Topics I want to write about

Erik Bjäreholt

Tags: meta ideas future

Table of contents

Meta
- Why write publicly about these things?
  - Primarily due to role models like Gwern, Eliezer, etc.
Longevity
- Is Longevity research an effectively altruistic action?
- Gwern has done an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of life extension.
Nootropics
- We have to do the best we can with the machine we have (our brains) until we can create something better (BCIs?)
The end of Moores law / The far-future of computing
- The way forward: Memristors, quantum computing?
- What are the consequences if we’ve really reached the end? How long do we expect it to last?
Self-management
- Valves model
  - The Valve Handbook for New Employees (2012): http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
  - Gabe Newell comments (2017): https://youtu.be/YpaNnX_9Q5s?t=3m8s
- Why don’t more companies use this model?
  - Maybe because it’s difficult for most people to work within this model. Requires self-driven individuals.
AI
- Andrew Ng thinks there wont be another AI winter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc
- How do we deal with job displacement? Andrew Ng comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc&t=1h5m20s
- Andrew Ng: “One pattern that’s true for a lot of industries: First comes the data, then comes the AI.”
Computer Interaction in the Future
- VR/AR
  - Might warrant an article in itself
- The issue of computer-human bandwidth
- Brain-Computer Interfaces
Future of Education
- Should governments incentivize learning by paying the unemployed to go to school?
- Will MOOCs ever reach maturity?
  - Maybe with the help of government sponsoring
Future of Personal Data
- Security concerns
- Should we use something like Syncthing to provide sync and git to provide integrity/versioning?
- How do we deal with data generated/stored by social media services? Can we extract it?
- How do we get the most value out of this data?
Open sourcing everything
- What could other fields learn? Why is open source so successful in software development but not in other areas?
- Does Open Hardware have a future, and if so, when?
  - Likely when barrier to getting custom PCBs/circuits is lowered significantly
Simulation hypothesis
- The question if we’re in a simulation is not really that interesting due to the sheer difficulty of the question. A much more interesting question would be if we could simulate a (micro)universe ourselves.
- What room is there for optimization? Are suns millions of lightyears away really having all their particles simulated?
Cryptocurrency
- How will/should governments deal with it?
How to capture created value in open source (how to make a profit writing open source software)
- We have workable solutions for enterprise software, but not very good ones for consumer/user-centered software.