🔮 The Sunday edition #498: Exponential conflict; AGI recipe; the perils of a cashless society; bad clutter & ageing animals ++
An insider’s guide to AI and exponential technologies
Hi, it’s Azeem. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Exponential View. Every week, I help you ask the right questions and think more clearly about technology and the near future.
If you want me to speak at your corporate event in 2025, get in touch asap. I tend to get very busy during the first quarter of the year.
Ideas of the week
Three scenarios for GLP-1s
This week, we published a scenario analysis for three possible futures for the impact of GLP-1 drugs. We show that even if the uptake of GLP-1s was for medical use alone – our lowest scenario – it would have a huge impact on the US society. As we look at other scenarios, we see that if the drugs are effective, accessible and adopted widely, they could transform how we think about lifestyle and food choices, as well as lead to a reduction in violence within society. Our full analysis is here.
Droning on
More than a century ago, Billy Mitchell, a US colonel, had a crazy idea: planes could sink battleships. Mitchell carried out Project B in 1921, to test if it was possible. Spoiler alert: it was. A similar “Mitchell moment” is happening now, a century on. Germany’s defence minister recently redirected commercial vessels around Africa rather than through the Red Sea because its navy isn’t able to protect them against private drones. It is the latest of several countries to recognise an exponential asymmetry in the ability of cheap consumer tech to destroy major military material. The military’s might will catch up – we are already seeing the US develop directed-energy weapons of exactly the type that could blast a $2,000 Iranian drone out of the sky – yet there will be a lag. Tempering the angst of the modern-day “Mitchell moment” is what might be called a “Schmidt moment”, when Google’s former CEO said this week that the US military should give up on tanks and plough cash into drones. That may be a step too far. Rarely does a new tech simply replace an older one. Instead, there is a period of time when the two coexist. Drones are good, but anti-drone weaponry will soon be better and in the next iteration of conflict the technologies will be used together. After all, we still have major surface ships and aeroplanes.
To dig deeper, read about the exponential gap in warfare in my book and listen to my conversation with General Sir Richard Barrons, one of the chiefs of staff who led the UK Armed Force until 2016.
The chip advantage
What really matters in the intelligent age are chips and the compute. This week,
and his team have published an analysis of China’s endeavours to route around US technology controls to continue to push with AI. The US has slowed China down, but China could be more likely to catch up than expected. Chinese sources report that Xiaomi has managed to create a prototype of a 3nm system-on-a-chip.