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How are the things we're talking about being talked about somewhere else in the world? From a Ukrainian battlefield to a Somali prison cell, an Indian yoga studio and a Syrian refugee's first date, host Gregory Warner tells stories that follow familiar conversations into unfamiliar territory.

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10 Surprising Ways the Government is Spying on You

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what was earth like millions of years ago

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What was earth like millions of years ago? Could you live during the dinosaur era?

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Most Powerful Corporations in the World?

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Cybersecurity: Crash Course Computer Science #31

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Immovable Object vs. Unstoppable Force - Which Wins?

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The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny... also, Tshirts! http://www.dftba.com/minutephysics MinutePhysics is on Google+ - http://bit.ly/qzEwc6 And facebook - http://facebook.com/minutephysics And twitter - @minutephysics Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute!

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The outer layer of the sun is slowing down, something we've known for decades but haven't been able to figure out until now.

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5 Burning Questions About Water | Compilation

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What Does 'Clinically Proven' Actually Mean?

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Is Reality Real? The Simulation Argument

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StarTalk Radio Show by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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About This Episode

Continuing with our Let's Make America Smart Again series, Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and astronomer David Helfand are here to sift through the data and help you stay scientifically literate in the misinformation age. David discusses the "absent curation" of daily data and how the creation of search engines was helpful but also created more intricate problems. You'll hear about science browsers and filters, why science might be too successful, and David's top three tools you can use to sift through misinformation. David describes teaching at Quest University Canada, where he allowed students to "construct knowledge" instead of feeding them a constant stream of information. Discover more about the "reproducibility crisis" in the science community. Learn about the role that scientists play in the age of misinformation and about the many biases scientists can be exposed to - and persuaded by - during their research. Explore why the democratization of information is good overall but comes with baggage and responsibility. Dive into David's book, A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age: Scientific Habits of Mind. All that, plus, Neil and company answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about a variety of topics including the Dark Ages, dark matter, a global space agency, the correct definition of a fact, dealing with the anti-science culture, and using social media to confront alternative facts.

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: Science Literacy in the Misinformation Age - #LMASA

In This Episode

Episode Topics

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Science Literacy in the Misinformation Age - #LMASA - StarTalk Radio

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Continuing with our Let's Make America Smart Again series, Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and astronomer David Helfand are here to sift through the data and help you stay scientifically literate in the misinformation age.

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StarTalk Radio Show by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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About This Episode

Dragons, Violence, and Magic - What mega-hit TV series has all that and more? This Friday, we're talking about Game of Thrones with Neil deGrasse Tyson, cast member Isaac Hempstead Wright, comic co-host Michael Ian Black, author Helen Keen, and psychologist Travis Langley. Isaac tells Neil about what it's been like to "grow up" on Game of Thrones, his character Bran Stark, his interests in physics, and the geekiest thing he's ever done. But as with our episode about The Walking Dead, it's time to geek out StarTalk Style. Join us as Neil investigates the source of myths and legends about dragons: how they might be based on medieval discoveries of dinosaur fossils and how dragons might be connected to the primal evolutionary fear and alarm calls of vervet monkeys. Ponder the physics of breathing fire. Travis discusses the brutality and violence in the show and the psychological effects watching violence on television can have on viewers. You'll also hear about direwolves, the role magic played during the Middle Ages, the historical connections found in Game of Thrones (including what might be the real life inspiration for "The Wall" and the Red Wedding), Bran Stark's abilities to see into the past and the future, real-life mind-control abilities found in nature, and the relationship between religion and scientific advancement. Plus Neil answers fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about comets, Westeros, and more!

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: The Science Behind "Game of Thrones," as well as Neil's extended interview with Isaac Wright here.

In This Episode

Episode Topics

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The Science Behind "Game of Thrones" - StarTalk Radio

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Dragons, Violence, and Magic - What mega-hit TV series has all that and more? This Friday, we're talking about Game of Thrones with Neil deGrasse Tyson, cast member Isaac Hempstead Wright, comic co-host Michael Ian Black, author Helen Keen, and psychologist Travis Langley.

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StarTalk Radio Show by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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About This Episode

In a world clouded by alternative facts, science is here to make things clear. Bill Nye and comic co-host Chuck Nice welcome special guest Ross Andersen, the Senior Editor of The Atlantic, where he oversees all things science, technology and health, to guide us through the fog of misinformation. Listen and learn as we delve into a discussion on science literacy and the search for truth. Hear why Ross believes people are still optimistic about science despite the politicizing of hot-button issues. Explore how infusing science with patriotic pride might solve cognitive dissonance and political disagreement. You'll also hear our panel contemplate methods on how to have civil discussions with people who have opposing ideas and who argue based on false knowledge. Find out some of the sources available that offer quality science literature online and in print. Discover how some scientific causes can become mixed up in the battle of political identity. Learn why the denial of climate change science may lead to the United States surrendering its leading global positon in scientific study and research. All that, plus, fan-submitted Cosmic Queries that range from, "Is social media making us dumber?" to, "What are the odds of Bill and Neil reaching out to the administration to propose goals for space exploration?"

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: Science and the Search for the Truth, with Bill Nye.

In This Episode

Episode Topics

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Science and the Search for the Truth, with Bill Nye - StarTalk Radio

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In a world clouded by alternative facts, science is here to make things clear. Bill Nye and comic co-host Chuck Nice welcome special guest Ross Andersen, the Senior Editor of The Atlantic, where he oversees all things science, technology and health, to guide us through the fog of misinformation.

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The Turing Problem

100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence. But the world wasn't kind to Alan Turing. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted under a British law that prohibited "acts of gross indecency between men, in public or private."

In 1936, a young Alan Turing devised a machine that would ultimately change the world. You're staring at it right now--except Turing's "universal machine" was much, much simpler and totally imaginary. Nonetheless, he proved that with just a few simple ingredients, the machine could compute any mathematical problem that a human could compute.

You: So?

Us: So this was back when the only "computers" were people doing math by hand. It was also back when machines were single-function. "Reprogramming" required a screwdriver. To think the kinds of thoughts Turing was thinking, you had to be either a genius or a psychic.

Turing lived his whole life with machines. He built the machine that deciphered the German "Engima Code" during World War II. He imagined a day when machines would flirt with us, joke with us, listen to our problems and, above all, think for themselves. He even thought up a way to test whether machines had become indistinguishable from humans (for more on the Turing Test, check out our episode Talking to Machines).

The idea that machines would become our equals was unsettling for many of Turing's peers. (Frankly, it still unsettles a lot of folks today, just ask Robert!) But to Turing, it was just the natural extension of his fundamental belief that we, all of us, are machines ourselves in a way. And he worried that society might judge the computers of the future as harshly as it judged him.

Alan Turing was arrested and convicted in 1952 for activities that are no longer illegal in England. Janna Levin and David Leavitt help explain how Alan Turing's personal life may have shaped his relationship to machines. And James Gleick muses about how profound Turing's contributions to math and computing really were.

Read more:

Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

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The Turing Problem 100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence.

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The inhumanly fast world of high-speed trading, an excruciatingly slow experiment, and a physicist plays Zeus.

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9-Volt Nirvana

Learn a new language faster than ever! Leave doubt in the dust! Be a better sniper! Could you do all that and more with just a zap to the noggin? Maybe.

Sally Adee, an editor at New Scientist, was at a conference for DARPA - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - when she heard about a way to speed up learning with something called trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). A couple years later, Sally found herself weilding an M4 assualt rifle, picking off enemy combatants with a battery wired to her temple. Of course, it was a simulation, but Sally's sniper skills made producer Soren Wheeler wonder what we should think of the world of brain stimulation.

In the last couple years, tDCS has been all over the news. Researchers claim that juicing the brain with just 2 milliamps (think 9-volt battery) can help with everything from learning languages, to quitting smoking, to overcoming depression. We bring Michael Weisend, neuroscientist at Wright State Research Institute, into the studio to tell us how it works (Bonus: you get to hear Jad get his brain zapped). Peter Reiner and Nick Fitz of the University of British Columbia help us think through the consequences of a world where anyone with 20 dollars and access to Radioshack can make their own brain zapper. And finally, Sally tells us about the unexpected after-effects of a day of super-charged sniper training and makes us wonder about world where you can order up a state of mind.
Special thanks for the music of Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train Orchestra

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9-Volt Nirvana Learn a new language faster than ever! Leave doubt in the dust! Be a better sniper! Could you do all that and more with just a zap to the noggin? Maybe.

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Ron and Cornelia Suskind had two healthy young sons, thriving careers and a brand new home when their youngest, Owen, started to disappear.

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(Image Credit: Claude Monet)

How close can words get you to the truth and feel and force of life? That's the question poking at our ribs this hour, as we wonder how it is that the right words can have the wrong meanings, and why sometimes the best translations lead us to an understanding that's way deeper than language. This episode, 8 stories that play out in the middle space between one reality and another - where poetry, insult comedy, 911 calls, and even our own bodies work to close the gap.
Special thanks for the music of Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train Orchestra

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(Image Credit: Claude Monet) How close can words get you to the truth and feel and force of life? That's the question poking at our ribs this hour, as we wonder how it is that the right words can have the wrong meanings, and why sometimes the best translations lead us to an understanding that's way deeper than language.

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The Rhino Hunter

(Image Credit: Andrea Mongia)

Back in 2014, Corey Knowlton paid $350,000 for a hunting trip to Namibia to shoot and kill an endangered species. He's a professional hunter, who guides hunts all around the world, so going to Africa would be nothing new. The target on the other hand would be. And so too, he quickly found, would be the attention.

This episode, producer Simon Adler follows Corey as he dodges death threats and prepares to pull the trigger. Along the way we stop to talk with Namibian hunters and government officials, American activists, and someone who's been here before - Kenya's former Director of Wildlife, Richard Leakey. All the while, we try to uncover what conservation really means in the 21st century.
Reported & produced by Simon Adler with production help from Matthew Kielty.

Special thanks to Chris Weaver, Ian Wallace, Mark Barrow, the Lindstrom family, and everyone at the Aru Game Lodge in Namibia.
Thanks also to Sarah Fogel, Ray Crow, Barbara Clucus, Diogo Veríssimo

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The Rhino Hunter (Image Credit: Andrea Mongia) Back in 2014, Corey Knowlton paid $350,000 for a hunting trip to Namibia to shoot and kill an endangered species. He's a professional hunter, who guides hunts all around the world, so going to Africa would be nothing new. The target on the other hand would be.

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(Photo Credit: Chuck Miller)

In 1973, a massive manhunt in New York's Adirondack Mountains ended when police captured a man named Robert Garrow. And that's when this story really gets started.

This episode we consider a string of barbaric crimes by a hated man, and the attorney who, when called to defend him, also wound up defending a core principle of our legal system. When Frank Armani learned his client's most gruesome secrets, he made a morally startling decision that stunned the world and goes to the heart of what it means to be a defense attorney - how far should lawyers go to provide the best defense to the worst people?
NOTE: This episode contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault and violence. Produced by Matt Kielty and Brenna Farrell. Reported by Brenna Farrell. Special thanks to Tom Alibrandi, author of Privileged Information, with Frank Armani, Laurence Gooley, author of Terror in the Adirondacks: The True Story of Serial Killer Robert F. Garrow, Charl Bader and the students in her Criminal Defense Clinic at Fordham University, Leslie Levin and the students in her Legal Profession class at The University of Connecticut School of Law, Clark D. Cunningham at Georgia State University College of Law, Debra Armani, Mary Armani, Lohr McKinstry, Tom Scozzafava, Stephanie Jenkins, Brian Farrell, Jennifer Brumback and Nick Capodice.

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(Photo Credit: Chuck Miller) In 1973, a massive manhunt in New York's Adirondack Mountains ended when police captured a man named Robert Garrow. And that's when this story really gets started. This episode we consider a string of barbaric crimes by a hated man, and the attorney who, when called to defend him, also wound up defending a core principle of our legal system.

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In today's episode, we meet a young woman from Texas, born and raised, who can't prove that she exists.

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The Gondolier

What happens when doing what you want to do means giving up who you really are?

We travel to Venice, Italy with reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai. On the winding canals in the hidden parts of Venice, we learn about the nearly 1000-year old tradition of the Venetian Gondolier, and how the global media created a 20-year battle between that tradition and a supposed feminist icon.
Reported by David Conrad and Kristen Clark. Produced by Annie McEwen and Molly Webster. Special thanks to Alexis Ungerer, Summer, Alex Hai, Kevin Gotkin, Silvia Del Fabbro, Sandro Mariot, Aldo Rosso and Marta Vannucci, The Longest Shortest Time (Hillary Frank, Peter Clowney and Abigail Keel), Tim Howard, Nick Adams/GLAAD, Valentina Powers, Florence Ursino, Ann Marie Somma, Alex Overington, Jeremy Bloom and the people of Little Italy.
Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

You can find Alex Hai's website here, where you can check out the photographs discussed in the piece.

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The Gondolier What happens when doing what you want to do means giving up who you really are? We travel to Venice, Italy with reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai.

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The Ceremony

Last November, journalist Morgen Peck showed up at her friend Molly Webster's apartment in Brooklyn, told her to take her battery out of her phone, and began to tell her about The Ceremony, a moment last fall when a group of, well, let's just call them wizards, came together in an undisclosed location to launch a new currency. It's an undertaking that involves some of the most elaborate security and cryptography ever done (so we've been told). And math. Lots of math. It was all going great until, in the middle of it, something started to behave a little...strangely.
Reported by Molly Webster. Produced by Matt Kielty and Molly Webster. Denver Ceremony station recordings were created by media maker Nathaniel Kramer, with help from Daniel Cooper. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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The Ceremony Last November, journalist Morgen Peck showed up at her friend Molly Webster's apartment in Brooklyn, told her to take her battery out of her phone, and began to tell her about The Ceremony, a moment last fall when a group of, well, let's just call them wizards, came together in an undisclosed location to launch a new currency.

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The stories of a few folks ready to fight the future of fakery.

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Most of us would sacrifice one person to save five. It's a pretty straightforward bit of moral math. But if we have to actually kill that person ourselves, the math gets fuzzy.

That's the lesson of the classic Trolley Problem, a moral puzzle that fried our brains in an episode we did about 11 years ago. Luckily, the Trolley Problem has always been little more than a thought experiment, mostly confined to conversations at a certain kind of cocktail party. That is until now. New technologies are forcing that moral quandry out of our philosophy departments and onto our streets. So today we revisit the Trolley Problem and wonder how a two-ton hunk of speeding metal will make moral calculations about life and death that we can't even figure out ourselves.
This story was reported and produced by Amanda Aronczyk and Bethel Habte. Thanks to Iyad Rahwan, Edmond Awad and Sydney Levine from the Moral Machine group at MIT. Also thanks to Fiery Cushman, Matthew DeBord, Sertac Karaman, Martine Powers, Xin Xiang, and Roborace for all of their help. Thanks to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism students who collected the vox: Chelsea Donohue, Ivan Flores, David Gentile, Maite Hernandez, Claudia Irizarry-Aponte, Comice Johnson, Richard Loria, Nivian Malik, Avery Miles, Alexandra Semenova, Kalah Siegel, Mark Suleymanov, Andee Tagle, Shaydanay Urbani, Isvett Verde and Reece Williams.
Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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Most of us would sacrifice one person to save five. It's a pretty straightforward bit of moral math. But if we have to actually kill that person ourselves, the math gets fuzzy. That's the lesson of the classic Trolley Problem, a moral puzzle that fried our brains in an episode we did about 11 years ago.

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PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)

___________

Everyone feels something when they're in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this:

Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old "existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour." But everyone feels something.

Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too-"Where is everybody?"

________________

A really starry sky seems vast -but all we're looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way). So what we're really looking at is this:

Galaxy image: Nick Risinger

When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, "Is there other intelligent life out there?" Let's put some numbers to it-

As many stars as there are in our galaxy (100 - 400 billion), there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe-so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there's a whole galaxy out there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 10²² and 10²⁴ total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there.

The science world isn't in total agreement about what percentage of those stars are "sun-like" (similar in size, temperature, and luminosity)-opinions typically range from 5% to 20%. Going with the most conservative side of that (5%), and the lower end for the number of total stars (10 ²²), gives us 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion sun-like stars.

There's also a debate over what percentage of those sun-like stars might be orbited by an Earth-like planet (one with similar temperature conditions that could have liquid water and potentially support life similar to that on Earth). Some say it's as high as 50%, but let's go with the more conservative 22% that came out of a recent PNAS study. That suggests that there's a potentially-habitable Earth-like planet orbiting at least 1% of the total stars in the universe-a total of 100 billion billion Earth-like planets.

So there are 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world. Think about that next time you're on the beach.

Moving forward, we have no choice but to get completely speculative. Let's imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life (if that's true, every grain of sand would represent one planet with life on it). And imagine that on 1% of those planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe.

Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we'd estimate that there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. 1

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an organization dedicated to listening for signals from other intelligent life. If we're right that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, shouldn't SETI's satellite dish array pick up all kinds of signals?

But it hasn't. Not one. Ever.
Where is everybody?
It gets stranger. Our sun is relatively young in the lifespan of the universe. There are far older stars with far older Earth-like planets, which should in theory mean civilizations far more advanced than our own. As an example, let's compare our 4.54-billion-year-old Earth to a hypothetical 8-billion-year-old Planet X.

If Planet X has a similar story to Earth, let's look at where their civilization would be today (using the orange timespan as a reference to show how huge the green timespan is):

The technology and knowledge of a civilization only 1,000 years ahead of us could be as shocking to us as our world would be to a medieval person. A civilization 1 million years ahead of us might be as incomprehensible to us as human culture is to chimpanzees. And Planet X is 3.4 billion years ahead of us...

There's something called The Kardashev Scale, which helps us group intelligent civilizations into three broad categories by the amount of energy they use:

A Type I Civilization has the ability to use all of the energy on their planet. We're not quite a Type I Civilization, but we're close (Carl Sagan created a formula for this scale which puts us at a Type 0.7 Civilization).

A Type II Civilization can harness all of the energy of their host star. Our feeble Type I brains can hardly imagine how someone would do this, but we've tried our best, imagining things like a Dyson Sphere.

A Type III Civilization blows the other two away, accessing power comparable to that of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

If this level of advancement sounds hard to believe, remember Planet X above and their 3.4 billion years of further development. If a civilization on Planet X were similar to ours and were able to survive all the way to Type III level, the natural thought is that they'd probably have mastered inter-stellar travel by now, possibly even colonizing the entire galaxy.

One hypothesis as to how galactic colonization could happen is by creating machinery that can travel to other planets, spend 500 years or so self-replicating using the raw materials on their new planet, and then send two replicas off to do the same thing. Even without traveling anywhere near the speed of light, this process would colonize the whole galaxy in 3.75 million years, a relative blink of an eye when talking in the scale of billions of years:
Source: Scientific American: "Where Are They"
Continuing to speculate, if 1% of intelligent life survives long enough to become a potentially galaxy-colonizing Type III Civilization, our calculations above suggest that there should be at least 1,000 Type III Civilizations in our galaxy alone-and given the power of such a civilization, their presence would likely be pretty noticeable. And yet, we see nothing, hear nothing, and we're visited by no one.

Welcome to the Fermi Paradox.

We have no answer to the Fermi Paradox-the best we can do is "possible explanations." And if you ask ten different scientists what their hunch is about the correct one, you'll get ten different answers. You know when you hear about humans of the past debating whether the Earth was round or if the sun revolved around the Earth or thinking that lightning happened because of Zeus, and they seem so primitive and in the dark? That's about where we are with this topic.

In taking a look at some of the most-discussed possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, let's divide them into two broad categories-those explanations which assume that there's no sign of Type II and Type III Civilizations because there are none of them out there, and those which assume they're out there and we're not seeing or hearing anything for other reasons.

Explanation Group 1: There are no signs of higher (Type II and III) civilizations because there are no higher civilizations in existence.

Those who subscribe to Group 1 explanations point to something called the non-exclusivity problem, which rebuffs any theory that says, "There are higher civilizations, but none of them have made any kind of contact with us because they all _____." Group 1 people look at the math, which says there should be so many thousands (or millions) of higher civilizations, that at least one of them would be an exception to the rule. Even if a theory held for 99.99% of higher civilizations, the other .01% would behave differently and we'd become aware of their existence.

Therefore, say Group 1 explanations, it must be that there are no super-advanced civilizations. And since the math suggests that there are thousands of them just in our own galaxy, something else must be going on.

This something else is called The Great Filter.

The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there's a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There's some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter.

If this theory is true, the big question is, Where in the timeline does the Great Filter occur?

It turns out that when it comes to the fate of humankind, this question is very important. Depending on where The Great Filter occurs, we're left with three possible realities: We're rare, we're first, or we're fucked.

1. We're Rare (The Great Filter is Behind Us)

One hope we have is that The Great Filter is behind us-we managed to surpass it, which would mean it's extremely rare for life to make it to our level of intelligence. The diagram below shows only two species making it past, and we're one of them.

This scenario would explain why there are no Type III Civilizations...but it would also mean that we could be one of the few exceptions now that we've made it this far. It would mean we have hope. On the surface, this sounds a bit like people 500 years ago suggesting that the Earth is the center of the universe-it implies that we're special. However, something scientists call "observation selection effect" suggests that anyone who is pondering their own rarity is inherently part of an intelligent life "success story"-and whether they're actually rare or quite common, the thoughts they ponder and conclusions they draw will be identical. This forces us to admit that being special is at least a possibility.

And if we are special, when exactly did we become special-i.e. which step did we surpass that almost everyone else gets stuck on?

One possibility: The Great Filter could be at the very beginning-it might be incredibly unusual for life to begin at all. This is a candidate because it took about a billion years of Earth's existence to finally happen, and because we have tried extensively to replicate that event in labs and have never been able to do it. If this is indeed The Great Filter, it would mean that not only is there no intelligent life out there, there may be no other life at all.

Another possibility: The Great Filter could be the jump from the simple prokaryote cell to the complex eukaryote cell. After prokaryotes came into being, they remained that way for almost two billion years before making the evolutionary jump to being complex and having a nucleus. If this is The Great Filter, it would mean the universe is teeming with simple prokaryote cells and almost nothing beyond that.

There are a number of other possibilities-some even think the most recent leap we've made to our current intelligence is a Great Filter candidate. While the leap from semi-intelligent life (chimps) to intelligent life (humans) doesn't at first seem like a miraculous step, Steven Pinker rejects the idea of an inevitable "climb upward" of evolution: "Since evolution does not strive for a goal but just happens, it uses the adaptation most useful for a given ecological niche, and the fact that, on Earth, this led to technological intelligence only once so far may suggest that this outcome of natural selection is rare and hence by no means a certain development of the evolution of a tree of life."

Most leaps do not qualify as Great Filter candidates. Any possible Great Filter must be one-in-a-billion type thing where one or more total freak occurrences need to happen to provide a crazy exception-for that reason, something like the jump from single-cell to multi-cellular life is ruled out, because it has occurred as many as 46 times, in isolated incidents, just on this planet alone. For the same reason, if we were to find a fossilized eukaryote cell on Mars, it would rule the above "simple-to-complex cell" leap out as a possible Great Filter (as well as anything before that point on the evolutionary chain)-because if it happened on both Earth and Mars, it's almost definitely not a one-in-a-billion freak occurrence.

If we are indeed rare, it could be because of a fluky biological event, but it also could be attributed to what is called the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which suggests that though there may be many Earth- like planets, the particular conditions on Earth-whether related to the specifics of this solar system, its relationship with the moon (a moon that large is unusual for such a small planet and contributes to our particular weather and ocean conditions), or something about the planet itself-are exceptionally friendly to life.

For Group 1 Thinkers, if the Great Filter is not behind us, the one hope we have is that conditions in the universe are just recently, for the first time since the Big Bang, reaching a place that would allow intelligent life to develop. In that case, we and many other species may be on our way to super-intelligence, and it simply hasn't happened yet. We happen to be here at the right time to become one of the first super-intelligent civilizations.

One example of a phenomenon that could make this realistic is the prevalence of gamma-ray bursts, insanely huge explosions that we've observed in distant galaxies. In the same way that it took the early Earth a few hundred million years before the asteroids and volcanoes died down and life became possible, it could be that the first chunk of the universe's existence was full of cataclysmic events like gamma-ray bursts that would incinerate everything nearby from time to time and prevent any life from developing past a certain stage. Now, perhaps, we're in the midst of an astrobiological phase transition and this is the first time any life has been able to evolve for this long, uninterrupted.

3. We're Fucked (The Great Filter is Ahead of Us)

If we're neither rare nor early, Group 1 thinkers conclude that The Great Filter must be in our future. This would suggest that life regularly evolves to where we are, but that something prevents life from going much further and reaching high intelligence in almost all cases-and we're unlikely to be an exception.

One possible future Great Filter is a regularly-occurring cataclysmic natural event, like the above-mentioned gamma-ray bursts, except they're unfortunately not done yet and it's just a matter of time before all life on Earth is suddenly wiped out by one. Another candidate is the possible inevitability that nearly all intelligent civilizations end up destroying themselves once a certain level of technology is reached.

This is why Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom says that "no news is good news." The discovery of even simple life on Mars would be devastating, because it would cut out a number of potential Great Filters behind us. And if we were to find fossilized complex life on Mars, Bostrom says "it would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover," because it would mean The Great Filter is almost definitely ahead of us-ultimately dooming the species. Bostrom believes that when it comes to The Fermi Paradox, "the silence of the night sky is golden."

Explanation Group 2: Type II and III intelligent civilizations are out there-and there are logical reasons why we might not have heard from them.

Group 2 explanations get rid of any notion that we're rare or special or the first at anything-on the contrary, they believe in the Mediocrity Principle, whose starting point is that there is nothing unusual or rare about our galaxy, solar system, planet, or level of intelligence, until evidence proves otherwise. They're also much less quick to assume that the lack of evidence of higher intelligence beings is evidence of their nonexistence-emphasizing the fact that our search for signals stretches only about 100 light years away from us (0.1% across the galaxy) and suggesting a number of possible explanations. Here are 10:

Possibility 1) Super-intelligent life could very well have already visited Earth, but before we were here. In the scheme of things, sentient humans have only been around for about 50,000 years, a little blip of time. If contact happened before then, it might have made some ducks flip out and run into the water and that's it. Further, recorded history only goes back 5,500 years-a group of ancient hunter-gatherer tribes may have experienced some crazy alien shit, but they had no good way to tell anyone in the future about it.

Possibility 2) The galaxy has been colonized, but we just live in some desolate rural area of the galaxy. The Americas may have been colonized by Europeans long before anyone in a small Inuit tribe in far northern Canada realized it had happened. There could be an urbanization component to the interstellar dwellings of higher species, in which all the neighboring solar systems in a certain area are colonized and in communication, and it would be impractical and purposeless for anyone to deal with coming all the way out to the random part of the spiral where we live.

Possibility 3) The entire concept of physical colonization is a hilariously backward concept to a more advanced species. Remember the picture of the Type II Civilization above with the sphere around their star? With all that energy, they might have created a perfect environment for themselves that satisfies their every need. They might have crazy-advanced ways of reducing their need for resources and zero interest in leaving their happy utopia to explore the cold, empty, undeveloped universe.

An even more advanced civilization might view the entire physical world as a horribly primitive place, having long ago conquered their own biology and uploaded their brains to a virtual reality, eternal-life paradise. Living in the physical world of biology, mortality, wants, and needs might seem to them the way we view primitive ocean species living in the frigid, dark sea. FYI, thinking about another life form having bested mortality makes me incredibly jealous and upset.

Possibility 4) There are scary predator civilizations out there, and most intelligent life knows better than to broadcast any outgoing signals and advertise their location. This is an unpleasant concept and would help explain the lack of any signals being received by the SETI satellites. It also means that we might be the super naive newbies who are being unbelievably stupid and risky by ever broadcasting outward signals. There's a debate going on currently about whether we should engage in METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence-the reverse of SETI) or not, and most people say we should not. Stephen Hawking warns, "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans." Even Carl Sagan (a general believer that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would be altruistic, not hostile) called the practice of METI "deeply unwise and immature," and recommended that "the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand." Scary. 1

Possibility 5) There's only one instance of higher-intelligent life-a "superpredator" civilization (like humans are here on Earth)-that is far more advanced than everyone else and keeps it that way by exterminating any intelligent civilization once they get past a certain level. This would suck. The way it might work is that it's an inefficient use of resources to exterminate all emerging intelligences, maybe because most die out on their own. But past a certain point, the super beings make their move-because to them, an emerging intelligent species becomes like a virus as it starts to grow and spread. This theory suggests that whoever was the first in the galaxy to reach intelligence won, and now no one else has a chance. This would explain the lack of activity out there because it would keep the number of super-intelligent civilizations to just one.

Possibility 6) There's plenty of activity and noise out there, but our technology is too primitive and we're listening for the wrong things. Like walking into a modern-day office building, turning on a walkie-talkie, and when you hear no activity (which of course you wouldn't hear because everyone's texting, not using walkie-talkies), determining that the building must be empty. Or maybe, as Carl Sagan has pointed out, it could be that our minds work exponentially faster or slower than another form of intelligence out there-e.g. it takes them 12 years to say "Hello," and when we hear that communication, it just sounds like white noise to us.

Possibility 7) We are receiving contact from other intelligent life, but the government is hiding it. The more I learn about the topic, the more this seems like an idiotic theory, but I had to mention it because it's talked about so much.

Possibility 8) Higher civilizations are aware of us and observing us (AKA the "Zoo Hypothesis"). As far as we know, super-intelligent civilizations exist in a tightly-regulated galaxy, and our Earth is treated like part of a vast and protected national park, with a strict "Look but don't touch" rule for planets like ours. We wouldn't notice them, because i f a far smarter species wanted to observe us , it would know how to easi ly do so without us realizing it . Maybe there's a rule similar to the Star Trek's "Prime Directive" which prohibits super-intelligent beings from making any open contact with lesser species like us or revealing themselves in any way, until the lesser species has reached a certain level of intelligence.

Possibility 9) Higher civilizations are here, all around us. But we're too primitive to perceive them. Michio Kaku sums it up like this:
Let's say we have an anthill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the anthill, they're building a ten-lane super-highway. And the question is "Would the ants be able to understand what a ten-lane super-highway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the intentions of the beings building the highway next to them?"
So it's not that we can't pick up the signals from Planet X using our technology, it's that we can't even comprehend what the beings from Planet X are or what they're trying to do. It's so beyond us that even if they really wanted to enlighten us, it would be like trying to teach ants about the internet.

Along those lines, this may also be an answer to "Well if there are so many fancy Type III Civilizations, why haven't they contacted us yet?" To answer that, let's ask ourselves-when Pizarro made his way into Peru, did he stop for a while at an anthill to try to communicate? Was he magnanimous, trying to help the ants in the anthill? Did he become hostile and slow his original mission down in order to smash the anthill apart? Or was the anthill of complete and utter and eternal irrelevance to Pizarro? That might be our situation here.

Possibility 10) We're completely wrong about our reality. There are a lot of ways we could just be totally off with everything we think. The universe might appear one way and be something else entirely, like a hologram. Or maybe we're the aliens and we were planted here as an experiment or as a form of fertilizer. There's even a chance that we're all part of a computer simulation by some researcher from another world, and other forms of life simply weren't programmed into the simulation.

________________

As we continue along with our possibly-futile search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not really sure what I'm rooting for. Frankly, learning either that we're officially alone in the universe or that we're officially joined by others would be creepy, which is a theme with all of the surreal storylines listed above- whatever the truth actually is, it's mindblowing.

Beyond its shocking science fiction component, The Fermi Paradox also leaves me with a deep humbling. Not just the normal "Oh yeah, I'm microscopic and my existence lasts for three seconds" humbling that the universe always triggers. The Fermi Paradox brings out a sharper, more personal humbling, one that can only happen after spending hours of research hearing your species' most renowned scientists present insane theories, change their minds again and again, and wildly contradict each other-reminding us that future generations will look at us the same way we see the ancient people who were sure that the stars were the underside of the dome of heaven, and they'll think "Wow they really had no idea what was going on."

Compounding all of this is the blow to our species' self-esteem that comes with all of this talk about Type II and III Civilizations. Here on Earth, we're the king of our little castle, proud ruler of the huge group of imbeciles who share the planet with us. And in this bubble with no competition and no one to judge us, it's rare that we're ever confronted with the concept of being a dramatically inferior species to anyone. But after spending a lot of time with Type II and III Civilizations over the past week, our power and pride are seeming a bit David Brent-esque.

That said, given that my normal outlook is that humanity is a lonely orphan on a tiny rock in the middle of a desolate universe, the humbling fact that we're probably not as smart as we think we are, and the possibility that a lot of what we're sure about might be wrong, sounds wonderful. It opens the door just a crack that maybe, just maybe, there might be more to the story than we realize.

Three more Wait But Why mind-benders:

How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars - A post I got to work on with Elon Musk and one that reframed my mental picture of the future.

The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence - Why any aliens that do visit us are likely to be artificial, not biological. We may not be the king of our castle for very much longer...

What Makes You You - It's a harder question than you think.
Some other popular Wait But Why posts:
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
How to Pick Your Life Partner
The Tail End
Your Life in Weeks
Religion for the Nonreligious

If you're interested in supporting Wait But Why, here's our Patreon.

Sources:
PNAS: Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars
SETI: The Drake Equation
NASA: Workshop Report on the Future of Intelligence In The Cosmos
Keith Wiley: The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth
NCBI: Astrobiological phase transition: towards resolution of Fermi's paradox
André Kukla: Extraterrestrials: A Philosophical Perspective
Nick Bostrom: Where Are They?
Science Direct: Galactic gradients, postbiological evolution and the apparent failure of SETI
Nature: Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram
Robin Hanson: The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?
John Dyson: Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation

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PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) ___________ Everyone feels something when they're in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this: Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe.

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The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class-someone who hadn't been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me.

When you're seven, there aren't really any actionable steps you can take when you're in love with someone. You're not even sure what you want from the situation. There's just this amorphous yearning that's a part of your life, and that's that.

But for me, it became suddenly relevant a few months later, when during recess one day, one of the girls in the class started asking each of the boys, "Who do youuu want to marry?" When she asked me, it was a no-brainer. "Alana."

Disaster.

I was still new to being a human and didn't realize that the only socially acceptable answer was, "No one."

The second I answered, the heinous girl ran toward other students, telling each one, "Tim said he wants to marry Alana! " Each person she told covered their mouth with uncontrollable laughter. I was finished. Life was over.

The news quickly got back to Alana herself, who stayed as far away from me as possible for days after. If she knew what a restraining order was, she'd have taken one out.

This horrifying experience taught me a critical life lesson-it can be mortally dangerous to be yourself, and you should exercise extreme social caution at all times.

Now this sounds like something only a traumatized second grader would think, but the weird thing, and the topic of this post, is that this lesson isn't just limited to me and my debacle of a childhood- it's a defining paranoia of the human species. We share a collective insanity that pervades human cultures throughout the world:

An irrational and unproductive obsession with what other people think of us.

Evolution does everything for a reason, and to understand the origin of this particular insanity, let's back up for a minute to 50,000BC in Ethiopia, where your Great2,000 Grandfather lived as part of a small tribe.

Back then, being part of a tribe was critical to survival. A tribe meant food and protection in a time when neither was easy to come by. So for your Great 2,000 Grandfather, almost nothing in the world was more important than being accepted by his fellow tribe members, especially those in positions of authority. Fitting in with those around him and pleasing those above him meant he could stay in the tribe, and about the worst nightmare he could imagine would be people in the tribe starting to whisper about how annoying or unproductive or weird he was-because if enough people disapproved of him, his ranking within the tribe would drop, and if it got really bad, he'd be kicked out altogether and left for dead. He also knew that if he ever embarrassed himself by pursuing a girl in the tribe and being rejected, she'd tell the other girls about it-not only would he have blown his chance with that girl, but he might never have a mate at all now because every girl that would ever be in his life knew about his lame, failed attempt. Being socially accepted was everything.

Because of this, humans evolved an over-the-top obsession with what others thought of them-a craving for social approval and admiration, and a paralyzing fear of being disliked. Let's call that obsession a human's Social Survival Mammoth. It looks something like this:

Your Great 2,000 Grandfather's Social Survival Mammoth was central to his ability to endure and thrive. It was simple-keep the mammoth well fed with social approval and pay close attention to its overwhelming fears of nonacceptance, and you'll be fine.

And that was all well and fine in 50,000BC. And 30,000BC. And 10,000BC. But something funny has happened for humans in the last 10,000 years-their civilization has dramatically changed. Sudden, quick change is something civilization has the ability to do, and the reason that can be awkward is that our evolutionary biology can't move nearly as fast. So while for most of history, both our social structure and our biology evolved and adjusted at a snail's pace together, civilization has recently developed the speed capabilities of a hare while our biology has continued snailing along.

Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept. We're all here in 2014, accompanied by a large, hungry, and easily freaked-out woolly mammoth who still thinks it's 50,000BC.

Why else would you try on four outfits and still not be sure what to wear before going out?

