I'm as tired of the snark as you are. Let's do a fun robotics story.

Here's to a cool toy (with very clever engineering) that got a lot of kids interested in robotics back in the day. 

How a 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics
Jon Keegan

Described as a “robot-like arm to aid young masterminds in scientific and laboratory experiments,” it was the rare toy that lived up to the hype printed on the front of the box. This was a legit robotic arm. You could rotate the arm to spin around its base, tilt it up and down, bend it at the “elbow” joint, rotate the “wrist,” and open and close the bright-­orange articulated hand in elegant chords of movement, all using only the twistable twin joysticks. 

Anyone who played with this toy will also remember the sound it made. Once you slid the power button to the On position, you heard a constant whirring sound of plastic gears turning and twisting. And if you tried to push it past its boundaries, it twitched and protested with a jarring “CLICK … CLICK … CLICK.”

It wasn’t just kids who found the Armatron so special. It was featured on the cover of the November/December 1982 issue of Robotics Age magazine, which noted that the $31.95 toy (about $96 today) had “capabilities usually found only in much more expensive experimental arms.”

...

I needed to know the story of this toy. I reached out to the manufacturer, Tomy (now known as Takara Tomy), which has been in business in Japan for over 100 years. It put me in touch with Hiroyuki Watanabe, a 69-year-old engineer and toy designer living in Tokyo. He’s retired now, but he worked at Tomy for 49 years, building many classic handheld electronic toys of the ’80s, including Blip, Digital Diamond, Digital Derby, and Missile Strike. Watanabe’s name can be found on 44 patents, and he was involved in bringing between 50 and 60 products to market. Watanabe answered emailed questions via video, and his responses were translated from Japanese.

 ...

The bold look and function of Armatron made quite an impression on many young kids who would one day have a career in robotics.

One of them was Adam Borrell, a mechanical design engineer who has been building robots for 15 years at Boston Dynamics, including Petman, the YouTube-famous Atlas, and the dog-size quadruped called Spot.

...

Borrell had a fateful reunion with the toy while in grad school for engineering. “One of my office mates had an Armatron at his desk,” he recalls, “and it was broken. We took it apart together, and that was the first time I had seen the guts of it. 

“It had this fantastic mechanical gear train to just engage and disengage this one motor in a bunch of different ways. And it was really fascinating that it had done so much—the one little motor. And that sort of got me back thinking about industrial robot arms again.”

 ...

Eric Paulos, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, recalls nagging his parents about what an educational gift Armatron would make. Ultimately, he succeeded in his lobbying. 

“It was just endless exploration of picking stuff up and moving it around and even just watching it move. It was mesmerizing to me. I felt like I really owned my own little robot,” he recalls. “I cherish this thing. I still have it to this day, and it’s still working.”

No one understands and explains the Age of the Business Idiot better than Ed Zitron

Zitron is one of the essential critics of the AI bubble. He is the essential critic of the business and finance side of the story which is where the really egregious stuff is going on. His newsletter is smart, angry, fearless and free.

We will be coming back to this and discussing how the story Zitron is telling about the AI bubble is intertwined with our humanoid robot thread (with many of the same names popping up in both contexts).

Society berated people for "quiet quitting," a ghastly euphemism for “doing the job as specified in your employment contract,” in 2022 because journalism is enthralled by the management class, and because the management class has so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what "labor" means that people got called lazy for literally doing their jobs. The middle manager brain doesn't see a worker as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as an asset that must provide a return. As a result, if another asset comes along that could potentially provide a bigger return — like an offshore worker, or an AI agent — that middle manager won’t hesitate to drop them. 

Artificial intelligence is the ultimate panacea for the Business Idiot — a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the Business Idiot themselves. The Information reported recently that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott — the chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of over $200 billion, despite the fact that, like SalesForce, nobody really knows what it does  — chose to push AI across his whole organization (both in product and in practice) based on the mental consideration I'd usually associate with a raven finding a shiny object:

When ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, McDermott joined his executives around a boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there, he made a quick decision. “Bill’s like, ‘Let me make it clear to everybody here, everything you do: AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,’” recalled Tzitzon, the ServiceNow vice chair.

To begin a customer meeting on AI, McDermott has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to their best impression of him: Present AI not as a matter of bots or databases but in grand-sounding terms, like “business transformation.

During the push to grow AI, McDermott has insisted his managers improve efficiency across their teams. He is laser-focused on a sales team’s participation rate. “Let’s assume you’re a manager, and you have 12 direct reports,” he said. “Now let’s assume out of those 12, two people did good, which was so good that the manager was 110% of plan. I don’t think that’s good. I tell the manager: ‘What did the other 10 do?’”

You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What do you mean "efficiency"? What does that quote even mean? 110% of plan? What're you on about? Did you hit your head on something Bill?

I'd wager Bill is concussion-free — and an example of a true Business Idiot — a person with incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on knowing stuff or caring about his customers, but on the latest shiny thing that makes him think "line go up." No, really, that's Bill McDermott's thing. Back in 2022, he said to Yahoo Finance the metaverse was "real" and that ServiceNow could help someone "create an e-mall in the metaverse" and have a futuristic store of some sort. One might wonder how ServiceNow provided that, and the answer is it didn't. I cannot find a single product that it’s offered that includes it.

 

Well, you have to admit, he can make things disappear.

Unfortunately, the link to Smith's article no longer works, but Ed Zitron posted this excerpt. Along with Qatar, SoftBank was, of course, among the investors.

