This analysis looks at the unexpected reemergence of email newsletters, despite social media’s early dominance. It explores the surprising rise of short video clips on TikTok, YouTube and other platforms. And it examines why static infographic images continue capturing attention in an increasingly automated world.

By illuminating these relationships, key insights emerge on what drives success for each format now and into the future:
- Email’s resilience owing to its universal protocols
- Cross-platform video sharing, though not without fragmentation challenges
- The ongoing popularity of infographics, fueled by human graphic design skills
- Striking the right balance with AI-generated content moving forward

As technologies progress, grasping these pivotal connections will prove vital. Understanding how these different formats complement one another allows us to better navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.

Vipassana is a meditation technique founded by Gautama Buddha Siddhartha around 2,500 years ago. It was embraced by what later evolved into the Buddhist tradition, and it was passed down orally for many years. The practice remained mainly in regions like Tibet, India, and present-day Bangladesh — where Buddhism was prevalent. About a century ago, it began to gain broader attention, particularly when Tibetan monks, fleeing China’s invasion and accompanying the Dalai Lama, began sharing their practices. By the mid-20th century, teachings were being translated from Sanskrit, the original language of the practice, into English and subsequently other languages. I’ll refrain from using too many Sanskrit terms.

Commitment is crucial. Throughout the silent retreat, participants don’t speak, read, write, use devices or even make eye contact. The aim is mental purification and enhancing concentration by eliminating distractions. Our group consisted of about 70 individuals, predominantly women, with about a dozen men. While we weren’t segregated, women and men were spatially separated during meals and meditation sessions. We were housed in a monastery in Northern Italy, sans monks, and enveloped in silence.

As AI continues to advance, it is vital for individuals to distinguish themselves from the mindless, automatic existence of a zombie and actively participate in building a future worth living.

The iterative, rapid improvement process that SpaceX utilizes is clearly working as shown by remarkable achievements of the Falcon 9 rockets. It is important to acknowledging the hard work behind it, and the competence of professionals.

I was invited to sign an open letter that asks to allow for deeper consideration of AI design, implementation, and regulation.

Concerns include inherent bias, job displacement, pollution of the info-sphere, loss of trust in communication, and potential dangers of Artificial General Intelligence.

The benefits of AI and AGI are immense, but responsible development and planning are crucial for harnessing these benefits and mitigating risks.

In today's world we receive a constant stimulation of inputs, and requests for outputs, in the search for efficiency, and the effort of reaching our goals. Without trying, I unexpectedly discovered how much I enjoy solitude, and the silence. It not only was refreshing, but made me more focused and productive, as well.

I'm often asked for advice about skills that are worth developing or learning, and I am always very happy to provide my feedback. These questions come from people of all ages, and this is very appropriate, because those who are not very young anymore, who are not at the beginning of their professional trajectory, can and should invest in themselves in order to maintain and improve their ability to provide value to the businesses that they work together with.

This is especially important in terms of what I call the half life of skills. If we decide to invest our attention, our resources, our time in a given direction, we have to take into account the opportunity costs that arise unavoidably. For example, our professional time is limited even if measured in decades, so we definitely want to maximize the return on the investment that we are making in developing a new skill.

So understanding and analyzing what is the likely life lifecycle of these technical skills enables a person to make very valuable judgments on the investment that a particular direction deserves. I hope that, alongside the other useful parameters of prioritizing certain skills, you may decide to use this concept of the half life of skills as something that you also find valuable.

There has been an explosion of experimentation in the past years, and now there are tools available, at least in preliminary beta versions, for neural networks of very large sizes that can provide paragraphs of text or images from an initial prompt. GPT-3 is an example of the first generating text from a prompt, and it has become the basis for numerous applications. DALL-E-2 and MidJourney are examples of platforms that generate images while being assisted and powered by Artificial Intelligence, where the prompt will produce a particular picture.

Yes, sometimes the robot would end up doing a different thing from what is asked, but this conversation between the robot and the human, it can lead to something bigger, something greater. Right now these neural networks have billions, hundreds of billions and soon, trillions of parameters, but I look forward to when they’ll be trained to handle even more large amounts of data.

What we are doing right now is not the definitive way that we are going to use to interact with AIs, and it’s already something that not everyone has the patience to learn and to follow. Some people will not want to keep experimenting and improving until the result satisfies them; they will want faster and easier ways of going about their business using Artificial Intelligence. But in the meantime, I think this current phase is very precious since it shows how large the space of creativity enabled by AI is.

This new level of creative scenario is going to be possible, but in the meantime, understanding the power of these tools and the unlimited universe of creation is accelerating, and I am so happy that these tools are available to anyone. Anyone can get their hands dirty and understand the power of Artificial Intelligence today, and I invite you to do so. Even if it's just a test with just a handful of images, you will be able to call yourself an artist and learn to interact with the superpower of Artificial Intelligence, which will help you create a better future.

It is definitely the case that on social media platforms there are a lot of accounts that do not necessarily correspond to a single human. For example, if an Internet of Things sensor uses Twitter in order to communicate the temperature, the humidity or whatever other parameter that it extracts from the environment, and someone else takes advantage of that value incorporating it in an application after it is publicly available on Twitter, is a completely automated non human account, which is certainly not spam or fake. So you can have those accounts that want to defraud, scam or trick people into doing something that at the end will harm them on one hand, and on the other hand there are those accounts that are very useful, even if they are bots.

What should we use? What should we decide? What should we keep the power towards? Can we expect each account to have an ID card to prove their human identity? And can we pretend that each human should only be able to do it once forever? I don't think that it is reasonable to expect that we should do that, and those platforms that will try will find that it is either impossible or undesirable since the value that we will lose by imposing this is too large. On one hand, we must enable anonymous and pseudonymous participation on online platforms for many reasons, but on the other hand, it can be argued that the increase of non-human powered human-like accounts can be valuable, they can play a useful role as well.

I think every platform should ask themselves the same question: “Why are we prohibiting bots? Shouldn't we allow them? And if we do, how should they behave on the platform after explicitly declaring their nature?” Let's see if there will be platforms that understand that this is the future, because I assure you, every year that it passes, the number of bots is going to increase, potentially, and that is definitely going to be the case may be in a decade or two, eclipsing the number of humans and we should rather than feared future, prepare for it, embrace it, and understand how to thrive in it.

I was in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. It is a very interesting and buzzing city of over 10 million people in a nation of 50 million. South Korea has been classified in 2021 as a developed nation by the United States. This means that until then, it was classified as a developing nation. As a matter of fact, it was extremely poor out of the Second World War and out of the Korean War in the 50s, for example 80% of the population and more couldn't read or write. Today, it is a major technology hub, an exporter of television sets, mobile phones, cars, brands like Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Kia, that are known worldwide. Over the course of just two three generations, it has been able to bootstrap the entire nation into the premier league. Definitely, the local culture contributed fundamentally to this. The belief in the value of education and in the belief that not only students, but institutions and teachers and families, of course have to work together in order to achieve the desired outcomes.

Today, the question is not whether this approach works, because it has proven to work, but the question is how to adapt this approach to the current new realities. The extreme pressure on the students is visible in the suicide rates that are very high. “The necessity to achieve and to succeed is not complemented by an understanding that failure can be part of it, and that failure is not an end of the road, but it is maybe a bump or maybe a learning experience instead”.

The challenge, of course, is how to stay competitive, how to maintain the growth in the domestic product. That has been the traditional measure of economic success, and certainly improved the material quality of life of South Korea. The wealth and income inequality in the country is high, and the Social Safety Net is insufficient, especially in protecting the elderly who are living in poverty in very large numbers, a percentage that is close to 30% of the South Korean elderly living in poverty. Like in many places in the world, Seoul and South Korea live in contrasts, and these contrasts are unavoidable. They are preferable than total homogeneous equality that gives no opportunity to excel, no opportunity to achieve no incentive to work on self improvement that benefits the entire society. However, these contrasts need to be managed; for South Korea and Seoul in the coming years and certainly decades, the new challenge is going to be how to adapt, how to not only achieve material wealth, but balance and psychological, mental well being in a society that has been able to push itself to succeed, but it must not crumble upon the responsibility of succeeding at any cost.

When we think about investors, we think about them as a homogeneous group, but in reality there are many different types of investors, like angel investors or managers of venture capital firms, and each of them have slightly different incentives, perspectives, timeframes, expectations of returns on their capital. Basically, traditional equity investment in startups needs about six to eight years to earn a return, and that period of time is actually sufficient to bridge recessions that may last a year or two.

If we consider this information, then it is somewhat surprising when immediately at the first signals of a bear market, or the first signals of a recession, you immediately read that the investors are investing less money, or at worse terms than before. One of the reason for this is the financial of course, but there is also a psychological one: during the bull market there is a rush to take a position in an exciting project, and the maesters trample each other, so when things are slowing down then everything is more calm, then they can take their sweet time to decide.

From the point of view of startup founders, bear markets are very hard, either to start or to survive, depending on the phase their startup is at. It must immediately react by freezing hiring, dismissing people from their project, and laying down on their marketing activities. The uncertainty of the many variables that need to be under control is frustrating, if not even panic-inducing, but at the same time the opportunity to actually start a project and in a bear market is great since the project will be less pressured in making decisions.

The Crypto market itself is a variant of these behaviors in a more compressed timelines. For many, the expectation was that whether Bitcoin, Ethereum, or cryptos different from these two main ones would be counter cyclical to the public stock market. Those people were surprised by the decline in technology stocks on NASDAQ or on other stock exchanges, and the decline in cryptocurrency prices would be going somewhat in lockstep.

I am not a trader, I cannot predict what is the short term variation of stocks or cryptocurrencies. There are people who believe technical analysis helps them draw certain lines, and they believe that these lines indicate trends that will support their trading assumptions. Good luck to them, but what I believe is that the ingenuity of talented teams and the desire of investors to earn a return by backing themes that come up with innovative solutions over large numbers and sufficient amounts of time will reverse the current bear market, the current recessions, and we will come out in a few months in the case of the crypto market, or in a few years, in the case of the public markets, and the global macroeconomic conditions, hopefully stronger with increased productivity and innovative solutions all around.

Technology is feeding on itself. It is the expression of our understanding of the world, and how we can structure the implementation of this understanding in a way that serves our purpose. When technology accelerates or when the rate of acceleration is even increasing, ideas matter even more than before because ideas stop being just a theoretical, philosophical, academic set of discussions among people who dream of what could be, but never step into what they can do, either because they don't want to or they are not able to.

