hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting pre-recorded from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today's video is a video about global events the global event that we are all living through is coronavirus and i imagine if you are like me or most people floating around you have corona fatigue you know we're just tired of it we're done with it we've been living with this for over a year imagine how the world felt with world war ii uh that lasted six years from 1939 to 1945 and sometimes you have events that last decades or even centuries there's been more than one plague that lasted decades for example there was a smallpox epidemic during the time of marcus aurelius that fundamentally transformed the roman empire and many historians believe was a contributing cause to the decline of the roman empire supremacy uh there have been regime changes or dictatorships or other things in areas like china throughout its multi-thousand-year history that have lasted a long period of time like the warring states period where china was fractured into many small states but global events are very rare and they tend to be measured on the century-by-century basis and this is the first global event of the information age the breakup of the soviet union happened right at the beginning of the modern commercial internet and we weren't quite there yet had that happen during the information age we would have seen a very different outcome and it would have probably been a little bit more fracturous but because it occurred right at the end of the old age the age of curated and controlled media curating control flow of information it didn't quite have that same impact that coronavirus is having today so coronavirus touches every aspect of human society it's not a medical issue in fact most people uh who are treating it that way are are like looking through a keyhole into a very elaborate room and perhaps they can only see the sofa or the desk and they say well that's what it is ignoring the fact that this room is huge and there's lots of stuff in it in fact there's a great video from lex friedman that i really really enjoyed and it's the seven levels of the coronavirus attack and lex actually goes through the biological psychological social economic political existential and philosophical levels of uh what coronavirus is doing and this is actually a slightly older video came out in march of last year so if he got a do-over there'd be a lot more to say and there's a really cool book actually from nicholas christakis and he's a brilliant author and a very brilliant man he has an md phd and a masters of public health imminently qualified to look at things from a business perspective an economic perspective but then also a health perspective and it's called apollo's arrow and he actually wrote it during the pandemic to discuss what it's doing to society as a whole so anyway this is a global event of the information age and the first challenge that we're facing is how to get good information the problem is that all of our mass media is controlled and curated and they love pushing 24 7 fear porn everything's a scandal everything has to have villains and heroes uh everything has a political ideology behind it whether it be conservative or liberal and as a consequence this has created an enormous amount of distrust and it's created a bit of skepticism as well and that's okay it's okay to be distrustful and skeptical of information as you receive it if you have the time to perform a proper analysis you can figure out fact from fiction but the problem with the information age is that it doesn't just improve access to information it improves the quantity of information and when your quantity goes up let's use a different marker when your quantity of information goes up and your level of access for information goes up then you have a situation where the tools for analysis simply don't work for example this happens even in the academic world the coronavirus crisis being a global crisis has gotten more scientists to think and work on it than probably anything else in recent memory so most of them are publishing on preprints because it's important to get information out the entire academic medical peer-review infrastructure is ddosed at the moment there's just simply too much scientific literature being produced and it's becoming exceedingly difficult to actually rigorously read it and analyze it so this is a curated controlled system it still kind of lives as if the internet didn't exist and there's a collection of regular known access points and distribution points and curators and those curators the tools that they use to analyze what's real and what's not real what's good and what's not good are overwhelmed because so many people are focusing on this particular topic now each and every one of us gets incredibly overwhelmed and the problem is that the normal curation mechanisms mass media they have become biased if they've probably always been biased but exceedingly so and compromised by a desire to maximize fear so everything that occurs has an ideology behind it and that ideology if you disagree with it you're an evil horrible person and also they will ignore things that are inconvenient to that ideology and overemphasize things that are convenient to it so political opponents are always incompetent everything is bad a great example would be in the united states biden our new president has this goal of a million vaccines 100 million vaccinations in a hundred days okay 100 million and 100 days okay so the narrative that's now being pushed by mass media is that there was no plan when biden took office and biden basically has to rebuild from scratch that's being pushed by cnn