Boulder Future Salon

Is psychology a young or mature science? "There's a thought that's haunted me for years: we're doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and...then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?" "I've got this picture in my head: we're all on a bus that's supposedly going to Cincinnati. But there are no road signs and we don't have a GPS, so we have no idea if we're going in the right direction. We can't measure our progress by how much gas we're burning, or whether we've upgraded from a manual transmission to an automatic, or whether the government bought us a new bus. And you can't just look out the window and go, 'I dunno, kinda feels like we're headed toward Arkansas,' which, I realize now, is what I've been doing so far." "Instead, you first gotta ask: how could we know we're getting closer to Cincinnati?" "In my estimation, there are five ways to measure psychology's progress, and we are succeeding in exactly one of them." The 5 are: 1. Overturning intuitions, 2. Pitting people armed with the psychological literature and against people armed only with their own intuitions, 3. Helping people make better decisions, 4. Producing useful technology, and 5. Seeing old ideas become nonsensical after paradigm shifts. "The philosopher Michael Strevens says that doing science requires an 'alien mindset' where you entertain ridiculous thoughts like 'perhaps Aristotle needs some updating' or 'maybe we should toss balls of varying weights off a tower and see which one hits the ground first.' Those thoughts don't seem alien anymore, of course, because they worked out. But going full alien-brain today means you will have to entertain thoughts that incur reputational risk, like 'maybe you don't have to pay attention to the literature' and 'maybe we should ask people how their toothbrush could be different'. Once you get into the alien mindset, the best thing to think about is mysteries. What are the self-evident phenomena: things that definitely happen, but that we cannot explain?"

Most of you probably know by now, but just in case you don't, or want to know more, SpaceX launched Starship, their almost 40-story-tall heavy lifter rocket, and landed it vertically back at its launch pad and grabbed it by the launch tower. This is SpaceX's system for making the giant rocket reusable.

If you buy a cheap Chinese thermal camera for your smartphone and install the app, the app will request a boatload of security permissions. It will requests permissions to access your location, to act as an Account Authenticator for the Account Manager, to request authorization tokens from the Account Manager, to read access of your phone state, including the current cellular network information, phone number, the status of any ongoing calls, and a list of any Phone Accounts registered on the device, to start automatically when the device boots up, to initiate a phone call without going through the Dialer user interface for the user to confirm the call, to read the low-level system log files, which can contain your private information, to create windows intended for system-level interaction with the user, to mount and unmount file systems for removable storage, to read or write the system settings, to get information about the currently or recently running tasks, to access information about Wi-Fi networks, to change Wi-Fi connectivity state, to receive a broadcast when the screen is on or has been unlocked, to keep processor from sleeping or screen from dimming, to change network connectivity state, to write to external storage, to perform Mobile Device Management tasks, a permission that is typically used by system apps or device policy management apps, and more. You might think that all the app would do is show you what the camera sees, but no. Oh, but this article has more. It shows how this was figured out, using a tool called JADX, a "Dex to Java decompiler", and Ghidra. By "Dex to Java decompiler", they mean it goes from Dalvik bytecode to Java code from APK, dex, aar, aab, and zip files. Dalvik is the virtual machine on Android phones. Well, Dalvik used to be the virtual machine on Android phones, but a newer, better virtual machine has been invented, but Dalvik is still the format used for the files that are used to distribute Android apps (which is what those file extensions mentioned are about). Not everything neatly decompiled with JADX, which is where Ghidra comes in. Ghidra is a full-fledged reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA. Yes, the NSA. Interestingly the device identifies itself as "Cypress Semiconductor Corp Cino FuzzyScan F760-B". Cypress Semiconductor Corporation was acquired by Infineon in 2020 and no longer exists as a separate corporation. I guess that doesn't stop other people from using its device driver. To top it all off, this article even includes a teardown of the device itself.

