Australian (Nvidia-Backed) Data Center Builder Firmus Raises $505 Million

 From Bloomberg, April 6:

Data center builder Firmus Technologies Pty raised $505 million in an investment round led by Coatue Management LLC, part of a global push to finance artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The deal values the Australian startup at $5.5 billion, Firmus said Monday. Nvidia Corp., the top maker of AI accelerator chips, also participated in the round.

The cash will go toward rapidly deploying AI hardware based on forthcoming Nvidia computer technology in the Asia-Pacific region. Firmus, which has data center projects in Australia and Singapore, has raised $1.35 billion in the last six months, including this latest transaction.

Firmus is leading an effort called Southgate, a plan to build data center capacity in Australia that runs on renewable energy, starting with a site in Tasmania. That facility will house computers based on 36,000 Nvidia accelerator chips after its first two rounds of technology deployments. The powerful processors help develop and run AI models by bombarding them with data.

Nvidia, often in partnership with venture capital investors, has invested billions of dollars in AI companies. It’s aiming to help cultivate an industry that has already fueled explosive sales growth and turned Nvidia into the world’s most valuable business.

As with the Firmus funding, Nvidia is backing companies that also buy its products. Some investors have expressed concern about the circular nature of these deals, something Nvidia has pushed back on.

Read More: A Guide to the Circular Deals Underpinning the AI Boom

Coatue, which has more than $70 billion in assets under management, has made its own push into AI technology. The New York-based investment firm has backed computing infrastructure as well as service providers like OpenAI and Anthropic PBC....

....MORE (sovereign AI) 

If interested see also:

December 2023 - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI to See ‘Major Second Wave (NVDA)

AI to See ‘Major Second Wave,’ NVIDIA CEO Says in Fireside Chat With iliad Group Exec
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang says sovereign AI a growing need for countries to reflect unique cultural, linguistic, industrial characteristics
European startups will get a massive boost from a new generation of AI infrastructure, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Friday in a fireside chat with iliad Group Deputy CEO Aude Durand — and it’s coming just in time.

February 2024 - "Nvidia chief sees rise of ‘sovereign AI’ infrastructure across nations, driving demand for company’s advanced chips"

This is the sort of thing we were referring to in January 20's "Advanced Micro Devices to Build 2 New Supercomputers in Germany (AMD)": "Taking a page out of Nvidia's playbook."

Nvidia wants every language to have its own large language model. And they want every country to have an Nvidia powered supercomputer (or five) to train and run the LLM on....

....Bi-lingual Canada is good but multi-lingual India is Mr. Huang's dream country.

PM Modi's people should ask for two free supercomputers upfront as part of a five 'puter order.

And side dishes. Maybe a billion dollars worth of gaming chips.

March 2024 - Here's Nvidia's "Sovereign AI" Pitch (NVDA)

***** 

....This is terrible. I now have Jensen Huang speaking in Dr. Martin Luther King's cadences as he repurposes the penultimate paragraph of "I have a Dream":

Let AI ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let AI ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let AI ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let AI ring. 

I may have to go lie down.

March 6

...Every, town, every village, every hamlet, every wide spot in the road, should have their own (NVDA-powered) supercomputer.

June 16, 2024
France's "Mistral AI warns of lack of data centres and training capacity in Europe" 

October 4, 2024
"Parlez-vous AI? Francophone scholars warn against English language dominating AI" 

November 6, 2024
Singapore: "Chinese Group Accused of Hacking Singtel in Telecom Attacks"

....Our last couple mentions of Singtel were in reference to Nvidia's roll-out of the Blackwell chip for their sovereign AI program:

December 2024 - Canada commits $1.4B to sovereign compute infrastructure as it joins the AI arms race

January 2025 - "Jensen Huang Wants to Make AI the New World Infrastructure" (NVDA)

This sovereign AI you speak of, I have heard of it.  

I have heard wondrous tales of immense wealth,

Of amazing deeds performed as if by magic.
Yes I have heard of all of this...*

And many more. 

Memory: "Samsung flags eightfold jump in Q1 profit as AI chip demand drives up prices"

From Reuters, April 7:

• Samsung estimates 57.2 trillion won in Q1 operating profit vs 6.7 trillion won year earlier
• Analysts estimate 40.6 trillion won in Q1 operating profit
• Chipmakers struggle to keep ​up with demand from AI data centres

SEOUL, April 7 (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), on Tuesday projected a record-high first-quarter profit, up more than eightfold from a year earlier and well above expectations as booming demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure ​caused supply bottlenecks and drove chip prices higher.

The world's largest memory chipmaker ​estimated an operating profit of 57.2 trillion won ($37.92 billion) for the ⁠January to March period, compared with an LSEG SmartEstimate of 40.6 trillion ​won and a more than eight-fold jump from 6.69 trillion won a year earlier. 

The ​preliminary results nearly triple Samsung's previous record quarterly operating profit of 20 trillion won, reached in the fourth quarter last year....

....MUCH MORE 

If interested see also: 

January 3 - "AI data centers are swallowing the world's memory and storage supply, setting the stage for a pricing apocalypse that could last a decade" 

January 5 - "Memory chipmakers rise as global supply shortage whets investor appetite"

January 7 -  Memory: "Samsung bulls bet record earnings will extend US$350b rally" (005930:Korea)

January 12 - Chips: "While you pay through the nose for memory, Samsung expects to triple its profits in Q4"

January 28 - Memory: Samsung’s profit triples, beating estimates...

January 30 - Memory: "Do It Now: Industry Insiders Urge Consumers To Front-Run PC, TV, Smartphone Purchases As 'Memory Crunch' Will Intensify"

February 24 - Chips: "Samsung, SK Hynix Drive Korea Benchmark’s Breakthrough Past 6000"

February 27 - Inflation: "Smartphone market set for biggest-ever decline in 2026 on memory price surge, IDC says"

March 2 - Memory: "The inflation spark that could become a deflation shock?" 

March 2 - “'Entry-Level PC Segment Will Disappear by 2028,' Says Gartner, as Soaring Memory Costs Start to Cripple Manufacturers"

March 3 - Thanks for the Memories: "South Korea’s Kospi plunges 12% amid broader declines in Asia markets as Iran conflict rages" 
The index, which has been driven by the memory chip makers, Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. et al., up over 145% from March 2025 to the February 25, 2026 peak is now down 10% on the day, March 4th.

