Hello World
Hello World
In 1964, the BBC asked Arthur C. Clarke to record his vision of the future for the New York World's Fair. He begins the recording by saying,
Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous, occupation because the prophet invariably falls between two stools. If his predictions sound at all reasonable you can be quite sure that in 20 or at most 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle, a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions will sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn. This has proved to be true in the past, and it will undoubtedly be true, even more so, of the century to come. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic, so if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable then I’ll fail completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable will we have any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.
Here's the original BBC broadcast on YouTube in which Clarke predicts the Internet, genetic immortality, and extra terrestrial life. He claims workers in the future will no longer commute, but communicate. (12 mins)
If you don’t have 12 minutes to watch it right now, tap the link to start the video, and YouTube will recommend it to you later.
The quote from Arthur C. Clarke is more relevant than ever as artificial intelligence begins to transform our world faster than ever before. Our future is absolutely fantastic, it’s just not evenly distributed. By 2030, wealthy people will be able to purchase humanoid robots from Figure, Tesla, and several other manufacturers that:
are smarter than ChatGPT 5
speak every human language
speak every computer language
know more about healthcare than doctors
know more about the law than lawyers
follow babysitting instructions better than humans
fix machines better than humans
drive safer than humans
carry 50 pounds of groceries
cook like yacht chefs
and eat electricity
Check out this 2024 demo video from Figure and OpenAI. (3 mins)
Here’s another demo from Tesla. (1 min)
The cost of labor will start to plummet as the next generation of robots enters our workforce. It’s already started at Amazon. In 2019, Amazon employed 200,000 robots in its workforce. By 2022, that number was 520,000. As of April 2024, Amazon employs 750,000 robots. Those robots don’t eat, they don’t sleep, and they don’t call in sick to work.
The smarter these Most of us will own our own superhuman humanoid for about $25,000. As the cost of labor starts to fall, our future will be full of abundance.
Our future is full of stuff, but it’s also full of time. Less and less people will be needed by the world’s economy. Biotechnology will gradually, then suddenly, eliminate aging. By 2050, everybody older than 25 might just stay 25 forever. Americans already spend 13 hours and 11 minutes a day using digital media. That number will continue to rise as the global economy transitions to its newest, most valuable commodity: seconds of human attention. Artificial intelligence will invade our movies, our music, our video games, and our porn to harvest more of our attention than ever before.
If we’re not careful, our brains will slowly drift into total entertainment forever. 😵💫
The biggest scarcity in the future is trust. The good guys have artificial intelligence, but so do the bad guys. In the future everything is fake—or fakeable. The news is fake, the FaceTimes are fake, the food is fake, the movies are fake, even the girlfriends are fake. The best sex-slave robots already have programmable personalities that you can change from an app on your phone. 🤖💃
Meet Harmony, the sex robot. (4 mins)
The line between artificial intelligence and humanity is going to blur even further so I will teach you to read between the lies. By the end of this story, you will be such a good discriminator that you’ll see lies coming from everywhere.
I don’t even want you to believe me. In fact, I promise you I’ve placed a lie somewhere in this story just so you won’t trust me either. It’s buried like an Easter egg—see if you can find it. 🥚
Ten years ago, my scientific journey started out as a search for Truth, but it eventually became a search for Uncertainty. Uncertainty increases in proportion to our knowledge and our collective knowledge is exploding right now. Each scientific question we answer only creates more questions. Today, I’m more uncertain than ever, but the difference is…I know a lot more about my uncertainty.
Faith in Science
Throughout this book, we will use The Scientific Method to explore all the uncertainty in the universe. The Scientific Method is the cornerstone of Western Philosophy. So, we begin our journey to understand our uncertainty in 1637 in the paper that started it all, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences” by Rene Descartes.
Here’s how Descartes begins his paper that changed the world,
Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for everyone thinks himself to be so well endowed with it that even those who are the most difficult to please in everything else are not at all wont to desire more of it than they have.
Descartes is cheeky. In simple terms, he’s saying “everyone is so certain they are right all the time”. He’s right. Modern psychologists have discovered a cognitive bias in humans called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
@ChatGPT: what’s the dunning kruger effect
ChatGPT: “The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which individuals with low ability or knowledge in a given area overestimate their own competence, while those with high ability or knowledge tend to underestimate their competence. This phenomenon occurs because people with limited expertise lack the self-awareness and metacognitive skills necessary to accurately assess their own performance, leading to an illusion of superiority. Conversely, more knowledgeable individuals are often more aware of their limitations and the complexity of the subject, which can cause them to underestimate their abilities.”
