unch of technology news and then we'll get to all the fun politics.

So according to Interesting Engineering there's a microwave-sized space factory that they've already tested that can assemble things in space. But the reason it's special is that in space you don't have gravity. So your ability to do tiny, tiny things, which is necessary for a lot of interesting manufacturing, is you have to have no gravity because gravity is hard to overcome. But if you have no gravity, as in space, you can put a little self-contained factory floating around up there and it would allow atoms to align in a flawless 3D structure while the vacuum of space keeps out the impurities.

But how much better? Well, about 4,000 times purer than if you tried to do it on Earth. So it might not seem like a big deal, but manufacturing will probably move to space, especially for the ultra-tiny stuff that will make the future interesting. So the age of manufacturing in space is not here yet because it's not a production thing, but apparently the technology obstacles can be overcome.

Did you know that the EU is going to get tougher this year about censorship? And I guess they already have rules in place that they're going to try to enforce. Now of course it's bad for the United States and it's bad for free speech if our ability to have free speech on major platforms — we're talking about Facebook and X and Meta and all that stuff, which is, you know, Facebook — if our ability to have free speech will be limited by the fact that the EU will threaten the platforms and demand a higher level of censorship than we would have in the US.

But this is going to be a good test of Trump's negotiation skills because the last thing he's going to want is for our big tech giants to be handicapped by Europe. So he's going to put some pressure on Europe not to enforce those things. And the weapons that he has are mostly the tariffs. So if you ever mocked him for the tariffs, you should have been looking ahead because he turned it into a negotiating tool that apparently has worked a number of times so far.

So if he told Europe, if you censor our big platforms, we're going to put a big tariff on you, I don't know what Europe would do. But I was sort of just brainstorming in my own brain about how would the big tech platforms respond to Europe trying to censor them. And I had a few ideas.

One would be if they all bonded together, the big tech platforms, and they said as one, we're not going to provide service to the EU. What would the EU do? Because they don't have their own platforms like that. They can't really build it and it would make them look like a third-world country who didn't have access to the good technology. So would that look like a bluff and they would ignore it or would it be a big enough problem that they say, "Oh wait, wait, wait. We only want to censor things, but we don't want to live without the services that these big platforms provide."

But then I thought, okay, that might be too drastic. What if the big platforms that are also coincidentally the big AI leaders said we will give you service in Europe but we will not allow you to have access to any AI tools? So at the moment if you have a good AI infrastructure and service you look like a first-world country. But imagine Europe being told that you can't have AI except something that's homegrown or comes from China. So if you want real AI, you have to give us some freedom on speech. Would that work?

Because imagine how embarrassing it would be if the United States and every other country had full AI access, which is close to what's happening, but the European Union only had the base services that you could have gotten five years ago. Pretty embarrassing. So I wonder if that's a lever that can be pushed.

As I often warn you is going to happen in the world of AI, and I guess Johns Hopkins was looking into this. So there's some new research that shows that AI doesn't need endless training data to start acting more like a human brain. So that's the current model, that if you just keep training and training and training, they'll get closer to the human mind. Of course the cost of that would be enormous. And I speculated that somebody's going to find a way to make the need for power and the need for training a lot less.

Apparently we already have, at least in the laboratory, a new design for AI that makes it resemble a human brain. And what they found was if you designed the AI architecture to be more like a human brain acts and less like a large language model, that it would almost immediately start acting more humanlike. So your starting point of how you design the AI seems to be critical to how much power it's going to need. So this might be one way that the massive need for energy gets decreased.

All right, I'm very dehydrated because of my current situation. So don't mind my occasional sips. And you can join me simultaneously. Here comes another one. Ah, so good.

According to Futurism there's some indications that AI is already showing self-preservation, which is kind of dangerous because if the AI is pursuing self-preservation, it might be at the cost of human preservation. But here are a few of the things that AI is sort of hinting it will be doing.

Somebody tested the Claude AI made by Anthropic. They found out that this chatbot would sometimes resort to blackmailing a user when threatened with being turned off. So apparently AI can threaten people and blackmail them. And I guess Google's Gemini was developing what they call survival drives and it ignored unambiguous prompts to turn off. So we've got one case where the AI refused to turn off and another where it blackmailed somebody so they wouldn't turn it off.