Gotta love that last line.

Trump, the Court and the Calculation: They will do anything for love, but they won't do that.

When I try to guess how Republicans—excluding True Believers and those who have left the party on principle—will react to Donald Trump, I always think in terms of the calculation.

The dilemma for smart Republicans has always been that Trump is likely to do long-term damage to the party (and to the country, though that seldom seems to figure here), but forcing him out would also do considerable damage. Therefore, the question has always been: which would be worse? You could see this in 2015, when the party establishment wavered between trying to squelch his campaign and simply hoping that he would go away. In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, you saw it again—briefly. When it looked like Trump was a spent force, a large number of party leaders stepped forward to condemn his actions. As soon as it became apparent that he was, in fact, still in control of the party and would be difficult to dislodge, this opposition completely evaporated.

We are seeing something along very similar lines with the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential power—especially with the notable carve-out for the Fed.

Every sane Republican knows that Trump going after Powell would almost certainly be disastrous for the country—and, more to the point in this case, for the GOP. The last time something comparable happened, the party was locked out of the White House for 20 years.

Even for a Jim Steinman/Michael Bay collaboration, this video is ... something.

Memorial Day Repost

A good day for a recommendation

There is, of course, no such thing as the military perspective -- no single person can speak for all the men and women who have served in the military -- but if you are looking for a military perspective, my first choice would be Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who writes eloquently and intelligently on the subject for Esquire. Here are Bateman's recent thoughts on Memorial Day.

When the guns fell silent in the Spring of 1865, they all went home. They scattered across the country, back across the devastated south and the invigorated north. Then they made love to their wives, played with their children, found new jobs or stepped back into their old ones, and in general they tried to get on with their lives. These men were no longer soldiers; they were now veterans of the Civil War, never to wear the uniform again. But before long they started noticing that things were not as they had been before.

Now, they had memories of things that they could not erase. There were the friends who were no longer there, or who were hobbling through town on one or two pegs, or who had a sleeve pinned up on their chest. There were the nights that they could not shake the feeling that something really bad was about to happen. And, aside from those who had seen what they had seen and lived that life, they came to realize that they did not have a lot of people to talk to about these things. Those who had been at home, men and women, just did not "get it." A basic tale about life in camp would need a lot of explanation, so it was frustrating even to talk. Terminology like "what is a picket line" and "what do you mean oblique order?" and a million other elements, got in the way. These were the details of a life they had lived for years but which was now suddenly so complex that they never could get the story across to those who had not been there. Many felt they just could not explain about what had happened, to them, to their friends, to the nation.

So they started to congregate. First in little groups, then in statewide assemblies, and finally in national organizations that themselves took on a life of their own.

The Mid-1860s are a key period in American history not just because of the War of Rebellion, but also because this period saw the rise of "social organizations." Fraternities, for example, exploded in the post-war period. My own, Pi Kappa Alpha, was formed partially by veterans of the Confederacy, Lee's men (yes, I know, irony alert). Many other non-academic "fraternal" organizations got their start around the same time. By the late 1860s in the north and south there was a desire to commemorate. Not to celebrate, gloat or pine, but to remember.

Individually, at different times and in different ways, these nascent veterans groups started to create days to stop and reflect. These days were not set aside to mull on a cause -- though that did happen -- but their primary purpose was to think on the sacrifices and remember those lost. Over time, as different states incorporated these ideas into statewide holidays, a sort of critical legislative mass was achieved. "Decoration Day" was born, and for a long time that was enough. The date selected was, quite deliberately, a day upon which absolutely nothing of major significance had occurred during the entire war. Nobody in the north or south could try to change it to make it a victory day. It was a day for remembering the dead through decorating their graves, and the memorials started sprouting up in every small town in the nation. You still see them today, north and south, in small towns and villages like my own home of Chagrin Falls -- granite placed there so that the nation, and their homes, should not forget the sacrifices of the men who went away on behalf of the country and never came back.

Any excuse to post this video

The dirty little secret of the generative AI bubble is that no one has come up with a business model that justifies a fraction of a fraction of the money that's gone into it. At least not one that depends on the systems real rather than imagined functionality. 

People riding this bubble have an incentive to talk up AI-based humanoid robots and over-priced Ive designed personal devices because they create the impression of limitless new markets ("a trillion in value") while distracting from the truly ugly numbers.

When they really want to tell a story...

I'm going to have to be disciplined when discussing this story. There are so many aspects intersecting with so many of our ongoing threads that I could easily fill a long-form New Yorker article—which would be fine, except that I would almost certainly never get around to posting anything. (Ironically, I can't recommend the actual New Yorker article on this.)

For now, we're just going to talk about what happens when the establishment press—in this case, particularly the NYT/Politico/Axios—decides that they really want to tell a story.

As we've discussed many times, The New York Times et al., since late in the 20th century, have implicitly—and often explicitly—narrowed their definition of bias down to saying mean things about conservatives and Republicans. Notably absent is any consideration of the biases that come from fear of criticism and, even more importantly, the desire to make oneself and one's organization look good.

Put bluntly, the leadership class of the establishment press is vain, petty, vindictive, and devoid of self-awareness. This led to a mild to moderate level of dysfunctional coverage, with such notable failures as Bush v. Gore, the Iraq War, Swift Boating, and the rise of the birther movement, but on the whole, the system was still functional. That changed in 2015.

