ONE
I’m following NBA basketball this season closer than I have in several years, because the Oklahoma City Thunder (who by rights should still be the Seattle Supersonics, screw Clay Bennett (the guy who bought and moved them) may all his fried eggs break and become scrambled until the end of time) are the best young team in the league and one of the best, period.
I really prefer when the games are on TNT because I love the pregame/halftime show with Shaq, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, and Ernie Johnson, because they’re all fools and do stuff like this. They give you a real feeling of being there with them, like it’s just a hang and you’re in the room.
It’s not that this app is so impressive, it’s not particularly. It’s slow, the responses are pretty stock, and the voice is weirdly androgynous and lacks inflection. And the worst problem is actually that it’s also expensive! Just those four prompts on the video cost eight cents. It would add up quick to sit there and watch a game with the bot!
But this is how technology works. In 1947, one transistor (the building block of the computer) existed in the world. This year, the semiconductor industry is on pace to produce two billion trillion transistors. That is not a typo. One trillion, multiplied by one billion, multiplied by two, produced in one year, less than a hundred years after there was one, total.
As it got wildly more numerous, it also got wildly cheaper. The first commercially-available transistor ever cost $7.60 in 1953, which is ~$76 in today’s dollars. Today, for ~$50, you can buy 57 billion transistors. That amount in 1953 would have cost $4.3 trillion dollars.
So apply that curve to this product. How would you like to watch your favorite team and talk ball with Charles Barkley and Shaq for a small monthly fee?
Forget about watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, how would you like to be a judge, trade bon mots with Michelle Visage, and give Ru your input about who should be in the top two and Lip Sync For Their Legacy? Ever think they ask stupid questions at Presidential debates and you could do better? Your chance to try may not be far away!
TWO
To me, the single most important web site in existence is Youtube. I believe this because I think that lowering the cost of knowledge is the single most important function of the internet. Throughout human history, most geniuses (and near-geniuses, who are perhaps more important for a functional society) have had their potential wasted because they were farmers who never got any education (or some similar brainpower-squandering life path). This is bad for the people themselves, but it’s even worse for society. We need those people!
I promise this is related to the last paragraph: Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time. He’s better than Michael Jordan, and it’s not that close. Their per—game statistics are comparable, although I’d take Lebron’s playmaking over Jordan’s scoring if I were starting a team. Lebron has a longevity advantage over anyone who has ever played the game, to a degree that looks like a bookkeeping error but isn’t. There are five other players besides Lebron who have played a 21st season in the NBA. Lebron is averaging more points per game in his 21st year than those other five players did *combined*. 21 years after he started playing in the NBA, Michael Jordan wasn’t playing anything but golf.
And of course, Lebron didn’t take a couple years off to play baseball in the middle of his career.
The real reason Lebron is the greatest, though, is that he’s doing this while competing in the NBA that Michael Jordan created, which is a totally different NBA than the one Michael Jordan actually played in.
In the documentary “The Last Dance”, Jordan describes joining the Chicago Bulls and finding most of the team in a hotel room snorting cocaine before games. None of them were nationally famous, much less world-famous. Jordan derived a tremendous advantage just from living a simple, sober life that was focused intently on getting better at basketball. And of course, he took basketball international, and became one of the most famous people in the world.
In 1997, less than 5% of NBA players were foreign-born. By 2017, 25% were, a 500% increase in 20 years. That’s the Michael Jordan effect—a profound and permanent increase in worldwide interest in basketball. The increased competitiveness (and increased financial rewards for success) that results have forced NBA players to adopt much, much more disciplined training and workout regimens.
The result of better training and a larger talent pool have predictable effects: The average size and skill of NBA players have both gone up at the same time, which should be almost impossible because of population effects (there are fewer taller people, so finding high skill among them should get harder, not easier—drawing from the entire world population mitigates this).
So Lebron has similar-or-slightly-better stats while competing against a much tougher average level of competition. (Another way I like to put this theory is that the second guy off an NBA bench today, if you plopped him down in 1983, would end up as a hall-of-fame player.)