"Machines of Loving Grace". Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote an essay about what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. "I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I'm the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I'm a pessimist or "doomer" who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don't think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they're the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future." "In terms of pure intelligence, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields -- biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc." "In addition to just being a 'smart thing you talk to', it has all the 'interfaces' available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on." "It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary." "It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use." "The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by ~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10x-100x human speed. It may however be limited by the response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with." "Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated tasks, or if needed can all work together in the same way humans would collaborate, perhaps with different subpopulations fine-tuned to be especially good at particular tasks." Sounds to me like automation of all work, but he doesn't address that until nearly the end. Before that, he talks about all the ways he thinks AI will improve "biology and physical health", "neuroscience and mental health", "economic development and poverty", and "peace and governance". AI will advance CRISPR, microscopy, genome sequencing and synthesis, optogenetic techniques, mRNA vaccines, cell therapies such as CAR-T, and more due to conceptual insights we can't even predict today. AI will prevent or treat nearly all infectious disease, eliminate most cancer, prevent or cure genetic diseases, improve treatments for diabetes, obesity, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, give people "biological freedom" with physical appearance and other biological processes under people's individual control, and double human lifespan (to 150). AI will cure most mental illnesses like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, and addiction. AI will figure out how to alter brain structure in order to change psychopaths into non-psychopaths. "Non-clinical" everyday psychological problems like feeling drowsy or anxious or having trouble focusing will be solved. AI will increase the amount of "extraordinary moments of revelation, creative inspiration, compassion, fulfillment, transcendence, love, beauty, or meditative peace" people experience. Economically, AI will make health interventions cheap and widely available, AI will increase crop yields develop technology like lab grown meat that increases food securty, AI will develop technology to mitigate climate change, AI will reduce inequality within countries, just as how the poor have the same mobile phones as the rich today; there is no such thing as a "luxury" mobile phone. Regarding "peace and governance", he advocates an "entente strategy", "in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources." This would prevent dictatorships from gaining the upper hand. If democracies have the upper hand globally, that helps with "the fight between democracy and autocracy within each country." "Democratic governments can use their superior AI to win the information war: they can counter influence and propaganda operations by autocracies and may even be able to create a globally free information environment by providing channels of information and AI services in a way that autocracies lack the technical ability to block or monitor." Finally he gets to "work and meaning", where he says, "Comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the '10%' expands to continue to employ almost everyone." "However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized. While that might sound crazy, the fact is that civilization has successfully navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism." Wish I could share his optimism that "civilization" will "successfully" "navigate" this "major economic shift". As those of you who've been hanging around me for any length of time know, I think the major effect of technology competing against humans in the labor market is decreased fertility, rather than an immediate drop in the employment rate, like everyone thinks because that seems more intuitive. He makes no mention of fertility in this context (he mentions it in the context of fertility treatments being something AI will advance), so I think it's not on his radar at all. He considers "opt-out" a "problem" whereby "Luddite movements" create a "dystopian underclass" by opt-ing out of the benifits of AI technology, yet it is the "opt-out" people, like the Amish, that today are able to maintain high fertility rates, and as such will make up the majority of the human population living on this planet in the future (something you can confirm for yourself by doing some math). The original essay is some 14,000 words and my commentary above is just 1,000 or so, so you should probably read the original and get his full original unfiltered point of view.

"Introducing the AI-Powered Electronic Component Classifier: The ultimate in intelligent component management." Possibly useful for those of you who work a lot with electronic components. "The Electronic Component Classifier is a project that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the identification and classification of electrical and electronic components." "Features: Component classification: Resistors, capacitors, LEDs, transistors, potentiometers, diodes, and integrated circuits are the seven classes into which electronic and electrical components can be simply categorised, using multilayer categorization. Further details: With only one click, you may find out more details about integrated Circuits, transistors, and capacitors. User-friendly design: The interface is simple to use and navigate, thanks to its clear headings, buttons, and text boxes."