When we talk about free speech, we are not only talking about what is worth talking about, but we are talking about what is worth doing. And there will be another step: when humanoid robots will be available, and they potentially enable us to live alternative lives. For example, one of those robots might live on Mars and another on the moon, while a third one may be in a form that is not humanoid at all. Even so, they’ll still might bring a human consciousness to the stars. How will we relate to the possibility of our own consciousness inhabiting one or more of these bodies? What will be the conversations that we are going to have, when these are going to be real possibilities?

Some of these will probably never happen, but can we afford not talk about them? Can we afford to not debate in a healthy, open, energetic, but civilized manner? Can we afford not to build the necessary defenses against those ideas that we establish or harmful instead of being beneficial?

You might ask: what is Twitter's role in all of this? Well, my question is if Twitter is going to be the final platform where the science of mimetics and mimetic engineering turn into concrete day to day reality. It probably won’t, but I believe that under Elon Musk's ownership, Twitter will accelerate our ability to understand what kind of debates, what kind of platforms, what kind of tools we need, in order to accelerate or even increase the rate of acceleration of our ideas.

We must understand what works, what does not work, and with our increased ability to turn ideas into action. Being able to do so is something that everyone should aspire to acquire.

The President of the United States believes that Bitcoin indeed matters. He labeled it a potential threat to the national security of the United States of America.

I don't think that Bitcoin cares about what the President of the United States thinks about Bitcoin, which is kind of the point; for 1000s of years, the way that we designed the money was such that what people thought about that particular kind of money influenced the money, and the behavior of that money and the rules under which that money would be able to exist.

What will be the next step? The next step is that Bitcoin will still not care. Bitcoin will still do its own thing, the network that will enable anyone to transfer value in an unfettered manner and without any possibility of nation states stopping it or organizations interfering. The European Union, for example, is the latest to delude themselves that they will be able to stop Bitcoin. The European Parliament voted a few weeks ago a resolution that will be implemented in all the member states that will impose reporting requirements on Bitcoin exchanges that are stricter than not those imposed on any bank. A bank is required to report on the source and the destination of a transaction when it is larger than the equivalent of $10,000 or 10,000. Euro. The rule that is now going to be imposed in Europe is for this reporting to apply at any amount being transferred; it is frankly, ridiculous, and it is not going to achieve whatever supposed desired effect the legislators felt they would need to act in order to achieve because Bitcoin doesn't care.

You should care about what the nation states are doing, and I am looking forward to understanding that you are caring, but you should also care for yourself and be fine with the fact and recognize your ability to let go of the feelings that you have towards Bitcoin, because Bitcoin doesn't care.

#finance #bitcoin #money

I'm here back in Dubai, where I will be speaking at conferences, talking about the various crypto technologies that are certainly very important. However, often, the teams that are analyzing how to improve these technologies, neglect other fundamental barriers to adoption.

So many wonderful technology solutions require dozens of difficult steps until you can do something, while others have a promise of providing you with great financial returns. However, they require a commitment and the ability to manage the risk that not a lot of people have. Finally, even though we speak English, and many of the people follow us as well, the vast majority of the people on the planet do not. It is crucially important to overcome these barriers if we want to scale crypto solutions to billions of people.

For the past few months, I have been working with a talented and passionate team that is building exactly that: CheetaX is focusing on India's 1.3 billion people, which is a huge market opportunity. Their current solutions for savings provide abysmal returns, and the population is ready to adopt something new. It has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, and smartphone distribution is huge: an estimated 800 million people have smartphones.

Now CheetahX wants to provide a very simple solution with easy onboarding, and the one-click decision for a bridge towards what we call DeFi Yield Opportunities, really simplifying what can be done. Not everyone in India speaks English or Hindi, and as a matter of fact, hundreds of millions of people speak neither of those two languages, but their local language.

CheetahX plans to release its application in seven languages to provide a necessary gateway to crypto adoption to these hundreds of millions of people, and the time is now because the infrastructure is here. The people are ready. We need to provide them with smart solutions. And we need to enable them to learn so that they can adopt crypto and its advantages. CheetahX is already providing the waitlist for signing up in their application, and they also have a native token that will be used as a reward token in their learning platform, and so many other ways.

On cheetahx.com people can already start understanding how they are aiming to approach this incredibly rich and promising market. Will India be only the first step? Will CheetahX go on to conquer Southeast Asia or Africa or other important markets? Well, we will see but the billions of people who haven't been using Blockchain and crypto solutions until now certainly have a new player that they can leverage If they want to make their first steps in this exciting world.

#india #crypto #startup

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you’re done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.

Bre Pettis wrote, together with Kio Stark, “The Cult of Done Manifesto” in 2009. He then went on to found MakerBot, and I'm sure he is doing exciting things today. At the time, when I read “The Cult of Done Manifesto”, it very strongly resonated with me; if you follow the context, you can still hear echoes in so many things that I keep often repeating in many of the subjects that I talked about. How important it is to test things out, how important it is to try new things, how natural it is to make mistakes. I am sure that there are dozens of more concepts that are smartly buried, and can take seeds from within this manifesto.

I recently had the chance to remember it because I am working with a very smart and passionate startup that is now coming out of their “stealth mode”. When you’re in this stage, no one knows what you're doing, and you are not ready to confront the crude reality of the world. But you must come out of your comfort zone, and face reality to receive both good and bad reception. Maybe you’re sharing your documentation, and people are trying passionately to poke holes in them, which is perfectly fine. If people just say “Oh, wow, this document is great. It is so inspiring, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it”, what could you learn? How could you improve?

It’s better to hear this criticism and try to improve your idea and mentality: How much do you believe in what you are doing on one hand and on the other? How smartly Can you listen and incorporate what actually of the criticism makes sense? How can you distinguish between what you can safely discard and what instead matters to you? Of course, rather than discarding, you have answers that you are able to rapidly develop or memorize as needed and provide the answer to that criticism without trying to deflect it and acknowledging it, but also letting the other person understand that you actually thought about what they are saying.

Make mistakes, because now is the time. Look at Elon Musk, for example: he has 17 million followers, yet he still makes plenty of mistakes. Don't treat your social media with gloved hands, instead just post stuff that you can always delete. Just reach out. Just make it done.

#procrastination #motivation #doing

Over the next weeks and months, missile attacks will continue, bombarding and destroying Ukrainian cities. The determination of the population will be crucial. If Russia is able to eliminate the democratically elected Ukrainian government, they will install a new one who will be friendly to Russia. But even if they were to declare victory with this government in place, that will not mean that they will have conquered Ukraine as a country. Putin's decision has fundamentally undermined his own rule, and has inflicted lasting damage to the political, economic future of Russia. The consequences are far reaching.

China is saying cynically: “Well, if we cannot trade in dollars, because unfortunately Russia is under sanctions, maybe we can trade in Chinese currency. By the way, we just introduced the digital Yuan. Wouldn't this be a convenient way of modernizing our economic ties?” India imports almost all of its weapons from Russia. And as the United States strengthened its ties with Pakistan in its fight against Afghanistan and the Taliban, India, the largest democracy on the planet, decided that cozying up to the Russian dictator was a good choice. During the Ukraine-Russia conflict they are pretending that they can afford not to take sides. That democracy and the democratically elected government is not worth supporting and defending, even with just a declaration of principle.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will see a lot more people dying. And we will see conflict going on. The people of Ukraine and the country of Ukraine will come out of it winning and that the aggression that they are suffering currently will cease.

#ukraine #russia #ukrainewar

We receive information from a wide variety of sources to a degree that hasn't happened before. We have television, YouTube, and other video content online. We have journalistic sources, as well as crowdsourced intelligence information that is coming from people on the ground. Most of us are not equipped with the tools that enable the correct aggregation and synthesis of these pieces of information.

In the past, we would rely on professional journalists to complete this task. Over the past 10 years or so, many people have started to look at the work of journalists as not only chronicling what is happening objectively, but giving a slant by expressing their point of view, or the point of view of their editorial board. There are many reasons, but this is a paradox; drinking from the firehose of information is beyond our human individual capacity, and we don't trust the interpretation and aggregation of the news by professionals.

Understanding that we are individually biased, and that our various sources are also unavoidably biased, should not reduce us to a paralyzed position of cynicism. Instead, it can be substituted by a more proactive stance with the help of innovative tools, like Improve the News.

Developed by MIT professor and researcher Max Tegmark and his group, Improve the News allows you to explore different points of view, and understand their merit, being exposed to them in a controlled fashion. Even if you end up confirming that you keep disagreeing with the alternative points of view, you can incorporate your knowledge of them in your worldview, to improve your future decisions.

#news #fakenews #information

I want to be a comedian. Do I want to be a comedian? My father was an actor, and he kind of made sure that I wouldn't actually go on the path of performing as an actor. But as a public speaker, I can feel that at least to some degree I would enjoy it, and maybe would be good at it. Telling a story, hearing the feedback from the audience, being able to read how they react, who are attuned to your speaking, who is maybe even riveted. And then, when I deliver a keynote, after I'm done opening the Q&A, I actually understand that people have been provoked into thinking, into asking themselves questions. These are indicators that possibly I could attempt to act as well.

Even seasoned professionals, comedians you admire, need the experience of developing the jokes, testing them and improving them until they work. And of course, during the process, they feel silly, they feel bad, they feel the hurt of the audience not laughing at the joke that doesn't work. So this is the same iterative process that I talk about so often, where you want to go somewhere, and you want to know what is needed in order to get there, but not exactly how it is going to play out. And as long as you are able to measure the outcome of a given step, you are able to improve, to try variants, until you achieve what you want.

The opportunity of going out on a limb, of getting your hands dirty, of making mistakes, of understanding how and when these things can work is part of the effort that makes the result valuable. The effort that distinguishes those who actually invest in the process, and those who do not. Knowing that we have put in the effort that we have made, the mistakes and that we have achieved our goal of making people laugh.

Watch the video until the end to hear my favorite joke.

#comedy #jokes #experiment

If you feel that you are smarter than the average in a particular group, you are probably wrong. This common condition is called superiority bias, and it is not one of the worst. We are all multi-dimensional people. There are so many ways that you can be seen and recognized objectively to be above average; you just have to realize that, on average, you are average. So how can you excel as an individual? You also have to realize that it is impossible to excel all around, across so many different parameters, so you have to pick the battles that you can win.

Organizations have the same problem constantly, both internally and externally. Observers will want to be able to conclude that the organization is improving and is beating its competition, but if you look over a certain period in a particular industry, you’ll see that it will have an average rating, and the likelihood that a particular organization in that group is average is statistically very high. You also have to consider that organizations tend to become more and more risk-averse, especially if they have been successful and achieved a certain position in their industry.

