Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 37

Reid Hoffman Interviews an AI Cloned Version of Himself to See How Good It Really Is

When you are a notoriously geeky tech billionaire, having an AI clone of yourself built and trained on all your books and public videos and then interviewing yourself probably seems like a good idea. Netflix founder Reid Hoffman just did that and started by asking his clone to summarize one of his books in the fictional Star Trek language of Klingon.

It’s a bit of fun to introduce a wildly controversial idea: realistic AI clone is nearly indistinguishable from the real person it was trained on.

As...

Playgrounds and Swing Sets Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore

Here’s a radical thought that really shouldn’t be: what if playgrounds were designed for teenagers instead of younger kids? At the Anna C. Verna Playground in Philadelphia’s FDR Park, that’s exactly what they did and it’s getting rave reviews and lots of usage so far.

The idea is an intriguing one because it challenges our perceptions of how spaces should be used. Great urban design should work for as many people as possible. It’s also why I love this idea of designing a playground to remind peop...

Can Seaweed Mining Become the Next Billion Dollar Industry?

A tiny branch of the US Department of Energy focused on high-risk projects just awarded $5 million dollars to three startup ventures that are each independently “investigating whether seaweed can serve as a practical source of critical materials, such as platinum and rhodium, as well as rare earth elements, including neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium, and dysprosium.” 

Aside from protecting coastlines, sheltering marine life and even serving as a food source for humans … scientists think seaweed may ...

What The New Ban on Non-Competes Actually Means for Companies

This week the FTC issued a rule this week that bans non-compete clauses, estimating that up to 8,500 new startups will be created as a result of the ban. The federal agency describes the downsides of non-competes this way: 

“Noncompetes are a widespread and often exploitative practice imposing contractual conditions that prevent workers from taking a new job or starting a new business. Noncompetes often force workers to either stay in a job they want to leave or bear other significant harms and c...

How Water Flipping, Excess Solar Energy and Shifting Hydropower Stations Show Us the Future Is All About Water

The skies were orange above Athens and that was just one of several climate and energy related stories this week that offered a glimpse into stories we will see more frequently in the coming years.

The first example is a concerning story of a tiny Arizona town where a private company purchased land and water rights only to flip the property and sell back the water rights to a local town for a huge profit. The concern is that more water speculators will “scavenge agricultural land” and engage in l...

The Invisibility Shield Can Help You Actually Disappear … Now Available on Kickstarter

Hiding during a game of paintball. Doing a magic trick. Avoiding detection by real-life spyware. These are just a few of the potential uses for a new invisibility shield 2.0 that’s taking pre-orders on Kickstarter right now. This “portable cloaking device” works by bending light around you.

The more scientific explanation is “the lenses diffuse the ambient light that’s reflected by your body across the entire front surface of the Shield. That said, the lenses also diffuse the light reflec...

Why Industrial Tourism Is One of the Fastest Growing Trends in Travel

Portugal is one of several countries investing big into industrial tourism – a term that describes experiences where travelers can visit factories to see how products get made. Of course, vineyards and liquor distilleries along with many food manufacturers have long offered this sort of experience. But Portugal is taking it one step further. In São João da Madeira, you can visit a pencil making factory, or a hat factory or facility that makes high end belts. The entire idea is a perfect twist on...

Detroit Rides “Post Bankruptcy Energy” To Become America’s Most Unlikely Boomtown, According to WSJ

About ten years ago, no one would have said the city of Detroit would be sitting at the perfect crossroads of multiple urban trends. Around then, the city was in the midst of declaring bankruptcy. That moment created a new sense of urgency among those wealthy enough to do something about the future of the city, and many of them stepped up. Dan Gilbert, the billionaire co-founder of home lender Rocket Mortgage, moved the company headquarters to downtown Detroit and bought more than 130 buildings ...

Why Amazon Is Filled with Garbage Ebooks and How They Could Fix It

An article from Vox this week explored why exactly Amazon is filled with so many garbage ebooks, and the answer is infuriatingly straightforward. AI makes it easy to generate content, Amazon makes it too easy to publish large volumes of ebooks with minimal quality standards and effective growth hacker marketing makes it easy to promote these ebook to unsuspecting consumers on the largest online retail platform in the world.

Recently Amazon, in a half-hearted attempt to address the problem, limite...

What Would You Put In the “Forever Library” to Archive Human Existence for a Billion Years?

Several million years from now when future civilizations or aliens or whatever is around then look back on human existence, at least they will know how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear back in 1983. That’s just one of the archives of humanity that is part of the Galactic Legacy Archive–a library of humanity that has been sent to the moon where scientists estimate it will last for billions of years barring an unlikely meteor strike.

The entire library is on a disc made of...