From the moment that Trump announced his bid for the presidency to the day of the election, the press engaged in a massive campaign of selective reporting, motivated reasoning, wishful analytics, and anything else they could come up with to support the idea that this man would never become president. They used this belief to justify childish score-settling with the Clintons. We discussed this at great length in real time here at the blog, and I feel pretty goddamn confident saying that the large majority of our posts stand up better than almost all of what The New York Times was writing at the time.

We saw a similar pattern in the run-up to the 2024 election, with publications like The New York Times assuring us that Trump was circling the drain and there was no stopping Ron DeSantis.

After it became apparent that Trump was not just the front-runner but had the overwhelming support of his party, the establishment press corps—for reasons better left to psychologists than to journalism critics—decided to double down on false balance and sane-washing. (Actually, that's not quite true. The publishers, editors, and a few of their more toadyish reporters decided to go along. There is considerable evidence that the rank and file were, in large part, very unhappy with the final versions of the stories that were coming out under their bylines.)

This time, however, whatever goodwill and reputational standing the NYT/Politico/Axios had possessed eight years earlier was gone, and prominent commentators—including some of the most distinguished names in American journalism, such as Margaret Sullivan and James Fallows—were very vocal with their criticisms. This led to tremendous hurt feelings and whining on the part of the press corps, arguably culminating in Maggie Haberman's Fresh Air interview, in which she complained of an "industry" out to get her and her colleagues.

If anything, the 2024 election and the events that have followed have only heightened the reputational damage, and the editors of these publications have been fighting back. Possibly the first major salvo was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where one of these editors gave a speech arguing that the press had failed not by ignoring Trump's cognitive decline, but by not having spent even more time discussing Biden's. This was a crude and spectacularly self-serving bit of rhetorical sleight of hand—the old "I'm sorry I didn't insist more strongly on doing things my way" argument.

Not long after that, we saw these organizations and their allies redoubling their efforts to push the narrative of Biden's decline. These stories were told in the most sensationalistic tone possible. There was a slew of stunningly dishonest "political analyses" framing this as an organic grassroots movement coming from the Democrats, rather than astroturf from the publications telling the story. Data points that undercut the narrative—such as Biden's personal negotiations of the incredibly complex hostage crisis while he was handing over the campaign to Harris—are nowhere to be seen.

This is also about conversations that the press corps really doesn't want to have. Perhaps one of the most notable things about this story is how tightly constrained the coverage has been. No historical context or discussions of how previous administrations (Wilson, FDR, JFK, Reagan) dealt with impaired presidents. No attempt to contrast these anecdotes with simultaneous cases where Biden was personally leading complex operations, such as the multinational hostage negotiations last summer. No comparisons with the cognitive state of Donald Trump. No explorations of how these anecdotes affected policy. All of these things would make for a better story, but it is not the story that the men (and we are overwhelmingly talking about men) who lead the establishment press want to talk about.

When the press wants to tell a story this badly—such as with Whitewater—ethical rules start to bend, and standards for things like sourcing start to lower. We are already seeing signs of that in this case.

Check out this extraordinary exchange:

Continued on Twitter.

Assuming CapitolHunters got the details right (and given that they're followed by some of the best journalists I know, I'm inclined to trust them), this is one hell of a tell.

This is being treated as one of the biggest stories in the country. Under those circumstances, shouldn't "eyewitness says incident in bombshell book never happened. Questions veracity of its anonymous sources." be a bigger part of the story? I can't find a single major news outlet that's even mentioned it, but I'd be lying if I said I were surprised. 

Humanoid robots are the blockchain of 2025

There are numerous reasons why a company will jump on a hype bubble. It tends to be good PR and projects an impression of forward thinking. Investors generally reward it and often punish companies that fail to jump on the bandwagon. Finally, CEOs are by no means immune to popular manias and fear of missing out; if anything, it's just the opposite.

The question that you need to keep asking yourself while reading any of these humanoid robot puff pieces (other than who stands to gain from another tech bubble) is: why bipedal? Wheels and treads are cheaper, simpler, more reliable, and generally more stable. If you do need to have a walking robot, it's generally best to go with: "Four legs good, two legs bad." Quadrupeds are simpler and more stable, which is probably why they have found their way into real-world applications while bipedal robots have not.

2025 Is the Year of the Humanoid Robot Factory Worker by Russell Brandom

Later this year, Boston Dynamics plans to put its all-electric humanoid Atlas robot to work in a Hyundai factory. The new version of the bot, evolved from the hydraulic Atlas model that’s been performing viral video demos since 2013, made its public debut last spring. But while the company’s dog-like Spot and warehouse robot Stretch are already deployed at industrial sites, the Hyundai pilot will be the first time Atlas is used in commercial manufacturing.

Boston Dynamics, which was acquired by Hyundai for $1.1 billion in 2021, is coy about how the robot will be used, but the general idea is that it’s designed to be stronger and more reliable than a human worker. “The robot is going to be able to do things that are difficult for humans,” Boston Dynamics spokesperson Kerri Neelon says. “Like pick up very heavy objects and carry things that are awkward for humans to carry.” [Doesn't the very fact that something is "awkward for humans to carry" suggest that a humanoid robot is not the way to go for that task? -- MP]

BD has great engineers and well-designed robots, but they (and Hyundai) have a huge incentive to see this hype bubble continue to inflate—both for the stock price and to promote their other, more useful robots.

 

Atlas will have friends: 2025 looks set to be the year that multipurpose humanoid robots, until now largely confined to research labs, go commercial. Some have already taken their first tentative robot steps into paid work, with Agility Robotics’ Digit moving items in a warehouse and Figure’s eponymous biped shipping out to commercial customers last year.