How can an organization avoid being seen as tending towards mediocrity? It is an effort in maintaining and improving company culture, it is an effort in allowing people to improve themselves by letting them learn, making them eager to learn. It is an effort in setting bars of objectives higher, constantly restructuring the organization as needed to make sure that it can achieve the harder objectives.

Being able to understand the origins of mediocrity whether in an organization or ourselves, is the first step to be able to recognize how we can improve and to what extent we can improve, understanding also the limits of this ability, and understanding how we can reach a life worth living and an organization that is generative, that contributes to a society, that makes this world a better place to be in and to thrive.

#excellent #mediocre #choice

The concept of DAO was born a few years ago on top of the Ethereum Blockchain, when its developers wanted to make a new way to invest in projects available to everyone, where the investors would not only passively make their funds available, but through a voting mechanism could decide which were the projects that deserved to receive the funds. The experiment wasn’t a success because the code on which it was based was defective due to many bugs, but it was an important initial test.

A DAO is not only for financing projects. There are many other use cases that can benefit from this kind of new organization; traditionally, we would tend to delegate the decision making to a single individual or a very small group of individuals, and one would think that this type of structure is necessary or maybe even optimal. It would appear very efficient on the surface, and that may be so in the short term. However, the danger is very clear: hierarchical organizations can efficiently make fatal decisions.

One of the challenges of DAOs is to make sure that human attention and participation is sustained; it is hard work, which requires a lot of effort. You could think of a DAO powered by humans as a Proof of Work consensus algorithm, because it requires a lot of energy and a lot of thinking brains are needed in order to form the decisions of the DAOs. But how about a DAO powered by machines? One that is composed of software and hardware to an increasing degree, where the decisions are not made by humans, but are made by machines. This can also be very interesting in many different ways.

When the internet was born, it was for academic researchers, for technologists, specialists. With the introduction of the World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser, it has become possible for non specialists to roam the digital superhighway. The first websites were simply the display of information that you would read, and then there would be a hyperlink leading to another page or server somewhere when you clicked on it. This kind of static connection of web pages and web sites together was already a huge improvement in the area of information retrieval.

Then, at the turn of the millennium, the concept of web 2.0 was born, which was the understanding that web pages and websites could and should display information much more dynamically, based on what the users also provided, text, photos, videos even. This information, that was enriching the websites, could be correlated displayed to others and others could react to them. This is what is now part of the daily life of many of us in this series of web services: social networks, video streaming sites, ecommerce platforms. Web 2.0 led to a concentration of power towards technology giants.

The dream of Web3 has a better balance. The distributed and decentralized control of the information on unstoppable services, and platforms for the empowerment and emancipation of billions of people is going to take time to fully develop, maybe 10 years. But we are already seeing the glimpses of Web3 in Blockchain technologies, like the NFTs that are laying the grounds of solutions that will persist and will be important through the Metaverse.

The most important component of Web3 is the challenge of a digital identity that is reliable, but is also flexible. Our digital identity must have multiple facets; if I need to be identified with my traditional passport, so be it. But if I want to be pseudonymous on some new platform that gathers one of my passions then I should be able to do so. Finally, I should also have the right to be anonymous. This flexible identity system doesn't exist yet, and it is going to be a cornerstone of Web3 applications.

What other aspects of Web3 intrigue you? I’ll make sure to cover them on future episodes of The Context.

When you think about money, you think of a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value, which was used over the course of the history of human civilization. Today the most advanced form of money is represented by Blockchain-based networks, in particular Bitcoin, and it is important to understand why they have their particular features, and if they are fit to replace traditional forms of money.

In the past for thousands of years, we have had gold backed money, and that too was Proof of Work. This is what is the greatest accusation against Bitcoin of how wasteful it is, but think about it: in order to have gold backed money, you had to discover, develop and control goldmines, and then extract the gold, refine it, transport it, and store it. This was and is still a pretty sizable effort, and that is why when you were able to show the physical gold, either in your vaults or in the form of coins, everyone admired you, the king, and trusted your money.

Modern forms of traditional money are Proof of Work as well: the petrodollar shows the ability of the United States to protect oil trade, and impose the monopoly use of the USD on it; fiat currencies derive their value from the cumulative effort of the people working in the economies accepting them.

We have an abundance of energy, and Bitcoin computers are not going to fry the world; they are going to bootstrap the world into discovering new opportunities and new ways to build a civilization. You must understand the details of this, at least to such a degree that you do not fall prey to the superficial analysis that is directed against it from the point of view of the incumbent interests. The reason why you must understand it is because it is unstoppable, not only from the point of view of cyber attacks, but also from the point of view of governments not being able to make it illegal to own or to transfer.

Bitcoin is going to be part of our future and it has been for the past 10 years. Hopefully, you will stop blaming it for being wasteful.

Yes, if you need to build widgets or if you need to serve at the restaurant then of course you need to be physically present at the place of work. But for all of us who work on our computers, we can work anywhere in the world. I think it is important for companies to understand that people must be trusted to be passionate about what they do, and as a consequence, to be measured by the objectives that they reach. To pretend to control that someone is sitting at their desk in the office and work as the middle manager walks past their back, controlling that they are at least pretending to be busy is an Orwellian nightmare. And it is totally unnecessary.

But the best place and the best combination is what you should aim for where there is reciprocal, well placed trust and that is what all of us should aim to achieve. That is what should drive our engagement in such an important activity in our lives as the place of work. And once that is achieved, really, you can as long as you have internet connectivity, you have your computer or your advanced tablet or phone. You can do your work anywhere at your own pace, together with your other members of the remote team.
using asynchronous communication, email, but also chat systems like Slack, managing everyone tasks on Asana, the task management system or any other similar tool in and then of course, having periodic online meetings, maybe every day, to make sure that things that could derail a project and lead to misunderstandings are clarified, everything is in sync, everyone is on the same page.

So the expectation is that with the end of the pandemic, hopefully, people should go back to the office after having been able to work from home or wherever they wanted. And having successfully done so is misguided backwards, and the companies that impose it should pay a penalty. Those companies that embrace remote work and maintain it in their culture will reap great benefits in terms of productivity, the satisfaction of the team members and the ability to hire the best talent worldwide.

We live in a complex world, and this has been highlighted for many of us during COVID, because the intricacies and the interconnected nature of so many processes and procedures became transparent. This kind of insight into the complexity of our world is extremely helpful. It is healthy to understand what effort it actually takes to accomplish things, and how much effort additionally is required when they are not going well. The ability to deliver the expected result under unexpected circumstances, adverse conditions, stong forces pushing you left and right is what resilience is about.

Our systems are resilient if we can rely on them, maybe not under a wide range of unanticipated circumstances. A complex world will express unexpected circumstances often, so we need resilient systems, but their resiliency comes at the cost of a lower degree of optimization, and as a consequence, a lower efficiency.

In 2022 let's remember what are the very natural consequences of a complex world where we want to be able to deliver solutions to our challenges. As a consequence, we want to create resilient and adaptable systems and procedures, without worrying about being super efficient. Let's give us a little slack. Let's give us collectively a little leeway, the benefit of doubt and empathy and love when we are together or from afar.

Evidently, current academic and educational institutions are not up to the job, while gamification, Learn to Earn and other components in moving to a decentralized system of certificates can be the solution to achieve what is needed.

Learning is a wonderful process, fundamental in our lives. The social signals that come with acquiring a given title can be valuable. The license earned can be a requirement for practicing a certain type of profession.

What can be the alternatives that we should explore and then implement if we find them useful and adapt to our needs that are going to replace the traditional college curriculum, if we decide it is not up to the expectations of today's world.

We know that traditional online learning cannot be it. We have statistics over the course of the past 10 years and more: the completion rates of online courses are abysmal (less than 5-10%). We need to find better ways to make sure that people have the right incentives. To do so, they need to learn to interact and engage with communities of interest that are constituted by like minded people. A good example of this is gamification, and we don't have to think about reducing learning to childish activities. What we need to understand is that the right nudges and the right prodding, on a daily or weekly basis can actually work. The smaller atomic benefits, the little badges, the achievements of leveling up: these are all part of the experience that an increasing number of people have grown up with.

We have to make sure that not only the knowledge, but the tools with which we acquire and analyze knowledge are constantly upgraded. These are, of course, going to be based on Artificial Intelligence. We already use tools that sort and rank information for us, as is the case of a search engine, like Google, where the results that we get are increasingly interactive. The AI behind these interactive tools must be incorporated in our ability to explore knowledge, and there are already a large number of applications that include them. Duolingo for learning languages is famous for its incentives, Khan Academy introduced similar systems in its website and app as well.

Blockchain promises the ability to make the badges earned transferable, transportable. Implementing them as NFTs will be a natural additional step.

What will be the next series of tools? You could be inspired by reading the book Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson, the same person that in Snow Crash employed the term Metaverse that is now inspiring us in so many ways. In Diamond Age there's a young child who has a book that becomes more complex as she grows. The kinds of knowledge and the kinds of wisdom that she can learn from the book very much resemble the tools that we will need in the future, to be able to adapt to the challenges that we are going to face.

You hear from many different places that Bitcoin mining is wasteful and that it is damaging the environment. This is completely misguided: the current system we live under is based on oil extraction, and the transportation of oil all across the world, which costs $2 trillion of military subsidies per year on the side of the United States alone. And it is undermining the sovereignty of nations that are exposed to the uneven distribution of energy resources that are the basis of all of their activities and abilities to support themselves and to make their residents thrive. Bitcoin mining represents the start of a new planet wide energy financial network that is radically different.

In the new Bitcoin energy financial network, evenly distributed across the world, smart nations are going to improve their own sovereignty, they are going to improve the degrees of freedom of their residents, and they are going to lead the planet towards a sustainable future where people and organizations can sustainably thrive.

Two applications of AI deserve special mention.

DeepMind released AlphaFold, which is able to predict the shape of proteins, and published the full database of the human proteome. Next year they expect to publish the shape of all the 100 million known proteins. The database is free, including for commercial applications.

Microsoft trained a special version of GPT-3 Codex, called Copilot, to assist programmers. Already over 30% of the new code written on GitHub is created with the help of Copilot.

The most important development in terms of AI platforms is the emergence of AutoML. The ability of machine learning systems to configure themselves in an unsupervised fashion.

Neural networks require huge amounts of carefully curated data, the selection of the appropriate algorithms to analyze the data, stages of fine-tuning. And then closing the feedback loop of how to introduce new sets of updated data to specifically tailor the neural network for a given application or another. An entire industry was born to support this called MLOps, Machine Learning Operations, which is how the operations for employing and deploying neural networks and machine learning should work.