Pyodide + JupyterLite. This is pretty impressive -- check out my screenshot https://earlywarning.news/files/2024-10-11-12-51-02-screenshot-jupyterlite.png Pyodide is Python running in your web browser -- more specifically, it is a port of CPython to WebAssembly, using Emscripten, which is a compiler toolchain based on LLVM (the compiler toolchain used by Apple languages and Rust) that compiles to WebAssembly. JupyterLite, in turn, enables Python Jupyter notebooks to run insider your browser. The "notebook" interface was pioneered by Mathematica in 1988 and is based on the the idea of creating a document that contains explanatory text, software code, and visualizations, all in the same document, in such a way that the computer actually runs the code and produces the visualizations. The document is divided into "cells" where each cell is text or code along with output produced by the code, such as a visualization. As you can see, I imported SymPy (symbolic math system for Python) and asked it to figure out a few integrals. Remember, the ** operator means exponentiation in Python, not ^ like you may be used to. The thing that really amazes me about this is, this is all running in the *browser* -- and not "in the browser" in the sense of, connecting to a server and running Python and Jupyter on the server and displaying the results in a browser -- no, once all the code is downloaded, everything you see is running in the *browser*. Python is running in the browser, SymPy is running in the browser, all the calculations to determine the integrals I asked for are done in the browser, and all the code for the "notebook" display and that generates the nice mathematical notation is running in the browser. Yes, I checked in Chrome developer tools and verified no network requests are being made -- everything really is running in the browser. Try it yourself.

"The Musa Alphabet" "Why would we want another alphabet, when we already have this one? There are three main reasons:" "1. because Musa is a better alphabet for English than the Roman alphabet (and a better alphabet for Hindi than Devanagari, and so on)," "2. because Musa is a universal alphabet that can be used to write all of the world's languages using the same letters for the same sounds, and" "3. because Musa is easier to learn and use than other alphabets." "The Musa Alphabet is a universal alphabet, designed to be shared by many languages. And it has only 10 basic shapes, so it's easy to learn and makes the Musa keyboard (below) much less complicated than, for instance, the one on your phone." "Those shapes pair up to form hundreds of letters, but each language will only use the ones it needs. For instance, English uses only about 50 of the letters. Each letter might be pronounced slightly differently for different languages - an English t sounds subtly different from a Hindi t - but we don't really care: each language just uses the best letter for each of its sounds." "The Musa Alphabet is featural: the shapes represent phonetic features. For example, nasal consonants like m n ng alll feature a triangular top, and retroflex consonants all feature a zigzag bottom. And it's also iconic: letters share features with their sounds. For example, rounded vowels are round, and closed vowels are closed. Sounds made in the front of the mouth face towards the front (left), and sharp sounds are sharp letters. As a result, letters that sound alike look alike." "As you can see at left, the Musa Alphabet can also be written in several different gaits: as an alphabet, as cursive script, as a syllabary or as characters. This helps Musa look familiar all over the world, and adapts it to the needs of each language. But all these gaits still use the same letters, so everybody can read it." It seems to me like this is a lot less likely to replace the Latin alphabet used for English (or any other writing system used for any other language -- especially in this age of unicode and good AI translators) than it is to replace IPA -- the international phonetic alphabet. The IPA is the alphabet for those pronunciations in dictionaries and Wikipedia and so fourth, and it's not intuitive at all.

