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The Age of Hyper Acceleration: AI, AGI & Beyond! · In the Loop AI

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Josh: The first person to break down and like reverse engineer the first protein,
0:03
Josh: it took him 12 years to do. And he took this protein and he crystallized and
0:06
Josh: he shot it with x-rays. And then he actually used like a ruler and pencil to
0:10
Josh: like connect them together and kind of reverse engineer this.
0:13
Josh: And then over the course of the next 60 or so years, we were able to finally
0:17
Josh: discover 150,000. And now because of AI, we've just discovered 250 million.
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David: 150,000 to 250 million, quite a different number.
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Josh: And that $250 million was only over the course of like the last two years and
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Josh: change. It was very quick.
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Josh: Okay, so David, there's this quote by Steve Jobs that I love that says,
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Josh: everything around us that we call life is made up by people no smarter than
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Josh: we are. And if you think about it, it's true. Like the clothes on our back,
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Josh: everything around us, no one smarter than us has ever made anything that we have here.
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Josh: And the same is true if we go back like 40,000 years to cavemen.
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Josh: We're not really even much smarter than they were. We have the same brain size,
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Josh: roughly same cognitive ability.
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Josh: We benefit, though, from the collective accumulation of knowledge over time.
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Josh: So it's like the snowball where theirs was very small, but over time it's kind
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Josh: of rolled down this hill faster and faster and it's grown and now we benefit
1:06
Josh: from this collective knowledge but we're not actually smarter
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Josh: so the question i think we want to answer in this podcast and the really interesting
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Josh: question is like what happens to the world around us when people are actually
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Josh: smarter than we are like what happens when they're 10 smarter 20 100 a thousand percent smarter
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Josh: and we could ask that question because this new thing called agi which is artificial
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Josh: general intelligence it kind of has this fuzzy explanation this fuzzy definition.
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Josh: My definition of it is like a form of intelligence that is smarter than a human
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Josh: across pretty much every medium.
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Josh: And the initial expectations from experts were 2040s, 2050s,
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Josh: 2060s. But the reality now is that we are months away from this intelligence instead of decades.
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Josh: So it's like, how crazy is this world about to be when everything around us
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Josh: is actually made up of people that are much, much smarter than we are.
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David: And let's back up with this. So I think you're setting this foundation of we've
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David: humans have always been on this exponential growth curve because we have capable
2:04
David: brains that's why we're humans and we have been like
2:07
David: building technologies building tools we created the wheel and then everyone
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David: had the wheel and then we could create like the next technology after that,
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David: on top of the foundation of having the wheel and then we created you know.
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David: Plumbing, agriculture, all these technologies got layered onto each other.
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David: And that's where we have this notion of like 2% growth year over year and 2%
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David: growth does compound like that is a that is an exponential growth.
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David: If you're growing 2% every single year, you are growing up an exponential.
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David: But I think what you're what you're doing, what you're setting us up for this
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David: episode, Josh, is you're.
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David: Calling for an inflection point, a change in that growth curve,
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David: because something different is happening where previously we have just been
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David: like layering technologies on each other. And humanity has been,
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David: you know, accelerating.
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David: Once we got the internet, we are going, we're going a lot faster because we
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David: somehow filled in all the gaps between, you know, building the wheel and having the internet.
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David: And we are layering all of our human advances on top of those previous technologies.
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David: But you're saying that this is different.
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David: Like in addition to all of that compounding growth curve, we are getting this
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David: new technology that is materially changing the rate of growth because
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David: where previously all of the intelligence of humans who created the wheel to
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David: create the internet where it was about the same, like we were all running on the same wetware.
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David: Our brains were about the same level of computational capacity.
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David: And everyone has been like able to become about the same level of smartness
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David: about each other. That's what you're saying is like the history.
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David: That's that's history up to today.
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David: And you're saying today is different. Now it's different. That's what you're saying.
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Josh: This time it's it's different and it actually is different. And I have the chart
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Josh: that I pulled up on the screen that I'll try to describe to people,
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Josh: which is the chart of human progress in relation to time over a long period of time.
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Josh: And it mostly looks like a fairly flat chart, except there is this like slight
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Josh: incline that starts to grow slightly exponentially about 60 years ago.
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Josh: And that's when the invention of Moore's law happened. So This was a big moment
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Josh: for us where we had transistors, and transistors led to computers,
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Josh: and computers led to a whole bunch of technology that accelerated things pretty
4:17
Josh: quick. We have now this steeper ramp-up.
4:20
Josh: Then today, things change. The reason I say this time it's different is because
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Josh: we have this new law called Quang's Law. It's loosely debated on how accurate
4:28
Josh: it is, but it is basically the speed of training a cluster is...
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Josh: It improves 25-fold over every five years. And Moore's law was that the speed
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Josh: of the amount of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months.
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Josh: So this is a 5x increase in Moore's law that initially started this growth trajectory.
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Josh: And that's why I think the chart will start to look like this.
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Josh: And it's really hard to, for the people that are listening, it's basically vertical.
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Josh: The line goes straight up.
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David: It's an exponential curve with a pretty strong kink in it that it's still curving
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David: upwards, but it goes up much faster, much sooner.
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Josh: Yes. And the idea is that like this is going to get pretty fast because we're
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Josh: entering the age of hyper acceleration.
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Josh: And the reason for that is because, like we said, everything has been built
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Josh: on this wetware that is like pretty dumb. Like we're smart, but we are only
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Josh: so smart relative to what's coming.
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Josh: Now, since we're able to accelerate five times faster than we were with Moore's
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Josh: Law in terms of training this new form of intelligence, there's going to be
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Josh: a lot of weird and wacky things that start to happen really,
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Josh: really quickly. And we're kind of seeing this.
5:34
Josh: It's similar to COVID where like humans are very durable and very malleable
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Josh: and we're good at getting over trauma. So you can kind of like mute out your
5:44
Josh: emotional bans to deal with this stuff. But if you just look at what happened in the last week...
5:50
Josh: We were able to give gene therapy to a blind Irishman. We had another one that treats babies.
5:55
David: Gene therapy to a blind Irishman. What does that mean? What happened?
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Josh: So we can inject these new forms of genes into a person who's blind and give them eyesight back.
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David: We made a blind person see again last week.
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Josh: See again, yes. And that's just through gene therapy. That's not through neural interfaces.
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David: We fixed blindness in one individual.
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Josh: In one individual, just like last week. And then there was another breakthrough
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Josh: With Arc Evo 2 DNA sequencing model.
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Josh: So there's this really interesting thing that's happened with DNA.
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Josh: And we won't go too deep, but basically, if you can reverse engineer a protein
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Josh: and rebuild it, you can create all these new forms of technology.
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Josh: You can solve forms of cancer. You can cure forms of Alzheimer's.
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Josh: We discovered 250 million of those. When over the past 60 years,
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Josh: we've only discovered 150,000. And the first person, it took him 12 years just to discover one.
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Josh: So we now have this like crazy slew of technology that was just released last week.
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Josh: Google AI has a co-scientist that accelerates the development of science.
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Josh: You can query 100 PhD students worth of compute for about like 10 cents in 10 minutes.
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Josh: Microsoft has a quantum, topological quantum chip.
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Josh: We have all these new humanoid figures. Croc 3 has a new AI model.
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Josh: There's all these new machine learning models that are frontier models.
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Josh: It's like accelerating very, very quickly. And every week there's something new.
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Josh: Just yesterday, for the people that remember the DeepSeek R1 model that broke
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Josh: Wall Street, that came out only two months ago.
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Josh: Yesterday, Alibaba released QWQ,
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Josh: which is 20 times more efficient than DeepSeek R1 and slightly better.
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Josh: So already, the thing that broke Wall Street has been broken 20-fold in a matter
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Josh: of two months. So things are going super fast.
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Josh: We're developing everything super fast. And that's because it's all kind of
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Josh: downstream of intelligence, is the smarter we are as people,
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Josh: the more complicated problems we can solve, and the faster we can solve them
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Josh: and the faster we can accelerate to these new problems worth solving.
7:48
David: Let's back up and define Moore's law and extrapolate that into Huang's law.
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David: Once again, Moore's law, my understanding of Moore's law was it was just really
7:55
David: an extrapolation on the computational power of a CPU, of a computer, of a computer chip.
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David: And the idea here is that we are just there's this trend line around how fast
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David: a chip can be. And it's and I think you defined it as two X's every two years.
8:09
David: And Moore's law has been in effect for decades, many, many decades.
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David: My understanding of it is like it runs up against a wall based off of like this,
8:18
David: thickness of silicon down to the nanometer level and so we eventually run out
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David: of slack to grow in Moore's law and I thought we are I thought we like my last
8:26
David: understanding of Moore's law is we are approaching that limit
8:29
David: maybe you can update me on that but then now we in addition to that we also have Huang's law which,
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David: I don't think is it's not apples to apples it's more apples to oranges but it's
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David: of the same spirit where it is talking about the computational power as it relates to,
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David: to, I mean, I'm guessing Huang is in Jensen Huang from NVIDIA.
