers and resolving customer service enquiries first time. Clearly if this removes the need to wait on hold listening to muzak for hours then most people will welcome this as a positive development.
There are compelling demos from AI voice solution providers including Bland.ai ("Still Hiring Humans?" says their latest billboard ad https://x.com/usebland/status/1785383574419718541) and Air.ai which promise sophisticated AI customer service agents.
In reality, as with all AI solutions, the reliability and accuracy of these AI voice solutions is still not quite high enough for prime time (yet) - and there are also a raft of novel vulnerabilities to address up front. (For example prompt-based "jailbreaking" attacks or just plain errors such as last year's at Air Canada chatbot incident). As a result, most enterprises will still be cautious rolling new AI technology out wholesale, even if the high-level investment case is compelling.
However, that doesn't counter the direction of travel... even TCS CEO K Krithivasan, head of one of the world's largest contact centre outsourcers, went on record earlier this year saying that 'AI could replace the need for call centres'.
Personally I think it is only a few short years — if that — until most routine customer service enquiries — and quite a few complex ones — will be able to be handled end-to-end by AI.
Bigger picture: contact centres could just be the canary in the coalmine for the rapid automation of all knowledge work. The potential implications of AGI are profound for society but people still haven't woken up to how imminent this is. I would like to see a cross-party political initiative in New Zealand which starts preparing for a "just transition" to a post-AI economy where most human cognitive work as we know it is automated - and thinks about how to share the dividends of automation more equally so that it isn't just a few global tech giants who benefit. But unfortunately this isn't anywhere near the mainstream political discourse yet.”
(Not holding my breath on that last point…)
💣💥Explosive technology supply chains
The boundaries of military conflict blurred profoundly last week as a complex technology supply chain attack resulted in thousands of new pagers and radios exploding spontaneously in Lebanon and Syria. At least 37 people were killed, including children, and at least 2,931 injured. Israeli intelligence services are suspected to be behind the attack, as reported by the WSJ, with a sophisticated plot to manufacture pagers with batteries laced with the explosive PETN.
Coverage:
FT: From Taipei to Budapest: the mysterious trail of exploding pagers (gift link)
Action On Armed Violence: Supply chain sabotage: the explosive plot behind the deadly attacks in Lebanon
The implications of the attack extend well outside the diabolical, escalating situation in the Middle East. Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar gets right to the nub of the matter for the rest of us ($walled):
“Can you trust your iPhone? Now that Israel has demonstrated this capability on a large scale, we can expect others to try the same. It marks a dramatic increase in the attack surface. Every electronic device, from smartphones to connected watches, becomes a potential remote-controlled grenade…The world's vectors of vulnerability have just become exponentially more complex.“
Many new layers of supply chain security and provenance traceability will be required to mitigate against these threats from hereon…
🏢WFH vs “culture”
A couple of developments this week forcing workers to give up their post-COVID work-from-home freedoms and force them back into the office.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy put out a lengthy memo to staff containing a directive to return to working from the office 5 days a week from January. Apparently this is all about “strengthening culture”:
“…we’ve observed that it’s easier [in the office] for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.“
(Elon Musk expressed a blunter version of the same sentiment for his companies back in 2022: )
caption...
Closer to home, Ministers in the current New Zealand
ClownshowGovernment took it upon themselves to (over)reach down into operational matters, demanding a tightening of working-from-home public service arrangements in the name of “productivity” and even “quality future leadership“.OK, Boomer. The evidence for WFH vs. Office productivity is inconclusive. Some studies indicate a decline in productivity during remote work periods, others highlight significant gains.
Plus, the word “leadership” in this context makes me even more queasy than usual - equating as it does to “social-ape-hierarchy-and-body-language-hacking” in most in-person office situations. The “leader” often being the most charismatic psychopath able to impose their will on others through coercive body language and enforced social conformity. Yuk.
Personally I’m utterly insensitive to the in-person “culture” argument as well. IMO effective culture equates more to well-designed organisational software and AI architecture, not charismatic personality-based social gameplay in the office… the most successful future organisations will be almost entirely automated by AI - and the most productive digital-native people working in them just need well-thought-through incentive structures to deliver to. If you really need to chat at the water cooler, use an avatar instead.
