America Is Losing the Robotics Race

The impossible

AI is reshaping both soft power and hard power around the globe. The United States, to its credit, has an early lead with the former. The leading LLMs are trained on Western text, global training and inference are still dominated by American companies, and we are ahead in the global race for market share of total tokens generated.

But as it stands, China is running away with the hard power part of AI – robotics. As the incredible progress in AI continues, we start seeing intelligence embedded in the physical world – culminating in generalist robots that perform a wide variety of tasks across applications, from manufacturing to services to defense. This will redefine every aspect of our society and reshape daily life. The country betting on that future is China, not the US.

In the 10 years since the CCP released its “Made in China 2025” strategy, Chinese companies have leapfrogged the rest of the world’s density of robots per capita. They passed the United States in 2021, then the famously automated economics of Japan and Germany in 2024, and will soon eclipse Singapore and South Korea, their last remaining contenders. In short order China has become the world’s central robotics power. Entirely autonomous “dark factories,” like those of smartphone and automobile manufacturer Xiaomi, operate in complete darkness with no humans present.

China has successfully executed what we once thought impossible. Only ten years ago we scoffed that “China can copy, but they can’t innovate,” which we then revised to, “They can innovate, but they can’t make the upstream high-precision tooling.” Maybe we shouldn’t have been so comfortable, given how Chinese companies had outcompeted the rest of the world in industry after industry – from solar photovoltaics, where competition outside of China has been practically decimated, to 5G, whose global deployment was a massive success for China’s national champion Huawei. The same pattern is playing out now with robotics. China has built a playbook to dominate strategic industries, and has used that playbook to become the robot superpower.

Homegrown Chinese companies now design and fabricate precision parts like harmonic reducers at competitive quality, cheaper prices, and – most importantly – colocated with their customers in manufacturing superclusters. This is the part that should scare the West the most. The colocation of so many robot toolmakers, assemblers, and customers in nodes like Shenzhen or Shanghai is how new combinatorial use cases are discovered, how manufacturing sequences are optimized around that new potential, and how firms develop advanced process knowledge that is completely opaque to the West. In a few years, it will be Chinese companies that are making parts that we cannot replicate – not just at low cost, but at any cost. There are parallels from the past. In the 1970s, Japan shocked the world with Toyota’s lean production methods, just-in-time inventory, and ethic of kaizen, continuous improvement to eliminate waste. Initially dismissed, by the 1980s Japanese automakers had overtaken American and European giants and reshaped the global auto industry. If we do not act to avert it, this will be another Toyota moment, but on a much greater scale.

If we don’t act soon, the United States will find it extremely difficult to catch up: we are approaching a period of compounding improvement that threatens to make China’s advantage virtually insurmountable. As with LLMs, training advanced robotics systems requires pretraining data on the scale of the internet, along with reinforcement learning to train generalist policies that can reason across a wide range of distortions in environment, perception, and task. As data from real-world deployment comes online, the country with more robots gains flywheel momentum; more deployment means more high-quality data which underwrites further deployment. The United States isn’t entirely out of the game, and our lead in AI software carries over: American companies like World Labs are at the forefront of building frontier models that could allow robots to reason about 3D space. But as these capabilities mature, it will be action in the real world – from routing cable harnesses through chassis pathways in electronics assembly to simply doing laundry – that will unlock the economic and strategic promise of generalist robotics.

Micron tolerance

To understand what China has achieved in the past few years, let’s talk about the harmonic reducer – a simple manufactured part that’s deceptively hard to make.

Harmonic reducers are a type of gear system that looks almost like a shoulder or an elbow in its socket. They transfer rotational energy from one end (usually at high speed, from an electric motor) into a much slower gearing, at high torque. They do this by offsetting an inner and outer gear ring that are slightly offset from one another, paired with a rotating oval-shaped piece on the inside. When driven by an electric motor, this creates a waveform that slowly drives the outer socket with a high gear ratio and high torque – suitable for many robotic applications, including humanoid ones.

The challenge in manufacturing these tools comes from how sensitive they are to minute distortions in tooling and operating. They must be made micron-level precise, at low cost, to do their jobs correctly. Even more precision is required when these sockets are chained together into systems with multiple degrees of freedom, like the multiple joints on a robotic finger, hand, or limb. Achieving the strength and dexterity of a human hand, at non-prohibitive cost, requires true manufacturing excellence.

