Are You Ready? - March 21, 2023

Hello All and Happy Spring!

Well, there’s a lot happening in the world as we’re now one week past the Ides of March and things are moving fast. There are several categories of game-changing technological innovations that will potentially revolutionize the human experience that have lately been in the news, and I thought I’d briefly mention a few. I intentionally refrained from getting into too much detail on most of these, but if anyone wants to dive deeper just contact me:

CRISPR Technology

CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - Basically gene editing. With this technology, scientists can utilize naturally occurring proteins that normally protect bacteria and turn them against that same bacteria cell, allowing the targeting of genes causing almost any pathogen and eliminate them, thus destroying the disease.

The potential for this technology is incredible and could lead to cures for almost any known disease, and eventually, may unlock the code to prevent, or at least slow, aging. This is a subject I delved into some in my book The Last Perfect Dawn, and I plan to get into it in much greater detail in the sequel.

Also, eliminating disease and/or aging, brings up some fascinating macro-ethical questions around availability (who has access) and the issue of population control in a world where people only die as a result of accidents.

Digital Currency

As the current banking crisis continues to resonate throughout the industry, digital currencies such as Bitcoin (and its cousins) have seen an uptick, even though some are blaming it as part of the cause. In the course of two or three days, Silicon Valley Bank, one of the largest in the world and recently featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine as an example of the best in the industry, basically became insolvent.

There were several reasons, mainly due to bank management loading up on long-term bonds at low interest rates. On paper, this didn’t look overly-risky. Problem was, once the Federal Reserve started increasing rates in order to fight inflation, those bonds were under water. The prudent course would have been for management to hedge their bet that inflation would remain low and there are various ways they could have done that. Instead, they kept that insurance money as a way to increase profit, which no doubt impacted their bonuses as well.

In a Hail Mary attempt to salvage the situation, SVB agreed to sell its bond portfolio at a significant loss and once the news hit the street, a bank run ensued. The speed with which things went down was almost as shocking as the fact it was happening at all.

As a result of SVB’s instant collapse, a chain reaction started, affecting many of the largest banks in the world. Credit Suisse found itself in a similar situation and was quickly taken over by UBS for pennies on the dollar. And even though here in the U.S. the FED stepped in to keep all depositors whole (regardless of the FDIC insurance limit of $250K), long term holders of Credit Suisse bonds lost $17 billion instantly, wiped out overnight.

The ramifications of all this are still reverberating and it’s far from over. But the whole event has reinvigorated the debate about whether or not money in a bank can ever be safe and secure. Proponents of digital currencies such as bitcoin and others maintain that the only way for the future is a blockchain-based replacement for our current forms of international currency. We’ll see. But the takeaway here is that this wasn’t supposed to be able to happen again after the 2008 banking crisis. Safeguards were implemented that supposedly made events like these nearly impossible. Yet…

UFO’s / UAP’s

There was a surreal moment on the NBC Nightly News last week when the anchor, Lester Holt, said something to the effect of “And when we come back, we’ll address all the UFO sightings and the fact the Pentagon’s expert is warning these could be probes from a mothership coming close to Earth.” Huh? It sounded like something straight out of one of my books.

I addressed this phenomenon in the last letter so won’t take up much space here. But my point is we’ve gone from looking at this subject as something mostly addressed in Sci-Fi novels, to talking about it on national news broadcasts; as if the potential for an alien mothership to appear demanded no more attention or sense of urgency than the winner of the National Dog Show, or a corn dog eating contest at a state fair.

As I said in the last letter, Navy pilots discuss openly the fact they see things nearly every day that are too technologically advanced to be man-made, but are of unknown origin. Now we’ve seemed to settle into this strange state where everyone just accepts something nobody can explain is there. And as long as they don’t start shooting or increase global warning, we’re okay with it.

But the 500 lb gorilla of these current events is, by far:

Artificial Intelligence

The current largest blip on the technology radar is without a doubt, AI. Previously, I’ve talked about Chat-GPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbots (you can still access in the blog section of the website). And now, a little over a month since the last letter, this technology has once again made a huge leap. Open AI, the company that created Chat-GPT came out with the next evolution of their chatbot called GPT-4. By all accounts it’s increased capabilities are next-level and it can even recognize images.

Here’s an example where a user asked GPT-4 to create a new emotion through sight, sound, and smell. The answer is truly reflective of technology that is game-changing.

Almost every tech company on the planet is pursuing this technology, including China. There is no doubt it is advancing faster than anyone could have imagined. And although there have been some clumsy attempts to build in safe-guards, there are now reports that random users have figured out ways to download the software and experiment outside the carefully constructed confines of the companies that created them. In other words, the genie is now fully out of the bottle.

What does all this mean?

The good:

There is huge potential for this technology to elevate the quality of life for all humans. Some are already theorizing near-term benefits such as providing inexpensive legal services as well as medical advice and writing computer code. In the past, we’ve only talked about AI making physical work redundant. Now, all of a sudden we’re seeing ways it might replace “thinking” jobs and not just decades into the future. This could happen sooner than anyone could have predicted.

And what about the concept of having access to a digital friend or teacher or advisor. A program designed specifically for you, accessible through any device; or possibly a robotic pet, one that can talk. The possibilities really are limitless.

The bad:

This technology is in its infancy and we have no way of knowing where this all leads, much less how it ends. I doubt we’re even asking the right questions. Think about when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard to rate the attractiveness of students. Social media has morphed from a benign, novel form of entertainment into a colossal propaganda machine that can be weaponized on an unprecedented scale. It’s also had a tremendous negative psychological impact on teens and young adults. Nobody saw that coming, at least not in the early days. And the potential impact on the human experience with AI’s evolution is exponentially greater than whatever algorithms drive social media.

At the end of the day, none of it is stoppable at this point. When I wrote Impermanent Universe four years ago, I created an antagonist, Milo Ackerman, who envisioned a world that would be destroyed by technology if left unchecked. In his mind, the only path to maintaining a sustainable world was to eliminate all technology before it replaced humans. Let’s hope that a decade from now, the character of Milo doesn't seem more prescient than I intended.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Best…..VB