March 18 - Memory: Shortage Could Last Five Years, It's The Wafers

"Economists Once Dismissed the A.I. Job Threat, but Not Anymore"

From the New York Times, April 3:

Artificial intelligence hasn’t disrupted the labor market, economists say, but they are increasingly convinced that it will — and that policymakers are unprepared. 

Among tech evangelists in Silicon Valley, it has become conventional wisdom that artificial intelligence will rapidly reshape the labor market, for better or worse. Economists, however, have often discussed A.I.’s impact with a skepticism bordering on dismissiveness.

Rising unemployment among young college graduates? The result of high interest rates and macroeconomic uncertainty. Dire predictions of widespread job losses? A failure to understand the lessons of past technological revolutions. Even the layoffs that companies themselves blamed on artificial intelligence were often chalked up to “A.I.-washing” from executives looking for something to blame other than their own mismanagement.

Recently, however, the message from economists has undergone a subtle change. Most still do not see much evidence that A.I. is disrupting the job market. But they are starting to take seriously the possibility that it could someday soon. If it does, they are worried that policymakers are not ready to respond.

“I don’t think A.I. has hit the labor market yet, and I don’t think it’s radically changed corporate productivity yet, either, but I think it’s coming,” said Daniel Rock, a University of Pennsylvania economist who has studied the economic impact of artificial intelligence.

In a working paper published this week, a team of researchers surveyed economists about their outlook over the next five and 25 years. Most expect the economy to grow a bit more quickly as A.I. improves, but not to diverge substantially from historical patterns. If the technology improves rapidly — a possibility they consider unlikely but plausible — they envision a far more drastic scenario with faster growth but also greater inequality and the disappearance of millions of jobs.

“Economists are certainly taking A.I. seriously,” said Ezra Karger, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who was one of the study’s authors.

Economists’ expectations for the future looked relatively similar to those of A.I. industry insiders, who were also surveyed for the study. Both groups agree the future is uncertain: A.I. could either wipe out whole categories of jobs or cause few job losses. Its effects could be concentrated among entry-level white-collar workers or spread to more experienced workers and those in blue-collar jobs. The changes could upend the economy within years or take decades to play out.

Given the potential scale of the disruption, economists say it is time to start considering the policies that could help workers displaced or otherwise harmed by the changing economy — something that societies often failed to accomplish in past technological transitions.

“There’s enough conversation around this that we certainly should, as a country, be talking about what sorts of policies make sense in a world where the way employment and careers work now changes a lot in the next two to five years,” said Robert Seamans, an economist at New York University.

A Paradigm Shift
When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, Alex Imas, an economist at the University of Chicago, did not necessarily see it as an economic game changer, he said. The technology was powerful but limited, prone to mistakes and incapable of producing work with the quality and consistency necessary for most professional applications.

“I knew it was important, but I was definitely on the more skeptical side when it first came out,” Mr. Imas recalled.

For Mr. Imas, the real shift came in late 2024, when OpenAI released a model capable of “reasoning,” meaning it could work through a question step by step before producing an answer. That ability greatly expanded the type of problems the model could tackle, and made it more reliable at solving them.

“It was just a paradigm shift for me,” Mr. Imas said. “And then I started thinking, ‘This is potentially an industrial revolution-scale event, if not more.’”

For other economists, the shift came just in the past few months, with the release of Claude Code — a tool from the A.I. company Anthropic that writes computer code from users’ prompts — and the widespread rollout of A.I. “agents,” autonomous systems capable of performing tasks directly.

Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies A.I., said that as she experimented with the new tools, she had a realization: She no longer needed anyone to do the kind of basic research that she ordinarily hired college students and recent graduates to perform — and that she had performed herself early in her career.

“I really don’t know anything a college student can bring to my team that Claude can’t do,” she said. More senior jobs — ones that require interacting with clients and investors, or making strategic decisions — may be safe for now, she said. But “if you can do your job locked in a closet with a computer, ultimately you’re going to be in trouble.”

Everywhere but the Statistics
Technological advancement alone will not reshape the economy. For that to happen, companies need to adopt the tools and figure out how to use them productively.

History shows that the process almost always takes longer than the inventors expect. Legal and regulatory hurdles slow things down. Companies have to retrain workers or hire new ones. Corporate leaders have to develop new processes and overcome resistance from reluctant managers and cautious information technology departments.

“These conversations have been, in my opinion, overly focused on what the technology can do,” said Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University. “There’s plenty of technology that could have changed things and didn’t.”

Many hospitals kept patients’ health records on paper for decades after the technology existed to digitize them, Ms. Gimbel noted. Videoconferencing tools have existed for years, but it took a pandemic to force companies to embrace them.

There are signs that A.I. could flow through the economy more quickly than past innovations. Already, nearly one in five companies reports having used A.I. in the last two weeks, according to data from the Census Bureau, and in some industries the rate is twice as high. Workers report using A.I. at even higher rates, suggesting many may be experimenting with the tools on their own initiative.

And while A.I. has not yet had a big impact on aggregate statistics, some economists argue its effects are visible beneath the surface. In a paper published last year, researchers at Stanford University found that employment was declining for entry-level workers in jobs that were highly exposed to A.I.

Technological advancements “sometimes take decades” to appear in the economy in the form of increased productivity, said Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the authors of the Stanford paper. “I don’t think it’s going to be decades this time.”

‘How Painful Is It Going to Be?’....

....MUCH MORE 

Earlier today at Yahoo Finance:

Goldman Sachs' blunt warning to laid-off tech workers: It will take time and earnings loss to find a new job 

"America’s AI Build-Out Hinges on Chinese Electrical Parts"

From Bloomberg, April 1:

The struggle to manufacture transformers, switchgear and batteries domestically has forced the US to rely on imports, delaying data center construction. 

In the red dirt of Abilene, Texas, more than 6,000 workers travel around on electric buggies, spending day and night constructing a massive data center that will feed the world’s growing artificial intelligence needs. When completed this year, the eight sprawling buildings — which OpenAI will use — will consume 1.2 gigawatts of power, or enough electricity for nearly 1 million American households.

As the global AI race heats up, there is a huge rush to build data centers fast. There’s no lack of money chasing these projects, with tech giants Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com, Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. committed to spending more than $650 billion this year alone. Yet neither ambition nor capital is enough to materialize all the necessary components for these power-hungry computers.

