Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT. He’s also the president of the somewhat sinister sounding Future of Life Institute, the group that authored the letter asking for a six-month pause on the development of advanced artificial intelligence. You know, to preserve the future of humanity. What Needs Sorting? It’s easy to get […]
Will AI Outsmart Us?
Artificial intelligence has changed a lot since it was invented in 1955. One of the biggest shifts happened in the 1990s, when neural networks were implemented. They allowed AIs to encode information or “learn” just like the human brain, absorbing data, gathering observations, and making inferences. Neural networks are the reason why AI image generators […]
Don’t Sell Yourself Short
The universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. So it’s understandable if, as puny humans, we think of ourselves as relatively inconsequential. Our physical bodies are very small compared to the vastness of the universe. The Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek has a different perspective. He points out that each individual contains about 10 […]
Why You Should Work Backwards
Jeff Bezos is a great leader. But he didn’t become the richest man in the world because he knows how to lead. Bezos got rich because he’s an excellent follower, chasing the desires and demands of his customers to a borderline-obsessive degree. One of the foremost leadership principles at Amazon is catering everything to customers’ […]
How Elon Musk Built SpaceX
In 2002, Elon Musk founded SpaceX with $100 million of his own money. Musk had a very ambitious goal for the first privately funded rocket company in the world: to send humankind to Mars. Musk wanted to hire people who were as passionate as he was. They worked hard, but they also got along well, […]
Jeff Bezos Is Less Powerful than You Think
People who have power can make others do something—or make them stop. It’s a simple concept, but the way it works is always changing. Fluctuations in the global economy, politics, demographic patterns, and the Internet have completely restructured how power works in the 21st century. The ever-growing wealth gap in the United States has fed the […]
Bill Gates Needs Your Help
By 2050, the effects of climate change could be as deadly as COVID-19 has been. We dump 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases a year into the atmosphere. If we want to avoid a climate disaster, we need to get that number down to zero. Fast. Here’s the problem: greenhouse gases are involved in the […]
How Facebook Makes Its Money
They know everything about us. And we know very little about them. The internet was created to help people share information and communicate. But now companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are using the internet to spy on people, find out what they want, and then use that information to sell them things. This […]
Don’t Let Anyone Drag You Down
Does your workplace have talent density? According to Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, talent density is when innovative workplaces with highly skilled people collaborate effectively. When talent density is high, people devote more energy to their jobs, and work harder to make the company succeed. Talent density can be diluted when one or more […]
Can You Break This Habit?
The Internet is like a drug. The more you use it, the more you need it. The average person spends about 3 hours a day on their phone. That’s 11 years over the course of a life. How does your screen time stack up? If you’re addicted to electronics, the first step is recognition. New […]