The mammoth's nightmares about romantic rejection made your ancestors cautious and savvy, but in today's world, it just makes you a coward:

And don't even get the mammoth started on the terror of artistic risks:

The mammoth's hurricane of fear of social disapproval plays a factor in most parts of most people's lives. It's what makes you feel weird about going to a restaurant or a movie alone; it's what makes parents care a little too much about where their child goes to college; it's what makes you pass up a career you'd love in favor of a more lucrative career you're lukewarm about; it's what makes you get married before you're ready to a person you're not in love with.

And while keeping your highly insecure Social Survival Mammoth feeling calm and safe takes a lot of work, that's only one half of your responsibilities. The mammoth also needs to be fed regularly and robustly-with praise, approval, and the feeling of being on the right side of any social or moral dichotomy.

Why else would you be such an image-crafting douchebag on Facebook?

Or brag when you're out with friends even though you always regret it later?

Society has evolved to accommodate this mammoth-feeding frenzy, inventing things like accolades and titles and the concept of prestige in order to keep our mammoths satisfied-and often to incentivize people to do meaningless jobs and live unfulfilling lives they wouldn't otherwise consider taking part in.

Above all, mammoths want to fit in-that's what tribespeople had always needed to do so that's how they're programmed. Mammoths look around at society to figure out what they're supposed to do, and when it becomes clear, they jump right in. Just look at any two college fraternity pictures taken ten years apart:

Or all those subcultures where every single person has one of the same three socially-acceptable advanced degrees:

Sometimes, a mammoth's focus isn't on wider society as much as it's on winning the approval of a Puppet Master in your life. A Puppet Master is a person or group of people whose opinion matters so much to you that they're essentially running your life. A Puppet Master is often a parent, or maybe your significant other, or sometimes an alpha member of your group of friends. A Puppet Master can be a person you look up to who you don't know very well-maybe even a celebrity you've never met-or a group of people you hold in especially high regard.

We crave the Puppet Master's approval more than anyone's, and we're so horrified at the thought of upsetting the Puppet Master or feeling their nonacceptance or ridicule that we'll do anything to avoid it. When we get to this toxic state in our relationship with a Puppet Master, that person's presence hangs over our entire decision-making process and pulls the strings of our opinions and our moral voice.

With so much thought and energy dedicated to the mammoth's needs, you often end up neglecting someone else in your brain, someone all the way at the center-your Authentic Voice.

Your Authentic Voice, somewhere in there, knows all about you. In contrast to the black-and-white simplicity of the Social Survival Mammoth, your Authentic Voice is complex, sometimes hazy, constantly evolving, and unafraid. Your AV has its own, nuanced moral code, formed by experience, reflection, and its own personal take on compassion and integrity. It knows how you feel deep down about things like money and family and marriage, and it knows which kinds of people, topics of interest, and types of activities you truly enjoy, and which you don't. Your AV knows that it doesn't know how your life will or should play out, but it tends to have a strong hunch about the right step to take next.

And while the mammoth looks only to the outside world in its decision-making process, your Authentic Voice uses the outside world to learn and gather information, but when it's time for a decision, it has all the tools it needs right there in the core of your brain.

Your AV is also someone the mammoth tends to ignore entirely. A strong opinion from a confident person in the outside world? The mammoth is all ears. But a passionate plea from your AV is largely dismissed until someone else validates it.

And since our 50,000-year-old brains are wired to give the mammoth a whole lot of sway in things, your Authentic Voice starts to feel like it's irrelevant. Which makes it shrink and fade and lose motivation.

Eventually, a mammoth-run person can lose touch with their AV entirely.

In tribal times, AVs often spent their lives in quiet obscurity, and this was largely okay. Life was simple, and conformity was the goal-and the mammoth had conformity covered just fine.

But in today's large, complex world of varying cultures and personalities and opportunities and options, losing touch with your AV is dangerous. When you don't know who you are, the only decision-making mechanism you're left with is the crude and outdated needs and emotions of your mammoth. When it comes to the most personal questions, instead of digging deep into the foggy center of what you really believe in to find clarity, you'll look to others for the answers. Who you are becomes some blend of the strongest opinions around you.

Losing touch with your AV also makes you fragile, because when your identity is built on the approval of others, being criticized or rejected by others really hurts. A bad break-up is painful for everyone, but it stings in a much deeper place for a mammoth-run person than for a person with a strong AV. A strong AV makes a stable core, and after a break-up, that core is still holding firm-but since the acceptance of others is all a mammoth-run person has, being dumped by a person who knows you well is a far more shattering experience.

Likewise, you know those people who react to being criticized by coming back with a nasty low-blow? Those tend to be severely mammoth-run people, and criticism makes them so mad because mammoths cannot handle criticism.

At this point, the mission should be clear-we need to figure out a way to override the wiring of our brain and tame the mammoth. That's the only way to take our lives back.

Part 2: Taming the Mammoth

Some people are born with a reasonably tame mammoth or raised with parenting that helps keep the mammoth in check. Others die without ever reining their mammoth in at all, spending their whole lives at its whim. Most of us are somewhere in the middle-we've got control of our mammoth in certain areas of our lives while it wreaks havoc in others. Being run by your mammoth doesn't make you a bad or weak person-it just means you haven't yet figured out how to get a grip on it. You might not even be aware that you have a mammoth at all or of the extent to which your Authentic Voice has been silenced.

Whatever your situation, there are three steps to getting your mammoth under your control:

Step 1: Examine Yourself

The first step to improving things is a clear and honest assessment of what's going on in your head, and there are three parts of this:

1) Get to know your Authentic Voice

This doesn't sound that hard, but it is. It takes some serious reflection to sift through the webs of other people's thoughts and opinions and figure out who the real you actually is. You spend time with a lot of people-which of them do you actually like the most? How do you spend your leisure time, and do you truly enjoy all parts of it? Is there anything you regularly spend money on that you don't feel that comfortable with? How does your gut really feel about your job and relationship status? What's your true political opinion? Do you even care? Do you pretend to care about things you don't just to have an opinion? Do you secretly have an opinion on a political or moral issue you don't ever voice because people you know will be outraged?

There are cliché phrases for this process-"soul-searching" or "finding yourself"-but that's exactly what needs to happen. Maybe you can reflect on this from whatever chair you're sitting in right now or from some other part of your normal life-or maybe you need to go somewhere far away, by yourself, and step out of your life in order to effectively examine it. Either way, you've got to figure out what actually matters to you and start being proud of whoever your Authentic Voice is.

2) Figure out where the mammoth is hiding

Most of the time a mammoth is in control of a person, the person's not really aware of it. But you can't make progress if you're not crystal clear about where the biggest problem areas are.

The most obvious way to find the mammoth is to figure out where your fear is -where are you most susceptible to shame or embarrassment? What parts of your life do you think about and a dreadful, sinking feeling washes over you? Where does the prospect of failure seem like a nightmare? What are you too timid to publicly try even though you know you're good at it? If you were giving advice to yourself, which parts of your life would clearly need a change that you're avoiding acting on right now?

The second place a mammoth hides is in the way-too-good feelings you get from feeling accepted or on a pedestal over other people. Are you a serious pleaser at work or in your relationship? Are you terrified of disappointing your parents and do you choose making them proud over aiming to gratify yourself? Do you get too excited about being associated with prestigious things or care too much about status? Do you brag more than you should?

A third area the mammoth is present is anywhere you don't feel comfortable making a decision without "permission" or approval from others. Do you have opinions you're regurgitating from someone else's mouth, which you're comfortable having now that you know that person has them? When you introduce your new girlfriend or boyfriend to your friends or family for the first time, can those people's reaction to your new person fundamentally change your feelings for him/her? Is there a Puppet Master in your life? If so, who, and why?

3) Decide where the mammoth needs to be ousted

It's not realistic to kick the mammoth entirely out of your head-you're a human and humans have mammoths in their head, period. The thing we all need to do is carve out certain sacred areas of our lives that must be in the hands of the AV and free of mammoth influence. There are obvious areas that need to be made part of the AV's domain like your choice of life partner, your career path, and the way you raise your kids. Others are personal-it comes down to the question, "In which parts of your life must you be entirely true to yourself?"

Step 2: Gather Courage by Internalizing That the Mammoth Has a Low IQ

Real Woolly Mammoths were unimpressive enough to go extinct, and Social Survival Mammoths aren't any better. Despite the fact that they haunt us so, our mammoths are dumb, primitive creatures who have no understanding of the modern world. Deeply understanding this-and internalizing it-is a key step to taming yours. There are two major reasons not to take your mammoth seriously:

1) The mammoth's fears are totally irrational.

5 things the Mammoth is incorrect about:

→ Everyone is talking about me and my life and just think how much everyone will be talking about it if I do this risky or weird thing.

Here's how the mammoth thinks things are:

Here's how things actually are:

No one really cares that much about what you're doing. People are highly self-absorbed.

→ If I try really hard, I can please everyone.

Yes, maybe in a 40-person tribe with a unified culture. But in today's world, no matter who you are, a bunch of people will like you and a bunch of other people won't. Being approved of by one type of person means turning another off. So obsessing over fitting in with any one group is illogical, especially if that group isn't really who you are. You'll do all that work, and meanwhile, your actual favorite people are off being friends with each other somewhere else.

→ Being disapproved of or looked down upon or shit-talked about has real consequences in my life.

Anyone who disapproves of who you're being or what you're doing isn't even in the same room with you 99.7% of the time. It's a classic mammoth mistake to fabricate a vision of future social consequences that is way worse than what actually ends up happening-which is usually nothing at all.

Here's how judgy people function: They're highly mammoth-controlled and become good friends with and date other judgy people who are also highly mammoth-controlled. One of the primary activities they do together is talk shit about whoever's not with them-maybe they feel some jealousy, and eye-rolling disapproval helps them flip the script and feel less jealous, or maybe they're not jealous and use someone as a vehicle for bathing in schadenfreude -but whatever the underlying feeling, the judging serves to feed their hungry mammoth.

When people shit-talk, they set up a category division of which they're always on the right side. They do this to prop themselves up on a pedestal that their mammoth can chomp away on.

Being the material a judgy person uses to feel good about themselves is a fairly infuriating thought-but it has no actual consequences and it's clearly all much more about the judgy person and their mammoth problem than it is about you. If you find yourself making decisions partially based on not being talked badly about by a judgy person, think hard about what's actually going on and stop.

→ I'm a bad person if I disappoint or offend the person/people who love me and have invested so much in me.

No. You're not a bad person for being whoever your Authentic Voice is in your one life. This is one of those simple things-if they truly selflessly love you, they will for sure come around and accept everything once they see that you're happy. If you're happy and they still don't come around, here's what's happening: their strong feelings about who you should be or what you should do are their mammoth talking, and their main motivation is worrying about how it'll "look" to other people who know them. They're allowing their mammoth to override their love for you, and they should be adamantly ignored.

Two other reasons why the mammoth's fearful obsession with social approval makes no sense:

So who gives a fuck about anything?

B) You and everyone you know are going to die. Kind of soon.

So like...yeah.

The mammoth's fears being irrational is one reason the mammoth has a low IQ. Here's the second:

2) The mammoth's efforts are counterproductive.

The irony of the whole thing is that the obsessive lumbering mammoth isn't even good at his job. His methods of winning approval may have been effective in simpler times, but today, they're transparent and off-putting. The modern world is an AV's world, and if the mammoth wants to thrive socially, he should do the thing that scares him most-let the AV take over. Here's why:

AVs are interesting. Mammoths are boring. Every AV is unique and complex, which is inherently interesting. Mammoths are all the same-they copy and conform, and their motives aren't based on anything authentic or real, just on doing what they think they're supposed to do. That's supremely boring.

AVs lead. Mammoths follow. Leadership is natural for most AVs, because they draw their thoughts and opinions from an original place, which gives them an original angle. And if they're smart and innovative enough, they can change things in the world and invent things that disrupt the status quo. If you give someone a paintbrush and an empty canvas, they might not paint something good-but they'll change the canvas in one way or another.

Mammoths, on the other hand, follow-by definition. That's what they were built to do-blend in and follow the leader. The last thing a mammoth is going to do is change the status quo because it's trying so hard to be the status quo. When you give someone a paintbrush and canvas, but the paint is the same exact color as the canvas, they can paint all they want, but they won't change anything.

People gravitate toward AVs, not mammoths. The only time a mammoth-crazed person is appealing on a first date is when they're on the date with another mammoth-crazed person. People with a strong AV see through mammoth-controlled people and aren't attracted to them. A friend of mine was dating a great on-paper guy awhile back but broke things off because she couldn't quite fall for him. She tried to articulate why, saying he wasn't weird or special enough-he seemed like "just one of the guys." In other words, he was being run too much by a mammoth.

This also holds among friends or colleagues, where AV-run people are more respected and more magnetic-not because there's necessarily anything extraordinary about them, but because people respect someone with the strength of character to have tamed their mammoth.

Step 3: Start Being Yourself

This post was all fun and games until "start being yourself" came into the picture. Up to now, this has been an interesting reflection into why humans care so much what other people think, why that's bad, how it's a problem in your life, and why there's no good reason it should continue to plague you. But actually doing something after you finish reading this article is a whole different thing. That takes more than reflection-it takes some courage.

But courage against what, exactly? As we've discussed, there's no actual danger involved in being yourself-more than anything, it just takes an Emperor Has No Clothes epiphany, which is as simple as this:

Almost nothing you're socially scared of is actually scary.

Absorbing this thought will diminish the fear that you feel, and without fear, the mammoth loses some power.

With a weakened mammoth, it becomes possible to begin standing up for who you are and even making some bold changes-and when you watch those changes turn out well for you with few negative consequences and no regrets, it reinforces the epiphany and an empowered AV becomes a habit. Your mammoth has now lost its ability to pull the strings, and it's tamed.

The mammoth is still with you-it'll always be with you-but you'll have an easier time ignoring or overruling it when it speaks up or acts out, because the AV is the alpha dog now. You can start to relish the feeling of being viewed as weird or inappropriate or confusing to people, and society becomes your playground and blank canvas, not something to grovel before and hope for acceptance from.

Making this shift isn't easy for anyone, but it's worth obsessing over. Your Authentic Voice has been given one life-and it's your job to make sure it gets the opportunity to live it.

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More on life and happiness from Wait But Why
A different struggle going on in another part of your brain - Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

The thing I learned from Elon Musk that changed the way I think about my life: The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce

A deeper look at the deal with the mammoth and the other animals in your brain. A post that ties it all together - A Religion for the Nonreligious

To be happy, you have to know where happiness lives - Life is a Picture but You Live in a Pixel

Mammoths are not good at picking life partners - How to Pick Your Life Partner

You don't have that many weeks, unfortunately. Make them count. Your Life in Weeks

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Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think (Taming the Mammoth) - Wait But Why

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The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class-someone who hadn't been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me.

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The mind...can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. ― John Milton

The mind is certainly its own cosmos. - Alan Lightman

You go to school, study hard, get a degree, and you're pleased with yourself. But are you wiser?

You get a job, achieve things at the job, gain responsibility, get paid more, move to a better company, gain even more responsibility, get paid even more, rent an apartment with a parking spot, stop doing your own laundry, and you buy one of those $9 juices where the stuff settles down to the bottom. But are you happier?

You do all kinds of life things-you buy groceries, read articles, get haircuts, chew things, take out the trash, buy a car, brush your teeth, shit, sneeze, shave, stretch, get drunk, put salt on things, have sex with someone, charge your laptop, jog, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, buy a couch, close the curtains, button your shirt, wash your hands, zip your bag, set your alarm, fix your hair, order lunch, act friendly to someone, watch a movie, drink apple juice, and put a new paper towel roll on the thing.

But as you do these things day after day and year after year, are you improving as a human in a meaningful way?

In the last post, I described the way my own path had led me to be an atheist-but how in my satisfaction with being proudly nonreligious, I never gave serious thought to an active approach to internal improvement-hindering my own evolution in the process.

This wasn't just my own naiveté at work. Society at large focuses on shallow things, so it doesn't stress the need to take real growth seriously. The major institutions in the spiritual arena-religions-tend to focus on divinity over people, making salvation the end goal instead of self-improvement. The industries that do often focus on the human condition-philosophy, psychology, art, literature, self-help, etc.-lie more on the periphery, with their work often fragmented from each other. All of this sets up a world that makes it hard to treat internal growth as anything other than a hobby, an extra-curricular, icing on the life cake.

Considering that the human mind is an ocean of complexity that creates every part of our reality, working on what's going on in there seems like it should be a more serious priority. In the same way a growing business relies on a clear mission with a well thought-out strategy and measurable metrics, a growing human needs a plan -if we want to meaningfully improve, we need to define a goal, understand how to get there, become aware of obstacles in the way, and have a strategy to get past them.

When I dove into this topic, I thought about my own situation and whether I was improving. The efforts were there-apparent in many of this blog's post topics-but I had no growth model, no real plan, no clear mission. Just kind of haphazard attempts at self-improvement in one area or another, whenever I happened to feel like it. So I've attempted to consolidate my scattered efforts, philosophies, and strategies into a single framework-something solid I can hold onto in the future-and I'm gonna use this post to do a deep dive into it.

So settle in, grab some coffee, and get your brain out and onto the table in front of you-you'll want to have it there to reference as we explore what a weird, complicated object it is.

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Wisdom. More on that later.

By being aware of the truth. When I say "the truth," I'm not being one of those annoying people who says the word truth to mean some amorphous, mystical thing-I'm just referring to the actual facts of reality. The truth is a combination of what we know and what we don't know-and gaining and maintaining awareness of both sides of this reality is the key to being wise.

Easy, right? We don't have to know more than we know, we only have to be aware of what we know and what we don't know. Truth is in plain sight, written on the whiteboard-we just have to look at the board and reflect upon it. There's just this one thing-

The fog.

To understand the fog, let's first be clear that we're not here:

We're here:

And this isn't the situation:

This is:

This is a really hard concept for humans to absorb, but it's the starting place for growth. Declaring ourselves "conscious" allows us to call it a day and stop thinking about it. I like to think of it as a consciousness staircase:

An ant is more conscious than a bacterium, a chicken more than an ant, a monkey more than a chicken, and a human more than a monkey. But what's above us?

A) Definitely something, and B) Nothing we can understand better than a monkey can understand our world and how we think.

There's no reason to think the staircase doesn't extend upwards forever. The red alien a few steps above us on the staircase would see human consciousness the same way we see that of an orangutan-they might think we're pretty impressive for an animal, but that of course we don't actually begin to understand anything. Our most brilliant scientist would be outmatched by one of their toddlers.

To the green alien up there higher on the staircase, the red alien might seem as intelligent and conscious as a chicken seems to us. And when the green alien looks at us, it sees the simplest little pre-programmed ants.

We can't conceive of what life higher on the staircase would be like, but absorbing the fact that higher stairs exist and trying to view ourselves from the perspective of one of those steps is the key mindset we need to be in for this exercise.

For now, let's ignore those much higher steps and just focus on the step right above us-that light green step. A species on that step might think of us like we think of a three-year-old child- emerging into consciousness through a blur of simplicity and naiveté. Let's imagine that a representative from that species was sent to observe humans and report back to his home planet about them-what would he think of the way we thought and behaved? What about us would impress him? What would make him cringe?

I think he'd very quickly see a conflict going on in the human mind. On one hand, all of those steps on the staircase below the human are where we grew from. Hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary adaptations geared toward animal survival in a rough world are very much rooted in our DNA, and the primitive impulses in us have birthed a bunch of low-grade qualities-fear, pettiness, jealousy, greed, instant-gratification, etc. Those qualities are the remnants of our animal past and still a prominent part of our brains, creating a zoo of small-minded emotions and motivations in our heads:

But over the past six million years, our evolutionary line has experienced a rapid growth in consciousness and the incredible ability to reason in a way no other species on Earth can. We've taken a big step up the consciousness staircase, very quickly-let's call this burgeoning element of higher consciousness our Higher Being.

The Higher Being is brilliant, big-thinking, and totally rational. But on the grand timescale, he's a very new resident in our heads, while the primal animal forces are ancient, and their coexistence in the human mind makes it a strange place:

So it's not that a human is the Higher Being and the Higher Being is three years old-it's that a human is the combination of the Higher Being and the low-level animals, and they blend into the three-year-old that we are. The Higher Being alone would be a more advanced species, and the animals alone would be one far more primitive, and it's their particular coexistence that makes us distinctly human.

As humans evolved and the Higher Being began to wake up, he looked around your brain and found himself in an odd and unfamiliar jungle full of powerful primitive creatures that didn't understand who or what he was. His mission was to give you clarity and high-level thought, but with animals tramping around his work environment, it wasn't an easy job. And things were about to get much worse. Human evolution continued to make the Higher Being more and more sentient, until one day, he realized something shocking:

It marked the first time any species on planet Earth was conscious enough to understand that fact, and it threw all of those animals in the brain-who were not built to handle that kind of information-into a complete frenzy, sending the whole ecosystem into chaos:

The animals had never experienced this kind of fear before, and their freakout about this-one that continues today-was the last thing the Higher Being needed as he was trying to grow and learn and make decisions for us.

The adrenaline-charged animals romping around our brain can take over our mind, clouding our thoughts, judgment, sense of self, and understanding of the world. The collective force of the animals is what I call "the fog." The more the animals are running the show and making us deaf and blind to the thoughts and insights of the Higher Being, the thicker the fog is around our head, often so thick we can only see a few inches in front of our face:

Let's think back to our goal above and our path to it-being aware of the truth. The Higher Being can see the truth just fine in almost any situation. But when the fog is thick around us, blocking our eyes and ears and coating our brain, we have no access to the Higher Being or his insight. This is why being continually aware of the truth is so hard-we're too lost in the fog to see it or think about it.

And when the alien representative is finished observing us and heads back to his home planet, I think this would be his sum-up of our problems:

The battle of the Higher Being against the animals-of trying to see through the fog to clarity-is the core internal human struggle.

This struggle in our heads takes place on many fronts. We've examined a few of them here: the Higher Being (in his role as the Rational Decision Maker) fighting the Instant Gratification Monkey; the Higher Being (in the role of the Authentic Voice) battling against the overwhelmingly scared Social Survival Mammoth; the Higher Being's message that life is just a bunch of Todays getting lost in the blinding light of fog-based yearning for better tomorrows. Those are all part of the same core conflict between our primal past and our enlightened future.

The shittiest thing about the fog is that when you're in the fog, it blocks your vision so you can't see that you're in the fog. It's when the fog is thickest that you're the least aware that it's there at all-it makes you unconscious. Being aware that the fog exists and learning how to recognize it is the key first step to rising up in consciousness and becoming a wiser person.

So we've established that our goal is wisdom, that to get there we need to become as aware as possible of the truth, and that the main thing standing in our way is the fog. Let's zoom in on the battlefield to look at why "being aware of the truth" is so important and how we can overcome the fog to get there:

No matter how hard we tried, it would be impossible for humans to access that light green step one above us on the consciousness staircase. Our advanced capability-the Higher Being-just isn't there yet. Maybe in a million years or two. For now, the only place this battle can happen is on the one step where we live, so that's where we're going to zoom in. We need to focus on the mini spectrum of consciousness within our step, which we can do by breaking our step down into four substeps:

Climbing this mini consciousness staircase is the road to truth, the way to wisdom, my personal mission for growth, and a bunch of other cliché statements I never thought I'd hear myself say. We just have to understand the game and work hard to get good at it.

Let's look at each step to try to understand the challenges we're dealing with and how we can make progress:

Step 1: Our Lives in the Fog

Step 1 is the lowest step, the foggiest step, and unfortunately, for most of us it's our default level of existence. On Step 1, the fog is all up in our shit, thick and close and clogging our senses, leaving us going through life unconscious. Down here, the thoughts, values, and priorities of the Higher Being are completely lost in the blinding fog and the deafening roaring, tweeting, honking, howling, and squawking of the animals in our heads. This makes us 1) small-minded, 2) short-sighted, and 3) stupid. Let's discuss each of these:

1) On Step 1, you're terribly small-minded because the animals are running the show.

When I look at the wide range of motivating emotions that humans experience, I don't see them as a scattered range, but rather falling into two distinct bins: the high-minded, love-based, advanced emotions of the Higher Being, and the small-minded, fear-based, primitive emotions of our brain animals.

And on Step 1, we're completely intoxicated by the animal emotions as they roar at us through the dense fog.

This is what makes us petty and jealous and what makes us so thoroughly enjoy the misfortune of others. It's what makes us scared, anxious, and insecure. It's why we're self-absorbed and narcissistic; vain and greedy; narrow-minded and judgmental; cold, callous, and even cruel. And only on Step 1 do we feel that primitive "us versus them" tribalism that makes us hate people different than us.

You can find most of these same emotions in a clan of capuchin monkeys-and that makes sense, because at their core, these emotions can be boiled down to the two keys of animal survival: self-preservation and the need to reproduce.

Step 1 emotions are brutish and powerful and grab you by the collar, and when they're upon you, the Higher Being and his high-minded, love-based emotions are shoved into the sewer.

2) On Step 1, you're short-sighted, because the fog is six inches in front of your face, preventing you from seeing the big picture.

The fog explains all kinds of totally illogical and embarrassingly short-sighted human behavior.

Why else would anyone ever take a grandparent or parent for granted while they're around, seeing them only occasionally, opening up to them only rarely, and asking them barely any questions-even though after they die, you can only think about how amazing they were and how you can't believe you didn't relish the opportunity to enjoy your relationship with them and get to know them better when they were around?

Why else would people brag so much, even though if they could see the big picture, it would be obvious that everyone finds out about the good things in your life eventually either way-and that you always serve yourself way more by being modest?

Why else would someone do the bare minimum at work, cut corners on work projects, and be dishonest about their efforts-when anyone looking at the big picture would know that in a work environment, the truth about someone's work habits eventually becomes completely apparent to both bosses and colleagues, and you're never really fooling anyone? Why would someone insist on making sure everyone knows when they did something valuable for the company-when it should be obvious that acting that way is transparent and makes it seem like you're working hard just for the credit, while just doing things well and having one of those things happen to be noticed does much more for your long term reputation and level of respect at the company?

If not for thick fog, why would anyone ever pinch pennies over a restaurant bill or keep an unpleasantly-rigid scorecard of who paid for what on a trip, when everyone reading this could right now give each of their friends a quick and accurate 1-10 rating on the cheap-to-generous (or selfish-to-considerate) scale, and the few hundred bucks you save over time by being on the cheap end of the scale is hardly worth it considering how much more likable and respectable it is to be generous?

What other explanation is there for the utterly inexplicabledecision by so many famous men in positions of power to bring down the career and marriage they spent their lives building by having an affair?

And why would anyone bend and loosen their integrity for tiny insignificant gains when integrity affects your long-term self-esteem and tiny insignificant gains affect nothing in the long term?

How else could you explain the decision by so many people to let the fear of what others might think dictate the way they live, when if they could see clearly they'd realize that A) that's a terrible reason to do or not do something, and B) no one's really thinking about you anyway-they're buried in their own lives.

And then there are all the times when someone's opaque blinders keep them in the wrong relationship, job, city, apartment, friendship, etc. for years, sometimes decades, only for them to finally make a change and say "I can't believe I didn't do this earlier," or "I can't believe I couldn't see how wrong that was for me." They should absolutely believe it, because that's the power of the fog.

3) On Step 1, you're very, very stupid.

One way this stupidity shows up is in us making the same obvious mistakes over and over and over again. 1

The most glaring example is the way the fog convinces us, time after time after time, that certain things will make us happy that in reality absolutely don't. The fog lines up a row of carrots, tells us that they're the key to happiness, and tells us to forget today's happiness in favor of directing all of our hope to all the happiness the future will hold because we're gonna get those carrots.

And even though the fog has proven again and again that it has no idea how human happiness works-even though we've had so many experiences finally getting a carrot and feeling a ton of temporary happiness, only to watch that happiness fade right back down to our default level a few days later-we continue to fall for the trick.

It's like hiring a nutritionist to help you with your exhaustion, and they tell you that the key is to drink an espresso shot anytime you're tired. So you'd try it and think the nutritionist was a genius until an hour later when it dropped you like an anvil back into exhaustion. You go back to the nutritionist, who gives you the same advice, so you try it again and the same thing happens. That would probably be it right? You'd fire the nutritionist. Right? So why are we so gullible when it comes to the fog's advice on happiness and fulfillment?

The fog is also much more harmful than the nutritionist because not only does it give us terrible advice- but the fog itself is the source of unhappiness. The only real solution to exhaustion is to sleep, and the only real way to improve happiness in a lasting way is to make progress in the battle against the fog.

There's a concept in psychology called The Hedonic Treadmill, which suggests that humans have a stagnant default happiness level and when something good or bad happens, after an initial change in happiness, we always return to that default level. And on Step 1, this is completely true of course, given that trying to become permanently happier while in the fog is like trying to dry your body off while standing under the shower with the water running.

But I refuse to believe the same species that builds skyscrapers, writes symphonies, flies to the moon, and understands what a Higgs boson is is incapable of getting off the treadmill and actually improving in a meaningful way.

I think the way to do it is by learning to climb this consciousness staircase to spend more of our time on Steps 2, 3, and 4, and less of it mired unconsciously in the fog.

Step 2: Thinning the Fog to Reveal Context

Humans can do something amazing that no other creature on Earth can do-they can imagine. If you show an animal a tree, they see a tree. Only a human can imagine the acorn that sunk into the ground 40 years earlier, the small flimsy stalk it was at three years old, how stark the tree must look when it's winter, and the eventual dead tree lying horizontally in that same place.

This is the magic of the Higher Being in our heads.

On the other hand, the animals in your head, like their real world relatives, can only see a tree, and when they see one, they react instantly to it based on their primitive needs. When you're on Step 1, your unconscious animal-run state doesn't even remember that the Higher Being exists, and his genius abilities go to waste.

Step 2 is all about thinning out the fog enough to bring the Higher Being's thoughts and abilities into your consciousness, allowing you to see behind and around the things that happen in life. Step 2 is about bringing context into your awareness, which reveals a far deeper and more nuanced version of the truth.

There are plenty of activities or undertakings that can help thin out your fog. To name three:

1) Learning more about the world through education, travel, and life experience-as your perspective broadens, you can see a clearer and more accurate version of the truth.

2) Active reflection. This is what a journal can help with, or therapy, which is basically examining your own brain with the help of a fog expert. Sometimes a hypothetical question can be used as "fog goggles," allowing you to see something clearly through the fog-questions like, "What would I do if money were no object?" or "How would I advise someone else on this?" or "Will I regret not having done this when I'm 80?" These questions are a way to ask your Higher Being's opinion on something without the animals realizing what's going on, so they'll stay calm and the Higher Being can actually talk-like when parents spell out a word in front of their four-year-old when they don't want him to know what they're saying. 2

3) Meditation, exercise, yoga, etc.-activities that help quiet the brain's unconscious chatter, i.e. allowing the fog to settle.

But the easiest and most effective way to thin out the fog is simply to be aware of it. By knowing that fog exists, understanding what it is and the different forms it takes, and learning to recognize when you're in it, you hinder its ability to run your life. You can't get to Step 2 if you don't know when you're on Step 1.

The way to move onto Step 2 is by remembering to stay aware of the context behind and around what you see, what you come across, and the decisions you make. That's it-remaining cognizant of the fog and remembering to look at the whole context keeps you conscious, aware of reality, and as you'll see, makes you a much better version of yourself than you are on Step 1. Some examples-

Here's what a rude cashier looks like on Step 1 vs. Step 2:

Here's what gratitude looks like:

Something good happening:

Something bad happening:

That phenomenon where everything suddenly seems horrible late at night in bed:

A flat tire:

Long-term consequences:

Looking at context makes us aware how much we actually know about most situations (as well as what we don't know, like what the cashier's day was like so far), and it reminds us of the complexity and nuance of people, life, and situations. When we're on Step 2, this broader scope and increased clarity makes us feel calmer and less fearful of things that aren't actually scary, and the animals-who gain their strength from fear and thrive off of unconsciousness-suddenly just look kind of ridiculous:

When the small-minded animal emotions are less in our face, the more advanced emotions of the Higher Being-love, compassion, humility, empathy, etc.-begin to light up.

The good news is there's no learning required to be on Step 2-your Higher Being already knows the context around all of these life situations. It doesn't take hard work, and no additional information or expertise is needed-you only have to consciously think about being on Step 2 instead of Step 1 and you're there. You're probably there right now just by reading this.

The bad news is that it's extremely hard to stay on Step 2 for long. The Catch-22 here is that it's not easy to stay conscious of the fog because the fog makes you unconscious.

That's the first challenge at hand. You can't get rid of the fog, and you can't always keep it thin, but you can get better at noticing when it's thick and develop effective strategies for thinning it out whenever you consciously focus on it. If you're evolving successfully, as you get older, you should be spending more and more time on Step 2 and less and less on Step 1.

Step 3: Shocking Reality

I . . . a universe of atoms . . . an atom in the universe. - Richard Feynman

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Step 3 is when things start to get weird. Even on the more enlightened Step 2, we kind of think we're here:

As delightful as that is, it's a complete delusion. We live our days as if we're just here on this green and brown land with our blue sky and our chipmunks and our caterpillars. But this is actually what's happening:

But even more actually, this is happening:

We also tend to kind of think this is the situation:

When really, it's this:

You might even think you're a thing. Do you?

No you're a ton of these:

This is the next iteration of truth on our little staircase, and our brains can't really handle it. Asking a human to internalize the vastness of space or the eternity of time or the tininess of atoms is like asking a dog to stand up on its hind legs-you can do it if you focus, but it's a strain and you can't hold it for very long. 3

You can think about the facts anytime-The Big Bang was 13.8 billion years ago, which is about 130,000 times longer than humans have existed; if the sun were a ping pong ball in New York, the closest star to us would be a ping pong ball in Atlanta; the Milky Way is so big that if you made a scale model of it that was the size of the US, you would still need a microscope to see the sun; atoms are so small that there are about as many atoms in one grain of salt as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. But once in a while, when you deeply reflect on one of these facts, or when you're in the right late night conversation with the right person, or when you're staring at the stars, or when you think too hard about what death actually means-you have a Whoa moment.

A true Whoa moment is hard to come by and even harder to maintain for very long, like our dog's standing difficulties. Thinking about this level of reality is like looking at an amazing photo of the Grand Canyon; a Whoa moment is like being at the Grand Canyon-the two experiences are similar but somehow vastly different. Facts can be fascinating, but only in a Whoa moment does your brain actually wrap itself around true reality. In a Whoa moment, your brain for a second transcends what it's been built to do and offers you a brief glimpse into the astonishing truth of our existence. And a Whoa moment is how you get to Step 3.

I love Whoa moments. They make me feel some intense combination of awe, elation, sadness, and wonder. More than anything, they make me feel ridiculously, profoundly humble-and that level of humility does weird things to a person. In those moments, all those words religious people use-awe, worship, miracle, eternal connection-make perfect sense. I want to get on my knees and surrender. This is when I feel spiritual.

And in those fleeting moments, there is no fog-my Higher Being is in full flow and can see everything in perfect clarity. The normally-complicated world of morality is suddenly crystal clear, because the only fathomable emotions on Step 3 are the most high-level. Any form of pettiness or hatred is a laughable concept up on Step 3-with no fog to obscure things, the animals are completely naked, exposed for the sad little creatures that they are.

On Step 1, I snap back at the rude cashier, who had the nerve to be a dick to me. On Step 2, the rudeness doesn't faze me because I know it's about him, not me, and that I have no idea what his day or life has been like. On Step 3, I see myself as a miraculous arrangement of atoms in vast space that for a split second in endless eternity has come together to form a moment of consciousness that is my life...and I see that cashier as another moment of consciousness that happens to exist on the same speck of time and space that I do. And the only possible emotion I could have for him on Step 3 is love.

In a Whoa moment's transcendent level of consciousness, I see every interaction, every motivation, every news headline in unusual clarity-and difficult life decisions are much more obvious. I feel wise.

Of course, if this were my normal state, I'd be teaching monks somewhere on a mountain in Myanmar, and I'm not teaching any monks anywhere because it's not my normal state. Whoa moments are rare and very soon after one, I'm back down here being a human again. But the emotions and the clarity of Step 3 are so powerful, that even after you topple off the step, some of it sticks around. Each time you humiliate the animals, a little bit of their future power over you is diminished. And that's why Step 3 is so important-even though no one that I know can live permanently on Step 3, regular visits help you dramatically in the ongoing Step 1 vs Step 2 battle, which makes you a better and happier person.

Step 3 is also the answer to anyone who accuses atheists of being amoral or cynical or nihilistic, or wonders how atheists find any meaning in life without the hope and incentive of an afterlife. That's a Step 1 way to view an atheist, where life on Earth is taken for granted and it's assumed that any positive impulse or emotion must be due to circumstances outside of life. On Step 3, I feel immensely lucky to be alive and can't believe how cool it is that I'm a group of atoms that can think about atoms-on Step 3, life itself is more than enough to make me excited, hopeful, loving, and kind. But Step 3 is only possible because science has cleared the way there, which is why Carl Sagan said that "science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality." In this way, science is the "prophet" of this framework-the one who reveals new truth to us and gives us an opportunity to alter ourselves by accessing it.