"The 'Whisperverse': The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head." I wasn't going to share this but then the Harvard students' video (below) came out, and I felt like the two go together somehow, so here you go. "Within the next few years, an AI assistant will take up residence inside your head. It will do this by whispering guidance into your ears as you go about your daily routine, reminding you to pick up your dry cleaning as you walk down the street, helping you find your parked car in a stadium lot, and prompting you with the name of a coworker you pass in the hall. It may even coach you as you converse with friends and coworkers, giving you interesting things to say that make you seem smarter, funnier, and more charming than you are. These will feel like superpowers." This is making me think of that famous quote from Douglas Adams: "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." -- Douglas Adams I'm 54 and didn't get the "against the natural order of things" itch at age 35, but... I find myself slipping into that "against the natural order of things" feeling on this one. Do I really want an "AI assistant" taking up residence in my head? The idea doesn't actually seem appealing. "Most of these devices will be deployed as AI-powered glasses because they give the best vantage point for cameras to monitor our field of view, though camera-enabled earbuds will be available too. The other benefit of glasses is that they can be enhanced to display visual content, enabling the AI to provide silent assistance as text, images, and realistic immersive elements that are integrated spatially into our world." Oh, right, that's why Google Glass did so well -- oh wait, it failed. Maybe it was just ahead of its time? And this time the idea will work? "Whatever we call this technology, it is coming soon and will mediate all aspects of our lives, assisting us at work, at school, or even when grabbing a late-night snack in the privacy of our own kitchen." This is like how they told us Twitter was for telling the world what you ate for lunch, and it actually turned out to be for fighting about politics. Now they tell us we'll have AI assistants taking up residence in our heads for assisting us with our late-night snacks, but it'll actually turn out to be for fighting about politics. (Don't ask me how. But the purpose of most technology always ends up being fighting about politics.)

Mathiness is a term for calculations and formulas that may look and feel like rigorous mathematics but lack true analytical rigor or validity, and often disregard logical coherence or factual accuracy. A big clue you've encountered mathiness instead of math is when the units can't be canceled out or otherwise managed in the normal way units are handled in scientific equations. Q = [A x (O+S) / W] (Quality equals Appropriateness times the sum of Outcomes and Service divided by Waste) Product idea = Dollars / Revenue + ICE + Time-to-money ("ICE" == "Impact, Confidence, and Ease" score)

"A headset-based device that can be used to noninvasively assess a patient's stroke risk by monitoring changes in blood flow and volume while a participant holds their breath" has been developed. The innovation here is (believe it or not) not AI -- it's a laser and camera setup. "Stroke is caused by the blockage or rupture of an artery in the brain, which results in a reduction in blood flow. Starved of oxygen, the brain's cells die rapidly -- about 2 million every minute during a stroke." "The Caltech team developed a compact device that shines infrared laser light through the skull and into the brain in one location and then uses a special camera nearby to collect the light that bounces back after it is scattered by blood flowing within the blood vessels. The approach, called speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS), measures the decrease in the light's intensity from the spot where it enters the skull to the place where the bounced-back light is collected to determine the volume of blood in the brain's blood vessels; it also looks at the way light scatters and creates speckles in the camera's field of view. The speckles fluctuate in images depending on the rate of blood flow in the blood vessels. The faster the blood is flowing, the more rapidly the speckle field changes." "The researchers can use those measurements to calculate a ratio of the flow over the volume of blood streaming through the vessel to get an idea of that patient's stroke risk." "Holding your breath stresses your brain as it begins to notice that it is taking in too much carbon dioxide and not enough oxygen. It goes into what Mahler refers to as 'panic mode,' and starts to pump oxygen from the rest of the body to itself. This greatly increases blood flow in the brain. Once you stop holding your breath, oxygen levels return to baseline. While this happens in both people at low and high risk of stroke, the researchers found that there were differences between the groups in terms of how the blood moved through the vessels." "The SCOS technique allows the researchers to measure how much the blood vessels expand while the subject holds their breath and how much faster blood flows through the vessels in response. 'These reactive measurements are indicative of vessel stiffness,' Yang says. 'Our technology makes it possible to make these type of measurements noninvasively for the first time.'"