The precision required to manufacture harmonic reducers is well beyond the reach of most machine shops. Production has historically been dominated by highly specialized German and Japanese manufacturers: the Japanese company Sumitomo and the German-Japanese firm Harmonic Drive are the two dominant players in the space, together accounting for 95 percent of global market share. But in the last few years they’ve faced intensifying competition from new entrants from China. A firm called Green Harmonic, based in the city of Suzhou near Shanghai, offers harmonic reducers with performance comparable to products from Sumitomo and Harmonic Drive, but at roughly 30 to 50 percent cheaper price points. Green Harmonic now has more than 30 percent market share within China; and will soon look abroad. In the coming years, we can expect companies like Harmonic Drive to face their “Toyota moment,” with major strategic implications: there are countless cases of Chinese firms translating cheap, reliable manufacturing into global market share and eventually driving competitors out of business.

Harmonic reducers are just one illustrative part of the robotics hardware stack. Creating a fully functioning robot requires a huge variety of other small components – precision bearings that enable smooth joint rotation, custom printed circuit boards that route power and signals between subsystems, specialized connectors that maintain reliable communication in high-vibration environments, miniature encoders that provide millimeter-accurate position feedback, force-sensitive resistors embedded in fingertips for delicate manipulation, inertial measurement units that track orientation changes down to fractions of a degree, servo motors with sophisticated current control algorithms, shielding to prevent electromagnetic interference between tightly packed electronics, thermal interface materials that dissipate heat from high-performance processors, and countless fasteners, gaskets, and protective housings engineered to withstand the mechanical stresses of real-world operation. Each component must be carefully selected not just for its individual performance characteristics, but for how it integrates with the broader system: a single point of failure can render a sophisticated robot completely inoperable.

Chinese companies, from Siasun and Estun in controllers to AVIC Electromechanical in torque sensors, are rapidly entering and starting to win the market for every part of that system. Together, these firms and countless others constitute a sophisticated and mature ecosystem that has allowed Chinese firms to locally source practically the entire robot – not only from within China, but within a megacluster like Shenzhen.

We’re at the point today where Chinese domestic manufacturers and their suppliers contribute all of the parts necessary to bring robotic dreams to life, and iteratively learn from one another. The Chinese startup Unitree has captured the global imagination with highly advanced robots cheaper than anything else offered before – agile and LLM-integrated robot dogs for as little as $1,600, a humanoid for $5,900. Those costs will keep coming down; the robot dogs will keep getting stronger and more capable.

by Martin Casado and Anne Neuberger, A16Z |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. This is from Andreessen Horowitz, so little surprise they would view government subsidies (too little) and over regulation (too much) as major contributing factors. But politics, policy, and a lack of strategic planning and funding priorities are probably the more important constraints. I mean, we currently have a president and congress that give lip-service to reshoring American manufacturing, but have no idea what industries are most important, or even how infrastructure improvements and corporate incentives (and disincentives) could help. All the while re-directing trillions of dollars into the military, homeland security and immigration enforcement. No wonder China is pulling away on all fronts. They actually have a clear idea of where they want to go.]

Who's the Terrorist?

via: X

[ed. Not saying there's a connection, but where there's smoke there's usually fire. Left wing terrorists. Huh... thought they were all effeminate snowflakes. Guess they're the ones wrapped in the flag, hiding behind facemasks, and stockpiling guns.]

The Problem (With Advanced AI)

The stated goal of the world’s leading AI companies is to build AI that is general enough to do anything a human can do, from solving hard problems in theoretical physics to deftly navigating social environments. Recent machine learning progress seems to have brought this goal within reach. At this point, we would be uncomfortable ruling out the possibility that AI more capable than any human is achieved in the next year or two, and we would be moderately surprised if this outcome were still two decades away.

The current view of MIRI’s research scientists is that if smarter-than-human AI is developed this decade, the result will be an unprecedented catastrophe. The CAIS Statement, which was widely endorsed by senior researchers in the field, states:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

We believe that if researchers build superintelligent AI with anything like the field’s current technical understanding or methods, the expected outcome is human extinction.

“Research labs around the world are currently building tech that is likely to cause human extinction” is a conclusion that should motivate a rapid policy response. The fast pace of AI, however, has caught governments and the voting public flat-footed. This document will aim to bring readers up to speed, and outline the kinds of policy steps that might be able to avert catastrophe.

Key points in this document:

• There isn’t a ceiling at human-level capabilities.
• ASI is very likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior.
• ASI is very likely to pursue the wrong goals.
• It would be lethally dangerous to build ASIs that have the wrong goals.
• Catastrophe can be averted via a sufficiently aggressive policy response.

