🚀 Faster, Please!: Week in Review+ #4
The real value of AI, the politics of Up Wing, Russia's brain drain, chats with Hayekian urbanist Alain Bertaud and existential risk expert Toby Ord, and much more!
My free and paid Faster, Please! subscribers: Welcome to Week in Review+. Thank you all for your support! For my free subscribers, please become a paying subscriber today. (Expense a corporate subscription perhaps?)
It was another superinteresting week, and I covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Thursday (as well as a paywall-free issue on Wednesday). Good stuff. Enjoy!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
— AI is the invention of a new method of invention — and its potential is more amazing than you realize
— Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America? (paywell-free issue)
— How Russia’s 'brain drain' could be a 'brain gain' for the world — especially America
Best of 5QQ:
— Hayekian urbanist Alain Bertaud of the Marron Institute at NYU
— Toby Ord, senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University
💥 Special Bonus: Toby Ord on the Fermi Paradox and the odds of extraterrestrial intelligence 👽
Best of Micro Reads:
— Woolly Mammoth Revival Raises $75 Million From VC Firms, Paris Hilton - Josh Saul, Bloomberg
— Estate Planning for Humanity - Jeff Hawkins, Noema
Essay Highlights
🤖 AI is the invention of a new method of invention — and its potential is more amazing than you realize (03.21.22) | Machine learning is obviously an economy-wide general-purpose technology, or GPT. It’s used in retail product recommendations, customer service chatbots, and business analytics, among other things. But ML is also an IMI, an invention of a method of invention. IMIs “have an important role in increasing the productivity of innovative effort,” writes University of Warwick economist Nicholas Crafts in a 2021 paper. One example: Data scientists and biochemists at BenevolentAI turned to machine learning to hunt for a drug to help treat the emerging coronavirus pandemic. Finding new purposes for existing drugs is important. The next step is AI-designed drugs. Another promising innovation is the AI tool Alphafold2, released last year by Google’s DeepMind. Its stunning ability to predict the shape of human proteins is a breakthrough that will advance drug development and lead to a better understanding of many diseases.
⤴ Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America? (03.23.22, paywall-free) | Despite what cable news and social media tell us every day, the cultural, economic, and political divide that matters most for America’s future is not Left Wing versus Right Wing. Never has been. Rather, the key divide always most critical in shaping our lives, our nation, and our world is Up Wing versus Down Wing. The core claim of Up Wing thinking is this: A vibrant and resilient society is one with a firm belief that tomorrow can be better than today — if we choose to make it so. And Down Wing thinking? To DWers, we live in a zero-sum society. (Even if faster growth were possible, it would just enrich the already rich and further destroy the environment.) Good thing, then, there’s been a surge in Up Wing thinking, from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “It’s time to build” ethos to what New York Times columnist Ezra Klein calls “supply-side progressivism.”
🌐 How Russia’s 'brain drain' could be a 'brain gain' for the world — especially America (03.24.22) | It’s never a bad time for Americans to remind themselves of the importance of the country’s ability to attract global talent. Immigrants have been key to America’s world-leading digital economy. No immigrants, no Silicon Valley as we know it. Example: Mikhail and Eugenia Brin, along with their young son and daughter, left the Soviet Union behind in 1979 and emigrated to America. Mikhail, who then changed his name to Michael, obtained an academic post at the University of Maryland, while Eugenia became a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Clearly the Brins, now both retired, have made a tremendous contribution to their adopted country. And so has their oldest son, Sergey. He’s co-founder of Google. Something for US policymakers to keep in mind as a wave of tech talents flees Putin’s Russia. Same goes for another geopolitical rival, China. Give America your tired, your poor, your talent!
Best of 5 Quick Questions
🏙 Alain Bertaud is a senior research scholar at the Marron Institute at NYU. He is the former principal urban planner for the World Bank, and he has worked as a resident urban planner in cities throughout the world, including New York, Paris, Bangkok, and Port au Prince. Most recently, he is the author of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. He contends that a healthy respect for markets — for the tendency of human action to generate an “order without design” — is key to a well-managed city. (The book’s title comes from economist Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit.)
What will be the lingering or long-term impact of the pandemic on American cities?
Nobody knows yet! However, the pandemic will probably change how labor markets are organized. Monitoring the changes in commuting patterns and residential and commercial real estate prices is the best thing cities can do at this moment. Eventually, new commuting patterns and market prices will stabilize, reflecting new transport and real estate demand. Meanwhile, cities should introduce a maximum of regulatory flexibility to allow the transformation of obsolete land use and forms of transport into new ones corresponding to the new emerging demand.
☄ Toby Ord is a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He is also the author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity released in early 2020. In the summer of that year, we had a really great podcast chat. With the continuing pandemic and now war in Europe, I thought it would be a smart time to circle back and ask Ord a few questions. This is one of them.