"LDraw[tm] is an open standard for LEGO CAD programs that allow the user to create virtual LEGO models and scenes. You can use it to document models you have physically built, create building instructions just like LEGO, render 3D photo realistic images of your virtual models and even make animations. The possibilities are endless. Unlike real LEGO bricks where you are limited by the number of parts and colors, in LDraw nothing is impossible." So there's a CAD program for LEGO. Before you build something with your LEGO bricks, model it in a CAD system first. "LDraw is a completely unofficial, community run free CAD system which represents official parts produced by the LEGO company."

Vinylon: North Korea's best invention. Wait, *North* Korea? North Korea invented something? Vinylon is a textile for clothing made from (drumroll please...) (spoilers!) (you'll never believe this...) limestone and coal. It's falling into disuse because it's itchy and hard to color. Regular clothing from China and Russia have been coming in.

"Drought has dried a major Amazon River tributary to its lowest level in over 122 years." "The level of the Negro River at the port of Manaus was at 12.66 meters on Friday, as compared with a normal level of about 21 meters. It is the lowest since measurements started 122 years ago. The previous record low level was recorded last year, but toward the end of October." "The Negro River's water level might drop even more in coming weeks based on forecasts for low rainfall in upstream regions, according to the geological service's predictions. Andre Martinelli, the agency's hydrology manager in Manaus, was quoted as saying the river was expected to continue receding until the end of the month." The AP tagged the article with "Climate change", but doesn't actually mention climate change.

This research paper, published May 5th of this year, says "People cannot distinguish GPT-4 from a human in a Turing Test". Can we declare May 5, 2024, as the date machines passed the Turing Test? I asked ChatGPT to tell me what all the implications are of AI passing the Turing Test. (Is it an irony I ask an AI that passed the Turning Test what the implications are of AI passing the Turing Test?) It said, for "Philosophical and ethical implications", that we'd have to redefine what it means to be "intelligent" and what "human intelligence" means, what it means to be "conscious", and the ability to simulate human conversation could lead to ethical dilemmas (deceptive automated customer service systems or deceptive medical or legal automated systems). For "Social implications", it said "Impact on employment", especially roles that involve interpersonal communication (e.g., customer service, therapy, teaching), "AI in media and entertainment" -- writing novels, creating art, or generating music -- and "Public trust and misinformation" such as deepfakes and fake identities. For "Legal and regulatory implications", it said "Legal accountability" -- who is accountable for an AI's actions -- "Regulation and oversight" especially in sectors where trust and human judgment are paramount (e.g., healthcare, legal advice, financial trading), and "Personhood and rights" -- does AI deserve rights? Under "Technological implications", "Advances in human-AI interaction" -- sophisticated, seamless, and natural interaction using language -- resulting in personal assistants, customer service, and virtual companions, "Enhanced autonomous systems" (self driving cars, really?), and "AI as creative agents", but not just content creation, also "emotional work" such as therapy and help with decision-making Under "Economic implications", "Market disruption", disruption of many industries, particularly those reliant on human communication and customer service, "Increased AI investment", well that's certainly happened, hasn't it, look how many billions OpenAI spends per year, but people will seek to capitalize on AI in specific sectors, e.g., healthcare, education, finance, and "AI-driven Productivity", particularly "in sectors where human-like interaction or decision-making is critical". Under "Cultural Implications", it listed "Changing social interactions", meaning developing social bonds with AI entities, and over-reliance on AI, and "Education and knowledge", transform education and enabling personalized learning. (Except the point of education isn't really learning, it's credentials, but that's a story for another time). Under "Security implications", it listed "Cybersecurity threats", especially social engineering attacks (e.g., phishing, fraud) enabled by AI's conversational abilities, and "Autonomous decision-making in security", in areas like national defense or policing, where bias could be a problem. And finally under "Scientific implications", it listed "Advances in cognitive science", how understanding and building AI that can pass the Turing Test might yield insights into human cognition and intelligence -- eh, not yet, not that I've seen anyway -- and "AI in research", with AI taking on hypothesis generation, data analysis, or even autonomous experimentation. I put the same question to Google's Gemini and (after the disclaimer that "The assertion that AI has *recently* passed the Turing Test is debatable") it... mostly listed the same items with slightly different categorization. The one new item it put in was "New benchmarks for AI", "Passing the Turing Test may necessitate the development of new, more comprehensive tests to evaluate AI's capabilities beyond just mimicking human conversation." That's a good point, Gemini. I put the same question to Claude and it listed the same results, as short points, inviting me to ask it elaborate more. Asked Meta.AI (from the company formerly known as Facebook), but it didn't seem to yield any new items. I asked Grok (from X, Elon Musk's company), and it gave me the same list without any categorization. I asked Perplexity and it mentioned "Multimodal AI development": "Success in language-based Turing Tests could accelerate progress in other areas of AI, such as visual reasoning and abstract problem-solving." Similarly under "Scientific and research implications", it listed "Shift in AI research focus: Passing the Turing Test might redirect AI research towards other aspects of intelligence beyond language processing." It also listed "Interdisciplinary collaboration": "There would likely be increased collaboration between AI researchers, cognitive scientists, and ethicists." Perplexity also added "New Business Models: Industries could emerge around creating, managing, and regulating human-like AI interactions". Other systems highlighted increased investment in existing "sectors". I also put the question to DeepSeek, the Chinese LLM, which gave a similar list but put legitimacy and ethical considerations first. It was also the first to mention "Data privacy": "Increased reliance on AI systems" "may raise concerns about data privacy and the collection of sensitive information." Finally, I put the question to ChatGLM, another Chinese LLM, which, under "Educational Implications", added "Pedagogical shifts: Educators may need to adapt their teaching methods to incorporate AI that can engage in dialogue with students." Also under "Security implications", it listed "Defense and military": "The use of AI in military applications could become more sophisticated, leading to new arms races."

