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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