How To Survive Our Uncertain Future

May 31, 2017

Could online communities create underground markets and economies that hold the key to surviving the upcoming technological disruptions? Let’s discuss.

LINKS LINKS LINKS:

The interview I reference in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWoyn…

TRANSCRIPT:

I was watching an interview the other day where they were talking about how apparently there are billionaires who are preparing for the kind of economic collapse I was talking about on a previous video.

Tech entrepreneurs who are plugged into the latest market news and know what’s happening with AI and are building bunkers and doing survivalist training to prepare for what’s coming.

Many are worried that as automation and artificial intelligence starts disrupting more and more industries and people start to suffer, that they’ll rise up all French Revolution style against the businessmen and tech leaders like themselves who made all that technology possible.

But I don’t think people will rise up against technology, that same technology makes it possible for them to watch their favorite TV show on their phone and post pictures of their food.

But I do think, and made the argument in my last video, that people will turn on each other.

Start blaming other groups of people for their misfortune.

But in the midst of this discussion, one of the people just kind-of blurted out something that really stuck with me. He said we need to build communities, not bunkers.

I think as trust in our institutions starts to fall apart, more than ever before we’ll need to rely on each other and our social circles for support.

I mean, you only need to look at the growth of Go Fund Me to see it starting to happen.

People who are squeezed by the economy may start to opt out of the system and join these community marketplaces.

Throw into the mix the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and you have whole off-the-grid economies that function completely independent from the banking and commerce system.

A cellular society of underground communities with decentralized self-sustaining economies just doing their own thing while the world burns.

Now, if it feels like I just keep talking about this, it’s because it’s important.

Most people don’t see the big picture, they’ve just got their heads down trying to live their lives and are so caught up in the day to day that when big systemic change starts to happen around them, it looks like something else.

It looks like something conspiring against them, either the elites above them with a boot on their neck or the lower class below them trying to take what they have.

The more we can get people to understand that these changes are inevitable, that it’s a much, much bigger force at work that is completely indifferent to them and their situation, something that is beyond any human’s control, the better.

Because humanity, and humans… are two completely different things.

Just like an ant colony acts as a singular unit, an emergent super organism, that has objectives that are totally different than that of an ant.

Humanity is the emergent super organism created by the natural collective machinations of humans.

Now, the ant metaphor may sound extreme because after all, we’re humans, we’re conscious, advanced creatures, not mindless little automatons, we have free will and reason and emotions…

But there is a foundational algorithm to our decisions and behaviors that, spread out over 7 billion people, creates humanity. A completely separate entity with completely different objectives. And humanity always moves in the direction of technological progress.

Humanity is not nostalgic. Humanity just keeps moving forward. Humanity has had a lot of setbacks because people didn’t understand this and wanted to turn things back the way they used to be.

This forward progress has always and is now disrupting the world of industry and commerce, and the way that disruption affects the average person is not always positive. Or fair.

I like Tim Urban’s description of the Human Colossus, I like putting a name on it, creating a separation between our personal motivations as people and the movements of our entire species as a whole.

But the more people understand that this is the natural flow of things and adjust accordingly instead of pointing the finger at other groups of people, the less likely this whole thing is to devolve into some kind of Mad Max style apocalyptic nightmare.

There is no divide and conquer here. There is only divide and fail. Build communities. Not bunkers.

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69-Question Lightning Round Video

May 30, 2017

This time around I got almost 70 questions and I answer them all right here. Grab a snack. It’s gonna take a while.
Support me on Patreon!
http://www.patreon.com/answerswithjoe

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LINKS LINKS LINKS:

Hilbert’s Unanswered Problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems

Millennium Prize Problems:
http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems

PBS Spacetime:

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I’ve Gone Viral!

May 14, 2017

…And by that, I mean I’m sick. For that reason, there won’t be a video this Monday.

Allow me to explain.

Many of you know about the skin treatment I’ve been doing for sun damage – if you don’t remember, here’s a reminder:

At the end of this video, I mention that I need to eventually do this treatment on my forearms. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing the last month or so. None of you had to see it because I’ve been wearing long-sleeve shirts in my videos, but it’s been fairly traumatic, especially as I was finishing up the treatment last week.

Ladies…

The flu-like symptoms that accompany this hit me pretty hard last weekend and I’ve been running at, tops, 70% since then.