Almost half of the US data centers planned for this year are expected to be delayed or canceled. One big reason is the shortage of electrical equipment, such as transformers, switchgear and batteries. They are needed not just for powering AI, but also for building out the grid that is seeing increased consumption from electric cars and heat pumps. US manufacturing capacity for these devices cannot keep up with demand, and the scarcity has caused data center builders to rely on imports.

Electrification is a key solution to both tackling climate change and powering AI ambitions. But America’s AI prowess on computer chips and cutting-edge software is being hamstrung by the country’s inability to manufacture the electrical parts. “There’s not enough domestic capacity to go around, so people are pretty much forced to go to the export market,” says Benjamin Boucher, senior analyst with Wood Mackenzie. 

The import dependence is putting data center companies in a bind. “There’s only going to be one winner,” President Donald Trump said in December, “and that’s probably going to be the US or China.” While he wants the US to win, his America First doctrine calls for installing trade barriers to cut imports.

Data centers consuming as much as 12 gigawatts of power are supposed to come online in 2026 in the US, according to analysts at market intelligence firm Sightline Climate, who will be releasing a new report in the coming weeks. However, only a third of that is currently under construction, Sightline estimates.

Crusoe won the contract to build the Texas data center campus because of its promise of speed. Cully Cavness, Crusoe’s chief strategy officer and co-founder, says the company pledged to get a portion of the data center powered up in less than a year after starting construction. The secret to achieving that was buying enough of the right electrical equipment through early orders, securing some supplies before export barriers were erected.

Electrical infrastructure adds up to less than 10% of the total cost of the data center, but it’s impossible to build the operation without it. “If one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can’t deliver,” says Andrew Likens, Crusoe’s energy and infrastructure lead. “It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment.”

Most companies contacted by Bloomberg News declined to comment on the problems they are facing or where they source their equipment from. The few that responded highlighted the solutions they have enacted. Spokespeople for Amazon and Microsoft said they plan electrical equipment procurement ahead of time when building their data centers, and a spokesperson for Equinix Inc. pointed to a recent investment in a manufacturing facility that makes switchgear. Google, Oracle, Nebius Group NV, and Coreweave Inc. declined requests to comment....

....MUCH MORE 

Recently: 

• February 27 - ICYMI: "Quanta Services Commits $700 Million to Bolster Transformer and Supply Chain Infrastructure" (PWR)
• March 25 - Grid: "Wait times for Hitachi Energy transformers hit more than 30 months" - UPDATED
• March 26 - More On Electrical Transformer Shortages, This One's Big: "Micron's $24 billion Singapore fab could need 500 transformers...."

Chinese Robotics: A Look At Unitree And Its Upcoming IPO

Following on April 5's "Inside China’s robotics revolution". 

We have no interest in IPOs as vehicles to invest/speculate/gamble with, but do pore over  offering documents to glean whatever insight might be publicly proffered. 

From Irene Zhang at ChinaTalk substack, April 2:

Unitree Goes Public 

robotics diffusion, AGI for the real world, and US-China entanglement 

In 2017, Hangzhou-based robotics firm Unitree 宇树科技 launched its first quadruped, Laikago. Laika was the name of the Soviet space dog onboard Sputnik 2, and the American English pronunciation of “go” is similar to that of the Chinese word for dogs, 狗 gǒu. Unitree’s battery-powered tribute to Laika wasn’t fuzzy, but walked on four feet and navigated through basic obstacles.

Unitree founder Wang Xingxing 王兴兴 has long held faith in the potential of robotic canines. Since 2020, when Unitree started gaining media attention, he has insisted in multiple interviews that humans are drawn to four-legged creatures and will have a natural fondness for their artificial counterparts.

Fast forward to 2026, and Unitree has just filed for a $610-million IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The company is a household name in China after its humanoid robots performed dances at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala for two consecutive years and counting. Through their IPO disclosures (investor prospectus and response letter to the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s inquiries), we get some answers to important questions about the development of embodied AI.

• How is Unitree profitable?

• Where is diffusion happening inside China, aside from dancing on TV?

• Are Chinese robotics companies content to lead in hardware and applications, or do they also see themselves as pursuing some kind of generalized “frontier”?

• And finally, what does this all mean for US-China dynamics in robotics?

***video***

What’s the money maker?
One of the most notable things about Unitree is the fact that it actually makes money. Unprofitability is a near-universal challenge because AI robotics, despite massive advances in the past few years, is still an early-stage technology. Mass adoption has not yet arrived; pathways out of bottlenecks like data are uncertain; and important safety standards have not caught up. Even shipping products consistently can be a challenge for some companies in the space, let alone manufacturing at scale and booking reliable customers.

This context is why observers have found Unitree’s ability to turn a profit remarkable. Not only has the company’s net profit been positive since 2024, but from 2024 to 2025, its net profit grew by 204.29%. A look at its growth, broken down by product category, reveals the most significant source of this revenue explosion: humanoids.

....MUCH MORE 

Previously:

• While You Were Busy Living Your Life: "Nvidia Announces GR00T, a Foundation Model for Humanoids" 
• Embodied Intelligence: China's Whole-of-Nation Push into Robotics
• China: There Might Be Something To This Humanoid Robot Stuff
• "America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1"
• Barron's: "Move Over, BigDog. Humanoid Robots Are Finally Here. How to Invest."
• "Founder of China’s Unitree sees lack of advanced AI as biggest roadblock to mass robot use"
• One Of Unitree's New Robots

January 29, 2026 - "Gartner Predicts Fewer Than 20 Companies Will Scale Humanoid Robots for Manufacturing and Supply Chain to Production Stage by 2028"

So it looks like 2027 will be a very important year for Unitree, Tesla and the other 90 wannabe players. We shall see.

Here's Gartner's Hype Cycle for emerging technologies. Humanoids are bottom left and tagged by Gartner with an expected ten years to the Plateau of Productivity:

 

Of course that also implies we are quite a ways from the Trough of Disillusionment as well.

And of course, your mileage may vary: 

September 13, 2022 - Gartner Outlines Six Trends Driving Near-Term Adoption of Metaverse Technologies  

There are many, many more. If interested use the search blog box, upper left.