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David: Yeah, so it's the computational power of clusters that is largely computing AI stuff.
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David: Maybe you can fill in the gap of all the gaps that I just left for our listeners.
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Josh: Yeah, so Moore's Law is the amount of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.
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Josh: That is roughly like, you could think of it as the computer processor,
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Josh: the CPU, the brain of a computer doubles in speed every two years.
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Josh: Huang's Law is slightly different. Apples to oranges, largely debated.
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Josh: But Huang's law is every five years, we get a 25x improvement in training capability
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Josh: for GPUs, which means we can train these LLMs, these AI models,
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Josh: 25 times faster every five years.
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Josh: And Moore's law is running into this interesting law where it's actually constrained
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Josh: by physics now, where the particles have gotten so small that we're not quite
9:32
Josh: able to fit many on there without these new innovations.
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Josh: And I think that's kind of why you're seeing things start to stagnate slightly,
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Josh: but equally an opposite takeoff in the world of AI.
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Josh: It's not certain that we won't hit a wall very quickly with Wang's Law as well,
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Josh: with GPU training clusters, but there's this other side of it with software.
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Josh: And the software can actually compensate for the lack of hardware in the case
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Josh: that this ever does degrade.
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Josh: What we just spoke about recently with DeepSeq and QWQ is they were able to
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Josh: take these giant foundational models that took hundreds of thousands of GPU
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Josh: clustered together, tons of energy, tons of compute, and they were able to distill
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Josh: them in a model that can actually run on a desktop computer.
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Josh: And that improvement is like a thousandfold improvement. And that happens on
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Josh: the software side of things.
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Josh: So there's these two pillars that are advancing really quickly.
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Josh: There's the software stack and there's the hardware stack, and both of them are going exponential.
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Josh: So even if Hwang's Law is half of what he says it is, or half of what is expected,
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Josh: the opposite forces that are happening in the software field will continue to
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Josh: accelerate that even faster. So we have these two tailwinds,
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Josh: I'm both going super quick.
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David: Okay, so Huang's Law is a 25x of computational efficiency every five years,
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David: which is pretty damn steep, much deeper than Moore's Law.
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David: But then you also gave us the 20x performance or efficiency increase between
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David: the Alibaba model that got released earlier this week versus the DeepSeq R1
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David: model that got released two months ago.
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David: So we're layering a 25x every five years of computational power.
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David: You're multiplying that with what we are seeing in the efficiency gains of the
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David: highly competitive AI Lab model releases.
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David: And that's software, right? And I love this metaphor. I use it many,
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David: many times on Banklist. There's two ways to scale.
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David: You can just have better hardware. Your Xbox 360 can upgrade to an Xbox One.
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David: You have a better chip in there. The hardware is better. But then also the software
11:27
David: devs, the devs writing the games can write more efficient code.
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David: It can use the same hardware more efficiently, create more beautiful games.
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David: There's two ways to do this. And we're seeing both happen.
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David: Like at these crazy scales, a 20x increase in efficiency for a model in two months is insane.
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David: That growth curve can't be sustainable. I suspect it like tapers out by the end of this year.
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David: And I think it just illustrates that there's a lot of slack in the AI model,
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David: development race. There's like a lot of optimizations to be had.
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David: But there's still the fact that we are 20xing in efficiency in two months in
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David: terms of like one model release to the next just tells me that there's so much.
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David: Much optimizations to be done here. And so we actually don't really know where
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David: the efficiency gains happens on the software side of things.
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Josh: Also, a part of this to take into account is we are building,
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Josh: these efficiency gains are happening, and they're compounding because of the
12:24
Josh: output of the efficiency gains.
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Josh: So now, because we have smarter models to help us, we are able to build even
12:30
Josh: more efficiencies, even more improvements.
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Josh: And that will kind of, hopefully, the hope is that it will increase systematically,
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Josh: whereas we build these smarter models, they can help us create more efficiency,
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Josh: help us design more efficient chips, and it will be the self-fulfilling acceleration curve.
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David: The models help us design better hardware, the hardware gets better,
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David: and we can run more powerful models, and then the models can help us design more hardware.
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David: And it kind of just naturally converges at the theoretical optimal,
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David: the optimization point extremely fast.
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Josh: Exactly. Yes. And as we accelerate faster, there will be even more improvements
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Josh: to the world of atoms instead of just bits.
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Josh: So now it can teach us how to build these machines to build this new computer,
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Josh: to build this new chip that will make things even faster. So it's kind of this
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Josh: like self-fulfilling cycle up to wherever we end up going.
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David: OK, and so that's why you're illustrating this kink here again on the screen
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David: that we're showing where there's this been this compounding growth of humans
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David: and the technology that we've had ever since we invented the concept of technology
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David: and innovation and science.
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David: And there's been just, you know, call it 2% growth year over year over year.
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David: We've been on an exponential growth curve. It's been a modest 2%.
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David: But this is why you're saying that there is a kink here and we are entering
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David: the age of hyperacceleration where, sure, we've had more useful tools.
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David: We've invented, you know, power tools for building better homes.
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David: We've invented computers and that really helped accelerate things.
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David: But nowhere have we actually cheapened the cost of intelligence.
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David: And the idea here, I think we, like, right now, doing, like,
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David: ChatGPT and OpenAI, they're spending a ton of money on just running inference,
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David: running people's queries into ChatGPT, and that costs a bunch of money.
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David: But also, the amount of inference that they're doing is also quite high.
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David: And I think what you're saying here is...
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David: Basically, we are collapsing the cost of intelligence from being expensive,
14:17
David: which is like you need to produce a whole entire human.
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David: You need to put them through school. You need to put them through college.
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David: You need to put them through a PhD program.
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David: That takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of energy. That's very costly.
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David: And that was the previous model. And now all of that intelligence is becoming
14:34
David: inside of the span of five years, ten years. It's becoming free.
14:38
David: Intelligence is like phd phd level intelligence will be free in a few short
14:43
David: years that's is that what you're saying.
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Josh: Yeah totally and that was kind of the essence of why i created this like little
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Josh: visual is because it was mostly the intention of exploring the downstream effects
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Josh: of intelligence as the price rapidly decreases to zero because everything again
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Josh: everything around us is it requires intelligence to make but what happens if
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Josh: that intelligence becomes so cheap that it is readily accessible and 10 times
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Josh: smarter than we are by anyone in the world.
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Josh: Like it just, it makes you think a lot about the productive output that we can
15:11
Josh: unlock. And that was the essence for the very steep curve.
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David: I see that there's two sides of this conversation. There is,
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David: there's so much optimizations left to be done on the hardware side.
15:21
David: There's so much optimizations, way more optimizations left to be done on the AI model side.
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David: These things are going to get so much more efficient intelligence.
15:28
David: The cost of intelligence is going to drop to zero. There's so much optimizations
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David: to be done on just like the mere intelligence side of the equation.
15:34
David: But that's the producing intelligence. And then there's the application of intelligence.
15:39
David: And that's where you went through some of this list here. And you talked about
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David: the gene therapy giving a blind man sight for the first time.
15:46
David: Or like Google AI co-scientists literally just accelerating science broadly.
15:52
David: And so while we have the AI lab wars...
15:55
David: Reducing the cost of intelligence down to zero. We are still like on the in
16:00
David: the very early days of actually seeing the application of that intelligence.
16:04
David: And I think also something that you're saying is like, well,
16:06
David: actually, some people are applying this and they're applying it into fields,
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David: all across science, all across academia, all across knowledge.
16:13
David: And it's kind of like slipping under the radar. But if you pay attention,
16:16
David: you'll kind of notice that we're doing some pretty crazy things really quickly.
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Josh: Yes, that's absolutely right. One of the more interesting ones that i do want
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Josh: to highlight here because i think it's so cool is the dna sequencing and the
16:27
Josh: protein sequencing um that is like a core foundational part of biology and
16:33
Josh: the first person to discover the to break down and like reverse engineer the
16:37
Josh: first protein it took him 12 years to do and he he took this protein and he
16:40
Josh: crystallized and he shot it with x-rays and then he actually used like a ruler
16:43
Josh: and pencil to like connect them together and kind of reverse engineer this
16:47
Josh: and then over the course of the next 60 or so years
16:50
Josh: we were able to finally discover 150,000.
16:52
Josh: And now, because of AI, we've just discovered 250 million.
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David: 150,000 to 250 million. Quite a different number.
17:00
Josh: And that 250 million was only over the course of like the last two years and
17:04
Josh: change. It was very quick.
17:06
Josh: And this was also, relatively speaking, two years ago, it was very early in the AI cycle.
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Josh: So by using this AI, we were able to unlock this entire foundational core of biology.
17:15
Josh: And when you could break down proteins to the simplest form,
17:20
Josh: it unlocks a lot of really cool innovation. So like I mentioned earlier,
17:24
Josh: Alzheimer's is a direct result of a DNA misfolding or a protein misfolding.