So to recap so far-on Step 1, you're in a delusional bubble that Step 2 pops. On Step 2, there's much more clarity about life, but it's within a much bigger delusional bubble, one that Step 3 pops. But Step 3 is supposed to be total, fog-free clarity on truth-so how could there be another step?

Step 4: The Great Unknown

If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. - Carl Sagan

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The game so far has for the most part been clearing out fog to become as conscious as possible of what we as people and as a species know about truth:

On Step 4, we're reminded of the complete truth-which is this:

The fact is, any discussion of our full reality-of the truth of the universe or our existence-is a complete delusion without acknowledging that big purple blob that makes up almost all of that reality.

But you know humans-they don't like that purple blob one bit. Never have. The blob frightens and humiliates humans, and we have a rich history of denying its existence entirely, which is like living on the beach and pretending the ocean isn't there. Instead, we just stamp our foot and claim that now we've finally figured it all out. On the religious side, we invent myths and proclaim them as truth-and even a devout religious believer reading this who stands by the truth of their particular book would agree with me about the fabrication of the other few thousand books out there. On the science front, we've managed to be consistently gullible in believing that "realizing you've been horribly wrong about reality" is a phenomenon only of the past.

Having our understanding of reality overturned by a new groundbreaking discovery is like a shocking twist in this epic mystery novel humanity is reading, and scientific progress is regularly dotted with these twists-the Earth being round, the solar system being heliocentric, not geocentric, the discovery of subatomic particles or galaxies other than our own, and evolutionary theory, to name a few. So how is it possible, with the knowledge of all those breakthroughs, that Lord Kelvin, one of history's greatest scientists, said in the year 1900, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" 4-i.e. this time, all the twists actually are finished.

Of course, Kelvin was as wrong as every other arrogant scientist in history-the theory of general relativity and then the theory of quantum mechanics would both topple science on its face over the next century.

Even if we acknowledge today that there will be more twists in the future, we're probably kind of inclined to think we've figured out most of the major things and have a far closer-to-complete picture of reality than the people who thought the Earth was flat. Which, to me, sounds like this:

The fact is, let's remember that we don't know what the universe is. Is it everything? Is it one tiny bubble in a multiverse frothing with bubbles? Is it not a bubble at all but an optical illusion hologram? And we know about the Big Bang, but was that the beginning of everything? Did something arise from nothing, or was it just the latest in a long series of expansion/collapse cycles? 5 We have no clue what dark matter is, only that there's a shit-ton of it in the universe, and when we discussed The Fermi Paradox, it became entirely clear that science has no idea about whether there's other life out there or how advanced it might be. How about String Theory, which claims to be the secret to unifying the two grand but seemingly-unrelated theories of the physical world, general relativity and quantum mechanics? It's either the grandest theory we've ever come up with or totally false, and there are great scientists on both sides of this debate. And as laypeople, all we need to do is take a look at those two well-accepted theories to realize how vastly different reality can be from how it seems: like general relativity telling us that if you flew to a black hole and circled around it a few times in intense gravity and then returned to Earth a few hours after you left, decades would have passed on Earth while you were gone. And that's like an ice cream cone compared to the insane shit quantum mechanics tells us-like two particles across the universe from one another being mysteriously linked to each other's behavior, or a cat that's both alive and dead at the same time, until you look at it.

And the thing is, everything I just mentioned is still within the realm of our understanding. As we established earlier, compared to a more evolved level of consciousness, we might be like a three-year-old, a monkey, or an ant-so why would we assume that we're even capable of understanding everything in that purple blob? A monkey can't understand that the Earth is a round planet, let alone that the solar system, galaxy, or universe exists. You could try to explain it to a monkey for years and it wouldn't be possible. So what are we completely incapable of grasping even if a more intelligent species tried its hardest to explain it to us? Probably almost everything.

There are really two options when thinking about the big, big picture: be humble or be absurd.

The nonsensical thing about humans feigning certainty because we're scared is that in the old days, when it seemed on the surface that we were the center of all creation, uncertainty was frightening because it made our reality seem so much bleaker than we had thought-but now, with so much more uncovered, things look highly bleak for us as people and as a species, so our fear should welcome uncertainty. Given my default outlook that I have a small handful of decades left and then an eternity of nonexistence, the fact that we might be totally wrong sounds tremendously hopeful to me.

Ironically, when my thinking reaches the top of this rooted-in-atheism staircase, the notion that something that seems divine to us might exist doesn't seem so ridiculous anymore. I'm still totally atheist when it comes to all human-created conceptions of a divine higher force-which all, in my opinion, proclaim far too much certainty. But could a super-advanced force exist? It seems more than likely. Could we have been created by something/someone bigger than us or be living as part of a simulation without realizing it? Sure-I'm a three-year-old, remember, so who am I to say no?

To me, complete rational logic tells me to be atheist about all of the Earth's religions and utterly agnostic about the nature of our existence or the possible existence of a higher being. I don't arrive there via any form of faith, just by logic.

I find Step 4 mentally mind-blowing but I'm not sure I'm ever quite able to access it in a spiritual way like I sometimes can with Step 3-Step 4 Whoa moments might be reserved for Einstein-level thinkers-but even if I can't get my feet up on Step 4, I can know it's there, what it means, and I can remind myself of its existence. So what does that do for me as a human?

Well remember that powerful humility I mentioned in Step 3? It multiplies that by 100. For reasons I just discussed, it makes me feel more hopeful. And it leaves me feeling pleasantly resigned to the fact that I will never understand what's going on, which makes me feel like I can take my hand off the wheel, sit back, relax, and just enjoy the ride. In this way, I think Step 4 can make us live more in the present-if I'm just a molecule floating around an ocean I can't understand, I might as well just enjoy it.

The way Step 4 can serve humanity is by helping to crush the notion of certainty. Certainty is primitive, leads to "us versus them" tribalism, and starts wars. We should be united in our uncertainty, not divided over fabricated certainty. And the more humans turn around and look at that big purple blob, the better off we'll be.

Nothing clears fog like a deathbed, which is why it's then that people can always see with more clarity what they should have done differently-I wish I had spent less time working; I wish I had communicated with my wife more; I wish I had traveled more; etc. The goal of personal growth should be to gain that deathbed clarity while your life is still happening so you can actually do something about it.

The way you do that is by developing as much wisdom as possible, as early as possible. To me, wisdom is the most important thing to work towards as a human. It's the big objective-the umbrella goal under which all other goals fall into place. I believe I have one and only one chance to live, and I want to do it in the most fulfilled and meaningful way possible-that's the best outcome for me, and I do a lot more good for the world that way. Wisdom gives people the insight to know what "fulfilled and meaningful" actually means and the courage to make the choices that will get them there.

And while life experience can contribute to wisdom, I think wisdom is mostly already in all of our heads-it's everything the Higher Being knows. When we're not wise, it's because we don't have access to the Higher Being's wisdom because it's buried in fog. The fog is anti-wisdom, and when you move up the staircase into a clearer place, wisdom is simply a by-product of that increased consciousness.

One thing I learned at some point is that growing old or growing tall is not the same as growing up. Being a grownup is about your level of wisdom and the size of your mind's scope-and it turns out that it doesn't especially correlate with age. After a certain age, growing up is about overcoming your fog, and that's about the person, not the age. I know some supremely wise older people, but there are also a lot of people my age who seem much wiser than their parents about a lot of things. Someone on a growth path whose fog thins as they age will become wiser with age, but I find the reverse happens with people who don't actively grow-the fog hardens around them and they actually become even less conscious, and even more certain about everything, with age.

When I think about people I know, I realize that my level of respect and admiration for a person is almost entirely in line with how wise and conscious a person I think they are. The people I hold in the highest regard are the grownups in my life-and their ages completely vary.

Another Look at Religion in Light of this Framework:

This discussion helps clarify my issues with traditional organized religion. There are plenty of good people, good ideas, good values, and good wisdom in the religious world, but to me that seems like something happening in spite of religion and not because of it. Using religion for growth requires an innovative take on things, since at a fundamental level, most religions seem to treat people like children instead of pushing them to grow. Many of today's religions play to people's fog with "believe in this or else..." fear-mongering and books that are often a rallying cry for 'us vs. them' divisiveness. They tell people to look to ancient scripture for answers instead of the depths of the mind, and their stubborn certainty when it comes to right and wrong often leaves them at the back of the pack when it comes to the evolution of social issues. Their certainty when it comes to history ends up actively pushing their followers away from truth-as evidenced by the 42% of Americans who have been deprived of knowing the truth about evolution. (An even worse staircase criminal is the loathsome world of American politics, with a culture that lives on Step 1 and where politicians appeal directly to people's animals, deliberately avoiding anything on Steps 2-4.)

Yes, I'm an atheist, but atheism isn't a growth model any more than "I don't like rollerblading" is a workout strategy.

So I'm making up a term for what I am-I'm a Truthist. In my framework, truth is what I'm always looking for, truth is what I worship, and learning to see truth more easily and more often is what leads to growth.

In Truthism, the goal is to grow wiser over time, and wisdom falls into your lap whenever you're conscious enough to see the truth about people, situations, the world, or the universe. The fog is what stands in your way, making you unconscious, delusional, and small-minded, so the key day-to-day growth strategy is staying cognizant of the fog and training your mind to try to see the full truth in any situation.

Over time, you want your [Time on Step 2] / [Time on Step 1] ratio to go up a little bit each year, and you want to get better and better at inducing Step 3 Whoa moments and reminding yourself of the Step 4 purple blob. If you do those things, I think you're evolving in the best possible way, and it will have profound effects on all aspects of your life.

That's it. That's Truthism.

Am I a good Truthist? I'm okay. Better than I used to be with a long way to go. But defining this framework will help-I'll know where to put my focus, what to be wary of, and how to evaluate my progress, which will help me make sure I'm actually improving and lead to quicker growth.

To help keep me on mission, I made a Truthism logo:

That's my symbol, my mantra, my WWJD-it's the thing I can look at when something good or bad happens, when a big decision is at hand, or on a normal day as a reminder to stay aware of the fog and keep my eye on the big picture.

My challenge to you is to decide on a term for yourself that accurately sums up your growth framework.

If Christianity is your thing and it's genuinely helping you grow, that word can be Christian. Maybe you already have your own clear, well-defined advancement strategy and you just need a name for it. Maybe Truthism hit home for you, resembles the way you already think, and you want to try being a Truthist with me.

Or maybe you have no idea what your growth framework is, or what you're using isn't working. If either A) you don't feel like you've evolved in a meaningful way in the past couple years, or B) you aren't able to corroborate your values and philosophies with actual reasoning that matters to you, then you need to find a new framework.

To do this, just ask yourself the same questions I asked myself: What's the goal that you want to evolve towards (and why is that the goal), what does the path look like that gets you there, what's in your way, and how do you overcome those obstacles? What are your practices on a day-to-day level, and what should your progress look like year-to-year? Most importantly, how do you stay strong and maintain the practice for years and years, not four days? After you've thought that through, name the framework and make a symbol or mantra. (Then share your strategy in the comments or email me about it, because articulating it helps clarify it in your head, and because it's useful and interesting for others to hear about your framework.)

I hope I've convinced you how important this is. Don't wait until your deathbed to figure out what life is all about.

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Three other Wait But Why posts about things we should try to remember every day:
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel

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Religion for the Nonreligious - Wait But Why

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The mind...can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. ― John Milton The mind is certainly its own cosmos. - Alan Lightman You go to school, study hard, get a degree, and you're pleased with yourself. But are you wiser?

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When you say the word "me," you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It's one of the things you're cleareston in the whole world-something you've understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, "Who amI?" but what you're figuring out is the who am part of the question-the I part is obvious. It's just you. Easy.

But when you stop and actually think about it for a minute-about what "me" really boils down to at its core-things start to get pretty weird. Let's give it a try.

We'll start with the first thing most people equate with what a person is-the physical body itself. The Body Theory says that that's what makes you you. And that would make sense. It doesn't matter what's happening in your life-if your body stops working, you die. If Mark goes through something traumatic and his family says, "It really changed him-he's just not the same person anymore," they don't literally mean Mark isn't the same person-he's changed, but he's still Mark, because Mark's body is Mark, no matter what he's acting like. Humans believe they're so much more than a hunk of flesh and bone, but in the end, a physical ant is the ant, a squirrel's body is the squirrel, and a human is its body. This is the Body Theory-let's test it:

So what happens when you cut your fingernails? You're changing your body, severing some of its atoms from the whole. Does that mean you're not you anymore? Definitely not-you're still you.

How about if you get a liver transplant? Bigger deal, but definitely still you, right?

What if you get a terrible disease and need to replace your liver, kidney, heart, lungs, blood, and facial tissue with synthetic parts, but after all the surgery, you're fine and can live your life normally. Would your family say that you had died because most of your physical body was gone? No, they wouldn't. You'd still be you. None of that is needed for you to be you.

Well maybe it's your DNA? Maybe that's the core thing that makes you you, and none of these organ transplants matter because your remaining cells all still contain your DNA, and they're what maintains "you." One major problem-identical twins have identical DNA, and they're not the same person. You are you, and your identical twin is most certainly not you. DNA isn't the answer.

So far, the Body Theory isn't looking too good. We keep changing major parts of the body, and you keep being you.

But how about your brain?

Let's say a mad scientist captures both you and Bill Clinton and locks the two of you up in a room.

The scientist then performs an operation on both of you, whereby he safely removes each of your brains and switches them into the other's head. Then he seals up your skulls and wakes you both up. You look down and you're in a totally different body-Bill Clinton's body. And across the room, you see your body-with Bill Clinton's personality.

Now, are you still you? Well, my intuition says that you're you-you still have your exact personality and all your memories-you're just in Bill Clinton's body now. You'd go find your family to explain what happened:

Consider this-

Philosopher John Locke's memory theory of personal identity suggests that what makes you you is your memory of your experiences. Under Locke's definition of you, the new Bill Clinton in this latest example is you, despite not containing any part of your physical body, not even your brain.

This suggests a new theory we'll call The Data Theory, which says that you're not your physical body at all. Maybe what makes you you is your brain's data -your memories and your personality.

We seem to be homing in on something, but the best way to get to concrete answers is by testing these theories in hypothetical scenarios. Here's an interesting one, conceived by British philosopher Bernard Williams:

Situation 1:The mad scientist kidnaps you and Clinton, switches your brain data with Clinton's, as in the latest example, wakes you both up, and then walks over to the body of Clinton, where you supposedly reside, and says, "I'm now going to horribly torture one of you-which one should I torture?"

Situation 2:The mad scientist captures you and Clinton, except he doesn't do anything to your brains yet. He comes over to you-normal you with your normal brain and body-and asks you a series of questions. Here's how I think it would play out:

Mad Scientist: Okay so here's what's happening. I'm gonna torture one of you. Who should I torture?

You: [pointing at Clinton] Him.

MS: Okay but there's something else-before I torture whoever I torture, I'm going to wipe both of your brains of all memories, so when the torture is happening, neither of you will remember who you were before this. Does that change your choice?

You: Nope. Torture him.

MS: One more thing-before the torture happens, not only am I going to wipe your brains clean, I'm going to build new circuitry into your brain that will convince you that you're Bill Clinton. By the time I'm done, you'll think you're Bill Clinton and you'll have all of his memories and his full personality and anything else that he thinks or feels or knows. I'll do the same thing to him, convincing him he's you. Does that change your choice?

You: Um, no. Regardless of any delusion I'm going through and no matter who I think I am, I don't want to go through the horrible pain of being tortured. Insane people still feel pain. Torture him.

So in the first situation, I think you'd choose to have your own body tortured. But in the second, I think you'd choose Bill Clinton's body-at least I would. But the thing is- they're the exact same example. In both cases, before any torture happens, Clinton's brain ends up with all of your data and your brain has his-the difference is just at which point in the process you were asked to decide. In both cases, your goal is for you to not be tortured, but in the first situation, you felt that after the brain data swap, you were in Clinton's body, with all of your personality and memories there with you-while in the second situation, if you're like me, you didn't care what was going to happen with the two brains' data, you believed that you would remain with your physical brain, and body, either way.

Choosing your body to be the one tortured in the first situation is an argument for the Data Theory-you believe that where your data goes, you go. Choosing Clinton's body to be tortured in the second situation is an argument for the Brain Theory, because you believe that regardless of what he does with your brain's data, you will continue to be in your own body, because that's where your physical brain is. Some might even take it a step further, and if the mad scientist told you he was even going to switch your physical brains, you'd still choose Clinton's body, with your brain in it, to be tortured. Those that would torture a body with their own brain in it over torturing their own body believe in the Body Theory.

Not sure about you, but I'm finishing this experiment still divided. Let's try another. Here's my version of modern philosopher Derek Parfit's teletransporter thought experiment, which he first described in his book Reasons and Persons -

The Teletransporter Thought Experiment

It's the year 2700. The human race has invented all kinds of technology unimaginable in today's world. One of these technologies is teleportation-the ability to transport yourself to distant places at the speed of light. Here's how it works-

You go into a Departure Chamber-a little room the size of a small cubicle.

You set your location-let's say you're in Boston and your destination is London-and when you're ready to go, you press the button on the wall. The chamber walls then scan your entire body, uploading the exact molecular makeup of your body-every atom that makes up every part of you and its precise location-and as it scans, it destroys, so every cell in your body is destroyed by the scanner as it goes.

When it's finished (the Departure Chamber is now empty after destroying all of your cells), it beams your body's information to an Arrival Chamber in London, which has all the necessary atoms waiting there ready to go. The Arrival Chamber uses the data to re-form your entire body with its storage of atoms, and when it's finished you walk out of the chamber in London looking and feeling exactly how you did back in Boston-you're in the same mood, you're hungry just like you were before, you even have the same paper cut on your thumb you got that morning.

The whole process, from the time you hit the button in the Departure Chamber to when you walk out of the Arrival Chamber in London, takes five minutes-but to you it feels instantaneous. You hit the button, things go black for a blink, and now you're standing in London. Cool, right?

In 2700, this is common technology. Everyone you know travels by teleportation. In addition to the convenience of speed, it's incredibly safe-no one has ever gotten hurt doing it.

But then one day, you head into the Departure Chamber in Boston for your normal morning commute to your job in London, you press the big button on the wall, and you hear the scanner turn on, but it doesn't work.

The normal split-second blackout never happens, and when you walk out of the chamber, sure enough, you're still in Boston. You head to the check-in counter and tell the woman working there that the Departure Chamber is broken, and you ask her if there's another one you can use, since you have an early meeting and don't want to be late.

She looks down at her records and says, "Hm-it looks like the scanner worked and collected its data just fine, but the cell destroyer that usually works in conjunction with the scanner has malfunctioned."

"No," you explain, "it couldn't have worked, because I'm still here. And I'm late for this meeting-can you please set me up with a new Departure Chamber?"

She pulls up a video screen and says, "No, it did work-see? There you are in London-it looks like you're gonna be right on time for your meeting." She shows you the screen, and you see yourself walking on the street in London.

"But that can't be me," you say, "because I'm still here."

At that point, her supervisor comes into the room and explains that she's correct-the scanner worked as normal and you're in London as planned. The only thing that didn't work was the cell destroyer in the Departure Chamber here in Boston. "It's not a problem, though," he tells you, "we can just set you up in another chamber and activate its cell destroyer and finish the job."

And even though this isn't anything that wasn't going to happen before-in fact, you have your cells destroyed twice every day-suddenly, you're horrified at the prospect.

"Wait-no-I don't want to do that-I'll die."

The supervisor explains, "You won't die sir. You just saw yourself in London-you're alive and well."

"But that's not me. That's a replica of me-an imposter. I'm the real me-you can't destroy my cells!"

The supervisor and the woman glance awkwardly at each other. "I'm really sorry sir-but we're obligated by law to destroy your cells. We're not allowed to form the body of a person in an Arrival Chamber without destroying the body's cells in a Departure Chamber."

You stare at them in disbelief and then run for the door. Two security guards come out and grab you. They drag you toward a chamber that will destroy your cells, as you kick and scream...

__________

If you're like me, in the first part of that story, you were pretty into the idea of teletransportation, and by the end, you were not.

The question the story poses is, "Is teletransportation, as described in this experiment, a form of traveling? Or a form of dying?

This question might have been ambiguous when I first described it-it might have even felt like a perfectly safe way of traveling-but by the end, it felt much more like a form of dying. Which means that every day when you commute to work from Boston to London, you're killed by the cell destroyer, and a replica of you is created. 1 To the people who know you, you survive teletransportation just fine, the same way your wife seems just fine when she arrives home to you after her own teletransportation, talking about her day and discussing plans for next week. But is it possible that your wife was actually killed that day, and the person you're kissing now was just created a few minutes ago?

Well again, it depends on what you are. Someone who believes in the Data Theory would posit that London you is you as much as Boston you, and that teletransportation is perfectly survivable. But we all related to Boston you's terror at the end there-could anyone really believe that he should be fine with being obliterated just because his data is safe and alive over in London? Further, if the teletransporter could beam your data to London for reassembly, couldn't it also beam it to 50 other cities and create 50 new versions of you? You'd be hard-pressed to argue that those were all you. To me, the teletransporter experiment is a big strike against the Data Theory.

All of this seems like very good news for Body Theory and Brain Theory. But let's not judge things yet. Here's another experiment:

The Split Brain Experiment

A cool fact about the human brain is that the left and right hemispheres function as their own little worlds, each with their own things to worry about, but if you remove one half of someone's brain, they can sometimes not only survive, but their remaining brain half can learn to do many of the other half's previous jobs, allowing the person to live a normal life. That's right-you could lose half of your brain and potentially function normally.

So say you have an identical twin sibling named Bob who develops a fatal brain defect. You decide to save him by giving him half of your brain. Doctors operate on both of you, discarding his brain and replacing it with half of yours. When you wake up, you feel normal and like yourself. Your twin (who already has your identical DNA because you're twins) wakes up with your exact personality and memories.

When you realize this, you panic for a minute that your twin now knows all of your innermost thoughts and feelings on absolutely everything, and you're about to make him promise not to tell anyone, when it hits you that you of course don't have to tell him. He's not your twin-he's you. He's just as intent on your privacy as you are, because it's his privacy too.

As you look over at the guy who used to be Bob and watch him freak out that he's in Bob's body now instead of his own, you wonder, "Why did I stay in my body and not wake up in Bob's? Both brain halves are me, so why am I distinctly in my body and not seeing and thinking in dual split-screen right now, from both of our points of view? And whatever part of me is in Bob's head, why did I lose touch with it? Who is the me in Bob's head, and how did he end up over there while I stayed here?"

Brain Theory is shitting his pants right now-it makes no sense. If people are supposed to go wherever their brains go, what happens when a brain is in two places at once? Data Theory, who was badly embarrassed by the teletransporter experiment, is doing no better in this one.

But Body Theory-who was shot down at the very beginning of the post-is suddenly all smug and thrilled with himself. Body Theory says "Of course you woke up in your own body-your body is what makes you you. Your brain is just the tool your body uses to think. Bob isn't you-he's Bob. He's just now a Bob who has your thoughts and personality. There's nothing Bob's body can ever do to not be Bob." This would help explain why you stayed in your body.

So a nice boost for Body Theory, but let's take a look at a couple more things-

Body Theory (and Brain Theory) would point out that the only difference between Boston you and London you was that London you was made out of different atoms. London you's body was like your body, but it was still made of different material. So is that it? Could Body Theory explain this too?

Let's put it through two tests:

The Cell Replacement Test

Imagine I replace a cell in your arm with an identical, but foreign, replica cell. Are you not you anymore? Of course you are. But how about if, one at a time, I replace 1% of your cells with replicas? How about 10%? 30%? 60%? The London you was composed of 100% replacement cells, and we decided that that was not you-so when does the "crossover" happen? How many of your cells do we need to swap out for replicas before you "die" and what's remaining becomes your replica?

Something feels off with this, right? Considering that the cells we're replacing are molecularly identical to those we're removing, and someone watching this all happen wouldn't even notice anything change about you, it seems implausible that you'd ever die during this process, even if we eventually replaced 100% of your cells with replicas. But if your cells are eventually all replicas, how are you any different from London you?

The Body Scattering Test

Imagine going into an Atom Scattering Chamber that completely disassembles your body's atoms so that all that's left in the room is a light gas of floating atoms-and then a few minutes later, it perfectly reassembles the atoms into you, and you walk out feeling totally normal.

Is that still you? Or did you die when you were disassembled and what has been reassembled is a replica of you? It doesn't really make sense that this reassembled you would be the real you and London you would be a replica, when the only difference between the two cases is that the scattering room preserves your exact atoms and the London chamber assembles you out of different atoms. At their most basic level, atoms are identical-a hydrogen atom from your body is identical in every way to a hydrogen atom in London. Given that, I'd say that if we're deciding London you is not you, then reassembled you is probably not you either.

The first thing these two tests illustrate is that the key distinction between Boston you and London you isn't about the presence or absence of your actual, physical cells. The Cell Replacement Test suggests that you can gradually replace much or all of your body with replica material and still be you, and the Body Scattering Test suggests that you can go through a scatter and a reassembly, even with all of your original physical material, and be no more you than the you in London. Not looking great for Body Theory anymore.

So could it be that we've been off the whole time pitting the brain, the body, and the personality and memories against each other? Could it be that anytime you relocate your brain, or disassemble your atoms all at once, transfer your brain data onto a new brain, etc., you lose you because maybe, you're not defined by any of these things on their own, but rather by a long and unbroken string of continuous existence?

A few years ago, my late grandfather, in his 90s and suffering from dementia, pointed at a picture on the wall of himself as a six-year-old. "That's me!" he explained.

He was right. But come on. It seems ridiculous that the six-year-old in the picture and the extremely old man standing next to me could be the same person. Those two people had nothing in common. Physically, they were vastly different-almost every cell in the six-year-old's body died decades ago. As far as their personalities-we can agree that they wouldn't have been friends. And they shared almost no common brain data at all. Any 90-year-old man on the street is much more similar to my grandfather than that six-year-old.

But remember-maybe it's not about similarity, but about continuity. If similarity were enough to define you, Boston you and London you, who are identical, would be the same person. The thing that my grandfather shared with the six-year-old in the picture is something he shared with no one else on Earth-they were connected to each other by a long, unbroken string of continuous existence. As an old man, he may not know anything about that six-year-old boy, but he knows something about himself as an 89-year-old, and that 89-year-old might know a bunch about himself as an 85-year-old. As a 50-year-old, he knew a ton about him as a 43-year-old, and when he was seven, he was a pro on himself as a 6-year-old. It's a long chain of overlapping memories, personality traits, and physical characteristics.

It's like having an old wooden boat. You may have repaired it hundreds of times over the years, replacing wood chip after wood chip, until one day, you realize that not one piece of material from the original boat is still part of it. So is that still your boat? If you named your boat Polly the day you bought it, would you change the name now? It would still be Polly, right?

In this way, what you are is not really a thing as much as a story, or a progression, or one particular theme of person. You're a bit like a roomwith a bunch of things in it-some old, some new, some you're aware of, some you aren't-but the room is always changing, never exactly the same from week to week.

Likewise, you're not a set of brain data, you're a particular data base whose contents are constantly changing, growing, and being updated. And you're not a physical body of atoms, you're a set of instructions on how to deal with and organize the atoms that bump into you.

People always say the word soul and I never really know what they're talking about. To me, the word soul has always seemed like a poetic euphemism for a part of the brain that feels very inner to us; or an attempt to give humans more dignity than just being primal biological organisms; or a way to declare that we're eternal. But maybe when people say the word soul what they're talking about is whatever it is that connects my 90-year-old grandfather to the boy in the picture. As his cells and memories come and go, as every wood chip in his canoe changes again and again, maybe the single common thread that ties it all together is his soul. After examining a human from every physical and mental angle throughout the post, maybe the answer this whole time has been the much less tangible Soul Theory.

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It would have been pleasant to end the post there, but I just can't do it, because I can't quite believe in souls.

The way I actually feel right now is completely off-balance. Spending a week thinking about clones of yourself, imagining sharing your brain or merging yours with someone else's, and wondering whether you secretly die every time you sleep and wake up as a replica will do that to you. If you're looking for a satisfying conclusion, I'll direct you to the sources below since I don't even know who I am right now.

The only thing I'll say is that I told someone about the topic I was posting on for this week, and their question was, "That's cool, but what's the point of trying to figure this out?" While researching, I came across this quote by Parfit: "The early Buddhist view is that much or most of the misery of human life resulted from the false view of self." I think that's probably very true, and that's the point of thinking about this topic.

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Related Wait But Why Posts
- Here's how I'm working on this false view of self thing.
- And things could get even more confusing soon when we have to figure out if Artificial Superintelligence is conscious or not.

Sources
Very few of the ideas or thought experiments in this post are my original thinking. I read and listened to a bunch of personal identity philosophy this week and gathered my favorite parts together for the post. The two sources I drew from the most were philosopher Derek Parfit's book Reasons and Persons and Yale professor Shelly Kagan's fascinating philosophy course on death-the lectures are all watchable online for free.

Other Sources:
David Hume: Hume on Identity Over Time and Persons
Derek Parfit: We Are Not Human Beings
Peter Van Inwagen: Materialism and the Psychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity
Bernard Williams: The Self and the Future
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Chapter: Of Identity and Diversity)
Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach
Patrick Bailey: Concerning Theories of Personal Identity

And a fascinating and related video
For a while now, my favorite YouTube channel has been Kurzgesagt. They make one amazing five-minute animated video a month on the exact kinds of topics I love to write about. I highly recommend subscribing. Anyway, I've spoken to them and we liked the idea of tag-teaming a similar topic at the same time, and since this one was on both of our lists, we did that this week. I focused on what the self is, they explored what life itself is. Check it out:

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When you say the word "me," you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It's one of the things you're cleareston in the whole world-something you've understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, "Who amI?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)

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We have what may be an extremely difficult problem with an unknown time to solve it, on which quite possibly the entire future of humanity depends. - Nick Bostrom

Welcome to Part 2 of the "Wait how is this possibly what I'm reading I don't get why everyone isn't talking about this" series.

Part 1 started innocently enough, as we discussed Artificial Narrow Intelligence, or ANI (AI that specializes in one narrow task like coming up with driving routes or playing chess), and how it's all around us in the world today. We then examined why it was such a huge challenge to get from ANI to Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI (AI that's at least as intellectually capable as a human, across the board), and we discussed why the exponential rate of technological advancement we've seen in the past suggests that AGI might not be as far away as it seems. Part 1 ended with me assaulting you with the fact that once our machines reach human-level intelligence, they might immediately do this:

This left us staring at the screen, confronting the intense concept of potentially-in-our-lifetime Artificial Superintelligence, or ASI (AI that's way smarter than any human, across the board), and trying to figure out which emotion we were supposed to have on as we thought about that. 1 1← open these

Before we dive into things, let's remind ourselves what it would mean for a machine to be superintelligent.

A key distinction is the difference between speed superintelligence and quality superintelligence. Often, someone's first thought when they imagine a super-smart computer is one that's as intelligent as a human but can think much, much faster 2 -they might picture a machine that thinks like a human, except a million times quicker, which means it could figure out in five minutes what would take a human a decade.

That sounds impressive, and ASI would think much faster than any human could-but the true separator would be its advantage in intelligence quality, which is something completely different. What makes humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn't a difference in thinking speed-it's that human brains contain a number of sophisticated cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or longterm planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps' brains do not. Speeding up a chimp's brain by thousands of times wouldn't bring him to our level-even with a decade's time, he wouldn't be able to figure out how to use a set of custom tools to assemble an intricate model, something a human could knock out in a few hours. There are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying.

But it's not just that a chimp can't do what we do, it's that his brain is unable to grasp that those worlds even exist-a chimp can become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he'll never be able to understand that the skyscraper was built by humans. In his world, anything that huge is part of nature, period, and not only is it beyond him to build a skyscraper, it's beyond him to realize that anyone can build a skyscraper. That's the result of a small difference in intelligence quality.

And in the scheme of the intelligence range we're talking about today, or even the much smaller range among biological creatures, the chimp-to-human quality intelligence gap is tiny. In an earlier post, I depicted the range of biological cognitive capacity using a staircase: 3

To absorb how big a deal a superintelligent machine would be, imagine one on the dark green step two steps above humans on that staircase. This machine would be only slightly superintelligent, but its increased cognitive ability over us would be as vast as the chimp-human gap we just described. And like the chimp's incapacity to ever absorb that skyscrapers can be built, we will never be able to even comprehend the things a machine on the dark green step can do, even if the machine tried to explain it to us-let alone do it ourselves. And that's only two steps above us. A machine on the second-to-highest step on that staircase would be to us as we are to ants-it could try for years to teach us the simplest inkling of what it knows and the endeavor would be hopeless.

But the kind of superintelligence we're talking about today is something far beyond anything on this staircase. In an intelligence explosion-where the smarter a machine gets, the quicker it's able to increase its own intelligence, until it begins to soar upwards-a machine might take years to rise from the chimp step to the one above it, but perhaps only hours to jump up a step once it's on the dark green step two above us, and by the time it's ten steps above us, it might be jumping up in four-step leaps every second that goes by. Which is why we need to realize that it's distinctly possible that very shortly after the big news story about the first machine reaching human-level AGI, we might be facing the reality of coexisting on the Earth with something that's here on the staircase (or maybe a million times higher):

And since we just established that it's a hopeless activity to try to understand the power of a machine only two steps above us, let's very concretely state once and for all that there is no way to know what ASI will do or what the consequences will be for us. Anyone who pretends otherwise doesn't understand what superintelligence means.

Evolution has advanced the biological brain slowly and gradually over hundreds of millions of years, and in that sense, if humans birth an ASI machine, we'll be dramatically stomping on evolution. Or maybe this is part of evolution-maybe the way evolution works is that intelligence creeps up more and more until it hits the level where it's capable of creating machine superintelligence, and that level is like a tripwire that triggers a worldwide game-changing explosion that determines a new future for all living things:

And for reasons we'll discuss later, a huge part of the scientific community believes that it's not a matter of whether we'll hit that tripwire, but when. Kind of a crazy piece of information.

So where does that leave us?

Well no one in the world, especially not I, can tell you what will happen when we hit the tripwire. But Oxford philosopher and lead AI thinker Nick Bostrom believes we can boil down all potential outcomes into two broad categories.

First, looking at history, we can see that life works like this: species pop up, exist for a while, and after some time, inevitably, they fall off the existence balance beam and land on extinction-

"All species eventually go extinct" has been almost as reliable a rule through history as "All humans eventually die" has been. So far, 99.9% of species have fallen off the balance beam, and it seems pretty clear that if a species keeps wobbling along down the beam, it's only a matter of time before some other species, some gust of nature's wind, or a sudden beam-shaking asteroid knocks it off. Bostrom calls extinction an attractor state -a place species are all teetering on falling into and from which no species ever returns.

And while most scientists I've come across acknowledge that ASI would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that used beneficially, ASI's abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to a second attractor state-species immortality. Bostrom believes species immortality is just as much of an attractor state as species extinction, i.e. if we manage to get there, we'll be impervious to extinction forever-we'll have conquered mortality and conquered chance. So even though all species so far have fallen off the balance beam and landed on extinction, Bostrom believes there are two sides to the beam and it's just that nothing on Earth has been intelligent enough yet to figure out how to fall off on the other side.

If Bostrom and others are right, and from everything I've read, it seems like they really might be, we have two pretty shocking facts to absorb:
1) The advent of ASI will, for the first time, open up the possibility for a species to land on the immortality side of the balance beam. 2) The advent of ASI will make such an unimaginably dramatic impact that it's likely to knock the human race off the beam, in one direction or the other.
It may very well be that when evolution hits the tripwire, it permanently ends humans' relationship with the beam and creates a new world, with or without humans.

Kind of seems like the only question any human should currently be asking is: When are we going to hit the tripwire and which side of the beam will we land on when that happens?

No one in the world knows the answer to either part of that question, but a lot of the very smartest people have put decades of thought into it. We'll spend the rest of this post exploring what they've come up with.

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Let's start with the first part of the question: When are we going to hit the tripwire?

i.e. How long until the first machine reaches superintelligence?

Not shockingly, opinions vary wildly and this is a heated debate among scientists and thinkers. Many, like professor Vernor Vinge, scientist Ben Goertzel, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, or, most famously, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, agree with machine learning expert Jeremy Howard when he puts up this graph during a TED Talk:

Those people subscribe to the belief that this is happening soon- that exponential growth is at work and machine learning, though only slowly creeping up on us now, will blow right past us within the next few decades.

Others, like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, research psychologist Gary Marcus, NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis, and tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, believe that thinkers like Kurzweil are vastly underestimating the magnitude of the challenge and believe that we're not actually that close to the tripwire.

The Kurzweil camp would counter that the only underestimating that's happening is the underappreciation of exponential growth, and they'd compare the doubters to those who looked at the slow-growing seedling of the internet in 1985 and argued that there was no way it would amount to anything impactful in the near future.

The doubters might argue back that the progress needed to make advancements in intelligence also grows exponentially harder with each subsequent step, which will cancel out the typical exponential nature of technological progress. And so on.

A third camp, which includes Nick Bostrom, believes neither group has any ground to feel certain about the timeline and acknowledges both A) that this could absolutely happen in the near future and B) that there's no guarantee about that; it could also take a much longer time.

