The idea that robots will be the best surgeons on earth anytime soon is absurd, and I challenged him about it on X:

Why did I bother to offer such a bet? Here are three reasons.

• Elon’s timeline predictions are notoriously, and to my mind, obviously, bad, yet all too often reported as gospel. I have used bets as a way to get people to take them less seriously. The last time I offered him a million dollar bet (offer raised to $10M by Damion Hankejh) was back in April 2024, after Musk claimed that AI would exceed the intelligence of all people by the end of 2025. That of course didn’t come to pass. Indeed, in his recent interview with The Economist Musk himself quietly backpedaled to 2031, shades of his regular re-predictions around autonomous vehicles. The surgery prediction, too, will surely be repackaged with a new date, at a later date. Elon Musk is, like a lot of LLMs, frequently wrong and never in doubt. Enough already.

• Regarding robotic surgery timelines, Musk is so deeply wrong it’s hard to fathom. I asked esteemed roboticist Rodney Brooks what he thought of Elon Musk’s claim, and he fired back with a firm opinion five minutes later, describing Musk’s claim as “Completely crazy talk”, elaborating as follows:

  There are no lab demonstration remotely close to doing surgery on a living test animal, even with a set of arms solidly affixed to the ground rather than being on top of a two legged balancing platform. Just the problem of seeing what is happening in the way a surgeon does is not even lab demonstrated. What we will see over time is more non-invasive surgeries and they will be a team of AI and geometry based sensing along with expert surgeons over the next few years, and only then will the stuff be good enough to use on pigs, and only many more years of refinement will we get to FDA (or whichever agency) that lets these things be tried on humans. See my weekend blog post at rodneybrooks.com/blog on how everyone gets time scales wrong.

  When I asked Brooks about the state of the art in existing robotic surgery trials, he added this

  All of them still have a human in the loop. Mako surgical from Stryker (I was the first VC who invested in them around 2000) for knee replacement, is closest, as it is not soft tissue but bones that can be accurately imaged with xrays during the surgery, and it is largely geometry, but then a whole lot of stuff the human worries about and supervises so that it doesn’t accidentally damage blood vessels or nerves.

  There is just no way all this gets sorted out by the end of the decade. What Musk told Diamandis is just not happening.

• Just as Hinton’s famous (and famously wrong) 2016 pronouncement about no longer needing to train radiologists probably scared away potential radiologists, Musk risks scaring away potential surgeons. That’s really bad, especially that his premise is probably off by a least a decade in the best case and quite possibly more.

It would be nice if these Tech CEOs were more accountable for what they said. That’s the real reason I offer these bets. And the real reason the CEOs never take them.

P.S. Jason Calacanis of the All-In podcast has expressed some interest in turning this debate into a bet on Polymarket. I will report back if he commits. For criteria I pointed a list to ten difficult surgeries as a possible metric; no word back thus far.

“On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran. By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war. Three military officials said that one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a ceasefire in the war in April.” — New York Times

Modern warfare is full of consequences that continue to exist even after the president says they do not. Fortunately, the Pentagon has begun replacing outdated military doctrine with a simpler system that should feel familiar to anyone who has ever lost an argument near a swing set.

NUH-UH
Nuh-Uh is used when journalists, intelligence agencies, satellite images, eyewitnesses, or the Pentagon’s own website claim something happened. Civilian deaths? Nuh-uh. School bombed? Nuh-uh. The official government website said eighteen yesterday, and now it’s substantially fewer? Websites say lots of things. Should journalists continue asking questions, officials may proceed directly to I Know You Are, but What Am I?

NOT IT
Not It determines which country must accept responsibility for a military disaster. The last country to touch the war is responsible for the entire war, unless the United States says “not it” first while touching the side of its nose. An enemy nation may attempt to invoke Not It, but it does not count because we already called it and they were not in the room.

