Category: TED

TED talk notes: Jill Tarter on the search for aliens and Noah Feldman on Islam as technology

Listening to TED talks used to be a regular habit of mine. So periodically, I publish some of those notes. It’s both a personal refresher and a chance to share valuable knowledge with readers. Here’s the complete list of TED notes.

This week we have talks from Jill Tarter on the search for alien life and Noah Feldman on Islam as a technology.

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Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters

  • “we live on a fragile island of life”
  • “if we’re alone…incredible waste of space”
  • discovering other cultured civilizations could strengthen humanity’s bonds with each other
  • “we’re a billion year lineage of wandering stardust”
  • SETI began 50 years ago, it’s the archaeology of the future (given speed of light)
  • our sun is one of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the Milky Way is only one of 100 billion other galaxies (!)
  • the more we learn the wider our “livable space” becomes (e.g., the more stars, the more species in extreme environments we’ve discovered just on Earth)
  • on Earth life happened quickly. the majority of time (90+%) has been spent developing and evolving life, not waiting for it to arise
  • Copernican revolution changed our thinking in many areas (astronomy, physics, theology). Finding alien life would be comparable
  • Drake conducted the first SETI observation of distant stars
  • Paul Allen and Nathan Myrhvold are generous supporters
  • “we all belong to one tribe, Earthlings”

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Noah Feldman: Politics and religion are technologies

  • politics and religion are analyzable as technologies, via conceptual design
  • democracy is a technology to channel power from many into the hands of a few
  • Islam is a means of construing the universe as way to bring salvation to its followers and to achieve goals such as peace, justice, equality as viewed within its doctrine
  • “because they’re technologies, they’re manipulable”
  • democracy and Islam are portrayed as incompatible, but technologies are more malleable than that
  • an Egyptian group of activists were blocked from forming a party which presented as combination of democracy and Islam

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!

TED talk notes: Nick Bostrom on what happens when computers become smarter than us

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (sorry, it takes awhile to load).

This week features two talks from Nick Bostrom on super intelligent computers. One is a TED talk and the other is an author talk @ Google.

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Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?

  • human brains are largely similar to those of apes (only in the last 250K-1M years did ours begin to differ)
  • AI used to be commands in a box
  • now there’s a paradigm shift, today it’s about machine learning, about algorithms that learn from raw data like an infant
  • because of this, AI is not domain-limited
  • machine substrate is hands down superior to biological tissue: no speed or size limitations
  • AI will evolve similarly to human intelligence: it took animals millions of years to develop basic intelligence, but complex intelligence developed faster by orders of magnitudes(“AI train won’t stop at human…will swoosh right by”)
  • believes super intelligence will have preferences and will – to some extent – get what it wants
  • what are those preferences?
  • we must avoid anthropomorphizing (ie, we can’t assume it wants what people want)
  • there will be unintended consequences no matter what goals we specify (eg, say we ask it to solve a math problem, and it realizes the best solution is re-organize the planet into a giant supercomputer to solve the problem!)
  • mentions the King Midas myth (everything he touched turned to gold)
  • what we should do now is specify precisely our constraints, goals, and design principles to guide AI’s development

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Nick Bostrom: “Superintelligence”

  • how do we control AI?
    1. control and limit its capabilities – for example, only allow it to exist in a box with no ethernet, or only print output on a screen. but to realize its full potential, you must give it full access, and super intelligence can by definition outsmart you
    2. control its motivation – change its motivations, preferences, and end-goals
  • the difference between normal risks (e.g., war) and existential risks (e.g., give everyone the ability to make and detonate a nuclear bomb)
  • AI/superintelligence is an existential risk
  • “we only get one shot at it…but humans are mostly bad at getting things right the first time”
  • we need to develop control mechanisms, the right ways to think about and constrain and optimize the problem, before AI gets ahead of us
  • when asked by experts to estimate the median years until development of human-level machine intelligence, estimated 40 years (2050)

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!

TED talk notes: Chris Urmson on Google’s driverless cars and Graham Hancock on ayahuasca

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (it takes awhile to load).

This week we have Chris Urmson on Google’s driverless cars and Graham Hancock on ayahuasca and psychedelics.

