Friday, July 03, 2015

Kurzweil's Schedule

Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In his estimate, current exponential growth of computing will continue until human-level intelligence is achieved around 2029. Merging with artificial intelligence will then follow, sometime in the 2030s as humans will be "a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking," wherein we connect our brains to the cloud to harness massive computational power. Beyond that? "As you get to the late 2030s or the 2040s, our thinking will be predominately nonbiological. The nonbiological part will ultimately be intelligent and have such vast capacity it'll be able to model, simulate, and understand fully the biological part. We will be able to fully backup our brains."
Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have a fundamental disagreement. Kurzweil thinks Artificial Intelligence is a faster, better computer. Musk thinks it is a nuclear weapon.

Longer Lives

Artificial Intelligence (John Cale album)
Artificial Intelligence (John Cale album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Exponential Finance: Financial Advice In the Age of AI and Long Life
most financial advisors as we’ve known them won’t be around much longer. ...... in the next ten years, half of all the financial advisors in this country will be gone ...... Not unlike other industries, like medical diagnostics, for example, artificial intelligence may soon perform many of the technical skills of financial advice better than their human counterparts. ...... AI won’t soon replace the uniquely human relationships clients seek from the best advisors. ...... “We are therapists, counselors, marriage consultants, and psychologists as much as we are financial planners” ...... Charles Schwab disrupted the industry back in 80s, putting many traditional stock brokers out of business. But they reinvented themselves as wealth planners. ..... “You don't see financial planners and financial advisors using a slide rule or a calculator and a number two pencil and a yellow pad.” ..... one of the greatest challenges they face is convincing their clients that instead of planning to live to 95—which is as far as financial planning software goes at the moment—they should plan to live longer. Perhaps much longer. ...... the first person to reach age 150 has already been born ...... Chances are, if you make it another 30 years, you'll make it another 100 ...... Instead of the traditional linear progression—birth, school, job, retirement, death—our lives will become more cyclical. That is, we’ll go to school, get our first job, work for awhile, take a five- or ten-year break, and then go back to school to reinvent ourselves and start our next career cycle. Rinse and repeat. ...... Discrete college degrees, he thinks, will be replaced with lifelong learning.
A lot of that recycling needs to happen already even before people have started living longer.

Digitizing Money For The Poor

I have an enormous interest in finance for the people at the very bottom. I think magical advances are possible. And there is also a lot of money to be made.


Exponential Finance: Who Will Be the Instagram or Uber of Finance?
Instagram was acquired for a billion dollars the same year Kodak went bankrupt. Though Kodak invented the digital camera behind Instagram’s business model—they failed to fully embrace it and paid the price. Uber is a five-year-old transportation company worth $40 billion, and they don't own a single car or bus. ....... relatively small organizations are rapidly rising up to take on big traditional players with little more than an app on a smartphone. So, what models are leading contenders to become the Instagram or Uber of finance? ..... As smartphones become ubiquitous in the developing world, it's possible many of the world’s unbanked billions in developing countries will skip traditional finance, a little like how they leapfrogged landlines for cell phones. ....... bank-free, digital cash will be a force to be reckoned with. ........ blockchain’s potential is massive—not just for cryptocurrencies, but anything of value. The same technology that records and confirms Bitcoin transactions can, in theory, do the same thing for “a will, a deed, a title, a license, intellectual property, an invention, or any type of financial instrument.” ...... Machines doing what machines do best, and humans doing what humans do best. Better together than either one alone. ...... By more fully digitizing finance (parts of it are, of course, already digitized), we can supercharge commerce and reduce the cost of doing business. ...... Even now, the digital camera market is shrinking as point-and-shoot cameras are replaced by smartphones. ...... Reality has surpassed science fiction.

Elon Musk And Tesla Shareholders