Michael Muntisov's Blog

One of the problems with conventional nuclear power plants is that they rely on an extremely hazardous fuel which persists for thousands of years. What if we could engineer a reliable and simple technique for dealing with these nuclear power hazards? By using a radically different engineering approach, a Californian-based startup, Deep Fission Inc., say they have.

To manage hazards, every good engineer and risk manager knows about the hierarchy of hazard control. At the top is “elimination”...

There are multiple signs that climate action urgency is receding in developed countries. Is it because of growing geopolitical unrest? Concerns over western economies? Trumpian claims of a hoax? Or just plain climate fatigue? Whatever the reasons, it is reminiscent of the period straight after the Global Financial Crisis when the world’s attention turned to financial survival, and to the early 2020s when the COVID pandemic was top of mind.

In this post I summarize the excellent reporting in T...

Weaving themes as diverse as oceanography, social divides, artificial intelligence and many others, the genius of Richard Powers is on show again in his latest novel Playground. Powers’ main characters are a Quebecoise marine specialist, a nerdy computer entrepreneur from northside Chicago, his bête noir a literary genius from the southside, and the community of the island of Makatea in French Polynesia where the characters come together for the story’s resolution.

Powers’ ability to seamless...

Human progress has largely been achieved during cycles of open societies which institute dramatic and transformative change followed by cycles of closed thinking which stills or even reverses progress. We are currently in an ‘open’ phase which is under threat from forces wanting to return to ‘simpler’ times. That is the well-argued and credible thesis of the book Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg.

Norberg doesn’t formally define progress, but the context of his book suggests ...

Economist Kenneth Boulding once said that “anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Despite this warning, the mantra that “growth is good” remains barely questioned today.

Christopher Jones’ book The Invention of Infinite Growth provides an insightful review of how delivering economic growth has become the most powerful imperative in politics over the past seventy-five years ...

Most older people today are unaware that in their lifetimes the population of the planet has tripled and we have burned nearly 90% of all the fossil fuel ever consumed. Did the population boom cause the explosion in fossil fuel use or the other way around? Author Vaclav Smil gives some clues to the answer in his meticulously researched book Energy and Civilization: A History.

Using first principles Smil compares the energy available from manpower to horsepower, through to water power, steam p...

After organizing a successful meeting between blue urban liberals and red conservative rural folk in 2017, journalist Monica Guzman began to see political polarization in the USA as “the problem that eats other problems, the monster who convinces us that the monsters are us”. She vowed to do something more about it. The result is her book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. There are many lessons we can take from Guzman’s wor...

Why did Homo sapiens triumph over other Homo species? And then how did we become the dominant species on the planet? Academic Hanno Sauer addresses these questions and more in his insightful book “The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality.”

One reason for our success is that we, as a social animal, have a spontaneous and surprisingly flexible capacity for co-operation. Modern group experiments show that humans are intrinsically generous and altruistic but that an individual ...

Henry Lien’s book Spring Summer Asteroid Bird provides an introduction to a common form of Asian storytelling known in the West by its Japanese name kishotenketsu.

To understand and appreciate kishotenketsu we need to quickly recap the traditional three-act story structure. In this familiar structure the first act sets up the story and introduces the catalyst that propels the protagonist on their ‘hero’s journey’. By the end of the first act, we have met the main characters and understand the...

“Always invite AI to the table.” That’s the first rule for living and working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) according to Wharton Business School professor, Ethan Mollick. He argues that workers who figure out how to make AI useful for their jobs will be the most successful. To achieve this means constantly working with AI to understand its nuances, limitations and abilities.

Mollick is an AI optimist. He sees the tremendous potential and upside in AI technology and he believes we should m...