2X for Kids

I speed up almost every thing I watch or listen to 1.25 to 2X. It doesn’t work for all types of content but – most of the time – it is more efficient.

There is always the question of comprehension. My level is bound – to big extent – by my childhood, where I watched and listened to things at base speed.

Now my brain is less plastic. Changing my wiring to comprehend more of the faster speed will take years.

Since our language comprehension happens at childhood, would kids be able to comprehend more in less time if they always watch/listen to things at faster speeds? If yes, does this mean we are able to have humans that are capable of processing more information than us?

I don’t know.

Non-Proliferation of Robotic Weapons

Yesterday Boston Dynamics posted a video of their humanoid robot Atlas jumping before doing a backflip.

This made me think of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction.

While Uranium is hard to acquire, transport, and enrich, the new weapons of mass destruction will be made of silicon.

Their software will be available on GitHub for any nation or terrorism group to fork their own. The defense against them will be remote people trying to hack into them.

This will also minize the gap between nations. Instead of having to build your own arsenal of robots, it will be easier to just hack into your adversaries’ robots and make them attack their makers.

Interesting times ahead.

The new echo chambers

This morning I saw those tweets by Patrick. They made me think a lot about the answers. The last question was the most interesting one.

Thinking about it, I would argue we never had “great, open to all” online communities.

The early adopters of every new social platform were like minded people. Because they were early adopters, it is expected they come from the most open minded percentiles of the society. The content they created early on attracted similar minded people to the conversation.

The communities were not great, open to all. They were in their early stages.

As the platforms grew, the social cohesion of the network started decaying. Facebook tried solving this by the news feed algorithm. The news feed created an algorithmic echo chamber. The algorithmic echo chamber made people stick to the platform while the conversation was still interesting.

After a while, the networks became saturated. Everyone is now on Facebook, twitter, and Quora. This resulted in two things

1) Conversation regression to the mean. It is no longer interesting, thought provoking as the early days. It is average.

2) Public scrutiny, and abuse towards contrarian opinions – regardless of the side – became much bigger.

This led people to try finding a new safe echo chamber. The easiest solution is private groups. Handpicked similar minded people who share the same interests. They can discuss whatever they want without feeling threatened by the public.

Back to Patrick’s questions. I think we need new echo chambers that can maintain their social cohesion, while giving the opportunity for new people to join the conversation. Until then, private groups are the new echo chambers.