Category Archives: The last man standing will laugh

Luck management

25 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in The last man standing will laugh

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Investing is all about luck management. There is plenty of luck to go around but it is not distributed equally all the time.

The say the market is irrational. True. But luck management isn’t.

It’s like a video game. Luck has its own rules and ‘levels of difficulty’. However, unlike a video game, the hardest level is the first one. After that it gets progressively easier and easier simply because there are fewer and fewer players left while the quantity of luck does not change.

There are two things to remember, though.

First is that everyone gets their chance. But the trick is we must wait for our turn. So, patience is paramount.

It’s almost like standing in a ‘queue’. But not the orderly queue you have, for example, in Canary Wharf in London at 5:15pm. It’s more like the ski queues in almost any resort in the Alps at 9:15am. We must make sure we manage our place in the ‘queue’ and, just like in a video game, do not drop out before our turn comes up.

Second, when we are up, we have to go for it. We must take full advantage of our luck so that we can get to the next level where there are fewer people in the queue and the luck-go-round is thus shorter. Just like a ski lift takes you up in the mountain and then there is another lift to go even further higher where there are always fewer people on it.

But to take that second lift, you must first take the time to become better. On the ski slopes you must have the patience to go up and down several times on the same run before you feel you are ready to go higher without breaking your legs on the way down.

I should not be saying this but it happens more often than people think: when you are on that lift, do not drop off by doing silly things.

What else? Oh yes, of course, the most important part. The bonus. No, not the bonus you are thinking of. If you are a good manager of luck eventually you should be able to hire someone else to stand in the queue for you while you go on and finally start to contribute to society.

Share the luck back. Give people a chance to play the game. It’s too late when you die, and it is not heritable. It’s the cycle of life.

How the optimists blew up the universe

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in AI, The last man standing will laugh

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All technology revolutions need a breakthrough in three factors to succeed: energy, transport and communications (see Jeremy Rifkin’s work on this). The most plausible argument against AI reaching overall human-like capabilities could be energy availability. I don’t think we have the energy system required to accommodate such a massive explosion of AI. Organic systems, like the human brain, are still the most energy efficient systems present.

However, we, humans are flawed by nature. And this is good. I think limited intellectual capability exists for a reason. The fact that there is some kind of natural upper limit to human IQ/intelligence is an essential requirement for our survival as species: any system needs an OFF switch (natural or artificial) as part of its in-built safety design. Therefore, we may never reach Singularity, or we may reach an adverse form of Singularity, which in the process of optimization to reach its perfection state, self-destroys.

For all we know, this might have happened already in the past. The energy requirements to carry on the task of optimization are so large that this intensity creates a black hole which sucks in not only the Earth but also the whole Solar System. The only way humans are able to survive such a scenario event is to exit the Solar System just before the process of self-destruction. It must be humans, in organic form, exiting, for they must make sure that they preserve their imperfections as the only hope for future survival (a perfect trans-human or an AI-equipped machine would simply carry on with the process of optimization and eventually reach a similar event).

With the knowledge on hand, these humans do not search for a habitable planet but simply create a biosphere on the first available planet they encounter. Then they proceed to recreate our world – the proverbial Garden of Eden – under one main condition: “never bite from the tree of knowledge” for fear of a repeat of the above scenario again. And again, and again, the process keeps repeating itself…

The universe, therefore, has to be expanding all the time because, if not, these black hole explosions will eventually destroy it all. In other words, humans are just planet-hopping imperfect organic forms who, in search of perfection, leave nothing but black holes behind them. Long live the pessimists!