4 things I learned in 2018
It felt like that this year came and went by very quickly. Yet at the same time, so much happened this year everywhere around the world. 2018 for me has been a year of experimentation and exploration, and I’ve learned a ton along the way. Here are a few of my thoughts to wrap up the year.
On Creativity
Thanks to the miracle of industrialization around the world in all the developing countries, there has never been so much physical resources that are made widely available. People are living in a world that has never been this prosperous. I’ve made a trip to rural central China a few months ago, and was surprised to see that the local roads between the villages are wider and better paved than the highways in California. People have access to food and healthcare. One interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that cities around the globe are looking more and more similar due to globalization. This hasn’t been the case in the history of mankind. Schools in North America adhere to a common guideline of best practices, and not to mention the school layouts are eerily similar. In China, every K-12 student is even holding the same set of textbooks. The Chinese education board has many subject field “experts” that decide what materials go into the hands of each student. Imagination and creativity are scarce resources today. Money is a commodity. The implications of unified approach to education is a huge impediment to the creative output of society. There is little value in having yet another expert who looks for and does the same thing as the other thousands of experts. This is perhaps why the average scientist today is much less productive than a scientist from a hundred years ago.
On Intelligence
Even though eminent research institutions are still actively exploring the human brain, there has been a growing number of evidence each year that supports the idea that human consciousness is the same kind of process compared to simple insect reflexes. There are different levels of consciousness, and we can allocate consciousness points commensurate to the number of neurons or transistors each organism has. The implication of this idea is profound, and could eventually transform the code of ethics that we are taking for granted today as the truth. If all conscious beings are on the same ethical plane, then why humans are allowed to kill chicken but not the other way around? The crude answer today is that humans have more technological power than any other organisms on earth, but can the same thing be said in 30 years? What gives a man the right to kill and control the environment according to his will? As it turns out, the answer maybe deeply rooted in the way that humans are evolved, and people don’t really have the free will power to break out of their comfortable American lifestyles.
Maybe the human brain can be seen as a specific implementation of neural network that is a subset of all possible neural network configurations. All the experts and gifted prodigies in the world are by definition still normal human beings, but they work a little harder than others and push their strengths a little closer to the edge of the possibility space. With the human brain as the foundation, everyone is still on the same playing field with the same biological architecture. However, digital neural networks are not limited in physical location, memory capacity, or the architectural configuration for computation, and the speed of electron on silicon is much faster than along the sheath of myelin. The impact that these new intelligent beings could be much more substantial than I initially imagined. The actions of geniuses and criminal minds today will be a child’s play compared to what’s really possible. There might not be another world war thanks to the fast communication across the globe, but fast communication between transistors could be the downfall of an entire civilization.
On Equality
No matter where you are, you can feel the connections everywhere. We are all connected as one. This is how humans are evolved. Surprisingly, I realized that there is no such thing as a bad person, only people who are misguided or misinterpreted. A lot of the conflict arise because different groups of people have different priorities, but ultimately are trying to do good for their team. Some traditional religions are potent agents for misleading people, and thus are capable of doing great harm in today’s humanistic world. These religions claim to give salvation for brave men and women that ruthlessly punish others who do not share their world view, causing unnecessary rivalry and drama when there could be none. Conflicts can be avoided if people are better informed of the true nature of our reality. These traditional religions are based on the antiquated assumption of a zero sum game. The humanistic world view that promotes equality encourages innovation and free trade, allowing all kinds of world views to flourish under the same roof. It’s important to realize that as good as the modern world seems, it too will not last forever. Automation is already primed to take out huge chunks of the economy, taking away millions of jobs from the middle class. Equality is at stake, and everyone has the obligation to think into the future and participate in the discussion for potential solutions, such as the controversial UBI system. Peace is not to be taken for granted, as history of the past millenia shows.
On Knowledge
There are so many things that we don’t know and many more things that we don’t know that we don’t know. Everything that the human eye can see is a tiny fraction of all the frequencies of light, but with the help of specialized sensors, we can record other spectrums of light and transform the signal into the visible spectrum. However, all the baryonic matter that we can ever detect and interact with is only 5% of all the contents available in the universe based on gravitational effects. There are many basic questions that are left to be answered. What are the other 95% hiding in the dark? Why does time go forward rather than backwards? What causes the quantum uncertainty? Are there parallel universes?
It takes decades to train a student to become competent at one subject field, and most of the materials end up being forgotten and instead replaced by rules of thumb that may not always apply in all situations. Knowledge of an entire lifetime is lost every time someone passes away, and the years of learning is repeated by the next generation of students. Education is expensive, and currently the US student debt sits at around 1.4 trillion. So many opportunities are lost because a person don’t know something that others already know. Billions of dollars are poured into advertising in an effort to get people to know a product. To answer the next chapter of fundamental questions, we need far better technology that allows the brain to be augmented and extended to communicate with other networks. We are going to have to embrace some change or be willing to stuck in ignorance forever. We are still toddlers about to babble and crawl. There are so much more to explore.
