The Coming Age
Artificial intelligence, transhumanism, fusion power, and the technologies now barreling toward us faster than most people have noticed. This wing is where the deep past finally meets the century we are actually going to have to live through.
The Machines That Learned to Talk: Large Language Models
The machine taken apart rather than praised or dismissed: byte pair encoding and why the model does not read words, self-attention in one paragraph, the 2017 footnote saying the author order was random, the scaling-law paper stating that its own trends must flatten before loss reaches zero, the GPT-3 paper disclosing a contamination bug it could not afford to fix, the year parameter counts stopped being published, and an interpretability team reporting satisfying insight on about a quarter of their attempts. Plus four numbers this page refuses to print, and the reason for each.
Rise of the Robots: Humanoids and the Automated World
The industrial robot at sixty-five, taken apart. Devol's Programmed Article Transfer patent of 1954, the arm that unloaded a die-casting press in New Jersey in 1961, and 4,664,000 machines in operational use on 2024 data. Then the hard part: a review in Science says dexterous manipulation remains an open problem; the robot-hand demonstration that escaped the laboratory succeeded one time in five on a hard scramble and did not compute the solution; a carmaker's announcement of a successful humanoid test states in the same release that there are no such robots at its plant; and six studies of automation and employment span a factor of five. With our own file corrected on six points and the numbers it could not verify refused in the open.
The Singularity: The Day the Curve Goes Vertical
The intelligence explosion taken apart: Good's 1965 sentence and the reversal he never published, Vinge's thirty years, which ran out in 2023 inside a window of his own that runs to 2030, Kurzweil's two dates, and the step our own research file never states. Against them, the objections our file says do not exist, from Thorstad, Walsh, Modis, Marcus, Chollet and Dreyfus, plus a measurement showing the exponential was bought with exponentially more researchers. And the uploading half, where the compute a 2008 roadmap priced for a spiking-neuron emulation arrived in 2022 and emulation did not.
Reading the Mind: The Brain-Computer Interface
Implanted in January 2024, moving a cursor by thought within weeks, and about three months in, roughly 85 percent of the threads had pulled loose. One trial, both facts.
The Star in a Bottle: The Race to Ignite Fusion
A laser shot in December 2022 got more energy out of the fuel than the light put in. The first true ignition, the 300-megajoule caveat, and the machines still being built.
The Multiplanetary Leap: Humanity Leaves the Cradle
Perseverance, Europa Clipper, Dragonfly, JWST: the missions are real and dated. Mars in the 2030s to 2040s is NASA's and SpaceX's stated goal, not a fact in evidence.
The Alignment Problem: Building a Mind We Cannot Outthink
Can a system that out-reasons its makers be built to want what they want? The control problem, the evidence for and against alarm, and where the field genuinely splits.
The Quantum Computer: Computing With the Impossible
Sycamore, Jiuzhang, Condor, Willow: the milestones are real and dated. The machine that beats a classical computer at something anybody needed is not here yet.