1. There isn’t a ceiling at human-level capabilities.

The signatories on the CAIS Statement included the three most cited living scientists in the field of AI: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Ilya Sutskever. Of these, Hinton has said: “If I were advising governments, I would say that there’s a 10% chance these things will wipe out humanity in the next 20 years. I think that would be a reasonable number.” In an April 2024 Q&A, Hinton said: “I actually think the risk is more than 50%, of the existential threat.”

The underlying reason AI poses such an extreme danger is that AI progress doesn’t stop at human-level capabilities. The development of systems with human-level generality is likely to quickly result in artificial superintelligence (ASI): AI that substantially surpasses humans in all capacities, including economic, scientific, and military ones.

Historically, when the world has found a way to automate a computational task, we’ve generally found that computers can perform that task far better and faster than humans, and at far greater scale. This is certainly true of recent AI progress in board games and protein structure prediction, where AIs spent little or no time at the ability level of top human professionals before vastly surpassing human abilities. In the strategically rich and difficult-to-master game Go, AI went in the span of a year from never winning a single match against the worst human professionals, to never losing a single match against the best human professionals. Looking at a specific system, AlphaGo Zero: In three days, AlphaGo Zero went from knowing nothing about Go to being vastly more capable than any human player, without any access to information about human games or strategy.

Along most dimensions, computer hardware greatly outperforms its biological counterparts at the fundamental activities of computation. While currently far less energy efficient, modern transistors can switch states at least ten million times faster than neurons can fire. The working memory and storage capacity of computer systems can also be vastly larger than those of the human brain. Current systems already produce prose, art, code, etc. orders of magnitude faster than any human can. When AI becomes capable of the full range of cognitive tasks the smartest humans can perform, we shouldn’t expect AI’s speed advantage (or other advantages) to suddenly go away. Instead, we should expect smarter-than-human AI to drastically outperform humans on speed, working memory, etc. (...)

2. ASI is very likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior.

Goal-oriented behavior is economically useful, and the leading AI companies are explicitly trying to achieve goal-oriented behavior in their models.

The deeper reason to expect ASI to exhibit goal-oriented behavior, however, is that problem-solving with a long time horizon is essentially the same thing as goal-oriented behavior. This is a key reason the situation with ASI appears dire to us.

Importantly, an AI can “exhibit goal-oriented behavior” without necessarily having human-like desires, preferences, or emotions. Exhibiting goal-oriented behavior only means that the AI persistently modifies the world in ways that yield a specific long-term outcome. (...)

Goal-orientedness isn’t sufficient for ASI, or Stockfish would be a superintelligence. But it seems very close to necessary: An AI needs the mental machinery to strategize, adapt, anticipate obstacles, etc., and it needs the disposition to readily deploy this machinery on a wide range of tasks, in order to reliably succeed in complex long-horizon activities.

As a strong default, then, smarter-than-human AIs are very likely to stubbornly reorient towards particular targets, regardless of what wrench reality throws into their plans. This is a good thing if the AI’s goals are good, but it’s an extremely dangerous thing if the goals aren’t what developers intend:

If an AI’s goal is to move a ball up a hill, then from the AI’s perspective, humans who get in the way of the AI achieving its goal count as “obstacles” in the same way that a wall counts as an obstacle. The exact same mechanism that makes an AI useful for long-time-horizon real-world tasks — relentless pursuit of objectives in the face of the enormous variety of blockers the environment will throw one’s way — will also make the AI want to prevent humans from interfering in its work. This may only be a nuisance when the AI is less intelligent than humans, but it becomes an enormous problem when the AI is smarter than humans.

by Rob Bensinger, tanagrabeast, yams, So8res, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gretta Duleba, Less Wrong |  Read more:

[ed. See also: When AI Seems Conscious: Here's What to Know.]

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CLA - The Revolutionary New Coaching Method

Victor Wembanyama is doing something wrong.

The 7-foot-4 unicorn, still in the early stages of rewriting how basketball is played, just made a move few in the world can. But it’s the antithesis of why he’s in a quiet Los Angeles gym with San Antonio Spurs teammate Harrison Barnes and his skill trainer, Noah LaRoche. In a summer of new adventures, ranging from kung fu training at a Shaolin temple in China to bicycle kicks on a soccer pitch in Japan, Wembanyama wanted to try one more novel thing.