This would never have happened if Michael Jordan hadn’t exposed a whole bunch of non-American kids to basketball before it was too late for them to practice 10,000 hours by their 18th birthday. So if you want to make an argument that he’s the most *important* basketball player ever, I agree. But he’s not the best.
Okay, basketball digression over: This is why Youtube is the most important web site. Stars need both exceptional potential and the right exposure to relevant skills at the right time. That’s true of basketball stars, rock stars, scientists and programmers, you name it. And that’s what Youtube is offering to anyone with an internet connection.
Want to learn a song on guitar? Marty Music alone has ~3000 videos, and it’s literally one guy. Justin Guitar has more free lessons than you could ever take. Code in Python? Here’s a free 4-hour course explaining all the basics. Need to replace the timing belt on your Toyota Hilux Diesel? This guy has you covered.
The catalog of Youtube is now so developed that there’s virtually nothing too esoteric or complex such that a world-class expert hasn’t take the time to explain it in detail. And if you find something, the great news is that there will *definitely* be a world-class expert that has a related channel and is on the hunt for new content ideas, and they’ll probably make a video on whatever you need if you ask.
This is arguably the greatest thing that has ever collectively happened to humanity. It is a treasure more dear than the Library of Alexandria.
The only problem with it is that you need to know what you want to know. That is, you mostly have to self-direct and design your own course of study. That’s my preference, but it’s a genuine hurdle for many people.
The good news is, A.I. is solving that, too. A guy made a thing called The Universal Primer, which is GPT-4 but tuned to specifically be a teaching machine. It will not only teach you things, it will design entire curriculums for you based on vague ideas of what you might want to know about. It’s like having an actual tutor to guide you through the process of learning, rather than just (“just”) a list of tutorials for specific questions you might have.
You can ask specific questions, sure, but you can also just prompt things like “I want to know more about Chinese History”, and it will sort you out with where to start, what order to read things in, which books and articles might interest you in particular the most. I’m just starting to play with it, really, but already I can tell that if A.I. is really going to revolutionize education (and I hope it is), then this is the beginning of it.
THREE
A hackathon is a competitive event where people see how cool of a tech thing they can make/program in 24-48 hours of continuous work. They’re important proving grounds and social events in the tech world, and they’re pretty insular and prestigious among technical people.
This year, for the first time, a hackathon was won by a non-technical person (a person who literally does not know how to program). She’s a project manager at a tech company, so her expertise is more in operations, design, management, and marketing. She accomplished the programming part by prompting a coding A.I. that then wrote the program her prompts specified.
At the end of this road, you, an end user, will tell a computer in plain English what you want it to be able to do, and the computer will program itself to do exactly what you need without further help from you.
FOUR
Materials Science is the most underrated area of human progress. Imagine the world without plastics, concrete, and steel. Almost nothing we use today exists. In recent decades, however, progress in materials science has slowed down, as the materials we’re looking for have gotten more artificial, more delicate, and more expensive.
The most important frontier of materials research is stable inorganic crystals. That’s what most modern tech (e.g. computer chips, batteries, solar panels) is made out of. It can take months and months to research and test a single new such material, which are often just slight tweaks of older, already-proven materials.
Not anymore.
An A.I. tool called GNoME has just discovered *2.2 MILLION* new inorganic crystal materials, including 380,000 that are stable enough for potential use in new technology. This represents about 800 years of materials science research using old methods, done in a matter of months.
I don’t really have any commentary, beyond reiterating that A.I. is going to change everything. Buckle up!
FIVE
This is my favorite Twitter thread in a while. There’s a trend right now where you tell a generative A.I. to “make it more X” (X being whatever thing you’re trying to make fun of) over and over and let it iterate on the theme to madness). This is the “Make it more Libertarian” example, which I love because I know a bunch of libertarians and find their hearts pure but their beliefs out of step with basic human nature, so it’s fun to make fun of them.
What’s crazy is, this isn’t even the final image! This is only middling Libertarianism.
END
Thanks as always for reading! Have a great week, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story.
From Rich: "You even make basketball interesting!"
From Di: "Your non-fiction is just as engaging as your fiction."
more X