it's being pushed by the new york times and so forth the day that biden took office the average vaccination rate was approximately 1 million people per day okay so before he did anything before he instituted anything the pre-existing regime the existing uh method of distribution was getting about a million people per day and that's off of two vaccine platforms in february we're going to have likely four vaccine platforms so how can we rely on media mass media when basic facts and reality are distorted and so what does that do it creates distrust and skepticism i don't believe anything that's reported by cnn or the new york times or any of these other outlets until i get a second source or a third source and then what i have to do is piece together information and it takes quite a bit of time because unfortunately the tools for analysis aren't so good and in many cases that information is still siloed it's not quite liquid another example would be the difference between the reporting of the trump rallies and the blm protests okay so in the case of the trump rallies these were labeled super spreader events and a contributing cause to the spread of corona and absolutely unnecessary the blm protests over 1 000 epidemiologists doctors and other people signed an open letter saying we should allow them to happen to combat systemic racism both of these are examples of events for political speech one for a particular movement the other for a particular candidate but they're both political speech and what we're basically told is that virus not an issue here so apparently it's a woke virus here virus horrible it's going to kill all of us and a lot of people say well systemic racism is a huge problem in society okay well the people who live in the trump side of the spectrum think endemic socialism in the woke cult is a huge problem for society and will result in depression and chaos and war and problems both sides have strong beliefs and about half of america sits on one or the other so they're both political speech at the end of the day about what we should do for future society not today and how we're going to resolve those things there's no urgency behind either of them in that you actually have to aggregate a large crowd to solve that problem that day no legislation was passed in either case it's political speech and our mass media told us that that political speech and one is going to result in an outcome that the virus is going to massively spread but then in the other it will not which is just a bizarre statement there were literally tens of millions of people across the united states who went to multi-day rallies densely packed and you could follow the data and i actually did and you could see that there were spikes from both events in fact a very famous american politician herman cain died as a result of a trump rally and there were big spikes of coronavirus that were directly correlated with blm protests apparently ignored in one case the other case not so mass media is not a good tool for curation and this is a global event and what we need is better tools for analysis and curation because the acts the information through social media is extraordinary and the quantity that's being produced every day is too much for a human to curate so for coronavirus in particular what i've done is i've put together a list of sources people often ask me how do i determine fact from fiction first for anything that happens you need to understand and get a basic set a fact you need to understand it and you need to understand it in a rigorous way because it does impact your life your livelihood for example asking questions will the vaccines be effective or not how much longer is this going to last at what point do we hit an inflection point where we accept that people are going to die but we let life go back to normal because for example with influenza we do that despite the fact that people die without these special measures okay so to understand it turns out that mit has done something really really really cool massachusetts institute of technology has been producing a pandemic lecture series and they've created so far 14 lectures lectures 1 2 lecture 14 and they invite world experts to talk about each and every one of the dimensions of coronavirus from a biological perspective and an epidemiological perspective so you cover coronavirus biology you cover lessons learned from prior pandemics insights that we've gained from the pandemic how viral immunology works things about the immune system in general taking talking about patients going into epidemiology and then vaccines and antibodies and therapeutics and they keep releasing actually lectures it's a really great series and i'd highly recommend it this is an objective source by a credible university mit is mit it's one of the top technical schools in the world and it's been put together by people who are either directly involved in the response or world experts who understand their domains far better than any of us can another corollary is this wonderful podcast from vincent roccaniello and it's this week in virology and vincent is a world famous virologist based i believe at columbia and he has this great show he's been running since before coronavirus and he invites clinical experts in and he talks on a weekly basis about what's going on in virology and he's trying to go through those preprints and so forth daily source of news about what is this daily status of coronavirus what's going on is from dr john campbell i use him on a regular basis and basically pulled out a piece of paper and john tells us what happened today in coronavirus and then finally to explain more about these medical topics not just in corona but everything from