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The billionaire Peter Theil has an interview question he uses often:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
From his book, Zero to One, this is why he thinks the question is important:
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer.
It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.
And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular.
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
It’s a way of examining how far out someone is willing to put themselves and their ideas.
Here are some of the craziest beliefs I have that few in society would take seriously.
Human-machine Merge
I believe that one day, we'll merge our brains with computers via a brain-machine interface (BMI).
This will allow us to increase our bandwidth for information.
Bandwidth is sort of like water flowing through a pipe. But think information, instead of water.
Our bandwidth is really fucking low compared to what computers can do.
It would take you decades to read all of Wikipedia if you did nothing but read page after page.
But a computer can download it all and process it in a few hours. You have to use your human eyes to crawl line after line of text.
When computers talk to each other it happens in milliseconds.
You stumble to pull out your phone and type with giant clunky fingers on a small glass screen, before sending.
A brain-computer interface would allow us to evolve into biological supercomputers.
You can watch every Oscar-winning movie in minutes or text a hundred people at once while on your morning run.
But it goes beyond just helping you war with trolls on Twitter.
When information can be beamed directly into your brain. Your mind becomes like a computer with software—which means we can run other cool shit on it.
You can play the latest RPG game in your mind, fly around New York as Spiderman, or experience mind-altering drugs the same way you change wallpapers on a computer.
Forget about boring monitors and controllers. We’ll enter the realm of full digital immersion.
Is this good or bad?
Like most things in life—it’s both.
Yes, some people will use it to enter virtual porn worlds from which they will never return—a moment of silence.
Others, however, will use this power to transcend their biology.
You can know everything humans have recorded ever, join a hive mind super intelligence…the possibilities are endless.
Animal farming will be illegal
First in some places, then everywhere.
But it’ll be okay because artificial meat will be tastier and healthier.
Even though I'm not vegan, I understand the moral dilemma of eating animals.
On one hand, you can argue that it’s natural and we've been doing it for millions of years.
And it’s literally how nature works.
But you can say the same thing about murder and slavery.
In fact, one day animal farming will be seen the same way as slavery is today.
Our failings as a society can only be seen in retrospect.
Just as slave owners all around the world saw themselves as upstanding citizens.
Society can only accurately judge itself looking back.
I like Jordan Peterson’s distinction of the difference between tragedy and evil.
Tragedy, is the unavoidable bad, based on what you have power over—Tsunamis, Earthquakes, Children born with genetic disease—it sucks but that’s life.
Evil, on the other hand, is intentioned.
It’s you dragging things into an even worse state than they could be.
Not only do you not make things better you actively make them worse.
Slavery was a tragedy performed all over the world by almost everyone.
Only a few— say, slave abolitionists—were already ahead of society on this (present-day this would be vegans).
Right now animal farming is more tragedy than evil.
Because when it’s an economic necessity it’s hard to see it as bad because you have no other choice.
The alternative is more suffering.
Humans need meat in their diet.
And plant-based/artificial meat is not nearly as popular or tasty as animal meat.
And humans will only give things up when a better alternative exists.
I believe at some point plant-based meat will taste better, be cheaper, and be more accessible than animal meat.
Simply because animal meat is static and we have really smart people working on improving plant-based meat every year.
At the end of the day, meat is chemistry.
If we can go from computer memory that looked like this in the 1950s:
We can go from farms that kill this:
to this:
...and we'll be much better for it.
Gas cars will be illegal in public
As someone who doesn’t drive, I really hate cars.
When I go for walks I always avoid the main roads because the fumes suck the life from me.
But this belief about the ban on petrol-fueled cars manifested after watching an episode of Cosmos by Neil Dygrasse Tyson.
It’s a great show about the progress of science and you should watch it.
One thing I learned was how things repeat again and again.
Like how Tobacco companies convinced Doctors to say that cigarettes don’t cause harm.
Makes you think how many things “experts” are lying about today.
Anyway, on an episode Neil talks about Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) and how they were all the rage in the 50s.
CFCs were in everything from refrigerators to airconditioners, and hair products.
Then scientists discovered it was causing a hole in the ozone layer.
And we fucking need the ozone layer!