"The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere"

From Quanta, March 16:

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day.  

No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by.

Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.

Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?

The answer boils down to the central limit theorem, a mathematical truth so powerful that it often strikes newcomers as impossible, like a magic trick of nature. “The central limit theorem is pretty amazing because it is so unintuitive and surprising,” said Daniela Witten (opens a new tab), a biostatistician at the University of Washington. Through it, the most random, unimaginable chaos can lead to striking predictability.

It’s now a pillar on which much of modern empirical science rests. Almost every time a scientist uses measurements to infer something about the world, the central limit theorem is buried somewhere in the methods. Without it, it would be hard for science to say anything, with any confidence, about anything.

“I don’t think the field of statistics would exist without the central limit theorem,” said Larry Wasserman (opens a new tab), a statistician at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s everything.”

Purity From Vice

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the push to find regularity in randomness came from the study of gambling.

In the coffeehouses of early-18th-century London, Abraham de Moivre’s mathematical talents were obvious. Many of his contemporaries, including Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley, recognized his brilliance. De Moivre was a fellow of the Royal Society, but he was also a refugee, a Frenchman who had fled his home country as a young man in the face of anti-Protestant persecution. As a foreigner, he couldn’t secure the kind of steady academic post that would befit his talent. So to help pay his bills, he became a consultant to gamblers who sought a mathematical edge.

Flipping a coin, rolling a die, and drawing a card from a deck are random actions, with every outcome equally likely. What de Moivre realized is that when you combine many random actions, the result follows a reliable pattern.

Flip a coin 100 times and count how often it comes up heads. It’ll be somewhere around 50, but not very precisely. Play this game 10 times, and you may get 10 different counts.

Now imagine playing the game 1 million times. The bulk of the outcomes will be close to 50. You’ll almost never get under 10 heads or over 90. If you make a graph of how many times you see each number between zero and 100, you’ll see that classic bell shape, with 50 at the center. The more times you play the game, the smoother and clearer the bell will become.

De Moivre figured out the exact shape of this bell, which came to be called the normal distribution. It told him, without his having to actually play the game, how likely different outcomes were. For instance, the probability of getting between 45 and 55 heads is about 68%.

De Moivre marveled with religious devotion at the “steadfast order of the universe” that eventually overcame any and all deviations from the bell. “In process of time,” he wrote, “these irregularities will bear no proportion to the recurrency of that order which naturally results from original design.”

He used these insights to sustain a meager life in London, writing a book called The Doctrine of Chances that became a gambler’s bible, and holding informal office hours at the famed Old Slaughter’s Coffee House. But even de Moivre didn’t realize the full scope of his discovery. Only when Pierre-Simon Laplace ran with the idea in 1810, decades after de Moivre’s death, was its full reach uncovered.

Let’s take an example slightly more complex than coin flips: dice rolls. Every roll of a die has six equally likely outcomes. If you repeatedly roll the die and tally the results, you’ll get a chart that looks flat — you’re bound to see about as many rolls of 1 as you do 2 or 4 or 6....

....MUCH MORE 

"Traders Overwhelmed by Iran News Are Turning to AI for Help"

Bunch of lightweights. 

Back in the day the old-timers didn't need much more in the toolbox than a rock and a stick.

Some months they didn't even use the rock for weeks at a stretch.

From Bloomberg, March 19:

As Maxence Visseau spent the first few days of the Iran war trying to make sense of what the conflict would mean for markets, he put artificial intelligence at the heart of his investment process.

Large-language models enabled Visseau, the founder of investment firm Arkevium, to cut the time he spent on research by about 80%. He used Anthropic’s Claude to stress-test multiple scenarios in parallel, compare historical precedents and map out potential ripple effects across asset classes. 

“I was up for almost 48 hours straight, monitoring the interceptions in the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously running scenarios and preparing for the market open,” said Visseau, who’s based in Dubai and specializes in macro trading strategies. “That’s precisely the kind of moment where AI becomes indispensable.”

While Visseau said the technology isn’t a reliable substitute for human judgment, he views the time-saving benefits of AI as increasingly essential for navigating markets whipsawed by a war that has upended energy supplies and left at least 4,000 dead. Interviews with investors and strategists across the globe suggest the conflict has led AI tools to become more entrenched in workflows, even as several flagged pitfalls including sloppy prompts and inaccurate results.

“We are witnessing history — the first major conflict where AI is being used to fight and where traders rely on AI to map out the war in ways that have never been done before,” said Nick Twidale, chief market analyst at AT Global Markets in Sydney and who’s a 25-year veteran of trading markets.

One of the advantages of using AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and China’s DeepSeek is a dramatic improvement in time management.

Jian Shi Cortesi says where she previously may have spent half an hour reading different sources to catch up on the news, now the Zurich-based fund manager at GAM Investment Management can get a summary of the latest developments in the war in seconds. Gathering information about a particular company takes a day or less, down from multiple days previously.

“In the past, it’s like digging a hole with a shovel. Now you’re digging dirt with these massive excavators,” Cortesi said. “The speed has probably increased by five times.”

Another is being able to mine history near instantaneously for insights and context on what may happen next, especially given the volatility in markets. Brent crude surged as much as 11% to top $119 a barrel on Thursday on concern over the risk of escalating tit-for-tat attacks on key energy facilities in the Middle East, before giving up most of its gains. It last traded at $108.

Deep Search

Anna Wu, a cross asset strategist at Van Eck Associates Corp. in Sydney, used ChatGPT and Claude to go back 100 years to track every war-driven oil breakout, and find out what asset classes outperformed in each occurrence. To improve the utility of the answers, she asked AI to cross reference with other data points such as the median inflation and global economic growth.

“It definitely has brought in more efficiency,” Wu said. “A lot of the historical analysis right now has become a lot less time-consuming because before it would be me searching to the end of Google.”

For Gustavo Pessoa, artificial intelligence tools provide instant access to information that previously might have been hard to get, at a time when calculating the impact of the virtual closure of the Strait of Hormuz is becoming more essential to investing.

“We use it for everything — from understanding the types of ships to analyzing the elasticity of oil demand to prices and even estimating how many barrels will be needed to stabilize flows,” said Pessoa, who’s a founding partner at Sao Paulo–based hedge fund Legacy Capital Gestora de Recursos Ltda.