So this last week I got an outbreak of canker sores in my mouth, which is not unexpected with this treatment, so I didn’t think anything of it, except it was a pretty huge outbreak, to the point I can barely eat. And my lips have been insanely chapped. I just figured it was a strong reaction to the medicine.

Then, Thursday morning, I woke up to find weird spots all over my hands…

So… That’s new.

I immediately assumed it was the supplements I was taking.

Oh right… I didn’t mention the supplements.

Last time I visited my dermatologist, she recommended I take a couple of supplements for the sun damage and I just happened to start taking them last week as I was wrapping up the Zyclara treatment. One of the side effects was a “niacin flush” and I figured these spots were a part of that.

Considering that this flush could also be inducing the kind of inflammation that was causing the extra-nasty outbreak of canker sores, I stopped taking them and reached out to my dermatologist to see if this was an expected side effect. I sent an email. She called me immediately.

(On one hand, it sucks when you can’t get a hold of your doctor, but nothing is more worrying than when a doctor is super responsive. It’s never a good sign.)

Turns out this is not an expected side effect of the supplements that she’s ever seen. But they are symptoms of an outbreak that’s been going around. A virus called Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease.

Why is it called that? Because it causes outbreaks of sores on your hands, your feet, and your mouth. Clever.

I nervously checked the bottom of my feet and saw that, yep, I got spots there, too. Great.

It’s a virus that’s very common amongst toddlers, but anybody can get it. And since I get diseases that match my mental maturity, there we are. And because it’s a virus, there’s nothing you can really do about it but let it run its course.

It’s been especially rough the last couple of days. I barely left the couch or the bed yesterday and am basically on a smoothie diet. The symptoms come and go in waves. Sometimes I’ll feel perfectly fine, and then an hour later I can’t peel myself off the couch, my mouth hurts so much I can barely talk and my hands and feet feel like they’re covered with splinters. I rarely go to bed before midnight normally and I was in bed at 8:00 last night. And slept at least 3 hours during the day.

I’m a mess right now is what I’m saying.

One more thing about me is I don’t work through sickness. I lay my ass down and let my body focus all its energy on fighting the disease. I’d rather be flat on my back for a few days and then get back to 100% than try to push through it and drag it out for weeks and months. I know I’m lucky that I can take some time when I need to do that – I haven’t always been so lucky and there’s far too many people out there who can’t.

So, there won’t be a video out this week. It sucks. I finally had a content schedule set up and I’m going to have to push everything back. I’m spending that time (in bed) focusing on behind-the-scenes stuff like getting the podcast worked out on the website.

But I’ll be back soon. Thanks for understanding. You guys are the best.

(Unless you aren’t understanding and hold a grudge against me. In which case I’ll come over and spit in your mouth.)

Cheers,

-Joe

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The Dark Side Of The Singularity

May 01, 2017

Or… How To Not Be A Horse.
Automation and AI promise to usher in an era of amazing productivity and innovation. But they also threaten our very way of life.

Partial Transcript:

For hundreds, even thousands of years, the horse was humanity’s go-to form of transportation. And in 13 years, that all changed.

Right now, we are on the cusp of a technological disruption that will make the switch from horses to cars look like switching from Coke to Pepsi.

So we talk a lot on this channel about exponential growth, artificial intelligence, the singularity, and that’s a lot of fun, but there is a dark side to all this change, one that really needs to be talked about because the way we respond to it is going to significantly alter our future as a species.

The BBC released a report just a few weeks ago that said that 30% of jobs are going to go away in the next 10 years because of automation.

In the U.S., we’ve heard a lot over the last election about the proverbial coal miners and our current president specifically campaigning to bring back coal jobs.

But coal is just one of hundreds of industries that are taking advantage of employees that can work 24/7, never need a bathroom break, never sleep, never make a mistake and work twice as fast. Oh, and you don’t have to pay them.

Factories already decimated by outsourcing are now losing even more jobs to automation. And as automation becomes more sophisticated, more industries are at risk.

The transportation sector actually makes up 25% of the jobs in the United States, if you can believe that. A full quarter of the population. And autonomous cars… They’re pretty much here, guys.

Famously, the Tesla Model 3, going into production this year, will have autonomous capability, though it may not have the software available, it will have the hardware ready for it.

