The Rail You Are On

12 entries, in the order they happened: 12 where the historical record answers. The full timeline holds 17 entries for this era; some of them are only there.

Every entry in this era

• 11 September 2001The towers and the Patriot ActForty-five days after the towers fall, the Patriot Act is signed: business records opened to collection on orders the subject never sees, and banks…
• 2001–2002Magnetometry at Uruk; the Book of GiantsIn 2001 and 2002 a magnetic survey at Uruk finds brick structures in the old bed of the Euphrates, where the epic says Gilgamesh was buried, and it…
• 2003 — a hypothesis, askedUruk and the 2003 invasion: a hypothesisA hypothesis, labelled speculation and asked rather than dismissed: that the unopened structure at Uruk, read as Gilgamesh's burial, was among the…
• 2009Aadhaar and biometric paymentIndia's Aadhaar begins enrolling people by their fingerprints and eyes, and a phone payment system launches that a fingerprint authorises; the face…
• 2012CRISPR-Cas9Doudna and Charpentier show that Cas9 can be aimed at any DNA sequence you name. The line of descent, which could always be struck from outside…
• 21 November 2012 → 25…Autonomy in weapons directivesNo government has acknowledged letting a machine decide to kill a particular person.
• June 2014 → blacklists 2018–20The social credit outline and the blacklistChina's State Council publishes a social-credit outline; there is no single national score on every citizen, but by 2018 the courts' blacklist of…
• June 2017 → 30 November 2022The transformer, then public releaseEight researchers publish “Attention Is All You Need” to improve machine translation; scaled up, the architecture opens to the public on 30 November…
• February 2022Accounts frozen without a court orderA G7 government orders banks to freeze the property of listed people with no warrant or court order; a public inquiry finds it lawful, and eleven…
• 2022 → 2026Beneath the Holy SepulchreExcavation beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre finds an old quarry filled in and planted with olive and vine, beside rock-cut tombs: the kind of…
• February 2025Encryption withdrawn from a national marketA company withdraws its strongest encryption from a whole country rather than build the access a secret notice under that country's surveillance law…
• documented, present tense…Model collapseTrain a made mind on its own output, generation after generation, and it does not fail at random: the rare cases go first.