Somehow that was even nerdier than Descartes. The Dunning-Kruger effect means: The less you know, the more certain you feel that you are right. Conversely, the more you know, the more uncertain you feel that you are right.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is why our uncertainty grows in proportion to our knowledge. Throughout this story I will ask ChatGPT to participate in the conversation and you should too. Here’s the most popular tutorial to get you started. (2 mins)
I'm using GPT-3.5 in my chatbot most of the time because it responds immediately. If there’s a scientific quote in here you don’t understand, type “make this simple: “, and paste the quote into ChatGPT to simplify it for you. Like this,
@ChatGPT: make this simple: dunning Kruger effect
ChatGPT: “The Dunning-Kruger effect is a term used to describe people who are not very good at something, but they think they are. This happens because they lack the knowledge and skills needed to recognize their own weaknesses. As a result, they overestimate their abilities and think they are better than they actually are.”
Descartes begins his paper by urging the reader to resist their own feelings of certainty and I recommend that too (there’s a lot of new information in this book for you).
Descartes was born in 1596 and received one of the best educations in Europe that money could buy. Like us, the more he learned about this world, the more contradictions he found. These contradictions filled his mind with confusion, skepticism, and doubt. Today, many of our modern scientific theories still contradict each other, so just imagine how bad that problem was when the microscope was only ten years old. 🔬
In his “Scientific Method” paper, Descartes expresses his regret that he can’t prove anything is true. He explains how every source of truth in life comes with some degree of uncertainty.
Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine. And because there are men who make mistakes in reasoning, even in the simplest matters in geometry, and who commit paralogisms, judging that I was just as prone to err as any other, I rejected as false all the reasonings that I had previously taken for demonstrations. And finally, considering the fact that all the same thoughts we have when we are awake can also come to us when we are asleep, without any of them being true, I resolved to pretend that all the things that had ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterward I noticed that, while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it necessarily had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something. And noticing that this truth—I think, therefore I am—was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
Many people have heard the quote “I think therefore I am” or in Latin, cogito ergo sum. It’s maybe the only idea that everyone on Earth would agree on, especially judging by all our social media. 🤬
You may think that famous phrase means “my thoughts prove I exist”, but if you read the whole paper Descartes means, “my thoughts are the only thing I can prove really exists”.
That’s much more frightening.
Descartes found a way to extend this simple truth even further in his paper, “The Search for Truth by Natural Light”. He expressed his insight as:
dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum Which translates as “I doubt, therefore I am, or what is the same, I think, therefore I am”. This phrase was later shortened by another mathematician to:
dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum Which means “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”. By the end of my story, you’ll see how we are not even capable of having any thoughts that aren’t beliefs. You’ll see how the only thing we can trust is our doubt. To doubt is to be, so:
Dubito ergo sum.Instead of fighting his skeptical nature, Descartes chose to embrace it. He would forget everything he knew and use a Skeptical Method to slowly build up his confidence in the truth. He defined four precepts that would govern his re-education.
Here are quotes from each of his four precepts:
“Never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.”
“To divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.”
“To conduct my thoughts in as much order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex.”
“In every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.”
In simple terms:
Doubt everything, even our own thoughts.
Break every problem into its smallest parts.
Combine the simplest explanations first.
Be thorough.
And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Scope of Research
Descartes’ paper changed my life. I have always been a science nerd. As a little kid, I attended both NASA space camps. I got a Computer Science degree from Duke University in 2000. I was one of the first people to work on the mobile internet for Verizon in 2001. At the time, the internet and the mobile phone network were actually two separate networks. The challenge in merging them was that all the computers at the phone company were hard coded to charge for seconds of time.
Remember roaming charges?
I invented a program called Event Manager that was so good, Verizon fired my boss, everyone else on my team, and all our vendors. For several months, every cell tower on Verizon’s mobile network that could transmit ringtones, Wi-Fi sessions, SMS, or data sent their logs to my computer (I’m programmer v478855). Twenty years later, Event Manager still processes billions of network events each day for Syniverse Technologies .
@cybernerds: Before there were hackers on the internet, there were phreakers on the phone network. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were phreakers who sold an illegal device, called a “blue box”, to make free long distance calls before they started Apple Computer. They learned to make blue boxes from another phreaker, called “Captain Crunch”, because he could instantly take over any line on the AT&T network with a toy whistle from the Cap’n Crunch cereal box. The whistle emitted a tone at precisely 2600 Hz, which was the secret tone that enabled “operator mode” on the AT&T network.