AI is not perfect, nor is it a replacement for human experience and decision-making. The technology has made mistakes in everything from gaming development to news content representation. A Bank of England policymaker warned that AI adoption in trading may amplify market shocks and herd-like behavior....

....MUCH MORE 

Capital Markets: "Cease-Fire Hopes Blunt US Ultimatum"

From Marc to Market:

The US deadline on Tehran for re-opening the Strait of Hormuz has subtly shifted until tomorrow. The holiday-thinned market initially bought dollars and oil and took risk off in response to the continued attacks and the escalation of US rhetoric. However, negotiations, apparently led by Pakistan, Egypt, and Türkiye for a 45-day cease fire, have captured the imagination of market participants, even though the negotiators themselves do not appear optimistic.

In quiet turnover, the dollar has given up its early gains, and as the North American session is about. to begin, the greenback is lower against all the G10 currencies and emerging market currencies. US index futures are trading firmer and May WTI is off around 1% but is still near $110. It still seems binary. If the hopes are dashed, risk will come off as the conflict could dramatically escalate....

....MUCH MORE  

Bill Gates: "The next generation of electricity is almost here"

From Mr. Gates' GatesNotes blog, March 23: 

I’m in Texas this week to talk about the remarkable breakthroughs fueling our zero-emission future.

Greetings from the Lone Star State! I’m in Texas this week for the Breakthrough Energy Ventures Investors Summit. This is one of the best places in the world to see the future of energy, and I can’t wait to see how much progress has been made since my last visit.

There’s a lot on the agenda this week, but I’m especially excited to talk about electricity breakthroughs. By 2050, the world will need nearly three times as much power as we use today—and if we’re going to decarbonize the economy, we’ll have to electrify a lot of things that currently use fossil fuels. That means we need to deliver a huge amount of energy in a clean, reliable, and affordable way.

If you’re an electricity nerd like me, this is an exciting moment. Earlier this month, TerraPower—the next-generation nuclear power company I created in 2008—received federal approval to start building the nuclear reactor at its Kemmerer, Wyoming plant. Wind and solar are reportedly generating more electricity than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time. We’re seeing a clear shift as the world’s electricity system is becoming more diverse, more innovative, and more dynamic than ever before.

Here are three of the coolest technologies people will be talking about this week:

Geothermal. Geothermal power has been around for more than a century, but new approaches are unlocking greater potential for the technology. Most geothermal power plants today are located near the boundary between two tectonic plates, where you don’t have to drill as deep to find usable heat that can be pumped to the surface to turn a turbine and generate electricity.

Fervo wants to make geothermal an option in more places by both digging deeper (up to a mind-blowing 15,000 ft below the surface) and extending their wells horizontally at their deepest point. The results so far are super promising: Their pilot project has been consistently generating electricity since 2023, and their Cape Station plant in Utah will come online this year.

Fusion. Fusion is the reaction that powers the sun and stars, and it has the potential to be a virtually unlimited source of clean, safe electricity. Once the technology is fully commercialized within the next decade, it can be built anywhere, scaled up, and used to make huge amounts of electricity with no carbon emissions and minimal waste.

The question right now is how we get there. It seems likely that the first commercial fusion plants will use magnetic fields to harness the reaction to generate electricity. There are two different approaches to this: the tokamak, a donut-shaped machine that is easier to build but harder to keep stable, and the stellarator, a twist-shaped machine that is harder to build but easier to keep stable. (An unstable reaction can damage the machine but poses no risk to safety.) Commonwealth Fusion Systems is on track to turn on their SPARC tokamak next year, and Type One Energy is making great progress with their Infinity One stellarator. Marathon Fusion, Xcimer, and Zap Energy aren’t quite as far along with their approaches, but I’m optimistic about what they’re doing.

Geologic hydrogen. Hydrogen shows great promise as an energy source, and the discovery of geologic hydrogen is one of the biggest energy surprises of the past decade. Although it’s the earliest stage technology on this list, I’m excited about its potential. Geologic hydrogen is a zero-emission power source that is continuously generated underground by the Earth itself. Bourakébougou, a village in Mali, is powered by the small hydrogen field it sits on top of, and researchers have found deposits in the U.S., France, and other places.

This is an unusual technology to talk about because it’s hard to predict a timeline....

....MUCH MORE including video. 

We have dozens, nay, scores of posts on Mr. Gates and energy and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. On Breakthrough and its billionaire backers;

https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/search?q=breakthrough+energy+ventures 

And on Bill and nuclear: 

Bill Gates Goes To Wyoming Coal Country, Breaks Ground On A Nuke Plant, Plays Poker With The Locals

On geologic hydrogen:

Want To Be A Hydrogen Tycoon? Maybe Prospect For Ophiolite And Chromite Ore

"There's hydrogen in them thar hills" 

Grizzled prospector intently looking for hydrogen.

just kidding, that's Tom Waits in the Coen brothers film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”

On the tribulations of dealing with stuff vs. dealing with software. May 2019: 
Bezos, Andreessen and Gates Looking For Cobalt In Canada

Not them personally, can you imagine? Tramping around northern Saskatchewan?

Jeff: Bill, does this rock look blue to you?
Bill: I can't see it, let me get my glasses.
Marc: Guys, have I told you all the things I've wanted to tweet since I quit Twitter?
Jeff and Bill: Oh Gawd

No, it's a company they're invested in....

"Inside China’s robotics revolution"

From The Guardian, March 19:

How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? I visited 11 companies in five Chinese cities to find out  

Chen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element – up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots – he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word guzhi, “steadfast intelligence”, though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome.

For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate – or, in his view, liberate – as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi’s engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: “final assembly”, the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces – the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions – come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on.

As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work. The technology behind China’s current robotics boom is deep learning, the mathematical engine behind large language models such as ChatGPT, which learn by discerning patterns from huge datasets. Many researchers believe that machines can learn to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned to navigate language: not by following rules, but by absorbing enough data for something like human dexterity to emerge. The aim, for many technologists, is the development of humanoid robots capable of performing factory labour – work that employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The resources being pumped into achieving this goal are staggering. In 2025, China announced a £100bn fund for strategic technologies including quantum computing, clean energy and robotics. Major cities have invested their own resources into robotics projects, too. There are now roughly 140 Chinese firms hoping to build humanoids. Some of the frontrunners made their debut in February, at the lunar new year festival gala, a state-choreographed spectacle loosely comparable to the Super Bowl in terms of bombast and national significance. Hundreds of millions watched as robots performed comedy sketches and martial arts routines. The speed of progress has been startling. Last year, the robots were doing a synchronised cheerleading routine. This year, they did cartwheels and parkour. The intended message was clear: the robots are coming, and China will be the nation building them.

