The Curious Mind: The Banned Eric Schmidt Interview, Outerspace and Blackholes, What Does It Mean To Be Human?, Is Your VC Fund Any Good?, Summer Reflection Framework, News and Charts You Missed....
August 22, 2024
I am sharing this weekly email with you because I count you in the group of people I learn from and enjoy being around.
If you missed last week’s discussion: Nate Silver on Battle Of The Elites, A Revolution in Economic Theory, Tyler Cowen's Average Is Over, How Goldman Uses AI, Co-Intelligence....
Quotes I Am Thinking About:
"The only constant in life is change."
- Heraclitus
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
- Charles Darwin
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
- William Butler Yeats
"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
- Pablo Picasso
"Be the change you wish to see in the world."
- Mahatma Gandhi
“The world is going to disappoint you. You’re probably going to fail more than you succeed — in anything. That’s just the way it works. Life is iteration. It is, by and large, trial and error. No one has ever lived your life before.”
- Adam Wright
A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:
1. Eric Schmidt’s banned Stanford Interview. Eric Schmidt presented at Stanford and the video was subsequently removed from YouTube.
A bunch of interesting ideas.
What’s going to change with AI in the next 2 years?:
Large context windows (10M tokens): This will solve the recency problem. If it takes 18 months to train a model, the model is out of date. Large context windows solve this, because everything that happened since model was built can be added in.
Agents are essentially LLMs with state and memory.
Text to Action: enables text to trigger actions, such as running a python program.
AI Infrastructure and NVIDIA:
Massive Capital Requirements: $100-300 billion investments reshaping the tech industry. NVIDIA's CUDA dominance and efforts to maintain leadership but also emerging competitors and the search for post-GPU AI compute
The Economic Transformation and Future of Work:
AI-Driven Productivity Leap: Potential doubling of knowledge worker productivity. Shift towards human-AI collaborative roles. Need for AI literacy across disciplines. Emphasis on creativity, critical thinking, and AI interaction skills
Entrepreneurship in the AI Era: Rapid prototyping and iteration as key success factors. Potential for AI to lower barriers to entry in various industries
Frontier AI Research and Development:
Lots of Areas of Progress: Post Transformer Architecture could lead to potential for significant leaps in AI capabilities. Look for impact in breakthroughs in chemistry, materials science. There can be synergies between quantum technologies and AI.
2. Re-listened to this one this week. If you are into space, science fiction and and the origins of life this is a must-listen.
They discussed a bunch of cool questions like: what actually happens as you approach the speed of light, if there is any chance of finding intelligent life out there in the universe, how big the universe actually is, the biggest questions we still have about black holes, how the moon was created, whether time is infinite or if the universe will ever end and much more...
The 4 BIG IDEAS:
Our Cosmic Rarity: Earth's habitability may be far more unusual than previously thought. The combination of our solar system's structure, Earth's large moon, our sun's stability, and our position in the galaxy could be exceptionally rare. This insight challenges our assumptions about the prevalence of life in the universe and offers a possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
The Fragility of Technological Civilizations: Advanced civilizations may be inherently unstable or self-limiting. The numerous existential risks we face (climate change, nuclear war, pandemics) could be common to all technological civilizations. This insight suggests that the greatest challenge for intelligent life might not be evolving, but surviving its own technological adolescence.
The Revolutionary Potential of Exomoon Discovery: Finding exomoons could be as transformative for astronomy and our understanding of the universe as the discovery of exoplanets was. Exomoons could potentially harbor life, influence planetary habitability, and fundamentally change our understanding of planetary system formation and dynamics.
The Mind-Bending Implications of Cosmic Deep Time: The universe's potential future spans trillions of years, dwarfing its current age. This vast timescale opens up possibilities for stellar engineering, the evolution of life in seemingly impossible environments, and raises profound philosophical questions about the nature of existence and humanity's cosmic significance.