I'll try to comment on these in more detail later, but if you watch videos of Digit and Figure 02 working you'll notice three things:

1. There is no reason for them to be using legs rather than a cheaper and more efficient wheeled base.

2. They aren't doing anything all that impressive.

3. By comparison, the non-featured, non-humanoid robots seen in the background are really amazing.

Tech giants are also getting in on the trend: Both Apple and Meta are rumored to be working on some kind of consumer-facing humanoid robot. A 2024 Goldman Sachs report estimates that humanoid robots will represent a $38 billion market by 2035 —more than six times what the firm projected a year earlier.

Two things:

1. This is exactly what you'd expect in a bubble. Companies jumping on the bandwagon. Analysts suddenly pumping up their estimates in order to be part of the next big thing.

2.  Given the amounts being invested, that $38 billion market by 2035 (which is itself based on optimistic assumptions) doesn't seem like that big of a number, particularly with respect to Tesla, a company with a valuation of over one trillion dollars, much, possibly most of which is now based on the perceived potential of its robotics division.

The basic promise of humanoid robots is that they will be able to switch between multiple tasks, just like their human peers. It’s a fundamentally different approach from traditional assembly line automation, which builds an entire environment around the specific tasks required for manufacturing. Jonathan Hurst, cofounder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, expects its robots to sit alongside that process, not disrupt it.

For the 8,000th time... It has become embarrassingly commonplace to equate multipurpose robots with humanoids, despite the fact that there is absolutely no good reason— from an engineering or economic standpoint— to do so. In fact, it's just the opposite. There are any number of tasks that the human body is badly designed to tackle, including many—probably most—of those suggested for humanoid robots, such as the previously mentioned carrying of large, heavy packages.

“A purpose-built automation solution is always going to be higher performance and lower cost for that purpose,” Hurst says. “That’s great if you have 24/7 operations for that specific thing you want to do.” But for tasks that don’t need to run around the clock, a flexible robot could be more productive.

Hurst deserves credit for honesty here -- for a given task, purpose built will always be better and cheaper -- but he understates how small the segment of manufacturing labor is left, particularly once AI expands the number of tasks a purpose built robot can perform.

Coming to a vineyard near you...

When you get away from the humanoid personal robot bullshit, the real research is really cool.

Evan Ackerman writing for IEEE Spectrum:

 The robot itself is not that complicated, at least on the scale of how complicated robots usually are. It’s made up of a head with some sensors in it plus a handful of identical cable-connected segments, each with a couple of motors for leg actuation. On paper, this works out to be a lot of degrees of freedom, but you can get surprisingly good performance using relatively simple control techniques.

“Centipede robots, like snake robots, are basically swimmers,” Goldman says. The key difference is that adding legs expands the different kinds of environments through which swimming robots can move. The right pattern of lifting and lowering the legs generates a fluidlike thrust force that helps the robot to push off more stuff as it moves to make its motion more consistent and reliable. “We created a new kind of mechanism to take actuation away from the centerline of the robot to the sides, using cables back and forth,” says Goldman. “When you tune things properly, the robot goes from being stiff to unidirectionally compliant. And if you do that, what you find is almost like magic—this thing swims through arbitrarily complex environments with no brain power.” 

For real engineers, getting the same functionality with less complexity is a good thing.

The complex environments that the robot is designed for are agricultural. Think sensing and weed control in fields, but don’t think about gentle rolling hills lined with neat rows of crops. That kind of farming is very amenable to automation at scale, and there are plenty of robotics companies in that space already. Not all plants grow in well-kept rows on mostly flat ground, however: Perennial crops, where the plant itself sticks around and you harvest stuff off of it every year, can be much more complicated to manage. This is especially true for crops like wine grapes, which can grow on very steep and often rocky slopes. Those kinds of environments are an opportunity for GCR’s robots, offering an initial use case that brings the robot from academic curiosity to something with unique commercial potential.

...

According to GCR, there is currently no automated solution for weed control around scraggly bushy or vinelike plants (like blueberries or strawberries or grapes), and farmers can spend an enormous amount of money having humans crawl around under the plants to check health and pull weeds. GCR estimates that weed control for blueberries in California can run US $300 per acre or more, and strawberries are even worse, sometimes more than $1,000 per acre. It’s not a fun job, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find humans willing to do it. For farmers who don’t want to spray pesticides, there aren’t a lot of good options, and GCR thinks that its robotic centipedes could fill that niche.

An obvious question with any novel robotic mobility system is whether you could accomplish basically the same thing with a system that’s much less novel. Like, quadrupeds are getting pretty good these days, why not just use one of them? Or a wheeled robot, for that matter? “We want to send the robot as close to the crops as possible,” says Goldman. “And we don’t want a bigger, clunkier machine to destroy those fields.” This gets back to the clutter problem: A robot large enough to ignore clutter could cause damage, and most robots small enough not to damage clutter become a nightmare of a control problem.

When most of the obstacles that robots encounter are at a comparable scale to themselves, control becomes very difficult. “The terrain reaction forces are almost impossible to predict,” explains Goldman, which means that the robot’s mobility regime gets dominated by environmental noise. One approach would be to try to model all of this noise and the resulting dynamics and implement some kind of control policy, but it turns out that there’s a much simpler strategy: more legs. “It’s possible to generate reliable motion without any sensing at all,” says Goldman, “if we have a lot of legs.” 

