🔮AI alignment; cars redux; Norway struck gold; Jamaican steel; mRNA warrior ++ #430
Your insider guide to AI and exponential technologies
Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. This week I spent time talking to people building foundation models, car makers, policy types and governance experts.
Every Sunday, I share my view on developments that I think you should know about in this newsletter.
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Sunday chart: The second century of the car
Source: FT
The car was the key technology of the 20th century. For better or worse, cars have defined what an affluent modern life looks like: urbanised, suburbanised and exurbanised.
But preferences change, and the cost of auto-centric cities (from sprawl to pollution, from isolation to climate change) was becoming increasingly clear. Micromobility and sharing models were increasingly starting to make more sense and nibble at the idea of car ownership. The growth of remote work post-COVID hinted at the end of the daily commute for many white-collar workers.
There is no doubt that there will be headwinds on traditional car ownership. But I am curious about how much longevity the car will actually have. It could continue as a key technology well into the 21st century. In many parts of the global south, up-and-coming means moving to a city and owning initially a motorbike, then a car. There are 1.3 billion passenger cars in the world according to 2022 figures1, and the number is rising. China’s auto industry has just entered the fray. Perhaps surprisingly, the centrality of the car is still a fact in many fully industrialised nations as well. Take the bike-loving Netherlands, more than half of the population owns a car, with rates similar to those in the UK, Qatar, or Sweden.
Electrification could be key to the longevity of the car in this century. Electric vehicles are basically smartphones, a massive battery & a set of wheels. The smarts in the car can connect the battery to a digitised electrical grid for the vehicle to share some of its excess energy. In aggregate, they become ‘virtual power plants’ contributing stored energy to balance an increasingly renewable grid. As I said in chapter 6 of my book, Exponential, “Our electric vehicles can hoard electricity which could also power our homes and offices through so-called vehicle-to-grid systems.”
Tesla is now offering this to Tesla Electric customers, who are making as much as $150 a day from it in Texas’s renewable heavy electricity market. Virtual power plants could make a tricky renewable-rich energy market work better. And they help tackle the big storage problem of the move to net zero. In fact, one conservative estimate suggests that EV batteries could satisfy short-term grid storage demand by 2030.
It helps that EVs are more efficient than traditional cars. Only a fifth of the energy you put into an ICE vehicle is turned into useful power, whereas today’s EVs waste only around 10%. These new powertrains coupled with personal computing, create vehicles that are far better than anything we’ve had before. I’ve sat in electric vehicles that are faster, safer, and more efficient and have greater range than similarly-priced petrol ones. And the market is just getting started.
We may have to face the fact that decarbonisation may involve… cars2.
Source: @ShanuMathew
Key reads
Superalignment and superethics. In the blizzard of chat about AI risks, there tend to be two distinct camps; two sets of arguments, world-views, and ideas of what the AI should(n’t) look like. These two camps (or threads, as Emily Bender calls them) also come from distinct backgrounds. Understanding those differences helps put the assertions into context. One thread is the “AI ethics thread”, which while not homogenous, is concerned with the immediate and tangible effects of AI on individuals and groups and considering the technology in its sociotechnical context.
The other thread, the AI security or alignment movement, emerges from research groups at top universities such as Stanford. The focus is often on existential risk, most often very abstract and theoretical concerns of AI causing the end of humankind. The work that is done to avoid this doomsday scenario is the process of alignment, the goal of which is to make sure that AI systems align to human goals and values. If the AI systems are aligned to us, goes the argument, it is unlikely that they will intentionally or accidentally cause our downfall.
This group tends to focus on technological, rather than institutional or sociotechnical, approaches to mitigate risks of AI. For example, OpenAI has announced the creation of a new team to help build “superalignment”, a roughly human-level AI alignment researcher to solve the “technical problem of superintelligence”. Not only is the firm arguing it can understand what the problem is, it believes it can solve it in four years. Yann LeCun, who is not an AI doomer, points out that “engineering-for-reliability” is an ongoing process, not a single shot. On the Effective Altruism form (a sort of hatchery of existential riskers), Geoffrey Miller critiques OpenAI from the opposite direction calling it a cynical PR exercise.