THEY STARTED IT
This permits any military response as long as the other country did something first. Should evidence show that the United States acted first, officials may move backward through history until they find something the enemy did earlier. This could be an attack, a threat, a mean look, or something Iran did in the 1970s. Once located, that action becomes the new beginning of the conflict.

DO-OVER
Sometimes an invasion does not produce the promised outcome. The government may fail to eliminate a weapons program, remove a hostile regime, establish democracy, or remember why the operation began twenty years ago. This is the beauty of the Do-Over. It permits the military to try the same strategy again with a different operation name. The previous attempt does not count because we were not ready.

I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I?
This powerful counterintelligence technique neutralizes accusations by immediately returning them to the accuser.

You violated the ceasefire.

No, you violated the ceasefire.

You are concealing the death toll.

No, you are concealing the death toll.

You entered a war without congressional authorization.

Maybe Congress entered a war without our authorization. Ever think about that, genius?

If this fails, the Pentagon may upgrade to I’m Rubber, You’re Glue.

I’M RUBBER, YOU’RE GLUE
This is an advanced missile-defense system in which all criticism bounces off the United States and sticks to the enemy. Accusations involving civilian casualties, illegal strikes, escalation, or war crimes are automatically redirected toward the enemy. No evidence is required because Rubber does not have to explain itself to Glue. Any criticism that somehow penetrates Rubber may still be neutralized with Nuh-Uh.

NO FAIR
No Fair activates whenever the enemy retaliates in a manner that negatively influences approval numbers back home. American strikes are strategic, proportionate, and necessary. Enemy strikes are reckless escalations proving they cannot be trusted to respond calmly to American strikes. Officials must appear genuinely surprised each time this happens and ask why the bad guy always makes everything into such a big deal.

BASE
Senior leaders may avoid accountability by having at least one hand or foot touching a secure military installation and loudly declaring “base.” While on base, they cannot be tagged by Congress, international law, casualty statistics, or Congressional committees.

TIME OUT
When casualty numbers become too large, Congress gets too curious, or the enemy starts hitting back, the president may yell “time out.” Everyone must stop counting costs and casualties immediately. Any deaths after that belong to the next war, which means No Backsies, which means we win.

The Batman Effect: people in an experiment acted more altruisticly when the caped crusader was present.

I appreciate the plain speech of Science magazine’s Derek Lowe in his recent piece, The Assault On Science Funding Continues.

When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragaph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.

That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try.

Yep. He’s the mob boss president — everything is about favors, taking his cut, deals, tough guy-ness, bending the world to his will, power, and white male supremacy.

Tags: Derek Lowe · Donald Trump · politics · science

There is persuasive evidence that the smoke from climate change-driven Canadian wildfires isn't being pushed into America by prevailing winds. It's entirely because of how much our current government sucks.

On Friday, both Donald Trump and Republican legislators made threats against Canada over how their fires are affecting air quality across a wide area of the United States. Because—and this is a great surprise to Republicans who have long argued to the contrary—there's only one atmosphere, and we all have to share it.

The stupidity. It really does burn.

First, Trump decried our northern neighbor's refusal to properly groom the 3.7 million square kilometers of boreal forests that covers 40% of the Canadian landmass. And he's going to charge them for it.

Yeah, Canadians, get out those rakes. Trump owns golf courses, so he knows that you can keep every tree in the taiga perfectly trimmed if only you practice "basic Forest Management." Trump, as many people have said, understands grooming.

But, is simply putting a tree tax on Canada sufficient? Nay, say GOP legislators. They have interrupted their busy schedule of pretending Mitch McConnell is breathing on his own to introduce the CANADA FIRE Act.

"To impose sanctions with respect to the Government of Canada in response to transboundary wildfire smoke affecting the United States, and for other purposes. … The Government of Canada has failed to take sufficient and timely measures to prevent, mitigate, or respond to repeated transboundary wildfire-smoke events affecting the United States."