Made me appreciate just how unique the earth and human life is and how large the universe and the potential ahead of us is.
For more on this, you can check out our old discussion on Toby Ord’s book: The Precipice.
3. What does it mean to be human? What is consciousness?
Demetri Kofinas (Hidden Forces) spoke with author and essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn, who writes on matters of philosophy and religion for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and other publications.
The conversation is titled: AI, Transhumanism, and the Future of Humanity.
They discuss what is the nature of reality, is consciousness fundamental to the universe, and what happens to us when we die?
**Transhumanism is the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints.
4 BIG IDEAS:
The Existential Dilemma of Post-Religious Meaning: What are societal implications of moving from religious to secular worldviews. The challenge of finding objective meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. The insufficiency of both religious certainty and materialist reductionism. The search for a middle ground that acknowledges mystery while embracing reason. The potential for new forms of spirituality or meaning-making in a secular context.
Transhumanism: The allure and dangers of seeking immortality through technology. Transhumanist ideas mirror and secularize religious concepts of transcendence. The philosophical implications of reducing consciousness to information. The potential loss of embodied human experience in pursuit of digital existence.
The Algorithmic Erosion of Human Autonomy: The shift from overt control to algorithmic nudging and prediction. The creation of feedback loops that narrow human experience and choice. The challenge of maintaining individual authenticity in a highly mediated world.
Reclaiming Authentic Human Experience in a Digital Age: The value of unmediated, embodied experiences in maintaining our humanity. The potential for technology to enhance rather than replace human connection. The importance of intentional technology use and digital mindfulness. The search for balance between technological progress and human essence.
See the work of folks like Cal Newport and Oliver Burkeman to deep dive into using technology intentionally.
4. If you missed last week’s discussion of Nate Silver’s new book, he spoke to Scott Galloway last week.
B. Summer Reflection Framework
Summer is a time to take stock and reflect.
This is a thoughtful and useful Annual Reflection Framework from Farnam Street with 7 questions to ask yourself, these two were my favourite for introspection and led to insights.
C. News And Charts You Might Have Missed:
1. The market for child diapers globally came to $46 billion while the market for adult diapers came in at $16.7 billion. The aging world and declining birth rates are leading to new needs for more adult diaper factories.
The unit sales of baby diapers slipped 1% last year, while the unit sales of adult diaper products are projected to grow 8% a year through 2030, at which point sales will hit $28 billion globally.
2. The rise in nonalcoholic and functional beverages is fueled by health-conscious younger consumers and an aging population, with over 40% of Americans planning to cut back on alcohol in 2024.
The functional beverage market, featuring ingredients like adaptogens and THC, has grown significantly post-pandemic, with global sales expected to hit $249.5 billion by 2026. Gen Z is driving the trend to reduce alcohol, with 61% aiming to cut back in 2024, though 80% of nonalcoholic beverage buyers still purchase alcoholic drinks.
Consumers prioritise health, with 75% believing functional beverages enhance energy, digestion, and cognitive function, and contribute to longer, healthier lives.
3. Most US consumers wrongly believe glass bottles are more sustainable than plastic, research suggested.
A study that asked 847 people to rank glass and plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard cartons for single-serve drinks in terms of environmental impact, found that glass was the most highly rated.
But glass, which is heavy and has high energy costs to make, is “among the least sustainable if you look at the whole packaging lifecycle,” one of the study’s authors said. Cardboard and plastic, which involve lower carbon emissions to make and transport, are both more sustainable options they say.
4. How To Set Priorities.
D. The Science and Tech Section
1. Carta's inaugural VC fund performance report looked at more than 1800 funds across six recent vintages and my friend Andrew Sarna did a good overview of the report.
P.S. Could you do me a favor ? This email takes many hours to put together, including hours of sourcing, curating and writing. If it is helpful to you, then do me a favor and hit the “heart” button so I know it’s useful to you.
interesting!
Great content, absorbing blog. Incredibly interesting finds!