My recent article on social media has fostered good social media engagement, so I thought I would follow up with a discussion of the most urgent question regarding social media – should the US ban TikTok? The Biden administration signs into law legislation that would ban the social media app TikTok on January 19th (deliberately the day before Trump takes office) unless it is sold off to a company that is not, as it is believed, beholden to the Chinese government. The law states it must be divested from ByteDance, which is the Chinese parent company who owns TikTok. This raises a few questions – is this constitutional, are the reasons for it legitimate, how will it work, and will it work?

A federal appeals court ruled that the ban is constitutional and can take place, and that decision is now before the Supreme Court. We will know soon how they rule, but indicators are they are leaning towards allowing the law to take effect. Trump, who previously tried to ban TikTok himself, now supports allowing the app and his lawyers have argued that  he should be allowed to solve the issue. He apparently does not have any compelling legal argument for this. In any case, we will hear the Supreme Court’s decision soon.

If the ban is allowed to take place, how will it work? First, if you are not aware, TikTok is a short form video sharing app. I have been using it extensively over the past couple of years, along with most of the other popular platforms, to share skeptical videos and have had good engagement. Apparently TikTok is popular because it has a good algorithm that people like. TikTok is already banned on devices owned by Federal employees. The new ban will force app stores in the US to remove the TikTok app and now allow any further updates or support. Existing TikTok users will continue to be able to use their existing apps, but they will not be able to get updates so they will eventually become unusable.

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One of the things I have come to understand from following technology news for decades is that perhaps the most important breakthroughs, and often the least appreciated, are those in material science. We can get better at engineering and making stuff out of the materials we have, but new materials with superior properties change the game. They make new stuff possible and feasible. There are many futuristic technologies that are simply not possible, just waiting on the back burning for enough breakthroughs in material science to make them feasible. Recently, for example, I wrote about fusion reactors. Is the addition of high temperature superconducting material sufficient to get us over the finish line of commercial fusion, or are more material breakthroughs required?

One area where material properties are becoming a limiting factor is electronics, and specifically computer technology. As we make smaller and smaller computer chips, we are running into the limits of materials like copper to efficiently conduct electrons.  Further advance is therefore not just about better technology, but better materials. Also, the potential gain is not just about making computers smaller. It is also about making them more energy efficient by reducing losses to heat when processors work. Efficiency is arguably now a more important factor, as we are straining our energy grids with new data centers to run all those AI and cryptocurrency programs.

This is why a new study detailing a new nanoconducting material is actually more exciting than it might at first sound. Here is the editor’s summary:

Noncrystalline semimetal niobium phosphide has greater surface conductance as nanometer-scale films than the bulk material and could enable applications in nanoscale electronics. Khan et al. grew noncrystalline thin films of niobium phosphide—a material that is a topological semimetal as a crystalline material—as nanocrystals in an amorphous matrix. For films with 1.5-nanometer thickness, this material was more than twice as conductive as copper. —Phil Szuromi

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Recently Meta decided to end their fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram. The move has been both hailed and criticized. They are replacing the fact-checkers with an X-style “community notes”. Mark Zuckerberg summed up the move this way: “It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

That is the essential tradeoff- whether you think false positives are more of a problem or false negatives. Are you concerned more with enabling free speech or minimizing hate speech and misinformation? Obviously both are important, and an ideal platform would maximize both freedom and content quality. It is becoming increasingly apparent that it matters. The major social media platforms are not mere vanity projects, they are increasingly the main source of news and information, and foster ideological communities. They affect the functioning of our democracy.

Let’s at least be clear about the choice that “we” are making (meaning that Zuckerberg is making for us). Maximal freedom without even basic fact-checking will significantly increase the amount of misinformation and disinformation on these platforms, as well as hate-speech. Community notes is a mostly impotent method of dealing with this. Essentially this leads to crowd-sourcing our collective perception of reality.

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How close are we to having fusion reactors actually sending electric power to the grid? This is a huge and complicated question, and one with massive implications for our civilization. I think we are still at the point where we cannot count on fusion reactors coming online anytime soon, but progress has been steady and in some ways we are getting tatalizingly close.

One company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, claims it will have completed a fusion reactor capable of producing net energy by “the early 2030’s”. A working grid-scale fusion reactor within 10 years seems really optimistic, but there are reasons not to dismiss this claim entirely out of hand. After doing a deep dive my take is that the 2040’s or even 2050’s is a safer bet, but this may be the fusion design that crosses the finish line.

Let’s first give the background and reasons for optimism. I have written about fusion many times over the years. The basic idea is to fuse lighter elements into heavier elements, which is what fuels stars, in order to release excess energy. This process releases a lot of energy, much more than fission or any chemical process. In terms of just the physics, the best elements to fuse are one deuterium atom to one tritium atom, but deuterium to deuterium is also feasible. Other fusion elements are simply way outside our technological capability and so are not reasonable candidates.

