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.
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”
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
Here’s the full list of TED notes!