Continuations

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 ...

Now we are getting to the biggest and weirdest risk of AI: a super intelligence emerging and wiping out humanity in pursuit of its own goals. To a lot of people this seems like a totally absurd idea, held only by a tiny fringe of people who appear weird and borderline culty. It seems so far out there and also so huge that most people wind up dismissing it and/or forgetting about shortly after hearing it. There is a big similarity here to the climate crisis, where the more extreme views are wi...

In my prior post I wrote about structural risk from AI. Today I want to start delving into existential risk. This broadly comes in two not entirely distinct subtypes: first, that we lose any grip on reality which could result in a Matrix style scenario or global war of all against all and second, a superintelligence getting rid of humans directly in the pursuit of its own goals. The loss of reality scenario was the subject of an op-ed in the New York Time the other day. And right around the s...

Yesterday I wrote a post on where we are with artificial intelligence by providing some history and foundational ideas around neural network size. Today I want to start in on risks from artificial intelligence. These fall broadly into two categories: existential and structural. Existential risk is about AI wiping out most or all of humanity. Structural risk is about AI aggravating existing problems, such as wealth and power inequality in the world. Today’s post is about structural risks. Stru...

I am writing this post to organize and share my thoughts about the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence over the last years and especially the last few months (link to a lot of my prior writing). First, I want to come right out and say that anyone still dismissing what we are now seeing as a “parlor trick” or a “statistical parrot” is engaging in the most epic goal post moving ever. We are not talking a few extra yards here, the goal posts are not in the stadium anymore, they are...

There were a ton of hot takes on the banking crisis over the last few days. I didn’t feel like contributing to the cacaphony on Twitter because I was busy working with USV portfolio companies and also in Mexico City with Susan celebrating her birthday. Before addressing some of the takes, let me succinctly state what happened. SVB had taken a large percentage of their assets and invested them in low-interest-rate long-duration bonds. As interest rates rose, the value of those bonds fell. Alre...

I just returned from a week-long trip to India. Most of this trip was meeting entrepreneurs and investors centered around spending time with the team from Bolt in Bangalore (a USV portfolio company). This was my second time in India, following a family vacation in 2015. Here are some observations from my visit: First, the mood in the country feels optimistic and assertive. People I spoke to, not just from the tech ecosystem, but also drivers, tour guides, waiters, students, and professors, al...

Over vacation I read Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Unlike many other recent books tackling the climate crisis, it is entirely focused on the controversial issue of geoengineering through solar radiation modification (SMR). The basic idea of SMR is to let slightly less sunlight into the Earth’s lower atmosphere where it can heat things up. Even a tiny decrease in solar radiation will have a big impact on global warming. To put upfront where I stand on this: I first wrote about the need...

If you are not familiar with it, I encourage you to check out the Network State Project. The basic idea is to form new states online first, with an eventual goal of controlling land in the real world. While I disagree with parts of the historic analysis and also some of the suggestions for forming a network state, I fundamentally believe this is an important project. In my book The World After Capital, I trace how scarcity for humanity has shifted from food to land (agrarian revolution), from...

We are once again at a transition moment in history. Where our journey goes from here could be exceptionally good or absurdly bad. This mirrors past moments, such as the transition into the Agrarian Age, which gave us early high cultures but also various dark ages. Or more recently the transition into the Industrial Age, with democracies flourishing, but also fascism and communism killing tens of millions. In the past few years we have had incredible unlocks across many fields. To name just a...