1. Ingenious: Max Tegmark – Interviews with Max Tegmark by Nautilus. A while back I read Max Tegmark’s “Our mathematical universe”. From that moment on I was hooked by his work. Here he reproduces some of the main points in short video segments.
  2. China’s Leaders Are Softening their Stance on AI by Will Knight for MIT Technology Review. China’s vice premier Liu He: “We’re hoping that all countries, as members of the global village, will be inclusive and support each other so that we can respond to the double-edged-sword effect of new technologies.”
  3. Fourteen Things That Will Remain Scarce (and Drive Future Job Growth?) by Ted Kupper and Jon Perry. Fourteen Things That Will Remain Scarce (and Drive Future Job Growth?) Old but gold. A collection of things that will (potentially) keep or gain value as automation captures market share.
  4. Thou Art Physics by Eliezer Yudkowsky. “But the gap between physics and cognition cannot be crossed by direct visualization. No one can visualize atoms making up a person, the way they can see fingers making up a hand. And so it requires constant vigilance to maintain your perception of yourself as an entity within physics.”
  5. Fasting Mimicking Diet Looks Pretty Good by Sarah Constantin. Fasting five days a month is probably the minimal intervention shown to cause life extension. “If you basically believe the science that periods of little or no food promote good metabolic processes (autophagy, reduced inflammation, increased neurogenesis & stem cell production) but you don’t want the nasty side effects of prolonged caloric restriction, some kind of intermittent or periodic fasting seems like a sensible thing to try.”
  6. The Mad Genius Mystery by Kaja Perina for Psychology Today. “The prospect of mathematical madness has been debated ever since Pythagoras, often described as the first pure mathematician, went on to lead a strange cult. Isaac Newton, Kurt Goedel, Ludwig Boltzmann, Florence Nightingale, and John Nash all attained mathematical prominence before succumbing to some type of psychopathology, including depression, delusions, and religious mysticism of the sort engendered by psychosis.”
  7. Everything is Going According to Plan by Lou Keep. “God is dead, but Platonic ideals stuck around to curse at us. Chief among them was truth. So why choose this value? What does it do for you?”
  8. If Poem by Rudyard Kipling
  9. Shiri’s Scissor by Scott Alexander. A very relevant short story. “That was 8 PM. We’d been standing in Brad’s office fighting for five hours. At 8:01, after David and Shiri had stormed out, we all looked at each other and thought – holy shit, the controversial filter works.”
  10. Does Your AI Understand Physics? Facebook Has Built A Framework To Test That by Abhijeet Katte for Analytics India Magazine. “[…] intuitive understanding of physics is latent, that is, it can only be observed and measured indirectly. This is in fact a grave challenge for both evaluation and engineering purposes, making this research particularly interesting.”