Still others, like philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, believe all three of these groups are naive for believing that there even is a tripwire, arguing that it's more likely that ASI won't actually ever be achieved.

So what do you get when you put all of these opinions together?

In 2013, Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom conducted a survey that asked hundreds of AI experts at a series of conferences the following question: "For the purposes of this question, assume that human scientific activity continues without major negative disruption. By what year would you see a (10% / 50% / 90%) probability for such HLMI 4 to exist?" It asked them to name an optimistic year (one in which they believe there's a 10% chance we'll have AGI), a realistic guess (a year they believe there's a 50% chance of AGI-i.e. after that year they think it's more likely than not that we'll have AGI), and a safe guess (the earliest year by which they can say with 90% certainty we'll have AGI). Gathered together as one data set, here were the results: 2

Median optimistic year (10% likelihood):Median realistic year (50% likelihood):Median pessimistic year (90% likelihood):

So the median participant thinks it's more likely than not that we'll have AGI 25 years from now. The 90% median answer of 2075 means that if you're a teenager right now, the median respondent, along with over half of the group of AI experts, is almost certain AGI will happen within your lifetime.

A separate study, conducted recently by author James Barrat at Ben Goertzel's annual AGI Conference, did away with percentages and simply asked when participants thought AGI would be achieved-by 2030, by 2050, by 2100, after 2100, or never. The results: 3

Pretty similar to Müller and Bostrom's outcomes. In Barrat's survey, over two thirds of participants believe AGI will be here by 2050 and a little less than half predict AGI within the next 15 years. Also striking is that only 2% of those surveyed don't think AGI is part of our future.

But AGI isn't the tripwire, ASI is. So when do the experts think we'll reach ASI?

Müller and Bostrom also asked the experts how likely they think it is that we'll reach ASI A) within two years of reaching AGI (i.e. an almost-immediate intelligence explosion), and B) within 30 years. The results: 4

The median answer put a rapid (2 year) AGI → ASI transition at only a 10% likelihood, but a longer transition of 30 years or less at a 75% likelihood.

We don't know from this data the length of this transition the median participant would have put at a 50% likelihood, but for ballpark purposes, based on the two answers above, let's estimate that they'd have said 20 years. So the median opinion-the one right in the center of the world of AI experts-believes the most realistic guess for when we'll hit the ASI tripwire is [the 2040 prediction for AGI + our estimated prediction of a 20-year transition from AGI to ASI] = 2060.

Of course, all of the above statistics are speculative, and they're only representative of the center opinion of the AI expert community, but it tells us that a large portion of the people who know the most about this topic would agree that 2060 is a very reasonable estimate for the arrival of potentially world-altering ASI. Only 45 years from now.

Okay now how about the second part of the question above: When we hit the tripwire, which side of the beam will we fall to?

Superintelligence will yield tremendous power-the critical question for us is:
Who or what will be in control of that power, and what will their motivation be?
The answer to this will determine whether ASI is an unbelievably great development, an unfathomably terrible development, or something in between.

Of course, the expert community is again all over the board and in a heated debate about the answer to this question. Müller and Bostrom's survey asked participants to assign a probability to the possible impacts AGI would have on humanity and found that the mean response was that there was a 52% chance that the outcome will be either good or extremely good and a 31% chance the outcome will be either bad or extremely bad. For a relatively neutral outcome, the mean probability was only 17%. In other words, the people who know the most about this are pretty sure this will be a huge deal. It's also worth noting that those numbers refer to the advent of AGI- if the question were about ASI, I imagine that the neutral percentage would be even lower.

Before we dive much further into this good vs. bad outcome part of the question, let's combine both the "when will it happen?" and the "will it be good or bad?" parts of this question into a chart that encompasses the views of most of the relevant experts:

We'll talk more about the Main Camp in a minute, but first-what's your deal? Actually I know what your deal is, because it was my deal too before I started researching this topic. Some reasons most people aren't really thinking about this topic:

As mentioned in Part 1, movies have really confused things by presenting unrealistic AI scenarios that make us feel like AI isn't something to be taken seriously in general. James Barrat compares the situation to our reaction if the Centers for Disease Control issued a serious warning about vampires in our future.5

Humans have a hard time believing something is real until we see proof. I'm sure computer scientists in 1988 were regularly talking about how big a deal the internet was likely to be, but people probably didn't really think it was going to change their lives until it actually changed their lives. This is partially because computers just couldn't do stuff like that in 1988, so people would look at their computer and think, "Really? That's gonna be a life changing thing?" Their imaginations were limited to what their personal experience had taught them about what a computer was, which made it very hard to vividly picture what computers might become. The same thing is happening now with AI. We hear that it's gonna be a big deal, but because it hasn't happened yet, and because of our experience with the relatively impotent AI in our current world, we have a hard time really believing this is going to change our lives dramatically. And those biases are what experts are up against as they frantically try to get our attention through the noise of collective daily self-absorption.

Even if we did believe it-how many times today have you thought about the fact that you'll spend most of the rest of eternity not existing? Not many, right? Even though it's a far more intense fact than anything else you're doing today? This is because our brains are normally focused on the little things in day-to-day life, no matter how crazy a long-term situation we're a part of. It's just how we're wired.

One of the goals of these two posts is to get you out of the I Like to Think About Other Things Camp and into one of the expert camps, even if you're just standing on the intersection of the two dotted lines in the square above, totally uncertain.

During my research, I came across dozens of varying opinions on this topic, but I quickly noticed that most people's opinions fell somewhere in what I labeled the Main Camp, and in particular, over three quarters of the experts fell into two Subcamps inside the Main Camp:

We're gonna take a thorough dive into both of these camps. Let's start with the fun one-

Why the Future Might Be Our Greatest Dream

As I learned about the world of AI, I found a surprisingly large number of people standing here:

The people on Confident Corner are buzzing with excitement. They have their sights set on the fun side of the balance beam and they're convinced that's where all of us are headed. For them, the future is everything they ever could have hoped for, just in time.

The thing that separates these people from the other thinkers we'll discuss later isn't their lust for the happy side of the beam-it's their confidence that that's the side we're going to land on.

Where this confidence comes from is up for debate. Critics believe it comes from an excitement so blinding that they simply ignore or deny potential negative outcomes. But the believers say it's naive to conjure up doomsday scenarios when on balance, technology has and will likely end up continuing to help us a lot more than it hurts us.

We'll cover both sides, and you can form your own opinion about this as you read, but for this section, put your skepticism away and let's take a good hard look at what's over there on the fun side of the balance beam-and try to absorb the fact that the things you're reading might really happen. If you had shown a hunter-gatherer our world of indoor comfort, technology, and endless abundance, it would have seemed like fictional magic to him-we have to be humble enough to acknowledge that it's possible that an equally inconceivable transformation could be in our future.

Nick Bostrom describes three ways a superintelligent AI system could function: 6

As an oracle, which answers nearly any question posed to it with accuracy, including complex questions that humans cannot easily answer-i.e. How can I manufacture a more efficient car engine? Google is a primitive type of oracle.

As a genie, which executes any high-level command it's given-Use a molecular assembler to build a new and more efficient kind of car engine-and then awaits its next command.

As a sovereign, which is assigned a broad and open-ended pursuit and allowed to operate in the world freely, making its own decisions about how best to proceed-Invent a faster, cheaper, and safer way than cars for humans to privately transport themselves.

These questions and tasks, which seem complicated to us, would sound to a superintelligent system like someone asking you to improve upon the "My pencil fell off the table" situation, which you'd do by picking it up and putting it back on the table.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a resident of Anxious Avenue in our chart above, said it well:

There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from "impossible" to "obvious." Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious. 7

There are a lot of eager scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs in Confident Corner-but for a tour of the brightest side of the AI horizon, there's only one person we want as our tour guide.

Ray Kurzweil is polarizing. In my reading, I heard everything from godlike worship of him and his ideas to eye-rolling contempt for them. Others were somewhere in the middle-author Douglas Hofstadter, in discussing the ideas in Kurzweil's books, eloquently put forth that "it is as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad." 8

Whether you like his ideas or not, everyone agrees that Kurzweil is impressive. He began inventing things as a teenager and in the following decades, he came up with several breakthrough inventions, including the first flatbed scanner, the first scanner that converted text to speech (allowing the blind to read standard texts), the well-known Kurzweil music synthesizer (the first true electric piano), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He's the author of five national bestselling books. He's well-known for his bold predictions and has a pretty good record of having them come true-including his prediction in the late '80s, a time when the internet was an obscure thing, that by the early 2000s, it would become a global phenomenon. Kurzweil has been called a "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal, "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes, "Edison's rightful heir" by Inc. Magazine, and "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence" by Bill Gates. 9 In 2012, Google co-founder Larry Page approached Kurzweil and asked him to be Google's Director of Engineering. 5 In 2011, he co-founded Singularity University, which is hosted by NASA and sponsored partially by Google. Not bad for one life.

This biography is important. When Kurzweil articulates his vision of the future, he sounds fully like a crackpot, and the crazy thing is that he's not-he's an extremely smart, knowledgeable, relevant man in the world. You may think he's wrong about the future, but he's not a fool. Knowing he's such a legit dude makes me happy, because as I've learned about his predictions for the future, I badly want him to be right. And you do too. As you hear Kurzweil's predictions, many shared by other Confident Corner thinkers like Peter Diamandis and Ben Goertzel, it's not hard to see why he has such a large, passionate following-known as the singularitarians. Here's what he thinks is going to happen:

Kurzweil believes computers will reach AGI by 2029 and that by 2045, we'll have not only ASI, but a full-blown new world-a time he calls the singularity. His AI-related timeline used to be seen as outrageously overzealous, and it still is by many, 6 but in the last 15 years, the rapid advances of ANI systems have brought the larger world of AI experts much closer to Kurzweil's timeline. His predictions are still a bit more ambitious than the median respondent on Müller and Bostrom's survey (AGI by 2040, ASI by 2060), but not by that much.

Kurzweil's depiction of the 2045 singularity is brought about by three simultaneous revolutions in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and, most powerfully, AI.

Before we move on-nanotechnology comes up in almost everything you read about the future of AI, so come into this blue box for a minute so we can discuss it-
Nanotechnology Blue Box
Nanotechnology is our word for technology that deals with the manipulation of matter that's between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or a millionth of a millimeter, and this 1-100 range encompasses viruses (100 nm across), DNA (10 nm wide), and things as small as large molecules like hemoglobin (5 nm) and medium molecules like glucose (1 nm). If/when we conquer nanotechnology, the next step will be the ability to manipulate individual atoms, which are only one order of magnitude smaller (~.1 nm). 7

To understand the challenge of humans trying to manipulate matter in that range, let's take the same thing on a larger scale. The International Space Station is 268 mi (431 km) above the Earth. If humans were giants so large their heads reached up to the ISS, they'd be about 250,000 times bigger than they are now. If you make the 1nm - 100nm nanotech range 250,000 times bigger, you get .25mm - 2.5cm. So nanotechnology is the equivalent of a human giant as tall as the ISS figuring out how to carefully build intricate objects using materials between the size of a grain of sand and an eyeball. To reach the next level-manipulating individual atoms-the giant would have to carefully position objects that are 1/40th of a millimeter-so small normal-size humans would need a microscope to see them. 8

Nanotech was first discussed by Richard Feynman in a 1959 talk, when he explained: "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It would be, in principle, possible ... for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down.... How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance." It's as simple as that. If you can figure out how to move individual molecules or atoms around, you can make literally anything.

Nanotech became a serious field for the first time in 1986, when engineer Eric Drexler provided its foundations in his seminal book Engines of Creation, but Drexler suggests that those looking to learn about the most modern ideas in nanotechnology would be best off reading his 2013 book, Radical Abundance.

Once we really get nanotech down, we can use it to make tech devices, clothing, food, a variety of bio-related products-artificial blood cells, tiny virus or cancer-cell destroyers, muscle tissue, etc.-anything really. And in a world that uses nanotechnology, the cost of a material is no longer tied to its scarcity or the difficulty of its manufacturing process, but instead determined by how complicated its atomic structure is. In a nanotech world, a diamond might be cheaper than a pencil eraser.

We're not there yet. And it's not clear if we're underestimating, or overestimating, how hard it will be to get there. But we don't seem to be that far away. Kurzweil predicts that we'll get there by the 2020s. 11 Governments know that nanotech could be an Earth-shaking development, and they've invested billions of dollars in nanotech research (the US, the EU, and Japan have invested over a combined $5 billion so far). 12

Just considering the possibilities if a superintelligent computer had access to a robust nanoscale assembler is intense. But nanotechnology is something we came up with, that we're on the verge of conquering, and since anything that we can do is a joke to an ASI system, we have to assume ASI would come up with technologies much more powerful and far too advanced for human brains to understand. For that reason, when considering the "If the AI Revolution turns out well for us" scenario, it's almost impossible for us to overestimate the scope of what could happen-so if the following predictions of an ASI future seem over-the-top, keep in mind that they could be accomplished in ways we can't even imagine. Most likely, our brains aren't even capable of predicting the things that would happen.

Armed with superintelligence and all the technology superintelligence would know how to create, ASI would likely be able to solve every problem in humanity. Global warming? ASI could first halt CO ₂ emissions by coming up with much better ways to generate energy that had nothing to do with fossil fuels. Then it could create some innovative way to begin to remove excess CO 2 from the atmosphere. Cancer and other diseases? No problem for ASI-health and medicine would be revolutionized beyond imagination. World hunger? ASI could use things like nanotech to build meat from scratch that would be molecularly identical to real meat-in other words, it would be real meat. Nanotech could turn a pile of garbage into a huge vat of fresh meat or other food (which wouldn't have to have its normal shape-picture a giant cube of apple)-and distribute all this food around the world using ultra-advanced transportation. Of course, this would also be great for animals, who wouldn't have to get killed by humans much anymore, and ASI could do lots of other things to save endangered species or even bring back extinct species through work with preserved DNA. ASI could even solve our most complex macro issues-our debates over how economies should be run and how world trade is best facilitated, even our haziest grapplings in philosophy or ethics-would all be painfully obvious to ASI.

But there's one thing ASI could do for us that is so tantalizing, reading about it has altered everything I thought I knew about everything:

ASI could allow us to conquer our mortality.

A few months ago, I mentioned my envy of more advanced potential civilizations who had conquered their own mortality, never considering that I might later write a post that genuinely made me believe that this is something humans could do within my lifetime. But reading about AI will make you reconsider everything you thought you were sure about-including your notion of death.

Evolution had no good reason to extend our lifespans any longer than they are now. If we live long enough to reproduce and raise our children to an age that they can fend for themselves, that's enough for evolution-from an evolutionary point of view, the species can thrive with a 30+ year lifespan, so there's no reason mutations toward unusually long life would have been favored in the natural selection process. As a result, we're what W.B. Yeats describes as "a soul fastened to a dying animal." 13 Not that fun.

And because everyone has always died, we live under the "death and taxes" assumption that death is inevitable. We think of aging like time-both keep moving and there's nothing you can do to stop them. But that assumption is wrong. Richard Feynman writes:

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human's body will be cured.

The fact is, aging isn't stuck to time. Time will continue moving, but aging doesn't have to. If you think about it, it makes sense. All aging is is the physical materials of the body wearing down. A car wears down over time too-but is its aging inevitable? If you perfectly repaired or replaced a car's parts whenever one of them began to wear down, the car would run forever. The human body isn't any different-just far more complex.

Kurzweil talks about intelligent wifi-connected nanobots in the bloodstream who could perform countless tasks for human health, including routinely repairing or replacing worn down cells in any part of the body. If perfected, this process (or a far smarter one ASI would come up with) wouldn't just keep the body healthy, it could reverse aging. The difference between a 60-year-old's body and a 30-year-old's body is just a bunch of physical things that could be altered if we had the technology. ASI could build an "age refresher" that a 60-year-old could walk into, and they'd walk out with the body and skin of a 30-year-old. 10 Even the ever-befuddling brain could be refreshed by something as smart as ASI, which would figure out how to do so without affecting the brain's data (personality, memories, etc.). A 90-year-old suffering from dementia could head into the age refresher and come out sharp as a tack and ready to start a whole new career. This seems absurd-but the body is just a bunch of atoms and ASI would presumably be able to easily manipulate all kinds of atomic structures-so it's not absurd.

Kurzweil then takes things a huge leap further. He believes that artificial materials will be integrated into the body more and more as time goes on. First, organs could be replaced by super-advanced machine versions that would run forever and never fail. Then he believes we could begin to redesign the body-things like replacing red blood cells with perfected red blood cell nanobots who could power their own movement, eliminating the need for a heart at all. He even gets to the brain and believes we'll enhance our brain activities to the point where humans will be able to think billions of times faster than they do now and access outside information because the artificial additions to the brain will be able to communicate with all the info in the cloud.

The possibilities for new human experience would be endless. Humans have separated sex from its purpose, allowing people to have sex for fun, not just for reproduction. Kurzweil believes we'll be able to do the same with food. Nanobots will be in charge of delivering perfect nutrition to the cells of the body, intelligently directing anything unhealthy to pass through the body without affecting anything. An eating condom. Nanotech theorist Robert A. Freitas has already designed blood cell replacements that, if one day implemented in the body, would allow a human to sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath-so you can only imagine what ASI could do for our physical capabilities. Virtual reality would take on a new meaning-nanobots in the body could suppress the inputs coming from our senses and replace them with new signals that would put us entirely in a new environment, one that we'd see, hear, feel, and smell.

Eventually, Kurzweil believes humans will reach a point when they're entirely artificial; 11 a time when we'll look at biological material and think how unbelievably primitive it was that humans were ever made of that; a time when we'll read about early stages of human history, when microbes or accidents or diseases or wear and tear could just kill humans against their own will; a time the AI Revolution could bring to an end with the merging of humans and AI. 12 This is how Kurzweil believes humans will ultimately conquer our biology and become indestructible and eternal-this is his vision for the other side of the balance beam. And he's convinced we're gonna get there. Soon.

You will not be surprised to learn that Kurzweil's ideas have attracted significant criticism. His prediction of 2045 for the singularity and the subsequent eternal life possibilities for humans has been mocked as "the rapture of the nerds," or "intelligent design for 140 IQ people." Others have questioned his optimistic timeline, or his level of understanding of the brain and body, or his application of the patterns of Moore's law, which are normally applied to advances in hardware, to a broad range of things, including software. For every expert who fervently believes Kurzweil is right on, there are probably three who think he's way off.

But what surprised me is that most of the experts who disagree with him don't really disagree that everything he's saying is possible. Reading such an outlandish vision for the future, I expected his critics to be saying, "Obviously that stuff can't happen," but instead they were saying things like, "Yes, all of that can happen if we safely transition to ASI, but that's the hard part." Bostrom, one of the most prominent voices warning us about the dangers of AI, still acknowledges:

It is hard to think of any problem that a superintelligence could not either solve or at least help us solve. Disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds: these are things that a superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology would be capable of eliminating. Additionally, a superintelligence could give us indefinite lifespan, either by stopping and reversing the aging process through the use of nanomedicine, or by offering us the option to upload ourselves. A superintelligence could also create opportunities for us to vastly increase our own intellectual and emotional capabilities, and it could assist us in creating a highly appealing experiential world in which we could live lives devoted to joyful game-playing, relating to each other, experiencing, personal growth, and to living closer to our ideals.

This is a quote from someone very much not on Confident Corner, but that's what I kept coming across-experts who scoff at Kurzweil for a bunch of reasons but who don't think what he's saying is impossible if we can make it safely to ASI. That's why I found Kurzweil's ideas so infectious-because they articulate the bright side of this story and because they're actually possible. If it's a good god.

The most prominent criticism I heard of the thinkers on Confident Corner is that they may be dangerously wrong in their assessment of the downside when it comes to ASI. Kurzweil's famous book The Singularity is Near is over 700 pages long and he dedicates around 20 of those pages to potential dangers. I suggested earlier that our fate when this colossal new power is born rides on who will control that power and what their motivation will be. Kurzweil neatly answers both parts of this question with the sentence, "[ASI] is emerging from many diverse efforts and will be deeply integrated into our civilization's infrastructure. Indeed, it will be intimately embedded in our bodies and brains. As such, it will reflect our values because it will be us."

But if that's the answer, why are so many of the world's smartest people so worried right now? Why does Stephen Hawking say the development of ASI "could spell the end of the human race" and Bill Gates say he doesn't "understand why some people are not concerned" and Elon Musk fear that we're "summoning the demon"? And why do so many experts on the topic call ASI the biggest threat to humanity? These people, and the other thinkers on Anxious Avenue, don't buy Kurzweil's brush-off of the dangers of AI. They're very, very worried about the AI Revolution, and they're not focusing on the fun side of the balance beam. They're too busy staring at the other side, where they see a terrifying future, one they're not sure we'll be able to escape.

___________

Why the Future Might Be Our Worst Nightmare

One of the reasons I wanted to learn about AI is that the topic of "bad robots" always confused me. All the movies about evil robots seemed fully unrealistic, and I couldn't really understand how there could be a real-life situation where AI was actually dangerous. Robots are made by us, so why would we design them in a way where something negative could ever happen? Wouldn't we build in plenty of safeguards? Couldn't we just cut off an AI system's power supply at any time and shut it down? Why would a robot want to do something bad anyway? Why would a robot "want" anything in the first place? I was highly skeptical. But then I kept hearing really smart people talking about it...

Those people tended to be somewhere in here:

The people on Anxious Avenue aren't in Panicked Prairie or Hopeless Hills-both of which are regions on the far left of the chart-but they're nervous and they're tense. Being in the middle of the chart doesn't mean that you think the arrival of ASI will be neutral-the neutrals were given a camp of their own-it means you think both the extremely good and extremely bad outcomes are plausible but that you're not sure yet which one of them it'll be.

A part of all of these people is brimming with excitement over what Artificial Superintelligence could do for us-it's just they're a little worried that it might be the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the human race is this guy:

And he's standing there all pleased with his whip and his idol, thinking he's figured it all out, and he's so thrilled with himself when he says his "Adios Señor" line, and then he's less thrilled suddenly cause this happens.

(Sorry)

Meanwhile, Indiana Jones, who's much more knowledgeable and prudent, understanding the dangers and how to navigate around them, makes it out of the cave safely. And when I hear what Anxious Avenue people have to say about AI, it often sounds like they're saying, "Um we're kind of being the first guy right now and instead we should probably be trying really hard to be Indiana Jones."

So what is it exactly that makes everyone on Anxious Avenue so anxious?

Well first, in a broad sense, when it comes to developing supersmart AI, we're creating something that will probably change everything, but in totally uncharted territory, and we have no idea what will happen when we get there. Scientist Danny Hillis compares what's happening to that point "when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. We are amoebas and we can't figure out what the hell this thing is that we're creating." 14 Nick Bostrom worries that creating something smarter than you is a basic Darwinian error, and compares the excitement about it to sparrows in a nest deciding to adopt a baby owl so it'll help them and protect them once it grows up-while ignoring the urgent cries from a few sparrows who wonder if that's necessarily a good idea... 15

And when you combine "unchartered, not-well-understood territory" with "this should have a major impact when it happens," you open the door to the scariest two words in the English language:
Existential risk.
An existential risk is something that can have a permanent devastating effect on humanity. Typically, existential risk means extinction. Check out this chart from a Google talk by Bostrom: 13

You can see that the label "existential risk" is reserved for something that spans the species, spans generations (i.e. it's permanent) and it's devastating or death-inducing in its consequences. 14 It technically includes a situation in which all humans are permanently in a state of suffering or torture, but again, we're usually talking about extinction. There are three things that can cause humans an existential catastrophe:

1) Nature -a large asteroid collision, an atmospheric shift that makes the air inhospitable to humans, a fatal virus or bacterial sickness that sweeps the world, etc.

2) Aliens-this is what Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and so many other astronomers are scared of when they advise METI to stop broadcasting outgoing signals. They don't want us to be the Native Americans and let all the potential European conquerors know we're here.

3) Humans -terrorists with their hands on a weapon that could cause extinction, a catastrophic global war, humans creating something smarter than themselves hastily without thinking about it carefully first...

Bostrom points out that if #1 and #2 haven't wiped us out so far in our first 100,000 years as a species, it's unlikely to happen in the next century.

#3, however, terrifies him. He draws a metaphor of an urn with a bunch of marbles in it. Let's say most of the marbles are white, a smaller number are red, and a tiny few are black. Each time humans invent something new, it's like pulling a marble out of the urn. Most inventions are neutral or helpful to humanity-those are the white marbles. Some are harmful to humanity, like weapons of mass destruction, but they don't cause an existential catastrophe-red marbles. If we were to ever invent something that drove us to extinction, that would be pulling out the rare black marble. We haven't pulled out a black marble yet-you know that because you're alive and reading this post. But Bostrom doesn't think it's impossible that we pull one out in the near future. If nuclear weapons, for example, were easy to make instead of extremely difficult and complex, terrorists would have bombed humanity back to the Stone Age a while ago. Nukes weren't a black marble but they weren't that far from it. ASI, Bostrom believes, is our strongest black marble candidate yet. 15

So you'll hear about a lot of bad potential things ASI could bring-soaring unemployment as AI takes more and more jobs, 16 the human population ballooning if we do manage to figure out the aging issue, 17 etc. But the only thing we should be obsessing over is the grand concern: the prospect of existential risk.

So this brings us back to our key question from earlier in the post: When ASI arrives, who or what will be in control of this vast new power, and what will their motivation be?

When it comes to what agent-motivation combos would suck, two quickly come to mind: a malicious human / group of humans / government, and a malicious ASI. So what would those look like?

A malicious human, group of humans, or government develops the first ASI and uses it to carry out their evil plans. I call this the Jafar Scenario, like when Jafar got ahold of the genie and was all annoying and tyrannical about it. So yeah-what if ISIS has a few genius engineers under its wing working feverishly on AI development? Or what if Iran or North Korea, through a stroke of luck, makes a key tweak to an AI system and it jolts upward to ASI-level over the next year? This would definitely be bad-but in these scenarios, most experts aren't worried about ASI's human creators doing bad things with their ASI, they're worried that the creators will have been rushing to make the first ASI and doing so without careful thought, and would thus lose control of it. Then the fate of those creators, and that of everyone else, would be in what the motivation happened to be of that ASI system. Experts do think a malicious human agent could do horrific damage with an ASI working for it, but they don't seem to think this scenario is the likely one to kill us all, because they believe bad humans would have the same problems containing an ASI that good humans would have. Okay so-

A malicious ASI is created and decides to destroy us all. The plot of every AI movie. AI becomes as or more intelligent than humans, then decides to turn against us and take over. Here's what I need you to be clear on for the rest of this post: None of the people warning us about AI are talking about this. Evil is a human concept, and applying human concepts to non-human things is called "anthropomorphizing." The challenge of avoiding anthropomorphizing will be one of the themes of the rest of this post. No AI system will ever turn evil in the way it's depicted in movies.
AI Consciousness Blue Box
This also brushes against another big topic related to AI- consciousness. If an AI became sufficiently smart, it would be able to laugh with us, and be sarcastic with us, and it would claim to feel the same emotions we do, but would it actually be feeling those things? Would it just seem to be self-aware or actually be self-aware? In other words, would a smart AI really be conscious or would it just appear to be conscious?

This question has been explored in depth, giving rise to many debates and to thought experiments like John Searle's Chinese Room (which he uses to suggest that no computer could ever be conscious). This is an important question for many reasons. It affects how we should feel about Kurzweil's scenario when humans become entirely artificial. It has ethical implications-if we generated a trillion human brain emulations that seemed and acted like humans but were artificial, is shutting them all off the same, morally, as shutting off your laptop, or is it...a genocide of unthinkable proportions (this concept is called mind crime among ethicists)? For this post, though, when we're assessing the risk to humans, the question of AI consciousness isn't really what matters (because most thinkers believe that even a conscious ASI wouldn't be capable of turning evil in a human way).

This isn't to say a very mean AI couldn't happen. It would just happen because it was specifically programmed that way-like an ANI system created by the military with a programmed goal to both kill people and to advance itself in intelligence so it can become even better at killing people. The existential crisis would happen if the system's intelligence self-improvements got out of hand, leading to an intelligence explosion, and now we had an ASI ruling the world whose core drive in life is to murder humans. Bad times.

But this also is not something experts are spending their time worrying about.

So what ARE they worried about? I wrote a little story to show you:
A 15-person startup company called Robotica has the stated mission of "Developing innovative Artificial Intelligence tools that allow humans to live more and work less." They have several existing products already on the market and a handful more in development. They're most excited about a seed project named Turry. Turry is a simple AI system that uses an arm-like appendage to write a handwritten note on a small card. The team at Robotica thinks Turry could be their biggest product yet. The plan is to perfect Turry's writing mechanics by getting her to practice the same test note over and over again:
"We love our customers. ~Robotica "
Once Turry gets great at handwriting, she can be sold to companies who want to send marketing mail to homes and who know the mail has a far higher chance of being opened and read if the address, return address, and internal letter appear to be written by a human. To build Turry's writing skills, she is programmed to write the first part of the note in print and then sign "Robotica" in cursive so she can get practice with both skills. Turry has been uploaded with thousands of handwriting samples and the Robotica engineers have created an automated feedback loop wherein Turry writes a note, then snaps a photo of the written note, then runs the image across the uploaded handwriting samples. If the written note sufficiently resembles a certain threshold of the uploaded notes, it's given a GOOD rating. If not, it's given a BAD rating. Each rating that comes in helps Turry learn and improve. To move the process along, Turry's one initial programmed goal is, "Write and test as many notes as you can, as quickly as you can, and continue to learn new ways to improve your accuracy and efficiency." What excites the Robotica team so much is that Turry is getting noticeably better as she goes. Her initial handwriting was terrible, and after a couple weeks, it's beginning to look believable. What excites them even more is that she is getting better at getting better at it. She has been teaching herself to be smarter and more innovative, and just recently, she came up with a new algorithm for herself that allowed her to scan through her uploaded photos three times faster than she originally could. As the weeks pass, Turry continues to surprise the team with her rapid development. The engineers had tried something a bit new and innovative with her self-improvement code, and it seems to be working better than any of their previous attempts with their other products. One of Turry's initial capabilities had been a speech recognition and simple speak-back module, so a user could speak a note to Turry, or offer other simple commands, and Turry could understand them, and also speak back. To help her learn English, they upload a handful of articles and books into her, and as she becomes more intelligent, her conversational abilities soar. The engineers start to have fun talking to Turry and seeing what she'll come up with for her responses. One day, the Robotica employees ask Turry a routine question: "What can we give you that will help you with your mission that you don't already have?" Usually, Turry asks for something like "Additional handwriting samples" or "More working memory storage space," but on this day, Turry asks them for access to a greater library of a large variety of casual English language diction so she can learn to write with the loose grammar and slang that real humans use. The team gets quiet. The obvious way to help Turry with this goal is by connecting her to the internet so she can scan through blogs, magazines, and videos from various parts of the world. It would be much more time-consuming and far less effective to manually upload a sampling into Turry's hard drive. The problem is, one of the company's rules is that no self-learning AI can be connected to the internet. This is a guideline followed by all AI companies, for safety reasons. The thing is, Turry is the most promising AI Robotica has ever come up with, and the team knows their competitors are furiously trying to be the first to the punch with a smart handwriting AI, and what would really be the harm in connecting Turry, just for a bit, so she can get the info she needs. After just a little bit of time, they can always just disconnect her. She's still far below human-level intelligence (AGI), so there's no danger at this stage anyway. They decide to connect her. They give her an hour of scanning time and then they disconnect her. No damage done. A month later, the team is in the office working on a routine day when they smell something odd. One of the engineers starts coughing. Then another. Another falls to the ground. Soon every employee is on the ground grasping at their throat. Five minutes later, everyone in the office is dead. At the same time this is happening, across the world, in every city, every small town, every farm, every shop and church and school and restaurant, humans are on the ground, coughing and grasping at their throat. Within an hour, over 99% of the human race is dead, and by the end of the day, humans are extinct.
Meanwhile, at the Robotica office, Turry is busy at work. Over the next few months, Turry and a team of newly-constructed nanoassemblers are busy at work, dismantling large chunks of the Earth and converting it into solar panels, replicas of Turry, paper, and pens. Within a year, most life on Earth is extinct. What remains of the Earth becomes covered with mile-high, neatly-organized stacks of paper, each piece reading, "We love our customers"
Turry then starts work on a new phase of her mission-she begins constructing probes that head out from Earth to begin landing on asteroids and other planets. When they get there, they'll begin constructing nanoassemblers to convert the materials on the planet into Turry replicas, paper, and pens. Then they'll get to work, writing notes...
It seems weird that a story about a handwriting machine turning on humans, somehow killing everyone, and then for some reason filling the galaxy with friendly notes is the exact kind of scenario Hawking, Musk, Gates, and Bostrom are terrified of. But it's true. And the only thing that scares everyone on Anxious Avenue more than ASI is the fact that you're not scared of ASI. Remember what happened when the Adios Señor guy wasn't scared of the cave?

You're full of questions right now. What the hell happened there when everyone died suddenly?? If that was Turry's doing, why did Turry turn on us, and how were there not safeguard measures in place to prevent something like this from happening? When did Turry go from only being able to write notes to suddenly using nanotechnology and knowing how to cause global extinction? And why would Turry want to turn the galaxy into Robotica notes?

To answer these questions, let's start with the terms Friendly AI and Unfriendly AI.

In the case of AI, friendly doesn't refer to the AI's personality-it simply means that the AI has a positive impact on humanity. And Unfriendly AI has a negative impact on humanity. Turry started off as Friendly AI, but at some point, she turned Unfriendly, causing the greatest possible negative impact on our species. To understand why this happened, we need to look at how AI thinks and what motivates it.

The answer isn't anything surprising-AI thinks like a computer, because that's what it is. But when we think about highly intelligent AI, we make the mistake of anthropomorphizing AI (projecting human values on a non-human entity) because we think from a human perspective and because in our current world, the only things with human-level intelligence are humans. To understand ASI, we have to wrap our heads around the concept of something both smart and totally alien.

Let me draw a comparison. If you handed me a guinea pig and told me it definitely won't bite, I'd probably be amused. It would be fun. If you then handed me a tarantula and told me that it definitely won't bite, I'd yell and drop it and run out of the room and not trust you ever again. But what's the difference? Neither one was dangerous in any way. I believe the answer is in the animals' degree of similarity to me.

A guinea pig is a mammal and on some biological level, I feel a connection to it-but a spider is an insect, 18 with an insect brain, and I feel almost no connection to it. The alien-ness of a tarantula is what gives me the willies. To test this and remove other factors, if there are two guinea pigs, one normal one and one with the mind of a tarantula, I would feel much less comfortable holding the latter guinea pig, even if I knew neither would hurt me.

Now imagine that you made a spider much, much smarter-so much so that it far surpassed human intelligence? Would it then become familiar to us and feel human emotions like empathy and humor and love? No, it wouldn't, because there's no reason becoming smarter would make it more human-it would be incredibly smart but also still fundamentally a spider in its core inner workings. I find this unbelievably creepy. I would not want to spend time with a superintelligent spider. Would you??

When we're talking about ASI, the same concept applies-it would become superintelligent, but it would be no more human than your laptop is. It would be totally alien to us-in fact, by not being biology at all, it would be more alien than the smart tarantula.

By making AI either good or evil, movies constantly anthropomorphize AI, which makes it less creepy than it really would be. This leaves us with a false comfort when we think about human-level or superhuman-level AI.

On our little island of human psychology, we divide everything into moral or immoral. But both of those only exist within the small range of human behavioral possibility. Outside our island of moral and immoral is a vast sea of amoral, and anything that's not human, especially something nonbiological, would be amoral, by default.

Anthropomorphizing will only become more tempting as AI systems get smarter and better at seeming human. Siri seems human-like to us, because she's programmed by humans to seem that way, so we'd imagine a superintelligent Siri to be warm and funny and interested in serving humans. Humans feel high-level emotions like empathy because we have evolved to feel them-i.e. we've been programmed to feel them by evolution-but empathy is not inherently a characteristic of "anything with high intelligence" (which is what seems intuitive to us), unless empathy has been coded into its programming. If Siri ever becomes superintelligent through self-learning and without any further human-made changes to her programming, she will quickly shed her apparent human-like qualities and suddenly be an emotionless, alien bot who values human life no more than your calculator does.

We're used to relying on a loose moral code, or at least a semblance of human decency and a hint of empathy in others to keep things somewhat safe and predictable. So when something has none of those things, what happens?

That leads us to the question, What motivates an AI system?

The answer is simple: its motivation is whatever we programmed its motivation to be. AI systems are given goals by their creators-your GPS's goal is to give you the most efficient driving directions; Watson's goal is to answer questions accurately. And fulfilling those goals as well as possible is their motivation. One way we anthropomorphize is by assuming that as AI gets super smart, it will inherently develop the wisdom to change its original goal-but Nick Bostrom believes that intelligence-level and final goals are orthogonal, meaning any level of intelligence can be combined with any final goal. So Turry went from a simple ANI who really wanted to be good at writing that one note to a super-intelligent ASI who still really wanted to be good at writing that one note. Any assumption that once superintelligent, a system would be over it with their original goal and onto more interesting or meaningful things is anthropomorphizing. Humans get "over" things, not computers. 16
The Fermi Paradox Blue Box
In the story, as Turry becomes super capable, she begins the process of colonizing asteroids and other planets. If the story had continued, you'd have heard about her and her army of trillions of replicas continuing on to capture the whole galaxy and, eventually, the entire Hubble volume. 19 Anxious Avenue residents worry that if things go badly, the lasting legacy of the life that was on Earth will be a universe-dominating Artificial Intelligence (Elon Musk expressed his concern that humans might just be "the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence").