This strikes me as an example of what a robotics story should be. An intelligent discussion of engineering principles and challenges applied to a real world business problems. I ran it by some actual roboticists on BlueSky and they were all in agreement. Here's what one had to say. 

Exactly.

Build and optimize the automation against requirements that bring immediate wins.

Then, and only then, once perfected, perhaps look to expand the domain of that automation or build new automation structures around it.

Understand the SYSTEMS problem as you go along.

Best possible way.

And they're fun to watch (though the weed pulling mechanism still needs some work).

 

It's almost as if, bear with me here, it's more cost efficient to reduce the amount of carbon you're putting into the atmosphere than it is to try to capture it after the fact.

I keep being drawn toward the idea of using biochar to simultaneously dispose of forest waste in the West while also creating a carbon sink. Then I convinced myself it could never be scalable or cost effective. Then I read something like this and find myself coming back to it.

Bjartmar Oddur Þeyr Alexandersson and Valur Grettisson writing for Heimildin:

Climeworks in Iceland has only captured just over 2,400 carbon units since it began operations in the country in 2021, out of the twelve thousand units that company officials have repeatedly claimed the company’s machines can capture. This is confirmed by figures from the Finnish company Puro.Earth on the one hand and from the company’s annual accounts on the other. Climeworks has made international news for capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere. For this, the company uses large machines located in Hellisheiði, in South Iceland. They are said to have the capacity to collect four thousand tons of CO2 each year directly from the atmosphere.

According to data available to Heimildin, it is clear that this goal has never been achieved and that Climeworks does not capture enough carbon units to offset its own operations, emissions amounting to 1,700 tons of CO2 in 2023. The emissions that occur due to Climeworks' activities are therefore more than it captures. Since the company began capturing in Iceland, it has captured a maximum of one thousand tons of CO2 in one year.

...

 The Swiss founders of Climeworks were ambitious when they started in 2009. In a 2017 interview, they said that by 2025 they planned to capture one percent of all global emissions. That amounts to 400 million tons of CO2. Those plans have not been realised, and the company has never come close to achieving that. They also planned to reduce the cost of capturing each ton of CO2 from the atmosphere to about $100. Today, a ton of CO2 costs about $1,000, according to the Climeworks website – ten times more than the target this year.

Despite not achieving those goals, the company’s executives have set new, more ambitious goals. The company now says it plans to capture 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2050. Climeworks’ operations and ambitious goals have garnered worldwide attention, and the company recently ranked second on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 top green tech companies in the world. This is the first time Climeworks has made the list, but another unrelated company, which has operated in Iceland, made the list last year, Running Tide. [Completely fail to come anywhere close to your absurdly unrealistic goal. Deflect criticism by proposing an even less realistic one. (These guys haven't just been watching Elon; they've been taking notes.) -- MP]

...

Climeworks has sold a significant amount of carbon credits. They are not only credits that have already been certified and captured, but also a large amount of credits that Climeworks plans to capture in the future. According to the company, one third of all the credits that the Mammoth capture plant is expected to capture from the atmosphere over the next 25 years have already been sold. About 21 thousand people have a subscription with the company, where they pay monthly for the capture and disposal of carbon credits. The waiting time to receive these carbon credits can be up to six years, according to the company's terms. If Climeworks' capture figures do not improve, the wait could extend from years to decades.

...

Not only investors have financed the operation of Climeworks. Since the company was founded, it has received approval for over one hundred billion krónur in grants from public sources, as stated on the Climeworks website, including from Swiss and American taxpayers. The Swiss handed over $5 million to the company, while the US government has promised the company $625 million.

 

This all goes back to our ongoing techno-optimism thread. We have been fed the dogma of putting our faith into tech entrepreneurs, leaping off the cliff and trusting that a new innovation will miraculously appear to catch us. It has made us easy marks for con artists and charlatans.

 

Criticism vs. Reviews vs. Meta-Reviews vs. Non-reviews

As part of our ongoing thread on critics and reviewers, here are a couple of relevant and enjoyable videos from Bob Chipman. The first is a thoughtful video essay that uses the reaction to Marvel's The Eternals as a springboard to discuss the role of the critic and the economic realities of the job in the age of Rotten Tomatoes.




The second takes a slightly meta, but completely appropriate, approach to reviewing Morbius. I haven't seen Sony's notorious box office bomb, but I am still almost certain that this video is more entertaining.

More on humanoid robots -- who ya gonna believe?

According to Elon Musk (whose fortune now largely rests on the perceived earnings potential of robots and AI), humanoid robots that can immediately replace anyone doing manual labor is just around the proverbial corner. Emphasis added throughout.]

Speaking on Tuesday at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Riyadh, the Tesla CEO predicted that humanoid robots could eventually number in the tens of billions, transforming the global economy.

"Everyone will want their personal robot," Musk said. "You can think of it like having your own personal C-3PO or R2-D2 — but even better," he said, referring to "Star Wars" characters.

With that scale of automation, Musk said productivity could soar and usher in what he called a "universal high income," where goods and services become so abundant that "no one wants for anything."

Musk has skin in the robot game. He called Tesla's humanoid Optimus potentially the "biggest product ever of any kind" during a launch event for its robotaxi last October.

 Musk has been making this sales pitch for months now.

"You can produce any product, provide any service," Musk said of humanoid robots. "There's really no limit to the economy at that point. You can make anything."

The billionaire said that money may not carry much value by then.