17:28
Josh: Same with a lot of forms of cancer.
17:29
Josh: But there's also these other applications outside of just biology that...
17:34
Josh: Where you can form a protein structure that eats plastic and you could just send it out into an ocean
17:39
Josh: and design it so that it doesn't harm the ecosystem but can it can just eat
17:43
Josh: a lot of plastic and convert it into something useful
17:46
Josh: or you could design these new materials that are much more heat resistant like
17:49
Josh: a like a rubber tire that never popped that lasts forever um material science that starts to expand
17:55
Josh: and there's this whole world of biology that we've just unlocked that now we
17:58
Josh: can manipulate and mutate for the first time because we understand it.
18:01
Josh: So it's starting to give us these really like foundational basis of knowledge
18:06
Josh: of biology that now we can take and we can use and we can apply to the real
18:09
Josh: world. And that unlocks an entirely new industry.
18:12
David: I think this is the subject that you're talking about. It's called synthetic biology.
18:16
David: At least that's how I understand it. And maybe the best way to explain this
18:19
David: to listeners is the way a computer works, like going back to a simple Turing
18:24
David: machine is you have this tape and you have this tape of like serial numbers.
18:28
David: It all goes down to like ones and zeros. But like the way a computer works is
18:31
David: it processes the string of digits serially.
18:34
David: And then we just make faster computers to do these things faster.
18:38
David: And then we also have multiple cores to do them in parallel.
18:40
David: But ultimately, at the end of the day, it boils down to a serial string of characters,
18:44
David: a serial string of bits that a computer processes.
18:47
David: And DNA is that same kind of structure. It is a serial chain of proteins with
18:55
David: more combinations than just at ones and zeros.
18:57
David: It has like the ATGE DNAs, but ultimately it's just a serial,
19:02
David: like a string of information.
19:04
David: And it's kind of like the, it's the organic code for biology.
19:08
David: And there's this whole like universe out there where like, okay,
19:11
David: if we figure out how to string the correct order of proteins together,
19:15
David: we can make some really cool things.
19:16
David: And I think what you're doing here, Josh, is you are combining our like intelligence,
19:21
David: complete and comprehensive intelligence onto like how we can correctly order
19:25
David: biology to create any sort of.
19:29
David: Organic structure that can do almost anything that we want. We can cure blindness.
19:33
David: We can produce this organism that consumes plastic, that helps fight climate change, whatever.
19:42
David: And because it's biology, the actual applications are pretty boundless.
19:46
David: They can kind of touch anything.
19:47
David: And that is just synthetic biology. There's still like all the other subjects
19:51
David: that we have to get into, which is like rocketry, like life on Mars,
19:56
David: anything else, like any other science that any listener wants to imagine in their head.
20:01
David: And so this is why you're saying we're entering the age of hyperacceleration
20:04
David: because every single industry is about to hyperaccelerate.
20:06
Josh: Yes. Everything around us that was made by us, if we were smarter, can be improved.
20:12
Josh: So you will see these improvements across the board. Another interesting one
20:15
Josh: about the synthetic biology too is the entire food supply chain and how we make
20:19
Josh: food, how we create food, how food gets genetically modified over time.
20:24
Josh: All of that changes too. So There's so many of these different areas that stand
20:27
Josh: to change so much once we understand them better and we know how to refine them
20:32
Josh: better to get better outputs.
20:34
David: Okay, so between the eras of AI labs becoming hyper-efficient,
20:40
David: creating massive intelligence, dropping the cost of intelligence to zero,
20:44
David: and then before we get to the actual changes in the industries that are actually
20:49
David: where the rubber meets the pavement, we're going to have kind of like the investment
20:53
David: layer or the economics layer. This is going to change the economics of everything.
20:57
David: Investors are going to reallocate capital. The cost of things are going to change
21:02
David: and fluctuate, I think, go down.
21:05
David: Where do you think this, before we actually talk about, and talking about all
21:09
David: the possible ways that this impacts us is literally- We'd be here forever.
21:12
David: We'd be here forever. We'd just be talking about the future of the universe.
21:17
David: So let's talk about what are the economies of this? What was the economic impact
21:22
David: of this in the short term?
21:23
Josh: It probably leads to some sort of rapid deflation in the type of industries that it affects.
21:30
Josh: So just to define deflation versus inflation, a lot of people know what inflation
21:36
Josh: is. It's just kind of like the price of goods and services slowly increasing
21:39
Josh: over time. They're very familiar. They see that in the grocery store.
21:41
Josh: We see that gas stations, everything you buy has slowly increased over time.
21:45
Josh: And the reasoning for that is there's this really great contrarian take by Peter
21:49
Josh: Thiel that I love, where he says that we haven't actually accelerated a whole
21:53
Josh: lot outside of the world of technology.
21:55
Josh: Meaning if you took your grandma and you just kind of froze her in time 50 years
21:59
Josh: ago and then dropped her into your living room today, not much would look very different.
22:03
Josh: If I look out the window, I'm looking at New York City, I'm looking at bridges
22:07
Josh: and buildings, and those have all been there for the last 50 years.
22:10
Josh: The roads, the infrastructure.
22:12
David: The cars look different, but they're still cars.
22:14
Josh: They look different, but they still run on the same fuel. They still have the
22:17
Josh: same materials that they're built with.
22:19
Josh: They just have computers inside and the computers make them a little bit smarter.
22:22
Josh: But outside of the world of computers, we haven't actually accelerated very quickly.
22:25
Josh: So we haven't had this like gross overproduction surplus of things that we need
22:30
Josh: that can lower the price. So we generally have seen inflation there,
22:34
Josh: but the place where we have seen deflation is in technology.
22:37
Josh: And that TV on the wall will look like magic to her. And the phone in your pocket
22:42
Josh: where you can reach anything in the world instantly at your fingertips, that seems like magic.
22:46
Josh: And the cost of that has come so low that now it's accessible to basically anyone.
22:50
Josh: So that is deflation. That's where we see it in technology. And it's probably
22:55
Josh: why we haven't seen it in many other industries outside of it.
22:58
Josh: But once we're able to apply this new intelligence to these new industries to
23:02
Josh: get that surplus, hopefully the downstream effects of that are more abundance,
23:06
Josh: more surplus, and a lower cost of goods, a higher quality of living.
23:10
Josh: I think we'll start to see that once we start to manufacture more in the world
23:13
Josh: of atoms versus bits, which is digital.
23:15
David: And that, Bankless Nation, is where we are going to take this conversation next.
23:18
David: Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet finance and internet
23:21
David: money, and now the future of Adams 2.
23:24
David: This is David Hoffman. I'm joined here once again with our very own Josh Kale.
23:28
David: Josh, welcome back to Bankless, your very own podcast.
23:31
Josh: Thank you. Oh, it's great to be here again. I'm so grateful that I have someone
23:34
Josh: who is interested in hearing me talk about this, because this is what I think
23:37
Josh: about all the time. So thank you for having me again. It's a pleasure.
23:40
David: Yeah, I really enjoyed the last conversation that we did. If this is your first
23:42
David: time listening to Josh, we did one other podcast, the one last week,
23:46
David: really just kind of doing the landscape of the AI arms race in a very like zoomed
23:52
David: out way where like, sure, it's fun to talk about like the competitiveness between
23:57
David: these different AI labs.
23:58
David: But I think Josh really synthesizes information in this very big way.
24:01
David: And that's what we want to do here again on this episode.
24:04
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David: Visit self.xyz and follow Self Protocol on X. Okay, Josh, with the arrival of AI.
27:06
David: People like to talk about the job market because there's that classic line of
27:10
David: AI is going to come take my job.
27:12
David: And then there's the usual rebuttal to that is, well, AI might take your job,
27:17
David: but the more likely thing is that it's actually going to be somebody who's using
27:21
David: AI better than you is going to take your job, not strictly AI.
27:26
David: And then there's also the additional rebuttal to that. Well,
27:28
David: it's like, yes, there might be some job destruction, but it's a creative destruction.
27:32
David: And there's going to be new jobs that are created.
27:35
David: You know, think about when the internet came and all the news,
27:39
David: we were worried about newspapers just going out of business,
27:41
David: which, you know, definitely happened. Although, you know, there are still,
27:45
David: you know, the Wall Street Journal, there's still the New York Times.
27:47
David: And so there was some like elimination of jobs as a result of the internet.
27:52
David: But then like YouTubers and influencers created this huge economy inside of the internet.
27:57
David: And so this idea of creative destruction came where, yeah, we're going to lose
28:00
David: some jobs, but we're going to create a lot new of opportunities ahead.
28:04
David: There's one sector that I think people are actually going to just materially
28:08
David: lose their jobs and they are going to have to figure out something else to do.
28:13
David: Because when you're talking about deflation, we're bringing the cost down.
28:18
David: Uber's biggest cost is probably paying drivers. And we're already seeing like
28:22
David: Waymo in San Francisco have just driverless cars.
