Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 19

AI Will Likely Crush the B2B Services Economy

Midjourney 5.2

I've been talking to my buddy Joel Parish about AI since, well, forever (2014?), and dinner last week was more of the same. This time we were riffing about the impact of AI on the economy, jobs, etc. Pretty Basic dinner convo for the Bay Area, honestly.

Anyway, we started thinking about how the economy breaks down into different sectors, and which ones would be hit hardest. Lots of groups have done similar analysis, including this latest one by McKinsey. That one focused on the upside though, similar to this piece I did recently. In this convo, however, we were thinking about the downside impact.

We started talking about services, which is where we think most of the impact will be. And we were talking about companies that exist to provide those services. Then we started thinking about the percentages.

Joel had the great idea to concentrate on the difference between B2B and B2C. B2C seems less vulnerable because the product or service is going directly from the creator to the buyer. We were in NOLA and were using restaurants as an example, where the chef can have a great idea, make the thing, and then serve it.

But B2B is different. It’s especially vulnerable to AI because it’s largely middleware. Not completely, but largely.

So after that conversation I decided to dig in a bit on possible impact, based on some numbers. First, how big is US GDP? Turns out it’s around $26 trillion or so.

Google

And how big is the services sector?

Google

77%.

That’s insane. Now for a harder piece. What percentage of that is B2B? Looks like around half again.

Google

Let’s call that 37% of GDP. So—according to these very rough estimates—37% of GDP is B2B Services.

AI Impact

So what percentage of that might be replaced by AI? That’s much harder to say because of all sorts of variables:

How long are we talking about?

Are we talking about GPT-4 level, or like AGI with a 150 IQ?

Which services? Not all of them are equally automatable.

So given those constraints, let’s ask (of course) ask AI. I seeded it with the information that AI at this particular moment (in the next 2-3 years) can:

Solve some creative problems

Analyze proposed solutions and give recommendations

Summarize nearly any sort of text content and reproduction it in various formats for various audiences

Write, correct, and recommend documentation and many other types of text-based artifact

Execute common tasks like sending emails, creating calendar invites, etc. via APIs

Given those (which I’d argue GPT-4 is getting very close to), here’s what it came back with.

From GPT-4

50-70% lost revenue, and 60-80% lost jobs! That’s ~60% of 37% of GDP, which is…22%.

22% of GDP.

Keep in mind this is all hand-wavy AI talking about AI, and based on estimates of estimates. But I honestly can’t find much flaw in the reasoning here.

More sci-fi stuff (but not really)

For giggles I decided to ask it to project based on a much smarter AI. Here’s what happens if you ask it to do the same numbers with an AGI (my definition here) level AI with an IQ between 120 and 160.

From GPT-4

That’s ~70% revenue loss, and ~80% job loss. Again, based on a whole lot of shenanigans, that doesn’t seem wrong to me.

What do we think this means?

Not much, really. This is all just napkin math stuff combined with science fiction. The main point was to say that the Services economy seems especially vulnerable to AI.

But that’s almost 80% of GDP. And B2B seems extra vulnerable, which is basically half of that, bringing us to something like 40% of GDP.

And GPT-4 thinks if AI hits it in any significant way we could see somewhere like 60-80% impact on the revenue and jobs in the sector.

I think our random guesses without any of this, um, “research”, was something like 50% to 90% of B2B being gutted by AI. So there’s a directional match anyway.

Now what?

I guess the takeaway would be for actual researchers to think about:

What the largest portions of the economy are

Which are most vulnerable to AI

How different levels of AI would impact them differently, since more advanced AI cuts deeper into high-skill knowledge and creative work

Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Why I Love Reading Biographies

I should read a lot more biographies. I’m never disappointed when I do, and I always extract so much wisdom from them.

I’ve been thinking about why that is.

I think it’s because good biographies of interesting people tend to highlight both insights and failures. They let us benefit from where others did something well or badly.

It’s almost like biographies extend our own lives. In terms of experience.