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The latest flap over drone sightings in New Jersey and other states in the North East appears to be – essentially nothing. Or rather, it’s a classic example of a mass panic. There are reports of “unusual” drone activity, which prompts people to look for drones, which results in people seeing drones or drone-like objects and therefore reporting them, leading to more drone sightings. Lather, rinse, repeat. The news media happily gets involved to maximize the sensationalism of the non-event. Federal agencies eventually comment in a “nothing to see here” style that just fosters more speculation. UFO and other fringe groups confidently conclude that whatever is happening is just more evidence for whatever they already believed in.

I am not exempting myself from the cycle either. Skeptics are now part of the process, eventually explaining how the whole thing is a classic example of some phenomenon of human self-deception, failure of critical thinking skills, and just another sign of our dysfunctional media ecosystem. But I do think this is a healthy part of the media cycle. One of the roles that career skeptics play is to be the institutional memory for weird stuff like this. We can put such events rapidly into perspective because we have studied the history and likely been through numerous such events before.

Before I get to that bigger picture, here is a quick recap. In November there were sightings in New Jersey of “mysterious” drone activity. I don’t know exactly what made them mysterious, but it lead to numerous reportings of other drone sightings. Some of those sightings were close to a military base, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, and some were concerned of a security threat. Even without the UFO/UAP angle, there is concern about foreign powers using drones for spying or potentially as a military threat. This is perhaps enhanced by all the reporting of the major role that drones are playing in the Russian-Ukraine war. Some towns in Southern New Jersey have banned the use of drones temporarily, and the FAA has also restricted some use.

A month after the first sightings Federal officials have stated that the sightings that have been investigated have all turned out to be drones, planes mistaken for drones, and even stars mistaken for drones. None have turned out to be anything mysterious or nefarious. So the drones, it turns out, are mostly drones.

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Some narratives are simply ubiquitous in our culture (every culture has its universal narratives). Sometimes these narratives emerge out of shared values, like liberty and freedom. Sometimes they emerge out of foundational beliefs (the US still has a puritanical bent). And sometimes they are the product of decades of marketing. Marketing-based narratives deserve incredible scrutiny because they are crafted to alter the commercial decision-making of people in society, not for the benefit of society or the public, but for the benefit of an industry. For example, I have tried to expose the fallacy of the “natural is always good, and chemicals are always bad” narrative. Nature, actually, is quite indifferent to humanity, and everything is made of chemicals.

Another narrative that is based entirely on propaganda meant to favor one industry and demonize its competition is the notion that organic farming is better for health and better for the environment. Actually, there is no evidence of any nutritional or health advantage from consuming organic produce. Further – and most people I talk to find this claim shocking – organic farming is worse for the environment than conventional or even “factory” farming. Stick with me and I will explain why this is the case.

A recent article in the NYT by Michael Grunwald nicely summarizes what I have been saying for years. First let me explain why I think there is such a disconnect between reality and public perception. This gets back to the narrative idea – people tend to view especially complex situations through simplistic narratives that give them a sense of understanding. We all do this because the world is complicated and we have to break it down. There is nothing inherently wrong with this – we use schematic, categories, and diagrams to simplify complex reality and chunk it into digestible bits. But we have to understand this is what we are doing, and how this may distort our understanding of reality. There are also better and worse ways to do this.

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A recent BBC article highlights some of the risk of the new age of social media we have crafted for ourselves. The BBC investigated the number one ranked UK podcast, Diary of a CEO with host Steven Bartlett, for the accuracy of the medical claims recently made on the show. While the podcast started out as focusing on tips from successful businesspeople, it has recently turned toward unconventional medical opinions as this has boosted downloads.

“In an analysis of 15 health-related podcast episodes, BBC World Service found each contained an average of 14 harmful health claims that went against extensive scientific evidence.”

These includes showcasing an anti-vaccine crank, Dr. Malhotra, who claimed that the “Covid vaccine was a net negative for society”. Meanwhile the WHO estimates that the COVID vaccine saved 14 million lives worldwide. A Lancet study estimates that in the European region alone the vaccine saved 1.4 million lives. This number could have been greater were in not for the very type of antivaccine misinformation spread by Dr. Malhotra.

Another guest promoted the Keto diet as a treatment for cancer. Not only is there no evidence to support this claim, dietary restrictions while undergoing treatment for cancer can be very dangerous, and imperil the health of cancer patients.

This reminds me of the 2014 study that found that, “For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%.” Of course, evidence published in the BMJ does little to counter misinformation spread on extremely popular shows. The BBC article highlights the fact that in the UK podcasts are not covered by the media regulator Ofcom, which has standards of accuracy and fairness for legacy media.

