Forecaster reacts: METR's bombshell paper about AI acceleration

https://peterwildeford.substack.com/p/forecaster-reacts-metrs-bombshell

#HackerNews #Forecaster #AI #METR #acceleration #bombshell

"The future won’t wait for your zip code to catch up! " - Futurist Jim Carroll

Yesterday I noted that the future won't slow down to wait for you to make a decision.

It also has little respect for those who try to avoid the reality that they are in a global economy.

When you step back and look around the world, something becomes crystal clear: The future is not unfolding in one place. It’s emerging everywhere—in labs in Ireland, factories in Vietnam, logistics hubs in the UAE, AI startups in Seoul, and solar grids in Morocco.

But while this global acceleration is happening, too many leaders and organizations are still thinking small. They’re stuck in a local mindset—tethered to domestic market opportunities, legacy business models, obsolete products or services, or outdated assumptions about where real progress comes from.

Here’s the reality: you can’t lead in tomorrow’s economy by thinking inside yesterday’s borders. I've said it before - the future doesn’t care about your region, your history, or your comfort zone. It flows to where the momentum lives. And that momentum is increasingly global.

- AI isn't just a Silicon Valley story—it's being industrialized in China, scaled in Europe, and accelerated in the United Arab Emirates

- the energy transition isn’t a North American trend —it’s becoming the default infrastructure in Scandinavia and the Middle East

- electric vehicles aren't some radical idea with a narrow future - it's becoming the dominant platform in China, Finland, and elsewhere
- advanced manufacturing isn't stuck in Detroit—it's transforming supply chains in Vietnam, Poland, and Mexico.

Meanwhile, companies that remain locally fixated are finding themselves cut off from opportunity—missing emerging markets, lagging on innovation, and getting blindsided by competitors they never saw coming. The world used to watch what happened in one or two countries to know where things were going. Now? You have to watch everywhere - because innovation doesn’t care about geography.

This reality is accelerating in the current economic and political volatility that defies 2025 - such that while one region tries to restore past glories, the rest of the world has decided to continue moving forward. Watch the latter - not the former - to figure out where tomorrow is now unfolding. 

Here’s what that means for your strategy:

- innovation is borderless.
- local thinking limits opportunity.
- a global mindset = competitive advantage.
- the future flows to momentum, not geography.

So ask yourself: Are you making decisions based on where the world once was? Or are you aligning with where it’s already going?

Because the future isn’t local anymore.

It’s global.

And it’s moving fast.

**#Global** **#Innovation** **#Future** **#Geography** **#Momentum** **#Opportunity** **#Mindset** **#Competition** **#Acceleration**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2025/04/decoding-tomorrow-your-daily-future-inspiration-the-future-wont-wait-for-your-zip-code-to-catch-up/

The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI

I once imagined an academic career involved a lofty devotion to knowledge at a distance from the world. This is what Bourdieu (2000: 1) described as “the free time, freedom from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. Or as the philosopher Richard Rorty once put it to a friend asking him about whether he was happy in this new role, “Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it” (Gross 2003).

Even if this was true of a tenured professor at an Ivy League university in 1980s America, it certainly isn’t true now for the vast majority of academics. It took me a while to come to terms with that fact, but what was constant in this process was the enjoyment of writing. It was precisely because of that enjoyment, the impulse ‘to read books and report what I thought about them’, that the reality of academic work felt so disappointing to me. It’s something I’ve long since made my peace with, but the fact it was a compromise I came to has left the enjoyment of writing at the heart of my professional self-conception: the space that can be found for it and the obstacles which stand in its way.

Unfortunately those obstacles are numerous. There are the new things which academics are expected to do, such as make research relevant to wider society and the mechanisms, such as social media, through which we are expected to do it. There is the growth in the work to be done as student numbers increase and our interactions with them increasingly take place through multiple channels. There are the spiralling expectations of what constitutes being productive, driven in part by a job market which is brutally competitive in some systems.

I take as background the widespread sense that there is a deep somatic crisis in higher education, which has structural roots (Burrows 2012). As Vostal (2016) demonstrates, it would be too simple to say the problem is one of speeding up, to which the solution would be to slow down. The evidence suggests that our relationship to speed is more ambivalent than this. I certainly recognize the enjoyment which can be realized through rushing under the right circumstances, such as the intense focus which can come with an imminent deadline or the intellectual sociability generated through an intensive workshop.

There is also a politics to speed too often overlooked by advocates of ideas like the ‘slow professor’ (Berg 2022). In my experience, the choice for a professor to slow down often relies on post docs who are willing to pick up the slack for them. But there is nonetheless a sense of rushing, of never having quite enough time for all the things we are expected to do, common within the contemporary academy (Carrigan 2016).

Obviously this is an experience which is far from confined to academics and the university, reflecting a broader sense of being harried in contemporary societies (Rosa 2014). It is easy for the time and space in which we might enjoy writing to find itself squeezed on all sides by the urgent items we are struggling to clear from our to-do list. It is easy to conclude from this experience that writing necessarily has to be a slow process, in which an excess of time and space provide the conditions in which creative writing is possible.