Of course all reading does that to some extent. But biographies are magnified versions of that. We’re literally watching someone grind and struggle and fail and get knocked down. And then get back up. And then try some more. And (usually) get some measure of success. Which is why there’s a book about them.

The biography superpower

To me the best insight I get from biographies is seeing the main character get crushed. That sounds bad, but it’s not. A biography is a zoomed-out timeline, where we can move left or right along it and learn the lessons.

So when I see someone got crushed as a kid. Or in college. Or at their first or fifth job. It teaches me resilience. Because then later in the book/timeline/story you find out they kept pushing. Or maybe they eventually got lucky.

Doesn’t matter.

What didn’t happen in any of these books is that the main character gave up. And after they gave up, success came to them and got them out of bed. That never happens. Or almost never.

What happens is the person keeps grinding. They keep being them. They keep failing. Falling down. Being called a failure. Being shit on. Being thought less of. And they eventually win.

That’s what I get from biographies. They’re like real-world pep-talks. They’re case studies in Stoicism. They’re case studies in resilience. They’re case studies in believing in yourself.

Read more biographies.

—

P.S.: Also, I just finished the Elon one. It wasn’t all that positive towards Elon, and don’t believe people who tell you it was if they haven’t read it. I thought it was quite balanced, and there was a lot of negative in there.

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The Great Bifurcation

The Great Bifurcation

I’m hoping this model isn’t too simple, but I’m willing to take the risk.

The world is largely split into those who who are doing the daily behaviors that bring them success, and those who aren’t doing those behaviors.

I call this The Great Bifurcation because technology magnifies the differences between those doing them and those who aren’t.

We have more access to business knowledge than ever before

We have more access to health information than ever before

We can now see exactly what successful people do day-to-day

We now have AI that can augment our knowledge and capabilities

But none of those matters if you’re not using them. The people at the top of the Bifurcation graphic are using them. Those on the bottom are not. Let’s make up a range and call that the top 10% of people in the US.

That means they are:

Disciplined enough to set strict, productive boundaries and goals and routines for themselves that they follow.

Reading high-quality books on a regular basis.

Controlling their calory intake and working out regularly.

Got an education or put in the work to self-teach to an equivalent level.

Spending their free-time reading and studying rather than playing video games or watching popular media.

Fixated on their output and contributions as their top metric behind family

10% might be generous there, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a small percentage.

Behavior > Identity

What’s most important about this whole model, and the only reason it interests me, is that it has little to do with the person’s past. Their race. Their gender. Their parents’ socio-economic status. Their traumas. The bad things that have happened to them in the past.

This model is an escape hatch from all of that. Or a trapdoor if you take the wrong path.

And to be clear, it’s 100% possible that many of those aspects of a person’s identity and experience could combine to make it harder for a person to see this fact, simply because they’re not exposed to this model and this way of seeing the world.

I’m one of those people, until relativity recently. I grew up in a 800sq/ft house. Didn’t go to college out of high school. Neither of my parents went to college. And while I was spoiled/blessed with a loving family, I was not guided to adopt any of these behaviors growing up in the way commonly seen with wealthy families.

The lie we’re told

I grew up thinking wealth and success were things you somehow magically had, or didn’t. I mean nobody told me that explicitly, but it’s kind of taught as a universal lesson where I grew up.

“The rich and successful got lucky somehow, or their parents were rich or successful.”, they say.

This is obviously true sometimes, and maybe even a lot of the time. But after a few decades of being a curious person I started noticing something super weird.

My thin friends didn’t eat that much

My smart friends read books

My rich friends were careful with money

I wasn’t too quick to catch on, honestly. I was like, hmm….could there be a link here? How is it that everyone I know who’s buffed goes to the gym all the time?

Freaky.

So like 15 years ago I started reading voraciously. And I started paying close attention to what successful people were doing.

How did they live their lives?

What did they eat?

When do they wake up?

How do they spend their free time?

What do they always do?

What do they never do?

