Weekly Dose of Optimism #46

Pirate Wires, Apple Vision Pro, Developer Productivity, Taurine, IT'S TIME TO AI

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 46th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This seems like one of those weeks that we’ll look back on in a few years. So much big, potentially world-changing stuff happening all at once.

This is going to be packed edition.

Let’s get to it.

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(1//spon) The Weekly Dose is brought to you by... Pirate Wires

There’s so much to be optimistic about this week that even our sponsor is guesting with a brief, morning white pill. Mike Solana runs Pirate Wires, an independent media company reporting at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture. He and his team publish multiple news roundups a week on the evolving information landscape, mind-bending new developments in tech, media distortion, government regulation, and, occasionally, that good Twitter drama. They also publish feature-length bangers from both staff and guest writers, espousing a flavor of “based optimism” that we dig here at Not Boring. Take the mic, Mike:

Last week, a clip featuring what appears to be one of the UAE’s successful inductions of desert rain went viral, sparking a wild conversation on the topic of geoengineering, including a good helping of my favorite kind of hater: mad because a thing is ‘fake,’ but also if it isn’t fake it’s bad. The anti-tech camp tends to bring together two unlikely tribes, FernGully environmentalists who believe “nature” is perfect just the way it is, and Republicans who don’t want to spend any money. The impulse from both camps is to just do nothing, and eventually die. I do not share this impulse.

The concept of man-made global warming poses an interesting corollary to the premise we’ve screwed up our environment: if we can change our planet at all, can’t we also change it for the better? The answer is obviously yes — and we should.

It’s 2023, we need to be terraforming Earth.

Hygroscopic cloud seeding has existed for decades, including throughout the United States. We have more than enough evidence to justify further resources in the field for research and development. Too much carbon in the atmosphere, and a devastated global fish supply? Turns out dumping iron in the ocean’s barren groves solves both of these problems. Deserts? Should not exist. California’s Salton Sea, which is currently dying because it hasn’t been replenished, was our accidental test-case. Next up? We’re seaflooding the Sahara, lowering the global sea level, and turning Northern Africa into a breadbasket (again).

Earth is a garden. Our garden, in fact. It’s time to weed the garden.

That's just a little taste. Pirate Wires is one of our favorites and you should definitely subscribe for more.

(2) Introducing Apple Vision Pro

Packy here. Taking over for Dan because I have some thoughts.

Everything about the Apple Vision Pro announcement is why we get out of bed over here at Not Boring. Obviously, the tech is cool and I’m excited to try it, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the reactions.

AR/VR is one of the canonical overhyped technologies, something people have pointed to when talking about the fact that some technologies just get too overhyped and never recover. There have been countless tweets and articles about why AR/VR wasn’t going to happen, and countless more about the death of the “metaverse” and the foolishness of anyone who got excited about it in the first place. There are infinity such articles, but for some reason, the one that sticks in my mind is the two-part piece from The Information in May 2022: The Inside Story of Why Apple Bet Big on a Mixed-Reality Headset.

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong about the article. In fact, the reporting was quite good, with a lot of intel from inside the normally secretive company. It even nailed that the device would look like ski goggles. But there was also the usual stuff: cost overruns, delays, a rumor that Tim Cook didn’t give the headset project the same attention Steve Jobs had given the iPhone and the fretting about what all of that might mean for the project’s chances.

I remember reading it on my phone in my kitchen and thinking that none of the stuff in there would matter when Apple finally released the headset because it would be beautiful and shiny and everyone would want to buy one and people would start getting really excited about AR or VR or MR or XR or whichever Reality Apple chose to present to us… and on Monday, that’s exactly what happened.

Apple announced the Vision Pro on Monday, and the reviews, particularly from those who got the chance to demo the device, have been glowing. AR is now the New Thing.

This is what bugs me so much about techno-pessimism. There’s no conviction.

If all it takes to change your mind is one predictably stunning Apple presentation…

…which is totally fine, just next time, take a beat and think, “What would I think about X if Apple put its might behind making one?” before dunking.

The Vision Pro situation captures the general problem nicely.

People are able to touch and feel the current, shitty stepping stone version of any product. They’re able to easily point out its flaws and opine on how something like that could never work. But, like, of course. It’s a shitty stepping stone version.

It’s much harder to imagine what the best people in the world will build when given the time, resources, iterations, and lessons to do it better than anyone has ever done it. If you could, you’d be one of the best people in the world, and you’d be building it.

Anyway, now we’re going to enter a period of AR/VR/MR/Metaverse (or, sorry, Spatial) hype and people are going to start creating all sorts of apps for the Vision Pro, some as silly as iBeer and I Am Rich, and some of them will be kind of cool and a bunch of them won’t work and then other people are going to learn from them and keep experimenting and iterating and tweaking, and then we’ll get the Ubers and Airbnbs and WhatsApps of Spatial and it will all seem very obvious in hindsight, like mobile.