Above all, operating remotely removes proximity bias from the workforce… frankly it’s so inefficient to colocate with colleagues, particularly if you’re based in a small city or market where valuable talent and skills are sparsely distributed. Remote work enables collaboration unconstrained by physical geography.
And for those of us who live in seismic zones and have actually experienced CBD-destroying earthquakes and other natural disasters … you *really don’t* want to have an operational model which relies on physical buildings when they are out of action… particularly in, er, the public-service-dominated city of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.
Put simply: in-person offices are obsolete twentieth-century technology unfit for twenty-first-century productivity, competitiveness or resilience. Change the operational model instead.
There are likely bigger forces at play behind these two stories:
Stanford remote working expert Nick Bloom thinks that it will lead to a rise in quit rates at Amazon… it could even be a less-than-subtle move to increase staff attrition without officially downsizing…? Either way, he also doesn’t think other firms will follow suit:
“Has work from home ended? No. Big data from SWAA www.wfhresearch.com, Kastle and the US Census HPS shows work from home has been flat since early 2023 ... For every big firm like Amazon pushing for a return to office there are others increasing working from home, often once their office leases expire. We all focus on firms forcing return to offices which is why this seems so common, but many other firms are quietly relaxing this and moving in the opposite direction.“
More cynically: It's all about debt on zombie office towers:
Exhibit 1: Commercial office occupancy remains stubbornly way off the pre-COVID peak, below 40% in some US cities:
As such, an article in HBR earlier this year points to what’s coming: U.S. Commercial Real Estate Is Headed Toward a Crisis.
So…reading between the lines on directive from the Aotearoa Government (and their landlord backers):
Perhaps our esteemed political “leaders” should lead by example first…💯
Seriously though, bigger trends I’m watching:
AI automation radically reducing the number of staff in competitive organisations… at which point the economies of scale of a centralised office building just don’t work out
Improving VR and AR hardware and software making remote collaboration seamless relative to physical presence
Conversion of commercial offices to residential
Investment in remodelling new and existing homes with dedicated (soundproofed) workspaces
More independent co-working spaces for (non-coercive) social contact.
There must be some pretty large opportunities for shorting commercial real estate right now…
📈The week in AI
The week's AI news and releases… as usual so much going on it’s hard to keep track…
☢️Nuclear powered AI
The increasingly uncertain question “where is all the electricity going to come from to power all the AI data centres?” took an unprecedented turn last week when Microsoft and nuclear plant owner Constellation announced that they have entered into to a deal to restart the closed Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The $1.6 billion project aims to revive the 837-megawatt facility (enough to power 800,000 homes!) by 2028 and Microsoft will pay $110-115 per megawatt-hour for the plant's output, a premium but a reasonable hedge based upon increasing prices in the US market.
(Three Mile Island is most famous for its 1979 meltdown — the reactor closed in 2019 because it was uneconomic to compete with cheap natural gas).
Insightful discussion between Mark Nelson and Chris Keefer and on the Decouple Podcast here:
This is unlikely to be the last nuclear-powered AI deal:
AWS is hiring at least one nuclear engineer:
Google is exploring Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as part of its energy strategy
Compare and contrast: Elon Musk’s new xAI Colossus data centre in Memphis was set up rapidly using polluting methane-gas-burning generators without permits.
However… nuclear may not be such a big part of the energy mix in future if solar (with batteries) keeps up its accelerating capacity growth globally:
Certainly solar energy is accelerating beyond analyst projections: Even Solar’s biggest fans are underestimating it. Hence this provocative thread on X (using optimistic assumptions for solar but the numbers stack up at an order of magnitude)
Illustrated:
In real life, here’s what happened in California in only 3 years adding more solar generation and grid-scale battery storage. Nuclear is the tiny dark blue stripe along the bottom…
(And definitely don’t mention the increasingly complex (physically and geopolitically) international supply chains for nuclear power either: for example, a US ban on Russian enriched uranium imports has accelerated efforts to diversify fuel sources and expand commercial alternatives…but with limited results so far.)
