12 Interesting Updates on AI, Immortality, Robotaxis, and More

From the last 6 months | Q4 2024 and Q1 2025

Today:

1. New uses of cabs thanks to robotaxis

2. How Europe is actually rising up

3. AI art is about to change movies, books, ads, social media, and more. We are all now creators.

4. What to eat to achieve immortality

5. The unstoppable intelligence progression of AI

6. Reaction to your comments in the article What Are My Politics: Is AI telling you what you want to hear?

7. Why diversity of values is bad

8. More evidence on the loneliness / aloneness “epidemic”

9. Accurate cancer diagnosis

10. The rise of the solopreneurs

11. The predicted demise of global taxation

12. My take on the Lab Leak Origin of COVID

13. AI and jobs

The Future of Robotaxis

Remember how a month ago I told you that robotaxis are here? And they will change how we use taxis. I gave this example:

You’ll start using robotaxis for new purposes, like dropping off and picking up your 12 year old child from extracurriculars—something you’d never imagine doing with a human driver…

Lo and behold:

Europe Is Rising Up

A few weeks ago, in Rise Up, Europe!, I incited Europeans to wake up to reality: We are no longer protected by the US against threats like Russia. Since then, Europe has been reacting.

European Union Crisis Preparedness

Just one week after that article, Europe unveiled a strategy to become more resilient to crises. It contains 60 proposals, one of which asks its member states and populations to assemble personal emergency kits to aid survival for 72 hours after a crisis breaks.

European Leaders Meet with Ukraine’s Zelenskiy

France pledged €2B in military aid to Ukraine as some 30 leaders met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Paris on March 27^th to discuss strengthening Kyiv's position and what role they might play if a peace deal is struck with Russia.—Reuters

German Elections

Thank you, German President Merz, for listening to me and prioritizing the fight against Putin with your trillion dollar fund for the military (including Ukrainian help) that requires changing the constitution.

Once the new parliament meets after March 2025, and Greens are not needed for power, you can make a similar move and walk back the closure of nuclear reactors.

UK Switch from Social Spending to Military

The UK’s left-wing government plans to reduce social spending by over €4B, which will withdraw support to over one million people! It will also reduce the spending on civil servants by 15%!

How will these savings be used? They are approximately equal to the increase in military spending—about €7B.

It’s unfortunate that taxpayers can’t spend more money in redistribution, but it reflects reality: Economies can only do so much, and right now the military in Europe is in need of more investment.

EU Military Orders Are Piling Up

The backlog of orders has increased by 75% since the Ukrainian invasion in 2022:

Source

The capital expenditure of European defense companies is growing, too. It used to be about 50% of the US’s spend before the war, and is now over 75%.

Source

AI Art Is About to Change the World

A couple of weeks ago, for the article Rise Up, Europe!, I made this image with Midjourney:

The idea was to show the US (imperial eagle) fighting against Russia (bear) and China (dragon), and a Europe (Athena) emerging in the middle as a giant that could side with the US, not as an inferior partner, but as a major one. Hopefully, you got that.

What you probably didn’t get is that I generated over 60 images to get to this one:

It took me about two hours to generate the image I finally used, and I was not quite happy with it: Europe is too small, the bear too big. But I wasn’t going to spend any more time on it.

The following week, I tried again, this time with ChatGPT’s new image generation technology. This was my very first attempt:

It’s not perfect—I don’t like the colors—but the composition is nearly perfect. So I asked it to make some improvements—something I could never do accurately before:

I just asked it to improve the colors. I could keep tweaking it, but it’s shocking that this was the 3rd attempt. It achieves 95% of what I wanted.

This is the true innovation: We can finally compose images the way we want them, rather than getting something that looks cool but doesn’t represent what we had in mind!

Ethan Mollick has some other good examples. If you prompt Microsoft Copilot’s traditional image generator this: “Show me a room with no elephants in it, make sure to annotate the image to show me why there are no possible elephants”, you’ll get the left image from below. But GPT-4o’s multimodal model will get you the right images:

The left image shows many elephants because it dumbly saw the word “elephant”. Meanwhile, the right image understands the assignment perfectly.

To illustrate how much image generators have improved, Ethan shared this example from 2.5 years ago. The prompt was “otter on an airplane using wifi”:

To compare the capabilities, this time he didn’t just ask for an otter on an airplane using wifi. That would be too easy. Now he asked that the otter use the wifi to:

• Buy an action figure of another otter

• The action figure is of a game designer otter, so it includes a tablet with game design rules

The image generator created the otter using wifi on an airplane, the action figure, the game design tablet that it added to the action figure, and added all that to the computer screen! Insane.

Here are a few examples of other images people have created with this technology:

Legible text! And not only that. Look at how accurate this looks! Not only does it really look like Wikipedia, but there is some true information in there! Source.

This is the meme of the girl that smiles in front of a fire, themed with Studio Ghibli’s style.

These are two athletes from the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Look at the composition, the colors, the text… It really looks like a professional pic!

Look at this! It takes images and redraws them in different styles, while identifying parts with acceptable quality! You could probably ask it to properly place the snout and it would comply.

Look at what it can do with a simple prompt!

It can edit and combine images almost perfectly!

Not only can it illustrate. It can make illustrations that look very close to accurate for real-life information. This is unreal!

You can now easily make comics!

And of course, this will revolutionize marketing! Found all these images through this thread.

Of course, you can also animate this stuff:

Source

Balaji Srinivasan has some interesting thoughts on how all this will evolve:

(1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park.

(2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated.

(3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached.

(4) This may change books. I’d like to see someone take a public domain book from

Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude [an LLM like ChatGPT’s text-based chatbot, but from another company, Anthropic], and have it turn it into comic book panels with the new ChatGPT. Old books may become more accessible this way.

(5) This changes slides. We’re now close to the point where you can generate a few reasonable AI images for any slide deck. With the right integration, there should be less bullet-point only presentations.

(6) This changes websites. You can now generate placeholder images in a site-specific style for any <img> tag, as a kind of visual Loren Ipsum.

(7) This may change movies. We could see shot-for-shot remakes of old movies in new visual styles, with dubbing just for the artistry of it. Though these might be more interesting as clips than as full movies.

(8) This may change social networking. Once this tech is open source and/or cheap enough to widely integrate, every upload image button will have a generate image alongside it.

(9) This should change image search. A generate option will likewise pop up alongside available images.

(10) In general, visual styles have suddenly become extremely easy to copy, even easier than frontend code. Distinction will have to come in other ways.

Next up:

• What to eat to achieve immortality

• The unstoppable AI intelligence progression

• Is AI telling you what you want to hear?

• Why diversity of values is bad

• More evidence on the loneliness / aloneness “epidemic”

• Cancer diagnosis is getting crazy accurate

• Solopreneurs are rising indeed

• What happened to the predicted demise of global taxation

• AI and job destruction