Slide Deck Transcript: [...] I'm going to talk now about energy and progress. You heard a lot of conversation about energy and things like, you know, people worrying about the electricity bill. I'm going to try and zoom out massively from the worry about this month's electricity price to the question of how energy and human progress are related. This is a very, very important chart. On this chart, you have lots of countries. On the horizontal axis, you have GDP per capita, which is some appro...

A couple of weeks ago I participated in Creative Destruction Lab’s (CDL) “Super Session” event in Toronto. It was an amazing convocation of CDL alumni from around the world, as well as new companies and mentors. The event kicked off with a 2 hour summary and critique of the new book “Power and Progress” by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. There were eleven of us charged with summarizing and commenting on one chapter each, with Daron replying after 3-4 speakers. This was the idea of Ajay Agra...

Politics in the US has become ever more tribal on both the left and the right. Either you agree with 100 percent of group doctrine or you are considered an enemy. Tim Urban, the author of the wonderful Wait but Why blog has written a book digging into how we have gotten here. Titled “What’s Our Problem” the book is a full throated defense of liberalism in general and free speech in particular. As with his blog, Urban does two valuable things rather well: He goes as much as possible to source ...

As humans we like to put things into categories. It makes communicating and thinking easier. Scratch that. It makes communicating and thinking possible. Categories go hand in hand with words as providing us with crucial compression of reality. Just like a 1:1 map is completely useless (it is the terrain itself), so would be a need to describe every detail of every person or object before being able to make a point. We would never get anywhere. Not surprisingly then, categories are everywhere....

There are still people out there who seem to believe that fighting the climate crisis is somehow in opposition to progress. That it will hold the economy back. The exact opposite is the case. Fighting the climate crisis is the most pro-progress program we can embark on. Driving an EV is a superior experience to driving a car with an internal combustion engine. I say this as someone who has driven a great many high end German cars. Using modern heat pumps combined with solar can save many hous...

I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France. It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). So what’s next after that? The key of course as always will be innovation. The single most urgent piece here is testing. Ideally we can get this to the ...

I have written and spoken a lot about how technological progress is incompatible with privacy. One example I have used is someone bioengineering a virus in their basement. It turns out a much simpler example is what we are seeing today: a new virus that’s spreading. We cannot both have fast, easy international travel and also have privacy of travelers. If you travel and later come down with the coronavirus, we need to know where you went and who else may have been exposed. At a minimum societ...

Yesterday Google’s paper announcing a first instance of “quantum supremacy” was published in Nature. Not surprisingly for those who have followed the topic there is now a healthy debate around what that actually means. Google was celebrating in a big way including tweets by Sundar Pichai. IBM was quick with a blog post suggesting it’s not as big a deal. If you want to form an opinion for yourself, I recommend two posts. First, John Preskill explains why he coined the term “quantum supremacy” ...

Last Friday I wrote about the power and danger of the meme of suppressed truth. In the post, I suggested that one form of countering negative memes is through positive ones. Since creating memes is definitely not my strength, please don’t expect any novel GIFs in this post. But let me start with an example of what I have in mind via GIPHY Yes, Captain Picard! Star Trek is a great source of positive memes. The show in its various incarnations is one of the only sustained narratives of a divers...

In my draft book World After Capital, I write about how digital technology has given us the possibility to leave the Industrial Age behind and enter the Knowledge Age. In an early chapter on Optimism, I argue against economic, historical and technological determinism. These are all theories in which an external force determines the shape of society, instead of the decisions made by us humans under the guidance of a set of values. The memo written by a Google employee, is a good reason to add ...