Life & AI: Long or Short? What I read...

The Moving Meterstick of Time

“I can’t believe I’m in the last chapter of my life. I can’t believe I’m in my 60s."‌ ‌‌ ‌

“Do you remember thirty years ago?
Does 30 years seem like a long time?
Don’t you think you have 30 more years in your life to live?”‌ ‌‌ ‌

"Yeah, I do. I think I've got at least 30 years."

The year after his wife died at age 57 from breast cancer, John Travolta shared this moment from a conversation with his 10-year-old son and concluded: "I realised it's about a viewpoint in life that allows you to settle down about something."

HEALTH

Decline or flourish

The current paradigm of ageing means people generally equate every decade of life with a progressive decline in health, and most don't imagine their much-older self to be healthy and thriving. But what happens when people start shaping this future self because they believe ageing can actually mean flourishing?

1. Reactive life choices -> Proactive life choices
2. Fixed mindset -> Growth mindset
3. Near-term planning and Future-oriented planning

The end of history illusion

People believe they won't change much in the future, even if they recognise how tremendously they've changed in the past. Said another way: "I laugh at who I was at age 20, but I assume that by age 60 I’ll roughly be the same person I am today."

For young teens, it's hard to imagine who the 30-year-old self might be—what it conjures is likely a hodgepodge of qualities from anyone they admire who's older.

For 30-year-olds, envisioning age 60+ is likely coloured by how people near and dear are ageing around them; how culture has shaped their views on work, leisure, and retirement; and how interest rates have shaped their personality, view of the future, and the money they've saved.

Present-focused or future-focused

An idea from The Time Paradox book is that everyone has a primary time focus: future-, present-, or past-oriented. Derek Sivers sums it up this way:

Acting too undisciplined? I've stopped vividly seeing my future. I can only see the present.

Acting too disconnected? I realize it's because I'm obsessed with my goals. I can only see the future.
...
Both mindsets are necessary. You need a present-focus to enjoy life. But too much present-focus can prevent the deeper happiness of achievement. (I call this “shallow happy” versus “deep happy”.)

Imagining the future can feel futile for people who grew up with instability. There's an intuitive understanding of luck & risk—of knowing the world is surprising and things happen every day that never happened before.

Rhythm & the time-keeper of life

No matter where one falls on the physics and philosophy of time as an illusion, there is a rhythm to life on Earth—the sun, the moon, the tide, the seasons.

Luke Burgis: "I often ask myself: who is the time-keeper of my life? To whose rhythm am I dancing?" from Tuning In To a Different Rhythm.

What alters this sense of rhythm? The brain and anything influencing it, including technology, diseases, and drugs including caffeine and alcohol. Many people are now surrounded by things designed to addict them, and it's destroying their vitality and warping their sense of time.

The antidote? Perhaps thick desires.

TECH

Technology always changes the world, even if you don’t use it. Once it's there, it's there. And even if you don't use it, there are questions: If you can use the technology, why don't you? Or, why don't you think you should?

AI: an intro in 3 sentences for my dad who never used a smartphone or computer

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) learns through different models.
2. There's a model called transformer that can understand everything as language—even images, videos, and computer code—kind of like how Leeloo learns in The Fifth Element; remember when she gets to war?
3. Much of this power in artificial intelligence can be accessed openly through a company called OpenAI, which is fuelling a wave of generative AI—generative because it's creating something that didn't previously exist. (Note: The GPT in ChatGPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer.)

Generative AI: how it's used

This quick demo of Microsoft Copilot shows how generative AI technology will be used to help draft emails, reports, and presentations in products like Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint following its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.