Six years earlier, Barnes came to a similar conclusion. A former No. 1 recruit out of high school, Barnes had just joined his third NBA team and wanted to evolve as a player. Barnes asked his friend Joe Boylan, an experienced NBA assistant coach, to recommend a skills trainer for his summer workouts.

Boylan gave him LaRoche’s number and a message: Trust his unconventional methods.

Now, it is time for Wembanyama to understand what that means.

“Victor wanted to come out to L.A. to train for the summer,” Barnes said, “and I wanted (him) to see what I do.”

They are participating in a three-on-three drill to push the players to make optimal reads each time they touch the ball. Things are going smoothly until Wembanyama does a vast Euro step through traffic to score.

Before anyone can marvel at the bucket, LaRoche calls practice to a halt. He waves Wembanyama over to the courtside video monitor. What looks like a basket that few players in the world can score is actually a problem.

“What did you see here?” LaRoche asked the former NBA Rookie of the Year.

In LaRoche’s gym, nothing can be predetermined. It’s all about making the best decision in that specific situation, not perfecting a single move.

As Wembanyama peered at the video, he immediately noticed something that had eluded him in the moment. In this scenario, there was more space for him to attack in a different direction. He knew exactly how he would react next time.

“My body is starting to understand these movements,” Wembanyama told LaRoche after watching the video.

It was Wembanyama’s first step toward understanding a new perspective on the game he has a chance to conquer. He was learning about three letters that the current Premier League champions (Liverpool), the World Series winners (Los Angeles Dodgers), the last two NBA champions (Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics) and many other teams across professional sports have already, to certain degrees, incorporated into their organizations.

C-L-A.

The CLA, which stands for Constraints-Led Approach, is a learning method that has made its way from academia to the mainstream, drawing from innovative research in psychology and neuroscience. It replaces traditional block training, where an athlete learns a single movement pattern step-by-step, with game-like situations that feature special rules, forcing them to adapt their moves on the fly. It’s founded on the principle that training perfectly yields imperfect results.

“It changed my career,” said Los Angeles Sparks guard Kelsey Plum, a four-time WNBA All-Star and two-time champion. “Before, I was very skilled. But I don’t think I was ever very purposeful.”

The CLA takes the ground-up approach of block training, which eliminates the infinite variables that affect athletes in the heat of competition, and flips it on its head.

That means putting players into scenarios with different limitations called “constraints” to simulate the unpredictable environment of an actual game. Whether it’s the number of steps they can take, the area of the playing surface from which they are allowed to maneuver or even the weight of the ball they are using, players are repeatedly told to overcome restrictions to accomplish a task. While painstakingly working through mistakes, they are forced to find advantageous opportunities, “affordances” in CLA parlance.

From pool noodles to a game known as “murderball,” coaches around the world are finding ways to put their players in a sea of constraints and guide them on how to work their way back to shore.

By forcing a player to deal with variables that are impossible to predict, the CLA teaches them to execute under duress rather than flawlessly in a vacuum. If a coach can get a player to work through failure and creatively solve problems, the thought goes, practice becomes more complex than the actual games.

“It’s creating different atmospheres and a culture that the toughest part of your day in player development is the practice,” said Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes, whose team is one of the strongest purveyors of the CLA in American sports. “Blocked practice has been shown to have a purpose, but once you get into the elite levels of talent, facing this type of stuff every day, then it’s not as effective. There’s a balancing of confidence pregame and then making sure you’re challenging yourself so that you’re up to the task of facing (Pirates pitcher) Paul Skenes, or whoever.” (...)

The CLA evolved from the study of ecological dynamics, a framework that integrates psychology and neurobiology to examine the relationship between how the brain and body interact to perceive and navigate our environment. It focuses on perception-action coupling, the feedback loop by which your brain processes sensory information and your body coordinates sequences of actions to create motion. It’s a continuous partnership between more than just the brain’s visual system and the body, but also involving touch, hearing, and proprioception — the body’s sixth sense of position and movement.

The latest research in ecological dynamics suggests our brain does not store a specific script of a given movement pattern. Instead, the brain and body work in tandem, using perception-action coupling to develop precise and flexible movements constantly.

Everything is a read, all the time, for all of us.

by Jared Weiss and Fabian Ardaya, The Athletic | Read more:

Image: Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; top photos: Chris Coduto, Andy Lyons, Luke Hales/Getty Images; David Richard/Imagn Images

[ed. See also: Steph Curry's Secrets to Success: Brain Training, Float Tanks and Strobe Goggles (BR).]