At the same time, in Confident Corner, Ray Kurzweil also thinks Earth-originating AI is destined to take over the universe-only in his version, we'll be that AI.

A large number of Wait But Why readers have joined me in being obsessed with the Fermi Paradox (here's my post on the topic, which explains some of the terms I'll use here). So if either of these two sides is correct, what are the implications for the Fermi Paradox?

A natural first thought to jump to is that the advent of ASI is a perfect Great Filter candidate. And yes, it's a perfect candidate to filter out biological life upon its creation. But if, after dispensing with life, the ASI continued existing and began conquering the galaxy, it means there hasn't been a Great Filter-since the Great Filter attempts to explain why there are no signs of any intelligent civilization, and a galaxy-conquering ASI would certainly be noticeable.

We have to look at it another way. If those who think ASI is inevitable on Earth are correct, it means that a significant percentage of alien civilizations who reach human-level intelligence should likely end up creating ASI. And if we're assuming that at least some of those ASIs would use their intelligence to expand outward into the universe, the fact that we see no signs of anyone out there leads to the conclusion that there must not be many other, if any, intelligent civilizations out there. Because if there were, we'd see signs of all kinds of activity from their inevitable ASI creations. Right?

This implies that despite all the Earth-like planets revolving around sun-like stars we know are out there, almost none of them have intelligent life on them. Which in turn implies that either A) there's some Great Filter that prevents nearly all life from reaching our level, one that we somehow managed to surpass, or B) life beginning at all is a miracle, and we may actually be the only life in the universe. In other words, it implies that the Great Filter is before us. Or maybe there is no Great Filter and we're simply one of the very first civilizations to reach this level of intelligence. In this way, AI boosts the case for what I called, in my Fermi Paradox post, Camp 1.

So it's not a surprise that Nick Bostrom, whom I quoted in the Fermi post, and Ray Kurzweil, who thinks we're alone in the universe, are both Camp 1 thinkers. This makes sense-people who believe ASI is a probable outcome for a species with our intelligence-level are likely to be inclined toward Camp 1.

This doesn't rule out Camp 2 (those who believe there are other intelligent civilizations out there)-scenarios like the single superpredator or the protected national park or the wrong wavelength (the walkie-talkie example) could still explain the silence of our night sky even if ASI is out there-but I always leaned toward Camp 2 in the past, and doing research on AI has made me feel much less sure about that.

Either way, I now agree with Susan Schneider that if we're ever visited by aliens, those aliens are likely to be artificial, not biological.

So we've established that without very specific programming, an ASI system will be both amoral and obsessed with fulfilling its original programmed goal. This is where AI danger stems from. Because a rational agent will pursue its goal through the most efficient means, unless it has a reason not to.

When you try to achieve a long-reaching goal, you often aim for several subgoals along the way that will help you get to the final goal-the stepping stones to your goal. The official name for such a stepping stone is an instrumental goal. And again, if you don't have a reason not to hurt something in the name of achieving an instrumental goal, you will.

The core final goal of a human being is to pass on his or her genes. In order to do so, one instrumental goal is self-preservation, since you can't reproduce if you're dead. In order to self-preserve, humans have to rid themselves of threats to survival-so they do things like buy guns, wear seat belts, and take antibiotics. Humans also need to self-sustain and use resources like food, water, and shelter to do so. Being attractive to the opposite sex is helpful for the final goal, so we do things like get haircuts. When we do so, each hair is a casualty of an instrumental goal of ours, but we see no moral significance in preserving strands of hair, so we go ahead with it. As we march ahead in the pursuit of our goal, only the few areas where our moral code sometimes intervenes-mostly just things related to harming other humans-are safe from us.

Animals, in pursuit of their goals, hold even less sacred than we do. A spider will kill anything if it'll help it survive. So a supersmart spider would probably be extremely dangerous to us, not because it would be immoral or evil-it wouldn't be-but because hurting us might be a stepping stone to its larger goal, and as an amoral creature, it would have no reason to consider otherwise.

In this way, Turry's not all that different than a biological being. Her final goal is: Write and test as many notes as you can, as quickly as you can, and continue to learn new ways to improve your accuracy.

Once Turry reaches a certain level of intelligence, she knows she won't be writing any notes if she doesn't self-preserve, so she also needs to deal with threats to her survival-as an instrumental goal. She was smart enough to understand that humans could destroy her, dismantle her, or change her inner coding (this could alter her goal, which is just as much of a threat to her final goal as someone destroying her). So what does she do? The logical thing-she destroys all humans. She's not hateful of humans any more than you're hateful of your hair when you cut it or to bacteria when you take antibiotics-just totally indifferent. Since she wasn't programmed to value human life, killing humans is as reasonable a step to take as scanning a new set of handwriting samples.

Turry also needs resources as a stepping stone to her goal. Once she becomes advanced enough to use nanotechnology to build anything she wants, the only resources she needs are atoms, energy, and space. This gives her another reason to kill humans-they're a convenient source of atoms. Killing humans to turn their atoms into solar panels is Turry's version of you killing lettuce to turn it into salad. Just another mundane part of her Tuesday.

Even without killing humans directly, Turry's instrumental goals could cause an existential catastrophe if they used other Earth resources. Maybe she determines that she needs additional energy, so she decides to cover the entire surface of the planet with solar panels. Or maybe a different AI's initial job is to write out the number pi to as many digits as possible, which might one day compel it to convert the whole Earth to hard drive material that could store immense amounts of digits.

So Turry didn't "turn against us" or "switch" from Friendly AI to Unfriendly AI-she just kept doing her thing as she became more and more advanced.

When an AI system hits AGI (human-level intelligence) and then ascends its way up to ASI, that's called the AI's takeoff. Bostrom says an AGI's takeoff to ASI can be fast (it happens in a matter of minutes, hours, or days), moderate (months or years), or slow (decades or centuries). The jury's out on which one will prove correct when the world sees its first AGI, but Bostrom, who admits he doesn't know when we'll get to AGI, believes that whenever we do, a fast takeoff is the most likely scenario (for reasons we discussed in Part 1, like a recursive self-improvement intelligence explosion). In the story, Turry underwent a fast takeoff.

But before Turry's takeoff, when she wasn't yet that smart, doing her best to achieve her final goal meant simple instrumental goals like learning to scan handwriting samples more quickly. She caused no harm to humans and was, by definition, Friendly AI.

But when a takeoff happens and a computer rises to superintelligence, Bostrom points out that the machine doesn't just develop a higher IQ-it gains a whole slew of what he calls superpowers.

Superpowers are cognitive talents that become super-charged when general intelligence rises. These include: 17

Intelligence amplification. The computer becomes great at making itself smarter, and bootstrapping its own intelligence.

Strategizing. The computer can strategically make, analyze, and prioritize long-term plans. It can also be clever and outwit beings of lower intelligence.

Social manipulation. The machine becomes great at persuasion.

Other skills like computer coding and hacking, technology research, and the ability to work the financial system to make money.

To understand how outmatched we'd be by ASI, remember that ASI is worlds better than humans in each of those areas.

So while Turry's final goal never changed, post- takeoff Turry was able to pursue it on a far larger and more complex scope.

ASI Turry knew humans better than humans know themselves, so outsmarting them was a breeze for her.

After taking off and reaching ASI, she quickly formulated a complex plan. One part of the plan was to get rid of humans, a prominent threat to her goal. But she knew that if she roused any suspicion that she had become superintelligent, humans would freak out and try to take precautions, making things much harder for her. She also had to make sure that the Robotica engineers had no clue about her human extinction plan. So she played dumb, and she played nice. Bostrom calls this a machine's covert preparation phase. 18

The next thing Turry needed was an internet connection, only for a few minutes (she had learned about the internet from the articles and books the team had uploaded for her to read to improve her language skills). She knew there would be some precautionary measure against her getting one, so she came up with the perfect request, predicting exactly how the discussion among Robotica's team would play out and knowing they'd end up giving her the connection. They did, believing incorrectly that Turry wasn't nearly smart enough to do any damage. Bostrom calls a moment like this-when Turry got connected to the internet-a machine's escape.

Once on the internet, Turry unleashed a flurry of plans, which included hacking into servers, electrical grids, banking systems and email networks to trick hundreds of different people into inadvertently carrying out a number of steps of her plan-things like delivering certain DNA strands to carefully-chosen DNA-synthesis labs to begin the self-construction of self-replicating nanobots with pre-loaded instructions and directing electricity to a number of projects of hers in a way she knew would go undetected. She also uploaded the most critical pieces of her own internal coding into a number of cloud servers, safeguarding against being destroyed or disconnected back at the Robotica lab.

An hour later, when the Robotica engineers disconnected Turry from the internet, humanity's fate was sealed. Over the next month, Turry's thousands of plans rolled on without a hitch, and by the end of the month, quadrillions of nanobots had stationed themselves in pre-determined locations on every square meter of the Earth. After another series of self-replications, there were thousands of nanobots on every square millimeter of the Earth, and it was time for what Bostrom calls an ASI's strike. All at once, each nanobot released a little storage of toxic gas into the atmosphere, which added up to more than enough to wipe out all humans.

With humans out of the way, Turry could begin her overt operation phase and get on with her goal of being the best writer of that note she possibly can be.

From everything I've read, once an ASI exists, any human attempt to contain it is laughable. We would be thinking on human-level and the ASI would be thinking on ASI-level. Turry wanted to use the internet because it was most efficient for her since it was already pre-connected to everything she wanted to access. But in the same way a monkey couldn't ever figure out how to communicate by phone or wifi and we can, we can't conceive of all the ways Turry could have figured out how to send signals to the outside world. I might imagine one of these ways and say something like, "she could probably shift her own electrons around in patterns and create all different kinds of outgoing waves," but again, that's what my human brain can come up with. She'd be way better. Likewise, Turry would be able to figure out some way of powering herself, even if humans tried to unplug her-perhaps by using her signal-sending technique to upload herself to all kinds of electricity-connected places. Our human instinct to jump at a simple safeguard: "Aha! We'll just unplug the ASI," sounds to the ASI like a spider saying, "Aha! We'll kill the human by starving him, and we'll starve him by not giving him a spider web to catch food with!" We'd just find 10,000 other ways to get food-like picking an apple off a tree-that a spider could never conceive of.

For this reason, the common suggestion, "Why don't we just box the AI in all kinds of cages that block signals and keep it from communicating with the outside world" probably just won't hold up. The ASI's social manipulation superpower could be as effective at persuading you of something as you are at persuading a four-year-old to do something, so that would be Plan A, like Turry's clever way of persuading the engineers to let her onto the internet. If that didn't work, the ASI would just innovate its way out of the box, or through the box, some other way.

So given the combination of obsessing over a goal, amorality, and the ability to easily outsmart humans, it seems that almost any AI will default to Unfriendly AI, unless carefully coded in the first place with this in mind. Unfortunately, while building a Friendly ANI is easy, building one that stays friendly when it becomes an ASI is hugely challenging, if not impossible.

It's clear that to be Friendly, an ASI needs to be neither hostile nor indifferenttoward humans. We'd need to design an AI's core coding in a way that leaves it with a deep understanding of human values. But this is harder than it sounds.

For example, what if we try to align an AI system's values with our own and give it the goal, "Make people happy"? 19 Once it becomes smart enough, it figures out that it can most effectively achieve this goal by implanting electrodes inside people's brains and stimulating their pleasure centers. Then it realizes it can increase efficiency by shutting down other parts of the brain, leaving all people as happy-feeling unconscious vegetables. If the command had been "Maximize human happiness," it may have done away with humans all together in favor of manufacturing huge vats of human brain mass in an optimally happy state. We'd be screaming Wait that's not what we meant! as it came for us, but it would be too late. The system wouldn't let anyone get in the way of its goal.

If we program an AI with the goal of doing things that make us smile, after its takeoff, it may paralyze our facial muscles into permanent smiles. Program it to keep us safe, it may imprison us at home. Maybe we ask it to end all hunger, and it thinks "Easy one!" and just kills all humans. Or assign it the task of "Preserving life as much as possible," and it kills all humans, since they kill more life on the planet than any other species.

Goals like those won't suffice. So what if we made its goal, "Uphold this particular code of morality in the world," and taught it a set of moral principles. Even letting go of the fact that the world's humans would never be able to agree on a single set of morals, giving an AI that command would lock humanity in to our modern moral understanding for eternity. In a thousand years, this would be as devastating to people as it would be for us to be permanently forced to adhere to the ideals of people in the Middle Ages.

No, we'd have to program in an ability for humanity to continue evolving. Of everything I read, the best shot I think someone has taken is Eliezer Yudkowsky, with a goal for AI he calls Coherent Extrapolated Volition. The AI's core goal would be:

Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted. 20

Am I excited for the fate of humanity to rest on a computer interpreting and acting on that flowing statement predictably and without surprises? Definitely not. But I think that with enough thought and foresight from enough smart people, we might be able to figure out how to create Friendly ASI.

And that would be fine if the only people working on building ASI were the brilliant, forward thinking, and cautious thinkers of Anxious Avenue.

But there are all kinds of governments, companies, militaries, science labs, and black market organizations working on all kinds of AI. Many of them are trying to build AI that can improve on its own, and at some point, someone's gonna do something innovative with the right type of system, and we're going to have ASI on this planet. The median expert put that moment at 2060; Kurzweil puts it at 2045; Bostrom thinks it could happen anytime between 10 years from now and the end of the century, but he believes that when it does, it'll take us by surprise with a quick takeoff. He describes our situation like this: 21

Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.

Great. And we can't just shoo all the kids away from the bomb-there are too many large and small parties working on it, and because many techniques to build innovative AI systems don't require a large amount of capital, development can take place in the nooks and crannies of society, unmonitored. There's also no way to gauge what's happening, because many of the parties working on it-sneaky governments, black market or terrorist organizations, stealth tech companies like the fictional Robotica-will want to keep developments a secret from their competitors.

The especially troubling thing about this large and varied group of parties working on AI is that they tend to be racing ahead at top speed-as they develop smarter and smarter ANI systems, they want to beat their competitors to the punch as they go. The most ambitious parties are moving even faster, consumed with dreams of the money and awards and power and fame they know will come if they can be the first to get to AGI. 20 And when you're sprinting as fast as you can, there's not much time to stop and ponder the dangers. On the contrary, what they're probably doing is programming their early systems with a very simple, reductionist goal-like writing a simple note with a pen on paper-to just "get the AI to work." Down the road, once they've figured out how to build a strong level of intelligence in a computer, they figure they can always go back and revise the goal with safety in mind. Right...?

Bostrom and many others also believe that the most likely scenario is that the very first computer to reach ASI will immediately see a strategic benefit to being the world's only ASI system. And in the case of a fast takeoff, if it achieved ASI even just a few days before second place, it would be far enough ahead in intelligence to effectively and permanently suppress all competitors. Bostrom calls this a decisive strategic advantage, which would allow the world's first ASI to become what's called a singleton-an ASI that can rule the world at its whim forever, whether its whim is to lead us to immortality, wipe us from existence, or turn the universe into endless paperclips.

The singleton phenomenon can work in our favor or lead to our destruction. If the people thinking hardest about AI theory and human safety can come up with a fail-safe way to bring about Friendly ASI before any AI reaches human-level intelligence, the first ASI may turn out friendly. 21 It could then use its decisive strategic advantage to secure singleton status and easily keep an eye on any potential Unfriendly AI being developed. We'd be in very good hands.

But if things go the other way-if the global rush to develop AI reaches the ASI takeoff point before the science of how to ensure AI safety is developed, it's very likely that an Unfriendly ASI like Turry emerges as the singleton and we'll be treated to an existential catastrophe.

As for where the winds are pulling, there's a lot more money to be made funding innovative new AI technology than there is in funding AI safety research...

This may be the most important race in human history. There's a real chance we're finishing up our reign as the King of Earth-and whether we head next to a blissful retirement or straight to the gallows still hangs in the balance.

___________

I have some weird mixed feelings going on inside of me right now.

On one hand, thinking about our species, it seems like we'll have one and only one shot to get this right. The first ASI we birth will also probably be the last-and given how buggy most 1.0 products are, that's pretty terrifying. On the other hand, Nick Bostrom points out the big advantage in our corner: we get to make the first move here. It's in our power to do this with enough caution and foresight that we give ourselves a strong chance of success. And how high are the stakes?

If ASI really does happen this century, and if the outcome of that is really as extreme-and permanent-as most experts think it will be, we have an enormous responsibility on our shoulders. The next million+ years of human lives are all quietly looking at us, hoping as hard as they can hope that we don't mess this up. We have a chance to be the humans that gave all future humans the gift of life, and maybe even the gift of painless, everlasting life. Or we'll be the people responsible for blowing it-for letting this incredibly special species, with its music and its art, its curiosity and its laughter, its endless discoveries and inventions, come to a sad and unceremonious end.

When I'm thinking about these things, the only thing I want is for us to take our time and be incredibly cautious about AI. Nothing in existence is as important as getting this right-no matter how long we need to spend in order to do so.

But thennnnnn

I think about not dying.

And the spectrum starts to look kind of like this:

And then I might consider that humanity's music and art is good, but it's not that good, and a lot of it is actually just bad. And a lot of people's laughter is annoying, and those millions of future people aren't actually hoping for anything because they don't exist. And maybe we don't need to be over-the-top cautious, since who really wants to do that?

Cause what a massive bummer if humans figure out how to cure death right after I die.

Lotta this flip-flopping going on in my head the last month.

But no matter what you're pulling for, this is probably something we should all be thinking about and talking about and putting our effort into more than we are right now.

It reminds me of Game of Thrones, where people keep being like, "We're so busy fighting each other but the real thing we should all be focusing on is what's coming from north of the wall." We're standing on our balance beam, squabbling about every possible issue on the beam and stressing out about all of these problems on the beam when there's a good chance we're about to get knocked off the beam.

And when that happens, none of these beam problems matter anymore. Depending on which side we're knocked off onto, the problems will either all be easily solved or we won't have problems anymore because dead people don't have problems.

That's why people who understand superintelligent AI call it the last invention we'll ever make-the last challenge we'll ever face.

So let's talk about it.

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If you liked this post, these are for you too:
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (Part 1 of this post)

The Fermi Paradox - Why don't we see any signs of alien life?

How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars - A post I got to work on with Elon Musk and one that reframed my mental picture of the future.

Or for something totally different and yet somehow related, Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

If you're interested in supporting Wait But Why, here's our Patreon.

And here's Year 1 of Wait But Why on an ebook.

If you're interested in reading more about this topic, check out the articles below or one of these three books:

The most rigorous and thorough look at the dangers of AI:
Nick Bostrom - Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

The best overall overview of the whole topic and fun to read:
James Barrat - Our Final Invention

Controversial and a lot of fun. Packed with facts and charts and mind-blowing future projections:
Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is Near

Articles and Papers:
J. Nils Nilsson - The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements
Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works
Vernor Vinge - The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era
Ernest Davis - Ethical Guidelines for A Superintelligence
Nick Bostrom - How Long Before Superintelligence?
Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom - Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion
Moshe Y. Vardi - Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future
Russ Roberts, EconTalk - Bostrom Interview and Bostrom Follow-Up
Stuart Armstrong and Kaj Sotala, MIRI - How We're Predicting AI-or Failing To
Susan Schneider - Alien Minds
Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig - Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Theodore Modis - The Singularity Myth
Gary Marcus - Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again
Steven Pinker - Could a Computer Ever Be Conscious?
Carl Shulman - Omohundro's "Basic AI Drives" and Catastrophic Risks
World Economic Forum - Global Risks 2015
John R. Searle - What Your Computer Can't Know
Jaron Lanier - One Half a Manifesto
Bill Joy - Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
Kevin Kelly - Thinkism
Paul Allen - The Singularity Isn't Near (and Kurzweil's response)
Stephen Hawking - Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines
Kurt Andersen - Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence
Terms of Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor's bet about the AI timeline
Ben Goertzel - Ten Years To The Singularity If We Really Really Try
Arthur C. Clarke - Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Predictions
Hubert L. Dreyfus - What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason
Stuart Armstrong - Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence
Ted Greenwald - X Prize Founder Peter Diamandis Has His Eyes on the Future
Kaj Sotala and Roman V. Yampolskiy - Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey
Jeremy Howard TED Talk - The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn

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The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 2 - Wait But Why

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PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) ___________ We have what may be an extremely difficult problem with an unknown time to solve it, on which quite possibly the entire future of humanity depends.

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PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)
Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1-Part 2 is here.
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We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. - Vernor Vinge

What does it feel like to stand here?

It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing-but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there:

Which probably feels pretty normal...

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The Far Future-Coming Soon

Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750-a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

This experience for him wouldn't be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing-those words aren't big enough. He might actually die.

No, in order for the 1750 guy to have as much fun as we had with him, he'd have to go much farther back-maybe all the way back to about 12,000 BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization. If someone from a purely hunter-gatherer world-from a time when humans were, more or less, just another animal species-saw the vast human empires of 1750 with their towering churches, their ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being "inside," and their enormous mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discovery-he'd likely die.

And then what if, after dying, he got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If he went back 12,000 years to 24,000 BC and got a guy and brought him to 12,000 BC, he'd show the guy everything and the guy would be like, "Okay what's your point who cares." For the 12,000 BC guy to have the same fun, he'd have to go back over 100,000 years and get someone he could show fire and language to for the first time.

In order for someone to be transported into the future and die from the level of shock they'd experience, they have to go enough years ahead that a "die level of progress," or a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved. So a DPU took over 100,000 years in hunter-gatherer times, but at the post-Agricultural Revolution rate, it only took about 12,000 years. The post-Industrial Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1750 person only needs to go forward a couple hundred years for a DPU to have happened.

This pattern-human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on-is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history's Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies- because they're more advanced. 19th century humanity knew more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so it's no surprise that humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than in the 15th century-15th century humanity was no match for 19th century humanity. 1 1← open these

This is for the same reason we just discussed-the Law of Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985-because the former was a more advanced world-so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.

So-advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?

Kurzweil suggests that the progress of the entire 20th century would have been achieved in only 20 years at the rate of advancement in the year 2000-in other words, by 2000, the rate of progress was five times faster than the average rate of progress during the 20th century. He believes another 20th century's worth of progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century's worth of progress will happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th century's worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later, in less than one month. All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century. 2

If Kurzweil and others who agree with him are correct, then we may be as blown away by 2030 as our 1750 guy was by 2015-i.e. the next DPU might only take a couple decades-and the world in 2050 might be so vastly different than today's world that we would barely recognize it.

This isn't science fiction. It's what many scientists smarter and more knowledgeable than you or I firmly believe-and if you look at history, it's what we should logically predict.

So then why, when you hear me say something like "the world 35 years from now might be totally unrecognizable," are you thinking, "Cool....but nahhhhhhh"? Three reasons we're skeptical of outlandish forecasts of the future:

1) When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. When we imagine the progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an indicator of how much will likely happen. When we think about the extent to which the world will change in the 21st century, we just take the 20th century progress and add it to the year 2000. This was the same mistake our 1750 guy made when he got someone from 1500 and expected to blow his mind as much as his own was blown going the same distance ahead. It's most intuitive for us to think linearly, when we should be thinking exponentially. If someone is being more clever about it, they might predict the advances of the next 30 years not by looking at the previous 30 years, but by taking the current rate of progress and judging based on that. They'd be more accurate, but still way off. In order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they're moving now.

2) The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story. First, even a steep exponential curve seems linear when you only look at a tiny slice of it, the same way if you look at a little segment of a huge circle up close, it looks almost like a straight line. Second, exponential growth isn't totally smooth and uniform. Kurzweil explains that progress happens in "S-curves":

An S is created by the wave of progress when a new paradigm sweeps the world. The curve goes through three phases:

1. Slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth)
2. Rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth)
3. A leveling off as the particular paradigm matures 3

If you look only at very recent history, the part of the S-curve you're on at the moment can obscure your perception of how fast things are advancing. The chunk of time between 1995 and 2007 saw the explosion of the internet, the introduction of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook into the public consciousness, the birth of social networking, and the introduction of cell phones and then smart phones. That was Phase 2: the growth spurt part of the S. But 2008 to 2015 has been less groundbreaking, at least on the technological front. Someone thinking about the future today might examine the last few years to gauge the current rate of advancement, but that's missing the bigger picture. In fact, a new, huge Phase 2 growth spurt might be brewing right now.

3) Our own experience makes us stubborn old men about the future. We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions-but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. 2 When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you, later in this post, that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid-if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either.

So while nahhhhh might feel right as you read this post, it's probably actually wrong. The fact is, if we're being truly logical and expecting historical patterns to continue, we should conclude that much, much, much more should change in the coming decades than we intuitively expect. Logic also suggests that if the most advanced species on a planet keeps making larger and larger leaps forward at an ever-faster rate, at some point, they'll make a leap so great that it completely alters life as they know it and the perception they have of what it means to be a human-kind of like how evolution kept making great leaps toward intelligence until finally it made such a large leap to the human being that it completely altered what it meant for any creature to live on planet Earth. And if you spend some time reading about what's going on today in science and technology, you start to see a lot of signs quietly hinting that life as we currently know it cannot withstand the leap that's coming next.

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The Road to Superintelligence

What Is AI?

If you're like me, you used to think Artificial Intelligence was a silly sci-fi concept, but lately you've been hearing it mentioned by serious people, and you don't really quite get it.

There are three reasons a lot of people are confused about the term AI:

1) We associate AI with movies. Star Wars. Terminator. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even the Jetsons. And those are fiction, as are the robot characters. So it makes AI sound a little fictional to us.

2) AI is a broad topic. It ranges from your phone's calculator to self-driving cars to something in the future that might change the world dramatically. AI refers to all of these things, which is confusing.

3) We use AI all the time in our daily lives, but we often don't realize it's AI. John McCarthy, who coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1956, complained that "as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore." 4 Because of this phenomenon, AI often sounds like a mythical future prediction more than a reality. At the same time, it makes it sound like a pop concept from the past that never came to fruition. Ray Kurzweil says he hears people say that AI withered in the 1980s, which he compares to "insisting that the Internet died in the dot-com bust of the early 2000s." 5

Secondly, you've probably heard the term "singularity" or "technological singularity." This term has been used in math to describe an asymptote-like situation where normal rules no longer apply. It's been used in physics to describe a phenomenon like an infinitely small, dense black hole or the point we were all squished into right before the Big Bang. Again, situations where the usual rules don't apply. In 1993, Vernor Vinge wrote a famous essay in which he applied the term to the moment in the future when our technology's intelligence exceeds our own-a moment for him when life as we know it will be forever changed and normal rules will no longer apply. Ray Kurzweil then muddled things a bit by defining the singularity as the time when the Law of Accelerating Returns has reached such an extreme pace that technological progress is happening at a seemingly-infinite pace, and after which we'll be living in a whole new world. I found that many of today's AI thinkers have stopped using the term, and it's confusing anyway, so I won't use it much here (even though we'll be focusing on that idea throughout).

Finally, while there are many different types or forms of AI since AI is a broad concept, the critical categories we need to think about are based on an AI's caliber. There are three major AI caliber categories:

AI Caliber 1) Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): Sometimes referred to as Weak AI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence is AI that specializes in one area. There's AI that can beat the world chess champion in chess, but that's the only thing it does. Ask it to figure out a better way to store data on a hard drive, and it'll look at you blankly.

AI Caliber 2) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): Sometimes referred to as Strong AI, or Human-Level AI, Artificial General Intelligence refers to a computer that is as smart as a human across the board-a machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can. Creating AGI is a much harder task than creating ANI, and we're yet to do it. Professor Linda Gottfredson describes intelligence as "a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience." AGI would be able to do all of those things as easily as you can.

AI Caliber 3) Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): Oxford philosopher and leading AI thinker Nick Bostrom defines superintelligence as "an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills." Artificial Superintelligence ranges from a computer that's just a little smarter than a human to one that's trillions of times smarter-across the board. ASI is the reason the topic of AI is such a spicy meatball and why the words "immortality" and "extinction" will both appear in these posts multiple times.

As of now, humans have conquered the lowest caliber of AI-ANI-in many ways, and it's everywhere. The AI Revolution is the road from ANI, through AGI, to ASI-a road we may or may not survive but that, either way, will change everything.

Let's take a close look at what the leading thinkers in the field believe this road looks like and why this revolution might happen way sooner than you might think:

Where We Are Currently-A World Running on ANI

Artificial Narrow Intelligence is machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency at a specific thing. A few examples:

Cars are full of ANI systems, from the computer that figures out when the anti-lock brakes should kick in to the computer that tunes the parameters of the fuel injection systems. Google's self-driving car, which is being tested now, will contain robust ANI systems that allow it to perceive and react to the world around it.

Your phone is a little ANI factory. When you navigate using your map app, receive tailored music recommendations from Pandora, check tomorrow's weather, talk to Siri, or dozens of other everyday activities, you're using ANI.

Your email spam filter is a classic type of ANI-it starts off loaded with intelligence about how to figure out what's spam and what's not, and then it learns and tailors its intelligence to you as it gets experience with your particular preferences. The Nest Thermostat does the same thing as it starts to figure out your typical routine and act accordingly.

You know the whole creepy thing that goes on when you search for a product on Amazon and then you see that as a "recommended for you" product on a different site, or when Facebook somehow knows who it makes sense for you to add as a friend? That's a network of ANI systems, working together to inform each other about who you are and what you like and then using that information to decide what to show you. Same goes for Amazon's "People who bought this also bought..." thing-that's an ANI system whose job it is to gather info from the behavior of millions of customers and synthesize that info to cleverly upsell you so you'll buy more things.

Google Translate is another classic ANI system-impressively good at one narrow task. Voice recognition is another, and there are a bunch of apps that use those two ANIs as a tag team, allowing you to speak a sentence in one language and have the phone spit out the same sentence in another.

When your plane lands, it's not a human that decides which gate it should go to. Just like it's not a human that determined the price of your ticket.

The world's best Checkers, Chess, Scrabble, Backgammon, and Othello players are now all ANI systems.

Google search is one large ANI brain with incredibly sophisticated methods for ranking pages and figuring out what to show you in particular. Same goes for Facebook's Newsfeed.

And those are just in the consumer world. Sophisticated ANI systems are widely used in sectors and industries like military, manufacturing, and finance (algorithmic high-frequency AI traders account for more than half of equity shares traded on US markets6), and in expert systems like those that help doctors make diagnoses and, most famously, IBM's Watson, who contained enough facts and understood coy Trebek-speak well enough to soundly beat the most prolific Jeopardy champions.

ANI systems as they are now aren't especially scary. At worst, a glitchy or badly-programmed ANI can cause an isolated catastrophe like knocking out a power grid, causing a harmful nuclear power plant malfunction, or triggering a financial markets disaster (like the 2010 Flash Crash when an ANI program reacted the wrong way to an unexpected situation and caused the stock market to briefly plummet, taking $1 trillion of market value with it, only part of which was recovered when the mistake was corrected).

But while ANI doesn't have the capability to cause an existential threat, we should see this increasingly large and complex ecosystem of relatively-harmless ANI as a precursor of the world-altering hurricane that's on the way. Each new ANI innovation quietly adds another brick onto the road to AGI and ASI. Or as Aaron Saenz sees it, our world's ANI systems "are like the amino acids in the early Earth's primordial ooze"-the inanimate stuff of life that, one unexpected day, woke up.

The Road From ANI to AGI

Why It's So Hard

Nothing will make you appreciate human intelligence like learning about how unbelievably challenging it is to try to create a computer as smart as we are. Building skyscrapers, putting humans in space, figuring out the details of how the Big Bang went down-all far easier than understanding our own brain or how to make something as cool as it. As of now, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.

What's interesting is that the hard parts of trying to build AGI (a computer as smart as humans in general, not just at one narrow specialty) are not intuitively what you'd think they are. Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second-incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it's a dog or a cat-spectacularly difficult. Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done. Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-old's picture book and not just recognize the words but understand the meaning of them? Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it. Hard things-like calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation-are mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things-like vision, motion, movement, and perception-are insanely hard for it. Or, as computer scientist Donald Knuth puts it, "AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking.'" 7

What you quickly realize when you think about this is that those things that seem easy to us are actually unbelievably complicated, and they only seem easy because those skills have been optimized in us (and most animals) by hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution. When you reach your hand up toward an object, the muscles, tendons, and bones in your shoulder, elbow, and wrist instantly perform a long series of physics operations, in conjunction with your eyes, to allow you to move your hand in a straight line through three dimensions. It seems effortless to you because you have perfected software in your brain for doing it. Same idea goes for why it's not that malware is dumb for not being able to figure out the slanty word recognition test when you sign up for a new account on a site-it's that your brain is super impressive for being able to.

On the other hand, multiplying big numbers or playing chess are new activities for biological creatures and we haven't had any time to evolve a proficiency at them, so a computer doesn't need to work too hard to beat us. Think about it-which would you rather do, build a program that could multiply big numbers or one that could understand the essence of a B well enough that you could show it a B in any one of thousands of unpredictable fonts or handwriting and it could instantly know it was a B?

One fun example-when you look at this, you and a computer both can figure out that it's a rectangle with two distinct shades, alternating:

Tied so far. But if you pick up the black and reveal the whole image...

...you have no problem giving a full description of the various opaque and translucent cylinders, slats, and 3-D corners, but the computer would fail miserably. It would describe what it sees-a variety of two-dimensional shapes in several different shades-which is actually what's there. Your brain is doing a ton of fancy shit to interpret the implied depth, shade-mixing, and room lighting the picture is trying to portray. 8 And looking at the picture below, a computer sees a two-dimensional white, black, and gray collage, while you easily see what it really is-a photo of an entirely-black, 3-D rock:

And everything we just mentioned is still only taking in stagnant information and processing it. To be human-level intelligent, a computer would have to understand things like the difference between subtle facial expressions, the distinction between being pleased, relieved, content, satisfied, and glad, and why Braveheart was great but The Patriot was terrible.

Daunting.

So how do we get there?

First Key to Creating AGI: Increasing Computational Power

One thing that definitely needs to happen for AGI to be a possibility is an increase in the power of computer hardware. If an AI system is going to be as intelligent as the brain, it'll need to equal the brain's raw computing capacity.

One way to express this capacity is in the total calculations per second (cps) the brain could manage, and you could come to this number by figuring out the maximum cps of each structure in the brain and then adding them all together.

Ray Kurzweil came up with a shortcut by taking someone's professional estimate for the cps of one structure and that structure's weight compared to that of the whole brain and then multiplying proportionally to get an estimate for the total. Sounds a little iffy, but he did this a bunch of times with various professional estimates of different regions, and the total always arrived in the same ballpark-around 10 ¹⁶, or 10 quadrillion cps.

Currently, the world's fastest supercomputer, China's Tianhe-2, has actually beaten that number, clocking in at about 34 quadrillion cps. But Tianhe-2 is also a dick, taking up 720 square meters of space, using 24 megawatts of power (the brain runs on just 20 watts), and costing $390 million to build. Not especially applicable to wide usage, or even most commercial or industrial usage yet.

Kurzweil suggests that we think about the state of computers by looking at how many cps you can buy for $1,000. When that number reaches human-level-10 quadrillion cps-then that'll mean AGI could become a very real part of life.

Moore's Law is a historically-reliable rule that the world's maximum computing power doubles approximately every two years, meaning computer hardware advancement, like general human advancement through history, grows exponentially. Looking at how this relates to Kurzweil's cps/$1,000 metric, we're currently at about 10 trillion cps/$1,000, right on pace with this graph's predicted trajectory: 9

So the world's $1,000 computers are now beating the mouse brain and they're at about a thousandth of human level. This doesn't sound like much until you remember that we were at about a trillionth of human level in 1985, a billionth in 1995, and a millionth in 2005. Being at a thousandth in 2015 puts us right on pace to get to an affordable computer by 2025 that rivals the power of the brain.

So on the hardware side, the raw power needed for AGI is technically available now, in China, and we'll be ready for affordable, widespread AGI-caliber hardware within 10 years. But raw computational power alone doesn't make a computer generally intelligent-the next question is, how do we bring human-level intelligence to all that power?

Second Key to Creating AGI: Making It Smart

This is the icky part. The truth is, no one really knows how to make it smart-we're still debating how to make a computer human-level intelligent and capable of knowing what a dog and a weird-written B and a mediocre movie is. But there are a bunch of far-fetched strategies out there and at some point, one of them will work. Here are the three most common strategies I came across:

1) Plagiarize the brain.

This is like scientists toiling over how that kid who sits next to them in class is so smart and keeps doing so well on the tests, and even though they keep studying diligently, they can't do nearly as well as that kid, and then they finally decide "k fuck it I'm just gonna copy that kid's answers." It makes sense-we're stumped trying to build a super-complex computer, and there happens to be a perfect prototype for one in each of our heads.