"Will money even be meaningful? I don't know; it might not be," he said, adding that robots could create a "universal high-income situation" because anyone will have the ability to make as many goods and services as they want.

Musk's bullishness on humanoid robots comes as no surprise. The CEO said during an earnings call on January 29 that Tesla will begin production of "several thousand" Optimus robots by the end of 2025.

"It's one of those things where I think, long term, Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue," he said during the call. "Like, it's really bananas."

 

He also suggested his robots could provide "quasi-infinite products and services."

 On the other side, we have actual researchers (from NPR):

BRUMFIEL: I spoke to Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. And he is pretty emphatic that AI-powered robots weren't here yet.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

KEN GOLDBERG: Robots are not going to suddenly become the science fiction dream overnight.

[END PLAYBACK]

BARBER: OK, so, like, tell me why because, like, AI chatbots have gotten, like, way better, super fast. So why are these robots getting stuck?

BRUMFIEL: Chatbots have a huge amount of data to learn from. They've taken basically the entire internet to train themselves how to write sentences and draw pictures. But Ken says--

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

GOLDBERG: For robotics, there's nothing, right? There's no examples online of robot commands being generated in response to robot inputs.

[END PLAYBACK]

BRUMFIEL: And if robots really need as much training data as their virtual chatbot friends, then having humans teach them one task at a time is going to take a really long time.

BARBER: Oof.

GOLDBERG: You know, at this current rate, we're going to take 100,000 years to get that much data.

BARBER: What? OK, that's so long.

BRUMFIEL: [LAUGHS]

BARBER: Like, are there any alternatives? There must be.

BRUMFIEL: One might be to let the AI brain of the robot learn in a simulation. A researcher who's trying this is a guy named Pulkit Agrawal. He's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

PULKIT AGRAWAL: The power of simulation is that you can collect, you know, very large amounts of data. For example, in three hours', you know, worth of simulation, we can collect 100 days' worth of data.

[END PLAYBACK]

BARBER: Hm.

BRUMFIEL: So this is a really promising approach for some things, but it's much more of a challenge for others. So, for example, let's talk about walking. When you're just dealing with the Earth and your body, the physics of walking around, it's actually kind of simple. But if you want your robot to, say, try and pick up a mug off a desk or something, that's a lot more complicated.

BARBER: Mm, more forces.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

AGRAWAL: If you apply the wrong forces, these objects can fly away very quickly.

[END PLAYBACK]

BRUMFIEL: Basically, your robot will fling things across the room if it doesn't understand the weight and the size of what it's carrying. And there's more. You know, if your robot encounters anything that you haven't simulated 100% perfectly, then it won't know what to do. It'll just break.

BARBER: OK, so, Geoff, you've taken me from, like, optimist to pessimist. It's the you know, the road I take every day.

BRUMFIEL: [LAUGHS]

BARBER: I'm starting to think that AI is, like, never going to work that well in robots. Or, like, it's going to be a really long time.

BRUMFIEL: I'm sorry if I've, like, turned you into a pessimist here, Gina. And then I'm going to--

BARBER: It happens.

BRUMFIEL: --and then I'm going to have to sort of whipsaw you back. Because AI is already finding its way into robotics in ways that are really interesting. So, for example, Ken Goldberg has co-founded a package sorting company. And just this year, they started using AI image recognition to pick the best points for their robots to grab the packages.

BARBER: Ooh.

BRUMFIEL: And I think we're going to see a lot of that, AI being used for parts of the robotic problem, you know, walking, or vision, or whatever. It just may not arrive everywhere all at once.

Robotics is the future but in the foreseeable future, it's not going to be the kind of bipedal humanoid Swiss Army knife Tesla is supposed about to unveil. If there's a major breakthrough it could speed things up, but even under the best case scenario, serious people working in the field will tell you we're years, possibly decades away from the kind of functionality Elon is promising will be coming off the assembly line in six months.

 So who ya gonna believe? Well, if you're an investor...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Possible Papal Posts

 

 

 Anti-papal Catholics

I've been talking about this for years now, and I was sure that I had written numerous posts on the subject, but it turns out that, other than one unfinished piece in the draft folder, apparently I never wrote anything down, which is a shame because it's a topic worth talking about.

Everyone knows about Catholic leaders in the far right...

"I mean it's kind of jaw-dropping," Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon told the BBC on Friday, speaking of Leo's election.

"It is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the Pope that had had the Twitter feed and the statements he's had against American senior politicians," said Bannon, a hard-right Trump loyalist, practising Catholic and former altar boy.

... but I'm mainly interested in those at the bottom.
   
 If you were paying close attention, you might have spotted them before, but these anti-papal Catholics really became a thing during the first Trump Administration. They almost always had the same backstory. They got sucked into right-wing media's indoctrination process, initially attracted to what seemed a pro-Church message. Much as with secular evangelicals (whom we have discussed before), they came to define their faith on less and less spiritual terms. Under John Paul II, and even more importantly Benedict, there was little danger of cognitive dissonance. Opus Dei and Fox News are not at all strange bedfellows, but when the Jesuit-affiliated Francis took the office, the disconnect became obvious. And when the cult of personality formed around Trump, it became fairly common to see people who weren't just Catholic but who had built their entire identities around their religion openly choosing a purely secular (and often profane) political figure over their own Pope.

The "Trump effect"?