Challenge Coins

Kash Patel’s Challenge Coin Is Perfect for Him

Members of the U.S. military have long had a tradition of giving or exchanging “challenge coins.” The medallions have no monetary value; they come in various shapes and sizes, but most are about the size of a silver dollar, and they carry the symbols and names of military units or commands. Members of those units carry them to give to others as tokens of esteem. (They are called challenge coins because they can be used to prove that you are a member of the unit; sometimes they are called “commander’s coins” when they’re given out by a senior officer.)

In my years as a professor at the Naval War College, I collected many such coins from military students and from organizations where I spoke. They’re a nice tradition, and it is always an honor when a service person passes you one during a handshake as a mark of respect or gratitude. Other organizations mint such coins, too, both inside and outside the government. I have a rather nice one, for example, from my visit to the National Counterterrorism Center, and another that was struck by a private group to commemorate Operation Iraqi Freedom.

FBI Director Kash Patel has created such a coin for himself that he’s now handing out, and Americans can only wish that he’d take them all and lock them in his desk, never to be seen again.

The coins are, to put it gently, ridiculous. On one side, they have what appears to be the symbol of the Punisher, a Marvel character. The Punisher is a vigilante who does … well, vigilante stuff, killing evildoers at will as revenge for the death of his family. The symbol is popular with a lot of people, including criminals, law-enforcement officers, soldiers, and some extremist groups such as the anti-government Three Percenters. None of this is good, especially because the character’s creator long ago admitted that the symbol was partly inspired by the Nazi SS’s Totenkopf, or “Death’s Head,” uniform insignia. (The author of the series also notes that the Punisher hates cops, something the police officers wearing the mark don’t seem to get.)

If you’re not a comic-book fan, the front of the coin looks more like a depiction of a space alien, or maybe a skull—or maybe a space alien’s skull—with spiders in the eye sockets and K$H on the forehead. (“Kash.” Get it? So edgy.) The face has a Greek or Roman helmet under the nose, and a pistol on each side, and together, it looks like a key or maybe a bottle opener. The other side carries Patel’s signature, the FBI seal, and a depiction of a tommy gun, perhaps as a romantic reminder of the days of J. Edgar Hoover hunting down John Dillinger or something.

This is not a challenge coin: It is something kids use to pop the caps off beer bottles at a gaming meetup or a cosplay convention. If someone pressed one of these into my hand at an official function, I’d think I was being pranked (or maybe being given a discount token to a local Halloween house). It is as unserious as the director himself, a metal symbol of the hollowness of Patel’s leadership. The FBI, prone to rogue operations under Hoover, has for decades been the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency. It is run and staffed by agents—serious men and women—who once struck fear into the hearts of bank robbers, kidnappers, and enemy spies. After Hoover, the agency’s directors were always drawn from the ranks of people with backgrounds in law enforcement or justice, people of significant accomplishment.

Patel’s coin does not convey this kind of gravitas. Instead, it says: “I am a grown man who has spent way too much time on the internet.” It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to get from someone with a lot of hardware hanging from their face and tattoos on their neck. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we might expect a bit more formality from a G-man.) Then again, maybe it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy who noted the death of Charlie Kirk by saying that he and Kirk would meet again in “Valhalla.” It’s sort of a Goth-horror movie-gamer coin that will never scare a bad guy or inspire respect in a colleague or a fellow law enforcer, but that might elicit a “Cool, dude” from an easily impressed middle schooler.

by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: X

[ed. Priorities.]

Andrey Sokolov, Illustration for Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451'

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Annual Check-up

Lea Ignatius,“Odotus”, 1982

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i. gustav vigeland eros and psyche / auguste rodin ii. triton and nereid, iii. the kiss, vi. eternal idol / iv. miklós ligeti / v. stephen sinding the mennesker

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OpenAI’s New Video App Is Jaw-Dropping (for Better and Worse)

This week, we — the two authors of this article — spent hours scrolling through a feed of short-form videos that featured ourselves in different scenarios.

In one hyper-realistic nine-second video, we were shown skydiving (and grinning) with pizzas as parachutes.

In another, Eli hit a game-winning home run in a baseball stadium full of robots.

In yet another, Mike was caught in a “Matrix”-style duel against Ronald McDonald, using cheeseburgers as weapons.

“I’m genuinely blown away,” Eli messaged Mike about the cheeseburger video, before liking the content. Mike kept sending videos — which included him ballroom dancing with his dog and sitting on a throne of rats — to other New York Times colleagues (all of whom found the clips slightly disturbing).

