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The Deutsch Files III

Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see The Deutsch Files I and The Deutsch Files II. Proving something about AGI is inherently impossible On exactly that, the fact that the more that we summarize what I think is an exceedingly clear body of work in The Fabric of Reality and in The Beginning of Infinity; when nonetheless you explain it to people, as Popper says, it’s impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood. More

Innovation Requires Decentralization and a Frontier

Technology has swung us towards centralization in the last decade
Innovation requires a couple of things. One of the things that it seems to require is decentralization. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Athenian city-states or the Italian city-states or even the United States—when it was more freeform and less federal government controlled—were hotbeds of innovation, because you had lots and lots of competition. More

The Probability of Human Existence Is Infinitesimally Small

From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s near impossible
Here’s another way to think about it that is mathematically frightening for the people who think that the aliens are out there and they’re going to visit us sometime in the future. We were talking earlier about trillions of planets that exist throughout the known universe that might even be friendly for life to arise. More