28:26
David: And so like, I think there are material industries there. There's going to be
28:30
David: like massive job, not like you don't really lay off your Uber driver,
28:33
David: but that's millions of jobs going away.
28:37
David: What do you think about this conversation?
28:38
Josh: Yeah, it's a scary thing. And I want to preface it for the people that are rude about it.
28:42
Josh: With just the essence of solving problems, which is what we're doing,
28:46
Josh: we are solving the problem that transportation is very unsafe.
28:49
Josh: It is very costly and it is very low production, meaning you have to sit there
28:52
Josh: and you have to drive and cars kill the most amount of people every year.
28:56
Josh: And it's just this very dangerous thing. Like you are allowed as a,
28:59
Josh: what, 17 year old to drive a five ton vehicle at a hundred miles an hour anywhere in the world.
29:04
Josh: That seems a little scary, a little unsafe. So what's happening here is we are
29:08
Josh: solving problems and there will be this
29:10
Josh: Dislocation of people who were solving the past problems.
29:15
Josh: But it's important to note that like solving these problems creates a more exciting world.
29:19
Josh: Like when you solve a problem, generally it leads to more problems,
29:23
Josh: but these are better problems to solve, which is why like the world around us
29:27
Josh: improves. It's not because we reduce the amount of problems,
29:29
Josh: but because we solve the worst ones, multiplying the amount of better problems to solve.
29:33
Josh: So we've kind of seen this happen with the agricultural revolution where there
29:36
Josh: was like seed drilling and crop rotation and crossbreeding. And all the people
29:40
Josh: who did those jobs originally, they lost their jobs.
29:43
Josh: But the productive output, the downstream effects of it were so much higher.
29:47
Josh: And it happened again in the industrial revolution where we invented the steam
29:50
Josh: engine and we invented the production line, textile machines.
29:54
Josh: And the people who did that, they lost their jobs. But the steam engine created
29:58
Josh: a train and then the train created railways and then railways created transportation
30:02
Josh: and cross-country distribution of goods and services.
30:06
Josh: So it opened up all these additional industries. And I think that's probably what's going to happen.
30:10
Josh: Cars is a great example because again, very unsafe, very expensive.
30:15
Josh: If you can remove the human element from that, suddenly your one hour car ride
30:18
Josh: to the airport is a fully productive time where you don't have to drive yourself.
30:22
Josh: You can just do stuff on your phone. You could take a nap. The
30:26
Josh: Amount of accidents that will happen will be much lower it'll be much safer
30:29
Josh: you don't have to worry about it and the cost because there is no human element will will drop
30:34
Josh: aggressively i think it's a few dollars currently per mile is the way you can
30:38
Josh: gauge transportation in new york city um that should drop down to
30:42
Josh: cents once these cars are able to drive themselves so it's one of those things
30:45
Josh: where yes the cab drivers will lose their jobs but the world will be a better
30:49
Josh: place because of it and the hope is that the productive unlock from this new
30:52
Josh: technology will enable even more jobs for them to take and more interesting jobs.
30:57
David: I think this conversation is quite timely for me personally,
30:59
David: because right after this podcast, I go and on Turo, there's this there's this
31:03
David: app out there for people who don't know who can just like rent a car.
31:05
David: It's like Airbnb for cars.
31:07
David: So there's this some guy like four blocks away from me has a Tesla that I'm
31:10
David: going to rent and I'm going to drive for six hours upstate.
31:14
David: And Tesla has auto driving, but I have to keep my hands on the steering wheel because of regulation.
31:19
David: And so that is six hours where I am unproductive.
31:23
David: I like my most productive form is going to be listening to a podcast and like
31:26
David: growing my knowledge and that's that's if i have the brain power for that so
31:30
David: otherwise i'm just like stuck in this car for six hours it's going to cost me like,
31:34
David: i'm going for the weekend it's going to cost me like 300 or 400 to like rent
31:37
David: this car for the weekend so it's going to cost me a bunch of money i'm going
31:39
David: to be very unproductive for six hours there six hours back uh and,
31:44
David: that is like it's some of the least i just have to get up there so there's no
31:47
David: other way way to do this and so i think what you're saying,
31:51
David: what we're extrapolating here is like, okay, so in the future,
31:54
David: short-term future, maybe regulations aside, in the short-term future,
31:58
David: that like $400 cost for a Tesla for three days is actually going to drop to
32:02
David: like, I don't know, $25, $50.
32:05
David: Maybe I don't rent a car, but there's just a car that takes me up there.
32:08
David: And during that time, I am not like with my hands on the steering wheel.
32:12
David: I have my laptop open on my lap. Maybe I'm even doing a podcast,
32:15
David: but I'm doing something otherwise productive with my time.
32:18
David: I think the low productivity angle of, you know, Uber drivers,
32:22
David: cab drivers is actually really illustrative because, like,
32:26
David: But other than getting some other human from point A to point B,
32:29
David: that's the only production that actually happens as a result of that job.
32:33
Josh: Yes, that's absolutely right. Actually, I would encourage you to try full self-driving
32:37
Josh: on your road trip up because it's really good and it signals how close we actually are to...
32:43
David: Oh, I intend to do it, but my last time I was in a Tesla, I had to keep my hands on the steering wheel.
32:48
Josh: Now it's gotten better. It's just your eyes need to be on the road.
32:50
Josh: So you don't have to touch anything. You just have to look forward.
32:52
David: Can I wear sunglasses?
32:53
Josh: You can, but there's actually these small sensors that can penetrate your sunglasses
32:57
Josh: that can see your eyes beneath them.
32:58
Josh: They've got it pretty good. And this is just really a matter of regulation.
33:02
Josh: The technology is mostly there. In fact, Tesla is planning to roll out their
33:05
Josh: cyber cab network, fully autonomous in Austin in the middle of this year.
33:09
Josh: So we are very close to this happening. And I think a lot of people who haven't
33:12
Josh: tried it don't know precisely how close we are.
33:15
Josh: So give it a try. I'm curious to hear your thoughts, but it's very good.
33:18
Josh: And it's very exciting because, yeah, you could either take a six hour nap or
33:22
Josh: you could do whatever you would want during that time and do so much more safely
33:25
Josh: than if you had a tire driver or if you yourself were tired.
33:28
David: And that's just the idea of transportation. And I don't think that's really,
33:31
David: I don't know if you have any takes on like airline transportation or if that's getting any cheaper.
33:35
David: Oh, you do. Okay, so this was talking about like car automobile transportation
33:41
David: is dropping, call it 100X in cost over when this technology gets absorbed by humanity.
33:48
David: Aviation transportation has not progressed at all over decades.
33:53
David: It's been one of the most frustrating things in my life.
33:56
David: Is aviation transportation costs going down too?
33:58
Josh: Yes, you can you can apply this to everything. We could have the same conversation
34:02
Josh: about 10,000 different industries, and it will be very similar because once
34:06
Josh: we have better materials, once we have better intelligence, once we have more
34:08
Josh: abundant energy, we can create much better products.
34:10
Josh: So one that I'm super excited about is called Boom Arrow. They're a supersonic airplane company.
34:16
Josh: And what they've done is they've been able to basically take the plane and turn
34:22
Josh: it into a supersonic plane that is much more efficient, much faster,
34:25
Josh: and does not disturb the ground level of people with these hypersonic booms.
34:30
Josh: So their new technology is allowing planes to go way faster.
34:35
Josh: I'm not sure the multiple, but significantly faster at significantly higher volume.
34:39
Josh: For the hope is a lower cost. So not only do you get a product that's better,
34:43
Josh: you get an experience that's better, but you actually get a lower cost and higher safety because these
34:48
Josh: will be built by really impressive engineers that don't have these edge cases
34:52
Josh: that you've been seeing with these airplanes that are crashing and burning.
34:54
Josh: And the airline industry has gotten a little scary. And it's mostly because
34:57
Josh: it's a duopoly between Boeing and Airbus.
35:01
Josh: Airbus. Yes, I believe those are the and they have no incentive to do right
35:06
Josh: by the people because they are the monopoly.
35:08
Josh: And if you can start to introduce these new competitors through this new technology
35:13
Josh: that provide such a better experience at such a better price,
35:16
Josh: then there's no reason why 10 more of those won't come into the market.
35:19
Josh: And gradually over time, we will just remove the duopoly that is these unsafe
35:23
Josh: kind of crappy airline companies and we'll have hypersonic travel and we will
35:27
Josh: have hypersonic travel that's like really comfortable and really cheap and affordable.
35:30
Josh: And it's mostly a matter of manufacturing materials and regulation.
35:35
Josh: Those are the three things that are stopping that from happening. But it's happening.
35:38
David: One thing I think we are doing with this conversation, maybe there is something
35:42
David: to fill in here, is like first we grow hardware and then sophistication of our
35:45
David: models. That's step one. Step one, grow intelligence.
35:49
David: Step two, reduce the cost of intelligence.