The app we used was not TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, the current leaders of short-form video. It was Sora, a smartphone app made by OpenAI that lets people create such videos entirely from artificial intelligence. Sora’s underlying technology debuted last year, but its latest version — which is faster and more powerful and can incorporate your likeness if you upload images of your face — was released on an invitation-only basis this week.

After we spent less than a day with the app, what became clear to us was that Sora had gone beyond being an A.I.-video generation app. Instead, it is, in effect, a social network in disguise; a clone of TikTok down to its user interface, algorithmic video suggestions and ability to follow and interact with friends. The powerful A.I. model that Sora is built on makes it simpler to produce clips, giving people an almost unlimited ability to generate as many A.I. videos as they want.

It was also disconcerting.

Almost instantly, Sora’s early-access users were spinning up videos made with copyrighted material plucked from pop culture. (We saw more “Rick and Morty” and Pikachu videos than we would have liked.) And when Mike posted one Sora video to his personal Instagram page, a half-dozen friends asked if it was him in the video, raising questions about whether we might lose touch with reality.

Worse still, being able to quickly and easily generate video likenesses of people could pour gasoline on disinformation, creating clips of fake events that look so real that they might spur people into real-world action. While some of this was already possible with other A.I. video generators, Sora could turbocharge it.

It is early days, and there is no guarantee Sora will have legs. But OpenAI appears to have created the type of product that companies like Meta and X have sought to build: a way to bring A.I. to the masses that people can share, enticing one another to create posts and regularly use their apps and services.

The race to create similar apps is heating up. Last week, Meta released a social media feed in its dedicated A.I. app called Vibes, which uses an A.I. video generator from the start-up Midjourney. Google hosts Veo, its version of a similar product.

With the social internet moving people from sharing text messages to posting photos and now to watching billions of hours of video, tech executives say A.I. video tools will be formative to the next generation of social media. (...)

Hollywood has spent the past 36 hours concerned over how Sora could make it simple for users to rip off likenesses with no compensation. A day after the app’s release, executives at the talent agency WME sent a memo to agents saying they would fight to defend their clients’ work, according to a copy viewed by The Times.

“There is a strong need for real protections for artists and creatives as they encounter A.I. models using their intellectual property, as well as their name, image and likeness,” the memo said. WME said it had told OpenAI that all of its clients were opting out of having their likenesses or intellectual property included in Sora’s videos.

Still, Sora’s broad appeal was immediately clear. Neither of us knows the first thing about creating videos, yet all it took was a kernel of an idea, two or three minutes of processing time and a boatload of computing power to spit out a video of Mike arm-wrestling Eli for the title of “best tech reporter.” (Eli won.)

Not everyone was charmed. After Mike showed his partner an eerily realistic Sora video of himself playing the psychopathic character Anton Chigurh from the 2007 film adaptation of the book “No Country for Old Men,” she had a simple request.

“Please never, ever show me this kind of video again,” she said.

by Mike Isaac and Eli Tan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sora

[ed. Fake everything, here we come. In the future, a premium will be placed on human interactions (including relationships), certified human-produced products (eg. art), and anything else that derives clearly from human-related efforts. Because it'll be hard to tell. See also: this post about Tilly Norwood (DS).]

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette", 1989
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Duane Michals, “Madame Schroedingers Cat”, 1998

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The Sufferable Evil

Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF—a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

What happened next should be the biggest story in America.

Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment in her nightgown to find armed agents yelling “police.” She had a gun pointed in her face. She was handcuffed. She was held until 3 AM before being released. Fisher isn’t suspected of any crime. She lives in the building.

Alicia Brooks stuck her key in her door to enter her own apartment. An officer grabbed her. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” He never told her. She was detained.

Every resident in the building was detained. Not just suspected gang members. Everyone. Adults. Children. Witnesses report children zip-tied together, crying, terrified. One federal officer, when asked about the children, reportedly said: “Fuck them kids.”

Marlee Sanders watched as agents separated detainees by race. “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.”

Thirty-seven people were arrested. How many innocent residents were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, detained for hours without probable cause? Federal authorities won’t say. Residents estimate 30-40 additional people were held and released.

Blackhawk helicopters. Flash bangs. A chainsaw to cut through fencing. Doors blown off hinges. Holes in walls. An entire building’s worth of American citizens treated as enemy combatants in a war zone.

This happened. In Chicago. In America. This week.