The dangerous play with authoritarianism. President Macron made some intemperate remarks about cutting off social media during riots. Governments, authoritarian and democratic, struggle with the power of citizen-to-citizen communication. For Macron, domestic pressure was the catalyst. The UK is endeavouring to do something worse with its Online Safety Bill, which would break strong end-to-end encryption. Already, dozens of security professionals have warned against this idiotic idea. The most powerful articulation comes from EV reader and Signal President Meredith Whittaker, who puts this farcical proposal into stark political reality. Authoritarian states want encryption on a weaker footing and would make hay if the UK (the home of Mill and Wollstonecraft!) were to lead that charge.
Citizens need more rights in the digital domain, not fewer. It’s up to democracies, ultimately, to pave the way. Of course, we should also recognise that social networks are products with design choices, and those design choices might be societally prejudicial. Think about unlimited WhatsApp forwarding and mob violence in India; or recommendation algorithms that drive us down the brain stem. But those require considered rules, not off-the-cuff interventions.
Norway’s golden ground. Norway has made an extraordinary discovery of a 70-billion-tonne deposit of phosphate rock, which amounts to almost as much as all previously known global deposits. Phosphate serves as a key component in the production of fertilisers, and historically Europe has had to rely heavily on imports.
Phosphate is also a key ingredient in certain solar panels as well as for lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, an alternative to traditional lithium-ion chemistries. LFP batteries are increasingly popular in China, found in 44% of all EVs. Even Tesla, the leader in the EV industry, is beginning to transition to these batteries.
The deposit could be enough to satisfy world demand for fertilisers, solar panels and electric car batteries over the next 50 years. Last year, I argued that pessimistic forecasts for resource availability were likely misplaced: “For the clean transition, the trifecta of economic incentives, better technology and improved licensing can perform the same sorcery. Turn an empty box full. Or more accurately, make the invisible visible.” With surging demand creating appropriate economic incentives, the quest for such materials is likely to be bountiful.
Weekly commentary
Here’s what I make of Meta’s Threads…
🐫 The eye of the needle
Threads will probably be the fastest-growing consumer service to 100m users in history, faster even than ChatGPT, securing 30m signups in just two days. Twitter is broken. I’ve used it for 16 years, I built a company on it. And for years I used it as a source of professional information, often supplemented by third-party …
Market data
The flabbergasting numbers behind Metaverse’s cruel return to reality: Decentraland’s 38 active daily users and the $470 global revenue of Meta’s Horizon.
Global venture funding fell by 18% quarter-by-quarter in Q2 2023, down 49% compared to Q2 2022.
Quantum computing startups are worth a combined $18 billion.
This week, on the 4th of July, global temperatures were the hottest ever recorded. A record was broken from only the day before.
On the 2nd of July, German day-ahead prices of electricity dropped to -500 €/MWh.
Short morsels to appear smart at dinner parties
🇯🇲 Records show that the iron mass production process that helped the UK to lead the industrial revolution was taken from Jamaica. Excellent - the full paper is here.
👀 The hydrogen bubble is (squeakily) popping. This shibboleth needs to finally be set aside.
👾 This platform uses gamification to label medical data and advance health AI.
🪢 Science has spoken. Here is the mathematically correct way to tie your shoes.
🤧 The reasons why some people get sick more often than others.
🐒 One shot of a kidney protein gave monkeys a brain boost. It works in monkeys. But will it work in humans? See also, mRNA Trojan Horse tricks cancer into making toxins to kill itself. via EV member Vishal Gulati
End note
We’ve just launched a proper referral programme. Visit this and collect your unique code and share it with friends. Email and LinkedIn work particularly well. Like any good referral programme, there are goodies available 😄
Thanks for your help,
Azeem
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What you’re up to — community updates
EV colleague Chantal Smith is climbing Snowdon by night to raise money for Olly’s Future, a suicide prevention charity set up in memory of Olly Hare. Please donate here. ❤️
Anil Seth wrote an excellent essay on why finding neural correlates to consciousness is still a good bet.
Joel Hellermark, founder and CEO of Sana, interviewed Jensen Huang.
Mark Schaefer has published his tenth book, "Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy."
Geoff Mulgan publishes an excellent case for what a Global AI observatory could look like.
Share your updates with EV readers by telling us what you’re up to here.
Original post stated that there were 4.5 billion cars in the world. This was an unintentional error and we apologise for the confusion. Thanks to the members who pointed our our mistake!
Apologies for the dad joke.