And that’s when it hit me.

It’s just behaviors

That’s when I figured out the ultimately freeing truth: successful people just spend their time differently than unsuccessful people.

If that sounds like victim-shaming then your sensors are not calibrated in a positive way. I’m not saying some people don’t get completely screwed by the system. They do. Everyone knows that.

I’m talking about you. I’m talking about me. Regular people. People who aren’t blessed, who aren’t screwed, but they’re a little blessed and a little screwed. Regular folk.

We’re the ones who have a choice. Most of us have a choice between doing the things at the top of this chart vs. doing the things at the bottom.

Having self-discipline

Reading books to better yourself

Controlling your calories, eating the right foods, and exercising

Getting an education, even if it’s on your own

Spending your time bettering yourself, not playing games or watching useless media

Spending your time creating instead of consuming

That’s it. That’s what successful people do. And what unsuccessful people don’t. They do the opposite. Of course we could tweak the list, but that’s a pretty decent model.

The takeaway

This is incredibly empowering to me.

It removes the power of the past, and the power of my faults, and flaws, and weaknesses. It gives the power back to me.

These things aren’t easy to do (see self-discipline) but they produce results if you do them. We know this because they’re the few things that successful people have in common. Read a million biographies and podcasts and you’ll triangulate on a very similar list.

In short, I have a choice.

I can either take the bottom, easy path of not following a routine, not reading, being unhealthy, not bettering myself, wasting my time on shallow fun, and thinking about all the ways I got screwed in life…

Or I can follow a routine, read 50 books a year, dial in my diet and exercise, educate myself, avoid excessive TV/video games, and focus on my output.

Completely up to me. My choice.

That’s power. That’s agency. That’s freedom to make my own future.

I am not the Instagram-perfect example of this model. I don’t do everything on this list easily. I still slack on some things sometimes. And when I do I feel like shit.

The magic is that I’ve stopped wondering why.

When I wonder why I’m not feeling good and getting the outcomes I want, I just just do a check in. And within 30 seconds I find the problem.

That didn’t happen to me. I did it to myself. And I know the precise solution.

Get. Back. On. Track.

Behaviors > Background.

Summary

Society is separating more aggressively than ever into the successful and unsucessful

There’s a lot of luck involved in that, but a surprising percentage of the time it comes down to behaviors

Successful people tend to have very similar habits for what they do every day, every week, every month, etc.—and it reflects in their results

Most people don’t know this. They think “those people” have something they don’t, but it’s not true

The truth is that you can largely copy their results simply by copying their behaviors

Find the people you want to emulate, and change your habits and behaviors to match theirs.

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Topics, Insights, and Resources from the Neri Oxman and Lex Fridman Conversation

This conversation between Neri Oxman and Lex Fridman is one of the most beautiful discussions I’ve ever listened to.

Rating

10/10

Summary

See the full scale.

In this conversation, Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and founder of the company Oxman, discusses her work at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology.

She emphasizes the importance of novelty in multiple disciplines to create something truly innovative. She also discusses her work with various organisms, such as silkworms and bees, and how she uses computational templates to guide their behavior and create unique structures.

Oxman also talks about her new company's focus on creating products that work with nature, not against it, and her vision for a future where everything is grown, not built. She also touches on the potential of AI and AGI in her work, and the importance of love, gratitude, and attention in life and work.

Insightful Ideas/Concepts:

1. The concept of combining novelty in synthetic biology, material science, and computational design to create something novel.

2. The idea of revolutionizing how humans design and build products by working with nature, not against it.

3. The concept of nature as everything that isn't produced by humankind.

4. The idea of returning to a world where humans and nature are synergistically connected.

5. The concept of leveraging nature's wisdom through technology.

6. The idea of augmenting nature with computational power and bandwidth.

7. The concept of creating products that start from CO2 and end with something that can be thrown into the ground and grow an edible fruit plant.

