Crystal Balls & Robot Falls: Your 2025 Tech Reality Check
From EV market splits to AI wine tasting: This week's most fascinating developments in technology, science, and human behavior.
Dear Friend –
From everyone here at radical, we wish you a truly epic 2025. It surely will be another year of wild advances in areas such as AI, robotics, synthetic biology, and many more. Couple this with a truly historic election year in 2024, where half the world’s population had national elections, and you know we are in for a wild ride.
Good thing that some things stay as they were – including your weekly radical Briefing. But do expect many improvements over the year – and if there is something you’d like to see from us, please drop us a line (simply hit reply to this email).
Onward and upward!
P ツ
Headlines from the Future
When It Comes to EVs, It Is Truly a Tale of Two Countries ↗
In the US, car rental company Hertz is becoming increasingly desperate to reduce its EV fleet:
Hertz has contacted multiple electric vehicle renters recently with interesting low-cost offers for cars like Teslas, offering them the option to buy their rental EVs instead of returning them. One 2023 Model 3 renter shared on Reddit that they were offered a price of $17,913, which is similar to deals currently showing on the Hertz Car Sales site. However, the rental they were in had about 30,000 miles on it — fewer than other current listings.
This is a trend that has been ongoing for a while for the company:
Last year, Hertz decided to scale back its big ambitions to electrify its rental fleet due to low customer demand and repair difficulties on some models, including the Tesla Model 3. Then, in February, Hertz said it would no longer buy Polestar 2 vehicles either before marking 30,000 Teslas to sell off from its rental fleet.
Meanwhile, in China, the picture looks dramatically different – recent headlines include “China’s EV sales to surpass traditional cars by 2025 amid slower U.S. and Europe adoption” and “China’s EV adoption projected to reach 80% by 2035.”:
Links to Hertz article and China EV report.
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Worldcoin Ordered to Delete All Iris Scanning Data from Users in Spain, Germany ↗
Turns out, scanning your iris to create a “privacy-enhanced Internet experience” might just be the opposite… At least the governments in Germany, Spain, Colombia, and Hong Kong think so.
“With today's decision, we are enforcing European fundamental rights standards in favour of the data subjects in a technologically demanding and legally highly complex case. All users who have provided Worldcoin with their iris data will in future have the unrestricted opportunity to enforce their right to erasure,” said BayLDA President Michael Will.
Just another hair-bending “use case” for the be-all and end-all 2019 hype technology, blockchain.
Link to article.
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Fixing the Food Waste Problem by Fixing Barcodes ↗
The U.S. wastes a staggering 5 million tons of food every single year, with half of it being food that had expired labels. Texas McCombs Business School showed in a new study that using digital shelf labels to implement dynamic pricing significantly lowers waste.
“Everyone is better off when dynamic pricing is enabled,” he says. “There’s less food waste and less emissions from food ending up in landfills.”
Supermarkets in China have long adopted dynamic pricing – not only to reduce food waste but also to optimize sales across the full spectrum of their inventory.
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Algorithms can determine whether a whiskey is of American or Scotch origin ↗
And there goes another profession: a machine learning algorithm successfully identified whiskeys by their molecular composition and predicted the top five flavor notes in each sample.
Two machine learning algorithms can determine whether a whiskey is of American or Scotch origin and identify its strongest aromas, according to research published in Communications Chemistry. The results also suggest that the algorithms can outperform human experts at assessing a whisky's strongest aromas.
Expect many more applications of AI in the creation, evaluation, and quality control processes of food and drink. I wouldn’t be surprised if wine is next… Cheers! 🍷
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Do Autonomous Vehicles Outperform Latest-Generation Human-Driven Vehicles? ↗
Surprise, surprise: Driving (well, being driven in) an autonomous vehicle (aka robotaxi) is much safer than driving yourself.
The Waymo team analyzed insurance claim data for more than 25 million miles driven in their cars and found that their autonomous vehicles vastly outperformed human drivers, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims.
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Is AI progress slowing down? ↗
This (long) post is well worth reading in full – Arvind Narayanan, Benedikt Ströbl, and Sayash Kapoor do an excellent job of drilling into the current challenges with scaling AI models, why we shouldn’t trust industry insiders telling us that they have scaling AIs figured out, and why we are still years behind leveraging even the powers that AI bestows upon us today.