rna vaccines to how the immune system works to how asthma works whatever you want there's some uh there's a great channel called medcram and roger he has a quadruple board certified doctor internal medicine pulmonology critical care and sleep medicine respiratory viruses are his wheelhouse this is what he does and so corona is his thing now these sources especially the dynamic ones vincent john and roger will give you a day-to-day feed on the pulse of coronavirus and really give you a nice sampling of what's going on what's coming on the horizon and this is above the mass media fear porn that keeps being pushed upon us on a daily basis now it took me quite a bit of time to get to these sources it's easy for example with mit you say okay that's a good point and you know learning about something i say we have to understand it okay mit will do that but then there's news there's events there's a flow of things that happen every single day for our example you guys will see in the news they talk about variants of corona okay and the question of the hour is those variants of coronavirus will the vaccines work or not so everybody seems to have an opinion on this and everybody seems to be an expert on this how many of you have actually done vaccine research and made vaccines very very very very very few well the people who do that for a living are these guys you know he knows a lot about it invites the people who do it on a show he knows a lot about it and has given them for over 40 years and a public health perspective invites the people who make them on a show and these guys actually make them for a living and the people come on the show are actually involved in that on a day in day out basis okay so there's a wealth of information about well what's real and what's not real there and it turns out that immunology is a complex topic go figure people get a phd in it people actually practice this as a field of medicine they think about it for a long time and it turns out that immunity is like a spectrum okay and when you have a new variant you can go from sterilizing immunity where the vaccine completely prevents infection and you're totally immune and who cares to completely ineffective complete failure like most of the hiv vaccines for example they really don't show anything of value okay it's a whole spectrum and so when you have a new variant let's say variant alpha and then variant beta it's going to live somewhere on this spectrum so when you get your vaccine that was made at time 0 that vaccine will have a profile against all the different variants and strains that are floating around and you may get more immunity or less immunity depending upon what happens there okay and that immunity is not just well either you get it or you don't get it it's also if you become infected how bad is the infection okay so you have a spectrum there as well and that can be you're in the icu and death and that can be asymptomatic okay so even if you do get infected perhaps because you've been vaccinated you sit on that spectrum it's entirely possible that a variant can exist that is more infectious but less lethal it's entirely possible that a variant can exist that's less infectious but more lethal okay so these scales are very difficult to know and they require quite a bit of domain expertise and they require observations of the population in general so when you think about these news and events you say okay the vaccines were tested in a particular snapshot of time t0 we began there and we said okay but what happens when we go to t1 what happens when we go to t2 so who's in charge of observing these things and are we doing a good job of genetic surveillance to identify variants gene surveillance and are we doing a good job of parsing all this data and trying to figure out what's significant or not genetic surveillance is what revealed the africa the south african variant and also revealed the uk variant which is now showing up across the entire world there apparently maybe an israeli variant as well okay then you have other events in the direction for example i did a video recently about israel and israel is right now because of good leadership engaging in one of the fastest vaccination programs ever there are approximately at 40 percent of population as of the time of the shooting of this video and there's a very good chance that by march they should have 70 percent of population vaccinated if that's the case they actually might have herd immunity we don't know because we actually don't know what herd immunity means for a novel virus it's new okay but the entire world should be watching israel they should be thinking about this because by march they're going to have the single most valuable data point the united states of america we had a unique opportunity to create one as well we could have for example vaccinated every single person in hawaii was priority over the rest of the united states continue vaccinate the u.s but give them enough doses to vaccinate 100 of the population it's not a large population it's a few hundred thousand people but if they closed the borders completely for a month or two vaccinated everybody in hawaii then that could be our israel and we would have had a statistically significant population with a high tourism rate from asia and from america that could completely reopen and we could look at community spread we could look at the level of sterilizing immunity we get a huge amount of data points from having a sample like that it's an island it's easy to do that with an island we chose not to okay so many policy decisions are being made right now the level of genetic surveillance the level of testing the level of contact tracing when can we reopen and all of these