This is fundamentally mistaken, with the sense that writing requires an abundance of time actually being a potent obstacle to a regular and rewarding writing routine. But it is conversely difficult to immerse yourself in writing if you feel harried, assailed on all sides by unmet expectations and impending deadlines. There is a risk this leads to a sense of enjoying writing being a luxury, as opposed to a practical requirement of the job which must be dispensed with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you frame writing in these terms then the instrumental use of AI becomes an inevitability. Why wouldn’t you rely on these systems to do your writing for you if that writing is an unwelcome obligation which weighs heavily on your working life? This gets to the heart of my concern. There is a pessimistic and self-defeating mood which too often accompanies academic writing. This is a problem in its own terms because it makes what should be a source of joy for academics into a gruelling chore. But with the advent of a technology which can do this writing for us, this mood goes from being individually self-defeating to potentially catastrophic for the knowledge system.

As Sword (2023: loc 220) points out, “writing signals hard work and puritanical virtue, while pleasure drips with hedonistic vice”. The tendency for academics to relate to writing as a serious matter, serving a lofty purpose beyond the trivial matters of feeling, rather than something which pleasure can be taken in makes it difficult to have these conversations. I share Sword’s (2023: loc 226) project “to recuperate pleasure as a legitimate, indeed crucial, writing-related emotion”. Indeed, such a recuperation is imperative, individually and collectively, because of the impact which AI is already starting to exercise over why and how we write.

If you’re taking joy in an activity, why would you outsource it? I struggle to see a difference in this sense between relying on machine writing and seeking an assistant who can work on your behalf. There might be contingent challenges which mean you need support at a particular point in time, as well as a need to prioritize certain tasks over others. In this sense I wouldn’t suggest the impulse to outsource a task necessarily means you don’t take joy in it, but if you persistently seek external support for a type of task or a project composed of multiple tasks, this suggests the potential for exploring your motivation.

There are parts of my administrative work which I’ve found myself tempted to rely on machine writing for. I’ve come to realize this is a red flag which indicates there’s a part of my portfolio of work I’m struggling with in some way or coming to be alienated from. The impulse to outsource it to a machine, to just get it done immediately rather than expanding any more energy on it, will become a mainstream one within higher education over the coming years. The ubiquity of this software, particularly as it comes to be embedded in the existing collaboration platforms which universities provide for their staff, means it will be ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’.

Meeting this temptation reflexively requires that we understand our work, the tasks that compose it, and how we tend to experience them. Do we persistently avoid or procrastinate from particular activities? What do we choose to do instead when we’re being avoidant? These questions help us identify which aspects of our academic writing might be at risk of being outsourced to AI, not because the technology offers genuine improvements, but because we’ve lost touch with the joy those activities might provide.

#academicWriting #acceleratedAcademy #acceleration #productivity #sociologyOfHigherEducation #time #universities

SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .April 9th, 2025

https://bit.ly/stc040925

#virus #vector-based #T-cell #respiratory #moisture #temperature #instability #latent-heat #transient #temporal #singularities #acceleration #fuel-cell #PEM #fincantieri #decarbonization #1420MHz #redshift #88-108MHz #CubeSats

New #TornadoVM v1.1.0 release!

👉 Improved profiling and logging.
👉 New memory and buffer management features to persist and reuse data.
👉 Support for more atomic operations.

Work done under #horizoneurope and UK Research and Innovation funded projects: AERO Project, TANGO EU, P2CODE project, ENCRYPT Project!

hanks to all our contributors! 👏

#opensource #Java for #AI #hardware #acceleration

Hartmut Rosa : Le paradoxe de la société hyperconnectée mais incompréhensible

📊 Nouveau billet : "Hartmut Rosa : Le paradoxe de la société hyperconnectée" Découvrez comment Rosa analyse le paradoxe moderne : Accélération sociale 🕒 Désynchronisation 🌐 Aliénation 🚫 Disponibilité du monde vs illisibilité 🌎 Repenser notre rapport au temps et au monde ! #HartmutRosa #Accélération #SociétéIncompréhensible Hartmut Rosa, philosophe allemand, met en lumière un paradoxe…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2025/03/17/hartmut-rosa-le-paradoxe-de-la-societe-hyperconnectee-mais-incomprehensible/

Nature–society relations in disaster governance frameworks

"This paper studies how the relations between nature and society are constructed in disaster governance frameworks. Dominant disaster governance frameworks present nature and society as separate realms, and the organisation of society is increasingly seen as the key cause of hazards and disasters. Disaster impacts are similarly framed around adverse societal consequences, while other-than-human nature is merely the background across which disasters unfold, as property lost, or a means of disaster governance. Although the centrality of human impacts is troubled when biodiversity or a disaster flagship species is threatened, neither situation challenges the nature–society dualism embedded in dominant disaster governance frameworks. The attention and resources of disaster governance target the societal side of nature–society dualism. This study finds, though, that in peripheries characterised by remoteness from centres of power, a sparse human population, and large spaces of other-than-human nature, the vulnerabilities facing humans and other-than-human nature risk being ungoverned."
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Meriläinen, E. (2025). Nature–society relations in disaster governance frameworks. Disasters, 49(2), e12678. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/disa.12678
#disasters #NaturalDisasters #governance #property #tourism #NSW #remoteness #FossilFuels #ClimateBreakdown #acceleration #climate #Bushfires #floods #cyclone #FirstResponders #trauma #nature #biodiversity #forests #NSWLogging #roads #koalas #deforestation #OtherThanHumanNature #NatureSocietyDualism #peripheries #vulnerability