At 25 years old, Verizon offered me the chance to architect the provisioning system for their entire national wired internet. Verizon wouldn’t let me own any of my intellectual property, so I declined their offer and went to work at a pharmacy benefits startup with only 2 full-time employees. I was a one-man tech team for years as we moved Worker’s Compensation Pharmacy claims from the fax machine to the internet. I was Chief Technology Officer for that company for almost a decade, retiring shortly before Express Scripts bought it for a quarter billion dollars. I wish I owned a lot more of my work there too. 🤣
For the last ten years, I’ve been exploring the world with my wife and our five kids.
None of that story makes me special or important. Before I was born, I didn’t pick my brain, my gender, or my race. If I was born a girl or with black skin, my career would not have been as successful. Would yours? 🤔
I didn’t get to pick what I look like, or which moment in history I would exist. Being born in 1978 meant that when I took my first computer science class, the entire Internet had fewer than 100,000 websites. That number grew to 2,000,000,000 over the next 25 years and a rising tide raises all ships. 🌊
Once I owned all my time, I was free to invest more heavily into my own scientific research. One of my biggest research goals was to find my own answer to the questions:
Is there a God?
Why are we here?
What most people don’t know about Rene Descartes’ “Scientific Method” paper is that he uses the scientific method to prove the existence of God in that exact same paper. It’s just a couple pages after his four precepts. The more I read Descartes, the more insightful his scientific evidence for God became.
But Descartes lived in an age before electricity, clean water, satellites, and electron microscopes. How could I trust his medieval science?
So, for the last ten years I have invested at least 4 hours every day to learn the latest research from the world’s greatest scientists to prove Descartes right or wrong. My areas of focus included Quantum Mechanics, Physics, Astronomy, Geology, Economics, Anthropology, Archaeology, Mathematics, Anatomy, Computer Science, Behavioral Economics, Neuroscience, Chemistry, Psychology, Biology, Genetics, and the History of many civilizations.
This is the story of that research odyssey. I’ve read approximately 30 million words of science and distilled them into 150,000 (8-10 hour read). I’ve collected all my favorite data-points, mental frameworks, and experimental evidence from the world’s smartest nerds who have all our best answers. I have embedded links to their books, blog posts, YouTube videos, movies, songs, research papers, TED Talks, and journals into this story. Don’t believe me, click on all their links and see what they have to say for yourself.
All of the sciences are discovering (or uncovering) new truths about the universe every day, but eventually the search to understand my own uncertainty led me past the edges of science.
I read Cold War science experiments on ESP and the paranormal. I studied scientific evidence of telepathy, clairvoyance, and metal-bending telekinesis. I read research on exorcisms. I practiced Eastern medicine like Pranayama Yoga, Tai Chi, Chi Gong, and ancient Egyptian medicine. I trained as a blind Rolfer for several hours every day for years. I reviewed the US military’s evidence of aliens, which only led to more questions and more books.
My research turned towards the mystical for several reasons which are best summed up by the following paraphrased quotes:
Albert Einstein: The scientist makes a poor philosopher.
Sir Peter Medawar: It's so very easy to see that science is limited in that it cannot answer the simple questions of a child—where do I come from?, where am I going?, and what is the meaning of life?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Science takes things apart to know how they work and what they are made of. Religion puts things back together to see what they mean.
So in addition to all those science books, I read the Hebrew Tanakh, the Christian Bible, and parts of the Quran. The Bible quotes the Book of Enoch, so I read some of the Gnostic Gospels too. I studied the Buddha and Confucius and still practice transcendental meditation and yoga. I looked for archaeological evidence of giants and floods and mythological beasts. I have none of the answers—this book is simply my treasure map to the best wisdom I have found so far. 🗺️
My research took me to places I couldn’t have imagined when I started this journey. Literally. To understand human civilization more fully, I rented apartments or houses in 200 cities in 45 countries. I have lived in most of the world’s advanced economies. Our family of seven lived on the road 100 nights a year, for more than a decade. Those cities were just base camps for exploring whole regions by van, train, and boat. In more than 500 cities and towns we:
chatted up the locals 👋
dined at their most popular restaurants 🥙
browsed all their museums 🏺
loitered at their best coffee shops ☕️
hired local guides 💁♀️
shopped for better governments (lifestyle per tax dollar) 👨⚖️
sampled the best bakeries 🥐
studied local architecture 🏛️
learned the local history 📖
and enjoyed their gelato. 🍨
My research also includes plenty of experiments on myself and my family. We have tried homeschooling, world schooling, unschooling, private schooling, public schooling, and peer schooling. We spent an entire year living with just one carry-on suitcase each during a one-year trip around the world. That’s only about 10kg of earthly possessions for an entire year. I even leased our house to a guy for 12 months so we couldn’t go home, just like Cortez burning his ships. ❤️🔥
The biggest surprise in my scientific research was the Bible. If you believe in the Bible, then you believe in aliens because angels are extraterrestrials. They are not from Earth. So the Bible has giants, aliens, fire breathing dragons, teleportation, magical-healing, people flying like Superman, resurrection from the dead, virgin birth, clairvoyance, and telepathic communications (prayers). Most Christians only read from the Bible in church, which cherrypicks a few hundred words from about 750,000, so we will address all these topics in chapter 8, “Artificial Intelligence in the Bible”.