And we’ve already moved on to the next story.

Thomas Jefferson understood something about human nature that we’re watching play out in real time. In the Declaration of Independence, just paragraphs after declaring certain truths self-evident, he observed: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Jefferson wasn’t making an abstract philosophical claim. He was describing what he had witnessed throughout history: humans endure tyranny. They accommodate. They find reasons why this particular violation isn’t quite bad enough to justify the terrifying work of resistance.

They suffer while evils are sufferable.

And what happened in Chicago this week? It’s sufferable. Barely. Just barely. But sufferable enough that most Americans will shrug and scroll past.

The bitter irony is that what occurred in that South Shore apartment building represents precisely the kind of tyranny that provoked the American Revolution itself. (...)

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t just prohibit searches without warrants. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures—including searches conducted under the kind of sweeping authority that allows agents to detain everyone in a building because the building itself is “known to be frequented by” suspected criminals.

What happened in Chicago wasn’t a targeted operation against specific individuals for whom probable cause had been established. It was a general sweep. Everyone detained. Everyone held. Everyone’s liberty suspended until federal agents decided whether you were interesting enough to arrest.

This is exactly—exactly—what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

And America yawned. (...)

This is the inversion of everything a constitutional system of justice is supposed to prevent.

In a legitimate legal order, suspicion of specific criminal activity creates the authority to investigate. You don’t get to pick your enemies and then rifle through their lives looking for something to charge them with. You don’t get to declare entire buildings or neighborhoods presumptively criminal and suspend constitutional protections for everyone within them.

But that’s exactly what’s happening. Chicago isn’t an outlier—it’s a demonstration project. A proof of concept. A test of how far the administration can go before Americans say “no further.” (...)

Why are we accommodating this?

The calculus is simple and ancient: it’s not happening to us. The targets are gang members and their unfortunate neighbors—mostly Black and brown people in neighborhoods most Americans will never visit. This violation doesn’t affect me directly, and resisting it would require effort, risk, discomfort. Easier to believe that people detained probably did something to deserve scrutiny, even if we can’t quite articulate what.

Because it’s sufferable.

This is the logic that makes tyranny possible. (...)

President Trump has suggested that Chicago should be used as a “training ground” for the military. Think about what that means. Not that the military should train in Chicago—that Chicago itself, an American city, should serve as practice for what? Urban warfare? Population control? The exercise of federal force against civilian populations?

This isn’t hyperbole. These are his words. And the response from most Americans has been... silence. Accommodation. The sufferable evil. 

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Next 'No Kings' rally is scheduled for October 18 (in your home town).]

The Garage Is the New Porch

In Houston, when football season kicks off, so does garage season.

In this car-bound city, and beyond, vehicles are being pushed aside to give the garage a second act.

Take Melissa Spence: On many evenings, she can be found relaxing with friends in her garage, feet up on a cooler, Michelob Ultra in hand. She and her husband, Joseph Spence, park on the street, and, where a car would be in the garage, there are instead a half dozen yard chairs, a rug, a big-screen TV, and string lights crisscrossing the ceiling. A mesh screen hangs where the retracted garage door would close, and when you push it to the side, as you might a hippie’s beaded curtain, it’s like entering a magical, mysterious realm.

“It’s become that third space you can go,” Ms. Spence, 49, said, referring to the sociological concept that the home is a person’s first space, work is their second and their third is an informal gathering spot. “People drop by to say hi or pick up the guitar and play,” she said. “It’s a really friendly room now.”

The American garage’s reincarnation looks different depending on the resident: It might be a hideaway man cave, a she-shed, a home theater, a workshop, a crafting zone or a band practice room.

Why hang out here, instead of a house’s air-conditioned living room? For many, the garage opens up an opportunity for interactions with neighbors and passers-by that closing yourself inside a home does not. In a city like Houston, where car-focused living minimizes the chance of running into people, the revived garage is a tool to create the human interaction that some people crave.

In Houston’s Rice Military neighborhood, Jane Haas, 53, spent many of this summer’s evenings sitting in her garage in a folding chair next to her dog and a fan, with Motown playing on the radio. “We’re getting older and I guess we’re becoming porch people,” she said one night, as a neighbor walked by and said hello. “But since we don’t have a porch, this is the place where friends will drop by for a drink or to maybe watch sports with us when we bring our TV down. Our garage has become our front porch.”