Without it, harmful radiation from space hits us, causing cancer which causes death.
The CFC companies argued against the harmful effects. Just as they did with Tobacco and now Oil.
But eventually, the evidence won and CFCs were banned worldwide in 1987.
Like CFCs, Petroleum-based products are everywhere.
From toys to fuel to cosmetics and soda bottles. Even though we know its production and use is harmful to the environment.
I believe it’s only a matter of time before the world turns away from petrol.
I mean just look at this:
Just as it was once socially acceptable to smoke in airplanes in the 40s but unthinkable today:
I think society will see a car pouring fumes on public roads the same way we view indoor public smoking.
The future is electric baby! ⚡
Intelligent Animals
And I don’t mean teaching Fido to sit or count.
I mean animals with human-level intelligence.
Just as a BMI can make humans smarter by taking care of functions our brain sucks at…such as poor bandwidth and multitasking.
A BMI can also make an animal smarter.
Animals think, feel, and express—just in different ways than we do.
With a BMI, we might one day be able to close the cognitive gap between us and them.
Every Disney movie you’ve ever seen where animals speak might come through.
Of course, they wouldn’t speak through mouths since theirs is not designed for human language.
A BMI could interpret their thoughts and synthesize it to human speech through a different device.
Your coworker in the future might just be a grumpy cat from Japan.
Crazy to imagine.
UFOs
Whether you believe it or not.
UFOs are now mainstream.
Here’s this ex-pentagon whistleblower testifying under oath, in Congress, about UFOs:
A decade ago you would only hear stories like this on UFO conspiracy sites and sci-fi movies.
Now it’s in fucking congress—the same place Mark Zuckerberg was called to explain how Facebook was spying on us.
I mean if a UFO picked you up right now as you read this—showed you super futuristic shit, shoved a probe up your ass, and dropped you right back in your room.
Who would believe you?
NO ONE!
Not your friends, family, lover—you would probably convince yourself it was a bad dream or a mental breakdown and take that shit to the grave.
UFOs are the kind of thing where even if a whole village saw it, no one would believe them.
Our brains can’t deal with this level of crazy.
Not when we have rent to pay and the next John Wick movie to see.
Better if we ignore it right?
I think it’s possible that some of these incidents are real. And it’s terrifyingly exciting to think it could be real.
What we call UFOs could be piloted by a future version of humanity so advanced we've invented time travel.
When it comes to thinking about advanced civilizations. There’s this framework where you take that the universe is 14 Billion years old.
And assume that humans have only been building anything for about 2 million years.
Starting with very simple tools until you get to our modern-day marvels.
Then you extrapolate what would happen if our civilization started building 500 million years ago or a billion years ago?
Because somewhere in the infinite Universe there’s probably a civilization that old.
What would they be able to do?
This is where the true sci-fi enthusiasts, collapse to the floor in violent orgasm from the philosophical bliss of this train of thought.
But this extrapolation operates on a very linear view of time.
If a civilization were to invent time travel they can step out of linear time.
To explain this better, imagine a crazy scientist spends decades of his life working on a new branch of physics that will change the world, but he dies near completion.
Now imagine if he invented a time machine before his death.
He could simply go back with the instructions to his younger self and accelerate his invention.
This younger version—after promptly shitting himself from seeing his future self—would have knowledge, which previously had taken him decades to acquire, instantly.
It’s the difference between picking an axe, heading into the woods, and cutting down a big tree to make a table.
Vs just assembling one from Ikea with instructions.
We’d close the loop on progress entirely.
To build anything new requires trial and error. But with the invention of time travel progress would be instant.
Time as a barrier would simply not exist.
So rather than needing 500 million years to become a galaxy-conquering civilization.
We might achieve it over the weekend.
The future is exciting…
And there you go—my most far-out beliefs.
None of these are completely original (what is anyway).
For example, the “UFO is advanced humans thing” is the plot for Interstellar—watch it again!
I have other ideas that may seem pretty out there:
Human solar system colonization.
Periodic asteroids wiping out many ancient human civilizations.
The replacement of governments by blockchains.
But for now, this is all the crazy you get.
See you next time friend ✌