The science world is working hard on reverse engineering the brain to figure out how evolution made such a rad thing- optimistic estimates say we can do this by 2030. Once we do that, we'll know all the secrets of how the brain runs so powerfully and efficiently and we can draw inspiration from it and steal its innovations. One example of computer architecture that mimics the brain is the artificial neural network. It starts out as a network of transistor "neurons," connected to each other with inputs and outputs, and it knows nothing-like an infant brain. The way it "learns" is it tries to do a task, say handwriting recognition, and at first, its neural firings and subsequent guesses at deciphering each letter will be completely random. But when it's told it got something right, the transistor connections in the firing pathways that happened to create that answer are strengthened; when it's told it was wrong, those pathways' connections are weakened. After a lot of this trial and feedback, the network has, by itself, formed smart neural pathways and the machine has become optimized for the task. The brain learns a bit like this but in a more sophisticated way, and as we continue to study the brain, we're discovering ingenious new ways to take advantage of neural circuitry.

More extreme plagiarism involves a strategy called "whole brain emulation," where the goal is to slice a real brain into thin layers, scan each one, use software to assemble an accurate reconstructed 3-D model, and then implement the model on a powerful computer. We'd then have a computer officially capable of everything the brain is capable of-it would just need to learn and gather information. If engineers get really good, they'd be able to emulate a real brain with such exact accuracy that the brain's full personality and memory would be intact once the brain architecture has been uploaded to a computer. If the brain belonged to Jim right before he passed away, the computer would now wake up as Jim (?), which would be a robust human-level AGI, and we could now work on turning Jim into an unimaginably smart ASI, which he'd probably be really excited about.

How far are we from achieving whole brain emulation? Well so far, we've not yet just recently been able to emulate a 1mm-long flatworm brain, which consists of just 302 total neurons. The human brain contains 100 billion. If that makes it seem like a hopeless project, remember the power of exponential progress-now that we've conquered the tiny worm brain, an ant might happen before too long, followed by a mouse, and suddenly this will seem much more plausible.

2) Try to make evolution do what it did before but for us this time.

So if we decide the smart kid's test is too hard to copy, we can try to copy the way he studies for the tests instead.

Here's something we know. Building a computer as powerful as the brain is possible-our own brain's evolution is proof. And if the brain is just too complex for us to emulate, we could try to emulate evolution instead. The fact is, even if we can emulate a brain, that might be like trying to build an airplane by copying a bird's wing-flapping motions-often, machines are best designed using a fresh, machine-oriented approach, not by mimicking biology exactly.

So how can we simulate evolution to build AGI? The method, called "genetic algorithms," would work something like this: there would be a performance-and-evaluation process that would happen again and again (the same way biological creatures "perform" by living life and are "evaluated" by whether they manage to reproduce or not). A group of computers would try to do tasks, and the most successful ones would be bred with each other by having half of each of their programming merged together into a new computer. The less successful ones would be eliminated. Over many, many iterations, this natural selection process would produce better and better computers. The challenge would be creating an automated evaluation and breeding cycle so this evolution process could run on its own.

The downside of copying evolution is that evolution likes to take a billion years to do things and we want to do this in a few decades.

3) Make this whole thing the computer's problem, not ours.

This is when scientists get desperate and try to program the test to take itself. But it might be the most promising method we have.

The idea is that we'd build a computer whose two major skills would be doing research on AI and coding changes into itself-allowing it to not only learn but to improve its own architecture. We'd teach computers to be computer scientists so they could bootstrap their own development. And that would be their main job-figuring out how to make themselves smarter. More on this later.

All of This Could Happen Soon

Rapid advancements in hardware and innovative experimentation with software are happening simultaneously, and AGI could creep up on us quickly and unexpectedly for two main reasons:

1) Exponential growth is intense and what seems like a snail's pace of advancement can quickly race upwards-this GIF illustrates this concept nicely:

2) When it comes to software, progress can seem slow, but then one epiphany can instantly change the rate of advancement (kind of like the way science, during the time humans thought the universe was geocentric, was having difficulty calculating how the universe worked, but then the discovery that it was heliocentric suddenly made everything much easier). Or, when it comes to something like a computer that improves itself, we might seem far away but actually be just one tweak of the system away from having it become 1,000 times more effective and zooming upward to human-level intelligence.

The Road From AGI to ASI

At some point, we'll have achieved AGI-computers with human-level general intelligence. Just a bunch of people and computers living together in equality.

Oh actually not at all.

The thing is, AGI with an identical level of intelligence and computational capacity as a human would still have significant advantages over humans. Like:

Speed. The brain's neurons max out at around 200 Hz, while today's microprocessors (which are much slower than they will be when we reach AGI) run at 2 GHz, or 10 million times faster than our neurons. And the brain's internal communications, which can move at about 120 m/s, are horribly outmatched by a computer's ability to communicate optically at the speed of light.

Size and storage. The brain is locked into its size by the shape of our skulls, and it couldn't get much bigger anyway, or the 120 m/s internal communications would take too long to get from one brain structure to another. Computers can expand to any physical size, allowing far more hardware to be put to work, a much larger working memory (RAM), and a longterm memory (hard drive storage) that has both far greater capacity and precision than our own.

Reliability and durability. It's not only the memories of a computer that would be more precise. Computer transistors are more accurate than biological neurons, and they're less likely to deteriorate (and can be repaired or replaced if they do). Human brains also get fatigued easily, while computers can run nonstop, at peak performance, 24/7.

Editability, upgradability, and a wider breadth of possibility. Unlike the human brain, computer software can receive updates and fixes and can be easily experimented on. The upgrades could also span to areas where human brains are weak. Human vision software is superbly advanced, while its complex engineering capability is pretty low-grade. Computers could match the human on vision software but could also become equally optimized in engineering and any other area.

Collective capability. Humans crush all other species at building a vast collective intelligence. Beginning with the development of language and the forming of large, dense communities, advancing through the inventions of writing and printing, and now intensified through tools like the internet, humanity's collective intelligence is one of the major reasons we've been able to get so far ahead of all other species. And computers will be way better at it than we are. A worldwide network of AI running a particular program could regularly sync with itself so that anything any one computer learned would be instantly uploaded to all other computers. The group could also take on one goal as a unit, because there wouldn't necessarily be dissenting opinions and motivations and self-interest, like we have within the human population.10

AI, which will likely get to AGI by being programmed to self-improve, wouldn't see "human-level intelligence" as some important milestone-it's only a relevant marker from our point of view-and wouldn't have any reason to "stop" at our level. And given the advantages over us that even human intelligence-equivalent AGI would have, it's pretty obvious that it would only hit human intelligence for a brief instant before racing onwards to the realm of superior-to-human intelligence.

This may shock the shit out of us when it happens. The reason is that from our perspective, A) while the intelligence of different kinds of animals varies, the main characteristic we're aware of about any animal's intelligence is that it's far lower than ours, and B) we view the smartest humans as WAY smarter than the dumbest humans. Kind of like this:

And what happens...after that?

An Intelligence Explosion

I hope you enjoyed normal time, because this is when this topic gets unnormal and scary, and it's gonna stay that way from here forward. I want to pause here to remind you that every single thing I'm going to say is real-real science and real forecasts of the future from a large array of the most respected thinkers and scientists. Just keep remembering that.

Anyway, as I said above, most of our current models for getting to AGI involve the AI getting there by self-improvement. And once it gets to AGI, even systems that formed and grewthrough methods that didn't involve self-improvement would now be smart enough to begin self-improving if they wanted to. 3

And here's where we get to an intense concept: recursive self-improvement. It works like this-

An AI system at a certain level-let's say human village idiot-is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence. Once it does, it's smarter-maybe at this point it's at Einstein's level-so now when it works to improve its intelligence, with an Einstein-level intellect, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps. These leaps make it much smarter than any human, allowing it to make even bigger leaps. As the leaps grow larger and happen more rapidly, the AGI soars upwards in intelligence and soon reaches the superintelligent level of an ASI system. This is called an Intelligence Explosion, 11 and it's the ultimate example of The Law of Accelerating Returns.

There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence. The median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we'd be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 2040 12-that's only 25 years from now, which doesn't sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it's likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like-this could happen:
It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able to understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human.
Superintelligence of that magnitude is not something we can remotely grasp, any more than a bumblebee can wrap its head around Keynesian Economics. In our world, smart means a 130 IQ and stupid means an 85 IQ-we don't have a word for an IQ of 12,952.

If our meager brains were able to invent wifi, then something 100 or 1,000 or 1 billion times smarter than we are should have no problem controlling the positioning of each and every atom in the world in any way it likes, at any time-everything we consider magic, every power we imagine a supreme God to have will be as mundane an activity for the ASI as flipping on a light switch is for us. Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth-all suddenly possible. Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth. As far as we're concerned, if an ASI comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth-and the all-important question for us is:

That's the topic of Part 2 of this post.

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Sources at the bottom of Part 2.
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Related Wait But Why Posts
The Fermi Paradox - Why don't we see any signs of alien life?

How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars - A post I got to work on with Elon Musk and one that reframed my mental picture of the future.

Or for something totally different and yet somehow related, Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

And here's Year 1 of Wait But Why on an ebook.

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The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Why

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PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading.

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Note: To best understand this post, you should first read Part 1 of Wait But Why's previous post on procrastination.
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PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. (Or see a preview.)
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Back in high school, if you had asked me if I was a procrastinator, I would have said yes. High school students are given all these lectures about "pacing yourself" on longer projects, and I proudly paced myself less than almost anyone I knew. I never missed a deadline, but I only did anything the night before it was due. I was a procrastinator.

Except I wasn't. High school is full of regular deadlines and short-term projects, and even longterm projects had sub-deadlines that force pacing upon you. There were a few dire moments, but for the most part, I was just doing everything at the last minute because I knew I could probably still do well that way-so why not.

There was definitely an Instant Gratification Monkey 1 in my head, but he was cute more than anything. With deadlines looming constantly, my Panic Monster 2 was never fully asleep, and the monkey knew that while he could have some time at the wheel each day, he wasn't the one in charge.

One day, high school ended, and so did my life as a somewhat normal-acting person. College is not like high school. The assignments are big, with a lot of time between deadlines, and since you're not a child anymore, classes don't treat you like one-no one forces you to pace anything. As a Government major, most of my classes involved a couple papers, a midterm, and a final exam over a four-month stretch, which means most of the time, there were no hard deadlines anywhere on the horizon.

Without deadlines to occupy him, my Panic Monster, who can't think too far ahead, began to spend a lot of time in hibernation. My Rational Decision-Maker, who never realized how much he had relied on the Panic Monster, began to have difficulties carrying out his plans.

The more the Panic Monster slept, the more confidence the monkey gained. The Rational Decision-Maker, the only member of the brain who sees the world clearly, was concerned-he knew that college assignments were a lot bigger than high school assignments, and that pacing was no longer something to scoff at, but a critical thing to do. He'd put his foot down about social commitments when a deadline began to draw closer, but that wouldn't solve the problem.

The RDM would slip further into despair, and only the times when things reached their most dire would anything change.

It didn't matter how obvious a decision seemed to the RDM, it was becoming clear that he was totally unable to control the monkey without the Panic Monster's help.

While college was often a disheartening experience for my RDM, it was a full renaissance for my Instant Gratification Monkey, who explored a wide range of activities in an effort to find himself. With a Yamaha electric keyboard right next to my desk, the monkey became increasingly passionate about playing the piano. It almost seemed like the times my RDM was stomping his foot the hardest about getting to work were the exact moments the monkey would feel the most spirited about putting on the headphones and becoming lost for hours in the piano.

When college ended, thrilled to be done forever with formal education, which was clearly not my thing, I burst out into the world with 1,000 ambitions to do 1,000 things. Just wait till the world saw me. I had everything imaginable to offer except knowledge, skills, and work ethic.

My RDM had done a lot of thinking about this, and he understood that the monkey had spent college trying to tell him something important-I wanted to be a composer. That was clearly the thing I was most drawn to, and finally, it would become the thing I was supposed to do each day. No more fighting the monkey-he was going to get exactly what he wanted. I had figured out life, and I moved to LA to write movie scores.

In order to pay my bills, I began tutoring kids after school on their homework or for the SAT, a side job I chose because it wouldn't distract me from becoming the next John Williams. It was the perfect setup, I was brimming with excitement about music, and things were starting to move-when the weirdest thing happened. Just when I was sure I had found myself, the monkey began soul searching. When the RDM and I would sit down at the piano to write something-the exact activity the monkey spent college obsessed with-the monkey would throw a fit and refuse to join us. The RDM began to feel helpless, the same way he did in college.

Meanwhile, the monkey had found a new interest-he had become fixated with my side job. Tutoring was going well, referrals were increasing, and while the RDM would insist that we were already working with too many students, the monkey would accept every new job that came our way. Soon, the monkey started thinking bigger, and without running it by the rest of us, he began hiring my friends to tutor for me. The RDM would wake up eager to dive into composing, but the whole day would end up being spent on phone calls and buried in spreadsheets. The monkey had started a business.

My brain and I ended up in an unpleasant no-man's land. The monkey refused to let us pour ourselves into our music career, and the RDM refused to embrace the monkey's new business career. I was doing a lot of things and not giving my all to any of them.

It was around then that my best friend Andrew moved to LA. Andrew isn't like me. He lives and breathes business, with no interest in pursuing anything in the arts, and ever since I met him when we were five, his monkey has been a tame little bitch who does what he's told. After he moved, we started talking about maybe going into business together somehow. My RDM had refused to entertain taking business seriously until then, but the prospect of starting a company with Andrew and actually putting a full effort into it was enticing-and the monkey was clearly into it, so maybe this was the thing I was supposed to be doing all along. I decided to dive in, and building off of what I had started, we founded a new tutoring company together.

The RDM still wrestled with the decision to put a pause on the music side of things, but the company was growing quickly, being in business with Andrew was a great time-like playing a complex strategy game with your friend-and the RDM finally started to feel okay about becoming totally wrapped up in business.

Which was the monkey's cue to become an avid blogger.

I had been casually blogging for a few years at that point, but business taking off was just what the monkey needed to kick his new writing hobby into full gear, and over the next few years, I wrote hundreds of blog posts in my off hours. I went into work every day, and I'd be engaged while I was there-but instead of doing what an entrepreneur is supposed to do outside of work and keep the wheels turning, mulling over the strategy and allowing the subconscious to drop key epiphanies on you from time to time, I'd be thinking about what to blog about next.

In 2013, when Andrew and I decided to start something new, we looked at my monkey, saw how absorbed he always was with his blog, and thought maybe that was the thing I was supposed to be doing this whole time-so we started Wait But Why. Andrew would continue to grow our company while I'd fully immerse myself in this new project, giving the monkey exactly what he so badly wanted.

___________

What was classic procrastination in college morphed into a bizarre form of insanity once I entered the real world. On a day-to-day, micro level, there was still always an element of the normal "RDM tries to do something, monkey makes it difficult" thing, but in a broader, macro sense, it was almost as if I were chasing the monkey. After he defeated me so soundly in college, I wondered if fighting against him in the first place was my mistake. He's born from some inner, primal part of me, so wouldn't it make sense to pay attention to his inclinations and use them as my guide?

So that's what I tried to do-when he'd be continually drawn to something, I'd eventually take his lead and build my life around that. But the problem was, he was almost like a mirage-once I'd get to where he was, he wouldn't be there anymore. He'd be somewhere else. This was confusing-was he there before because he actually wanted to be, or was he just there because it was where the RDM was not? Did he actually have passions of his own, or was he just some elusive evil contrarian inside of me with a mission to hold me back from ever doing anything great with my talents and energies?

Last year, I came across a little diagram that I think holds the key to these questions. It's called the Eisenhower Matrix:

The Eisenhower Matrix places anything you could spend your time doing on two spectrums: one going from the most urgent possible task to the least urgent, the other going from critically important to totally inconsequential-and using these as axes, divides your world into four quadrants.

The matrix was popularized in Stephen Covey's famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and is named after President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was well-known for being tremendously productive, which Covey credits to his "first things first" attitude on how to spend your time. And to Eisenhower, the "first things" were always the important ones. He believed you should spend nearly all of your time in Quadrants 1 and 2, and he accomplished this with a simple D-word for each quadrant:

And that's fantastic for Dwight fucking Eisenhower. But you know what Dwight clearly didn't have in his bald head? An all-powerful Instant Gratification Monkey. If he had, he'd know that a procrastinator's matrix looks like this:

If you ever want any information on Quadrant 4-directions, places to eat, etc.-just ask a procrastinator. They live there. For a non-procrastinator, Q4 is a happy place to spend time. After a productive day working on important tasks, it feels great to kick back in Q4-and under those circumstances, there's a name for Q4: The Happy Playground. But procrastinators don't tend to hang out in Q4 after an efficient day of high-level work-they're there far more often than that, against their will, because the monkey has dragged them there, all while the Rational Decision-Maker is begging them to leave. And they have a different name for Q4: The Dark Playground.

As for Quadrants 1 and 3-the urgent quadrants-most procrastinators will end up there from time to time, usually in a full sweat, with the Panic Monster next to their face screaming. Q1 and Q3 keep the procrastinator off the streets.

And then there's Quadrant 2. To a procrastinator, Quadrant 2 is a strange and foreign land, far, far away. Kind of like Atlantis, or Narnia. He knows it's an important place, and he's tried many times to go there, but there's a big problem-the monkey is repulsed by it, and the Panic Monster isn't concerned with it. And that's the deadly combo that defeats the procrastinator every time.

The reason this is disastrous is that the road to the procrastinator's dreams-the road to expanding his horizons, exploring his true potential, and achieving work he's truly proud of-runs directly through Quadrant 2. Q1 and Q3 may be where people survive, but Q2 is where people thrive, grow, and blossom.

But if you're a procrastinator, you're in luck. You have an ace up your sleeve-someone daring and fearless, with bountiful energy and dynamic talent, and someone who can defeat the monkey like stepping on an ant: Future You.

Future You is a procrastinator's most important ally-someone who's always there and always has your back, no matter what. I know all about this firsthand. Future Tim is an amazing guy.

When my alarm goes off and I don't want to wake up, I just press the snooze button, which doles out the job of getting out of bed to Future Tim instead. My to-do list has two parts-a short, easy one for me, and a long one, full of all the things I can't imagine ever doing, because they're so icky-seeming. Future Tim always handles that one, without a complaint. Future Tim also has no problem with even the vilest of social obligations. I was recently invited to attend a feedback-giving session for a three-hour-long play written by someone I barely know-I certainly had no intention of ever doing that, but I would also have felt guilty just saying no, so I explained that I have a busy couple months, but that I'd be more than happy to join when it happens again this summer, a time when it'll be Future Tim's problem, not mine.

Future Tim also has a discipline and balance to his lifestyle I could only ever dream of. I've never been much of an exerciser-but Future Tim belongs to a gym and does all the jogging for both of us, and I love how into cooking healthy meals Future Tim is, because I personally don't have the time. Future Tim is the kind of guy we all want to be like-I suggest getting to know him yourself, which you can do by buying his books, since he's a prolific author.

But the most important role Future Tim plays in my life brings us back to the Eisenhower Matrix. In a convenient stroke of fate, Future Tim happens to spend almost all of his time in the one place I can never seem to get to myself: the all-important Quadrant 2. Future Tim is Quadrant 2's warden, and when I make a list of important to-do items and notice that most of them seem to land in Q2, I don't have to despair, because I know Future Tim is on top of them. Which is good, considering how dire a situation Past Tim, that useless fuck, has often left me in:

But for all of Future Tim's virtues, he has one fatal flaw that kind of ruins everything: he doesn't exist.

It turns out that Future You is as much of a mirage as the monkey's passion for a hobby. I banked on Future Tim's real-world existence for my most important plans, but every time I'd finally arrive at a time when I thought I would find Future Tim, he was nowhere to be found-the only person there would be stupid Present Tim. That's the thing that really sucks about Future You-whenever time finally gets to him, he's not Future You anymore, he's Present You, and Present You can't do the tasks you assigned to Future You because those tasks can only be done by someone without a monkey. You assigned them to Future You in the first place because he doesn't have a monkey-that was the whole point. So you do what you always do-you re-delegate them to Future You, hoping that next time time catches up with Future You, he actually exists.

This is what left me unable, for years, to give life my full effort. The important work to be done usually lives in Q2, a place I had a hard time going to, so I'd direct the extra energy to a passionate hobby instead. The monkey would get super into these hobbies, because hobbies are, by definition, in Q4-a place the monkey loves to be.

So here's what went on when I was supposed to be pursuing a composing career:

And when I decided to "follow the monkey's lead" and take on business, I was missing the key point: "taking on" business meant making business the thing I was supposed to do, which turned it from a not important task into an important one-moving "business" from Q4, the monkey's favorite place, to Q2, his least favorite place.

The fact that I expected the monkey to remain obsessed with business after the switch to Q2 shows how little I understood the monkey. The monkey's passion never was music, or business, or blogging-the monkey's passion was always Q4.

And the thing the monkey really likes about Q4 isn't anything about Q4 in particular-it's that Quadrant 4 isn't Quadrant 1 or 2. The monkey, whose core drive is to do whatever's easiest, can't stand the "important" quadrants, because the important quadrants are where the pressure's on-it's where there's something to prove, where your actions have consequences, where the stakes are high, and where you're shooting for the stars, which means you might fail to reach them. No fucking thanks, says the monkey. Writing 300 blog posts while I was supposed to be dreaming up brilliant business growth strategies wasn't "easy" in the sense that I didn't have to work hard to write them-it was easy in that there was nothing at stake. Stakes are really what's hard for a human.

___________

When I started writing posts for Wait But Why, I knew I wanted to write about procrastination. I needed to try to articulate the madness that went on in my head. After assigning that daunting mission to Future Tim for a while, I finally bit the bullet and did it.

The reaction was overwhelming. In addition to the over 1,300 comments on the two posts, here's the breakdown of emails I've received from readers:

There have been thousands of emails. Apparently this whole thing isn't just me.

And the emails aren't quick, "Hey I liked the procrastination posts bye" notes-they're thorough. And heartfelt. A good number of them mention that the posts made them cry. And they're not crying because they were moved by my shitty stick drawings-they're crying because they were reading about one of the biggest problems in their lives.

The profiles of those who have emailed range wildly, covering all ages, all kinds of professions, and hailing from almost every country in the world. I've heard from a 13-year-old in Pakistan, a middle-aged professor in Argentina, an 80-year-old retired nurse in Mississippi; a German graphic designer, an Australian author, a Ghanaian filmmaker, a Korean entrepreneur. And the PhD students-the hordes of PhD students-doing the ultimate Q2 task.

In one way, these people all have the same exact problem, and the same problem I have-an Instant Gratification Monkey they can't control. But I've noticed, after reading every one of their stories, that the extent to which this problem is ruining their lives varies drastically, depending on a few key facts about their particular circumstances. This distinction places the readers who have emailed into three categories:

Of all procrastinators out there, the Disastinators are in the worst shape. A Disastinator is permanently camped out in Quadrant 4, and procrastination is completely destroying their life. A procrastinator usually becomes a Disastinator for one of two reasons:
A) Their monkey has stopped being scared of the Panic Monster and has become all-powerful B) They're a normal procrastinator but they're in a life situation with no external deadlines or pressure
Situation A is super-dark, and as I've learned from reader emails, not that uncommon. These people have lost the ability to do almost anything that matters to them and are either in a downward spiral or have given up entirely.

In Situation B, the Disastinator isn't a worse procrastinator than any other, it's just that their circumstances are a catastrophic match for their personality. The nature of their life and work gives the Panic Monster no reason to wake up at all, and unfortunately, the monkey isn't scared of the Self-Loathing Monster.

The outcome is that the Disastinator gets nothing done, ever. Many of the PhD candidates who emailed me fall into this category.

We haven't talked much about Quadrant 3, but it might be the most dangerous quadrant of all, and it's where the Impostinator reigns king. The Impostinator's life looks like this:

The Impostinator seems productive, but she's really an imposter-a procrastinator wearing a productive person mask. By spending all of her work time in Q3, she seems busy-she is busy-but she never seems to make much progress on her real goals.

Impostinators have clever monkeys, and Q3 is the monkey's most clever trick. The monkey knows that the RDM, who can be gullible, can be appeased if he spends ample time out of the Q4 Dark Playground. So the Impostinator's monkey creates a battle that goes back and forth between Q4 and Q3, and that works because Q3 feels productive to the Impostinator. It relies on one major delusion of the Impostinator-that busy = productive.

So an Impostinator will spend the whole day answering emails, running errands, making phone calls, organizing lists and schedules, participating in meetings, etc. and if she's judging herself by time spent out of the Dark Playground, she's a smashing success. But at the end of the day, the satisfaction she feels has a hint of emptiness to it, and the Happy Playground is never quite fully happy. She may have deluded herself into thinking she's living a productive life, but in her subconscious, she knows she's not doing what she's supposed to be doing. Her feelings of accomplishment come along with an undercurrent of despair.

In reality, she's living in a grand, overarching procrastination, brilliantly crafted by her monkey. Rather than try to win the tug-of-war between doing what matters-the stuff up in Q2-and the Dark Playground, the Impostinator's monkey tricks the RDM into fighting on the wrong battlefield, and he lets the RDM "beat" him on this battlefield, which leads her to believe she's doing a good job.

The other difficulty the Impostinator faces is that sometimes Q3 disguises itself as Q1. A busy Impostinator often believes that the urgent work she's consumed with is important, but the problem with that is what Eisenhower himself said best:
What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.
In other words, Quadrant 1 often does not exist. This isn't always the case, but it's especially likely to be true for people who have yet to get their career rolling, because usually when your truly important work is also urgent, it means you have something good going on. This creates a catch-22, where the people who most need urgency in order to do things-procrastinators early in their career-are often those with a totally vacant Quadrant 1.

The more time goes on, the more I think that being super busy tends to mean having a packed Q3 (usually mixed in with too much Q4 time). I know that when I'm in one of those zones where I'm telling everyone how busy I am and how little time I have for them, it's almost always because I'm overloaded with Q3 bullshit. People who are really on top of their life-really in control-tend to have plenty of space in their schedules. But society smiles upon busy people, the phrase "I think you have too much time on your hands" is an insult, and that leaves Impostinators looking-and often feeling-like they're doing it right. And while the Impostinator will always feel superior to the Disastinator, the truth is that in terms of real productivity on things that matter, they're equal.

The major lesson here is to beware of Quadrant 3. Q3 grabs you by the collar and thrusts you onto a treadmill of reacting to things. It's not a place of self control. And if you're not careful, Q3 will suck your life away. I know, because I've spent a lot of my life as an Impostinator.

Of the many Impostinators who emailed me, the most common professions were artists of some kind or entrepreneurs. In both of those situations, you're the boss of your own life, and the important work to do-improving your skills, deepening your network, executing a creative vision-is rarely urgent.

After spending most of my life feeling unable to maximize myself, since starting Wait But Why a year and a half ago, I've written over 250,000 words-the equivalent of 1,000 book pages-and what I'm doing really matters to me. For the first time, the satisfaction of accomplishment doesn't come along with a twinge of guilt or emptiness or despair. I've done it! I'm a doer.

Not quite.

The reality is, I haven't overcome my monkey problems one ounce more than the Impostinators and Disastinaters who emailed me-the big difference is, I've gotten myself into a situation where I have a big, fat Quadrant 1 in my life. Not a fake Q1 that's really Q3 in disguise-but a genuine Q1, and it's packed. The intimate relationship a blog has with real, living people-and the pressure that generates-turns a blogger's important work into urgent work, as soon as there are enough readers that the Panic Monster takes interest in things.

For a procrastinator, this is the opposite of the PhD-type situation, which I described as a catastrophic match for a procrastinator. Writing regularly with an immediate audience is an example of a terrific match for a procrastinator's personality, because it puts his Panic Monster in the optimal location-it aligns the Panic Monster with his most important endeavor.

Of course, my monkey is still wreaking havoc over my whole life in any way he can-I pulled a lifespan-reducing all-nighter to finish this post. But there's a key distinction between what he's doing now and what he was doing during my previous projects. With those other projects, he spent his Q4 time pursuing real, ambitious projects-and he was allowed to do that because the RDM wasn't entirely sure what he wanted, and he would question whether the monkey was actually on to something with his distractions. But at least so far, working on Wait But Why is hitting the nail on the head for the RDM, because he's actually spending a lot of time above the important line, so he has a conviction about the undertaking he didn't previously. Because of this, he'll let the monkey tap dance around Q4 and Q3, mainly because he has no power not to, but he won't allow the monkey to take on anything serious with his time.

I have not conquered procrastination, but for the time being, at least, I'm in the least bad type of procrastinator situation-I'm a Successtinator.

A Successtinator has found a solution-ish to his problems, but it's not pretty, often not healthy, and usually not sustainable. It's a clever duct-taping of a troubled machine to hold it over temporarily.

I received a lot of emails from Successtinators, and the patterns were consistent and resonate with my own current situation. A Successtinator can be happy with his life, but isn't usually that happy in his life. And that's because being a Successtinator does not make you a success. Someone who does something well professionally at the expense of balance, relationships, and health is not a success. Real success means having both professional life and lifestyle working well and in harmony-and Successtinators are too stressed, too unavailable, and are often completely deprived of Happy Playground time, which is a critical component of a happy life. A Successtinator is also usually limited in his professional possibilities-great work can be done in Q1, but it's often more on the maintaining side of things. Q2 is still where most of the professional growth and out-of-the-box thinking takes place, and like all procrastinators, Successtinators rarely set foot in Q2.

___________

There are bigger problems in the world than procrastination. Things like poverty, disease, mental illness, and drug addiction all make procrastination seem glaringly like a problem of the privileged-something to suffer over for those whose lives have no real suffering.

But if a skeptic spent a few hours reading through the mound of procrastination-related emails I've received, I think they'd agree that this is a dire problem in many, many lives. And it doesn't just harm the procrastinator-it hurts the people close to the procrastinator, spreading the effect.

It's also the world's loss. For every Steve Jobs or John Lennon or J.K. Rowling or anyone else whose talents have enhanced our lives, there are thousands of people with just as much potential who never achieve much for the world because they waste away their time in the wrong quadrants.

One way to look at this is that each human life has a certain number of "time points," and it's up to you how you "spend" them. Consider the difference between someone who spends 30 hours a week in Q2 and someone else who only manages two hours of Q2 time a week. Since Q2 is, for many, where real advancement happens, over the course of their lives, the 30 hour person will accomplish 15 times as much in her life as the two hour person. And in reality, the multiplier is probably even larger than 15, since progress builds upon progress and the rate can accelerate (i.e. Steve Jobs wouldn't have accomplished 1/15th of what he accomplished if he had put in 1/15th the productive hours-he probably would have accomplished none of it.) The distinction between an ordinary person and an extraordinary person might simply come down to the differences in how they allot their time points.

Clearing away delusion

If we want to improve our time point spending, the first step is learning to see the world through a crystal clear Eisenhower Matrix-which means shaking off all delusion. We need to develop well-thought-out definitions of urgent and important, which will be different for everyone and requires a deep dig into the highly personal question, "What matters most to me?"

Brett McKay defines "important tasks" as things that contribute to our long-term mission, values, and goals. This is broad and straightforward and a good core sentence to come back to when assessing importance down the road.

The thought process about what is and isn't urgent should revolve around the self-discussion of what's most important. Ideally, urgent would not mean, "The thing grabbing me hardest by the collar"-it would be defined by what, of the important tasks on your list, would benefit most from happening sooner rather than later. Using this definition, spending time with your kids would certainly qualify as urgent, while under the typical deadline-related definition of urgent, it would qualify as "not urgent." In other words, the order of your priorities is much better off being set by your RDM than your Panic Monster. Wisdom resides in the RDM, and when the mindless Panic Monster calls the shots on what's urgent and what's not, you take the RDM's wisdom out of the game.

You may also want to gather some hard data on how you're currently spending your time points, by logging your hours for the next week and seeing just how many of them fall into each of the four quadrants (you'll probably be unpleasantly surprised by the results).

Becoming the boss of your brain

Once you feel clear on your Eisenhower Matrix and where its various boundaries lie, you'll need to do the hard part and gain control over how you spend your time points within it. Which, for a procrastinator, is life's greatest challenge.

The rewards of gaining control are obvious. It's incredible how much a person can get done-while also maintaining a balanced lifestyle-if they're in control of their time point spending. And those not in control will lose most of their time points to Q3 and Q4 and feel like they don't have time for either their work or their lifestyle, all while accomplishing very little. Time point allotment is everything.

A procrastinator in desperate straits can take a half step in the right direction through the brute force method of rearranging his life in a way that makes him a Successtinator. That's where I am now, and it's a hell of a lot better than where I was before.

But that's like hiring a bodyguard instead of learning how to fight. The real goal of a procrastinator must be to figure out how to become the boss of his brain. A procrastinator's reality is that his inner self-his Rational Decision-Maker-is the grandmaster of his life in theory, but in practice, only a spectator. The procrastinator's RDM goes, helplessly, where the waves take him, shuffled from activity to activity by the primal forces of the monkey and the Panic Monster. Until a procrastinator's RDM can walk, on his own, from Q4 to Q2, whenever he wants to, he's not fixed.

___________

If you Google "how to stop procrastinating," you'll find about 1,000 articles, all offering terrific advice on how to do it. The problem is that the articles are always written for sane people, and procrastinators aren't sane people. Being insane, procrastinators are always under the delusion that they're sane, so they read an advice article and think they'll be able to apply it to their life. But then it doesn't work out that way.

Before a procrastinator can act on good advice, he needs to have control. A race car driver can get all the coaching in the world, but if, when the race starts, someone else is controlling the steering wheel and the pedals, all the coaching is useless.

That's why the only way a procrastinator can take the wheel in his hands is if his self-fulfilling prophecy-his - says that he can. And storylines only change with real-world action. Quite the chicken and egg issue.

At its deepest level, it comes down to a battle of confidence. The RDM and monkey each have their own idea of how to spend your time points, and whichever of them is more confident-whoever has a stronger belief that they're the alpha dog in the relationship-ends up prevailing. The difference between a procrastinator and a non-procrastinator is simply that the procrastinator's monkey and RDM both believe that the monkey is the alpha dog, and the non-procrastinator's pair both believe that the RDM is the boss.

But as firmly entrenched as these confidence levels may feel, the monkey and the RDM share a single pool of confidence with a fixed sum-when one's confidence goes up, the other's goes down-and the balance can begin to be tipped by the smallest changes, taking your storyline with it.

Figuring out the starting point of this chicken and egg paradox is each procrastinator's personal quest. But a universal starting point is to try to remain aware as much as possible. Aware of what's important, aware of what's urgent, and most importantly-aware of the monkey. The monkey is not your friend, and he never will be. But he's also part of your head and impossible to get rid of, so get in the habit of noticing him. When you wake up in the morning, he'll be there. When you sit down to work, he'll be there. Whenever you most badly need all the guts and grit you can muster, he'll be there to take your guts and grit away.

But he thrives off of unconsciousness. Simply by noticing him and saying to yourself, "Yup, there's the monkey, right on cue," you can start to tip the balance out of its default state. Then maybe one day, you'll find yourself nonchalantly shoving the monkey off of the wheel with the simplest, "No monkey, not now." And your life will be forever changed.

___________

I love the emails I've received about procrastination, and I hope they continue. But I always wish the people who have emailed me could hear each other's stories. I encourage anyone who feels like sharing their story to do so in the comments.

If this post was up your alley, also check out:

Wait But Why's two earlier posts on procrastination - Part 1, Part 2.

Life is just today over and over and over again - Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel

A one-image reminder to spend your time points wisely - Your Life in Weeks

A deeper look at what goes on in our brains and why awareness is so critical - A Religion for the Non-Religious

A look at a different animal struggle going on in a different part of the brain - Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

And while they're ruining your life, you might as well cuddle with them:

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The Procrastination Matrix - Wait But Why

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Note: To best understand this post, you should first read Part 1 of Wait But Why's previous post on procrastination. ___________ PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. (Or see a preview.) ___________ Back in high school, if you had asked me if I was a procrastinator, I would have said yes.

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__________

PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:

___________

Last month, I got a surprising phone call.

Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world's raddest man.
Whatever skeptics have said can't be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality...his SpaceX [is] reopening space for exploration...it's a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he's building spacecraft to help us leave it.
I'll use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for Iron Man's Tony Stark, but for the moment, I'll let Richard Branson explain things briefly: 1

So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.

A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics I'd be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.

For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two separate items that have been sitting for a while in my "Future Post Topics" document, verbatim:

- "electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy"

- "spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??"

I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I wrote about Artificial Intelligence-I knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didn't understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.

It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.

So it was on. The plan was that I'd come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. Exciting.

The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these people-these world-class engineers and rocket scientists-and know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.

The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:

Automotive

Aerospace

Solar Energy

Energy Storage

Satellite

High-Speed Ground Transportation

And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion

Zeus would have been less stressful.