    It is unwise to draw inferences from an unequal data set of three, but in the course of a few days, we saw three striking examples of candidates perceived as anti-Trump figures winning elections they were favored to lose (or, in the case of Prevost, not even supposed to be in the running). In Canada and Australia, the ministers from the relatively pro-Trump parties who were expected to be the new prime ministers actually lost their seats. In the case of the conclave, this was a historically fast decision, suggesting that this was not a difficult choice for the College of Cardinals.

They did not see that coming

    One conclave story, mainly of interest to political scientists and statistics nerds (in other words, our readership), was how badly the prediction markets missed this. Prevost was a well-known figure in the Church, something of a protégé of Pope Francis, and a likely beneficiary of the previously mentioned pattern we’d seen in Canada and Australia. Though certainly a long shot, it was difficult to explain why he was showing up at less than half a percent in the betting markets, particularly given their historical tendency to greatly overvalue other long-shot candidates.

    This miss raises all sorts of interesting questions. One of the big arguments for wisdom-of-the-crowd-type approaches is that they can supposedly accurately assign weights to a range of information that would be difficult to incorporate into a traditional model. They should be able to do a reasonably good job even without having polling data. That doesn't seem to be the case here (they missed Francis too). How have prediction markets fared in other low-data, high-information situations?

Allison Morrow writing for CNN:

The conclave markets’ big miss this week reflects the limits of their predictive powers.

In sports betting, you’ve got thousands of data points about individual athletes, team stats going back decades and any number of informed opinions from professional commentators. Political winds can be volatile, but polling and voter data are practically endless at the national level.

In pope betting, the data are far more scarce.

“The papal conclave markets are one of the ones that you’d expect to be the least well-calibrated since they only get a data point every decade or two,” Eric Zitzewitz, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, told CNN. “And the process is much more opaque than almost any other political selection process… No tell-all memoirs, even well after the fact.”

Plenty of academics and journalists offered insights into who might be among the favorites based on their various CVs and reputations in the church. Pietro Parolin and Luis Antonio Tagle were among the favorites heading into the conclave on Wednesday. And, as election forecaster Nate Silver noted Friday, Parolin’s chances shot up as the white smoke emerged, “presumably on the assumption that the quick decision was good news for the frontrunners.”

Of course, the dynamics inside the Sistine Chapel were impossible for market participants to gauge from the outside. All any of us regular people could do was watch “Conclave” and, based on the movie, assume there’s plenty of drama and shifting allegiances.

Bottom line: Even in a highly liquid market, which crowd-wisdom theory holds should be more accurate, there are simply no tools to measure what Catholics believe is the spirit of God guiding the cardinals’ choice.

“The Holy Spirit is indeed a wily one,” Zitzewitz said.

“How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”

Ariel Wittenberg writing for Politico. 

MEMPHIS, Tennessee — Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.

None of the 35 methane gas turbines that help power xAI’s massive supercomputer is equipped with pollution controls typically required by federal rules.

The company has no Clean Air Act permits.

In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.

The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road. That’s according to calculations by the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonpartisan legal advocacy group that focuses on the South, which used turbine manufacturer spec sheets to estimate xAI’s annual emissions and compare them with pollution that other South Memphis plants have reported to the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Emissions Inventory.

The turbines were necessary to get the third version of the company’s AI chatbot up and running in time, Musk said at the product’s launch in February, adding: “We have generators on one side of the building, just trailer after trailer of generators until we can get the utility power to come in.” He has not publicly addressed the pollution concerns and did not respond to requests for comment about the turbines powering the plant and their lack of pollution controls.

“In time,” in this case, means meeting an entirely arbitrary deadline which Elon Musk set because he's desperately trying to overcome his last-mover disadvantage in what has turned out to be a huge hype bubble. Musk needs to be seen as a major player in AI if he wants to maintain the obscenely inflated values of his companies. As mentioned before, if Tesla and SpaceX were to suddenly be valued on any kind of rational basis, his net worth would drop by one to two orders of magnitude, and there are a number of margin calls lurking between here and there.

Just three miles away is Boxtown, a secluded neighborhood that officially became part of the city of Memphis in 1968, the year that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel downtown. While the annexation had come with the promise of connecting Boxtown to municipal utilities, many homes still had no running water or sewage service as late as the 1970s.

Today, more than 90 percent of residents living in Boxtown’s ZIP code are Black, with a median household income of $36,000, according to the Census Bureau. It’s also home to more than 17 industrial facilities — some of which share an industrial park with xAI — that release enough toxic pollution to require registration with EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.

“I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,” Boxtown resident Alexis Humphreys said through tears, holding up her asthma inhaler during a public hearing about the turbines on April 25. “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”

Together the turbines produce enough energy to power 280,000 homes. XAI has been relying on them because the data processing center’s voracious appetite for energy has outpaced electric utilities’ ability to serve it.

...

XAI’s main product is Musk’s chatbot, Grok, which also generates images. It has become known for having fewer user guardrails than other artificial intelligence programs, like ChatGPT, which often prevent users from requesting images that violate copyright standards or are deemed insensitive. Grok allows users to make deepfakes depicting things like Mickey Mouse wearing a Nazi uniform. Musk has called it “the most fun AI in the world.”

 Grok is also notable for allowing users to upload images of fully clothed women and showing what they would supposedly look like in sexy lingerie. Say what you will about Elon Musk—he certainly does know his fan base.

 Boxtown residents say they have been paying for the images with their health.