Or like AI, biotech, electric cars, space, solar, the list goes on. The Gartner Hype Cycle remains undefeated.

Any sufficiently valuable technology will attract swarms of talent and capital, will go through bubbles and pops, until all of the little things that go into getting it right snap into place, the economics start making sense, and someone figures out a good way to make it happen. It’s practically a law of technology physics.

Here’s to the crazy ones, the optimists who’ve had conviction around AR and VR and xR and virtual worlds before Apple showed everyone else that they were probably right all along.

(3) The Unintended Consequences of Censoring Digital Technology – Evidence from Italy’s ChatGPT Ban

Research from David Kreitmeir and Paul A. Raschky

We analyse the effects of the ban of ChatGPT, a generative pre-trained transformer chatbot, on individual productivity. We first compile data on the hourly coding output of over 8,000 professional GitHub users in Italy and other European countries to analyse the impact of the ban on individual productivity. Combining the high-frequency data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the output of Italian developers decreased by around 50% in the first two business days after the ban and recovered after that.

A new study found that developer output decreased by 50% when ChatGPT was banned in Italy. Of course, developers being the resourceful folks that they are, found ways around the ban and output rebounded in just two days.

However, the abrupt ban and subsequent drop in productivity paints a pretty clear picture as to how useful ChatGPT is for developers. Let’s assume that pre-ChatGPT developers were at a 1x output and the introduction of ChatGPT raised developer output to (conservatively) 1.25x. What will developer output look like when:

1. ChatGPT is much more powerful

2. An ecosystem of ChatGPT-native developer tools are released

3. Developers are schooled and trained to use ChatGPT as part of their workflows

I think it’s fair to say that developer output guess 2-3x over the coming years (disclosure: I’m not a developer), which will have major implications on company building and should also result in an abundance of new technologies.

(4) Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging

Singh et al for Science

Supplementation with taurine slowed key markers of aging such as increased DNA damage, telomerase deficiency, impaired mitochondrial function, and cellular senescence. Loss of taurine in humans was associated with aging-related diseases, and concentrations of taurine and its metabolites increased in response to exercise. Taurine supplementation improved life span in mice and health span in monkeys.

A new study published in Science found that the dietary supplement taurine "delayed death" and mitigated against the biological risks of aging in mice populations. Taurine, a popular supplement among the bodybuilder crowd, is naturally found in various foods and often time added to energy drinks. The study also found improvements in strength, memory, and metabolism. Most surprisingly, middle-aged mice that regularly took taurine lived significantly longer than those that did not.

Hey, are you guys thinking what I'm thinking...? Looks like Create just found its second product line.

(5) Why AI Will Save the World

Marc Andreesen for Andreesen Horowitz

A shorter description of what AI isn’t: Killer software and robots that will spring to life and decide to murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything, like you see in the movies.

An even shorter description of what AI could be: A way to make everything we care about better.

From Stability.ai

Every couple of years, Marc Andreessen drops an essay that ignites a movement and unleashes a flood of resources. A few notable examples are:

• "Why Software Is Eating the World" (2011)

• "It's Time to Build" (2020)

This most recent essay, published this week, is his optimistic argument for “Why AI Will Save the World.” To make this argument, he of course had to address the counter argument: why AI is going to kill us all and ruin society. In his view, it’s a pretty simple one to debunk:

• AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive.

• “AI Alignment” is a form of thought-policing.

• Technology waves have always created new jobs.

Say what you will about these arguments — it’s really hard to prove that something won’t happen. Andreessen doesn’t have a crystal ball. but he does have about as deep of an understanding of technology history as anyone to inform his projections.

Counterarguments aside, what I find more compelling is why he thinks “AI Will Save the World.” This argument centers on intelligence, and AI’s ability to augment human intelligence.

Human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.

According to Andreessen, what AI offers is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence much, much better. The results?

• Every child will have a personalized tutor

• Every person will have an AI coach, advisor, and mentor

• Every scientist, researcher, artist, inventor will have an AI assistant that allows them to increase the scope and depth of their work

• World leaders and CEO will be aided in policy and decision making

Simply put: anything that people do with human intelligence can be done much better with AI assistance. AI makes human intelligence more intelligent. And elevated human intelligence is what has always driven civilization forward. This is the optimistic, abundance-focused view of the world that we subscribe to at Not Boring.

IT’S TIME TO AI.

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That’s all for this week. We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday. Enjoy the weekend!

Thanks for reading,

-Dan +Packy