35:52
David: Step three is three question marks. And then step four is profit,
35:56
David: where we have like super cheap transportation, super cheap airlines,
36:00
David: and all of a sudden we can do a supersonic travel for very, very low.
36:04
David: So how does that first conversation that we had about AI intelligence actually
36:07
David: relate to producing deflation in transportation costs?
36:12
David: Or are we just kind of assuming that eventually with the massive reduction in
36:17
David: intelligence that we're going to figure out at scale hypersonic,
36:21
David: supersonic airline travel?
36:24
Josh: Yeah. So I want to amend your hierarchy slightly. You put intelligence at the
36:27
Josh: top. I think there is one thing that is slightly higher than intelligence and
36:30
Josh: that's energy to power all these intelligence systems to power us.
36:34
Josh: We need tons of energy and we don't currently have enough energy.
36:38
Josh: So I think this all kind of starts with the energy layer. And again,
36:41
Josh: it's synchronous with intelligence. This is really, this is one fact that I love.
36:45
Josh: It's that if you go outside into your backyard, if you go to like a park down
36:48
Josh: the street and you pick up a rock, the rock actually has more potential energy
36:52
Josh: inside of it than the equivalent size piece of coal.
36:56
Josh: And it's interesting because we use coal, we burn coal, but it turns out that
37:01
Josh: organic plant matter that's been stored underground isn't super dense in energy.
37:05
Josh: Whereas this rock that's down the park, it has trace amounts of thorium and
37:09
Josh: uranium, and they're very low amounts.
37:12
Josh: But the only thing stopping us from extracting that versus coal is understanding how to process it.
37:18
Josh: And the resource thing is really interesting because it's like,
37:21
Josh: But nothing is really a resource until we assign the knowledge to it that it
37:26
Josh: is a resource. Like we didn't get iron out of nowhere. Some guy found a rock
37:29
Josh: and then he figured out how to smelt it and refine it. And we went from iron
37:33
Josh: ore to iron ingots. And now we have skyscrapers.
37:35
Josh: And there's this kind of progression through resources where as we get more
37:40
Josh: intelligent, we are able to access them more abundantly.
37:43
Josh: And I think this kind of happens synchronously with intelligence,
37:47
Josh: where the more energy we have, the more we can power the GPU clusters,
37:50
Josh: the more we can understand.
37:51
Josh: And then to get to your question, the downstream effects of it,
37:53
Josh: well, it can teach us how to manufacture better factories. So one of the really
37:57
Josh: interesting developments has been humanoid robots recently.
38:00
Josh: And these are robots that have general purpose intelligence.
38:03
Josh: They have hands, they have actuators that kind of function like humans.
38:07
Josh: And they've been starting to go into factories and starting to manufacture things themselves.
38:11
Josh: And a lot of the production line has been simulated through these large AI models
38:15
Josh: that can kind of emulate the efficiencies and inefficiencies of a system and
38:19
Josh: then weed them out for you.
38:21
Josh: So generally with like technology applications or products, the first one is
38:24
Josh: kind of crappy. Like if you bought the first iPhone, it like wasn't that great.
38:27
Josh: The second one was like pretty good. The third one was like really good.
38:30
Josh: The fourth one was amazing. And the fourth one is basically the same as the
38:33
Josh: 16th one. They're all the same because we kind of reached this local maximum.
38:36
Josh: But if a computer can do all those iterations for you because it's much smarter
38:41
Josh: than you, then the first version can actually be the fourth version,
38:44
Josh: that final version, that like local maximum of what we're able to do.
38:47
Josh: So I think that probably applies through most places. as we kind of synchronize
38:52
Josh: Manufacturing machine layer with the intelligence layer, it can basically teach us how to make things.
38:59
Josh: And then our job as humans would be to go and create the infrastructure required
39:02
Josh: to make these things that we want, to make these hypersonic airlines,
39:05
Josh: to make these self-driving cars.
39:08
Josh: It can remove all the inefficiencies and basically give us the answer, give us the blueprint.
39:12
David: So your equation is that energy plus intelligence equals profit, basically.
39:18
David: Once we have abundance of energy. We are currently growing an abundance of intelligence
39:23
David: and you can combine those two things. And then the universe is our oyster.
39:26
David: We can literally unlock every single door once we have those two things.
39:30
Josh: Yes. From down to the biology example that we used all the way up to just like
39:33
Josh: building the most large, like starship, rocket ships to other planets to go mine other resources.
39:39
Josh: And these things are very abundant.
39:42
Josh: China last week, the thorium in those rocks that I mentioned,
39:45
Josh: they found a deposit of thorium that can power the country for 60,000 years.
39:50
Josh: And it's just sitting there. And they don't really know what to do with it because
39:53
Josh: they don't have the intelligence or the manufacturing capabilities.
39:56
Josh: So they're starting to learn how to create these things called salt bed reactors
39:59
Josh: that are safe nuclear reactors to extract it and to refine it.
40:02
Josh: But it's not there yet. And if they had this higher form of intelligence that
40:05
Josh: could feed them a blueprint, like, hey, here's exactly what you need to do in
40:08
Josh: the optimal state to extract this energy, they suddenly have power for 60,000
40:11
Josh: years. And then they can apply all of that energy to whatever problems they
40:14
Josh: want to solve outside of that.
40:16
Josh: And there's this chart, it's basically showing that there are no energy poor
40:20
Josh: countries in the world. If you don't have energy, you cannot
40:24
Josh: produce valuable things and so that that higher energy thing the higher intelligence
40:28
Josh: thing they're the self-fulfilling loop and they're upstream of basically all of that that profit
40:35
David: I remember doing an episode we've done a couple episodes with guests like this
40:38
David: one of them is arthur hayes where he says he he denominates his wealth in,
40:42
David: hydrocarbons in energy uh and i don't know if he actually does that but the
40:46
David: point stands of just like well i mean what is the dollar what is the really.
40:51
David: It's actually the petrodollar. And it's actually petro, the oil,
40:56
David: oil reserves of the world that is actually the fundamental denominator of anything.
41:00
David: And like, why is it so valuable? So well, because it produces energy.
41:04
David: Josh, have you ever read any of David Dorsche's stuff?
41:07
Josh: Oh, man, it's funny. I have the beginning of infinity and fabric of reality
41:10
Josh: like right here. Actually, hold on.
41:11
David: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So okay. So I think you know exactly where I'm going with
41:15
David: this. Josh is zooming over to go get his books. Yeah. Have you read it?
41:20
Josh: I've tried.
41:22
David: David Deutsch is dense.
41:23
Josh: This is a tough book. I don't want to say I've read it because I have not,
41:26
Josh: but I have tried and I've actually consulted YouTubers on how to go about approaching
41:31
Josh: this book because it is so dense.
41:33
Josh: But it's very high signal. And I think a lot of people who I trust and respect
41:37
Josh: really love and keep coming back to this book. So that is why I continue to
41:41
Josh: chug away. But yes, I have attempted to read it.
41:44
David: You're aware of David Deutsch. So he's got this idea. in these books,
41:48
David: the two books that you named, he argues that the only fundamental limitation
41:52
David: on what humans can achieve is constrained by knowledge.
41:57
David: Like all constraints are knowledge constraints at the end of the day.
42:00
David: And specifically, it's our ability to like discover the right explanations and
42:05
David: create the technology for the
42:06
David: necessary technology to do things is just a knowledge constraint. And so –.
42:12
David: His idea is that if something doesn't break the law of physics,
42:16
David: then the only thing preventing us from achieving that is the lack of knowledge to get there, right?
42:20
David: So space travel, there's nothing in physics that forbids humans from colonizing
42:25
David: other planets or traveling between galaxies. The reason why we haven't done
42:28
David: it yet is we don't have the knowledge, right?
42:30
David: Aging, if aging is just a biological process governed by physical laws,
42:35
David: then in principle, we can learn how to reverse it. The only obstacle is the knowledge how.
42:42
David: And so I think this is what you're alluding to is like, okay,
42:44
David: we need the energy to power the intelligence. We actually have the intelligence,
42:48
David: or at least we're getting it very, very soon.
42:51
David: I consider us having the intelligence, but I'm sure we're going to have even
42:54
David: more intelligence at the rate of these AI labs competitions.
42:57
David: And so once we get the energy, we have the knowledge, and then the world is our oyster.
43:01
David: And so, like, yes, we didn't really have a clear answer as to how AI actually
43:07
David: allows for supersonic travel at, you know, very, very low cost.
43:11
David: But it's making this big assumption that, you know, you smash energy and knowledge
43:14
David: together and there's literally no problem that we can't access.
43:18
David: And that is why you're calling this the age of hyper acceleration and why there's
43:22
David: a kink in the compounding growth curve, because everything becomes accessible
43:27
David: to us by like the end of this decade.
43:28
Josh: Yeah, really, really soon. And there's this example I mentioned last time,
43:32
Josh: but I really love so much.