There’s a Twitter account called the Sweet Meteor O’Death, and people joke that things are so bad we’d welcome an extinction-level meteor impact. On a more serious level: Why should we care about long-termism? Why should we care if human civilization goes on?
One thing that moves me is when I look back a couple of centuries and see how much less good things were: how much less prosperous we were before the Industrial Revolution, and how our life expectancy was only half as long, and how many fewer freedoms many members of our society had in those times. Now that we’re much healthier, freer, and prosperous, I think of what the next 200 years could look like. This didn’t just come for free. These are things that people fought for. But I think we’ll keep fighting. And it looks to me like the future is going to be even better — at least it has the potential to be. And so that’s what moves me most to want to protect it.
Week in Review: Bonus
I had an extra question for Precipice author Toby Ord that I didn’t include in my 5 Quick Questions with him. Back in 2018, he co-authored the paper “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” with his Future of Humanity colleagues Anders Sandberg and Eric Drexler. “Where are they,” famously asked physicist Enrico Fermi of his fellow scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950. As Drexler, Ord, and Sandberg write:
[Fermi] was pointing to a discrepancy that he found puzzling: Given that there are so many stars in our galaxy, even a modest probability of extraterrestrial intelligence arising around any given star would imply the emergence of many such civilizations within our galaxy. Further, given modest assumptions about their ability to travel, to modify their environs, or to communicate, we should see evidence of their existence, and yet we do not. This discrepancy has become known as the Fermi paradox, and we shall call the apparent lifelessness of the universe the Fermi observation.
So, you know, where are they? Maybe nowhere. The researchers apply some clever statistical analysis to the Drake Equation to represent a more realistic distribution of uncertainty than is typically done. They end up with a disappointing — at least from my perspective — conclusion: “… we find a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it.”
But in the years since that paper, there have been some interesting developments on the ET front, most notably video of strange aerial phenomena witnessed by US Navy pilots, along with their testimony. There’s also been a Pentagon report on the issue. Given all that, I thought it would be interesting to ask Ord if those events have altered his view in any way. His response
I have trouble believing that we could actually have been contacted by aliens and don’t know about it. That seems kind of crazy to me, although crazier things, I suppose, have happened. But I think that ultimately we’re probably alone in the universe. This is something where, sure, there are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, so there are many chances for there to be other alien civilizations out there. But it’s also entirely possible that the chance of it occurring in any one place is less than one in a hundred billion. Us existing at all is no evidence that this thing is probable, because we’d have to find ourselves on the place where life started, no matter how rare that is. So I think that our failure to have observed any alien civilizations in the skies is mainly just evidence that there aren’t any.
Best of Micro Reads
🐘 Woolly Mammoth Revival Raises $75 Million From VC Firms, Paris Hilton - Josh Saul, Bloomberg | Resurrecting woolly mammoths isn’t exciting enough? Bloomberg felt it had to include the media personality and socialite in the headline? Actually, this effort from Colossal Biosciences — founded by Harvard University geneticist George Church and technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm is exciting in several ways. First, the company is trying to combine “genetic material from modern-day Asian elephants with that of mammoth DNA frozen into ice and preserved for thousands of years.” So that’s obviously awesome.
Second, these new arctic elephants might help slow climate change. From the piece:
Church pictures herds of mammoths stomping down deep snow that insulates the ground, allowing the intense cold of winter to reach the permafrost so it can refreeze instead of melting away and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide. He expects the mammoths would also knock down trees, clearing the way for other large animals to follow along and pack down more snow. Entire landscapes could be transformed from forest into grassland, which Church said is more efficient at photosynthesis and sequestering carbon — although the science on that isn’t always straightforward.
Third, and this is where the revenue potential actually lies, all this research into genetic engineering and computational biology could help fight human diseases or genetic abnormalities. As one investor put it, “The mammoth captures people’s imaginations, but for me, it’s more about the technology they’re developing.”
🌌 Estate Planning for Humanity - Jeff Hawkins, Noema | Where is everybody? Consider: “Intelligent and technologically advanced life might have sprung up millions of times in the Milky Way.” But maybe they don’t last too long. Nuclear war, deadly pandemics, and killer asteroids aren’t just an Earth thing. What if humanity goes extinct? If so, then a million years from now it will be as if we never existed. Unless we have a plan. As Hawkins writes:
For example, we could continually archive a knowledge base such as Wikipedia [located in] in a set of satellites that orbit the Sun. This way, the archive will be easy to discover but difficult to physically alter or destroy. … We could use multiple satellites at different orbits for redundancy. In essence, we could create a time capsule designed to last for millions or hundreds of millions of years. In the distant future, intelligent beings — whether they evolve on Earth or travel from another star — could discover the time capsule and read its contents.