8. The idea of creating a universal language for nature.

9. The concept of creating a product that is materially, computationally, and robotically novel.

10. The idea of creating a life support system for bees.

11. The concept of creating a synthetic apiary, an environment that is a perpetual spring for bees.

12. The idea of creating a product that is entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, and bio-renewable.

13. The concept of creating a high-throughput computational environment for nature.

14. The idea of creating a biodiversity chamber.

15. The concept of creating a functionalized fragrance that interacts with the environment.

16. The idea of creating a world where all things technosphere are designed as if they're part of the biosphere.

17. The concept of creating a world where driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars.

18. The idea of creating a world where buildings and cities augment and heal nature as opposed to their absence.

19. The concept of creating a world where you cannot separate between grown and made.

20. The idea of creating a world where everything and anything can be grown instead of built.

Interesting Facts:

1. 2020 was the crossover year when Anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet.

2. The first extinction event occurred around 440 million years ago.

3. The first technology was fire.

4. The first plants emerged from cyanobacteria.

5. The death of the first plants enriched the soil and created nutrients for new plants.

6. The first extinction event led to life as we know it.

7. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is an example of architecture that can evoke a spiritual reverence.

8. The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider.

9. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is an example of architecture that can evoke a spiritual reverence.

10. The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider.

Books, Stories, Podcasts, Articles, and Other Works/Resources:

1. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

2. "The Alchemist" by Paolo Coelho

3. "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy

4. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl

5. "The Godfather" film by Francis Ford Coppola

6. "2001: A Space Odyssey" film by Stanley Kubrick

7. "Particle Fever" documentary about the Large Hadron Collider

8. "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

9. "Megalopolis" film by Francis Ford Coppola

10. "Into the Woods" Broadway show

11. "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho

12. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl

13. "The Godfather" film by Francis Ford Coppola

14. "2001: A Space Odyssey" film by Stanley Kubrick

15. "Particle Fever" documentary about the Large Hadron Collider

16. "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

17. "Megalopolis" film by Francis Ford Coppola

18. "Into the Woods" Broadway show

19. "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho

20. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.

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How I Differentiate the Unsupervised Newsletter & Podcast

I have been thinking about the rise of completely AI-generated newsletters for a long time now, and discussing these concepts with Clint Gibler and Joseph Thacker and others.

Basically we all see the whole newsletter being overrun soon by AI. What used to take one of us 10-20 hours a week will soon be possible with an AI and a smart team. So here’s the question:

My first answer to that is the THOC Hierarchy, which I captured here:

The Hierarchy of Content

Humans are creative. It’s one of the things that separates us from the other animals. Other animals create things, but most don’t change what they create based on new ideas, or how they feel…

danielmiessler.com/p/the-hierarchy-of-content

It’s basically a ladder for how to make your content harder to copy, with collection and curation at the bottom, and pure original thought at the top.

That got me thinking about my show, Unsupervised Learning, and its various sections. I have lots of original content, but I also have news and discovery sections that are more vulnerable.

It ultimately got me thinking about the entire value proposition. And here’s what I came up with. I’ve shared it with the community and will likely put it somewhere in the pitch for the newsletter/community as well.

Let me know wha you think.

The UL Value Prop

There are thousands of newsletters out there that hit you with the latest news, the latest projects, the latest software, etc. I used to subscribe to them all but I had to stop. What I found was that they made me feel like I was doing something useful by reading them, but at the end of the day—or the month, or the year—it was just noise. Looking backward, my life was no different whether I subscribed to 20 of them and read every story, or didn’t read any of them.

Now when I look at any media I ask myself one simple question: “How often do I get something from this source that makes me see the world differently, brings me closer to people with common goals and interests, or causes me to change my behavior in a positive way?” If the answer is “almost never”, or even “not very often”, then I remove it from my inputs.

The goal of Unsupervised Learning—both the newsletter and the community—is to produce something that answers yes to all three of those. We’re not here to fill your inbox. We’re not here to “impress” you. We’re here to help you become the best version of yourself—both in work and in life. Full stop.