Automatic machine learning is the application of neural networks to the task of analyzing fine-tuning, deploying, upgrading, and maintaining neural networks for machine learning tasks. And it will dominate the field going forward.

An important consequence is going to be that of democratizing the access to tools that previously were available only for companies with billion-dollar budgets. In the future, everyone can be, if they want to, an Artificial Intelligence engineer.

We have been tracking who we are forever. The basic example is presenting yourself by stating your name to someone while shaking their hand. We have also developed ways to make sure that people are who they say they are through identification documents, both paper, and digital ones. However, there is very little or no corresponding streamlined, efficient way of managing our digital identity. At least three sets of online identities are necessary, and all of the platforms must be able to accommodate at least one or two, if not all three: the true name based digital identity, the pseudonymous digital identity, and the anonymous digital identity.

For the true name based digital identity, I’ll bring up as an example Proof of Humanity, which is an interesting initiative that allows a network of humans vouching to confirm that you are who you say you are, and you get associated with an Ethereum wallet address. After you establish your true name, with a digital identity, this should be applicable and portable. With this, you can easily make it verifiable by another platform without having to go through the entire process again.

The second application is a pseudonymous digital identity. There is no reason to establish the explicit and visible correspondence between your physical identity and a pseudonym, and there are a myriad of legitimate reasons for this. The simplest kind of reason can be for example, that on LinkedIn you are driven to like and comment in a professional manner, which can be either by interacting with the brand of your employer and other brands in the ecosystem. But simultaneously, you have a lot of interests that have nothing to do with that kind of activity, and you don’t want to mix your identity as a vice president of a company with your cosplays or DJing.

The third application is an anonymous digital identity. This is fundamentally important for platforms, and for society as a whole. The reason why anonymous identity in platforms is so crucially important is that there can be existentially important reasons to be able to participate in the online digital world while making sure that the connection between your online anonymous identity and your physical identity cannot be established. In most Western countries, for example, same-sex relationships are recognized and legalized, while in others this is a criminal activity punished by death. And for those who believe that the emancipation of the human condition goes through recognizing the right of a person to be homosexual, without running the risk of being put to death, the ability to express themselves online knowing that their physical identity is separate and that the separation is protected is crucial.

These three kinds of digital identities must be analyzed, understood, and implemented in our platforms in a surefooted manner, not just through the terms and conditions that no one reads. Even if the platform does not enforce it, like in the case of using your real name in a Facebook account, the future of the health of our digital lives depends on this, together with a lot of our activities and our wealth. Let's get to it and establish a clear understanding of these three kinds of digital identities.

What is the hardware and the software that can support it, the new business models that can be disrupting the existing leaders of technology, and how Artificial Intelligence has an important role to play.

We have many different words that from time to time we employ to describe our concepts of digital reality. It can be the Matrix, it can be virtual reality and augmented reality, it can be the Metaverse and many others too. For the past several months, there has been an increasing level of interest around this set of concepts. I am talking about digital realities. Because for me, describing, implementing, and leveraging what we can do in the digital world is not inferior, it is no less real than what we can do in the physical world.

Whatever the application, a new business model now is available, based on NFTs, and it is here to stay. NFTs implement unique traceability for digital objects. Based on Blockchain, globally distributed and decentralized networks that are becoming ever more powerful and ever more important and impossible to ignore.

The role of grandparents plays an important foundation in human society. It frees up the parents either for a precious few hours or for a more extended amount of time to procure food or to just be a little bit farther away from the wonderful but screaming and always pretending bundle of joy that their child represents.

The network of connections is represented by the older generation and is something that we must leverage even further than we are today. Those societies that relegate their elderly miss a lot of opportunities of taking advantage of plenty of energy that they have to invest in the well-being of these networks of relationships, and they miss out on being able to have a dialogue about their experiences, about their outlook, about how they see the present and the future that the society is building.

The societies, on the other hand, that keep their elders closer, in my experience are stronger, they are more resilient, they can withstand pretty large changes and challenges.

What does this have to do with blockchain? The uninterrupted chain of life that we are part of that lasted for billions of years, literally never having been interrupted, and that is always renewing itself through the recombination of our genetic material while always finding solutions to the challenges that a changing environment puts on both individuals and the species themselves as they evolve… This is like the Blockchain: it is unbroken and unbreakable in the sense that we are so strongly interested in making sure that it keeps going. Like you can lose a private key to a wallet and then a particular repository of bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies get lost, similarly, certain branches of this genetic chain can become fallow, individuals and species can stop without any offspring, and species can become extinct. The genetic chain is pseudonymous similarly to how blockchain is we can have all kinds of relationships that are assumed to represent what we understand reality to be, but so many novels and so many movies start from the fact that when you look at the genetic basis, it turns out there is a distance between reality and what you understood.

Do you find this analogy useful?

There are a lot of advantages in reforming the system that is now in place and bringing it into a more modern architecture where the certificate itself would be harder to forge, verifying it would be more secure and definitive. updating it with additional skills would be fast and reliable. And many many other points that are satisfied by a blockchain implementation of this particular certificate, the driving license, and many others as well. An important only partially solved problem is what in the blockchain world is called the oracle problem. The world’s messy information of uncertain reliability, or even where people actively try to inject false information into systems to gain an unfair advantage, must be evaluated, normalized, before being used in a blockchain system. In my case, for example, that I still have to wear glasses to drive.

I feel that it is likely this will be the last time for me to renew my driver's license. Self driving cars will be widespread by that time. And the next time after the license expires, if I want to drive, I will do it in a closed circuit. I will maybe drive a race car and it will be risky.I will have special insurance paying a high premium just for that hour or so of entertainment. But as far as moving around, my ability to reach my destination safely and securely and on time will be delegated to the machines. Of course, these machines and their abilities will be also checked and verified and certified and certifiable on blockchains with oracles bringing the data from the outside world onto the blockchain in a much more reliable way, with machine communication, updating on a real-time basis.

I'm exaggerating of course. In Dubai, the air is breathable when you leave the enclosed air-conditioned hotels or shopping malls. Dubai doesn't need to generate its air, but it needs to generate its water and energy. It will also radically change how these things are generated because it is doing it unsustainably, and it has to become completely sustainable, like everything else on planet Earth. The Martian colonies are going to be the same; a Martian colony that is not 100% sustainable is not going to survive, and 99.999% is not enough either.

I have been here in Dubai speaking at the CoinAgenda Blockchain conference, and I am intrigued by how unique the place is. I am looking forward to learning more about Dubai, and how it is going to keep reinventing itself. Maybe developing sustainable technologies that it can commercialize all over Earth, and sell to the Martians until they learn even more, and sell it back to us on planet Earth.

When Bitcoin was born, it was really just for geeks, for people who were already interested in monetary systems or in cryptography; they were prepared mentally, but also they had the skills that were needed in order to understand the implications, and to do the experiments with the primitive tools available at the time. Today, we are in a completely different world: easy platforms, apps on our phones, or on the web are available for practically anyone who uses a smartphone.

NFTs, Non Fungible Tokens, are not only about collecting digital art, the metaverse is not only about playing interactive 3D games that in some way integrate Blockchain and represent digitally the loyalty of players that are dedicated everyday to the platform. DeFi is not only about replicating the existing features of the banking system on the Blockchain. Each of these and the new applications that will be discovered, extend the abilities that we have, and potentially benefit billions. There will be new waves and the newcomers will become the early adopters in the eyes of the next wave again, and I hope that tolerance and the welcoming culture will characterize each of these in order for the Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency world to be empowering people all around the world.

When you have an object that can calculate, knows its position and has memory, and it can communicate, Bruce Sterling calls it a “spime”. The best and simplest example of a spime is your phone: it can definitely calculate, it has memory, can communicate, and it also acts on its environment. In this case, the environment of the phone is you, your phone acts on you. As another example, cars have become ever more digital in the Internet of things, and they are starting to take over the functions of driving from humans, in a manner that is increasingly incisive and autonomous.

When we started creating the civilization that we are now enjoying 10,000 years ago and more, embracing agriculture was a one-way street. We increased the number of people that a given area of territory could support, but at the same time, we became dependent on a set of practices that on the individual level were measurably harmful. We became shorter as a consequence of the lifestyle that we adopted, and for a long set of millennia, the calories per head available were less than those at hunter gatherer societies. Today, we are climbing out of the shadow of that decision. We are able to delegate an increasing number of dangerous repetitive or boring jobs to our machines. The Internet of Things is going to continue delivering benefits, and the advantage of this trajectory is going to make us human again.

If you want to talk to me on the phone then you should make sure that I have your number in my contact list, and maybe you should make sure that I'm available and I know what you want to talk about, for how much time we plan to talk. What I am describing is basically a calendar invite; it can be something less formal too, like just a couple of messages on WhatsApp or Telegram, with a message that says “Hey, I'd like to talk for 15 minutes about X, Y and Z tomorrow at 3PM. Are you available?” I do like calendar invites. My family and friends laugh about it, because I send calendar invites to them for almost everything, I just find it convenient and relaxing.

Managing information flow is important for our attention span, and that is why these tools are so useful. That is what I mean about them being relaxing, because I can concentrate on what matters, the substance of the communication, the decisions that flow from it, agreeing to go to the movies together or settling on a partnership or a business deal and not having to worry about the details and the mechanics.

When I talk with someone so directly on a video call or conference, which is now becoming universal, I do like to see the other person and encourage the camera to be turned on, and accepting when it cannot is wonderful. That is why knowing how to develop the tools, adapt, configure them, and how to then take advantage of the opportunity of speaking practically to anyone on the planet is an opportunity that we have to treasure and we have to take advantage of. Do you want to talk to me? You are absolutely welcome. And I am looking forward to being able to do that. Let’s follow best practices to take advantage of the opportunity.

Unlearning can be as important as the ability to learn, when the pace of technological change provides everyone with increased abilities to collaborate, communicate, assign and deploy resources in order to solve our challenges.

When the pace of innovation was imperceptible, we could achieve status by perfecting and maintaining our position around mastering a set of tools and practices. The incentive was not ever to move beyond.

We are now in an age where that attitude is counter productive. We can, of course, achieve a certain degree of mastery of the tools and the methods and the processes that we are using, and spread that mastery in our teams, but the return on the investment of increasing that mastery above a certain level is negative. And the threshold, beyond which it becomes negative, is possibly lowering.