require not only that you understand it but it also requires you to ask good questions and it also requires the right people to be in the room and we on the mass media side don't ask questions we don't ask who should be in the room we don't think about a thought experiment certain tests on testing for example it turns out there's a significantly better way of doing it there's a great interview in lex friedman's podcast with a world expert his name is michael mina he's a physician an epidemiologist and an immunologist at harvard and he has if you go to the time scale right here his rapid testing he actually talks about a very low cost way that you can test an entire population on a regular basis in a very very very very uh fast and cheap way and it's becomes an engineering problem not a medical problem highly recommend you listen to this podcast uh this guy's not in the room nobody talks to him so despite the fact that we have all this domain expertise there's all these amazing people who can decompose corona as a global event into a engineering event as much as a scientific event as much as a social event these people aren't real because people who make decisions they don't live in the information age our president united states is 78 the prior president was 74. not an ageist but i do acknowledge that if you're born of a different time your thinking tools may not be well prepared for that time for example the biggest foundation in critical thinking is this one right here the foundation for critical thinking and uh critical thinking uh richard paul was a titan in that field and he's created all these amazing lectures uh and he has a huge book set and so forth like all all guys who've been around for a really long time with foundations there's always some critics and scandals but all things considered there's a huge amount of tools that they've built all of these tools are phenomenal and they are designed for a slow methodical expensive process okay so if you follow them you will be able with any set of information with enough time to form an incredibly educated very balanced ethical position on whatever that thing happens to be unfortunately none of these tools are well suited for an age where information comes at you again and again and again and again like a fire hose and that's a huge huge problem in fact there's a great book it's from rolf de belli and it's called the art of thinking clearly and all ralph did is he took a hundred cognitive biases and fallacies that we tend as human beings to get stuck into logical traps cognitive errors these types of things our inability to reason with exponential growth and he just put them all in a book so it's got 100 short chapters and each one is organized to a particular cognitive bias okay all of these things get amplified as a consequence of social media all of these things get amplified as a consequence of how information is spreading their mind viruses in a certain bit and i would argue that as good as this is this would be perfect for the 20th century in 19th century unfortunately it's not good enough for our time period there's some great lectures on critical thinking that actually are a little bit more useful and this comes from the james randy foundation that james randy recently died but he was a very famous uh magician and he was a very famous skeptic and the thing about james randy is james uh would uh would often hold big competitions for the paranormal people and so anybody was on art bell show or george nori's show he would challenge they said come over and talk to me and if you can prove to me that you actually have discovered something paranormal then i'll give you a million dollars no one ever claimed the prize because no one could ever prove to james that they actually had done something extraordinary so anyway he made quite a bit of money throughout his life and so he created a foundation shortly before he died and the foundation focuses on critical thinking and skepticism and other things that come up in society well there are 10 great lectures here taught by a lot of domain experts and it goes the keys of critical thinking cognitive biases fast and slow thinking so that's kind of a danny kahneman thing it talks about esp recap and intro to the framework of critical thinking and a whole bunch of things so highly recommend this this checklist and i'll put all of these links in the show notes uh for this lecture but anyway even these i would argue are ineffective the real value of coronavirus is that uh it is telling us how to deal with a global event in an information age when the people that we normally trust to deal with these problems can't deal with it because the thinking tools that they have are frankly outdated they need an update because the access and quantity of information is simply too high this is why you see a big push by members of the media and by my country the left for censorship you'll see term fake news and so they say because we have fake news the only solution to this is deplatforming as if somehow someway banning a person on a social network is going to prevent them from talking to other people when we live in an age of the internet unless you turn the internet off deep platforming will be it not effective in the spread of information just people be pushed underground and they'll be pushed into less curated experiences where you lose the opportunity to combat distrust and skepticism and you lose the opportunity to perform better analysis on the information that's there so what ends up happening is you go from one commons to a bunch of feedback loops that are all siloed and each and every one of them because they're come from confirming their own biases get more and more radicalized