The mystery of the possible Dyson spheres may be solved. First, a quick reminder on what Dyson spheres are: "In their need for more powerful energy sources, an advanced civilization might harness the entire output of a star. They wrap a star within a sphere to capture every last photon of stellar energy. Such an object would have a strange infrared or radio spectrum. An alien glow that is faint and unique. So astronomers have searched for Dyson spheres in the Milky Way, and have found some interesting candidates." Next the possible Dyson spheres: "One major search was known as Project Hephaistos, which used data from Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE to look at five million candidate objects. From this they found seven unusual objects. They appear to be M-type red dwarfs at first glance, but have spectra that don't resemble simple stars. This kind of star-like infrared object is exactly what you'd expect from a Dyson sphere. But of course extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that's where things get fuzzy." And how the mystery is solved (probably): "Almost immediately after the paper was published, other astronomers noted that the seven objects could also be hot Dust-Obscured Galaxies, or hotDOGs. These are quasars, so they appear star-like, but are obscured by such a tremendous amount of dust that they mostly emit in the infrared." So there you have it. Not Dyson spheres, hotDOGs. Click through if you want to get the paper with all the details of what spectral bands were analyzed and how they were interpreted.

"SLS is still a national disgrace". The blog post starts with, "Four years ago, unable to find a comprehensive summary of the ongoing abject failure known as the NASA SLS (Space Launch System), I wrote one. If you're unfamiliar with the topic, you should read it first." Uh, no, don't do that... unless you have a *lot* of time. This follow-up even still takes a lot of time. If you have a lot of time and are in the mood to feel depressed over NASA mission failures, you've come to the right place. "By continuing to humor this monstrosity, NASA has squandered its technical integrity and credibility." "NASA has spent $20b on SLS and related programs in the last four years, so let's tick off updates since my previous blog on this topic. $20b should buy a lot of progress, but if anything, this program is even further from any semblance of functionality than it was back then." Besides the commentary on the SLS failures, what struck me was the "Litany of other canceled and delayed projects": "Mars Perseverance, a supposedly cheaper built-to-print replica of the Curiosity Mars rover from 2012 then required extensive re-engineering costing $2.4b, the same as the previous rover." "Mars Sample Return's budget grew from $1.6b to $11b while the schedule slipped multiple years to the right." "VERITAS (mission to Venus) indefinitely postponed due to budget constraints." "HWO/HabEx/Luvoir and the new (bi)decadal survey. JWST, originally budgeted in 1999 for $1b to launch in 2007, ultimately launched in 2021 after spending $10b, so horrendously late and over budget that instead of re-imposing any kind of programmatic discipline or inventing a contract structure that doesn't reward Northrop Grumman for wasting money, NASA instead has decided to delay the next big space telescope (currently termed the Habitable Worlds Observatory) into the 2050s." "Dragonfly -- a super cool nuclear powered robotic octocopter to explore Titan, was originally budgeted at $850m and is now pushing well beyond flagship status at $3.35b." "VIPER -- a robotic moon rover at the south