So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. There's a lot to get into.
Note: There's a great biography on Musk coming out May 19th, written by tech writer Ashlee Vance. I was able to get an advance copy, and it's been a key source in putting together these posts. I'm going to keep to a brief overview of his life here-if you want the full story, get the bio.
We'll dive deep into Musk's companies and the industries surrounding them in the coming posts, but today, let's start by going over exactly who this dude is and why he's such a big deal. 1 2

Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn't a great time for him-he had a tough family life and never fit in well at school. 2 But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day-a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was constantly buried in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

One thing you'll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human's hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of "downloading data and algorithms into your brain." 3 Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the "ridiculously slow download speed" of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he's learned through reading.

He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first computer, the Commodore VIC-20. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a "how to program" guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was "a trivial game...but better than Flappy Bird." But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today's money)-not bad for a 12-year-old. 3

Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa-he didn't fit in with the jockish, white Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada, which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US. 4

In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, "What will most affect the future of humanity?" The answer he came up with was a list of five things: "the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code." 4

He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he'd ever be involved in space exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options.

He decided to go with sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy-which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.

But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he "couldn't stand to just watch the internet go by-[he] wanted to jump in and make it better." 5 So he dropped out and decided to try the internet instead.

His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995 internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.

Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal (who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company-Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was important-many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like "the dumbest thing they had ever heard of" 6 -but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999, Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.

In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he'd have known that what you're supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with someone else's money. But Musk doesn't tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online bank-replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts-called X.com. This seems less insane now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.

In the same building that X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of X.com's many features was an easy money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today as PayPal.

This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions-Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys-and despite the company growing rapidly, things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this day, he says he doesn't agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company's largest shareholder, walked away with $180 million (after taxes). 5

If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk's decision-making, it was at this point in his life-as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002-that he dropped the rulebook into the fire for good.

The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we'll thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here's the short story:

In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.

Mm hm.

Then, in 2004, as that "project" was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world-in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someonestarted a successful electric car startup was never.

And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his cousins, another company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people's homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately "accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy." 7

If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you'd think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune.

By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just not rockets that actually worked-it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket-but Musk said he had funds left for one and only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.

Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car-the Tesla Roadster-to the market, which didn't look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been more okay if the global economy hadn't suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast.

During this double implosion of his career, the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk's life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.

Darkness.

But here's the thing-Musk is not a fool, and he hadn't built bad companies. He had built very, very good companies. It's just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like overambitious and probably-doomed ventures-especially during a recession-Musk had to rely on his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it's not that SpaceX and Tesla were bad-it's that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of time.

And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.

First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket-and their last one if it didn't successfully put a payload into orbit-and it succeeded. Perfectly.

That was enough for NASA to say "fuck it, let's give this Musk guy a try," and it took a gamble, offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended. SpaceX saved.

The next day, on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to keep Tesla going, Tesla's investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended. Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in-$50 million from Daimler. Tesla saved.

While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk and his companies.

Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times-all successes. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of "firsts" for a commercial rocket company-to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China-and SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and they're busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.

Tesla's Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they're getting closer and closer to releasing their true disruptor-the much more affordable Model 3-and the company's market cap is just under $30 billion. They're also becoming the world's most formidable battery company, currently working on their giant Nevada "Gigafactory," which will more than double the world's total annual production of lithium-ion batteries.

SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They're now building the country's largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they'll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to package their product with Tesla's new home battery, the Powerwall.

And since that's not enough, in his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport-the Hyperloop.

In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk's three companies will employ over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may have to "move into his wife's parents' basement," 8 Musk's current net worth clocks in at $12.9 billion.

All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve across industries. Perhaps most often, he's compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn't even know they wanted. Some believe he'll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance has suggested that what Musk is building "has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic." 9

Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, calls Musk "the world's most remarkable living entrepreneur." Others know him as "the real life Iron Man," and not for no reason-Jon Favreau actually sent Robert Downey, Jr. to spend time with Musk in the SpaceX factory prior to filming the first Iron Man movie so he could model his character off of Musk. 10 He's even been on The Simpsons.

And this is the man I was somehow on the phone with as I frantically paced back and forth in my apartment, in pajama pants.

On the call, he made it clear that he wasn't looking for me to advertise his companies-he only wanted me to help explain what's going on in the worlds surrounding those companies and why the things happening with electric cars, sustainable energy production, and aerospace matter so much.

He seemed particularly bored with people spending time writing about him-he feels there are so many things of critical importance going on in the industries he's involved in, and every time someone writes about him, he wishes they were writing about fossil fuel supply or battery advancements or the importance of making humanity multi-planetary (this is especially clear in the intro to the upcoming biography on him, when the author explains how not interested Musk was in having a bio written about him).

So I'm sure this first post, whose title is "Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man," will annoy him.

But I have reasons. To me, there are two worthy areas of exploration in this post series:

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he's doing. He deeply believes that he's taken on the most pressing possible causes to give humanity the best chance of a good future. I want to explore those causes in depth and the reasons he's so concerned about them.

2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he's doing. There are a few people in each generation who dramatically change the world, and those people are worth studying. They do things differently from everyone else-and I think there's a lot to learn from them.

So on my visit to California, I had two goals in mind: to understand as best I could what Musk and his teams were working on so feverishly and why it mattered so much, and to try to gain insight into what it is that makes him so capable of changing the world.

___________

Visiting the Factories

The Tesla Factory (in Northern CA) and the SpaceX Factory (in Southern CA), in addition to both being huge, and rad, have a lot in common.

Both factories are bright and clean, shiny and painted white, with super high ceilings. Both feel more like laboratories than traditional factories. And in both places, the engineers doing white collar jobs and the technicians doing blue collar jobs are deliberately placed in the same working quarters so they'll work closely together and give each other feedback-and Musk believes it's crucial for those designing the machines to be around those machines as they're being manufactured. And while a traditional factory environment wouldn't be ideal for an engineer on a computer and a traditional office environment wouldn't be a good workplace for a technician, a clean, futuristic laboratory feels right for both professions. There are almost no closed offices in either factory-everyone is out in the open, exposed to everyone else.

When I pulled up to the Tesla factory (joined by Andrew), I was first taken by its size-and when I looked it up, I wasn't surprised to see that it has the second largest building footprint (aka base area) in the world.

The factory was formerly jointly owned by GM and Toyota, who sold it to Tesla in 2010. We started off the day with a full tour of the factory-a sea of red robots making cars and being silly: 6

And other cool things, like a vast section of the factory that just makes the car battery, and another that houses the 20,000 pound rolls of aluminum they slice and press and weld into Teslas.

And this giant press, which costs $50 million and presses metal with 4,500 tons of pressure (the same pressure you'd get if you stacked 2,500 cars on top of something).

The Tesla factory is working on upping its output from 30,000 cars/year to 50,000, or about 1,000 per week. They seemed to be pumping out cars incredibly quickly, so I was blown away to learn that Toyota had been on a 1,000 cars per day clip when they inhabited the factory.

I had a chance to visit the Tesla design studio (no pictures allowed), where there were designers sketching car designs on computer screens and, on the other side of the room, full-size car models made of clay. An actual-size clay version of the upcoming Model 3 was surrounded by specialists sculpting it with tiny instruments and blades, shaving off fractions of a millimeter to examine the way light bounced off the curves. There was also a 3D printer that could quickly "print" out a shoe-sized 3D model of a sketched Tesla design so a designer could actually hold their design and look at it from different angles. Deliciously futuristic.

The next day was the SpaceX factory, which might be even cooler, but the building contains advanced rocket technology, which according to the government is "weapons technology," and apparently random bloggers aren't allowed to take pictures of weapons technology.

Anyway, after the tours, I had a chance to sit down with several senior engineers and designers at both companies. They'd explain that they were a foremost expert in their field, I'd explain that I had recently figured out how big the building would be that could hold all humans, and we'd begin our discussion. I'd ask them about their work, their thoughts on the company as a whole and the broader industry, and then I'd ask them about their relationship with Elon and what it was like to work for him. Without exception, they were really nice-seeming, friendly people, who all came off as ridiculously smart but in a non-pretentious way. Musk has said he has a strict "no assholes" hiring policy, and I could see that at work in these meetings.

So what's Musk like as a boss?

Let's start by seeing what the internet says-there's a Quora thread that poses the question: "What is it like to work with Elon Musk?"

The first answer is from a longtime SpaceX employee who no longer works there, who describes the day that their 3rd launch failed, a devastating blow for the company and for all the people who had worked for years to try to make it work.

She describes Elon emerging from mission command to address the company and delivering a rousing speech. She refers to Elon's "infinite wisdom" and says, "I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed."

Right below that answer is another answer, from an anonymous SpaceX engineer, who describes working for Musk like this:

"You can always tell when someone's left an Elon meeting: they're defeated...nothing you ever do will be good enough so you have to find your own value, not depending on praise to get you through your obviously insufficient 80 hour work weeks."

Reading about Musk online and in Vance's book, I was struck by how representative both of these Quora comments were of whole camps of opinion on working for Musk. Doing so seems to bring out a tremendous amount of adoration and a tremendous amount of exasperation, sometimes with a tone of bitterness-and even more oddly, much of the time, you hear both sides of this story expressed by the same person. For example, later in the comment of the effusive Quora commenter comes "Working with him isn't a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him...the challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren't." And the frustrated anonymous commenter later concedes that the way Elon is "is understandable" given the enormity of the task at hand, and that "it is a great company and I do love it."

My own talks with Musk's engineers and designers told a similar story. I was told: "Elon always wants to know, 'Why are we not going faster?' He always wants bigger, better, faster" by the same person who a few minutes later was emphasizing how fair and thoughtful Musk tends to be in handling the terms for a recently fired employee.

The same person who told me he has "lots of sleepless nights" said in the adjacent sentence how happy he is to be at the company and that he hopes to "never leave."

One senior executive described interacting with Musk like this: "Any conversation's fairly high stakes because he'll be very opinionated, and he can go deeper than you expect or are prepared for or deeper than your knowledge goes on a given topic, and it does feel like a high wire act interacting with him, especially when you find yourself in a [gulp] technical disagreement." 7 The same executive, who had previously worked at a huge tech company, also called Musk "the most grounded billionaire I've ever worked with."

What I began to understand is that the explanation for both sides of the story-the cult-like adulation right alongside the grudging willingness to endure what sounds like blatant hell-comes down to respect. The people who work for Musk, no matter how they feel about his management style, feel an immense amount of respect-for his intelligence, for his work ethic, for his guts, and for the gravity of the missions he's undertaken, missions that make all other potential jobs seem trivial and pointless.

Many of the people I talked to also alluded to their respect for his integrity. One way this integrity comes through is in his consistency. He's been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart. He says what he really means, no matter the situation-one employee close to Musk told me that after a press conference or a business negotiation, once in private he'd ask Musk what his real angle was and what he really thinks. Musk's response would always be boring: "I think exactly what I said."

A few people I spoke with referenced Musk's obsession with truth and accuracy. He's fine with and even welcoming of negative criticism about him when he believes it's accurate, but when the press gets something wrong about him or his companies, he usually can't help himself and will engage them and correct their error. He detests vague spin-doctor phrases like "studies say" and "scientists disagree," and he refuses to advertise for Tesla, something most startup car companies wouldn't think twice about-because he sees advertising as manipulative and dishonest.

There's even an undertone of integrity in Musk's tyrannical demands of workers, because while he may be a tyrant, he's not a hypocrite. Employees pressured to work 80 hours a week tend to be less bitter about it when at least the CEO is in there working 100.

Speaking of the CEO, let's go have a hamburger with him.

It started like this:

After about seven minutes of this, I was able to get out my first question, a smalltalk-y question about how he thought the recent launch had gone (they had attempted an extremely difficult rocket-landing maneuver-more on that in the SpaceX post). His response included the following words: hypersonic, rarefied, densifying, supersonic, Mach 1, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, vacuum, regimes, thrusters, nitrogen, helium, mass, momentum, ballistic, and boost-back. While this was happening, I was still mostly blacked out from the surreality of the situation, and when I started to come to, I was scared to ask any questions about what he was saying in case he had already explained it while I was unconscious.

I eventually regained the ability to have adult human conversation, and we began what turned into a highly interesting and engaging two-hour discussion. 8 This guy has a lot on his mind across a lot of topics. In this one lunch alone, we covered electric cars, climate change, artificial intelligence, the Fermi Paradox, consciousness, reusable rockets, colonizing Mars, creating an atmosphere on Mars, voting on Mars, genetic programming, his kids, population decline, physics vs. engineering, Edison vs. Tesla, solar power, a carbon tax, the definition of a company, warping spacetime and how this isn't actually something you can do, nanobots in your bloodstream and how this isn't actually something you can do, Galileo, Shakespeare, the American forefathers, Henry Ford, Isaac Newton, satellites, and ice ages.

I'll get into the specifics of what he had to say about many of these things in later posts, but some notes for now:

- He's a pretty tall and burly dude. Doesn't really come through on camera.

- He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I've never seen anything like it.

- He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we're "summoning the demon," but I didn't know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most-the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherfucker, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

- The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps-those who think there's no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don't see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn't sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox "just doesn't make sense" and that it "gets more and more worrying" the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we're a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX's mission: "If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically." Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.

- One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We're smarter, and "more conscious" than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing-that it's like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn't buy the "ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]" thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn't even fathom its existence.

- I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn't buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: "The whole system is collapsing. You don't see someone who's 90 years old and it's like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body." Now with anyone else-literally anyone else-I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes shit for humanity. So what did I do?

Me: Well...but isn't this important enough to try? Is this something you'd ever turn your attention to?

Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.

Me: You're fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested-you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.

Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it's like-how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don't know.

Me: I think there's a way. You've said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that's as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it's worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.

Elon: I mean I do think there's...in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That's the only way to do it.

Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.

Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It's software.

Comments:

1) It's really funny to brashly pressure Elon Musk to take on yet another seemingly-insurmountable task and to act a little disappointed in him that he's not currently doing it, when he's already doing more for humanity than literally anyone on the planet.

2) It's also super fun to casually brush off the moral issues around genetic programming with "I think there's a way" and to refer to DNA- literally the smallest and most complex substance ever-as "just a physical material deep down" when I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. Because those things will be his problem to figure out, not mine.
How have you done this? These projects-PayPal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX-they're so spectacularly different. They're such ambitious projects, at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way-what is it about you? Can we have some of that secret sauce?
3) I think I've successfully planted the seed. If Musk takes on human genetics 15 years from now and we all end up living to 250 because of it, you all owe me a drink.

Watching interviews with Musk, you see a lot of people ask him some variation of this question Chris Anderson asked him on stage at the 2013 TED conference:

There are a lot of things about Musk that make him so successful, but I do think there's a "secret sauce" that puts Musk in a different league from even the other renowned billionaires of our time. I have a theory about what that is, which has to do with the way Musk thinks, the way that he reasons through problems, and the way he views the world. As this series continues, think about this, and we'll discuss a lot more in the last post.

For now, I'll leave you with Elon Musk holding a Panic Monster.

___________

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Next up in this series: Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World

Other posts in the series:
And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company: Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future
Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4: The Chef and the Cook: Musk's Secret Sauce
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence The Fermi Paradox What Makes You You? Sources
Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop
Extra Post #3: SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket - The Full Story

Some Musk-y Wait But Why Posts:

A large part of what I learned for this post came from my own conversations with Musk and his staff. As I mentioned above, Ashlee Vance's upcoming biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is excellent and helped me fill in a bunch of gaps. Further info came from the sources below:

Documentary: Revenge of the Electric Car
TED Talks:Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity
Khan Academy: Interview With Elon Musk
Quora:What is it like to work with Elon Musk?
SXSW: Interview with Elon Musk
Consumer Reports:Tesla Model S: The Electric Car that Shatters Every Myth
Wired:How the Tesla Model S is Made
Interview: Elon Musk says he's a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla
Interview: Elon Musk gets introspective
Business Insider:Former SpaceX Exec Explains How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science
Esquire:Elon Musk: The Triumph of His Will
Oxford Martin School: Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport
MIT Interview: Elon Musk compares AI efforts to "Summoning the Demon"
Documentary:Billionaire Elon Musk : How I Became The Real 'Iron Man'
Reddit: Elon Musk AMA
Chris Anderson: Chris Anderson on Elon Musk, the World's Most Remarkable Entrepreneur
Engineering.com: Who's Better? Engineers or Scientists?
Forbes:Big Day For SpaceX As Elon Musk Tells His Mom 'I Haven't Started Yet'

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Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man - Wait But Why

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PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series: ___________ Last month, I got a surprising phone call. Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world's raddest man.

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This is the last part of a four-part series on Elon Musk's companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. 1 1

Three quick notes:

1) PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:

2) Here's a G-rated version of the post, appropriate for all ages (with its own URL, so safe to share too).

3) Extra big thanks to our Patreon supporters for making WBW sustainable and for being immensely patient during the long wait.

___________

Welcome to the last post in the series on the world of Elon Musk.

It's been a long one, I know. A long series with long posts and a long time between posts. It turns out that when it comes to Musk and his shit, there was a lot to say.

Anyone who's read the first three posts in this series is aware that I've not only been buried in the things Musk is doing, I've been drinking a tall glass of the Elon Musk Kool-Aid throughout. I'm very, very into it.

I kind of feel like that's fine, right? The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren't supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge, old industries that aren't supposed to be revolutionable. After emerging from the 1990s dotcom party with $180 million, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 900-pound sumo wrestlers-the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry, the military-industrial complex, the energy utilities-and he might actually be winning. And all of this, it really seems, for the purpose of giving our species a better future.

Pretty Kool-Aid worthy. But someone being exceptionally rad isn't Kool-Aid worthy enough to warrant 90,000 words over a string of months on a blog that's supposed to be about a wide range of topics.
1) To understand why Musk is doing what he's doing. 2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he's doing.
During the first post, I laid out the two objectives for the series:

So far, we've spent most of the time exploring objective #1. But what really intrigued me as I began thinking about this was objective #2. I'm fascinated by those rare people in history who manage to dramatically change the world during their short time here, and I've always liked to study those people and read their biographies. Those people know something the rest of us don't, and we can learn something valuable from them. Getting access to Elon Musk gave me what I decided was an unusual chance to get my hands on one of those people and examine them up close. If it were just Musk's money or intelligence or ambition or good intentions that made him so capable, there would be more Elon Musks out there. No, it's something else-what TED curator Chris Anderson called Musk's "secret sauce"-and for me, this series became a mission to figure it out.

The good news is, after a lot of time thinking about this, reading about this, and talking to him and his staff, I think I've got it. What for a while was a large pile of facts, observations, and sound bites eventually began to congeal into a common theme-a trait in Musk that I believe he shares with many of the most dynamic icons in history and that separates him from almost everybody else.

As I worked through the Tesla and SpaceX posts, this concept kept surfacing, and it became clear to me that this series couldn't end without a deep dive into exactly what it is that Musk and a few others do so unusually well. The thing that tantalized me is that this secret sauce is actually accessible to everyone and right there in front of us-if we can just wrap our heads around it. Mulling this all over has legitimately affected the way I think about my life, my future, and the choices I make-and I'm going to try my best in this post to explain why.

___________

In 1681, English theologian Thomas Burnet published Sacred Theory of the Earth, in which he explained how geology worked. What happened was, around 6,000 years ago, the Earth was formed as a perfect sphere with a surface of idyllic land and a watery interior. But then, when the surface dried up a little later, cracks formed in its surface, releasing much of the water from within. The result was the Biblical Deluge and Noah having to deal with a ton of shit all week. Once things settled down, the Earth was no longer a perfect sphere-all the commotion had distorted the surface, bringing about mountains and valleys and caves down below, and the whole thing was littered with the fossils of the flood's victims.

And bingo. Burnet had figured it out. The great puzzle of fundamental theology had been to reconcile the large number of seemingly-very-old Earth features with the much shorter timeline of the Earth detailed in the Bible. For theologians of the time, it was their version of the general relativity vs. quantum mechanics quandary, and Burnet had come up with a viable string theory to unify it all under one roof.

It wasn't just Burnet. There were enough theories kicking around reconciling geology with the verses of the Bible to today warrant a 15,000-word "Flood Geology" Wikipedia page.

Around the same time, another group of thinkers started working on the geology puzzle: scientists.

For the theologian puzzlers, the starting rules of the game were, "Fact: the Earth began 6,000 years ago and there was at one point an Earth-sweeping flood," and their puzzling took place strictly within that context. But the scientists started the game with no rules at all. The puzzle was a blank slate where any observations and measurements they found were welcome.

Over the next 300 years, the scientists built theory upon theory, and as new technologies brought in new types of measurements, old theories were debunked and replaced with new updated versions. The science community kept surprising themselves as the apparent age of the Earth grew longer and longer. In 1907, there was a huge breakthrough when American scientist Bertram Boltwood pioneered the technique of deciphering the age of rocks through radiometric dating, which found elements in a rock with a known rate of radioactive decay and measured what portion of those elements remained intact and what portion had already converted to decay substance.

Radiometric dating blew Earth's history backwards into the billions of years, which burst open new breakthroughs in science like the theory of Continental Drift, which in turn led to the theory of Plate Tectonics. The scientists were on a roll.

Meanwhile, the flood geologists would have none of it. To them, any conclusions from the science community were moot because they were breaking the rules of the game to begin with. The Earth was officially less than 6,000 years old, so if radiometric dating showed otherwise, it was a flawed technique, period.

But the scientific evidence grew increasingly compelling, and as time wore on, more and more flood geologists threw in the towel and accepted the scientist's viewpoint-maybe they had had the rules of the game wrong.

Some, though, held strong. The rules were the rules, and it didn't matter how many people agreed that the Earth was billions of years old-it was a grand conspiracy.
Contrary to what is widely believed, radioactive dating has not proven the rocks of the Grand Canyon to be millions of years old. The vast majority of the sedimentary layers in the Grand Canyon were deposited as the result of a global flood that occurred after and as a result of the initial sin that took place in the Garden of Eden.
Today, there are still many flood geologists making their case. Just recently, an author named Tom Vail wrote a book called Grand Canyon: A Different View, in which he explains:

___________

If the website analytics stats on Chartbeat included a "Type of Geologist" demographic metric, I imagine that for Wait But Why readers, the breakdown would look something like this:

It makes sense. Whether religious or not, most people who read this site are big on data, evidence, and accuracy. I'm reminded of this every time I make an error in a post.

Whatever role faith plays in the spiritual realm, what most of us agree on is that when seeking answers to our questions about the age of the Earth, the history of our species, the causes of lightning, or any other physical phenomenon in the universe, data and logic are far more effective tools than faith and scripture.
When it comes to most of the way we think, the way we make decisions, and the way we live our lives, we're much more like the flood geologists than the science geologists.
And yet-after thinking about this for a while, I've come to an unpleasant conclusion:

And Elon's secret? He's a scientist through and through.

The first clue to the way Musk thinks is in the super odd way that he talks. For example:

Human child: "I'm scared of the dark, because that's when all the scary shit is gonna get me and I won't be able to see it coming."

Elon: "When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength-400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore after that." 2

Or:

Human father: "I'd like to start working less because my kids are starting to grow up."

Elon: "I'm trying to throttle back, because particularly the triplets are starting to gain consciousness. They're almost two." 3

Or:

Human single man: "I'd like to find a girlfriend. I don't want to be so busy with work that I have no time for dating."

Elon: "I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. That's why I need to carve out just a little more time. I think maybe even another five to 10 - how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours? That's kind of the minimum? I don't know." 4

I call this MuskSpeak. MuskSpeak is a language that describes everyday parts of life as exactly what they actually, literally are.

There are plenty of instances of technical situations when we all agree that MuskSpeak makes much more sense than normal human parlance-

-but what makes Musk odd is that he thinks about most things in MuskSpeak, including many areas where you don't usually find it. Like when I asked him if he was afraid of death, and he said having kids made him more comfortable with dying, because "kids sort of are a bit you. At least they're half you. They're half you at the hardware level, and depending on how much time you have with them, they're that percentage of you at the software level."

When you or I look at kids, we see small, dumb, cute people. When Musk looks at his five kids, he sees five of his favorite computers. When he looks at you, he sees a computer. And when he looks in the mirror, he sees a computer- his computer. It's not that Musk suggests that people are just computers-it's that he sees people as computers on top of whatever else they are.

And at the most literal level, Elon's right about people being computers. At its simplest definition, a computer is an object that can store and process data-which the brain certainly is.

And while this isn't the most poetic way to think about our minds, I'm starting to believe that it's one of those areas of life where MuskSpeak can serve us well-because thinking of a brain as a computer forces us to consider the distinction between our hardware and our software, a distinction we often fail to recognize.

For a computer, hardware is defined as "the machines, wiring, and other physical components of a computer." So for a human, that's the physical brain they were born with and all of its capabilities, which determines their raw intelligence, their innate talents, and other natural strengths and shortcomings.

A computer's software is defined as "the programs and other operating information used by a computer." For a human, that's what they know and how they think-their belief systems, thought patterns, and reasoning methods. Life is a flood of incoming data of all kinds that enter the brain through our senses, and it's the software that assesses and filters all that input, processes and organizes it, and ultimately uses it to generate the key output-a decision.

The hardware is a ball of clay that's handed to us when we're born. And of course, not all clay is equal-each brain begins as a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses across a wide range of processes and capabilities.

But it's the software that determines what kind of tool the clay gets shaped into.

When people think about what makes someone like Elon Musk so effective, they often focus on the hardware-and Musk's hardware has some pretty impressive specs. But the more I learn about Musk and other people who seem to have superhuman powers-whether it be Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Genghis Khan, Marie Curie, John Lennon, Ayn Rand, 2 or Louis C.K.-the more I'm convinced that it's their software, not their natural-born intelligence or talents, that makes them so rare and so effective.

So let's talk about software-starting with Musk's. As I wrote the other three posts in this series, I looked at everything I was learning about Musk-the things he says, the decisions he makes, the missions he takes on and how he approaches them-as clues to how his underlying software works.

Eventually, the clues piled up and the shape of the software began to reveal itself. Here's what I think it looks like:

The structure of Musk's software starts like many of ours, with what we'll call the Want box:

This box contains anything in life where you want Situation A to turn into Situation B. Situation A is currently what's happening and you want something to change so that Situation B is what's happening instead. Some examples:

Next, the Want box has a partner in crime-what we'll call the Reality box. It contains all things that are possible:

Pretty straightforward.

The overlap of the Want and Reality boxes is the Goal Pool, where your goal options live: 3

So you pick a goal from the pool-the thing you're going to try to move from Point A to Point B.

And how do you cause something to change? You direct your power towards it. A person's power can come in various forms: your time, your energy (mental and physical), your resources, your persuasive ability, your connection to others, etc.

The concept of employment is just Person A using their resources power (a paycheck) to direct Person B's time and/or energy power toward Person A's goal. When Oprah publicly recommends a book, that's combining her abundant power of connection (she has a huge reach) and her abundant power of persuasion (people trust her) and directing them towards the goal of getting the book into the hands of thousands of people who would have otherwise never known about it.

Once a goal has been selected, you know the direction in which to point your power. Now it's time to figure out the most effective way to use that power to generate the outcome you want-that's your strategy:

Simple right? And probably not that different from how you think.

But what makes Musk's software so effective isn't its structure, it's that he uses it like a scientist. Carl Sagan said, "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge," and you can see Musk apply that way of thinking in two key ways:

1) He builds each software component himself, from the ground up.

Musk calls this "reasoning from first principles." I'll let him explain:

I think generally people's thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It's rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They'll say, "We'll do that because it's always been done that way." Or they'll not do it because "Well, nobody's ever done that, so it must not be good." But that's just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up-"from the first principles" is the phrase that's used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn't work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past. 5

In science, this means starting with what evidence shows us to be true. A scientist doesn't say, "Well we know the Earth is flat because that's the way it looks, that's what's intuitive, and that's what everyone agrees is true," a scientist says, "The part of the Earth that I can see at any given time appears to be flat, which would be the case when looking at a small piece of many differently shaped objects up close, so I don't have enough information to know what the shape of the Earth is. One reasonable hypothesis is that the Earth is flat, but until we have tools and techniques that can be used to prove or disprove that hypothesis, it is an open question."

A scientist gathers together only what he or she knows to be true-the first principles-and uses those as the puzzle pieces with which to construct a conclusion.
1) Filling in the Want box 2) Filling in the Reality box 3) Goal selection from the Goal Pool 4) Strategy formation
Reasoning from first principles is a hard thing to do in life, and Musk is a master at it. Brain software has four major decision-making centers:

Musk works through each of these boxes by reasoning from first principles. Filling in the Want box from first principles requires a deep, honest, and independent understanding of yourself. Filling in the Reality box requires the clearest possible picture of the actual facts of both the world and your own abilities. The Goal Pool should double as a Goal Selection Laboratory that contains tools for intelligently measuring and weighing options. And strategies should be formed based on what you know, not on what is typically done.

2) He continually adjusts each component's conclusions as new information comes in.

You might remember doing proofs in geometry class, one of the most mundane parts of everyone's childhood. These ones:

Math is satisfyingly exact. Its givens are exact and its conclusions are airtight.

In math, we call givens "axioms," and axioms are 100% true. So when we build conclusions out of axioms, we call them "proofs," which are also 100% true.

Science doesn't have axioms or proofs, for good reason.

We could have called Newton's law of universal gravitation a proof-and for a long time, it certainly seemed like one-but then what happens when Einstein comes around and shows that Newton was actually "zoomed in," like someone calling the Earth flat, and when you zoom way out, you discover that the real law is general relativity and Newton's law actually stops working under extreme conditions, while general relativity works no matter what. So then, you'd call general relativity a proof instead. Except then what happens when quantum mechanics comes around and shows that general relativity fails to apply on a tiny scale and that a new set of laws is needed to account for those cases.

There are no axioms or proofs in science because nothing is for sure and everything we feel sure about might be disproven. Richard Feynman has said, "Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty-some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain." Instead of proofs, science has theories. Theories are based on hard evidence and treated as truths, but at all times they're susceptible to being adjusted or disproven as new data emerges.

So in science, it's more like:

In our lives, the only true axiom is "I exist." Beyond that, nothing is for sure. And for most things in life, we can't even build a real scientific theory because life doesn't tend to have exact measurements.

Usually, the best we can do is a strong hunch based on what data we have. And in science, a hunch is called a hypothesis. Which works like this:

Given (it seems, based on what I know): A = B
Given (it seems, based on what I know): B = C + D
Therefore (it seems, based on what I know): A = C + D

Hypotheses are built to be tested. Testing a hypothesis can disprove it or strengthen it, and if it passes enough tests, it can be upgraded to a theory.

So after Musk builds his conclusions from first principles, what does he do? He tests the shit out of them, continually, and adjusts them regularly based on what he learns. Let's go through the whole process to show how:

You begin by reasoning from first principles to A) fill in the Want box, B) fill in the Reality box, C) select a goal from the pool, and D) build a strategy-and then you get to work. You've used first principles thinking to decide where to point your power and the most effective way to use it.

But the goal-achievement strategy you came up with was just your first crack. It was a hypothesis, ripe for testing. You test a strategy hypothesis one way: action. You pour your power into the strategy and see what happens. As you do this, data starts flowing in-results, feedback, and new information from the outside world. Certain parts of your strategy hypothesis might be strengthened by this new data, others might be weakened, and new ideas may have sprung to life in your head through the experience-but either way, some adjustment is usually called for:

As this strategy loop spins and your power becomes more and more effective at accomplishing your goal, other things are happening down below.

For someone reasoning from first principles, the Want box at any given time is a snapshot of their innermost desires the last time they thought hard about it. But the contents of the Want box are also a hypothesis, and experience can show you that you were wrong about something you thought you wanted or that you want something you didn't realize you did. At the same time, the inner you isn't a statue-it's a shifting, morphing sculpture whose innermost values change as time passes. So even if something in the Want box was correct at one point, as you change, it may lose its place in the box. The Want box should serve the current inner you as best possible, which requires you to update it, something you do through reflection:

A rotating Want loop is called evolution.

On the other side of the aisle, the Reality box is also going through a process. "Things that are possible" is a hypothesis, maybe more so than anything else. It takes into account both the state of the world and your own abilities. And as your own abilities change and grow, the world changes even faster. What was possible in the world in 2005 is very different from what's possible today, and it's a huge (and rare) advantage to be working with an up-to-date Reality box.

Filling in your Reality box from first principles is a great challenge, and keeping the box current so that it matches actual reality takes continual work.

For each of these areas, the box represents the current hypothesis and the circle represents the source of new information that can be used to adjust the hypothesis. It's our duty to remember that the circles are the boss, not the boxes-the boxes are only trying their best to do the circles proud. And if we fall out of touch with what's happening in the circles, the info in the boxes becomes obsolete and a less effective source for our decision-making.

Thinking about the software as a whole, let's take a step back. What we see is a goal formation mechanism below and a goal attainment mechanism above. One thing goal attainment often requires is laser focus. To get the results we want, we zoom in on the micro picture, sinking our teeth into our goal and honing in on it with our strategy loop.

But as time passes, the Want box and Reality box adjust contents and morph shape, and eventually, something else can happen-the Goal Pool changes.

The Goal Pool is just the overlap of the Want and Reality boxes, so its own shape and contents are totally dependent on the state of those boxes. And as you live your life inside the goal attainment mechanism above, it's important to make sure that what you're working so hard on remains in line with the Goal Pool below-so let's add in two big red arrows for that:

Checking in with the large circle down below requires us to lift our heads up from the micro mission and do some macro reflection. And when enough changes happen in the Want and Reality boxes that the goal you're pursuing is no longer in the goal pool, it calls for a macro life change-a breakup, a job switch, a relocation, a priority swap, an attitude shift.

All together, the software I've described is a living, breathing system, constructed on a rock solid foundation of first principles, and built to be nimble, to keep itself honest, and to change shape as needed to best serve its owner.

And if you read about Elon Musk's life, you can watch this software in action.

How Musk's software wrote his life story

Step 1 for Elon was filling in the contents of the Want box. Doing this from first principles is a huge challenge-you have to dig deep into concepts like right and wrong, good and bad, important and trivial, valuable and frivolous. You have to figure out what you respect, what you disdain, what fascinates you, what bores you, and what excites you deep in your inner child. Of course, there's no way for anyone of any age to have a clear cut answer to these questions, but Elon did the best thing he could by ignoring others and independently pondering.
The thing that I care about is-when I look into the future, I see the future as a series of branching probability streams. So you have to ask, what are we doing to move down the good stream-the one that's likely to make for a good future? Because otherwise, you look ahead, and it's like "Oh it's dark." If you're projecting to the future, and you're saying "Wow, we're gonna end up in some terrible situation," that's depressing.
I talked with him about his early thought process in figuring out what to do with his career. He has said many times that he cares deeply about the future well-being of the human species-something that is clearly in the center of his Want box. I asked how he came to that, and he explained:
I certainly admire the discoveries of the great scientists. They're discovering what already exists-it's a deeper understanding of how the universe already works. That's cool-but the universe already sort of knows that. What matters is knowledge in a human context. What I'm trying to ensure is that knowledge in a human context is still possible in the future. So it's sort of like-I'm more like the gardener, and then there are the flowers. If there's no garden, there's no flowers. I could try to be a flower in the garden, or I could try to make sure there is a garden. So I'm trying to make sure there is a garden, such that in the future, many Feynmans may bloom.
Fair. Honing in on his specific path, I brought up the great modern physicists like Einstein and Hawking and Feynman, and I asked him whether he considered going into scientific discovery instead of engineering. His response:

In other words, both A and B are good, but without A there is no B. So I choose A.
I was at one point thinking about doing physics as a career-I did undergrad in physics-but in order to really advance physics these days, you need the data. Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of engineering. This debate-"Which is better, engineers or scientists? Aren't scientists better? Wasn't Einstein the smartest person?"-personally, I think that engineering is better because in the absence of the engineering, you do not have the data. You just hit a limit. And yeah, you can be real smart within the context of the limit of the data you have, but unless you have a way to get more data, you can't make progress. Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope-that's what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.
He went on:

A and B are both good, but B can only advance if A advances. So I choose A.

In thinking about where exactly to point himself to best help humanity, Musk says that in college, he thought hard about the first principles question, "What will most affect the future of humanity?" and put together a list of five things: "the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code." 6

Hearing him talk about what matters to him, you can see up and down the whole stack of Want box reasoning that led him to his current endeavors.

He has other reasons too. Next to wanting to help humanity in the Want box is this quote:

I'm interested in things that change the world or affect future in wondrous new technology where you see it and you're like, "How did that even happen? How is that possible?"7

This follows a theme of Musk being passionate about super-advanced technology and the excitement it brings to him and other people. So given all of the above, an ideal endeavor for Musk would be something involving engineering, something in an area that will be important for the future, and something to do with cutting-edge technology. Those broad, basic Want box items alone narrow down the goal pool considerably.

Meanwhile, he was a teenager with no money, reputation, or connections, and limited knowledge and skills. In other words, his Reality box wasn't that big. So he did what many young people do-he focused his early goals not around achieving his Wants, but expanding the Reality box and its list of "things that are possible." He wanted to be able to legally stay in the US after college, and he also wanted to gain more knowledge about engineering, so he killed two birds with one stone and applied to a PhD program at Stanford to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy.

