4: How did humans prosper; GPT3 in a nutshell; and more..
Welcome new subscribers!
I’ve learned a lot of things last week. In this post I will review a book for the first time, give you a glimpse of gpt3, and share all the other cool stuff i’ve come across. Shall we begin?
The rational optimist: A book review
The year 2020 has produced a lot of anxiety and suffering in the world, and it seems that things are getting worse and maybe humanity has begun a steep decline into chaos. But is this case? are life standards becoming low? Is now not the best time to be alive? In his book, The rational optimist, Matt Ridely wants to convince us that we should be optimists about the future; not naive optimists who refuses to face reality, but rational optimists that know how humanity, with its collective intelligence, can achieve more progress and far higher standards of living, because that’s what we have done all throughout history.
There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference_ their collective brains.
There was a period in time when Progress was annoyingly slow, those primitve hunting tools invented by hunter gatherers didn’t improve for thousands of years. Life was so hard back then. You had to spend all day masticating on plants and trying to digest raw meat. This is partly why people back then didn’t have time to think up new ways of doing things. Fire was invented, and everything changed. Fire brought about cooking. A lot of time was saved in the process. Tools of hunting started to get better, albeit the progress was still slow. and invention was scarce. And then people discovered Bartering: give me something i need and in exchange for it, i will give you something you need. The progress started accelerating, and life was structured in a way that benefited all. A lot of time was saved because the division of labor and specialization.
With the expansion of humanity throughout the world, Trade made the exchange of ideas possible, which caused an accelerating trend of innovation. Every human was now a node on a network that gave rise to a collective intelligence, which produced higher life standards. Everybody was working for everybody. Look around you now. Everything you see was made by the combining efforts of individuals all over the world. Trade, division of labor, and specialization made the world prosperous.
Ridely talks about a crucial element in the prosperity of humanity: Energy. Now,one thing you need to know about energy is that, all of it comes from the sun.
The earth recieves 174 million billion watts of sunlight, about 10000 times as much as the fossil-fuel output that human being use.
We used to extracte our energy from the human force, wood, water, moved to coal, and finally to fossil fuels. We changed our ways of doing business whenever we felt returns were diminishing. Fossil fuels is literally dead species full of high density of the sun’s energy. With the arrival of Fossil fuels and the first steam engine, innovation exploded. Transportation was easier, which implied easier transfer of ideas and thus a virtuous cycle of innovation. With every new tech, ideas were “having sex” faster and the world was changing faster than people could catch up. Exponentially. Communication tech was evolving, leading up to now, where, thanks to the internet, it is easier than ever to share ideas and exchange them.
Ridely is not a big fan of renewables, for now. He argues that if you want to invent better ways of capturing energy cleanly, You have to take into considerations several factors like land use_you don’t want to scar the landscapes with your giant uneffective wind turbines_you need to avoid falling into the malthusian trap_He talks about how we should find ways to save more land with our innovations.
A sustainable future for nine billion people on one planet is going to come from using as little land as possible for each of people’s needs.
Matt Ridely kinda sorta defends Fossil fuels, which was surprising to me. Global warming is actually not that bad, he argues, and that whatever the sceanrios of planet warming will turn out to be( 4 scenarios),it’s better we have higher living standars and warmer climate then lower living standars and cooler planet. This climate change thingy happened a lot in the past and species adapted every time. Why not give the poor people of Africa the opportunity to prosper like the rest of the world did? He thinks that It doesn't make sense to pool our resources into preventing big crises far in the future when we can spend it focusing on the numerous problems we could prevent now. Ridely adds, people will innovate and will be better equipped to adapt to rising temperatures.
What makes innovation happen? Innovation is enabled by things like smooth form of bureaucracy, fewer number of transactions and useful knowledge.
the engine that is driving human prosperity in the modern world is the accelerating generation of useful knowledge.
Innovation is also enabled by constant disruption of your products:
The way to keep your customers, if you are, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, is to keep making your own products obsolete.
Exchanging ideas enables innovation:
It is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world.
Innovation is hindered by property rights, parasites( takers only,cryonists, Ponzi schemers..), tarrifs( China prospered thanks to free trade); self sufficiency (aukarty), top down imposition instead of bottom up operations. Ridely is a big believer in bottom up innovation and decentralization. He thinks governments, strict regulations, and bureaucracy are barriers to innovativeness.
At the end of the book, Ridely paints a rosy picture of the future( although he is aware that predicting things is tricky). Innovation will accelerate, our energy needs will be satisfied not by occupying more lands( wind,biofuels..) but by solar and forms of energy that decrease pollution and preserve land.