If this approach to newsletters and community appeals to you, I have but one word for you. Welcome.

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Defensive Security is a Glacier, and That's Ok

I think I just figured out why so many people burn out in defensive cybersecurity after a decade or two.

It's because Defense is a glacier that moves at its own speed, with occasional bursts due to major incidents and/or regulation.

But nothing within the glacier is dictating its speed.

That's our problem. We are the pebbles and sticks and moss that gets captured by the giant wall of ice as it creeps. And we scream at it from within.

Go faster! Make progress! I've been telling you about this problem for years, why are you not listening?

Us

Glaciers don't listen. They do precisely what they are going to do.

Think about the innovations that moved security forward the most in the last 15 years. I'm not sure what they are but let me throw a couple candidates out there.

SSL/TLS

Password Managers

PCI

FIDO2 "Passwordless" (Happening now)

Incorporation of Security into Windows and macOS

A few things jump out at me about this list, which I know isn't perfect.

First, everything here was inevitable. Second, everything here could only happen when it happened, and not a moment before. When a new technology gets invented, like SSL, that was the moment for it. And if that person/group hadn't done it, someone else would have.

It's the same with a thousand other ideas. They don't exist for all of human history, and then all of a sudden multiple people have the idea at the same time. A few examples:

Calculus: Both Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed calculus independently around the same time in the 17th century.

The Telephone: Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed patents for the telephone on the same day in 1876.

The Theory of Evolution: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both independently developed and proposed the theory of evolution through natural selection in the mid-19th century.

The Radio: Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla are both credited with the invention of the radio in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Television: Philo Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin, and John Logie Baird are all credited with significant contributions to the invention of television in the early 20th century.

The Jet Engine: Frank Whittle in the UK and Hans von Ohain in Germany independently developed the jet engine in the late 1930s.

And then you have something like PCI, which, again, could only happen at a certain level of industry and government maturity. Plus the prevalence of attacks that make such a thing necessary.

Why Software Remains Insecure

There are myriad theories as to why software remains insecure after we’ve spend decades trying to solve the problem. Common reasons include: Get the Audio

danielmiessler.com/p/the-reason-software-remains-insecure

So these things were basically going to happen.

Slow. Steady. Glacial. But inevitable.

Glacial problems

Then you have unyielding problems---like human gullibility.

How many security people have screamed at users because they clicked on something they obviously shouldn't have? Well, humans are set up a certain way, and they really like free stuff, and relationships with royalty, and they tend to get lonely.

That's millions of years of evolution in the red corner. And in the blue corner? Your security awareness campaign.

So what do we do? We bash our faces against a wall of gullible for multiple decades.

FIDO2 and Passwordless

But then here comes "passwordless", which is truly great and is likely to be the first thing to make a serious dent in phishing in forever.

Why didn't we just do FIDO2/Webauthn sooner! Gee, how silly of us! Answer: we couldn't have. It is happening now because that's the time it can happen.

Real progress bakes into the furniture

Then you have the real progress, which is integration into the operating systems we use everyday.

Windows

Mac

Android

iOS

That's where real progress is made.

So again I ask you---why didn't we just incorporate all these security features in these OS's back in 2005? Or 2010?

Same answer. Because we couldn't. Turns out, it's very hard to move giant machines like Microsoft and Apple to add things. Millions of moving parts. Things happen when they happen, just like electrification of the country.

The takeaway

What made me realize is that cybersecurity is this planetary-sized box of a trillion tiny gears. Or it's a glacier. Or it's an ocean. The metaphor doesn't matter. Use the one you like most.

What's important is that it's:

slow

random

inevitable

And that's the problem with a lot of the burnout in cyber. Specifically on the defensive side.

We're sold that we can make the difference. We'll just tell the boss about this thing, and they'll let the business know, and we'll get it fixed.

But we do that, and nothing fucking changes.

We build elaborate plans, perfectly articulate them. Expertly socialize them.