and the spacing between these the ideological spacing between these grows tremendously so what coronavirus did is it exposed that our software for thinking is wrong because the people running it either are economically conflicted and ideologically bent or simply running older software and they're in incapable because of that older software to actually sort their way out of all of it so the way that we move forward for any of these global events and there are going to be many global events the rise of ai that's going to be a big global event in the next 20 years next one is nanotechnology this is going to be a big global event within 20 to 30 years there's going to be crispr and genetic engineering of human beings and viruses and so forth you can look up things like gene drives for example where they're actually having discussions of changing the genome of an entire species like mosquitoes okay so there's crispr there's nanotechnology there's rise of a.i there's next-gen weapons for example what if we could create nuclear weapons that have all the destruction but uh none of the long-term environmental impacts what would that do to war or tiny drones that you can release in swarms and they attach to your neck and explode then you could depopulate an entire city if you have these flying drones in just a matter of a day or two okay devastating stuff okay so each and every one of these are global events and they're going to fundamentally change human society social credit in china in its proliferation is another the great war on information and the flow of information if we're not running the right software actually another actually what's going on right now the rise of cryptocurrencies i'd i'd argue that it's of equal importance to any of these because it's fundamentally transforming society each and every one of these requires a software upgrade and our ability to analyze information and understand it and coronavirus has definitely demonstrated that these people aren't going to solve it these people are the enemy they're not going to solve it they they've already decided that short-term wealth and power is more important than anything in society and that only one ideology matters they've made up their minds where the world needs to go and because they can't handle this new world they want to de-platform the entire new world and we've seen if we leave things to their own devices you end up getting a situation where people isolate silo and get very radicalized and at some point violence forms between these greeks when you create tribes and the tribes get very radicalized to try to fight each other and that's exactly what's starting to occur we're starting to see the undercurrents of all those things so the biggest legacy of coronavirus is perhaps a global awakening the reality is we're going to get out of all of this you know these vaccines if you actually go to the links and sources i give you the longer the short is that this year we're going to break the back of it and then it's going to be with humanity probably forever floating around between people it has a safe harbor reservoir in the unvaccinated developing world it will continue to mutate and some of those mutations will be problematic but we'll do world genetic surveillance and we're going to couple the flu vaccination program with the covet program put them together and then every year people get a booster shot and the vulnerable will be protected and we'll go back to life as normal not this year completely but next year okay and we move on the real value is not this i mean there's tons of magical medical advancements that have occurred as a consequence of this the real value is that the first time in a while everybody in the planet has realized that we're having a global event and we're starting to expose all the cracks in the social systems that we have what can you do as an individual well as an individual i'd highly recommend you take these lectures from the randy foundation and you also at the very least read the art of thinking clearly and at the very least you also pay attention to people like dan dennett so forth uh for example this video right here tools for transforming our thinking this uh these whole things yeah he's very good at this stuff and there's a lot of people that are thinking about how to solve this problem getting some better thinking tools is the start but the reality is we do not have a canonical set of critical thinking stuff like this like the critical thinking foundation has for the information flows of our time this was a finishing point richard paul's work for the 20th century standing on the shoulders of mortimer atler standing on the shoulders of so many people who thought very carefully about how to think carefully and unfortunately it's useless when you have too much and you have to make priorities and you have to outsource and the reality is that cognition is no longer an individual concern that's the final point of this video there's an individual critical thinking and then there's a collective my opinions about coronavirus i have outsourced to trusted parties because i'm not capable in my current wake of life of spending enough time to get deep enough and to understand enough about all of these things to be able to have something original in thought so my trusted sources i've given to you vincent roccaniello and the medcram guys and campbell and then also what the people at mit are telling me pretty good authorities i think most reasonable people would agree that they're qualified to have a domain specific opinion so it's okay to outsource the things that you think are happening to someone else accepting that they could potentially be wrong and that's why you go to a multi-model