A world in which AI-powered humanoid robots are produced at scale still seems to belong in the realm of science fiction. Late last year, I visited 11 robotics companies in China across five cities to try to grasp just how close we are to the robot future. I met many ambitious entrepreneurs, who were operating in an environment so deeply integrated with municipal governments that the distinction between private and public was losing its meaning. All of them were engaged, in different ways, in the race to build and commercialise robots capable of replacing human workers – and some of them already have eager western buyers. 

Inside one of the Guchi Robotics warehouses, a team of employees from General Motors was testing Guchi’s wheel-installation machines ahead of a shipment to Canada. The hull of a white GM truck occupied a raised platform at the centre of the room. The truck, surrounded by four large robotic arms and a jungle of wires, sat inside a yellow safety enclosure made of steel bars. I watched on the sidelines as a bearded GM engineer tinkered with a control panel outside the steel cage.

The engineer, an American man whom I’ll call Jack, worked in GM’s “manufacturing optimisation” division. “To be grim, anything that eliminates people from the production line is basically my job,” Jack told me. General Motors sets job-reduction targets for his division each year, he said, which requires eliminating a set number of factory workers across all plants in North America. His team chose Guchi over a German-based competitor – itself 95% owned by a Chinese company – because the other couldn’t offer a moving assembly line, Jack explained. The purchase of the Guchi machines, he said, would eliminate 12 assembly operators on the line at a single factory. (General Motors did not confirm the job-reduction targets, but a spokesperson said it implements technology to help improve safety, efficiency and quality, “particularly for physically demanding or repetitive tasks.”)

An irony of the Trump administration’s mission to revive industrial production within the US is that much of the machinery required to make America great again comes from the country that motivated America’s industrial revival in the first place. China now accounts for more than half of the world’s new factory robot installations annually. Chen thinks Chinese and American engineers are comparable in skill and talent. “The difference is really just cost and speed, and how many people you can throw at a problem – we might have 1,000 who can do this work, and they might have 100,” he said.

Chen and I walked to the end of the warehouse, where we now had a frontal view of the GM truck. After watching Jack work for a bit, Chen pointed me to the robotic arms on each side of the car body: “You see those? This is the screwdriving robot. Even if manufacturing does come back to North America, they won’t be putting workers on the line to fasten screws any more. They’ll use robots.”

I wasn’t so sure. Wasn’t one reason that Americans elected Trump because they wanted their blue-collar jobs back? Chen thought this was pure illusion. The world had changed, and so had young people. Chen told me to think about China, where factory culture is deeply ingrained but young Chinese are increasingly reluctant to tolerate the drudgery. “It’s just how people are wired now.” If even Chinese people aren’t willing to do factory work any more, Chen was saying, why would Americans?

---

One week after my visit to Guchi HQ, I met Chen in north-west Beijing, where the city’s top universities are located. He had invited me to a meeting at the head office of Galbot, one of China’s most hyped humanoid robotics startups. One of its wheeled humanoids appeared in a skit at this year’s lunar new year jamboree, where it handed a male actor a bottle of water from a shelf and folded laundry. Since its founding in 2023, Galbot has pursued a less showy strategy than many of its competitors: building robots that can perform mundane tasks such as picking up items and setting them down elsewhere safely and reliably. The founder, Wang He, told a Chinese reporter recently that their robots are already deployed in several Chinese car factories, though videos appear to show them in highly controlled settings.

Galbot’s “pick-and-place” robots might seem a lot dumber than their backflipping rivals, but a crucial difference is that the robot acrobats operate according to pre-programmed instructions: they are feats of motion control and balance, but they do not go off-script. The kind of technology being developed at Galbot is what roboticists call a vision-language-action model (VLA), which aims to allow machines to operate in unfamiliar and fluid environments, just as humans do. For now, Galbot’s robots cannot reliably do what, for humans, would be trivial tasks – say, washing the dishes – but Wang, has told Chinese reporters he aims to have 10,000 robots handling basic retail and factory work in three years. (Some AI pioneers, such as Yann LeCun, are extremely sceptical that the current paradigm of deep learning will deliver the results companies such as Galbot hope for.)....

....MUCH MORE 

"Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin."

From Rober Lynch's The Laughing Ape substack, March 19:

Remembering Robert Trivers 

Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin. He had a rare gift for seeing through the messy clutter of life and revealing the underlying logic beneath it. E. O. Wilson called him “one of the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time.” Steven Pinker described him as “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

I was Robert’s graduate student at Rutgers from 2006 to 2014. Long before I knew him personally, however, he had already established himself as one of the most original and insightful scientists of the twentieth century. In an astonishing series of papers in the early 1970s, he changed forever our understanding of evolution and social behavior.

The first, published while he was still a graduate student at Harvard, confronted one of the deepest problems in evolutionary theory: how can natural selection favor cooperation between non-relatives? In The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism Trivers proposed that cooperation could evolve when the same individuals interacted repeatedly, making it advantageous to help those who were likely to help in return while avoiding cheaters who took benefits without reciprocating — i.e.“you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” The paper offered an elegant solution to the problem of how natural selection can “police the system” and has had enormous implications for human psychology, including our sense of justice, with parallels in other mammals such as capuchins and dogs. The next year in 1972, Trivers published his most cited paper, Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. Here he offered a unified explanation for something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin. Writing perhaps the most famous sentence in all of evolutionary biology—“What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring”—Trivers threw down the gauntlet and revealed a deceptively simple principle that reorganized the field. From that insight flowed one of the most powerful and falsifiable ideas in modern science: the sex that invests more in offspring will tend to be choosier about mates, while the sex that invests less will compete more intensely for access to them.

