“Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow: a natural experiment in what can be achieved outside the constraints that have stifled progress on dry land…

Since the SS Great Eastern in 1858, the gross tonnage of the largest passenger ships has grown an average of 1.59 percent per year, nearly double the 0.84 percent annual growth rate in the height of the world’s tallest buildings between the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and the Burj Khalifa in 2010. If we restrict ourselves to the tallest buildings in the United States in the last century, from the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931 to the One World Trade Center in 2020, the record of tallest building has only inched up at 0.24 percent a year.”

From Works in Progress.

“In the 1930’s they spent 48 hours working, 56 hours sleeping, 31 hours on home obligations, and 24 hours eating or running errands. What remained, a rather precarious 9 hours per week, was time spent in the pursuit of what could generously be called pleasure.”

From The One Percent Rule.

“In an age of increasingly sophisticated AI and the fear that one day humans will be made obsolete, the classical music world has remained relatively unfazed, with the prospect of a robotic symphony orchestra the stuff of a sci-fi movie.

Now though, that illusion has all changed, as a robot made its debut playing the cello with a symphony orchestra.

In a mesmerising piece written by Swedish-born contemporary classical composer and producer Jacob Mühlrad, the lines between acoustic and electronic music are skilfully blurred in this performance which took place in the Malmö Live Concert Hall.”

From Classic FM.

“‘All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,’ a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. 

The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as part of NotebookLM, a year-old AI-powered research assistant. NotebookLM, which is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model, allows people to upload content such as links, videos, PDFs, and text. They can then ask the system questions about the content, and it offers short summaries. 

The tool generates a podcast called Deep Dive, which features a male and a female voice discussing whatever you uploaded. The voices are breathtakingly realistic—the episodes are laced with little human-sounding phrases like ‘Man’ and ‘Wow’ and ‘Oh right’ and ‘Hold on, let me get this right.’ The ‘hosts’ even interrupt each other.”

From MIT Technology Review.