Bigger picture, opportunities abound for energy innovators:
“The capital cost of the power infrastructure is just a tiny fraction (like 3%!) of the capex of the compute, and even just the depreciation of the compute exceeds the cost of even premium power. Hence, AI hyperscalers and those that aspire to be in their class are traveling to where the power is, are building where power has been (and there's legacy transmission to support it, like old nuclear plants) and are getting into the business of actually building powerplants and reactors. Utilities and transmission and distribution companies, interconnection queues, all are used to react much slower -- over many years -- unlike the top technology companies, now vying to compete at the highest levels of AI performance. Since ~99% of energy technologies previously died withering while waiting for utilities to consider them bankable, this represents an extremely fertile, attractive new state of play if you're bringing a new energy technology to market.“ — Danielle Fong
🫧Bubble inflating
That AI bubble I so often mention…? It may only just be getting started:
Blackrock and Microsoft announced a new US$30Bn AI infrastructure investment fund (US$100Bn with debt funding)
AI chip startup Groq has partnered with oil producer Aramco to build “the world’s largest AI inferencing center” in Saudi Arabia which initially will have 19,000 of Groq’s language processing units. No guesses what the energy source for that will be.
💬 More on o1
After the fanfare of the launch of its o1 model last week, OpenAI has finished the rollout to all ChatGPT Plus paid users and has started opening up rate limits some more…
A few other updates:
OpenAI posted a thread of favourite posts about o1… some interesting takes, many covered last week.
The exact definition and method of calculating “reasoning tokens” is still opaque
You can talk to o1 in ciphers…
Personal impression… I’ve found myself “trusting” ChatGPT’s answers *more* than previously… not nearly 100%… but more. However, I remain wary:
In breaking OpenAI news…fabled Apple iPhone designer Jony Ive confirmed he’s working on a new AI hardware device with OpenAI. Sam Altman is a master negotiator if he manages to get Apple in as an investor… while not-so-secretly plotting to take their flagship product out…
🎬 Runway / Lionsgate
Runway is the first AI video firm to break into Hollywood… signing a deal with Lionsgate to train a new GenAI model on Lionsgate content, to use the tech for producing future film and TV projects.
(That subheadline… “capital-efficient content creation opportunities”…. really makes me want to get out of bed in the morning…)
Meanwhile independent AI video producer Jeff Synthesized announced a funding round for his new film studio NeoCinema AI. Impressive trailer…
🤖 I am not a robot (really!)
Breaking reCAPTCHAv2 - new research which solves 100% of the CAPTCHAs presented by reCAPTCHAv2, surpassing the success rates of previous works, which range from 68% to 71%.
Implication: now if you fail a Captcha test you’re more likely to be a human than an AI!
🆕 New releases and research
As usual a raft of new updates, too many to keep up with…
New tech:
Qwen 2.5 from Alibaba … topping the open source benchmarks (this week)?
Kling AI motion brush… cue infinite cat videos:
Solarpro - aiming to be the most powerful LLM to run on a single GPU?
Genetic programming company Gingko Bioworks launched a model API, making its proprietary AI tools for biological research publicly available, including a large-scale protein language model trained on over 2 billion sequences.
New research:
Having a dialogue with a LLM chatbot can durably reduce conspiracy beliefs
The widely used Wordfreq language library will no longer be updated - according to the maintainer, Generative AI has “polluted” the data… (OR language continues to evolve…, depends how you look at it…)
PaperQA2 - the first AI agent which conducts reviews of scientific papers on its own.
🔮[Weak] signals
And then there are all the non-AI signals from near and far futures...
🇨🇳🇺🇸📊ASPI Critical Technology Tracker
Australian strategic think ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker first launched in March 2023 (covered in Memia 2023.09) recently underwent a major expansion in August 2024 which took the dataset from five years (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years (2003–2023). Explore the broader project here. It tracks 44 “Critical Technologies” from a research and human talent perspective.
“What’s the problem?
Western democracies are losing the global technological competition, including the race for scientific and research breakthroughs, and the ability to retain global talent—crucial ingredients that underpin the development and control of the world’s most important technologies, including those that don’t yet exist.
Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas….We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors“
The data is published interactively - for each technology can render a Sankey diagram showing the talent flows for each country - for example the top 25% researchers (by most cited papers) for Post-Quantum Cryptography. As with most technologies, it shows China gaining most, US gaining second most… generally at the expense of all other countries out there.
Worth a rummage…
💻Consolidation and chips
News surfaced that challenger Qualcomm is exploring a merger with troubled chipmaker Intel … how the mighty have fallen. Intel's stock has fallen 53% this year due to disappointing earnings and investor doubts about costly manufacturing plans - bit Intel's market cap still exceeds US$90 billion, making this potentially one of the largest technology mergers ever. (Dwarfed by NVIDIA’s market cap of nearly US$3 trillion!)