1. Information: conversational Q&A with ChatGPT, Metaphor, Perplexity, Poe
2. Images & video: supercharged creativity with Midjourney, DALL-E, Runway
3. Coding: accelerated with GitHub Copilot

AI vs human intelligence

1. AGI (artificial general intelligence): hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that can perform any intellectual task a human can; sometimes called the singularity in reference to how a moment like this in technology irreversibly changes human civilisation
2. Takeoff: hypothetical moment when artificial intelligence is accelerating to exceed human intelligence broadly and begins to self-improve
3. AGI apocolypse: a hypothetical dystopian future when human extinction is caused by artificial intelligence

TECH / AI

1. The AI Dilemma: "Half of AI researchers believe there's a 10% or greater chance that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI."

Who was surveyed: This was sourced from AI Impacts' "2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI," a survey with 738 responses between June-Aug 2022 of machine learning experts defined as "researchers who published at the conferences NeurIPS or ICML in 2021." Both conferences are generally respected in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence research.

Why it matters: Imagine you're about to get on a plane and 50% of engineers who build planes like that say, "If you get on this plane, there's a 10% chance that everybody goes down." What would you do?

2. Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. What people like Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak did is sign an open letter asking all AI labs to pause for at least 6 months on building systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Why it matters: GPT-4 learned from a foundation of information much bigger than GPT-3. Since GPT-3 is impressive in many ways and GPT-4 is even more capable, visualising the difference in size between GPT-3 and GPT-4 puts some perspective on why some people are concerned about the power and consequences of what comes next.

Takeaways:

a. "What we're hearing from the inside is not, 'Slow down AI.' What we're hearing from the inside is: 'We need to move at the speed of getting it right, because we only get one shot at this.'"

b. "The point we're trying to make is: No matter how good the utopia you create, if your dystopia is bad enough it doesn't matter." (The AI Dilemma)

3. Question everything.
Not-true information: ChatGPT is powerful and also intermittently wrong. There are many examples of artificial intelligence giving fake citations, links, and summaries. (DuckDuckGo "chatgpt fake"; Kate Crawford). OpenAI currently has a disclaimer noting ChatGPT produces inaccurate information.

Not-real photos: A fake, AI-generated picture of Pope Francis in stunning fashion went viral (Continuations). And the clothing brand Levi's will soon supplement human models with AI-generated models (BoF).

Not-human dupes (audio & video): With three seconds of your voice, anyone can now continue speaking with it. And a single image of you can be used to create a talking head video. What's possible when someone has access to your photo and a clip of your voice? Anyone can now create an avatar that looks and talks exactly like you in real-time video.

TECH / IN OTHER NEWS

Substack is making a play in social media. Substack announced the upcoming rollout of Substack Notes, which looks like Twitter. This is a bet on three things:

1. Trust and attention belong to the writer now—not a brand or institution,
2. Writers leveraging the Substack social media feed of recommendations to convert casual readers into paying subscribers, and
3. Readers expanding their willingness to pay for digital subscriptions since the platform isn't supported by ads.

But just after the announcement, things got weird. People started saying they couldn't post or share Substack links on Twitter. Substack's co-founder said Twitter was blocking their links. Twitter chief Elon Musk claimed Substack's IP address was untrusted because Substack was trying to "download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone." Yesterday Substack sent a cryptic tweet suggesting the spat was over and Notes would be "available soon."

MONEY

Oprah Winrey, the self-made billionaire who revolutionised media. Winfrey rarely talks about her business and it takes a lot of digging to find her in the hot seat. This dossier is a curation of gems about her very long career in business with a focus on the dealmaking that gave her ownership. This sounds simple in theory, but think about how many people gave away equity and eventually control of their life's work. (The Profile)
"Own everything. This allows you to be in control of your work, and write your own check."

How Michael Jordan became the richest athlete ever. If Oprah is not your cup of tea, the learning is the same with Michael Jordan: licensing made him millions but it was ownership that created massive wealth. (Huddle Up)

DOSE OF WONDER

First Prototype of the New Moonsuit. NASA is upgrading the moonsuit with help from a Hollywood costume designer ahead of the 2025 Artemis III lunar mission that will put American astronauts on the moon again for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. (via Full Throttle)