Two years later, in 1974, Robert once again gave birth to an entirely new field of study with Parent-Offspring Conflict. In it, he built on William Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness to show that parents and children have divergent genetic interests. Because a parent is equally related to all of its offspring, while each offspring is related to itself more than to its siblings, conflict is built into the family from the beginning. With that insight, Trivers revealed that some of the most intimate and emotionally charged features of life—begging, weaning, sibling rivalry, tantrums, parental favoritism, even the distribution of love and attention within families—all could be understood as the product of natural selection acting on family members with conflicting evolutionary interests. In other papers, Trivers made wide-ranging predictions about the conditions under which parents should produce or invest more in sons than daughters, how female mate choice can favor male traits that benefit daughters, why insect colonies are structured by conflicts over sex ratios, reproduction, and control, and how self-deception may have evolved as a way of more effectively deceiving others.

Each of these papers spawned entirely new research fields, and many have dedicated their careers to unpacking and testing the implications of his ideas. As Harvard biologist David Haig put it, “I don’t know of any comparable set of papers. Most of my career has been based on exploring the implications of one of them.” Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his ideas gave birth to the field of evolutionary psychology and the whole line of popular Darwinian books from Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright to David Buss and Steven Pinker....

....MUCH MORE 

The Easter Parade, Berlin 1949

Originally posted Thursday, March 20, 2008.

Ag Stocks and The Berlin Airlift (AG; MOS; MON; POT)

Last night in "Commodities Comeuppance" I said my best guess was that the ag stocks would be up today. When POT and MOS opened down I was reminded of a vignette from the Berlin Airlift.

We're coming up on the 60th anniversary of the Soviet blockade that June.
During the summer the two million people that the Brits and Americans were trying to feed could get by with two tons of coal per day (over the course of the airlift 80% of the weight hauled was coal) but as the blockade went on, it was apparent that the Sov's. intended to starve the city and it became imperative that an efficient method of delivering coal be found.

During winter the absolute minimum requirement was 3100 tons of coal per day. The little C-47's could haul around three tons per flight. The first week of the airlift, deliveries averaged 90 tons per day. The second week, 1000 tons/day.

It was decided to experiment with a low-speed, low-level drop of coal onto an empty field, the idea being that if it worked, B-29 Superfortress' with a 105 mph stall speed and 22-25 ton capacity would solve the problem.

On the appointed day the senior commanders went to the field, the plane came over, low and slow, dropped the coal, packed 100 pounds to a bag, the bags landed, exploded open, the coal was pulverized and a great black cloud of coal dust covered everyone watching.

One of the Generals, I forget if it was LeMay, Tunner or Smith, said "Doesn't work" and that was that.

When I saw the ag stocks open this morning I thought
"Doesn't work".

The logistics geniuses figured out what needed to be done, took 300 of the 400 10-ton capacity C-54's in the U.S. fleet, developed flight rules so efficient that the Germans called it "die Luftbrücke" (Air Bridge) and on Easter Sunday 1949 in a move to crush the Soviet's spirit, they decided to show off with the "Easter Parade".

In the 1440 minutes of that day, they flew 1398 flights into Berlin delivering 12,940 tons of coal.
The Soviets gave up the blockade the next month, two million people didn't starve or be forced to live under Moscow masters and thousands of kids remembered the candy bars the pilots would tie to handkerchief parachutes and drop as they came into Tempelhof.

39 British and 31 American airmen were killed in crashes during the airlift:

Berlin Airlift Monument in Berlin-Tempelhof with inscription

"Sie gaben ihr Leben für die Freiheit Berlins im Dienste der Luftbrücke 1948/49"

"They lost their lives for the freedom of Berlin in service for the Berlin Airlift 1948/49"

 

Yup Sonny

---

Sunrise in Jerusalem

From Daily Roman Updates: 

pic.twitter.com/HyCSWNFAMP

— Daily Roman Updates (@UpdatingOnRome) April 20, 2025

"A Shakeup Is Coming for the Nation-State"

As we've seen—most recently with Israel's Mossad in Iran and Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb in Russia—tractor-trailers and shipping containers make dandy places to hide your weapons of war. Also handy for transporting same. More after the jump.... 

—December 10, 2025 - "How China Built a Network of Ports Encircling the Globe"

From the New Atlantis, Spring 2026: 

Essay

For centuries, holding vast territory has been the basis of state security. Drones and AI are about to make it a vulnerability. 

On June 13, 2025, Iran’s air defense network was largely silent in the face of an intense Israeli bombing campaign. Just before the attack, swarms of explosive quadcopter drones, launched by Israel from inside Iranian territory and acting on vast troves of intelligence sifted with the use of AI to select targets, had taken out Iran’s radar systems and numerous missile sites. Israel’s one-two punch made Iran an object lesson in how a combination of AI and drones is blazing a new trajectory for international politics.

Not long before, on June 1, Ukraine had employed a strikingly similar tactic, using cargo trucks with false inventories to smuggle drones deep into Russian territory. The drones had been trained using AI to recognize Tu-95 “Bear” bombers based on photographs taken of a decommissioned version in a Ukrainian air museum and to recognize the weakest point of the bombers, often the fuel tanks in the wings. This allowed the drones, flying first autonomously and then with human pilots, to strike Russian bombers with high precision as far away as Siberia.

In the grand scheme of geopolitics, these events were small. The conflict between Iran and Israel ended up being more like glorified shadowboxing than real war, and the Ukrainian strike on Russia did nothing to change the relentless, grinding attrition of the front line. These events are not obvious ruptures in international politics, as when nuclear fire consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. That moment announced with dreadful clarity that the future of war and strategy would never be the same. The use of AI coupled with drones, however, is more like Sputnik in 1957, a seemingly small event that nevertheless drastically altered the human relationship to technology.

Heidegger once remarked that the first images of Earth from the Moon shocked him because they revealed a new way of grasping the human condition, drained of direct human experience. AI-enabled drone strikes carry a similar symbolic charge: they represent war drained of direct human contact.

What does it mean for this relatively cheap and widely available technology to exist in the hands not only of sovereign states but of non-state actors, rebel groups, terrorists, and even ordinary people? It means that in fragile or conflict-prone regions such as parts of Yemen and Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa, small groups of motivated individuals will be able to destabilize political authority through attacks on infrastructure that is far from where those groups are operating, threatening at a whole new level the state’s capacity to control its territory and population. AI-plus-drone technology thus accelerates the fragmentation of international order by weakening the sovereign state’s grip on territory and empowering local groups as well as opaque, transnational networks capable of organized violence.