..Quite soon engineers will be able to use sunlight to make hydrogen directly from water with ruthenium dye as a catalyst- replicating photosynthesis, in effect.
We will satisfy our energy using nuclear plants(the waste problem seems like its not that big of a deal, and we can reach 99% efficiency);Fusion might happen, we will generate our energy from tides,from the earth's rotation; genetic engineering will prosper... That is unless we annihilate ourselves or halt innovation by regressing to our old ways of doing business...
I would not be doing the book justice if i said that reading this review is all there is to it. I absolutely missed a lot of things here. I think it is an important book that i recommend everyone read to appreciate living in the 21st century and get their hopes up about the future. This book pairs well with Harari’s Sapiens. Harari thinks that humanity prospered through the sharing of fictions.
GPT3 is everywhere. What is it, in a nutshell?
The world has been talking about gpt3 for three months now. Researchers who have access to the beta version have been sharing their demos on twitter mostly and…. It is mind blowing!
GPT3 is a language model (LM) that was trained on a large text corpus with the sole purpose of predicting the next word. As simple as that. Gpt3 is just gpt2 trained on a larger set of texts.
You give gpt3 a prompt and it predicts the next word( answer, phrase). The prompts can be anything you wish to ask, whether it is commonsense questions like what is the capital of Lebanon? or How to questions like How do i make a cake? gpt3’s answers are satisfying no matter how hard or cunning the question is, for gpt3 it is just predicting the next word than the next word. Gpt3 could also wrtite articles, poetry, apps, and even code!
Surprsingly, GPT3 learned to do translations and summarization of texts even though it was not being trained how to. Kinda reminds me of Alphago ,when the AI surprised the researchers by “coming up” with a strategy to beat Alpha go world champion. You create an AI to do one thing and it surprises you with the other litany of things it can also do.
It is easy to feed data into an AI, but for that AI to make sense of this data and outputs relevant answers it needs parameters, and the more parameters there is, the more the result are accurate. But is there a limit? This is where the points of views diverge. Gpt3 is unscalable and with it we pretty much reached the limits of what it can do, and feeding more data and parameters won’t make gpt3 brain like. Others say that Gpt3 is scalable and gpt4 would surprise us even more. I, for one, think that language models are scalable and gpt4 will be quite better than its predecessor.
What I have been reading
1- The parable of talents: Should i be worried that poor people are dying in Africa, or that i am not Elon Musk? Very insightful article about the distribution of talents.
2- Twelve rules for life: A review: Great review of the book by Jordan Peterson
3-GPT-3 Explained in Under 3 Minutes: Good primer on gpt3
4-From Zero to One: I read Peter thiel’s from Zero to One two times already and after i’ve read this amazing review of the book, i want to read it for the third time!
5-The secret of our success: We’ve got cultural evolution to thanks for our success.
6- Review of the Black Swan: I read Nassin Taleb’s book 6 years ago. It was cool to refresh my memory with this amazing review. Someday i will be able to write fun interesting reviews like this!
7-Better Language Models and Their Implications: An important article that discusses language models, especially gpt2 and its impllications: pros and cons, and future uses.
8- Do neural nets dream of electric hobbits: Very interesting take on gpt2 working in humans dream mode
9- The obligatory gpt3 post: It is obligatory that you read this article!
10- Clarke’s three law: My favorite law is the 2nd: if you want to see if something is impossible go a little bit beyond the possible
11- Review of human compatible: I am so excited to read this book. The review is enlightening!
What I’ve been watching:
Youtube:
1- Never get bored: John Green recommends some things we do to not get bored
2-Asteroid mining for energy: Coal mining here on earth is not clean. What does it take to move the whole process to the sky. Can we mine asteroids for energy?
3- Crawling under a torpedo: Destin is back with his series on life in a nuclear submarine under ice. I learned a lot from this video!
Docs:
1- On any sunday: A doc about motorcycles, motorcyclists, and all kinds of races that used in happen in 1971s America. I enjoyed watching this one.
2- Buck: Inspiring documentary. Tells the story of Buck( the horse whisperer) lived a violent childhood, but figured he’d spend his life being kind to those around him, especially horses. He has this amazing skill in controlling horses without ever forcing them to acquiese, the horse seems like it is a projection of him, and a sort of relationship based on respect and kindness is clear. He has this philosophy that the way the horse behave reflects the person, and a person will treat a horse as he treats those around him or her.
Films:
Cool films i’ve seen last week
3- Conte D’hiver
4- I, Tonya
5- Big Eyes
Twitter:
Music:
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Until next week.