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Category: robotics/AI

Futurists Don’t Have Crystal Balls: How to Hire a Futurist Keynote Speaker

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt assembled what was then the most credentialed group of forecasters in the world. He called it the Brain Trust.

He asked them to map the next 25 years.

They missed transistors. They missed atomic energy. They missed antibiotics. They missed faster-than-sound travel. They missed space probes. They missed World War II.

I have spent the last 16 years interviewing 300 of the most credentialed futurists alive. From Ray Kurzweil to Peter Diamandis to Marvin Minsky to Sir Martin Rees.

They agree on almost nothing.

That is my report from inside the room.

There is now a professional class that sells certainty about an inherently uncertain thing. Call it the crystal ball industry. The product is confidence. The buyer is the anxious executive. The medium is the keynote stage.

Continue reading “Futurists Don’t Have Crystal Balls: How to Hire a Futurist Keynote Speaker” | >

Lunar Outpost has big plans for the moon. The new Pegasus lunar rover is just the start

Lunar Outpost aims to develop a whole ecosystem of infrastructure on the moon, as well as the robots that will build it.

“We’re a lunar infrastructure company, and the infrastructure of the moon base won’t be built by astronauts alone,” the company’s Vice President of Strategy Michael Moreno told Space.com. “It’ll be an autonomous robotic workforce, and that’s our expertise.”

Space.com spoke with Moreno in April 2026 at the Space Foundation’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs about Lunar Outpost’s vision for autonomous technologies that will operate alongside astronauts to build the infrastructure needed for a sustained human presence on the moon.

New ‘AI scientists’ are improving—but reveal their fundamental limits

Many of the most exciting discoveries in science involve highly specialized knowledge and making connections between far-flung facts. Scientists must combine deep analysis with broad reasoning strategies.

As in many information-rich tasks, researchers are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) systems to speed up their work. AI tools may be able to support key steps such as generating ideas, reviewing existing work and analyzing data.

The latest systems use large language models (LLMs) to allow scientists to interact naturally and directly with the vast body of knowledge captured in words in the scientific literature.

A Colorado startup just raised $30 million to send a second rover to the Moon — and the real bet isn’t on exploration, it’s on becoming the construction crew that arrives before the astronauts do

Lunar Outpost has secured $30 million in Series B funding as the Colorado company tries to move from building individual lunar rovers to supplying the machines that could prepare the Moon for longer-term human use.

The money is meant to accelerate production of its robotics and mobility platforms. It also arrives as Lunar Outpost is promoting Pegasus, a smaller rover concept that Space.com reported the company hopes to deliver by the end of 2027 and launch to the Moon in 2028, on a timeline that broadly lines up with NASA’s current Artemis 4 schedule.

The real bet is not just exploration. It is that the Moon is becoming a worksite, and that whoever supplies the mobile robotic workforce may become more important than whoever sells the most dramatic single vehicle.

Desperate search for relief in a time of anxiety [a 16-year-old writes to Socrates]

Almost 12 years ago, a 16-year-old girl named Stefanie wrote to me the night before her senior year of high school. She could not sleep. She was terrified of the Singularity. And she wanted to know what she could actually do about it.

I still get these messages. More of them than ever, in fact. The names change. The fear does not. If anything, in the age of frontier AI, autonomous agents, and accelerating capability, the desperation in young people’s voices has only deepened.

What struck me when I went back to read my reply was how little I wanted to change. The advice I gave Stefanie has, mostly, stood the test of time. So rather than rewrite it, I am simply reposting it. A few of the things I told her then, and would tell any anxious young person today:

Be unreasonable. The reasonable person adapts to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself. All progress depends on unreasonable people. Shaw was right.

Think in decades, not weeks. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Persistence will be your best friend and your biggest enemy.

Prepare to fail. It took Edison thousands of attempts to make the light bulb. What matters is not how many times you fall, but how long you are willing to endure.

Continue reading “Desperate search for relief in a time of anxiety [a 16-year-old writes to Socrates]” | >

🚀 The Alien Civilizations That Chose Infinite Knowledge Instead of Space Travel

What if advanced alien civilizations achieved infinite knowledge not through space travel, but by harnessing the power of stars? This video explores how a type 2 civilization could repurpose a star into a giant computer, a concept tied to the kardashev scale and the theoretical dyson sphere. It’s a fascinating look into advanced future technology and the potential of artificial intelligence in the cosmos.

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