set and that's why you go to multiple sources so i went from one to a collection and they're balanced not just with a u.s centric view but across the globe for example john campbell is based in the uk and then i also look at a lot of data i look at the bloomberg data that's compiled on vaccinations i look at the israeli data i'm looking at what's happening with serums work over in india and seeing how things are materializing there so i've outsourced from an individual to a collective mindset my critical thinking on corona now that's not a that's not an absolute outsource i still have a filter test where it turns out that a lot of the techniques that come from randy's lectures and a lot of techniques that come from richard allen and wrote a lovely book as well the miniature guide the critical thinking has actually i think 40 of these guides uh for everything from how to read a paragraph to how to ask questions guide to fallacies i obviously still have some filters but you see it's much easier for me to filter what four people are telling me rather than what social media has with 4 000 people telling me something okay so this i actually can take the time to apply the 20th century thinking tools and i can hold them accountable for example every now and then i john campbell says something i said i don't know about that and so then i really think carefully about it and goes through it but for the most part that's a fast test and it really helps me in that over time artificial intelligence is going to come in and what ai is going to do is assist us in the application of thinking filters this is perhaps one of the most valuable advancements for the information age it hasn't occurred yet but this is a big deal and i think artificial intelligence has a huge pla place to play here where when you decide how to create good collective thought collective curation of thoughts we got rid of mass media but we found other sources that are trusted they're still going to be potentially too many of them and they're not going to be paired in the right way it's extremely important that you pair thoughts together so for example for every hour of ben shapiro i listened to i listened to an hour of sam harris it kind of balanced the world for me if you listen to too much shapiro you listen to too much harris you only get one viewpoint you become imprinted and biased there so it's important to ideologically and and from a fact basis pair your ideas together well what an ai can do is an enforcement mechanism make sure have you constructed the right pairs you know are you thinking about the right things have you accounted for common cognitive biases that you have this is a missing component of the information economy the other is incentives the mass media could be incredibly effective at being a collective source of information for us and i think that they have been in certain cases but for the most part aren't anymore because the incentives are wrong they make money if there's a scandal they make money if a certain ideology wins they make money if we're afraid so everything is a scandal everything is ideological everything is social justice this and this that and bahrara it's an agenda because that agenda makes some money so what if you realign the incentives for the curation of information so that you make more money if you go from subjective opinion to objective reality and you separate those who provide objective reality from those who are annotating subjective reality you create a more explicit separation and if you don't directly do it have an ai do that to pull the stuff apart because this is where we should agree regardless of our ideology the asteroid hit texas we can all agree this is where values come into play and we may have different values and sometimes it's worthwhile to explicitly separate them but that's where values come into play and we're not going to necessarily agree the problem is because they've become blended we no longer can agree even on objective reality for example this video i guarantee there's at least one person who's going to comment on it who firmly believes that coronavirus is a hoax and it doesn't exist that it's not real i have people who message me over twitter reddit telegram sending me links to say that viruses don't exist and that all of the science for germ theory is is made up and it's a global conspiracy we are having trouble getting to an objective reality where we can agree on the same set of facts even though our values can and should be different diversity matters so the other big challenge of the 21st century is when do we need to build up our muscles of critical thinking and information curation as individuals to filter things and what critical thinking skills are most relevant for that kind of curation and how do we develop institutions that collectively can curate information for us and then we can vet those institutions instead of vetting every single source of information that we're getting from social media ai i believe is going to have a huge part incentives i believe are going to have a huge part and i also believe that some government reform might be able to help us out a little bit there too if we can kind of rein in some of these mass media people a bit that's a whole separate conversation but it's very clear that there's propaganda in one particular direction and monopolistic views in one particular direction and it's having a huge impact on our ability to think as a society complex topic not going to be solved in a single video but i hope this gives you guys some way of understanding how i think and how things are connected together you know everything in life is is very interdependent it's very connected one of the biggest things