As soon as we arrive at a given level of mastery of the tools and methodologies, rather than investing our effort in increasing that level, we should start looking around, comparing the features and the benefits with those of alternatives, asking ourselves if what we are doing is fit for purpose. Very likely, by the time we are asking ourselves that question, new tools will indeed be available. Moving to the new tool will represent a positive change. In order to be able to move, we need to relinquish the comfort and the stability of working with the known and embrace the unknown early, rather than having to do it, infrequently, and under pressure.

As an example, just a few days ago I had a very bad experience; I have been using a specific hosting provider for dozens of websites, and a few of these have been infected. As an emergency response, the hosting provider suspended my entire account, including the websites that were not infected, rather than undergoing the process of cleaning and restoring everything which would have been faster. It was almost two days that I had to fight over the course of almost a dozen technical support calls and technical support chats, sometimes simultaneously juggling one against the other, until I was finally able to have them turn the account back up again, thanks also to my team.

What is amazing is that if you search online for the best hosting service in 2021 they are in first place. Is it because their search engine optimization is very good? Is it because the review process of these recommendations is itself bad? I don't know, but when I am dealing with an organization, especially a service organization my question is not how does everything go when everything goes well, my question is “What do you do when something goes wrong? How fast, reliable and intensively their support helps a customer?”

A solution, in my opinion, is a combination of smart routing and application of rules, of better incentives on all sides, together with common sense and going beyond the rules when those don't, and should not apply. Knowing what the rules are that you should break is always an important question, and having the ability and the authority and the courage to make those decisions are door openers to new possibilities.

Tesla has demonstrated to be able to deliver surprising innovations that experts in the field are betting against, and to do it at scale, meaning that these are not research projects anymore, but they are products that consumers and businesses want to buy, and produce in the hundreds of 1000s, or millions of units. The Tesla humanoid robot is going to be similar to the Tesla cars because they’ll have sensors that collect data, which is analyzed by advanced artificial intelligence, which in turn allow actuators to plan and to achieve the desired goal.

How will these robots impact our economy and our society? When they are going to be available in large numbers? There are a myriad of situations where they will be incredibly beneficial, like for elderlies that are insufficiently cared for: they will be able to stay independent in their own homes. How many other occupations are better suited to robots because they are dangerous, or boring, or those that humans are now forced to execute but they wouldn't if they had a choice? The labor market will need to adapt and our societies overall will need to adapt; there will be whole new questions arising. There are environments where the robots are going to be extremely useful, and these environments are adversarial to humans, operating in space, on the Moon, on Mars.

But if artificial intelligence, blockchain, quantum computing and so many other technologies are not only accelerating, but their rate of acceleration is increasing, they are jolting, will businesses still have the luxury to internalize the capability to take advantage of them?

The decisions made without external help are even more difficult.

They can delay the moment that they will concretely embrace, analyze, and understand how these technologies should be incorporated in their business processes, but sooner or later that moment will come.

In the ecosystem of businesses, consulting companies occupy an important and delicate position: they have to balance the interests of their customers with their own, and their product is an amalgam of repeatable components that get commodified, as well as value-added services that have to be invented every time.

I recently joined Beyond Enterprizes as its Managing Advisor. Beyond Enterprizes specializes in helping projects succeed in the field of Blockchain at 360 degrees.

Over the past four years the combined market capitalization of Beyond’s reached $14 billion: this is exciting, accelerating, and something that makes me proud. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next, how we can evolve the best tools and practices to take care of our clients.

The role of strategic advisory firms such as Beyond becomes even more crucial in times of jolting technological change. In a way that is somewhat similar to what happened in marketing with social media, the rigid distinction between what is inside and what is outside of the company becomes mute, the active participation, with aligned interests, or a diverse set of parties involving specialized consulting partners, will design and implement the new, more flexible and permeable business models that will win the future.

The most fundamental scarcity or abundance that we know and recognize readily is that of food. Humanity's history has been characterized by a scarcity of food and famines where common. Population couldn't grow, declined, or even went extinct in certain geographical areas. Only more recently, in the 20th century, we have been able to apply new tools that provide ample food for everyone. Today, when people don't have enough to eat it is not a question of not being able to produce enough. It is a question of not being able to distribute it to them.

A world of abundance is now here, and it is going to be available to more and more people in every part of the world. We have to learn how to live together with this abundance in many areas. If we don't, well, the quality of our life will decline. Paradoxically, not only when we live in a world of scarcity, but also when we live in a world of abundance. We want quality to increase. Learning about this world is the only way to make sure that we progress, rather than regress.

There are unique moments in history that we recognize as very important, and even now we are living a unique moment of transition and transformation that is as important, probably more than any other time in history. It is our collective mission to build the basis of inclusivity and empowerment that allows as many people as possible to realize that they are active participants.

One of the characteristics of our glorious times is that we have realized that we are all one. There is no human that is an enemy.
We have so many challenges, that what we lack is enough people taking part, to realize what we can achieve yet. We don't have enough talent, because we allow it to be squandered. We need people all around the world, not only to fulfill their individual potential, but to join the ranks of those who believe that it is worth fighting the challenges in order to overcome them. There are billions of people who are already learning what tools are available, learning that indeed we have methods that are reliable that can analyze what are the solutions, test them and then implement them at scale. That is what can be embraced all over the world, in every continent. In every country, in every community.

When many decades ago the protocols for the Internet were designed using the TCP/IP set of standards, the architects of that design were able to realize that it would have been impossible to predict the type of applications that in the future will be built on top of those protocols using those protocols. As a consequence, they didn't try to forecast the type of applications that would emerge, and the type of features that these applications would need. What they did instead was to agree on the minimum set of protocol components that would be able to support the richest set of applications, whatever creative developers came up with in the future and this approach has been transformative.

Something similar should be happening with AI as well. Completing the hard task of working out what is the minimum set of support services that the AI layer should provide uniformly to everyone. In a few years we will see flourishing new AI applications, similar to how the Internet was able to flourish, thanks to the same approach, starting many decades ago.

Space exploration for many decades was the exclusive purvey of nation states. With the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union on one side and the United States on the other agreed to collaborate on the next Generation Space Station, the ISS. I remember specifically talking to Burt Rutan, the inventor of the space plane that today we call Virgin Galactic: he was complaining that the Russians were better capitalists than the Americans because you could buy a ticket to space from them, and you couldn't buy it from NASA.

SpaceX, if successful, with its Starship initiative will have certainly demonstrated the ability to push the boundaries into deep space exploration, at the same level as the National Space agencies, alongside its ultimate mission of colonizing Mars.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, with their suborbital flight programs are satisfying a clear market need. There are a lot of people who signed up for future flights. The technological advantages gained by a sustained ability of every cheaper flight are going to be numerous.

Do you want to save the world? Go do it, and don’t tell others what they should be doing instead.

Do you despise billionaires, and their wealth? Vote for representatives that will legislate towards a progressive taxation that will eliminate future accumulation of wealth.

In the meantime I applaud and congratulate both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin for their achievements. But especially keep an eye on SpaceX and their most ambitious purpose to make humanity a multi-planetary species.

Why are the laws and parameters of our particular universe the way they are? What are the differences in the laws of other universes? Through these questions we possibly realize that there are evolutionary selection criteria that lead to one or another of these sets of values.

Megaverse, multiverse and metaverse are three different ways in which we are mapping and understanding the nature of reality. In describing them I introduce concepts of evolutionary fitness in each of them: I'm a universal Darwinist, so I do believe that the concept of evolution and natural selection applies not only in biology, but in every process that has the ability to create copies of itself, with variation, in an environment with constraints.
Each of these three ways of looking at reality allows us to apply our own preferences and then execute and act on those preferences in order to have a reality emerge that is desirable. With this power we can assume and embody a concept of “creating reality”, comparing it with models that we want and go out in the universe that lives in the megaverse, the multiverse and the metaverse with our wonder, and full enjoyment of our existence.

This is not a dream anymore, and it is urgent that we not only think about the technological hurdles that can make this a reality, but the sociological and regulatory obstacles that can make the spreading of self-driving cars much slower than otherwise it could be, and generate unexpected side effects that if we are not able to foresee can actually slow down even further, or reverse this important technological development.

Why are self-driving cars so important? The most important factor is the ability to eliminate human suffering. More than a million people die every year in car accidents, and the vast majority of these accidents are due to human error. If we are able to have cars drive themselves and progressively eliminate human drivers, it is expected that over 95% of these accidents will not happen. Hundreds of thousands, and soon millions of people without even realizing will not have to die in car accidents. Even when someone doesn't die there are tens of millions of people who suffer very disruptive and very painful accidents.

As a consequence, the moral calculation of accelerating the rollout of self-driving cars is in this respect, absolutely clear.

DeFi emerged over the course of the past few years, mainly based on blockchain technologies, overcoming the costs and the bottlenecks associated with the traditional approaches. We are at the beginning of exploring its implications, but already billions of dollars are flowing out from the traditional banking system into the decentralized finance platforms.

At the Ritossa Family Office Investment Summit last week in Monaco, there was a lot of attention on DeFi, in particular on Eqify, a new DeFi platform led by Brad Yasar as CEO.

Brad also announced at the conference that I am joining Beyond Enterprizes, which he founded, as Managing Advisor.

But we can prepare for this complex and important task, using artificial intelligence as a training partner. As a matter of fact, the Explainable AI project from the European Union achieves exactly this. The goal of the Explainable AI project is the ability to understand how an AI reasons and makes decisions in a manner that is intelligible to a human being, expressed in human language, in a manner that makes the reasoning transparent.

If we do not succeed in effectively establishing a positive and reliable communication with artificial intelligences, how can we pretend to be able to talk to alien civilizations?

PS: This is true not only for AIs, but also for whales or dolphins that have a complex language, which we must attempt to fully decode. Once we do that, communicating with them is going to be the equivalent of communicating with aliens.

El Salvador already belongs, before this recent decision, to a small set of countries that do not have a sovereign currency of their own. The economy of El Salvador went through what is called dollarization; it adopted the United States dollar as its own legal tender.

Regardless of whether 90 days is enough, or 180 days are going to be needed before all the wrinkles are ironed out, the experiment in El Salvador is very important. Other countries will definitely look at it, and this will hugely influence, and I expect to benefit the Bitcoin ecosystem on a worldwide basis. There will be other countries that will do the same and adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.

Artificial Intelligence is a technology that has been simmering for decades and promising incredible breakthroughs described by science fiction books and movies. We used to discount it, but now we can’t do that anymore: AI is here, and today is the day with the least amount of artificial intelligence around you. Every day, from today onwards, is going to have only more of it.