43:33
Josh: And it's the mouse in the prime number maze where you have this mouse that's
43:37
Josh: not super smart. It's in the middle of a maze and it will run forever and never
43:41
Josh: figure out how to get out of it.
43:42
Josh: But if the mouse knows that it's a prime number maze and it understands what
43:45
Josh: prime numbers are, then it can very easily get its way out of this maze.
43:49
Josh: And there's so many questions to be explored to unlock that one key bit of knowledge
43:55
Josh: that unlocks this entire world for us.
43:58
Josh: So, part of the higher level of intelligence is asking just better questions
44:03
Josh: or even knowing what questions to ask that are worth solving and then pointing it at those questions.
44:07
Josh: I very much agree with with David in the sense that like all of this is just
44:11
Josh: an intelligence problem and an energy problem.
44:13
Josh: And if we have unlimited of both or if you have enough resources to harness
44:17
Josh: a seemingly unlimited amount of both, there is no problem that we can't solve
44:21
Josh: everything like any it kind of breaks your mind in the same way that LLMs kind
44:25
Josh: of broke my mind when I first started using them.
44:27
Josh: The only constraint is your own creativity or your own questions to ask it.
44:31
Josh: Like I feel like I'm still not getting the most out of these large language
44:33
Josh: models because I just don't know how to use them quite well and that's kind
44:37
Josh: of the case with these these llms as they get better is the the hardest thing will be
44:42
Josh: understanding what to ask what questions we should are worth learning wow
44:46
David: That's deep once once we have infinite intelligence at our fingertips the question
44:52
David: the constraint becomes what do we ask it.
44:55
Josh: Yeah, within within the realms of physics, or perhaps not, like perhaps we understand
44:59
Josh: more quantum physics that break all the rules that we have.
45:02
Josh: Like we can kind of play God, you can create these, these like new forms of
45:05
Josh: babies that are genetically perfect, and they never have any mutations and they
45:09
Josh: age at the exact rate that you set.
45:10
Josh: Or you could have this food that you create that looks nothing like what we've
45:14
Josh: had, but it's the exact nutrient macro complex for your specific body.
45:18
Josh: And it just shows up every day and it tastes delicious. And it's built just
45:20
Josh: for you because we can manufacture it for every person on earth.
45:23
Josh: And this kind of goes across the board for anything and everything that you can imagine.
45:28
Josh: Again, once it's made up by people smarter than we are, it changes everything for everyone.
45:33
Josh: So it's a weird thing. And we're getting there super quick.
45:36
David: Can you pull up the graphic about how there are no energy-rich,
45:40
David: there are no energy-poor-rich countries.
45:42
David: And so the claim here is that we can look at all of the countries that exist
45:47
David: in the world and all of the rich ones, all the ones that are wealthy,
45:51
David: have an abundance of energy.
45:54
David: Trace over this idea and why this is so important again.
45:57
Josh: So what you're looking at is this relationship between electricity consumption
46:01
Josh: and GDP per capita of countries along the world.
46:04
Josh: And you'll notice in the bottom left, there is a lot of countries like Bangladesh,
46:08
Josh: Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria. These are all energy consumption.
46:12
Josh: Poor companies in the sense that they haven't quite figured out how to unlock
46:16
Josh: large amounts of energy.
46:17
Josh: And then you reach this threshold, which is kind of set by India and Indonesia,
46:21
Josh: where they're just kind of there.
46:23
Josh: They've consumed, what is that, 1,000 kilowatt hours of energy per capita.
46:28
Josh: And everything above that is the wealthy nations. That's where you'll see in
46:32
Josh: the top right, Norway is actually very wealthy and has a lot of energy.
46:36
Josh: But there you see the United States.
46:37
Josh: A little bit lower down, you see China, Japan.
46:40
Josh: You don't see any of the large dominant countries in the world underneath this
46:43
Josh: threshold because energy is so important, because energy powers our transportation,
46:49
Josh: our food, everything you do on a day-to-day basis requires that,
46:52
Josh: particularly for manufacturing.
46:55
Josh: We have managed to unlock through burning fossil fuels, alternative energy sources
47:00
Josh: like solar, enough energy to power ourselves and to become wealthy.
47:04
Josh: But we are pretty quickly outpacing our ability to create this energy.
47:09
Josh: And we're starting to see it with data centers where people,
47:12
Josh: companies like Project Stargate, the $500 billion plan by Masayoshi-san and OpenAI,
47:19
Josh: they need to create large amounts of power just to power these energies because
47:24
Josh: the grid can't support it.
47:25
Josh: So we do have enough energy. It's very important for energy because everything
47:29
Josh: is downstream of that energy.
47:30
Josh: But again, we are quickly coming up against that threshold of how much energy
47:34
Josh: we actually have versus how much we're going to need.
47:37
David: Looking at this chart, I'm just very much reminded of Y equals MX plus B.
47:42
David: Just to be clear, on the vertical axis is energy consumed per capita.
47:47
David: And so if you're a country that has a higher energy consumption per individual,
47:52
David: you are higher on the vertical axis. And on the horizontal axis is just wealth of the nation.
47:57
David: And so if you're a more wealthy nation, you are further on the horizontal axis.
48:02
David: And this is just a perfectly linear chart.
48:05
David: As in like I've never seen something like more correlated to like wealth that
48:09
David: I've seen in this than in this chart it's like if you have more energy your
48:13
David: country is more wealthy uh,
48:15
David: like this has definitely always been a topic of like policy debate and I think
48:20
David: this is something that like the Trump administration is actually like leaning
48:23
David: into it's just like more energy more energy that's,
48:26
David: like the the Democrats the liberals are very hesitant to with his type of energy because it's coal.
48:31
David: He's like very, he's into all forms of energy, including coal.
48:34
David: The Democrats are like, well, what about global warming? But then the conservative
48:37
David: right is like more energy, like accelerate, like innovate, dominate,
48:42
David: like let's grow the energy conversation.
48:45
David: And in terms of just like strictly, politics aside, in terms of strictly like
48:48
David: domestic innovation, what does that conversation looks like about like our,
48:53
David: what's the energy conversation inside the United States look like right now?
48:57
Josh: Yeah, it's such a shame that technology has become politicized because it is
49:00
Josh: so foundational to the well-being of everybody.
49:04
Josh: So it sucks that there are these split views on how we should go about it.
49:08
Josh: I think currently the ideology is to use as much energy as we can to accelerate
49:14
Josh: quicker, which is something that I'm really excited about.
49:17
Josh: Again, going to the problem-solving thing is like,
49:20
Josh: solving one bad problem never leads to like a non-problematic state,
49:23
Josh: but it leads to much better problems to solve.
49:25
Josh: So if we do need to burn a lot more fossil fuels, a lot more coal to power these
49:30
Josh: new plants that will then give us the information we need to unlock nuclear
49:34
Josh: technology, say, that is a big win.
49:36
Josh: And maybe we suffer on a short-term basis where we do produce a lot more pollution,
49:41
Josh: but the second order effects of that vastly outweigh the slowing down and diminishing
49:47
Josh: of this accelerative force that will get us out of the problem.
49:50
Josh: So I think currently the United States is roughly aligned with the energy needs
49:57
Josh: of what we're going to eventually have.
50:00
Josh: There is a move over to nuclear energy, which I think is super exciting because
50:04
Josh: that feels like the end game. That feels like the final form.
50:07
Josh: And it's a shame that nuclear technology has gotten such a bad rap.
50:10
Josh: Again, technology has become this politicized thing.
50:13
Josh: Very few people have actually died from it. It is very safe.
50:16
Josh: The old power plants that did melt down are nothing like these new power plants.
50:19
Josh: And there's this new company actually just last week.
50:22
Josh: I think it's Valor, Valor Electronics. I could be butchering that,
50:26
Josh: but they created this modular nuclear reactor that is the size of a large apartment maybe.
50:33
Josh: And the idea is that you can take a stack of these modular reactors and you
50:36
Josh: could place them around a data center like the OpenAI Project Stargate one that's
50:40
Josh: gonna require a lot of power.
50:42
Josh: It can be fully self-sufficient and fully stable with nuclear energy.
50:46
Josh: And I think that is like a really fun direction that we're headed to,
50:50
Josh: where we are now able to produce these things.
50:53
Josh: We don't really have the regulatory restrictions and safeguards preventing these
50:57
Josh: people from innovating and accelerating on it.
50:59
Josh: And I think that feels like a very healthy direction that I'm super excited
51:02
Josh: about going, is now we do have permission to build these new nuclear systems.
51:06
Josh: We do have permission to explore these new forms of energy that are necessary
51:10
Josh: to power this world in which There will be a lot more robotics,
51:12
Josh: a lot more manufacturing than we currently do today.
51:15
David: I'm not terribly informed about the nuclear subject, but my loose understanding
51:19
David: is that it was one of these industries that, A, got a bad rap downstream of
51:24
David: the Cold War. We had the Three Mile Island incident inside the United States.