Meanwhile… despite negative media coverage, TSMC’s new Arizona plant has reportedly started shipping 5nm process wafers to its first customer Apple… earlier than scheduled. Small “but significant” volumes. Soon Apple devices will have chips “Made In America”… (but likely still manufactured in China and SE Asia, natch…)
👓 Snap OS
Remember Snap? The niche social networking and advertising firm has been ploughing a lonely furrow for years now… the company launched two new AR and AI platform products recently:
5th generation Snap AR spectacles:
“AR Glasses powered by Snap OS“
Chunky…but quite a mission to get these into production, I imagine. Here’s the launch event outlining the tech specs:
Snap AI video (Generative AI text-to-video inside the Snapchat app):
(Both videos via @bilawalsidhu):
Evan Spiegel wrote a long and slightly rambling letter to all staff on the company’s financial turnaround since IPO and its future: 13 years at Snap.
👅Mouthpad
The latest “tongue UI” from startup Augmental (I assume “hands up” position is optional)
🤖🦾Robot roundup
Pudu “semi-humanoid” robot:
(Reminded of this classic Birkett cartoon from the 70s…)
Nifty autonomous digger building a rock retaining wall (video via @nhfoley):
This clearly AI-generated concept video of a Humanoid agricultural robot working alongside humans in the field has been doing the rounds on my social networking feeds (video via @Sam_TalkEngine):
In reality, modern real-world agricultural robots are already far more impressive: (Video via @AlecStapp)
🌐Worldwide energy matrix
I recently refreshed myself on this 2022 concept from Kiwi energy startup Emrod for a Worldwide Energy Matrix - the first ever (wireless) global energy grid, beaming energy from Earth base stations up to space and bouncing it back down to somewhere else on the planet’s surface. They talk about eventually reaching energy efficiency of 80-85% (…hmmm). But clearly has military / maritime applications in the near term - the ability to power a swarm of drones way away from the power grid, not needing to carry any fuel source with them.
🐝Drones swarming
Speaking of drones…
After last week’s impressive Shenzhen demo with 8,100 drones, here’s the scary flip side of the massive advances in drone swarming technologies that are happening right now (video via @GrandpaRoy2):
Earlier this year more information came out on China’s dedicated drone carrier ship, currently under construction on the Yangtze River:
NavalNews Australian-manufactured ultra-low-cost cardboard drones are being used with high effectiveness by Ukraine against Russia:
As Ukraine is showing … modern drone warfare makes multi-million dollar tanks obsolete… next up: naval ships
🇨🇳🚀💥Deep Blue test
Also in China, the Deep Blue rocket *almost* managed an autonomous takeoff and landing on a test flight… but not quite, exploding at the last second. Super impressive video:
🛡️Brilliant Pebbles
Brilliant Pebbles was a proposed ballistic missile defense (BMD) system concept developed during the late Cold War era, specifically in 1987, envisioning a global mesh of orbiting anti-ICBM fast interceptors that can destroy a nuclear weapon during it's slow moving boost-phase anywhere in the world. Feasibly private US companies SpaceX and Anduril now have the tech to build this.
🦖RNA extraction for de-extinction
Scientists have successfully sequenced RNA from a 130-year-old extinct Tasmanian tiger specimen, marking a significant breakthrough in the efforts towards de-extinction of lost species.
💎5D eternity crystal
Scientists at the UK’s University of Southampton developed a revolutionary “5 dimensional” memory crystal capable of storing vast amounts of data for billions of years. The crystal encodes information using five dimensions: two optical and three spatial coordinates, and has a storage capacity of up to 360 terabytes. The crystal remains stable for billions of years, even in extreme temperatures (-273°C to 1,000°C).
The team have successfully stored the complete human genome (approximately 3 billion letters), inscribed with a visual key for future decoding, including DNA structure and chromosome arrangement. It is currently housed in an Austrian salt cave as part of the Memory of Mankind archive.
⏳Zeitgeist
Once around the world outside tech, treading lightly...
🌿COP16 for biodiversity
This year’s COP16 UN conference on Biodiversity in Cali, Colombia will be held from 21 October - 1 November 2024. COP16 is the first meeting of the COP after the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) in 2022, also known as the Biodiversity Plan. This year’s gathering turns the focus to implementation… before it’s too late.