The ability of AI to act, promoting ethical systems and ethical decision making, ultimately, is summarized in the expression “AI For Good”: we have the ability to choose, every time we adopt and deploy advanced technologies, what we want to do with them, and AI For Good is the ultimate desire to make sure that the powerful technology of Artificial Intelligence is going to be deployed in a manner that benefits humanity. that inclusively promotes the opportunities of everyone.

Taking advantage of AI today is a stepping stone to be able to coexist with AI in the future.

This is the season finale of The Context, and we will take a few weeks of pause and then restart with season four. It may be that we will introduce some new components, refresh the thumbnails, which could be the easiest and least intrusive or profound innovation. Maybe we will do something else. I am planning to restart the new season of The Context with as much curiosity as much dedication and dependable creation of hopefully useful and valuable thoughts, expressed in my own way, as before.

I am very much looking forward to continuing creating content receiving feedback from you on this journey that gave me and hopefully you as well, a lot of satisfaction. See you in the new season of The Context.

What are the necessary steps that they need to be making in order to maximize their opportunities, overcome their challenges and keep going forward on the path they have chosen? It is something that is very valuable, otherwise there wouldn't be a large market for this kind of advice.

I am always interested to make technologies or services that previously were very exclusive available to the broadest possible number of people instead. With Torre Coach this is what we are trying to do: to make professional coaching available to everyone, to disrupt the business model of coaching, to really democratize the access to this wonderful tool of personal and professional development.

How do you change the world? Because of how and what you have become is of fundamental importance. Serendipity, in this sense, is strongly related to your fitness to your being well adapted, and to your adaptability. And in turn, being adapted and adaptability are related as well, because the excessive degree of adaptedness may diminish your capacity to change. And as a consequence may cancel your adaptability.

If you explore new things, the opportunities for serendipitous discovery are, in turn, improving your adaptability, starting from a given state of adaptedness.

Serendipity becomes the recognition of the value of change in the world, and the value of you changing with the world.

BitClout is based on its own blockchain and has a native token, and the user interface looks very much like Twitter, where you can post, reply, like, and there are users that you can follow and be followed by them. The big difference is that each account, in turn, has its own native currency.

On BitClout what you can do is to put money in the creator coin of the people you like and you follow, and that of course will inspire them to keep doing what they do and what you love, but rather than just having that as a return, you will have a potential financial return as well. The reason is because, as more people put money in the creator coin of a given account, the value of that account will go up. When anyone decides to sell the Creator coin, the value of that coin will go of course down. As you can see, BitClout created a market in the consensus of the value around an individual. You’ll be able to find millions of people who follow you today on Twitter, and these people may follow you on BitClout as well, and they might invest in your creator coin.

There are many important consequences:
A business model that is not based on advertising
No need to exploit the data of the users
A decentralized uncensorable base of posts
The possibility of developing alternative user interfaces
A platform with APIs for second layer applications (imagine DeFi on BitClout)

We will see over the next few months how the platform will evolve. I am optimistic and invite you to experiment with it.

My BitClout account is http://bitclout.com/u/davidorban, and I hope to see you there!

Should you care about NFTs? And why all the interest? Should you now turn everything you have into an NFT? What does that even mean? The ability to better handle digital objects than alternative systems has been a promise of blockchain technologies for long. Bitcoin is digital money, and the promise of Bitcoin is to be a better money than other alternatives.

The solution of NFTs is the ability to transfer the uniqueness of physical objects that are not interchangeable, to unique digital objects that become also not interchangeable, as a consequence of wrapping them in a digital signature that is managed on the blockchain. We know of all the various features of Blockchains: the transparency, the traceability, the free unfettered participation, and so on. As you combine this wrapper around a digital object that makes it unique, with the rest of the features that blockchains have, you achieve something that can be applied in various areas, and they can be useful indeed useful, with a staying power that deserves your attention.

The first application of NFTs has been the collection of digital art. In the past few months the prices of certain auctions reached levels that are hard to justify. But as it is often the case, it is not the price that matters, and you should not concentrate on that, or the mere expectation of financial gain when experimenting with NFTs.

I sold as an NFT my first tweet about Bitcoin from 10 years ago, and it gave me direct experience in the process. An opportunity to see if the platform was friendly enough. And indeed, one of the best surprises was how much the systems have evolved and how easy the process has become.

There will be many other applications of NFTs in the future, and we are really at just the beginning of this new interesting technology.

With the organization of our societies, the set of rules and regulations that influence or define what can or cannot be done, obviously should take into account this ongoing experiment as well. The hypocrisy and the contradiction of governments that regulate and allow dangerous drugs like tobacco and alcohol that cause dependence, deaths in the millions worldwide versus prohibiting other substances like cannabis or 5-MeO-DMT is perverse.

So what are the limits of our pursuit of cognitive freedom? Is our ability to pursue these experiments of introspection and understanding of self awareness and awareness of others going to increase or decrease? I really hope that in the future we will understand that in a responsible and self aware manner these experiments should continue, that our degrees of freedom around them should increase. And that whether with chemical or other technological means, understanding who we are, has been and is going to be a genuinely human pursuit.

People don’t take the first step because they are afraid of failure, or of the unexpected they will discover. Of what they will learn about themselves on the journey towards the unknown. Even worse, a lot of those people feel completely justified in pointing their finger towards those who do want to experiment, who are dreaming things that are difficult and uncertain and dangerous, and sometimes even impossible, blaming them for daring. Don't be one of those people.

It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter what you aspire to do. Just take the first step.

As with many things, if you don't try, you are guaranteeing that it is not going to happen. And if you try and it doesn't happen, you may learn a lot of things along the way.

Now, whether we are talking about space whether we are talking about reforming a nation, scientific exploration, or a new art form, writing a novel, or preparing for a profession, searching and finding a person to love and spend your life with... dreams like these are exhilarating and fantastic and uplifting and they are wonderful to share.

The value, for example, of space exploration is in itself, because of the technological benefits of what we are able to do and learn and apply in so many different areas on Earth. But space exploration, as a metaphor of our desire to explore, of our desire to understand, is maybe even more precious, more valuable in inspiring us to attempt what we want to achieve as individuals and as a civilization.

Our civilization has been able to produce the knowledge, and corral the resources that allowed millions of parts working together, and successfully land our latest envoy, and explorer. It will roam, watch, dig and sense. And we will receive and perceive its transmissions, collate and analyze its data.

There are naysayers, there are those who say, Oh, it's worthless to go to Mars, it's worthless to aim and and understand and to feel that yearning and adventure is not what you should feel. I am sure that many times those people are simply wrong, because even if they don't realize, they are on Mars, with you and I. They are part of it too. They are part of humanity and our adventure.

Especially those among us who are able to inspire billions and make us feel the emotions that we feel when we succeed in our highest dreams. The most audacious aspirations.

These Martian adventures are not only emotionally uplifting but very practically benefit all of humanity. It is so important to explore, to understand, to fulfill the dreams of expanding the human race in the universe!

Probably the most important immediate benefit that you can derive from digital biology, is the mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. This has been developed, tested. and then produced based on our increased knowledge about what is the digital basis of biology, and how it works. But there are many other benefits as well: from understanding your ancestry, your treats and the predisposition to certain types of health conditions,

The shape, and the function of certain molecules, thanks to evolutionary pressure, became the language for programming those functions through the shapes, the proteins express certain functions as veritable molecular machines. The programming language that the biological operating system uses is DNA. We are starting to understand how from DNA through RNA and ribosomes, the recipe for creating certain proteins, ie molecular machines, influences what we are.

Digital biology, the understanding the digital nature of biology is a huge achievement that we are still in the process of completely unlocking. It is going to shape the world.

During the 20th century agriculture advanced to the point of being able to feed everyone on the planet. The next challenge is to do so sustainably and with an increasing biodiversity.

A few days ago I keynote and moderated the opening meeting of the new Think Tank Farm To Fork, that aims to spread the knowledge about advanced technologies in agriculture, especially in view of the new Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, that embodies those two goals.

The EU is one of the largest markets in the world, and its policies influence technologies, and practices that go well beyond its borders. Getting the incentives right has a profound impact on all of use, the environment, and the planet.

Energy, manufacturing, food, health, learning, finance, security and policymaking are subject to profound disruptions, with jolting technologies acting on them. Each going towards decentralization!

The number of experiments being run worldwide to find what works is exploding and of course a myriad of them fail, but it is enough that some of them succeed, they will spread like wildfire adopted by everyone, because of how attractive how exciting how inclusive how emancipating and thrilling, the new solutions are.

Jolting decentralization is going to characterize your life in the coming years. The surprising developments of incredible leverage that the crowd can have, whether in economic, political, or other ways. The weird fashions and manias that grip us reverberating globally from continent to continent. These are going to stay as a feature of these times. We have to recognize the power of these forces, and we have to develop healthy defense mechanisms, to differentiate what is meaningful from what is plain crazy. The centralized structures’ ability in doing so is going to rapidly diminish.

There is a new course about decentralization in the Jolting Technologies Courses platform. Sign up today, to equip yourself with the knowledge and the skills needed to cope with the disruptions around you!

You can also subscribe to my content in an audio-only podcast format on davidorban.com/podcast using Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Audible or Music, Google Podcasts, or any other podcast player of your choice.

You will automatically receive the episodes of The Context, Searching For The Question Live, Qual è la domanda in Italian.I will be producing additional podcast-only content as well, whether by myself or together with guests in a conversation style.

The first experiments in podcasting, the first wave of popularity of audio distributed over the internet started before video became popular through YouTube or other means. Recently over the course of the past few years, it regained popularity.

Every kind of media has a place whether it is the printed text on dead wood, we call paper, whether it is digital text, online video or even traditional broadcast television. What matters is gaining a share of our global attention. There are 24 hours in a day. When we are watching videos we are exclusively dedicated to that activity. When we are reading a book, we can’t drive. But podcast listening can be done in addition to driving, preparing food, and many other activities.

We can measure whether a given society or nation is expected to be able to generate future fitness, through the legal and illegal immigration flows. Look at what are the nations where emigration is larger than immigration. Look at those nations where it is the opposite. Other people want to come in, desperately, even risking their lives, because they realize that the country where they were born, doesn't give them an opportunity to thrive and maybe even to survive in the coming years. If you look at these flow, what you're looking at is a kind of a stock market for nations where people express their desire and their future expectation. The smarter nations can take action, and decide what they want to do, formulated in political programs. I hope that it is going to be possible to have rational conversations around this.