The mythology of the garage’s reimagined potential runs deep in modern American culture. For businesses like Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, Disney and Harley-Davidson, the garage is the backdrop of their origin story. Those companies’ founders took that common, square structure that was originally built to house a certain vision of American success and transformed it to house their own version of the American dream. [ed. As did countless garage bands.]

by Shannon Sims, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Meridith Kohut

[ed. I've often wondered why more people (on the mainland) don't do this. In Hawaii, garages (and carports) have always been a focal point for parties, tailgating, music making, and just about everything else. Great for promoting and maintaining neighborly interactions and community cohesion (unless you party too much!).]

The War Between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is Officially Over...

Silicon Valley needs creativity, but hates to pay for it. So the war rages on.

But we are now entering the final stage of the war. Silicon Valley is now swallowing up Hollywood. The pace at which this is happening is frightening.

The main protagonist here is a man named David Ellison—a tech scion who wants to be the biggest mogul in the movie industry. A few days ago, his father Larry Ellison became (briefly) the richest man in the world.

Ellison is founder of Oracle, a database software company with a market cap of almost a trillion dollars. That’s nice work if you can get it. But his son David wanted to do something more fun than databases, so he dropped out of college to dabble in movies.

But this quickly became more than dabbling. He produced hit franchise films, notably the Mission Impossible movies. He didn’t care much about artsy cinema—and instead churned out Baywatch and Spy Kids. Like his dad, he knows how to make money.

And then he went on a spending spree. It’s not hard to do that in Hollywood if you have a big pile of cash. Many of the legendary properties from the past have fallen on hard times, and can be acquired from their current owners at a very reasonable price.

So David Ellison bought up National Amusements and merged it into his production company. This gave him control over

• Paramount Pictures

• CBS (and CBS News)

• MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other cable TV channels

• Paramount+ and Pluto TV streaming platforms

But now he is preparing a takeover of Warner Bros Discovery—which would put him in charge of Warner Bros film and television studios

• HBO

• CNN

• TNT

And it doesn’t stop there.

Oracle, the company founded by David Ellison’s father, will now be one of the new owners of TikTok. So in one generation, the Ellison family has gone from software entrepreneurs to the biggest powerhouse in film and media.

What’s next?

The most attractive remaining asset in Hollywood is Disney. It’s just a matter of time before it gets swallowed up by the techies. The most likely outcome is Apple acquiring Disney, but some other Silicon Valley powerhouse could also do this deal.

There’s so much money in NorCal, and a lot of techies would like to own their own famous mouse (along with theme parks and all the rest). Musk could do it. Zuckerberg could do it. Alphabet could do it. Even some company you don’t think much about, like Broadcom (market cap = $1.6 trillion), could easily finance this deal.

There’s heavy irony in this fact. That’s because Disney helped launch Silicon Valley.

There’s a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto that’s called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. But that birthing only happened because Walt Disney gave Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard an order for eight audio oscillators—which gave them enough cash and confidence to create their garage-born company.

Hewlett-Packard trained the next generation of tech entrepreneurs, including Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. So an Apple buyout of Disney would simply take things full circle.

There are still some chess pieces on the board, and a few moves left to be made—but the winner of this game is already obvious. Hollywood, or what’s left of it, will become a subsidiary of tech interests. I don’t see any other outcome.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Hollywood Boulevard in the 1930s

Grzegorz Jacek Olejniczak (Polish b.1968), Before the Storm, 2025

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Why Getting Older Might Be Life’s Biggest Plot Twist

Aging isn’t easy, and topics like dementia and medically assisted dying can be hard to talk about. The British mystery writer Richard Osman is trying to change that. Osman has reimagined the notion of aging through his best-selling “Thursday Murder Club” series, centered on four seniors living in a posh retirement community who solve murders.

In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)

Michelle Cottle: This week I’m talking with Richard Osman, who writes the best-selling mystery novels known as the “Thursday Murder Club” series. These books revolve around four residents of a posh retirement village in the British countryside who investigate murders in their spare time.

The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.

Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)

Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?

Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.

As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.

Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.

As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.

Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.

Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?

Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.

But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.

Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.

You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.

Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?

Osman: Yeah.

Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?

Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.

My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.

I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.

In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)

Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —

Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”

When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.

In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.

Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.

But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.

Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.

But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.

My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.

My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)

Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.

Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.

The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.

Cottle: That’s my goal.

Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?

That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.

And that feels like a revolutionary act.

by Michelle Cottle and Richard Osman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. There's still quite a bit of ageism around, I don't know if it's getting better or worse.  I'm old and this all feels very familiar.]

Víctor M. Alonso

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