The furious debate about whether there is a capability slowdown is ironic, because the link between capability increases and the real-world usefulness of AI is extremely weak. The development of AI-based applications lags far behind the increase of AI capabilities, so even existing AI capabilities remain greatly underutilized. One reason is the capability-reliability gap --- even when a certain capability exists, it may not work reliably enough that you can take the human out of the loop and actually automate the task (imagine a food delivery app that only works 80% of the time). And the methods for improving reliability are often application-dependent and distinct from methods for improving capability. That said, reasoning models also seem to exhibit reliability improvements, which is exciting.
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When a Crystal Ball Isn't Enough to Make You Rich ↗
What happens when you give people near-perfect information about the future (a proverbial “crystal ball”)? It turns out we still make bad decisions.
In November 2023, we ran an in-person, proctored experiment involving 118 young adults trained in finance. We called the experiment “The Crystal Ball Challenge.” We gave each participant $50 and the opportunity to grow that stake by trading in the S&P 500 index and 30-year US Treasury bonds with the information on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) one day in advance, but with stock and bond price data blacked out. The game covered 15 days, one day for each year from 2008 to 2022. The players in the proctored experiment did not do very well, despite having the front page of the newspaper 36 hours ahead of time. About half of them lost money, and one in six actually went bust. The average payout was just $51.62 (a gain of just 3.2%), which is statistically indistinguishable from breaking even. The poor results were a product of: 1) not guessing the direction of stocks and bonds very well, and 2) poor trade-sizing.
Here is the full article – a good reminder that it is not enough to know the future… You still have to (consistently) make good decisions about it.
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Boston Dynamics to lay off 45 employees ↗
Turns out, robotics is hard – even for wunderkind Boston Dynamics.
Waltham-based Boston Dynamics laid off 45 employees last week, representing a reduction of five percent of the company’s workforce, The Boston Globe reports.
What We Are Reading
💰 Scientists Just Discovered How Your Personality Affects Your Income Your personality might be your secret paycheck weapon: groundbreaking study reveals traits that can boost your earnings. @Jane
🏢 2024 Was a Record-Setting Year for Office Building Conversions Compared to 2023, office conversions are up 63% in 2024. Seventy-four percent of empty office space is mainly being used for housing. @Mafe
🔧 America Is Losing the Physical Technologies of the Future A timely reminder for our uncertain geopolitical era: "The power of nations has historically hinged on their ability to master the key technologies of the day." Today's key technologies aren't exclusively digital, and one nation has a huge lead in the key physical technologies. @Jeffrey
🚀 NASA Astronauts Butch and Suni’s Homecoming Delayed Again Not-so-great news keeps piling up for Boeing. The two astronauts who were supposed to hang out in space for just a week back in June will unintentionally be overstaying their welcome until April as the Boeing Starliner faces technical issues. @Pedro
💻 A Rising Tide of E-Waste, Made Worse by AI, Threatens Our Health, the Environment and the Economy We already know that AI consumes enormous amounts of energy and needs oodles of water to cool itself, but did you know that it also generates heaps of e-waste? @Pascal
Some Fun Stuff
🧑🏼🚀 The moon. Our most familiar celestial neighbor – yet there is still so much to learn. What better way to do so than interactively?
🚀 Speaking of which… Here is the fascinating tale of how the enormous Saturn V rocket was built by the very people who constructed it.
🧠 Here is a conundrum: Your body’s neurons gather data at a staggering 10^9 bits/s, but the information throughput in your overall system is only a slow 10 bits/s… And nobody knows why this discrepancy is so large.
☕ For all of us caffeine addicts: Beware! “Caffeine can disrupt your sleep — even when consumed 12 hours before bed.”
🎧 Wondering why your Spotify playlist is full of weird garbage? There is a method behind the madness — and it is, spoiler alert!, the usual suspect: money.
📀 Turn your songs into gorgeous posters—for free.
Robotics, it turns out, is hard when most of your production seems oriented towards viral videos of robots doing parkour and dancing to the oldies.
Which somehow doesn’t justify spending 6-7 figures on a robot.
Someone needs to decide whether they are a meme company or a serious robotics company.