We have to be forward looking: new technologies are coming, these new technologies support new ways of living, new ways of living can give rise to new types of social contracts. And our imagination is such that we can dream, and we can then realize those dreams of just, inclusive, empowering societies that give opportunities to thrive in the future for all.

The methods of how we cultivate this kind of creativity in a given discipline or in an interdisciplinary manner, also evolve. When we are able to resort to books, rather than referring to word of mouth of our ancestors, or when more recently, we can check the Wikipedia article of creative methods, or follow video courses on YouTube .

Now AI tools are becoming available, like GPT-3 for generating text, or DALL-E for images. There is no reason not to label these as fully creative.

How should we approach these? Is the conclusion that creative professionals are now in danger? Not at all. Creative professions are not endangered by these tools. They are accelerated joltingly, just as architects didn't stop designing buildings because computer aided design has become available and AutoCAD became a reference tool of theirs. They just moved from designing buildings by hand to using the computer to be much more effective and proficient. The same is going to happen with the creative professions.

Let's enjoy it, and let's thrive in this new era of jolting creativity.

There have been a scary handful of hours a few days ago, where in a large part of the world Google, and its various platforms became unavailable, whether it was Gmail for sending and receiving email messages, or it was YouTube for uploading or watching videos, and many, many others.

It is easy to realize that relying excessively on those platforms and tools can cripple our ability to be resilient to adapt and to be fit in a complex situation. We must keep evolving our tools: especially peer to peer, distributed, and decentralized platforms are a must. We cannot afford to put our individual, and social survival at risk by relying to an excessive degree on centralized tools regardless of how rich they are, regardless of how their features correspond to our needs, regardless of how they have provided us a stepping stone towards a deeper understanding of the world.

It is one of the reasons why it is so irresponsible to pretend that peer to peer tools are equivalent to infringing or even criminal purposes. It is ridiculous to paint with a wide brush and just pool every possible use together, completely excluding fundamental, legal, and even vital uses that do not rely on the sanctioned permitted compliant regulated platforms.

You owe it to yourself. In order to proceed in your becoming more resilient, you have to learn, teach, adopt and practice what these tools allow.

I invite you to become a subscriber of the Jolting Technologies Courses. Go to jolting.co and sign up to enjoy both pre recorded videos as well as live sessions where we go in depth, answering the questions that you ask, having conversations about the implications. We are now entering the third decade of the 21st century. It is time that we step up to its challenges.

SpaceX is designing, prototyping and testing a new generation of spacecraft called Starship. Starship serial number 8, SN8, flew to the altitude of 12.5 kilometres just a few days ago. During that test flight, many different categories of new solutions were tested, which have never before been tried. Practically all of the steps of this historic test flight were successful, and even though as usual, Elon Musk lowered the expectations beforehand, saying that most likely the test would fail, it was a great success.

The mission of SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars with a million people or more before the end of the century. In order to reach that goal, an increasing rate of innovation is needed. The successful test of SN8 is testimony to this jolting nature of SpaceX and the jolting nature of the new phase of space exploration that we have entered.

The way this has been achieved is through the increasingly sophisticated simulations that we can run, thanks to the power of our computers. For Internet of Things networks, or robotic systems, there is no difference between simulation and reality. As the feedback loop of sensors and actuators is trained at a much improved rate in simulations, when the time comes to test it, the performance will be surprisingly, joltingly good.

Subscribe to the Jolting Technologies Courses: you get the first month free. Immerse yourself in the mindset that is the necessary premise in order to understand the reality with the right tools. You can leverage AI, robotic systems, Internet of Things, intelligence augmentation, collective intelligence, in order to be an active protagonist of the world of the 21st century.

This is a very important achievement. You will hear it being labeled as the most important scientific result of the 21st century. Now, certainly, there is not one single revolution that we are seeing and going through, there will be many other important scientific results during the 21st century.

We are in a new era of synthetic biology, of AI Driven Protein Engineering. We are not only able to take an existing protein and establish the sequence, and now its shape. We are also able to design new proteins. Churn through thousands or millions of different possible combinations until we find the particular shape that serves our purpose.

For example, we could design very rapidly and reliably, “in silico” (without leaving the computers), proteins that will block the ability of a virus to reproduce in a human cell.

This is due to the jolting nature of AI itself, and we are going to observe it more and more. The different branches of knowledge are not isolated: the achievements in one, the tools that we are developing, are constantly transplanted and fertilize approaches in another.

In the next series of videos of The Context we are going to see additional examples of how AI driven design is increasing the rate of acceleration in different fields.

As you know, you can also acquire the mindset that is now required in order to understand what is going on in the world.

At the jolting technology courses you can sign up, get your first month free access to all the courses, and find out why and how artificial intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain and other technologies are experiencing an increasing rate of acceleration, and why they are jolting. Go to jolting.co and sign up today to the Jolting Technologies Courses.

With the Jolting Technologies Courses you can not only learn about the technologies but also extend the range of your adaptability as the world transforms.

The Jolting Technologies Courses are available for anyone: you can go to jolting.co, sign up, and you get the first month for free. Start with the Introduction To Jolting Technologies course, then follow with the course on Artificial Intelligence, on Quantum Computing, on Bitcoin and Blockchain, and so on.

Each course is composed of a dozen or so short five minute videos, that you can watch whenever and wherever it is convenient for you. Also, the transcription of the videos are available if you prefer reading. There is an interactive chart, and you can explore and analyze the interconnected nature of the topics that we cover. There are also curated lists of articles and websites available for each course, that allow you to get deeper in the various products and services available already, the implications of the technologies, and keep learning.

Most importantly, there is a monthly interactive Q&A session, where you can get together with me live, and ask questions, but also vote on questions that are asked by others. The next one is on December 15. We dedicate all the time that is needed to understand if you understand, to understand, what are the limits of your current understanding and go beyond them.

There are also convenient corporate license options available for the Jolting Technologies Courses, if you want to adopt it in your business, and make it available for everyone.

Go ahead and connect to jolting.co, and start your journey of learning, of increased adaptability, and of exploration of the world of jolting technologies together with me.

These tools allowed us to organize ever larger groups of people in ways that increasingly leverage their best abilities, instead of just ordering them what to do. There are today societies that explicitly aim to empower individuals to fulfill their potential, and design their life trajectory.

The limits of representative democracy are clear to many, and we have to keep trying to improve it. A candidate that emerged, not necessarily replacing it but offering alternatives that must not even be geographically defined, is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). A DAO aims to use advanced consensus mechanisms to allocate resources, organize skills, achieve goals, and its potential is still to be fully explored, understood, let alone implemented. I believe that DAOs may represent the next stage of evolution of our collective intelligence.

Together with intelligence augmentation, centered on individual abilities, collective intelligence centered on what a community can achieve, represent two essential components of a future in which humanity will coexist with dignity, full participation and clear purpose with AIs.

The next quantum leap in improving the tools that allow us to gather data about the world is about to happen through brain machine interfaces of various kinds. These are today experimented and then implemented almost exclusively on people with disabilities. They are eager to improve lost or impaired faculties! But just as it happened with computer based speech recognition, these interfaces are going to rapidly become indispensable tools, that all of us will want to use.

When Elon Musk talks about the mission of Neuralink, he refers to the need to improve our ability, to increase our information processing bandwidth, especially in a world increasingly defined by artificial intelligence.

When a jolting world exposes you to degrees of adaptation required superior to your natural abilities, you have two possible choices: to give up, because you are unable to overcome those limitations or to embrace the adaptations through technological means. Through those technological means, you can extend the range of your adaptability to the world whose acceleration is increasing. So you don't have to throw in the towel. You don't have to give up. You don't have to feel disenfranchised without any power. But you can feel a protagonist of the jolting world of tomorrow.

That is why I am so excited to also offer an entire series of courses about jolting technologies that you can enjoy, you can use to your advantage talking about artificial intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, decentralization, and many, many other topics that we have covered in past episodes of the context. The jolting technologies courses are an exciting way of learning and learning to act interactive, deeply documented, participatory, community oriented, updated constantly modern and I am awaiting you to join so that you can also take advantage of the sharing of this empowering knowledge.

Sign up to the Jolting Technologies Courses on http://course.jolting.co.

In order to understand the world, we not only have to collect and analyze data, but act on the changes that are coming towards us with increasing acceleration. When we give up, we decide that it is not possible for us to humanly adapt, but we don't throw in the towel about our own very existence. But we stop trusting our ability to interpret the world rationally, and we need to construct an alternative support system. That is when we resort to superstition, conspiracy theories, and the way of looking at the world that is decoupled at an increasing degree from the actions and the plans of those of us who still believe in our ability to absorb and to act on the phenomena around us.

This fragmentation of reality, and this resorting to superstition and to conspiracy theories makes an increasing number of people extremely vulnerable to manipulation, to exploitation, to be enslaved to a set of toxic ideas, that rather than working in their favor, are working to further destabilize their world.

The way out of this is twofold. On one hand, we have to recognize and understand that it is not that person's or that community's fault. If they cannot cope, you have to realize there will be a point where you will say the same, you will step back, raise your hand and ask the world to please slow down, stop increasing the acceleration, stop jolting. The world will look at you for the briefest of the moments, and then shrug and keep jolting. Realize that the fellow human beings that experience this already, are an echo of your future self. And understand that as a community of human beings, we must support each other. The second part of the solution of course is to find the right tools, to find what can help the people who are already in the process of giving up or have given up, and what can allow the people who have not yet given up to postpone, maybe indefinitely, that moment. There are tools that are available and in future episodes of The Context we will look at them.

To transition humanity to renewable energy before runaway climate change creates irreversible damage, Tesla must produce cars, solar systems, batteries, in such volumes, that it would be impossible with the current rate of innovation. The goal would be unreachable. But Tesla is compounding the rate of innovation to unprecedented levels, starting from first principles, creating new mining processes for raw minerals, up to new types of automated factories.

To make humanity an interplanetary species, with a self sustaining colony on Mars of one million people, able to survive even if the resupplying spaceships from Earth stop arriving, SpaceX must similarly increase the rate of innovation to resolve the huge challenges it has. Not only in launch capability, space refueling, and transportation, but also life support systems, extreme sustainability and recycling on the surface of Mars, and many more.

From the point of view of a linear mind set both goals are plain impossible. From that of an exponential mindset, they may take too long. The new mindset that is accustomed to the jolting paradigm of increasing acceleration in technological change is necessary to not only make these ambitious goals achievable, but to do so within the time constraints in front of us.

Elon Musk understands this, he has this kind of mindset. Elon Musk is jolting.