And nothing. Fucking. Happens.

This is why.

Progress in security is a massive machine. It's moving very slowly. And even when it occasionally bursts ahead with progress, that progress is random and not generally tied to any one person or even any one company or industry.

So I just quit?

And that leaves us with what to do.

I don't think this revalation is sad. If anything it's empowering. It wasn't you. It's just the machine. When we absorb this message we can reclaim our sanity. We can reclaim our peace.

Progress will be made, but it won't be on a clock set by us or anyone else. It'll happen in its own time. It actually reminds me of General Absurdism, which is my way of dealing with the big questions in the universe.

On one hand, I behave as if I can change things. Me. Just me. With my very own will. And I try hard in that mindset. But I also---and simultaneously---know that I can't. This does two things for me.

It keeps me motivated and trying to improve, and makes me productive

It keeps me grounded and sane becasue I understand the larger mechanism

More practically, if you are seeking a field in which your idea can more instantly and directly translate into a change in the world, I recommend business.

If you create something net-new that solves a problem people have, and people actually use it, well now you've made a real difference, and you might make some money in the process.

And to be clear, you can still get wins in defensive cybersecurity. You can innovate new detections, new products, new techniques, etc. And they can make some difference.

Just don't fall into the trap that depresses so many people, where they zoom out and look at the overall machine, and see that their impact didn't really change what was going to happen anyway.

Summary

Defensive security is a slow-moving machine that makes incremental and inevitable progress

The largest advances come from integration of new security features into operating systems and regulation

We can make some progress as individuals, but ultimately, change happens at the speed it's going to happen at---especially in security

If you want to have a more direct impact on the world, consider something more dynamic like business where you can more easily create net-new things in the world

If you stay with security, break your mind into two pieces: 1) the one who knows they can change the world by themselves, and works to do so, and 2) the one who knows change only happens when it's supposed to, and who doesn't get rattled when things don't move fast enough

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A List of Timeless Concepts from the Ancient Myths

Read more about AIL

At least 10 times a month I find myself in a book and they make a reference to some ancient concept, like Narcissus, or Oedepus, or whatever.

I’m usually familiar with the concept to some degree, but it always makes me question how well I know it. And I wish I had a list of all of these concepts, along with their source material, so I can go read them.

Well, here’s a great start.

PROMPT: Give me a list of the most timeless, ubiquitous, and commonly referenced stories and parables that appear in today's art. I want them ordered by prevalence and importance, and the output should be the concept/lesson itself, followed by the source material. Give me the top 50.

1. The Tragedy of Fate and Free Will

- Source: "Oedipus Rex" by Sophocles

2. Power and Corruption

- Source: "The Ring of Gyges" from Plato's "Republic"

3. Honor and Duty

- Source: "The Iliad" by Homer

4. Resisting Temptation

- Source: "The Odyssey" by Homer (The story of Circe)

5. The Fleeting Nature of Life

- Source: "The Epic of Gilgamesh"

6. Justice and Morality

- Source: "Antigone" by Sophocles

7. The Dangers of Playing God

- Source: "Prometheus" from Hesiod's "Theogony"

8. The Value of Wisdom Over Strength

- Source: "The Odyssey" by Homer (The story of the Cyclops)

9. Persistence and Ingenuity

- Source: "The Aeneid" by Virgil (The story of Aeneas)

10. Value of Humility

- Source: "The Odyssey" by Homer (The story of Odysseus and Polyphemus)

11. Hubris and Self-love

- Source: "Narcissus" from Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

12. The Consequences of Greed

- Source: "King Midas" from Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

13. Pride and Consequences of Disobedience

- Source: "Icarus" from Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

14. Revenge and its Consequences

- Source: "The Oresteia" by Aeschylus

15. Sacrifice for Love

- Source: "Orpheus and Eurydice" from Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

16. The Nature of Reality and Illusion

- Source: "The Allegory of the Cave" from Plato's "Republic"

