Life After Google summary

In January 2017, a “secret” gathering took place in Monterey Bay, California, attended by some of the pioneers of the information age, such as Google cofounder Larry Page. Their intention was to discuss and prepare to inform the world of the developing risks in the growing field of Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

But most of the attendees were actually helping develop AI in Silicon Valley – why would they want to warn people of its dangers?

In 2013, the Guatemalan Universidad Francisco Marroquín became the first university in the Americas to allow payments with the cryptocurrency bitcoin. This forward-facing move shows how some academic institutions are embracing progress more than others.

Many American universities, on the other hand, would rather focus on reactionary measures that end up halting progress instead of enabling it.

In October 2008, a mysterious character known as Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the first cryptocurrency: the bitcoin, which has since come to steadily change the world we live in.

To understand bitcoin, we need to dive into an emerging online world that the author calls the cryptocosm.

In 2016, Australian computer scientist and businessman Craig Steven Wright came out claiming that he was the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Some believed him, but many remained skeptical.

One of these skeptics argued that it would have been much easier for Wright to prove his identity by posting “Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto” with Satoshi’s private key than to try to convince people in person instead. For this reason, it was considered unlikely that Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto.

In computer science, Moore’s Law dictates that the cost-effectiveness of circuits doubles every two years, while its corollary, Bell’s Law, states that every ten years, a huge drop in the price of processing power causes the development of a brand new computer architecture. It happened when the PC replaced the huge mainframes of IBM in the 70s and 80s, then more recently with Google’s cloud. Are we due for another shift soon?

In Silicon Valley, it seems to be arriving in a rebirth of hardware manufacturing. Though many Valley companies are no longer building the silicon chips that gave the area its name, some such as Nvidia and their chief scientist Bill Dally still are. However, they are moving in a different direction, away from fast but energy-demanding “hot” chips to cooler and more efficient ones, enabled by the cheaper circuitry now available.

In the eighteenth century, the British physicist Isaac Newton established the gold standard. For almost 200 years, governments worldwide guaranteed their currencies against the value of gold, in a bid to ensure economic stability.

Why gold? Well, for starters, it is the most resistant to corrosion of the precious metals, so you can be fairly sure it won’t disappear.