He counts on the ecosystem of third parties, as well as Intel’s engineering prowess, to achieve a 4x improvement in several key areas: memory, interconnect, architecture, software, and packaging. Since the improvement of four times of each multiplies with the improvement of all the others,4x4x4x4x4 = 4^5 = 1024. That is the relatively simple elementary calculation to deliver at the end the thousandfold improvement.

This is many times faster than Moore's law. Whether we are talking about Moore's Law, or the increasing acceleration of Jolting Technologies, these are not natural laws. They only happen as self fulfilling prophecies.

It is hard to wrap our heads around the implications of such an increasing rate of innovation. But one thing is sure, it is important to change the mindset. It is not enough to think about exponentials anymore.

The increasing rate of acceleration of technology innovation, as implemented in products and services across an entire industry has become the dominating paradigm. Jolting technologies must be understood, adopted, implemented in order to be able to lead over the course of the third decade of the 21st century.

These alternate realities in my opinion should be as interactive as possible. I am not especially fond of sitting back and passively watching what is going on.

The ability to manipulate objects, to pick them up, and to change them is fundamental, in a manner that does not require some kind of specialized knowledge. As much as possible the creation of the virtual world and the experience of it should be unified.

It will take a few years before these tools become sophisticated enough for us to realize that we have started to do things that have no equivalent in the physical world, and that are superior in their ability to let us achieve our goals. That will be the moment where virtual reality will have arrived.

I looked at the increasing acceleration in the power of AI applications. In particular I criticized Stanford University’s approach which used a linear interpolation on a logarithmic chart to conclude that AI had “two eras”. My prediction was that rather than conveniently staying on the line that they drew two years ago, AI applications would evolve with an increasing acceleration.

In its recent developers’ conference, NVIDIA proved me right, quoting now a doubling rate of two months for AI power, rather than the four months reported by Stanford two years ago.

So, if we want to go out on a limb, we could talk about the law of Jolting AI, of a two year doubling in the rate of acceleration. Based on that we can predict that around 2022 the doubling rate of AI power will be about one month.

Still very few data points, and vague, rather than precise predictions. However what matters is the principle of jolting: an increasing rate of acceleration characterizing artificial intelligence applications.

What will be the consequences of this?

The analogies between the nature of a physical singularity inside a black hole, and that of the world after the technological singularity are tricky.

We were supposed to stop even trying to understand what could happen after the technological singularity. But today, that is not the case anymore. We are starting to formulate all kinds of theories, and we are starting to experiment, at least on paper with what are the parameters that could lead to different kinds of technological singularity. We are now starting to look at what a postsingularitarian world is going to look like.

The matter is our Universe is a black hole maximizer. What if intelligence, across the Universe, were a technological singularity maximizer?

Too rarely if ever people running established processes ask themselves: “If I went back to the drawing board, could I achieve some kind of radical improvement that would vastly out compete the previous approach?” There are many reasons for not doing that. One one hand, it requires real creativity and effort, ingenuity, and invention on top of innovation. On the other hand, it also requires a lot of risk taking and dedicating resources in finding the new solution, resources that are taken away from the incremental improvements that could be applied to the existing solution.

What is the role of the new technologies? They change the rules of the game, they make abundant something that was previously scarce. New technologies make business models possible, where the relationship between suppliers and intermediary producers, and consumers gets completely restructured. Most importantly, new technologies make novel products and services possible things that literally look magical, if we were able to see them with the eyes of the past.

I supported Cory Doctorow and his new kickstarter campaign, aiming to break the gridlock that Audible has on audiobooks. He also was a guest on Searching For The Question Live, where we spoke about how regulations are impacting the emerging technologies, specifically audiobooks and podcasts, where it may see the necessity of a regulator stepping in because of the market’s failure to stop monopolistic practices.

It might have been the case that we couldn't afford it in the past. But there are plenty of things that we can afford. And a fraction of those things is enough to start financing Basic Income initiatives. For example, we can afford apparently, very large military budgets. And these military budgets are justified by societies in wartime. But are these military budgets justified in peacetime? And shouldn't we work towards peace to strengthen and as a consequence, military budgets to shrink, liberating resources that can be allocated better? The economy is not a closed system. As we build new knowledge, and we apply that knowledge, we become more effective and efficient, we have more resources that we can decide to allocate in order to build inclusive systems of support.

Another objection is that if we implement basic income, then people will just do nothing, they will be leisurely watching video series on their couches, and all their initiative will be extinguished. And no one will strive to make a living because they will not have to.

This is very offensive, and very demeaning towards so many of us, maybe most of us, maybe all of us, because we have drives that do not need the kick in the butt of the fight for survival. We don't need to be told that it is wonderful to learn, it is wonderful to create, it is wonderful to produce for our own benefit and the benefit of others without having to do that, because otherwise we wouldn't survive, we would suffer hunger or even die.

Why also important? Because we have to counter the fear based narrative that in an age of AI, robots and automation tells people that they are worthless and hopeless. The mission of Torre of making work fulfilling for everyone is empowering, and promises to reverse this defeatist view of the world.

Full disclosure, I've known Alex for ten years, am an advisor to Emma, his Venture Studio where Torre was born, and am VP Corporate Development at Torre.

In reality we are all ambiverts, dynamically adjusting our filters as needed.

Communicating, whether creating output speaking or writing, or input through listening and reading, requires both cognitive effort and physical energy.

It is a necessary component of our lives.

When we are born, we are all naturally extroverts: have you been near a hungry newborn baby?

It is not going to be shy about her needs!

Maybe because we die for the first time, breaking a chain of life billions of years long, it is shocking.

Or maybe my life is particularly lucky, and with the exception of my father who died young, death of friends and close relatives was not that much part of it.

A product or service that are the embodiment of your ideas: then you are an entrepreneur.

The resources needed to enable entrepreneurs, money: then you are an investor.

The expertise that you earned with time, and your time itself: then you are an employee, if dependent on others, or a consultant if independent.

I have never defined myself as a consultant, as I would always prefer to use my expertise as the opportunity to move to the next stage, and it would not be monetized by itself.

But in this times of free experimentation I have introduced the opportunity for those who want to pay for the attention that I can give, to be able to do so, through two different options.

Creative Commons represents an innovative approach of pre-negotiated licenses, where from complete control, to complete release in the public domain, the content creator can decide what is the right set of freedoms to endow to the recipient.

Instead, the features we didn’t know they could have are brought alive by improving the software layer that they all possess.

In practice, all complex systems need to constantly adjust their parameters to support themselves in their changing environment.

And in the process, their components will change, and evolve. If from the point of view of the system as a whole we can observe this continuity, it is only possible through considerable effort and adaptation.

From the point of you of the component parts that are replaced, there is no continuity, no sustainability.

Even if we are bombarded by messages that want us to conform, from schools that impose uniform behaviors and learning rhythms, to workplaces that put us in specific boxes both physically and in measuring our inputs, our individuality and the different ways that it can flourish, are important and enriching, not only to ourselves, but to society as a whole.

If you were to meet yourself from four months ago, and give updates, even in vague terms about today, you would not believe what you are hearing.

However, in a new environment, where extreme variability makes scenarios with low probability become real, being able to anticipate, and potentially to plan for the unthinkable is a valuable skill.

Artificial Intelligence tools, based on natural language processing, image recognition using neural networks, and via many other approaches, are assisting us to understand the information, including what we ourselves produce.

Today computer based image classification has a superhuman performance, and your online photo storage systems don’t require any manual tagging on your part.

You can find the photo you want by searching as you give a description of the contents of the photo that you want.

The process and the structure of these meetings has been often unclear to startups, and in today’s world need to adapt to a new reality.

I’ve started with Network Society Ventures a new open and live startup pitching series, Network Society Ventures Pitching Live (NSVPL), streaming on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Fifteen minutes of presentation are followed by fifteen minutes of questions, both from me, as well as from anyone following the presentation online.

NSVPL is open to startups from all over the world, and can be leveraged by incubators and accelerators that want to feature the best projects graduating from their cohorts.

Do you have a candidate startup that you’d like to see on NSVPL?

Do you want to partner with NSVPL? Let me know!

As we execute carefully planned Extra Vehicular Activities (EVAs: the weekly grocery shopping in masks and gloves), our account of inputs and outputs and the circular nature of flows of our homes may become clear.

And realizing how that works in our homes, may lead us to a more immediate perception that the same applies to Earth in its entirety.Martian colonies won’t have the dumb luxury of wasting resources.

Only 100% sustainability will let them last. Their valuable export is going to be the technologies and practices to make it happen on Earth as well.

Copyrights patents and trademarks have emerged as a protection of what we today call intellectual property.

There are plenty of examples when these serve a useful purpose, however excessive extensions to the expiration of copyright as well as harmful patent trolls show the negative side of this arrangement.

Open source software and hardware has emerged as a powerful alternative that is compatible with profit making but also with building a Commons benefiting everybody inclusively.

The pandemic is not merely exponential.

As it is impacting with its assault on multiple supporting infrastructural elements of a community, region, a nation, the cumulative effect has an increasing acceleration, and it is jolting.

The governments that work well in other scenarios can’t function when it is pushed beyond the limits of its adaptability and of the individuals that compose them.

The opportunity to share the process accelerates it, because the feedback can arrive from outside observers, whose independent point of view will enrich ours.

That is what I have been doing now for two weeks, streaming live each day, learning how to use the software and hardware tools, how to integrate the destination platforms, manage chat and feedback with the audience, invite and interview guests, and so on.

Spatial, temporal, static, dynamic, and reflect the organization of the information in our theories and experiments.

We aim to make them reliable and reproducible, to serve as a firm basis for the implementation of solutions, engineered to help us achieve our goals.

Our collective intelligence evolves, both at the level of the individual, as well as on the level of our businesses and larger communities, the policies that are being put in place in our nations.

We are adapting to the new conditions that are shared by more and more countries, with social distancing measures, even though we realize that they neither will be necessarily solving the challenge of the virus forever, nor can be sustained very long.

Comparing how we are coping and adopting what works, learning from the mistakes is now literally a question of life and death.

There are multi billion dollar companies with over a thousand employees, and no offices.

With the effectiveness of the social distancing measures due to the COVD-19 pandemic, we are seeing a much wider interest about how to efficiently implement the tools that facilitate this collaboration.

But beyond the tools, what are the components of the right type of culture that can help remote teams to thrive?

If you are a conference organizer, a speaker, an exhibitor, these days you are scrambling with the restructuring of your activities.

What we have to aim for is to recognize the differences between the two options, and build a sustainable ecosystem of online events.

In the process we may discover that what we achieve is in its own way superior to what has been possible in the conferences organized in the traditional manner.