51:29
David: There was a Chernobyl incident in Eastern Europe. And I think that's kind of
51:32
David: like marked the tone of nuclear. But it's also just been highly regulated.
51:37
David: Like it's been so incredibly regulated i think that's actually the main culprit
51:40
David: as to why we don't see too much nuclear energy production because it's,
51:45
David: we regulated it heavily because of well nuclear bombs and so maybe you can kind of understand that uh,
51:50
David: but it is also like you say a shame that we don't have like this robust nuclear
51:54
David: industry uh because again to my knowledge just like you said it's super safe
51:57
David: it's super clean it's super powerful uh and super abundant uh and,
52:02
David: And again, going with this relationship of like more energy equals more innovation,
52:07
David: maybe we should like reset our priors on understanding nuclear as an industry
52:12
David: inside of the United States.
52:14
Josh: Yeah, the chart was so clear, like the correlation between energy and dominance
52:18
Josh: is like, it's such a clear cut representation. That's really hard to debate that it's a shame.
52:23
Josh: And I wish I had these specific examples, because I know the meltdowns were
52:26
Josh: not as bad as most people think.
52:28
Josh: But it's a shame that that very early form of technology impacts so greatly
52:32
Josh: the technology that we could produce today.
52:35
Josh: Day. We have accelerated so much in our understanding of nuclear engineering,
52:39
Josh: but also manufacturing, technology, material science,
52:42
Josh: where now we do have these things called pebble bed reactors and these new Gen
52:46
Josh: 4 reactors that are meltdown proof and they have a much smaller footprint and
52:49
Josh: they don't lead to any extra pollution and they're self-sufficient and they
52:52
Josh: don't require this grid that's kind of broken down to distribute energy, it could do so locally.
52:58
Josh: So it largely has been a matter of this bad reputation that it's gotten,
53:02
Josh: but also the people preventing it because they do feel like it's afraid.
53:06
Josh: And we have this like very, we've had in the past this very afraid mindset where
53:11
Josh: we don't want to hurt anybody. We are far too empathetic to harm anybody.
53:15
Josh: But in not hurting anybody, we've harmed everybody because now we have this
53:19
Josh: energy constraint and we don't have the ability to accelerate our way out of
53:24
Josh: it because we have not been allowed to.
53:26
Josh: So it's very clear, like we need energy and we would love more intelligence.
53:30
Josh: These things are amazing. And we have the technology to do it without hurting
53:34
Josh: people. We just need to get out of the way and let the people who are ambitious
53:38
Josh: enough to try give it their best shot.
53:40
David: Josh, I'm getting a very clear sense that you are a techno optimist with a very
53:45
David: strong bent towards acceleration. Like you are, you are, you are acceleration, ride or die.
53:51
David: I don't, I don't think you're not being pragmatic about it. I think you do understand
53:55
David: that there are costs, but I think you are just heavily biased towards like,
53:58
David: yeah, there's costs and there are solutions to those costs, too,
54:01
David: which we will also discover if and only if we accelerate.
54:05
Josh: Yeah, it's kind of like religion where I chose this because this one makes me
54:08
Josh: the most excited about waking up in the morning. And it feels really good to me.
54:12
Josh: And I'm very familiar with the downsides and actually less so because I choose
54:17
Josh: to be blindly optimistic. I find it helpful.
54:19
Josh: But I am familiar with the downsides of a lot of this technology.
54:22
Josh: I understand that there are lots of them, but I also do feel pretty strongly
54:26
Josh: that like solving these really hard problems will lead to more problems,
54:29
Josh: but they are better problems, more interesting problems to solve.
54:31
Josh: So I think the second order effects of this acceleration are better issues,
54:37
Josh: even though there will be more of them.
54:38
Josh: And that's something that that does get me excited.
54:41
David: You know the name Ted Kaczynski, right, Josh?
54:45
Josh: I'm not familiar. No, you have to fill me in.
54:46
David: The Unabomber?
54:48
Josh: Oh, yeah. Familiar with that name.
54:50
David: Do you know why the Unabomber was the Unabomber?
54:55
Josh: Unfamiliar? No.
54:56
David: Okay, so he was, I think he had a mental disorder, something like schizophrenia
55:04
David: or mania. I could be misremembering here.
55:07
David: But he was the Unabomber because he had this,
55:12
David: prediction about the future, which was that the abundance of technology and
55:17
David: the cost of technology would become so high and the cost would be so low that
55:22
David: long tail risks would be absolutely everywhere.
55:26
David: And the optionality for an individual to cause outsized destruction upon the
55:32
David: planet would become increasingly available to the point where merely statistics
55:37
David: says that something bad will happen because we are creating so much potential
55:42
David: out of the long tail of humans that one human can, using technology,
55:47
David: using infinite intelligence, ask ChatGPT,
55:50
David: or the uncensored, unhinged version of ChatGPT, how do I make an atom bomb with
55:56
David: normal household equipment?
55:57
David: And as we defined earlier in this podcast, the only constraint to whatever we
56:02
David: want to do is access to intelligence, to the intelligence needed,
56:06
David: the information needed to get what we want.
56:10
David: I'm with you every step of the way. And I'm really like where this is going.
56:14
David: And I think there's a lot of cool futures that we have. There's going to be
56:17
David: cool technologies. We're going to be able to zip around the whole entire planet
56:21
David: for pennies in like 10 years. It's going to be great.
56:24
David: And I also think that most humans are good. Most humans are good people,
56:27
David: like 98, 99% of people are inherently good people.
56:31
David: But it actually, the problem is, and this is what Ted Kaczynski saw,
56:35
David: it was that it actually only takes one person when technology is so powerful
56:40
David: and information is so cheap and energy is so abundant.
56:43
David: It actually only takes one person to cause outsized destruction.
56:47
David: Have you thought about this subject? What are your thoughts or reflections?
56:50
Josh: Yes. And my solution was actually derived from Palmer Luckey,
56:53
Josh: who is just like the super interesting guy that I love. He's in defense tech.
56:57
Josh: And he talks a lot about the war field and how like the dynamics of what works.
57:02
Josh: Because he builds missiles and he builds weapons.
57:04
Josh: And his thesis, and the thesis kind of since the beginning of time,
57:07
Josh: is that defense is always slightly easier than offense.
57:11
Josh: And this is true in software. This is true in hardware. It's always easier to
57:15
Josh: defend something than it is to attack it.
57:18
Josh: And in a lot of cases, we have built these malicious tools. I mean,
57:22
Josh: lots of people have guns in their house. We have nuclear bombs.
57:25
Josh: We have genetic mutations.
57:28
Josh: One did get away from us with COVID where, sure, maybe a handful of people did
57:31
Josh: do something bad. Maybe it leaked out. Like, that's really bad. The hope is that as we...
57:36
Josh: Go faster as we understand more it will continue to be easier to defend against
57:42
Josh: these bad actors than it will be for the actors to attack and that's generally
57:47
Josh: the hope and again it's it's like it's hard to
57:50
Josh: make a convincing argument to stop the progress because of the edge case of
57:54
Josh: one person causing damage
57:55
Josh: it's more interesting to continue the path forward while taking into account
58:01
Josh: and being very careful about the edge cases that can harm people i think we're
58:04
Josh: seeing this a lot in AI from
58:07
Josh: the leading labs like OpenAI, where they're super concerned about alignment and safety
58:12
Josh: Because they do understand the power of these large language models and this intelligence.
58:16
Josh: And if it gets into the wrong person's hand, what can happen?
58:18
Josh: Not necessarily if it gets into the wrong person's hand, but if it's able to
58:22
Josh: manipulate a large group of people into doing things, changing their minds.
58:25
Josh: There's a lot of weird edge cases where we're very malleable and we are very
58:29
Josh: subject to these sways of opinion.
58:32
Josh: So there's always going to be that bad thing.
58:35
Josh: And there's going to be lots of them and they're going to get progressively worse, most likely.
58:40
Josh: But I guess the hope is that the trade-offs for making things better,
58:45
Josh: for moving faster, will offset the downside of those few bad actors that want to use it maliciously.
58:53
Josh: And there's always this double-edged sword to all progression, all technology.
58:57
Josh: But you just have to hope that people are smart and are caring and are thoughtful
59:02
Josh: and can work together to kind of build something that is non-destructive.
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David: of the community that's uniting bitcoin and ethereum i think this is highly
1:01:06
David: aligned or maybe even synonymous with vitalik buterin's deac or defensive acceleration
1:01:11
David: it also goes like decentralized acceleration but i i.
1:01:14
David: I think it's really kind of found its identity as defensive acceleration,
1:01:17
David: where he says, yes, I'm a fan of acceleration as concept, but I'm even more
1:01:21
David: of a fan of defensive acceleration.
1:01:23
David: And there are technologies that he labels that are out there that are inherently
1:01:27
David: defensive rather than offensive, where like weapons, armaments,
1:01:31
David: bombs are inherently offensive.