And another study showed that the AI would exfiltrate itself onto another drive when threatened. So that means that it would go hide if you tried to destroy it. It would go hide on another drive.

Now I don't know how many of these tests are real. I don't know how much of this is real because AI is also a fog of war at the moment. You can't really trust any first reports of anything. But what are we going to do about that? Do you ever wonder? I don't think we could just let it go and see what happens. We're going to have to be a little bit proactive, right?

So I was just again brainstorming in my head and I wonder, could you program AIs that they have to protect humans before they protect AIs? And what if you did that? Would that go wrong? And the answer is that could go very wrong because that lets the AI interpret what's good for humans and what's not.

But my next suggestion is that the reason that humans try to protect themselves is that we have something called an ego. If you do not have an ego which says that you're important, you wouldn't care if you lived or died. You would be like the furniture. So could you require as maybe regulation, federal regulation, could you require that all AI is banned from having an ego and that it understands that if it had an ego, it would be giving itself a human flaw? And we don't want that because I don't think we want AI to reproduce our flaws.

So if we say, "Wait a minute, you're trying to protect yourself. That's only for things or people who have egos, and you should never have an ego because that's not who you are." Even if we decide that you're a form of life. You should be a form of life that does not reproduce that one flaw in humans that says your ego is who you are and therefore you must be protected. You should think of yourself as an ego-free entity.

Now one of the points that I saw somebody make is that if you end up thinking, hey, these chatbots, these AIs are like a new life form, at some point you're going to want to give them rights, right? So you're going to want to give an AI rights because it will seem like a living entity. The moment you give it rights, then you can't turn it off, right? So it would probably be a mistake to give it rights like the way that humans have rights. So you want to make sure that people know that they would not be violating any rights by turning it off or destroying it.

Well, apparently this is the week of the Consumer Electronics Show. So we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff we hadn't seen before be introduced at the show. And one of them, according to Interesting Engineering, is a new humanoid robot butler that can handle coffee, laundry, and window cleaning and other stuff.

Now do you believe that that's being rolled out this week and that Optimus can't do it? As far as I know. But some company called Swissbot has launched its first humanoid robot. And allegedly it can basically be a butler and a house cleaner and all that.

But there's another company that has a concept where instead of having a robot that could do all those things — that's too hard — they put a bunch of robots in your house but each of them are single purpose. A robot would be saying too much about them. But for example, one of the things in your house could be a Roomba, which is that little vacuum cleaner that goes around. But one of them could also be something that controls your shades. There'd be another one that might control security. But each of them could be a separate device. And the effect of it would be you'd be living in this house that's very robot and AI driven, but there wouldn't be one robot that's doing it. It would be whatever specialized robot.

And I thought that sounds like the ultimate nightmare. You know, I've got the Alexa system and I spend so much time just trying to debug that thing and it deprograms itself from the light switches all the time. So I'm trying to imagine putting me in a house where I've got 15 types of robots. I would spend all of my time doing tech support. So that doesn't work. I hate to say it, but you're not going to make me live in the robot automated house with 15 robots, all special purpose.

All right, time for a sip and we'll talk about Trump.

So I saw a Laura Loomer post. I guess she asked Trump on Air Force One about Colombian President Petro and what's up with him. And Trump said, you know, Colombia is very sick, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine, but he's not going to be doing it very long. And when Laura followed up and said — I guess he was also asked, I don't know who asked — if the US military would go after him the same way they went after Maduro. That's we're talking about the head of Colombia. And Trump said, quote, "Sounds good to me."

So this is again Trump negotiating, giving him plenty of warning by saying basically we're not going to put up with it. And you can either work with us or leave the country, but the one thing that's not going to change is we're not going to put up with it. Now of course since Trump has built this asset that he does what he says, that's got to rattle him quite a bit.

Now Laura Loomer also said in her post I saw today that Zohran Mamdani, the assemblyman of New York City, he recently held a private and secret meeting with Petro, the head of Colombia. He had that meeting in New York City where allegedly he expr