But less famously, there are a lot of other car companies trying to beat Tesla to market with this. Nissan has a fully self-driving prototype in development that they took a drive in on Fully Charged and it was spooky how good it was.

Cadillac is so bullish on self-driving technology, they spent millions of dollars to create a lidar map of every highway in the United States using their own proprietary system.

This way their cars won’t just rely on sensors and GPS to find their way, the Cadillac system will contain a 3D map of everything, including the roadsigns.

Google’s working on a car, Apple supposedly is working on a car, but the people who are really big on this technology are the service providers.

Uber made over 2 billion dollars last year. Imagine how much they could make if they didn’t have to pay their drivers…

Uber has been working for years on a transportation fleet of autonomous cars, and even Ford has made some intentions known of pivoting in a similar direction.

Many are predicting that cars will go from a retail industry to a service industry, with Peter Diamandis saying that in ten years, car ownership will be an outdated idea.

The fact of the matter is, you can be for automation or against it, you can agree with its use or not, but this is happening. And we need to be ready for it.

Some people are talking about a basic minimum income, a flat amount of money that everybody in a society makes, as a safety net to keep people above water. This is an interesting idea that’s even being tested in some places.

There is a coming change on a fundamental and massive level in this world. One that is filled with amazing advancements and technological wonders. The question is, will we be able to change with it?

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Moore’s Law Is Ending – Here’s 7 Technologies That Could Bring It Back To Life

April 18, 2017

SUMMARY:

Gordon E. Moore was one of the co-founders of Intel and first proposed was came to be known as Moore’s Law, which predicted that computer power would double every 2 years.

For nearly 50 years, the industry kept pace with this prediction, but in recent years there’s been a slowdown. 2 main reasons are heat and the quantum tunneling effect that occurs at the atomic scales.

Some of the technologies that have been theorized to break through this barrier include:

Graphene processors. Graphene carries electricity far better than traditional silicon processors, but is currently very expensive to produce.

Three Dimensional Chips. Some manufacturers are experimenting with 3-D chips that combine processing and memory in one place to improve speed.

Molecular transistors. Transistors that use a single molecule to transfer electricity.

Photon transistors. These take electrons out of the process entirely and replaces them with laser beams.

Quantum computers. These long-hyped machines could perform multiple calculations at once by using the superposition of quantum particles to process information.

Protein computers. These use folding proteins to make calculations.

And finally, DNA computers. DNA is the perfect data storage device, allowing scientists to store 700 terabytes of information in only one gram. But it can also be used in logic gates and are being tested in a processing capacity.

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Zeno’s Paradox and the Planck Length

March 30, 2017

 

Zeno was an ancient philosopher/cult member who had some interesting thought experiments regarding infinity.
LINKS LINKS LINKS:

VSauce’s video on Supertasks:

https://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/units/3/textbook/04.php
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-planck-length-explain-resolve-Zenos-Paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

====================

TRANSCRIPT:

Zeno was in a cult.

Back in ancient Greece, hero cults were a thing, and kind-of a big thing. A Hero in Greek culture was a man who had died and was now revered as not quite godlike, but close.

They were somewhere between man and God.

And followers would build temples in their names and establish churches around them, and devout followers would pledge their lives to their ideals.

But Zeno was a part of the first known hero cult based around a philosopher. A philosopher named Ameinias of Elea, who created the Eleatic School of Philosophy.

The Eleatics, led by the Philosopher Parmenides, believed that the senses cannot be trusted to reach truth, that only by thinking and logic can you arrive at truth.

They also believed that change and even motion was nothing but an illusion brought about by our senses.

To prove this idea, Zeno posited a series of paradoxes, the most famous being the Arrow paradox and the Achilles and the Tortoise Paradox.

Much like my spinning example earlier, the arrow paradox says that for an arrow to get from the bow to a target, it must pass through an infinite number of halfway points to get there, and the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox takes the use of movement a bit further by saying that if Achilles were racing a tortoise and gave the tortoise a head start that every time he got halfway to the tortoise, the tortoise would have moved forward a small amount, therefore even though he’s going much faster, could he ever actually catch the tortoise?

Now logic says that of course the arrow reaches the target, there’s not some invisible field keeping it from touching, and of course Achilles beats the tortoise.

These are some of the first examples of a rhetorical device called reductio ad absurdum, where you disprove a statement by showing that it inevitably ends with an absurd result.