17. Excess in Anything is Dangerous

- Source: "The Bacchae" by Euripides

18. Fatal Attraction and the Perils of Curiosity

- Source: "The Odyssey" by Homer (The story of the Sirens)

19. Love and its Consequences

- Source: "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare

20. The Inevitability of Change

- Source: "Pygmalion and Galatea" from Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

21. The Consequences of Deception

- Source: "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" - Aesop's Fables

22. Knowing Oneself

- Source: "Apology" by Plato (The story of Socrates)

23. Understanding Human Nature

- Source: "The Prince" by Niccolò Machiavelli

24. Man vs. Nature

- Source: "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville

25. The Struggle for Identity

- Source: "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare

26. Dangers of Blind Ambition

- Source: "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare

27. Evils of Racism and Prejudice

- Source: "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

28. Religion and Morality

- Source: "Paradise Lost" by John Milton

29. Importance of Being True to Oneself

- Source: "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

30. The Cycle of Life and Death

- Source: "The Bhagavad Gita"

31. Unintended Consequences

- Source: "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley

32. Consequences of Ignorance

- Source: "The Allegory of the Blind Men and the Elephant" - Buddhist Parable

33. Nature of War and Peace

- Source: "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy

34. Perils of Absolute Power

- Source: "1984" by George Orwell

35. Resilience in the Face of Oppression

- Source: "The Diary of Anne Frank"

36. The Cost of Social Conformity

- Source: "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

37. Dystopia and Loss of Individuality

- Source: "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

38. Human's Relationship with Nature

- Source: "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau

39. The Pursuit of Happiness

- Source: "Candide" by Voltaire

40. The Complexity of Human Emotions

- Source: "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

41. The Thin Line Between Civilization and Savagery

- Source: "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

42. Man's Inhumanity to Man

- Source: "Night" by Elie Wiesel

43. Value of Friendship and Loyalty

- Source: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain

44. Death as a Part of Life

- Source: "Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson

45. Moral Relativism

- Source: "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad

46. The Illusion of Free Will

- Source: "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess

47. Balance Between Passion and Reason

- Source: "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë

48. Chaos and Order in Society

- Source: "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens

49. The Search for Meaning

- Source: "The Trial" by Franz Kafka

50. The Role of Memory in Shaping Identity

- Source: "Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust

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Getting Into Short-form Video

Naabu for the win

This is my first short-form video. Kind of random what I did for the first topic, but I intend to be putting out tons of stuff in my common categories of:

Technical tutorials

Technical explainers

Code snippets

Original ideas

Etc.

Basically an extension of UL itself.

Here’s the first one, which you might have to follow me on TikTok to see.

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Why and How I Believe We'll Attain AGI by 2025-2028

I have a strong intuition about how we’ll achieve both AGI and consciousness in machines.

Keep in mind: it’s just an intuition. And I’m not a triple Ph.D. in AI or anything. But I don’t think I—nor anyone else—has anything solid to stand on with this stuff, so intuition / hypothesis is what you’ll get here. So what that throat-clearing out of the way, let’s get into it.

The key is disparate components talking to each other

I think the emergent phenomenon of systems like our:

Creative, goal-based processing

Our subjective experience

Our sensation of agency

…all come from various parts of our brains (and minds) being a) separate from each other, and b) connected to each other in various ways.

I got this idea in 2014 after reading Sam Harris’ Waking Up. In that book, Sam talks about how you can lose major components of your humanity by disrupting either the components themselves (like having a tumor present), or the connections between components (like from a penetrating head injury).

The best example is when you can surgically isolate two sides of the brain (via the Corpus Callosum) and have one side do things that the other side then explains that it did—when we know that it didn’t. Like you can show the left side of the brain that you knocked over a glass on accident, and the unconnected right side will say that “the wind blew it over”, which it just made up.

Then there are multiple examples where someone gets a tumor in their brain and suddenly loses the ability to control impulses. Like the serial killer who didn’t know why he wanted to kill people, only to find out he had a massive tumor in the spot that can cause this.