pole. Originally conceived as the Resource Prospector rover from NASA Ames, then canceled in 2018 after spending $100m on development, the concept returned as VIPER. Its budget grew from $250m to $450m and most recently to $685m, exceeding a critical cost cap leading to cancellation despite being a supposedly essential part of Project Artemis." "Psyche -- a mission to a metal asteroid. It missed its launch window due to a software issue discovered during final check out, growing its budget from $1b to $1.2b and pushing VERITAS into limbo." "NEO Surveyor. In 1998 Congress mandated that NASA map 90% of near Earth objects larger than 1 km -- asteroids capable of destroying our entire civilization. Now, 30 years later, the mission has been pushed back another two years despite an increased budget, now expected to top $1.2b." "Europa Clipper. Budget grew from $2b in 2013 to $5.2b." "Ingenuity -- developed for less than $25m, because JPL was spending its own money." "CASIS -- ISS National Lab. In an effort to defray costs and prolong the life of the station, NASA spent years building CASIS (an independent non-profit) and the ISS National Lab to find private customers." "Chandra X-ray observatory, already launched and operating in space, is being defunded with 10 years of operational life remaining, because of budgetary pressures." "Block 1B and the Exploration Upper Stage. Yet another configuration of SLS with a beefier upper stage, but only a marginal increase of launch capacity." "Artemis space suit provider Collins backs out." "Artemis space suit provider Axiom Space in trouble." "I haven't forgotten Gateway and Starliner, they get a full treatment below." Gateway, also known as Lunar Gateway, is a space station assembled in orbit around the Moon. "The entire damn lunar gateway only exists because SLS is too anaemic to launch the incredibly overweight Orion anywhere useful, so perhaps we should just drop the whole thing into the Atlantic ocean and be done with it." "In September 2014, NASA awarded Boeing $4.2b and SpaceX (somewhat grudgingly) $2.6b to develop capsules to transport people to and from the ISS." "SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule first flew in 2019 and in 2020 brought astronauts to and from the space station. As of September 2024, it's flown thirteen flights (three private) to the ISS, two other private flights including the highest ever Earth orbit and first private space walk, and carried 54 people in space." "In contrast, Boeing's Starliner only flew two astronauts to the ISS, after two previous launches with a series of failures and near misses. Despite being a much simpler design than Crew Dragon, Starliner has suffered from:" [list of stuff] "Conway's Law explains that product structure mirrors the organizational structure that built it. ..." Commentary: I have been wondering if there's something in the nature of human bureaucracies that causes them to gradually become moribund over time. It seems like this inflicts not just NASA, not even just the US government, but our society at large. It seems like, infrastructure-wise, things get done more and more slowly and at higher and higher cost, with no discernible explanation. The advancement of technology is supposed to make everything cheaper and faster, yet we see the opposite happening. At least in the tech industry there are nimble startups, but they seem to be outliers to the way our society is increasingly operating, and even they have a tendency to get acquired by established incumbents, for whom people have observed "enshittification" is a thing that happens enough to coin a word for it.