Hello from the French Alps! It’s been a while.
I’m very late with this one — apologies. I’ve been vacationing with family in Italy and have been minimizing my digital usage, a perpetual battle wherein my most productive screen time is often the first to go. Luckily, I had a few hours this past weekend on the train up from Florence, as well as a couple shots from the espresso cart that apparently comes with longer Trenitalia rides (Amtrak, start taking notes!).
As we climbed towards Milan, I flipped through the 604 ideas, musings, and links I wrote down since my last Monthly Thoughts. Yes, I capture too many notes. Here are some of the tidbits I wanted to share most.
📖 6/18
The sentiment behind this tweet is one I encounter often:
The description of a novel is not the argument of the novel. If a good novel has an argument at all, then it will be the novel itself. You can’t know what the book stands for without reading the book.
But if a novel has an argument, the novel itself might not even be it. Sometimes, only the author can ever know what was truly meant.
Likewise, our experience of reality itself is merely a description. Even the most powerful superintelligence, unless it is the Simulation itself, can only asymptotically strive toward understanding the Universe.
As such, no model embedded in this reality can ever deem it fully predictable. The possibility of surprise will always lurk. Awe will never disappear.
👶 6/21
Elon Musk seems hell bent on having lots of children. So far he’s had 10, but I’m surprised he hasn’t had more. With his fortune, he could be funding surrogate mothers at scale. I’m glad we don’t yet live in a world where all billionaires have thousands of children, but I fear we soon will.
📜 6/26
I love r/Place. It’s a simple system for humans to create something far more beautiful and complex than any single human could ever create. I’d love to see what r/Constitution might look like, where all humans get to collaboratively edit the laws they’d like to see globally upheld.
In hindsight, a potential issue: it might be prone to edits like this one.
🎚️ 6/28
I asked GPT-4 for examples of systems that are designed to never be turned off. It came up with a dozen:
Power Grids, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Emergency Services, Hospitals and Healthcare Systems, Data Centers, Air Traffic Control Systems, Satellite Systems, Telecommunication Networks, Banking and Financial Systems, Water and Sewage Systems, Public Transportation Systems, Nuclear Power Plants
That is so many more than I thought there would be. A super-intelligent AI could easily someday assume a critical role in society similar to these “always-on” systems (and likely will play a central role in many of these existing ones), so definitely don’t count on being able to “turn it off” if it starts misbehaving.
💀 7/1
A tech billionaire status symbol seems to be to have a compound in New Zealand as a way to stake out the apocalypse. To me, that seems quite silly; I doubt an AI apocalypse, were it to happen, would spare any part of the Earth’s surface, Mars, or even the Milky Way (given enough time)
A smarter hedge — though a dark one — might be securing easy access to a hypoxic chamber: gradual oxygen deprivation is probably the most peaceful way to die, so the billionaires would be spared whatever horrible end the AI had in store for them. Pair that with a DMT vape: three puffs and they’d be lifted into probably the only mental state appropriate for facing death. Of course all of that’s assuming they’re able to evacuate the oxygen from the chamber fast enough when the shit hits the fan.
⛓️ 7/4
Well July clearly started on a dark note for me, but I’m glad to report I’ve been finding a lot of joy in life lately. I would in fact credit this tweet for helping me the most:
I’ve been living by these words to immensely beneficial effect: striving to always either be fully present, or thinking about what I will do next. No more ruminating over regrets; the past is only water under the bridge.
♐️ 7/8
In addition to RLHF, we should make RLAF a mandatory part of AI development: reinforcement learning with astrological feedback. Models must be ascribed the personality of their Zodiac sign. Make GPT-3.5 a Sagittarius, GPT-4 and Claude Pisces, and Claude-2 a Cancer.
🌾 7/9
These laser weed-killer farming bots are neat, but I’d love to see bots dedicated to permaculture: geo-tagged, solar-powered drone fleets that can recognize and snuff out invasive species, and optimally support native growth. There’s definitely no way that could go wrong.
🥁 7/10
A friend of mine and I came up with some words to live by:
The late bird sleeps in
Count your eggs before they’ve hatched
Keep your acquaintances close and your neighbors closer
The thesis of Born to Run is that ancestral humans ran all the time, so our bodies are built for running. But with the accumulated death toll of all the wars humans have fought, I believe we’ve been more heavily selected for efficiency at an altogether different mode of movement. This will be the thesis of my upcoming book: Born to March.
🏮 7/11
A few years ago I came across this fascinating paper detailing the maximum density city that optimal land use can sustainably support, given energy and agricultural requirements. Their calculation assumes full reliance on solar, wind, and geothermal power, and comes up with a density akin to that of Los Angeles. But what about the true source of geothermal power: nuclear fission? Surely if you tapped into all of the radioactive elements below a sliver of land, you could sustainably support many more residents for millions of years.
Another way to improve the energy budget per unit of land: lights that only activate when we need them. Imagine a dystopian future where everyone is plunged in pitch black darkness until they start moving, at which point light would illuminate whatever action they’d need to take next, beamed only at near-infrared optical wavelengths to maximize photon-encoded information per unit of energy. I’d love to see this concept explored in a movie, but hopefully not real life.
📝 7/15
Among the many reasons I love Numberphile is that it has quietly revolutionized the form of the interview, so as to enable advanced mathematical concepts to be conveyed via a simple conversation. It did so by adding a sheet of brown paper for interviewees to scribble on. Their 15-minute videos are far more effective than many university lectures I’ve sat through.
This makes me think that the world needs a show where the host hands guests iPads and asks them to explain difficult concepts using diagrams. The bit rate for conveying knowledge would be so much higher than podcasts, or even regular TV interviews.
🐮 7/16
Ahimsa Milk would be a hugely profitable business model when selling to a New York audience of vegetarians and aspiring vegans. Imagine a cruelty-free pizza slice — it would be a hit. It almost makes me want to start such a milk farm upstate myself, offering petting zoos and guided tours, and selling overpriced cheeses and yoghurts in the city’s farm markets.
⛪️ 7/24
I saw Piero della Francesca’s beautiful fresco, the Legend of the True Cross, in Arezzo. It’s quite an amazing set of scenes; I’d love to see it made into a movie.
Large parts of the fresco were missing, erased by the ages. It made me wonder if art conservators will ever rely on AI to offer best guesses of what those blanks might have contained — restorative fill, if you will.
🏛️ 7/31
I find it unfair that thin majorities often grant total control of legislative bodies. I wonder if legislative sessions that worked more like draft picks might work better: representatives get to take turns allocating funds or settling important issues, and the order of picks is determined by the number of votes each representative won their district by.