that i learned early on uh was you know as we grow as humans we start as a dependent then at some point we become independent and then at some point we become interdependent so the 30 year old kid never moves out of his parents basement he's here maybe the loaner lives in apartment don't have any friends is here and the very successful happy social person is here okay so there's a spectrum as you move and your level of joy success happiness and resilience is dependent on where on the scale you become well information is no different social structures are no different everything is very complex these are very complex systems and as they move from dependent to interdependent systems they are very difficult to analyze and what chronovirus did is it just took something that was a surface problem and real that it is actually a global event and again it showed us that the systems we currently have were inadequate to solve it it showed that the healthcare system was more incapable of making vaccines quickly it was more capable of publishing gargantuan amounts of research very quickly and actually figure out new therapeutics very quickly so that's a big win and it brought a whole new dawn of treatments for example mrna vaccines which are going to have a huge impact on the treatment of cancer in the next 10 or 20 years so we got a lot out of that we got a lot of mass testing and genetic surveillance of diseases we got a lot of huge advancements for the treatment of ards for icus and they probably advanced the whole field of pulmonology by at least a decade or two as a result of this and we've learned a huge amount about epidemiology and virology in general and we've learned a lot about effective distribution of vaccines and ineffective distribution of vaccines okay but we also learned that unfortunately society is not quite prepared for a global event in the information economy and we learned that there's a big difference between individual curation of information and collective curation of information and we don't have cognitive filters and mirrors to assist us yet and there's a huge social need for cognitive filters and mirrors ai enforced ideally and also a huge incentive issue where we need to rebuild the incentives of the collective so that they assist in the separation of objective and subjective uh information we've learned all of that and i hope that this leads to a tremendous amount of social innovation and information innovation and if you watch any of the videos that i've given you i'd highly recommend watching what lex did here on the coronavirus and i'd highly highly highly recommend watching the critical lecture series from the randy foundation just to give you guys a sense of where we're at and i mentioned there's all these books and these other things this is just a beginning it's not an end in any sense i always end these types of lectures with the same statement think for yourself why because anytime we have a global event there's an isomorphism between all of them and that isomorphism is that each global event requires each and every one of us to have an opinion on it surveillance capitalism and the rise of social credit and government curation of what is legitimate thought fact that we're creating a new entity a new species and a creature and it's going to be smarter than us and by the way every time that's happened by evolution the smartest always usually went out in the long term and they kill all the others rise of nanotechnology creates materials that nature can't and therefore nature can't address and deal with the grey goo problem grey goo the fact that we can change the human organism and create new species that will transcend others and create huge social problems weapons that can end the human race we've nearly done it twice in the 20th century we have more opportunities here in my industry the rise of cryptocurrencies these are global events right on par with pandemics the pandemic is the first time in our information age we've had a global event this is a great opportunity for us to realize that the information requirements for each and every one of these are the same and if we are incapable of dealing with the pandemic we will not be capable of dealing with any of these in a desirable way the easiest way of dealing with this is centralized control you hand the magic to a master you say i can't do it i'm not qualified to do it here you go you take care of it we did this with nuclear weapons we created a very aggressive nuclear weapon proliferation program because we realized they were global and existential and if not handled properly the human race would end and even still there were two events the cuban missile crisis and a software bug in the 1980s with a russian colonel named pavel where both events could have ended the human race and in both events there was literally just a single human being who made the decision not to end the world one person with no checks and balances that's it even so we handed to a master all that power they almost resulted in the destruction of mankind and that was one system and then imagine all of these systems one two three 4 5 6 that have a potential to dramatically change the race either to extinct us or to enslave us this is why it's so incredibly important that you think for yourself because either somebody is going to think for you and decide for you one person and let's hope that they don't end the world or we can think together and the odds are if we think together that mankind will be able to get through the 21st century without an extinction event and that we will live in a far better world thank you so much for listening this was a lot of fun to make macon i hope this lecture was valuable to you cheers