The diffusion of cheap AI drones — and thus of a relatively easy and far-reaching means of violence — will likely evince a response from sovereign states. The great powers may expand their capacities for surveillance and security and reemphasize the importance of borders. The global cosmopolitan fluidity of recent decades may yield to a renewed focus on territory and control. What emerges would not be the end of the current order but its contraction and reinvention. In this scenario, states will reassert their sovereignty not out of a sense of revanchist nostalgia but of state survival.

Perhaps none of this will occur. But machine learning software and drone hardware are powerful, and now both easily accessible. The confluence of the two, and their likely increasing deployment to inflict violence, demands a thought experiment about the future we may face.

The Rise of the Nation-State 
The ultimate, if déclassé, question in political thought is: Who rules, and how is that rule justified? Various justifications have been offered, such as faith, reason, or the will of the people, but for its implementation each ultimately relies on force. Legitimacy requires the capacity for violence. In the age of Enlightenment, the sovereign state emerged as the sole entity authorized to use violence within a defined territory. Sovereignty meant nothing without territory, just as the “rights of man” meant little without property. Hence the modern state became defined by its monopoly on legitimate force.

The origin of this concept helps to clarify AI’s potential effect on international order. In the 1500s, Europe’s religious unity under the Catholic Church collapsed from the pressures of the Protestant Reformation and rising nationalism. These in turn were enabled by a profound transformation: the spread of literacy through the printing press. Rising literacy fostered the prestige of vernacular languages, national literatures, and new interpretations of Scripture. Political identity — Italian, Spanish, English — was shaped as much by Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare as by any prince.

When the Thirty Years’ War, largely between Catholic and Protestant territories, ended in 1648, the new political order came to be known as “Westphalian,” named after the peace treaty. Westphalian politics was governed by the sovereign state, its political authority bounded by its territory, and its relations with other states governed by treaties backed by a balance of military and economic strength.

But Europe’s political transformation did not destroy the Catholic Church. The Church responded to the twin challenges of Protestantism and nationalism with reform and consolidation, becoming more centralized, more professionalized, and more capable of global expansion. Even as Christendom fragmented, the Church grew more coherent and purposeful. 

From Printing Press to AI Drone Strikes 
A similar transformation now confronts the modern nation-state. Like the Catholic Church in the 1500s, the nation-state has long struggled against forces of dissolution. But a technological and political upheaval may now be triggering its reassertion.

The story of the nation-state’s decline goes roughly like this. Globalized economies favor the unrestricted movement of goods, capital, and labor. The institutions and practices required for this movement conflict with national cohesion. International governance regimes — think of the United Nations and the European Union — undermine the state’s capacity to define and defend its own laws and customs. These pressures converge in the question of how to think about immigration: popular discourse may focus on borders, on the state’s sovereignty, and on individual rights, but the deeper challenge is to the legitimacy of the distinction between citizen and noncitizen. That distinction — the political distinction par excellence because of its close association with the question of who rules over whom — is now blurred by a cosmopolitan global order that prizes universality over cultural and territorial particularity.

Not only does cosmopolitanism call citizenship into question; it also gives rise to new forms of violence that challenge the territorial logic of the state. The global diffusion of media in the twentieth century made human suffering visible in unprecedented ways, creating a moral imperative to act, often without regard for the sovereignty of other states. Humanitarian intervention — often a euphemism for military invasion — became a new instrument of policy for major powers. The disjunction between state sovereignty and cosmopolitanism has reached its most radical expression in international terrorism. Transnational groups, bound not by nationality but by ideology, target civilians in pursuit of political aims.

The story has an important technological component. As we’ve seen, the Westphalian system was formed partly as a response to the effects of the printing press; now the system finds itself reshaped by the cumulative impact of nuclear weapons, mass mobility, and instantaneous communication. Nuclear arms make direct conflict between great powers intolerably dangerous, replacing conventional warfare with long strategic stalemates and seemingly irrational proxy conflicts. Air travel allows individuals to think of themselves less as nationals and more as citizens of the world. Global supply chains bind the economic life of one nation to the productive capacity of far-flung others. And the spread of telecommunications, particularly the Internet, has created a global information market, where ideas flow without much regard for borders....

....MUCH MORE

Asymmetric cost-benefit terror:

"Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready"
A repost from 2019 that seems to have come true.

From Nautil.us:

In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, “home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity,” tricks women and teenage girls into downloading malware that enables him to monitor and record their activity, for the purposes of blackmail. The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, “have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States.” 

Technology is, in other words, enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale. Emerging bio-, nano-, and cyber-technologies are becoming more and more accessible. The political scientist Daniel Deudney has a word for what can result: “omniviolence.” The ratio of killers to killed, or “K/K ratio,” is falling. For example, computer scientist Stuart Russell has vividly described how a small group of malicious agents might engage in omniviolence: “A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,” he says.

“You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.’ A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.” Manufacturers will be producing millions of these drones, available for purchase just as with guns now, Russell points out, “except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch.” In this scenario, the K/K ratio could be perhaps 3/1,000,000, assuming a 10-percent accuracy and only a single one-gram shaped charge per drone.

Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not.

That’s completely—and horrifyingly—unprecedented. The terrorist or psychopath of the future, however, will have not just the Internet or drones—called “slaughterbots” in this video from the Future of Life Institute—but also synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and advanced AI systems at their disposal. These tools make wreaking havoc across international borders trivial, which raises the question: Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not. What justifies the existence of the state, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued, is a “social contract.” People give up certain freedoms in exchange for state-provided security, whereby the state acts as a neutral “referee” that can intervene when people get into disputes, punish people who steal and murder, and enforce contracts signed by parties with competing interests....MORE

It gets worse.  

If interested see also 2022's "The US Navy wants swarms of thousands of small drones"  and two from 2021:

"Meet the future weapon of mass destruction, the drone swarm"
From The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.... 

"Autonomous 'Slaughterbot' Drones Reportedly Attack Libyans Using Facial Recognition Tech"

Also: 

 Islamic Terrorists Are Now Attacking With Drones In Nigeria

"Ukraine Is the First 'Hackers’ War'”

Coming to a country near you. 

The author, "Juan Chulilla, is a cofounder of Red Team Shield S.L., a company dedicated to developing defense solutions against weaponized commercial drones."