In other words, we’re not seeing perfection. What we have going on in our minds is a very precarious balancing act where things just barely work, and if you harm any of the components or the communication paths, things go wonky in very strange ways. But the result of them working well is a fully functioning human. And a miracle.

Evolution had hundreds of millions of years to strike this precarious balance. It had all that time to tweak the components themselves having enough neurons, synapses, etc., and to tweak the connections between these components in precisely the right way. I.e., sending precisely the right signals, between the right components—at the right time—to generate the functional miracle/illusion that we live every day.

Looking at the components in detail

So now let’s pull that hack-a-mind model into AI.

What are the components, communication paths, and knobs and switches we can play with?

Luckily, we have some knowledge of that from public knowledge out of OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others. Here are some of the major knobs they’re tweaking in their training to get to the current state of the art in 2023.

The size of the neural net (number of nodes and layers)

The amount of data trained

The diversity and quality of the data trained

The amount of compute used to train

Time spent training

The use of multiple models interacting with each other

There is tons of complexity in all of those components. And infinite combinations of size, what connects to what, what gets shared with what, in what order, etc.

But we don’t have to wait millions of years to make our iterations.

OpenAI didn’t invent a new neural net to go from GPT-3 to GPT-4. It’s the same stuff in the list above, just more of this, less of that, more of that, put in different configurations.

The intuition

The core intuition—and it really is just that—is that the whole thing is a massive hack. Intelligence. Consciousness. All of it.

The brain is mystical because we don’t understand it. But we can see physical differences in the brains of the smartest people and average people, and we know its magic allure predictably breaks when we interrupt specific pieces or communication paths. And we seem to be playing with very similar analogs right now in our current tech.

But we don’t need to understand the human brain. It doesn’t need to be the hack we end up with. That was just how evolution did it. I really don’t see us coming up with a replication of the brain—just as evolution would probably do it differently if you ran the experiment 1,000 more times.

But I think, given the tens of billions that will likely be spent on this over the next few years, I see too many chances for one of those hacks to match—and then exceed—the information processing and generalization of our biological version.

Think of all the advantages we have:

We’re just starting to understand how GPT-4 did what it did

We’re just starting to optimize TPUs

We will soon be able to train on far more and better data

We’ll soon be able to train on thousands of times more compute

We’ll soon be able to train for thousands of times as long

We have multiple teams and companies working on combinations of all these knobs and levers to find hacks that multiply performance

The most powerful companies in the world are pivoting to spend billions on this

Now combine that with the (likely) fact that the human brain is not some paragon of performance, but rather just the result of one system’s very slow hack. And we can barely remember where our car keys are or stop ourselves from ending civilization due to petty warfare.

I think human intellectual performance will soon be shown for what it is, which is an arbitrary tick on a scale that goes very much higher than we can imagine. And don’t see how our manipulation of all these variables doesn’t propel us way above it very soon.

What about consciousness?

Right, and then there is consciousness. Dennet said it best when he said it was basically a series of hacks. I think it comes down to disparate parts of our brain’s processing not knowing about each other, and basically doing a hand off.

And I think we get free will the same way—or the sensation of it anyway. Basically, I think groups of humans who believe in agency and moral responsibility have far better survivability than those that don’t. So we evolved to have that sensation of ownership of our actions.

I don’t see how we won’t either 1) engineer that into an AI, or 2) watch it emerge naturally as an adaptive advantage for the reason above. Again, it’s just another hack.

Summary

I know this all sounds really down on humans. Like, really? We’re just a bunch of biological meat hacks with no specialness?

Yes, but I didn’t say we weren’t wonderful and special. We are. That’s not mutually exclusive with being a collection of evolution-created meat hacks.

I’m only saying that I think we’re going to be able to surpass ourselves. And sooner rather than later.

NOTES

I am only predicting AGI for 2025-2028. While I think consciousness is quite possible, it’s not nearly as economically interesting. Nor is it required for AGI.

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