Other versions of this that came later include Gabriel’s cake, which says if you slice a piece of cake in half, then slice one of those halves in half, and again and so on into infinity, and then stack each of those layers on top of each other, the cake would stretch to infinity.

Now these are all space paradoxes, but there’s also one that divides time called Thompson’s Lamp.

It says you take one minute and turn a lamp on and off at every halfway division, so turn it on at 30 seconds, turn it off at 15 seconds, turn it back on at 7.5 seconds, on at 3.75, and on and on until it’s blinking so fast we wouldn’t be able to see the difference. When the minute passes, is the lamp on or off?

Now, there have been countless resolutions of Zeno’s paradox through the years, some philosophers going so far as to reasoning that space and time don’t exist… which is kind-of what Zeno was going for…

But mathematical constructs worked to prove that the sum of infinitely decreasing quantities could result in a finite number.

And the idea for a limiting value to an infinite process is central to calculus, which relies on infinitesimals in order to ascribe a finite number to an infinite number of pieces.

Thanks, Sir Isaac Newton!

But maybe the easiest answer is simply that you can’t divide time and space forever. There might be a real, physical limit to smallness. Enter Max Planck.

Max Planck was one of the most substantial physicists of the early 20th century who proposed an elemental size to the fabric of spacetime, which he called a Planck Length.

The Planck Length is insanely small. It’s 1.6×10-35 meters.

To give you an idea of how small that is, This (graphic – 15 zeroes) is the length of a proton. To get to Planck’s length, you have to add not 5 (graphics change for each), not 10, not 15, but 20 zeroes. It’s one hundred quintillionth the length of a proton.

He came to this by combining three fundamental constants, Gravity, the speed of light, and his own Planck’s constant.

And from there, he created Planck Time, the time it takes for light to travel one planck length.

So if there truly is a smallest indivisible length of time and space, Zeno’s paradox is solved. But many still aren’t so sure.

 

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Why Is The Speed Of Light The Speed Of Light?

February 20, 2017

Today I answer another question from my 50-question lightning round video, this one on the speed of light.

Transcript:

So when we talk about the speed of light, the first thing to remember is that light is just a sliver of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, ranging from gamma rays to radio waves.

So we’re really talking about the speed of electromagnetism.

James Clerk Maxwell was the genius who first described the properties of electromagnetism into physics equations.

From these equations, we can calculate the speed of light. 299,792 kilometers per second.

Einstein was able to prove through his theory of special relativity that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down for a person in that relative frame. And if you were to go the speed of light, time would stop altogether.

So if you were able to travel faster than light through spacetime, time itself would actually flip. Time would go backwards. And that would break causality.

Effect would precede cause, which is impossible. The speed of light is the speed of causality.

The other prediction that supports a speed limit is the idea that inertia increases as velocity approaches the speed of light. That means mass increases.

So mass is a speed impediment. Nothing that has mass can go the speed of light.

But if you are massless, you can only go the speed of light, because you have no speed impediments. And photons are massless particles.

Particles that must travel at the speed of light and because they are traveling at the speed of light, time stands still from its point of view.

So really, that video I talked about earlier is all wrong, from the perspective of the photon, that journey would have occurred instantly.

So when you look at a star at night, that massless photon might have traveled a million light-years to reach you, but its experience was instantaneous.

Now there is another theory that’s a little controversial but starting to gain some ground.

It says that the speed of light is actually caused by quantum vacuum fluctuations.

See, quantum field theory claims that empty space is actually not empty at all but filled with quantum fluctuations and virtual particles popping in and out of existence.

And two different teams of researchers have calculated c using electromagnetic properties of the quantum vacuum, so it could be that the quantum foam of virtual particles and fluctuations may be slowing the speed of light.

But what if the speed of light wasn’t the speed of light?

What if Galileo was right and the speed is infinite?

Then nothing would exist. Because matter is made of energy, it would take infinite energy to create any mass. Time and space wouldn’t exist because all things communicate with each other instantaneously. Cause and effect wouldn’t exist.

But if the speed of light were slower, that might be even cooler. Because then we could see all the way back to the big bang.

The speed of light, of course, is just one of many constants in the universe, like gravity, the specific charges and masses of the fundamental particles, quantum effects, and the list goes on.

A whole handful of very specific constants that if they were just a little bit different, we would never exist.

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