Past issues

Jan 20 2025

#1

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Welcome to Unruly Futures
We're testing out this format to see if it's interesting for people. We plan to simply collect all of the things we've read over the week and sometimes provide some commentary.

We might add other tidbits from time to time to show people the different futures we're seeing!

Thought we might start with a relatively quiet week as everybody settles in for the new year.
Didn't imagine the LA fires situation obviously, and want to think for a minute of all the people impacted. Can't begin to think how scary and devastating it must be.

Let us know what you think of this format and remember to send us any Unruly stuff you find around!
What we're reading
MIT researchers fabricated 3D chips with alternating layers of semiconducting material grown directly on top of each other. The method eliminates thick silicon between layers, leading to better and faster computation, for applications like more efficient AI hardware.
Absolutely insane emotion expression in a fully robotic face
The main takeaway of this post is meant to be: Labour-replacing AI will shift the relative importance of human v non-human factors of production, which reduces the incentives for society to care about humans while making existing powers more effective and entrenched.
Fred tries again on 2025 predictions

An optimist take.
1. Automation increases productivity and output.
2. Automation raises the amount of capital available to each worker.
3. Automation often improves capital productivity
4. Automation creates new tasks that labor can perform.
AI Crash Course that went viral
‘MiniLife’ research extends growing field of synthetic biology into new territory
China’s primary goal is to damage America’s economy and pave the way for it to become the world’s pre-eminent power. Believable.
The humanoid robots space is already at "corporates partnerships" level of competition
The founder and CTO of Loom explains his path from selling for $1B (my guess is a $100M pre-tax exit?), giving up $60M for two years at the acquirer and figuring out what to do next

Intel is spinning out RealSense as a standalone company in the first half of 2025, not exactly clear (as ever with Intel) if this means they really believe in the robotics part of the business or not. But hard to think they wouldn't

We've heard this from a few people already, but now there is full public confirmation that AI is working on robotics. Unclear if they want to put out a sensor suite, actual robots or just a robotics-specific model which is what we had heard.

You surely saw the video of the guy riding a robot firearm that was vocally controller with an OpenAI integration.

Well it's no more, OpenAI cut him off. Hard to think he wouldn't just implement with an OSS model, but still worth thinking about how companies will have to handle all of this edge cases in their model's usage.

Plug in hybrid winning by far in China, with EVs also growing rapidly and gasoline and diesel tanking 17%
NVIDIA CES announcements
Nvidia is going all in on robotics. COSMOS is their way to help developers accelerate AI development for robotics. 
Pretty incredible to think that you now can have suck power on your desktop

It's really worth taking a look at the whole thing
Epic tweets

Text to CAD finally happening
"Almost nobody is grasping the full implications and imminence of mass produced teleoperated humanoid robots. This is going to upend society and is *entirely* decoupled from anything going on with AI."
Very close to what we argue in Unruly's Manifesto
Not sure this is going to be a permanent section, but over the holidays and the past week I've discovered not one, but two artist that I think are once-in-a-generation talent. 
Papers

It seems like we're in the golden age of quantum computing research.

Superconducting resonators will be used to enable coherent interactions between distant spin qubits, meaning we might get scalable networks of on-chip spin qubits, making real quantum computing quite more likely. (Nature)

Another CRISPR moment?
Researchers built an all-in-one tool that can precisely edit genes, activate gene expression and repress genes all at the same time.

This mvGPT shows AI+BIO in its best manifestation.

A new particle that's not a Boson and not a Fermion but a fractional exciton.

Quantum mechanics potentially altered with deep implications for quantum computing (although in a decade at the very least I guess)

Surely a lot of work to write this paper, but nothing groundbreaking out of it. We already know innovation in construction materials can have a gigantic impact on climate emissions.

Maybe someone can write a paper explaining how to scale it and enter that incredibly hard market :)

Epic, and at the same time quite scary, developments in CRISPR where researchers have been able to mask Cas9 and Cas12 nucleases from the immune system.

So we get both safer gene therapies 🎉 and more dangerous bioweapons 🥶

Pretty self explanatory paper. Oceans at their peak temps despite moving from El Nino to neutral conditions.

2024 is confirmed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) to be the warmest year on record globally, and the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level.

Climate change is here, LA fires and all. Adaptation will start becoming more important very fast, given that prevention and mitigation aren't really doing great.
Music
Fred again is clearly a musical genius. He was raised in a rich family, and went to a private musical school, and then.. he went unruly. 
He has a unique style, with some electronic stuff put in and he uses Maschine like no other.

I'm maybe a bit late to the party (he produced Bad Habits for Ed Sheeran so he's not really underground) but I don't think many people know about him.

This set is honestly mind bending, as well as his boiler room set.

Enjoy
Ren is.. undescribable?

A mix of a Shakespear, Eminem, Santana and Fatboy Slim.

I have been blown away by so many of his performances (you can't really call them tracks) that I have to link to the actual channel.

Please watch some of this stuff to see the breadth, from solo piano sessions, electro rap, bard-style guitar sonnets, and proper masterpieces - all live and in one take.

Thanks Ren for showing us what extraordinary talent and obsession is like!

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