Exactly how Canada is to turn back smoke at the border goes unstated, but there is a good deal of chest thumping about making them get out there and do some unspecified hard work. The bill provides for seizing the property of any Canadian official involved in resource management or policy making, along with that of their family members, should Trump declare a "transboundary smoke emergency." It also allows Trump to block all Canadian imports, close the border, cancel all Canadian vias, and declare the Canadian ambassador and other diplomatic personell to be “persona non grata.”

In other words: Trump gets to declare war on Canada if they let their stinky smoke cross our sacred border. Maybe we should start planning now for control of the St. Lawrence seaway.

As of Friday, over 850 wildfires were burning across Canada. As the Detroit Free Press reports, wildfire summers are the "new normal," and we can expect them to keep recurring.

The last three fire seasons have been among the 10 worst on record in Canada, according to the Canadian Climate Institute, the nation's leading independent, nonprofit climate change policy research organization. Research shows accelerating climate change, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, makes wildfires bigger, hotter and more destructive — and Canada is warming twice as fast as the global average, according to a 2019 Canadian government report. Canada's area burned in wildfires has quadrupled since the 1970s.

The incidence of wildfire is increasing, not because Canada suddenly slacked off on sweeping up pine needles, as Trump seems to believe, but because their forests are getting hotter and drier. And it's getting worse.

The sanctions that he is applying, and the laws that Republicans are trying to pass, are targeting the effect of something whose cause Trump has celebrated.

That smoke blanketing the Midwest? That smoke is Trump using war time powers just one month ago to protect the most polluting power source on the planet.

"As a result of the $700m investment that I'm announcing today, we will protect 14 coal plants and 42 coal mines, a tremendous number, and build two new coal plants and one massive new export terminal," Trump said.

That smoke is Trump sending Duke Energy $179 million to stop building a wind farm before it could go into operation. And then spending $765 million to kill a whole group of offshore wind projects already in the works.

“Today marks a significant step in advancing President Trump’s energy agenda and lowering energy prices for Americans,” said Department of Justice Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward. “By ending these offshore wind leases and pivoting investment toward dependable natural gas infrastructure in multiple states, Invenergy is helping revitalize American energy and national security."

That smoke is Trump cancelling the nation's largest solar power project along with $83 billion of clean energy spending that had already been approved.

The analysis found that 223 manufacturing and clean energy projects representing $82.9 billion in investment and 111,765 jobs have stalled or been cancelled during President Donald Trump's second term.

That smoke is Trump ending support for electric vehicles at a time when they are poised to dominate sales and rolling back fuel efficiency standards to increase burning of oil.

"We're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdensome, horrible, actually, CAFE standards that impose expensive restrictions," Trump said, referring to the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules, often called CAFE standards. "And all sorts of problems, all sorts of problems for automakers."

That smoke is "drill, baby, drill."

That smoke is "wind kills dolphins."

That smoke is "clean, beautiful coal."

That smoke is every Republican who has, for over four decades, denied the existence of human-caused climate change while encouraging its acceleration. And, unfortunately, it won't be going away soon as the Canadian Climate Institute makes clear.

Thanks to climate change:

• Snow cover is lower.
• Rainfall is more erratic.
• Forests are drier.
• Summers are hotter.
• Lightning is more frequent.
• Fires start sooner.
• Fires burn hotter.
• Fires spread faster.
• Fires burn more area.
• "Zombie fires" smolder through the winter. ready to start the process again.

All of that is happening because human beings keep burning fossil fuels. Because of stupidity and greed.

It is perfectly in our grasp to have clean, abundant, cheap energy. Republicans are doing everything possible to make sure American energy is dirty, scarce, and expensive. Because no one can monopolize sunshine.

I'm sorry, Canada, that you have to share our air.

Marvin Gaye’s isolated vocals on I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The man has pipes.

[This is a vintage post originally from Sep 2014.]

Tags: Marvin Gaye · music · video