📺Secret Sauce for your newsfeeds Nov23-1

🔥 80,000 people partying in the desert. #murica

🤯 Nerds cut open animal brains to train scary smart artificial intelligence.

👶 People aren’t having babies anymore. Pretty much everywhere.

📐15 minutes on the boundaries of human precision

😇 Mr Beast builds 100 wells

📸 Photographers may want to upgrade their iPhone

@biblenerds: these geologists are backing up your story.

👩 I wish Brené Brown was America’s mom.

💰 Comedians who understand buying and selling human attention.

🧠 Every memory we have is made up. Even what we didn't make up, was made up. This link is in my new book, “Human Attention”.

😀 Smile for 21 minutes

SNL jokes about America

🎙️ Changing the boundary lines of Twitter’s Free Speech

#humanmade

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For people who read

😴 Scientists Are Researching a Device That Can Induce Lucid Dreams on Demand

🤖 Google AI Chief Says There’s a 50% Chance We’ll Hit AGI in Just 5 Years

💰 Elon Musk Predicts the End of All Jobs—Google AI Exec Disagrees

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman rebutted Musk's predictions at the AI Safety Summit in the UK.

🏴‍☠️ Is a Rogue AI Company Training Powerful AI on a Barge to Avoid U.S. Regulations?

Uh, yes, there is.

🦾 ChatGPT chief warns of some 'superhuman' skills AI could develop

🛠️ A Tool to Supercharge Your Imagination

New technologies for making pictures can be prosthetics for your mind.

Book Review: In 'White Holes,' Carlo Rovelli takes readers beyond the black hole horizon

New neural-network-based AI outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT in learning

This neural network is scary smart at learning new things.

MIT startup has big plans to pull carbon from the air

AI better than biopsy at assessing some cancers, study finds

Have a good week,

Stuart

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Here’s the most recent essay I published from my new book:

The War for Human Attention

As of June 2023, the world’s 10 most valuable corporations are:

1. Apple ($2.7T)

2. Microsoft ($2.3 T)

3. Saudi Aramco ($2 T)

4. Alphabet ($1.5 T)

5. Amazon ($1.1 T)

6. Nvidia ($746 B)

7. Berkshire Hathaway ($718 B)

8. Meta ($621 B)

9. Tesla ($550 B)

10. Visa ($487 B)

What do they have in common? 

Count how many of these corporations generate their revenues from harvesting Human Attention?

Apple (#1) is the primary mobile device for 1.2 billion people worldwide.

Microsoft (#2) has Xbox, Bing, and Office. Just imagine how much human attention is poured into Microsoft Office every day. Just imagine how much human attention is poured into Xbox every day. How many of those Xboxes are harvesting human attention directly from little kid’s bedrooms? Microsoft probably knows a lot more about your kids than you think. 😬

Alphabet (#4) has Google, YouTube, and Gmail. How much human attention does the Google search bar collect every minute? Even you if you don’t watch YouTube, you still probably see hours of YouTube clips each month embedded in webpages.

You might think Amazon (#5) isn’t an Attention Merchant, but they made $40 billion dollars last year from advertising in the Amazon Search bar. That is more money than they made on Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services, which serves Netflix (also an Attention Merchant).

Are you seeing the Wall Street trend here?

Nvidia (#6) makes the best graphics chips for video games and film makers. Nvidia also makes the best chips for artificial neural networks, which will harvest more of our human attention than ever.

Meta (#8) has Instagram and Facebook. Actually based on their revenue, Meta is just Instagram and the hope that everyone on Earth will be retired in 5 years, spending their whole day in Oculus virtual reality (which may be right).

Even Tesla (#9) is developing full self-driving artificial intelligence so we won’t have to Pay Attention when we ride in Tesla cars.

According to Wall Street, Human Attention is the most valuable commodity in the world. If quantum mechanics only “renders reality” wherever there’s an observer, then Human Attention might be the most valuable commodity in the universe. 😳