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Why does news reporting of science and technology have to be so terrible at baseline? I know the answers to this question – lack of expertise, lack of a business model to support dedicated science news infrastructure, the desire for click-bait and sensationalism – but it is still frustrating that this is the case. Social media outlets do allow actual scientists and informed science journalists to set the record straight, but they are also competing with millions of pseudoscientific, ideological, and other outlets far worse than mainstream media. In any case, I’m going to complain about while I try to do my bit to set the record straight.

I wrote about nuclear diamond batteries in 2020. The concept is intriguing but the applications very limited, and cost likely prohibitive for most uses. The idea is that you take a bit of radioactive material and surround it with “diamond like carbon” which serves two purposes. It prevents leaking of radiation to the environment, and it capture the beta decay and converts it into a small amount of electricity. This is not really a battery (a storage of energy) but an energy cell that produces energy, but it would have some battery-like applications.

The first battery based on this concept, capturing the beta decay of a radioactive substance to generate electricity, was in 1913, made by physicist Henty Moseley. So year, despite the headlines about the “first of its kind” whatever, we have had nuclear batteries for over a hundred years. The concept of using diamond like carbon goes back to 2016, with the first prototype created in 2018.

So of course I was disappointed when the recent news reporting on another such prototype declares this is a “world first” without putting it into any context. It is reporting on a new prototype that does have a new feature, but they make it sound like this is the first nuclear battery, when it’s not even the first diamond nuclear battery.  The new prototype is a diamond nuclear battery using Carbon-14 and the beta decay source. They make diamond like carbon out of C-14 and surround it with diamond like carbon made from non-radioactive carbon. C-14 has a half life of 5,700 years, so they claim the battery lasts of over 5,000 years.

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As I predicted the controversy over whether or not we have achieved general AI will likely exist for a long time before there is a consensus that we have. The latest round of this controversy comes from Vahid Kazemi from OpenAI. He posted on X:

“In my opinion we have already achieved AGI and it’s even more clear with O1. We have not achieved “better than any human at any task” but what we have is “better than most humans at most tasks”. Some say LLMs only know how to follow a recipe. Firstly, no one can really explain what a trillion parameter deep neural net can learn. But even if you believe that, the whole scientific method can be summarized as a recipe: observe, hypothesize, and verify. Good scientists can produce better hypothesis based on their intuition, but that intuition itself was built by many trial and errors. There’s nothing that can’t be learned with examples.”

I will set aside the possibility that this is all for publicity of OpenAI’s newest O1 platform. Taken at face value – what is the claim being made here? I actually am not sure (part of the problem of short form venues like X). In order to say whether or not OpenAI O1 platform qualified as an artificial general intelligence (AGI) we need to operationally define what an AGI is. Right away, we get deep into the weeds, but here is a basic definition: “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This contrasts with narrow AI, which is limited to specific tasks.”

That may seem straightforward, but it is highly problematic for many reasons. Scientific American has a good discussion of the issues here. But at it’s core two features pop up regularly in various definitions of general AI – the AI has to have wide-ranging abilities, and it has to equal or surpass human level cognitive function. There is a discussion about whether or not how the AI achieves its ends matters or should matter. Does it matter if the AI is truly thinking or understanding? Does it matter if the AI is self-aware or sentient? Does the output have to represent true originality or creativity?

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What is Power-to-X (PtX)? It’s just a fancy marketing term for green hydrogen – using green energy, like wind, solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric, to make hydrogen from water. This process does not release any CO2, just oxygen, and when the hydrogen is burned back with that oxygen it creates only water as a byproduct. Essentially hydrogen is being used as an energy storage medium. This whole process does not create energy, it uses energy. The wind and solar etc. are what create the energy. The “X” refers to all the potential applications of hydrogen, from fuel to fertilizer. Part of the idea is that intermittent energy production can be tied to hydrogen production, so when there is excess energy available it can be used to make hydrogen.

A recent paper explores the question of why, despite all the hype surrounding PtX, there is little industry investment. Right now only 0.1% of the world’s hydrogen production is green. Most of the rest comes from fossil fuel (gray and brown hydrogen) and in many cases is actually worse than just burning the fossil fuel. Before I get into the paper, let’s review what hydrogen is currently used for. Hydrogen is essentially a high energy molecule and it can be used to drive a lot of reactions. It is mostly used in industry – making fertilizer, reducing the sulfur content of gas, producing industrial chemicals, and making biofuel. It can also be used for hydrogen fuel cells cars, which I think is a wasted application as BEVs are a better technology and any green hydrogen we do make has better uses. There are also emerging applications, like using hydrogen to refine iron ore, displacing the use of fossil fuels.

A cheap abundant source of green hydrogen would be a massive boost to multiple industries and would also be a key component to achieving net zero carbon emissions. So where is all the investment? This is the question the paper explores.

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