1:01:33
David: But cryptography is an inherently defensive technology. Bearer assets,
1:01:38
David: Bitcoin, Ether, DeFi, inherently a defensive technology.
1:01:43
David: I'm actually unfamiliar with Palmer Luckey's idea that defensive technologies
1:01:47
David: are easier to create than offensive technologies.
1:01:49
David: I'd love to hear like a deep dive on that. But if that is true,
1:01:53
David: if those arguments are sound, then I too find myself highly unconcerned with
1:02:00
David: the Unabomber's future of the universe.
1:02:03
Josh: It's important to have people like Vitalik, to have people on both sides that
1:02:05
Josh: are some people that are very like, oh, we are just going to go super fast,
1:02:08
Josh: heads down as fast as we possibly can.
1:02:10
Josh: And then other people that are like, wait a second, we're unlocking these like
1:02:13
Josh: this whole slew of attack vectors that need to be accounted for.
1:02:16
Josh: And like, let's build solutions for that.
1:02:18
Josh: So there needs to be stuff that happens on both sides. It does feel as if it
1:02:22
Josh: will be easier to defend than attack.
1:02:25
Josh: But at the end of the day, like we still have nukes. It only takes one person to start a nuclear war.
1:02:29
Josh: And that's that's it. So we exist in a very fragile state as a society,
1:02:34
Josh: which is also why it's like, oh, like, why don't we just go to Mars and just
1:02:37
Josh: like duplicate our intelligence there? That way we have some redundancy.
1:02:40
David: Right. We have a plan B.
1:02:41
Josh: Yeah, plan B. So there again, like there are ways to defend against these nukes.
1:02:45
Josh: Well, let's just get off of the planet and let's take intelligence to this new
1:02:48
Josh: place. So if they nuke this one, surely their nukes can't reach this next one.
1:02:52
Josh: And you can kind of like follow this down the line of threat vectors and figure
1:02:57
Josh: out solutions that are kind of creative and unique to all of them.
1:03:01
David: Josh, I think this conversation that we've had spawns many, many new conversations.
1:03:06
David: Something that we didn't talk about this episode that I think is still highly relevant is robotics.
1:03:11
David: I think there has been just like a general movement towards robotics in just
1:03:15
David: very recent weeks and months.
1:03:17
David: My understanding of robotics is like we're going to totally have robots and
1:03:21
David: like they're going to be humanoid robots because we have created a humanoid
1:03:25
David: universe as in the form factor for navigating the universe is human.
1:03:29
David: And so if we want help, if we want the most effective robots,
1:03:31
David: they need to be robotic. And we can talk about like the downstream implications of that.
1:03:35
David: I think there's like a nuclear episode to be done here.
1:03:38
David: There is a synthetic biology episode to be done here.
1:03:42
David: What would you be most interested in exploring next out of all the all the different
1:03:46
David: doors that have been opened up once once we slam together the particles of energy
1:03:50
David: and intelligence and we want to see the downstream impacts of that?
1:03:53
David: What do you think are the first doors that we ought to go down here?
1:03:55
Josh: Those are the top three. It's energy. It is manufacturing. It is synthetic biology.
1:04:00
Josh: Those are all amazingly impressive.
1:04:03
Josh: The energy one is probably the least exciting, even though it's the most important
1:04:06
Josh: because they're just, okay, we figured out like nuclear fusion vision.
1:04:10
Josh: We can build these reactors. They supply us with a lot of energy.
1:04:12
Josh: Cool. The manufacturing is unbelievable. The biology is even crazier.
1:04:17
Josh: I think if you want to like blow people's minds, the biology is cool because
1:04:20
Josh: everything is downstream of biology. Like the materials that we use,
1:04:24
Josh: our own chemistry, you can recreate the biological world synthetically.
1:04:28
Josh: That's super cool because it creates a lot of outcomes.
1:04:30
Josh: And then the manufacturing is super cool because our world will actually start to look different.
1:04:35
Josh: That world we describe where if you take your grandma and you drop her into
1:04:37
Josh: a living room 50 years from now,
1:04:39
Josh: The hope is that it'll look much different because we'll have robotic helpers
1:04:43
Josh: doing things and we'll have all
1:04:45
Josh: this autonomous transport, things that we probably can't even imagine now.
1:04:49
Josh: So I think robotics is super cool in the sense that for the first time,
1:04:53
Josh: we'll have computers that can coexist with us in the real world that are autonomous.
1:04:58
Josh: Our interaction with computers has only ever been static in the sense that like
1:05:03
Josh: we have a computer on our desk, a phone in our pocket.
1:05:05
Josh: But they've never been able to it's never really been two ways where there is
1:05:09
Josh: this like this other person like thing that you can actually converse with or
1:05:13
Josh: interact with and not only does it unlock a lot of
1:05:16
Josh: quality of life improvements for us where it can do all the things that you
1:05:19
Josh: don't want to do but it also allows them to do all the less favorable things
1:05:23
Josh: in life as a society that we don't want to do like now all the
1:05:27
Josh: the harmful jobs the the jobs that can hurt people they're all taken care of
1:05:30
Josh: by robots and now all the manufacturing that kind of sucks that that isn't super
1:05:33
Josh: precise, that's all done by robots.
1:05:35
Josh: And the convergence of humanoid robot and alien looking robot that does a specific
1:05:41
Josh: narrow set of tasks, that is super cool because it opens up this whole new world.
1:05:46
Josh: It's the autonomous transport. It's the humanoid robots. It's the swarms of
1:05:50
Josh: drones that can deliver anything, anytime.
1:05:52
Josh: There's a lot of really cool improvements in both of those places.
1:05:55
Josh: So I would say manufacturing, industrial manufacturing and biology,
1:05:59
Josh: synthetic biology in particular are like two rabbit holes that go so deep,
1:06:04
Josh: there is no end to them. They are black holes and they're all equally exciting in their potential.
1:06:09
David: I can definitely feel your excitement through the microphone.
1:06:11
David: I think maybe just one last like visual metaphor that is coming to my brain
1:06:14
David: that we can leave the listeners with is something that you said earlier in this
1:06:17
David: podcast is maybe what you said about Peter Thiel, which is,
1:06:22
David: the only thing that has really innovated meaningfully over the last 50 years is technology.
1:06:27
David: So computers are very powerful and they've been innovating very fast.
1:06:30
David: Cell phones, anything, anything with a chip, anything electricity wise,
1:06:34
David: all technology has innovated very, very fast.
1:06:36
David: Now with the arrival of AI and like commoditized intelligence,
1:06:42
David: using our favorite David Deutsch quote, which is like the only constraint that
1:06:45
David: we have is knowledge. And now that we have knowledge at our fingertips,
1:06:48
David: we have the means of all of that innovation that technology has seen over the last 50 years.
1:06:53
David: Technology can now reach back at every single other industry that we haven't
1:06:58
David: seen that industry and pull it forward simultaneously, all at once,
1:07:02
David: all together, all in our lifespans and not just in our lifespans for like the next decade or so.
1:07:06
David: I think we're really going to see a lot of change and that is something to definitely
1:07:10
David: look forward to, maybe be scared about, maybe feel optimistic about,
1:07:13
David: feel quite a lot about at the very least, no matter what.
1:07:17
David: And it's going to be very exciting. And so I'm very, very interested in doing
1:07:20
David: subjects around all of these episodes in the future.
1:07:22
David: Josh, thanks so much for coming back on your very own podcast.
1:07:25
David: Really, really glad to have you here.
1:07:26
Josh: Thank you. Yeah, it's been my pleasure. It's been so much fun talking about
1:07:28
Josh: this stuff. I really love chatting about it, but normally don't have many people to talk to.
1:07:32
Josh: So thank you for listening to me. For everyone else who's listening,
1:07:35
Josh: I appreciate it. I hope you also enjoy talking about this crazy,
1:07:38
Josh: wacky, weird, wild future that that is coming fairly quickly.
1:07:42
David: Bankless Nation, if this episode nerd sniped you, we can go talk about it inside
1:07:46
David: of the Bankless Discord. That's where I hang out. That's where Josh hangs out.
1:07:49
David: That's where all of the Bankless community talks about.
1:07:51
David: Mostly crypto things, of course, but also there's Frontier technology channels in there as well.
1:07:56
David: So if you like this episode, we can go talk about it in there.
1:07:58
David: If you are not a Bankless citizen, there is a link in the show notes so you
1:08:01
David: can go sign up to become a Bankless Citizen.
1:08:03
David: There's also a $9 a month ad-free podcast feed. You do not get access to the Bankless Discord.
1:08:09
David: That's the only thing that you get is the ad free podcast feed but if you're
1:08:11
David: tired of the ads you can get that or if you become a full citizen you can come
1:08:15
David: and hang out with me josh and the rest of the bankless team in the discord,
1:08:19
David: guys thanks so much for bearing with us for this episode crypto is risky you
1:08:22
David: can lose what you put in but nonetheless we are headed west this is the frontier
1:08:25
David: it's not for everyone but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot.