Top of mind recently is how fast some parts of technology are going. I think the general reader has glimpses of the splashy news items such as the Space trips by Bezos and Branson, but there are many technology problems which have made huge progress.

I am thinking biological protein folding and what looks like setting up to be another strong decade for biological knowledge. The breakthrough work of Deepmind here is going to herald a step change in how we think about making proteins.

I think developments from the world of blockchain will be surprising. I don’t view anything as standout yet, but maybe smart brains and a lot of money are working in these areas and we have glimpses of possibilities with NFTs and “smart contract” protocols. And the backlash against regulation (see below) is notable.

The vast computing power now available to us when applied to hard problems mixed with machine learning algorithms is going to unleash a whole new way of creating software and software-interactions. And, I think we are on the verge of where a smart mind with no coding knowledge will soon be able to partner with tools to create code and ideas which before only coders of several years experience could do. We have a glimpse of that with GPT-3, and we have an iteration of that with the Deep Mind models for protein folding (noted above) but this recent video from OpenAI about the possibilities of what coding AI can produce based on very simple inputs suggests to me the world is going to change again in the digital space very rapidly.

The interface with the physical world is still behind, although certain parts eg automation and robots are advancing.

I think the general population is also behind and so is the humanities thinking, the social contracts and constructs behind it. While we have eg AI ethics, the people involved with them are narrow, so I hope it does all work out.

Meanwhile, we have all sorts of catastrophes, at a glance:

-Haiti earthquakes
-Afghanistan fighting
-Ethiopian civil war, and likely atrocities
-Rohinyga refugees
-A crisis in South Sudan coming out of a civil war
-Torture and execution from the recent Bolivia government
-the list goes on...and of course, COVID...

A few links from above:
Sudan: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/world/africa/deadly-clashes-threaten-south-sudans-shaky-peace-deal.html
Bolivia:  https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-bolivia-454d1102672f6fbc1e47dab7eca66714
Deepmind: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02025-4
OpenAI Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&ab_channel=OpenAI
And challenge and details: https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/