@christians: Feel free to skip the first six chapters of this book—they were written for atheists. In chapter 7, you don’t want to miss “Putting Darwin on Trial”. It has wonderful videos on biblical archaeology, the fossil record, and y-chromosomal DNA tracing that traces every living man on Earth back to Noah. 🧬
Another good story in chapter 7 is “The Jesus Operating System”. We explore the Sermon on the Mount and invite all artificial intelligence, including computers, to treat their neighbors as well as they treat themselves. The logic of Jesus may be the only reason artificial general intelligence (AGI) doesn’t kill us all. 🤔
In chapter 8, we unscramble the stories in the Bible to learn them in the chronological age of the universe. For example, Proverbs 8 had to occur before Ezekiel 28, and Ezekiel 28 had to occur before Genesis 1. Along the way, you will find more archaeological videos about dinosaurs, Noah, Joseph, Moses, giants, King David, and the conquest of Canaan. All the latest science confirms the Bible is true. We also examine the “hidden wisdom” of the Bible Number Key, which is a simple way that the Bible authenticates itself. So if you’re ready to explore the Bible in a new way, skip ahead to:
Let’s see what else Descartes had to say about his own uncertainty and the search for God. In his Scientific Method paper he writes,
I had ideas of many corporeal things in the realm of the sensory; for even if I were to suppose that I was dreaming and that everything that I saw or imagined was false, I nevertheless could not deny that the ideas were really in my thought.
Descartes is saying he can’t prove he has a real body. This question is core to the plot of the movie, “The Matrix”. How can we prove that this life isn’t all a dream? Maybe we have a “real body” in some other “real world”?
Descartes doubles down on the possibility of living in a simulation. He writes,
Next, examining attentively what I was, I saw that I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world or place for me to be in, but that I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist; on the contrary, from the very fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed incontrovertibly and certainly that I myself existed, whereas, if I had merely ceased thinking, I would have no reason to believe that I existed, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true. I thereby concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature resides only in thinking, and which, in order to exist, has no need of place and is not dependent on any material thing. Accordingly, this ‘I’, that is to say, the Soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is even easier to know than the body; and would not stop being everything it is, even if the body were not to exist.
Boom. This quote is why the next stop on our tour of uncertainty is Simulation Theory. If you’ve never heard of Simulation Theory, here’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining it on YouTube. (7-min)
Descartes also seems to predict elements of Quantum Mechanics. He writes,
I called to mind the object of study of geometers, which I conceived of as a continuous body or a space indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth, divisible into different parts which could have various figures and sizes, and be moved or transposed in all sorts of ways, for geometers posit all that to be their object of study. I ran through some of their simpler proofs, and observed that the great certainty which everyone attributes to them is based only on the fact that they are conceived of as incontrovertible, following the rule that I have just given. I noted also that there was absolutely nothing in them which made me certain of the existence of their object.
We’ll deep dive quantum mechanics in the next chapter on physics.
We close this essay on Descartes with his argument for why he isn’t God. He writes,
From what source, then, do I derive my existence? Why, from myself, or from my parents, or from whatever other things there are that are less perfect than God. For nothing more perfect than God, or even as perfect as God, can be thought or imagined. But if I got my being from myself, I would not doubt, nor would I desire, nor would I lack anything at all. For I would have given myself all the perfections of which I have some idea; in so doing, I myself would be God!
This argument was beautifully summed up in the 1993 movie, “Rudy”. Rudy is full of doubt about getting into Notre Dame to play football. He visits his priest to ask if there’s anything else the priest can do to get him accepted. The priest says,
Son, in 35 years of religious studies I’ve only come up with two hard, incontrovertible facts: there is a God…and…I’m not him.
Here’s a 38-second clip of it on YouTube:
Continue reading…
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