The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) is a membership Union of government and civil society organisations and has prepared two position papers ahead of the conference which are worth a read.
(The problems keep getting more urgent - this week an updated briefing showed that Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, with ocean acidification at a critical threshold.)
📈Non-linear climate change
More extreme weather this week:
Floods in Japan six people have been killed and 10 others are missing after record rainfall caused floods and landslides in parts of Japan's Ishikawa prefecture.
Major floods across a swath of central and West Africa have displaced at least 2.9 million people, killed about 1 000 and are devastated crops in a region that’s already short of food and plagued by insecurity
A new study has compiled a model of half a billion years of Earth’s temperatures. The models, which the researchers call PhanDA, estimate global temperatures over the last 485 million years, going back to the end of the Cambrian period.
Global mean temperatures varied from lows of 11°C during recent glacial periods to highs of 36°C about 90 million years ago. The study found a strong link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures throughout most of the period examined. The very recent Holocene period in which humans evolved is almost the lowest mean temperature on record:
On a more immediate timescale, it looks like the global average temperature is now increasing at a non-linear rate (graphic compiled from NASA data by German scientist Stefan Rahmsdorf, Head of Earth System Analysis @ Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact):
This is a self-reinforcing system… it’s unlikely things are going to slow down. Some developments which may mitigate the rate of acceleration…
What does Peak Emissions mean for China - and the world? Various projections have suggested that carbon emissions from China, the world's largest emitter, will probably peak soon — if they haven’t already — well ahead of Beijing’s pledge that they would peak before 2030.
Bison fails: Project Bison, a massive carbon removal venture in Wyoming backed by the Biden administration, has been abandoned by technology startup CarbonCapture. The project aimed to remove 5 million tons of CO2 annually by 2030 but failed due to insufficient carbon-free energy availability. The irony.
Make sunsets continue to trial their controversial geoengineering technology:
Anthropogenic CO2 fixation? A fringe concept unproven by science (to date), but potentially feasible:
“Ocean-based Self-Replicating Systems cultivating microalgae & processing biomass to useful materials … will enable recapture & utilization of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions by midcentury.“
🛢️End of Growth?
On Tuesday September 10, Brent futures price fell to its lowest level in three years as prices dropped more than US$12… oil markets and the global economy are now in the middle of a paradigm shift as demand falls off a cliff: Is this The end of growth? why oil prices are falling.
🇪🇺Draghi on EU competitiveness
A major recent report on European competitiveness from a team led by EU bigwig Mario Draghi is scathing about Europe’s sluggish economic growth prospects and outlines a strategy to close the innovation gap with the US and China in key technologies, recommending massive investments of €750-800 billion annually, with €450 billion for the energy transition alone.
All other countries outside US and China are faced with the same conundrum.
🌌8 billion years ago
On a more cosmic scale…Astronomers have detected FRB 20220610A, one of the most distant and energetic fast radio bursts (FRBs) ever observed, which traveled for 8 billion years before reaching Earth. The burst emitted energy equivalent to 30 years of solar output in milliseconds.
🧘Memetic savasana
Lots of travel this week… had a bit of time to let my mind wander…
⚔️The AI arms race… as foretold
🔄Loop De Loop
Less seriously… now taking ideas for a second Auckland Harbour Bridge crossing…!
🎬Mickey17
What's it feel like to die? Mickey17 - the new film from director Bong Joon Ho (whose last film Parasite has been lauded widely) released January 31, 2025
🔮Book of the future
They don’t make them like this any more…
(Tom Cheesewright is still going!)
🙏🙏🙏 Thanks as always to everyone who takes the time to get in touch with links and feedback.
แล้วพบกันใหม่ (Láew phóp gan mài)2
Ben
One other highlight: leaving Europe I am now mercifully free of ubiquitous GDPR cookie consent popups on every website I visit… an energy-sapping example of perverse unforeseen consequences of regulation…!) I find using ad blocker Chrome extension Ghostery does a better job of maintaining privacy.
"See you again" in Thai, Claude assures me
Re: processing goes where the power is. Major NZ vision failure (amongst many) is selling Manapouri hydro power at rock bottom prices to RTZ to make aluminium, instead of setting up data centres for onshore processing....