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Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

  • first car ever was driven by Benz and it crashed into a wall
  • 1M people die of car accidents every year, 30K of those in the US (equivalent to a 747 crash EVERY DAY! me: not sure how they did this math…)
  • billions of minutes are spent each day in commute
  • driving is not egalitarian (e.g., it’s harder for blind, deaf, handicapped, underage, overage)
  • growth in car usage far outpaces growth in roads. in other words it’s not just your imagination: traffic is getting worse
  • humans make roughly one mistake that leads to an accident every 100K miles
  • there are important differences between “driver-assisted” and true driverless cars
  • driverless cars take data and predict behaviors, and even respond to unexpected ones (for example, a Google driverless car encountered a woman in an electric-powered wheelchair chasing ducks in a circle!)
  • driverless cars can see things humans can’t (e.g., using lasers, it can detect a cyclist out of a human driver’s field of view)
  • Google’s cars do 3M miles in simulators every day (me: what a great way to improve AI)
  • parking lots are “urban craters”

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Graham Hancock – The War on Consciousness (a banned TED talk)

  • some academics now believe our consciousness was triggered by experiences with psychedelic plants
  • what evidence do we have? cave art and the rise of shamanism
  • DMT compound in ayahuasca plant is closely related to psilocybin
  • he drank an ayahuasca brew
  • was a 4-hour journey
  • “foul taste, dreadful smell”
  • often have vomiting and diarrhea, “you’re not doing this for recreation”
  • a universal experience is encounters with intelligent entities
  • ayahuasca is very successful at breaking addictions to cocaine, heroin
  • “for 24 years I was pretty much permanently stoned”
  • ayahuasca means “vine of souls” or “vine of the dead” — related to why people often have visions of their own death, near-death experiences (NDE), hell
  • Egyptians believe your soul survives death. They highly valued dream states and used hallucinogenic plants
  • “if we want to insult someone, we call them a dreamer, could not be more different from Egyptians where dream states were praised”
  • “our love affair with alcohol, glorify this terrible drug”
  • default state of (Western) society: “alert, problem-solving state of consciousness”
  • Shamans believe the West has severed its connection with spirit

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!

TED talk notes: Robert Neuwirth on our informal economy and Chrystia Freeland on the super rich

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (it takes awhile to load).

This week we have Robert Neuwirth on the informal (mostly untaxed, unregulated) economy and Chrystia Freeland on a rise in the super rich.

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Robert Neuwirth: The power of the informal economy

  • Lagos — no streets for stores, so lady sells stuff from boat, comes to your home
    • garbage dump — 2K people work there scavenging materials
  • “alif” — a place in the world where everything exists (e.g., imagine a hyper-crowded flea market next to a camp)
  • he calls this System D — the DIY economy, the economy of self-reliance; government hates DIY
  • we’re focused on the “luxury economy” ($1.5T market) but this excludes 2/3 of the world’s workers
  • P&G’s largest market segment is actually the informal economy: tiny stores, street hawkers selling detergent (and it’s the only segment that’s growing)
  • Nigeria is the “big dog in Africa” — 1 in 7 Africans are Nigerian
    • M-Tel — only sells airtime, sells through street vendors
    • tons of Guangdong (China) phones going to Nigeria
  • for large brands, “piracy is research” — not going to buy their products anyway, and lets them learn where their products are hot
  • Siemens paid $2B in bribes, yet we demonize the little guys

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Chrystia Freeland: The rise of the new global super-rich

  • as income inequality increases, social mobility decreases
  • today we live in the era of superstars in every industry — even dentists!
  • while the rise in the top 1%’s wealth is astonishing, rise in 0.1% is even more extreme
  • how GM employs 100K, FB only employs thousands
  • today productivity increases are decoupled from wage increases

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!

TED talk notes: Bill Gross on the #1 reason why startups succeed, and Leslie Chang on China’s factory workers

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (it takes awhile to load).

Here are brief notes from talks by Bill Gross (Idealab founder) and Leslie Chang (author).

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Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China’s workers

  • spent 2 years in Dongguan studying female Chinese factory workers
  • motivation: better lives, help their family, curiosity, see the world
  • they didn’t care that much about their own living conditions or creature comforts, but wanted upward mobility
  • there’s decent upward mobility, some of these factory workers can become urban middle class (although she didn’t share #s in the talk)
  • what they wanted most: education; for example on weekends they’d take computer skills and English language classes

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Bill Gross: the single biggest reason why startups succeed

  • most important qualities (ranked)
    1. timing
    2. team execution
    3. idea (he thought this would be #1, but it wasn’t)
    4. business model
    5. funding
  • cites the following as examples of great timing: AirBnb (timing: there was a recession, people needed to earn and save money), Citysearch, Uber

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!