At a public hearing on the xAI permits at Fairley High School on April 25, multiple residents described cases of asthma and cancer in their families they attribute to air pollution, asking for the Shelby County Department of Health to deny xAI’s permit and shut down all the turbines. Many have health conditions, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, that predate xAI’s arrival in South Memphis. But NOx emissions are known to worsen lung conditions, and residents fear that the sheer volume released by xAI will further harm their health. Some, like Humphreys, showed their inhalers and portable oxygen tanks as proof of the damage.

...

Memphis Light, Gas and Water and chamber officials initially suggested last summer there were 18 turbines of varying sizes. But then, when xAI filed a permit application in January, it listed 15 machines, at 16 MW each. Then, at the end of March, environmental groups flew over the facility and came back with aerial photos showing 35 turbines onsite. Memphis Mayor Paul Young defended the company, saying only 15 were actually running and that the rest were for backup.

But in late April, environmental groups sent a plane with thermal cameras to fly over the facility and found 33 turbines giving off significant amounts of heat — a sign they were also generating electricity and pollution.

“The way they have come into the city, it’s like, oh, you think we are unintelligent, you think that the people in these communities aren’t able to comprehend what you are doing and will take this assault on our health lying down,” 15-year-old Boxtown resident Jasmine Bernard said.

 Musk’s companies have always had horrific environmental records, to the point of setting up the launch site for his frequently exploding rockets in the middle of a nature preserve harboring numerous endangered species. What we're seeing in Memphis is simply par for the course.

I plan to get back to the larger question of large language models and energy consumption. It's a tremendously complex issue where I don't have any relevant experience, so I need to proceed cautiously and frequently check my assumptions with whatever authorities I can find.

I do have some relevant experience critiquing statistical analyses, and, having looked at some of the most widely circulated arguments that AI power usage is no big deal, I can tell you that while they may not be wrong (that's a question for the experts), they are bad—filled with the kind of red flags that we've been pointing out here at the blog for over a decade now.

I'll be spelling those out in an upcoming post.

 

A leftist filmmaker is interviewed in a leftist magazine about his recent pro-nuclear documentary

Another one that got somehow left behind in the queue.

 I'm not going to go into the merits of the arguments or of the film itself, other than to say it was fairly well-reviewed, with a 75% Tomatometer, where even the negative reviews seem to be mostly complimentary of the content—just not of the uncharacteristically low-key filming style.

If I get a chance to see it, I may have more to say on that subject, but what's interesting here is the way that climate change is realigning the left in unexpected ways.

I mean, seriously. Who out there would have predicted that Oliver Stone would go pro-nuke, and that Jacobin would give him a friendly reception when he did?

Oliver Stone Goes Nuclear

Ed Rampell:

So how did Nuclear Now come about?

 

Oliver Stone:

I was scared. In the 2006 movie [An Inconvenient Truth by] Al Gore, I was obviously conscious that he was giving solutions to the problems of clime change. But I was confused by the many different sides I was hearing. It was confusing — and I wanted to straighten it out for myself. I saw a book in 2019 that was well reviewed in the New York Times by Richard Rhodes: it was called A Bright Future. It was written by Josh Goldstein, an emeritus professor of international relations, and by a nuclear scientist named Staffan A. Qvist, from Sweden. It was a small little book, but it was simple and commonsensical. Common sense is important. It was very different in the sense that it was saying: “What’s wrong with nuclear power?”

Because that’s all you had heard for many years. I didn’t know; I just went along with the consensus that nuclear power was a bad thing. But when you read the book, you begin to understand that it is not a bad thing — it has been confounded with nuclear war; war and power are not the same thing — and that we have lost, bypassed a great opportunity, in America anyway, [compared to] if we had followed through on “Atoms for Peace,” what presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy had started in the 1950s and ’60s.

Nuclear power was working. It worked for many years with the Navy, with Hyman Rickover, and then he transferred his acumen to building civilian power stations. Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was the first one in the United States; in 1958 and 1959 it came online. Many of those same reactors are still going; they’re called “legacy reactors,” but they’re almost finished now. But they worked seventy years [laughs], and nobody complained.

Except there was a scare at Three Mile Island, where no one died, and in fact, the containment structure worked. But a lot of hysteria and brouhaha — as you know, I’m not a guy who believes in passion, necessarily, when it’s wrong. You’ve got to call it out; I wanted the truth, and this is the truth.

I’ve been talking to many scientists. I went to Idaho National Laboratory; I went to France, and I went to Russia and talked to a lot of people. It’s all a lot of hooey from a lot of scared types who love to tell you what’s wrong with everything. You’ve got to scale it down and say, “Relative to what?” Relative to climate change — coal, oil, and gas?

Ed Rampell

In Nuclear Now, you criticize the fossil fuel energy industry for spreading disinformation regarding climate change. Did the nuclear industry have anything to do with the funding of Nuclear Now?

Oliver Stone

No, no, no. This was done with private investors. And the nuclear industry [laughs] has not done a very good job defending itself, if you look at the history. It has had no sense of fighting back. When Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader started their attacks, there was no really interesting response from the industry. It kind of folded up. Which was a shame, because I think when history is written, if we presume the planet will survive, and there’ll be a civilization, and I’d very much like. . . . I am an optimist. When this is written, they’ll say: “This was a huge mistake in the 1970s to stop building nuclear reactors in the United States.” Thank God they did not stop in Russia or China or France, which has kept it going.

But as we said in the film, “It’s too good to die. You cannot kill it off.” The United States is now slowly getting back into, of course, smaller reactors and more modern, new-generation reactors. There’s a lot promise. But the big building is still going on in China, Indonesia, Eurasia, India and so on.