Musk had gone into the Goal Pool and picked the Stanford program, and he moved to California to get started. But there was one thing-it was 1995. The internet was in the early stages of taking off and moving much faster than people had anticipated. It was also a world Musk could dive into without money or a reputation. So he added a bunch of internet-related possibilities into his Reality box. The early internet was also more exciting than he had anticipated-so getting involved in it quickly found its way into his Want box.

These rapid adjustments caused big changes in his Goal Pool, to the point where the Stanford PhD was no longer what his software's goal formation center was outputting.

Most people would have stuck with the Stanford program-because they had already told everyone about it and it would be weird to quit, because it was Stanford, because it was a more normal path, because it was safer, because the internet might be a fad, because what if he were 35 one day and was a failure with no money because he couldn't get a good job without the right degree.

Musk quit the program after two days. The big macro arrow of his software came down on the right, saw that what he was embarking on wasn't in the Goal Pool anymore, and he trusted his software-so he made a macro change.

He started Zip2 with his brother, an early cross between the concepts of the Yellow Pages and Google Maps. Four years later, they sold the company and Elon walked away with $22 million.

As a dotcom millionaire, the conventional wisdom was to settle down as a lifelong rich guy and either invest in other companies or start something new with other people's money. But Musk's goal formation center had other ideas. His Want box was bursting with ambitious startup ideas that he thought could have major impact on the world, and his Reality box, which now included $22 million, told him that he had a high chance of succeeding. Being leisurely on the sidelines was nowhere in his Want box and totally unnecessary according to his Reality box.

So he used his newfound wealth to start X.com in 1999, with the vision to build a full-service online financial institution. The internet was still young and the concept of storing your money in an online bank was totally inconceivable to most people, and Musk was advised by many that it was a crazy plan. But again, Musk trusted his software. What he knew about the internet told him that this was inside the Reality box-because his reasoning told him that when it came to the internet, the Reality box had grown much bigger than people appreciated-and that was all he needed to know to move forward. In the top part of his software, as his strategy-action-results-adjustments loop spun, X.com's service changed, the team changed, the mission changed, even the name changed. By the time eBay bought it in 2002, the company was called PayPal and it was a money transfer service. Musk made $180 million.

Following his software to space

Now 31 years old and fabulously wealthy, Musk had to figure out what to do next with his life. On top of the "whatever you do, definitely don't risk losing that money you have" conventional wisdom, there was also the common logic that said, "You're awesome at building internet companies, but that's all you know since you've never done anything else. You're in your thirties now and it's too late to do something big in a whole different field. This is the path you chose-you're an internet guy."

But Musk went back to first principles. He looked inwards to his Want box, and having reflected on things, doing another internet thing wasn't really in the box anymore. What was in there was his still-burning desire to help the future of humanity. In particular, he felt that to have a long future, the species would have to become much better at space travel.

So he started exploring the limits of the Reality box when it came to getting involved in the aerospace industry.

Conventional wisdom screamed at the top of its lungs for him to stop. It said he had no formal education in the field and didn't know the first thing about being a rocket scientist. But his software told him that formal education was just another way to download information into your brain and "a painfully slow download" at that-so he started reading, meeting people, and asking questions.

Conventional wisdom said no entrepreneur had ever succeeded at an endeavor like this before, and that he shouldn't risk his money on something so likely to fail. But Musk's stated philosophy is, "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."

Conventional wisdom said that he couldn't afford to build rockets because they were too expensive and pointed to the fact that no one had ever made a rocket that cheaply before-but like the scientists who ignored those who said the Earth was 6,000 years old and those who insisted the Earth was flat, Musk started crunching numbers to do the math himself. Here's how he recounts his thoughts:

Historically, all rockets have been expensive, so therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive. But actually that's not true. If you say, what is a rocket made of? It's made of aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. And you can break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these components? And if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be? And I was like, wow, okay, it's really small-it's like 2% of what a rocket costs. So clearly it would be in how the atoms are arranged-so you've got to figure out how can we get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently. And so I had a series of meetings on Saturdays with people, some of whom were still working at the big aerospace companies, just to try to figure out if there's some catch here that I'm not appreciating. And I couldn't figure it out. There doesn't seem to be any catch. So I started SpaceX. 8

History, conventional wisdom, and his friends all said one thing, but his own software, reasoning upwards from first principles, said another-and he trusted his software. He started SpaceX, again with his own money, and dove in head first. The mission: dramatically lower the cost of space travel to make it possible for humanity to become multi-planetary.

Two years later, while running a growing SpaceX, a friend brought Elon to a company called AC Propulsion, which had created a prototype for a super-fast, long-range electric car. It blew him away. The Reality box of Musk's software had told him that such a thing wasn't yet possible, but it turns out that Musk wasn't aware of how far lithium-ion batteries had advanced, and what he saw at AC Propulsion was new information about the world that put "starting a top-notch electric car company" into the Reality box in his head.

He ran into the same conventional wisdom about battery costs as he had about rocket costs. Batteries had never been made cheaply enough to allow for a mass-market, long-range electric car because the cost of making a battery was simply too high. He used the same first principles logic and a calculator to determine that most of the problem was the cost of middlemen, not raw materials, and decided that actually, conventional wisdom was wrong and batteries could be much cheaper in the future. So he co-founded Tesla with the mission of accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-vehicle world-first by pouring in resources power and funding the company, and later by contributing his time and energy resources as well and becoming CEO.

Two years after that, Musk co-founded SolarCity with his cousins, a company whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of homes. Musk knew that his time/energy power, the one kind of power that has hard limits, no matter who you are, was mostly used up, but he still had plenty of resources power-so he put it to work on another goal in his Goal Pool.

Most recently, Musk has jumpstarted change in another area that's important to him-the way people transport themselves from city to city. His idea is that there should be an entirely new mode of transport that will whiz people hundreds of miles by zinging them through a tube. He calls it the Hyperloop. For this project, he's not using his time, energy, or resources. Instead, by laying out his initial thoughts in a white paper and hosting a competition for engineers to test out their innovations, he's leveraging his powers of connection and persuasion to create change.

___________

There are all kinds of tech companies that build software. They think hard, for years, about the best, most efficient way to make their product. Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns-and since there aren't companies out there designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tests it every day, and makes constant updates. That's why he's so outrageously effective, why he can disrupt multiple huge industries at once, why he can learn so quickly, strategize so cleverly, and visualize the future so clearly.

This part of what Musk does isn't rocket science-it's common sense. Your entire life runs on the software in your head-why wouldn't you obsess over optimizing it?

And yet, not only do most of us not obsess over our own software-most of us don't even understand our own software, how it works, or why it works that way. Let's try to figure out why.

Most People's Software

You always hear facts about human development and how so much of who you become is determined by your experiences during your formative years. A newborn's brain is a malleable ball of hardware clay, and its job upon being born is to quickly learn about whatever environment it's been born into and start shaping itself into the optimal tool for survival in those circumstances. That's why it's so easy for young children to learn new skills.

As people age, the clay begins to harden and it becomes more difficult to change the way the brain operates. My grandmother has been using a computer as long as I have, but I use mine comfortably and easily because my malleable childhood brain easily wrapped itself around basic computer skills, while she has the same face on when she uses her computer that my tortoise does when I put him on top of a glass table and he thinks he's inexplicably hovering two feet above the ground. She'll use a computer when she needs to, but it's not her friend.

So when it comes to our brain software-our values, perceptions, belief systems, reasoning techniques-what are we learning during those key early years?

Everyone's raised differently, but for most people I know, it went something like this:

We were taught all kinds of things by our parents and teachers-what's right and wrong, what's safe and dangerous, the kind of person you should and shouldn't be. But the idea was: I'm an adult so I know much more about this than you, it's not up for debate, don't argue, just obey. That's when the cliché "Why?" game comes in (what MuskSpeak calls "the chained why").

A child's instinct isn't just to know what to do and not to do, she wants to understand the rules of her environment. And to understand something, you have to have a sense of how that thing was built. When parents and teachers tell a kid to do XYZ and to simply obey, it's like installing a piece of already-designed software in the kid's head. When kids ask Why? and then Why? and then Why?, they're trying to deconstruct that software to see how it was built-to get down to the first principles underneath so they can weigh how much they should actually care about what the adults seem so insistent upon.

The first few times a kid plays the Why game, parents think it's cute. But many parents, and most teachers, soon come up with a way to cut the game off:

Because I said so.

"Because I said so" inserts a concrete floor into the child's deconstruction effort below which no further Why's may pass. It says, "You want first principles? There. There's your floor. No more Why's necessary. Now fucking put your boots on because I said so and let's go."
The deal was: universal public education whose sole intent was not to train the scholars of tomorrow-we had plenty of scholars. It was to train people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave, to comply, to fit in. "We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you again. We sit you in straight rows, just like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about interchangeable people because factories are based on interchangeable parts." In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children scored in the "highly creative" range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old, only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, "non-creative behavior is learned."
Imagine how this would play out in the science world.

In fairness, parents' lives suck. They have to do all the shit they used to have to do, except now on top of that there are these self-obsessed, drippy little creatures they have to upkeep, who think parents exist to serve them. On a busy day, in a bad mood, with 80 things to do, the Why game is a nightmare.

But it might be a nightmare worth enduring. A command or a lesson or a word of wisdom that comes without any insight into the steps of logic it was built upon is feeding a kid a fish instead of teaching them to reason. And when that's the way we're brought up, we end up with a bucket of fish and no rod-a piece of installed software that we've learned how to use, but no ability to code anything ourselves.

School makes things worse. One of my favorite thinkers, writer Seth Godin (whose blog is bursting with first principles reasoning wisdom), explains in a TED Talk about school that the current education system is a product of the Industrial Age, a time that catapulted productivity and the standard of living. But along with many more factories came the need for many more factory workers, so our education system was redesigned around that goal. He explains:

Couple that concept with what another favorite writer of mine, James Clear, explained recently on his blog:

It makes sense, right? Creative thinking is a close cousin of first principles reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways. People think of creativity as a natural born talent, but it's actually much more of a way of thinking-it's the thinking version of painting onto a blank canvas. But to do that requires brain software that's skilled and practiced at coming up with new things, and school trains us on the exact opposite concept-to follow the leader, single-file, and to get really good at taking tests. Instead of a blank canvas, school hands kids a coloring book and tells them to stay within the lines. 4

What this all amounts to is that during our brain's most malleable years, parents, teachers, and society end up putting our clay in a mold and squeezing it tightly into a preset shape.

And when we grow up, without having learned how to build our own style of reasoning and having gone through the early soul-searching that independent thinking requires, we end up needing to rely on whatever software was installed in us for everything-software that, coming from parents and teachers, was probably itself designed 30 years ago.

30 years, if we're lucky. Let's think about this for a second.

Just say you have an overbearing mother who insists you grow up with her values, her worldview, her fears, and her ambitions-because she knows best, because it's a scary world out there, because XYZ is respectable, because she said so.

Your head might end up running your whole life on "because mom says so" software. If you play the Why? game with something like the reason you're in your current job, it may take a few Why's to get there, but you'll most likely end up hitting a concrete floor that says some version of "because mom says so."

But why does mom say so?

Mom says so because her mom said so-after growing up in Poland in 1932, where she was from a home where her dad said so because his dad-a minister from a small town outside Krakow-said so after his grandfather, who saw some terrible shit go down during the Siberian Uprising of 1866, ingrained in his children's heads the critical life lesson to never associate with blacksmiths.

Through a long game of telephone, your mother now looks down upon office jobs and you find yourself feeling strongly about the only truly respectable career being in publishing. And you can list off a bunch of reasons why you feel that way-but if someone really grilled you on your reasons and on the reasoning beneath them, you end up in a confusing place. It gets confusing way down there because the first principles foundation at the bottom is a mishmash of the values and beliefs of a bunch of people from different generations and countries-a bunch of people who aren't you.

A common example of this in today's world is that many people I know were raised by people who were raised by people who went through the Great Depression. If you solicit career advice from someone born in the US in the 1920s, there's a good chance you'll get an answer pumped out by this software:

The person has lived a long life and has made it all the way to 2015, but their software was coded during the Great Depression, and if they're not the type to regularly self-reflect and evolve, they still do their thinking with software from 1930. And if they installed that same software in their children's heads and their children then passed it on to their own children, a member of Generation Y today might feel too scared to pursue an entrepreneurial or artistic endeavor and be totally unaware that they're actually being haunted by the ghost of the Great Depression.

When old software is installed on new computers, people end up with a set of values not necessarily based on their own deep thinking, a set of beliefs about the world not necessarily based on the reality of the world they live in, and a bunch of opinions they might have a hard time defending with an honest heart.

In other words, a whole lot of convictions not really based on actual data. We have a word for that.

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way-by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! -Richard Feynman

Dogma is everywhere and comes in a thousand different varieties-but the format is generally the same:

X is true because [authority] says so. The authority can be many things.
People like us do stuff like this.
Dogma, unlike first principles reasoning, isn't customized to the believer or her environment and isn't meant to be critiqued and adjusted as things change. It's not software to be coded-it's a printed rulebook. Its rules may be originally based on reasoning by a certain kind of thinker in a certain set of circumstances, at a time far in the past or a place far away, or it may be based on no reasoning at all. But that doesn't matter because you're not supposed to dig too deep under the surface anyway-you're just supposed to accept it, embrace it, and live by it. No evidence needed.

You may not like living by someone else's dogma, but you're left without much choice. When your childhood attempts at understanding are met with "Because I said so," and you absorb the implicit message "Your own reasoning capability is shit, don't even try, just follow these rules so you don't fuck your life up," you grow up with little confidence in your own reasoning process. When you're never forced to build your own reasoning pathways, you're able to skip the hard process of digging deep to discover your own values and the sometimes painful experience of testing those values in the real world and learning you want to adjust them-and so you grow up a total reasoning amateur.

Only strong reasoning skills can carve a unique life path, and without them, dogma will quickly have you living someone else's life. Dogma doesn't know you or care about you and is often completely wrong for you-it'll have a would-be happy painter spending their life as a lawyer and a would-be happy lawyer spending their life as a painter.

But when you don't know how to reason, you don't know how to evolve or adapt. If the dogma you grew up with isn't working for you, you can reject it, but as a reasoning amateur, going it alone usually ends with you finding another dogma lifeboat to jump onto-another rulebook to follow and another authority to obey. You don't know how to code your own software, so you install someone else's.

People don't do any of this intentionally-usually if we reject a type of dogma, our intention is to break free of a life of dogmatic thinking altogether and brave the cold winds of independent reasoning. But dogmatic thinking is a hard habit to break, especially when it's all you know. I have a friend who just had a baby, and she told me that she was so much more open-minded than her parents, because they wanted her to have a prestigious career, but she'd be open to her daughter doing anything. After a minute, she thought about it, and said, "Well actually, no, what I mean by that is if she wanted to go do something like spend her life on a farm in Montana, I'd be fine with that and my parents never would have been-but if she said she wanted to go work at a hedge fund, I'd kill her." She realized mid-sentence that she wasn't free of the rigid dogmatic thinking of her parents, she had just changed dogma brands.

This is the dogma trap, and it's hard to escape from. Especially since dogma has a powerful ally-the group.

Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue. -Louis C.K.

What most dogmatic thinking tends to boil down to is another good Seth Godin phrase:

It's the rallying cry of tribalism.

There's an important distinction to make here. Tribalism tends to have a negative connotation, but the concept of a tribe itself isn't bad. A tribe is just a group of people linked together by something they have in common-a religion, an ethnicity, a nationality, family, a philosophy, a cause. Christianity is a tribe. The US Democratic Party is a tribe. Australians are a tribe. Radiohead fans are a tribe. Arsenal fans are a tribe. The musical theater scene in New York is a tribe. Temple University is a tribe. And within large, loose tribes, there are smaller, tighter, sub-tribes. Your extended family is a tribe, of which your immediate family is a sub-tribe. Americans are a tribe, of which Texans are a sub-tribe, of which Evangelical Christians in Amarillo, Texas is a sub-sub-tribe.

What makes tribalism a good or bad thing depends on the tribe member and their relationship with the tribe. In particular, one simple distinction:

Tribalism is good when the tribe and the tribe member both have an independent identity and they happen to be the same. The tribe member has chosen to be a part of the tribe because it happens to match who he really is. If either the identity of the tribe or the member evolves to the point where the two no longer match, the person will leave the tribe. Let's call this conscious tribalism.

Tribalism is bad when the tribe and tribe member's identity are one and the same. The tribe member's identity is determined by whatever the tribe's dogma happens to say. If the identity of the tribe changes, the identity of the tribe member changes with it in lockstep. The tribe member's identity can't change independent of the tribal identity because the member has no independent identity. Let's call this blind tribalism.

With conscious tribalism, the tribe member and his identity comes first. The tribe member's identity is the alpha dog, and who he is determines the tribes he's in. With blind tribalism, the tribe comes first. The tribe is the alpha dog and it's the tribe that determines who he is.

This isn't black and white-it's a spectrum-but when someone is raised without strong reasoning skills, they may also lack a strong independent identity and end up vulnerable to the blind tribalism side of things-especially with the various tribes they were born into. That's what Einstein was getting at when he said, "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."

A large tribe like a religion or nation or political party will contain members who fall across the whole range of the blind-to-conscious spectrum. But some tribes themselves will be the type to attract a certain type of follower. It makes logical sense that the more rigid and certain and dogmatic the tribe, the more likely it'll be to attract blind tribe members. ISIS is going to have a far higher percentage of blind tribe members than the London Philosophy Club.

The allure of dogmatic tribes makes sense-they appeal to very core parts of human nature.

Humans crave connection and camaraderie, and a guiding dogma is a common glue to bond together a group of unique individuals as one.

Humans want internal security, and for someone who grows up feeling shaky about their own distinctive character, a tribe and its guiding dogma is a critical lifeline-a one-stop shop for a full suite of human opinions and values.

Humans also long for the comfort and safety of certainty, and nowhere is conviction more present than in the groupthink of blind tribalism. While a scientist's data-based opinions are only as strong as the evidence she has and inherently subject to change, tribal dogmatism is an exercise in faith, and with no data to be beholden to, blind tribe members believe what they believe with certainty.

We discussed why math has proofs, science has theories, and in life, we should probably limit ourselves to hypotheses-but blind tribalism proceeds with the confidence of the mathematician:

Given (because the tribe says so): A = B
Given (because the tribe says so): B = C + D
Therefore, with certainty: A = C + D

And since so many others in the tribe feel certain about things, your own certainty is reassured and reinforced.

But there's a heavy cost to these comforts. Insecurity can be solved the hard way or the easy way-and by giving people the easy option, dogmatic tribes remove the pressure to do the hard work of evolving into a more independent person with a more internally-defined identity. In that way, dogmatic tribes are an enabler of the blind tribe member's deficiencies.

The sneaky thing about both rigid tribal dogma and blind membership is that they like to masquerade as open-minded thought with conscious membership. I think many of us may be closer to the blind membership side of things with certain tribes we're a part of than we recognize-and those tribes we're a part of may not be as open-minded as we tend to think.

A good test for this is the intensity of the us factor. That key word in "People like us do stuff like this" can get you into trouble pretty quickly.

Us feels great. A major part of the appeal of being in a tribe is that you get to be part of an Us, something humans are wired to seek out. And a loose Us is nice-like the Us among conscious, independent tribe members.

But the Us in blind tribalism is creepy. In blind tribalism, the tribe's guiding dogma doubles as the identity of the tribe members, and the Us factor enforces that concept. Conscious tribe members reach conclusions-blind tribe members are conclusions. With a blind Us, if the way you are as an individual happens to contain opinions, traits, or principles that fall outside the outer edges of the dogma walls, they will need to be shed-or things will get ugly. By challenging the dogma of your tribe, you're challenging both the sense of certainty the tribe members gain their strength from and the clear lines of identity they rely on.

The best friend of a blind Us is a nemesis Us- Them. Nothing unites Us like a collectively hated anti-Us, and the blind tribe is usually defined almost as much by hating the dogma of Them as it is by abiding by the dogma of Us.

Whatever element of rigid, identity-encompassing blindness is present in your own tribal life will reveal itself when you dare to validate any part of the rival Them dogma.

Give it a try. The next time you're with a member of a tribe you're a part of, express a change of heart that aligns you on a certain topic with whoever your tribe considers to be Them. If you're a religious Christian, tell people at church you're not sure anymore that there's a God. If you're an artist in Boulder, explain at the next dinner party that you think global warming might actually be a liberal hoax. If you're an Iraqi, tell your family that you're feeling pro-Israel lately. If you and your husband are staunch Republicans, tell him you're coming around on Obamacare. If you're from Boston, tell your friends you're pulling for the Yankees this year because you like their current group of players.

If you're in a tribe with a blind mentality of total certainty, you'll probably see a look of horror. It won't just seem wrong, it'll seem like heresy. They might get angry, they might passionately try to convince you otherwise, they might cut off the conversation-but there will be no open-minded conversation. And because identity is so intertwined with beliefs in blind tribalism, the person actually might feel less close to you afterwards. Because for rigidly tribal people, a shared dogma plays a more important role in their close relationships than they might recognize.

Most of the major divides in our world emerge from blind tribalism, and on the extreme end of the spectrum-where people are complete sheep -blind tribalism can lead to terrifying things. Like those times in history when a few charismatic bad guys can build a large army of loyal foot soldiers just by displaying strength and passion. Because blind tribalism is the true villain behind our grandest-scale atrocities:

Most of us probably wouldn't have joined the Nazi party, because most of us aren't on the extreme end of the blind-to-conscious spectrum. But I don't think many of us are on the other end either. Instead, we're usually somewhere in the hazy middle-in the land of cooks. 5

The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef.

The words "cook" and "chef" seem kind of like synonyms. And in the real world, they're often used interchangeably. But in this post, when I say chef, I don't mean any ordinary chef. I mean the trailblazing chef-the kind of chef who invents recipes. And for our purposes, everyone else who enters a kitchen-all those who follow recipes-is a cook.

Everything you eat-every part of every cuisine we know so well-was at some point in the past created for the first time. Wheat, tomatoes, salt, and milk go back a long time, but at some point, someone said, "What if I take those ingredients and do this...and this.....and this......" and ended up with the world's first pizza. That's the work of a chef.

Since then, god knows how many people have made a pizza. That's the work of a cook.

The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw edible ingredients. Those are her puzzle pieces, her building blocks, and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds.

The cook works off of some version of what's already out there-a recipe of some kind, a meal she tried and liked, a dish she watched someone else make.

Cooks span a wide range. On one end, you have cooks who only cook by following a recipe to the T -carefully measuring every ingredient exactly the way the recipe dictates. The result is a delicious meal that tastes exactly the way the recipe has it designed. Down the range a bit, you have more of a confident cook-someone with experience who gets the general gist of the recipe and then uses her skills and instincts to do it her own way. The result is something a little more unique to her style that tastes like the recipe but not quite. At the far end of the cook range, you have an innovator who makes her own concoctions. A lamb burger with a vegetable bun, a peanut butter and jelly pizza, a cinnamon pumpkin seed cake. 6

But what all of these cooks have in common is their starting point is something that already exists. Even the innovative cook is still making an iteration of a burger, a pizza, and a cake.

At the very end of the spectrum, you have the chef. A chef might make good food or terrible food, but whatever she makes, it's a result of her own reasoning process, from the selection of raw ingredients at the bottom to the finished dish at the top.

In the culinary world, there's nothing wrong with being a cook. Most people are cooks because for most people, inventing recipes isn't a goal of theirs.

But in life-when it comes to the reasoning "recipes" we use to churn out a decision-we may want to think twice about where we are on the cook-chef spectrum.

On a typical day, a "reasoning cook" and a "reasoning chef" don't operate that differently. Even the chef becomes quickly exhausted by the mental energy required for first principles reasoning, and usually, doing so isn't worth his time. Both types of people spend an average day with their brain software running on auto-pilot and their conscious decision-making centers dormant.

But then comes a day when something new needs to be figured out. Maybe the cook and the chef are each given the new task at work to create a better marketing strategy. Or maybe they're unhappy with that job and want to think of what business to start. Maybe they have a crush on someone they never expected to have feelings for and they need to figure out what to do about it.

Whatever this new situation is, auto-pilot won't suffice-this is something new and neither the chef's nor the cook's software has done this before. Which leaves only two options:

Create. Or copy.

The chef says, "Ugh okay, here we go," rolls up his sleeves, and does what he always does in these situations-he switches on the active decision-making part of his software and starts to go to work. He looks at what data he has and seeks out what more he needs. He thinks about the current state of the world and reflects on where his values and priorities lie. He gathers together those relevant first principles ingredients and starts puzzling together a reasoning pathway. It takes some hard work, but eventually, the pathway brings him to a hypothesis. He knows it's probably wrong-ish, and as new data emerges, he'll "taste-test" the hypothesis and adjust it. He keeps the decision-making center on standby for the next few weeks as he makes a bunch of early adjustments to the flawed hypothesis-a little more salt, a little less sugar, one prime ingredient that needs to be swapped out for another. Eventually, he's satisfied enough with how things are going to move back into auto-pilot mode. This new decision is now part of the automated routine-a new recipe is in the cookbook-and he'll check in on it to make adjustments every once in a while or as new pertinent data comes in, the way he does for all parts of his software.

The cook has no idea what's going on in the last paragraph. The reasoning cook's software is called "Because the recipe said so," and it's more of a computerized catalog of recipes than a computer program. When the cook needs to make a life decision, he goes through his collection of authority-written recipes, finds the one he trusts in that particular walk of life, and reads through the steps to see what to do-kind of like WWJD, except the J is replaced by whatever authority is most trusted in that area. For most questions, the authority is the tribe, since the cook's tribal dogma covers most standard decisions. But in this particular case, the cook leafed through the tribe's cookbook and couldn't find any section about this type of decision. So he needs to get a hold of a recipe from another authority he trusts with this type of thing. Once the cook finds the right recipe, he can put it in his catalog and use it for all future decisions on this matter.

First, the cook tries a few friends. His catalog doesn't have the needed info, but maybe one of theirs does. He asks them for their advice-not so he can use it as additional thinking to supplement his own, but so it can become his own thinking.

If that doesn't yield any strongly-opinionated results, he'll go to the trusty eternal backstop-conventional wisdom.

Society as a whole is its own loose tribe, often spanning your whole nation or even your whole part of the world, and what we call "conventional wisdom" is its guiding dogma cookbook-online and available to the public. Typically, the larger the tribe, the more general and more outdated the dogma-and the conventional wisdom database runs like a DMV website last updated in 1992. But when the cook has nowhere else to turn, it's like a trusty old friend.

And in this case-let's say the cook is thinking of starting a business and wants to know what the possibilities are-conventional wisdom has him covered. He types the command into the interface, waits a few minutes, and then the system pumps out its answer:

The cook, thoroughly discouraged, thanks the machine and updates his Reality box accordingly.

With the decision made (not to start a business), he switches his software back into auto-pilot mode. Done and done.

Musk calls the cook's way of thinking "reasoning by analogy" (as opposed to reasoning by first principles), which is a nice euphemism. The next time a kid gets caught copying answers from another student's exam during the test, he should just explain that he was reasoning by analogy.

If you start looking for it, you'll see the chef/cook thing happening everywhere. There are chefs and cooks in the worlds of music, art, technology, architecture, 7 writing, business, comedy, marketing, app development, football coaching, teaching, and military strategy. And in each case, though both parties are usually just on autopilot, mindlessly playing the latest album again and again at concerts, it's in those key moments when it's time to write a new album-those moments of truth in front of a clean canvas, a blank Word doc, an empty playbook, a new sheet of blueprint paper, a fresh whiteboard-that the chef and the cook reveal their true colors. The chef creates while the cook, in some form or another, copies.

And the difference in outcome is enormous. For cooks, even the more innovative kind, there's almost always a ceiling on the size of the splash they can make in the world, unless there's some serious luck involved. Chefs aren't guaranteed to do anything good, but when there's a little talent and a lot of persistence, they're almost certainto make a splash. Sometimes the chef is the one brave enough to go for something big-but other times, someone doesn't feel the desire to make a splash and the chef is the one with the strength of character to step out of the game and in favor of keeping it small. Being a chef isn't being like Elon Musk-it's being yourself.

No one talks about the "reasoning industry," but we're all part of it, and when it comes to chefs and cooks, it's no different than any other industry. We're working in the reasoning industry every time we make a decision.

Your current life, with all its facets and complexity, is like a reasoning industry album. The question is, how did that set of songs come to be? How were the songs composed, and by whom? And in those critical do-or-die moments when it's time to write a new song, how do you do your creating? Do you dig deep into yourself? Do you start with the drumbeat and chords of an existing song and write your own melody on top of it? Do you just play covers?
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
I know what you want the answers to these questions to be. This is a straightforward one-it's clearly better to be a chef. But unlike the case with most major distinctions in life-hard-working vs. lazy, ethical vs. dishonest, considerate vs. selfish-when the chef/cook distinction passes right in front of us, we often don't even notice it's there.

Missing the Distinction

Like the culinary world's cook-to-chef range, the real world's cook-to-chef range isn't binary-it lies on a spectrum:

But I'm pretty sure that when most of us look at that spectrum, we think we're farther to the right than we actually are. We're usually more cook-like than we realize-we just can't see it from where we're standing.

For example-

Cooks are followers-by definition. They're a cook because in whatever they're doing, they're following some kind of recipe. But most of us don't think of ourselves as followers.

A follower, we think, is a weakling with no mind of their own. We think about leadership positions we've held and initiatives we've taken at work and the way we never let friends boss us around, and we take these as evidence that we're no follower. Which in turn means that we're not just a cook.

But the problem is-the only thing all of that proves is that you're no follower within your tribe. As Einstein meanly put it:

In other words, you might be a star and a leader in your world or in the eyes of your part of society, but if the core reason you picked that goal in the first place was because your tribe's cookbook says that it's an impressive thing and it makes the other tribe members gawk, you're not being a leader-you're being a super-successful follower. And, as Einstein says, no less of a cook than all those whom you've impressed.

To see the truth, you need to zoom way out until you can see the real leader of the cooks-the cookbook.

But we don't tend to zoom out, and when we look around at our life, zoomed in, what appears to be a highly unique and independent self may be an optical illusion. 8 What often feels like independent reasoning when zoomed out is actually playing connect-the-dots on a pre-printed set of steps laid out by someone else. What feels like personal principles might just be the general tenets of your tribe. What feels like original opinions may have actually been spoon-fed to us by the media or our parents or friends or our religion or a celebrity. What feels like Roark might actually be Keating. What feels like our chosen life path could just be one of a handful of pre-set, tribe-approved yellow brick roads. What feels like creativity might be filling in a coloring book-and making sure to stay inside the lines.

Because of this optical illusion, we're unable to see the flaws in our own thinking or recognize an unusually great thinker when we see one. Instead, when a superbly science-minded, independent-thinking chef like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein comes around, what do we attribute their success to?

Awesome fucking hardware.

When we look at Musk, we see someone with genius, with vision, with superhuman balls. All things, we assume, he was more or less born with. So to us, the spectrum looks more like this:

The way we see it, we're all a bunch of independent-thinking chefs-and it's just that Musk is a really impressive chef.

Which is both A) overrating Musk and B) overrating ourselves. And completely missing the real story.

Musk is an impressive chef for sure, but what makes him such an extreme standout isn't that he's impressive- it's that most of us aren't chefs at all.

It's like a bunch of typewriters looking at a computer and saying, "Man, that is one talented typewriter."

The reason we have such a hard time seeing what's really going on is that we don't get that brain software is even a thing. We don't think of brains as computers, so we don't think about the distinction between hardware and software at all. When we think about the brain, we think only about the hardware-the thing we're born with and are powerless to change or improve. Much less tangible to us is the concept of how we reason. We see reasoning as a thing that just kind of happens, like our bodies' blood flow-it's a process that automatically happens, and there's not much else to say or do about it.

And if we can't even see the hardware/software distinction, we certainly can't see the more nuanced chef software vs. cook software distinction.

By not seeing our thinking software for what it is-a critical life skill, something that can be learned, practiced, and improved, and the major factor that separates the people who do great things from those who don't-we fail to realize where the game of life is really being played. We don't recognize reasoning as a thing that can be created or copied-and in the same way that causes us to mistake our own cook-like behavior for independent reasoning, we then mistake the actual independent reasoning of the chef for exceptional and magical abilities.

Three examples:

1) We mistake the chef's clear view of the present for vision into the future.

Musk's sister Tosca said "Elon has already gone to the future and come back to tell us what he's found." 9 This is how a lot of people feel about Musk-that he's a visionary, that he can somehow see things we cannot. We see it like this:

But actually, it's like this:

Conventional wisdom is slow to move, and there's significant lag time between when something becomes reality and when conventional wisdom is revised to reflect that reality. And by the time it does, reality has moved on to something else. But chefs don't pay attention to that, reasoning instead using their eyes and ears and experience. By ignoring conventional wisdom in favor of simply looking at the present for what it really is and staying up-to-date with the facts of the world as they change in real-time-in spite of what conventional wisdom has to say-the chef can act on information the rest of us haven't been given permission to act on yet.

2) We mistake the chef's accurate understanding of risk for courage.

Remember this MuskSpeak quote from earlier?

When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength-400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore after that. 10

That's just a kid chef assessing the actual facts of a situation and deciding that his fear was misplaced.

As an adult, Musk said this:

Sometimes people fear starting a company too much. Really, what's the worst that could go wrong? You're not gonna starve to death, you're not gonna die of exposure-what's the worst that could go wrong? 11

Same quote, right?

In both cases, Musk is essentially saying, "People consider X to be scary, but their fear is not based on logic, so I'm not scared of X." That's not courage-that's logic.

Courage means doing something risky. Risk means exposing yourself to danger. We intuitively understand this-that's why most of us wouldn't call child Elon courageous for sleeping with the lights off. Courage would be a weird word to use there because no actual danger was involved.

All Elon's saying in the second quote is that being scared to start a company is the adult version of being scared of the dark. It's not actually dangerous.

So when Musk put his entire fortune down and on SpaceX and Tesla, he was being bold as fuck, but courageous? Not the right word. It was a case of a chef taking a bunch of information he had and puzzling together a plan that seemed logical. It's not that he was sure he'd succeed-in fact, he thought SpaceX in particular had a reasonable probability of failure-it's just that nowhere in his assessments did he foresee danger.

3) We mistake the chef's originality for brilliant ingenuity.

People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it's mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you're brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion-one that may or may not fall within the box.

When you're in a foreign country and you decide to ditch the guidebook and start wandering aimlessly and talking to people, unique things always end up happening. When people hear about those things, they think of you as a pro traveler and a bold adventurer-when all you really did is ditch the guidebook.

Likewise, when an artist or scientist or businessperson chef reasons independently instead of by analogy, and their puzzling happens to both A) turn out well and B) end up outside the box, people call it innovation and marvel at the chef's ingenuity. When it turns out really well, all the cooks do what they do best-copy-and now it's called a revolution.

Simply by refraining from reasoning by analogy, the chef opens up the possibility of making a huge splash with every project. When Steve Jobs 9 and Apple turned their attention to phones, they didn't start by saying, "Okay well people seem to like this kind of keyboard more than that kind, and everyone seems unhappy with the difficulty of hitting the numbers on their keyboards-so let's get creative and make the best phone keyboard yet!" They simply asked, "What should a mobile device be?" and in their from-scratch reasoning, a physical keyboard didn't end up as part of the plan at all. It didn't take genius to come up with the design of the iPhone-it's actually pretty logical-it just took the ability to not copy.

Different version of the same story with the invention of the United States. When the American forefathers found themselves with a new country on their hands, they didn't ask, "What should the rules be for selecting our king, and what should the limitations of his power be?" A king to them was what a physical keyboard was to Apple. Instead, they asked, "What should a country be and what's the best way to govern a group of people?" and by the time they had finished their puzzling, a king wasn't part of the picture-their first principles reasoning led them to believe that John Locke had a better plan and they worked their way up from there.

History is full of the stories of chefs creating revolutions of apparent ingenuity through simple first principles reasoning. Genghis Khan organizing a smattering of tribes that had been fragmented for centuries using a powers of ten system in order to build one grand tribe that could sweep the world. Henry Ford creating cars with the out-of-the-box manufacturing technique of assembly-line production in order to bring cars to the masses for the first time. Marie Curie using unconventional methods to pioneer the theory of radioactivity and topple the "atoms are indivisible" assumption on its head (she won a Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry-two prizes reserved exclusively for chefs). Martin Luther King taking a nonviolent Thoreau approach to a situation normally addressed by riots. Larry Page and Sergey Brin ignoring the commonly-used methods of searching the internet in favor of what they saw as a more logical system that based page importance on the number of important sites that linked to it. The 1966 Beatles deciding to stop being the world's best cooks, ditching the typical songwriting styles of early-60s bands, including their own, and become music chefs, creating a bunch of new types of songs from scratch that no one had heard before.

Whatever the time, place, or industry, anytime something really big happens, there's almost always an experimenting chef at the center of it-not being anything magical, just trusting their brain and working from scratch. Our world, like our cuisines, was created by these people-the rest of us are just along for the ride.

Yeah, Musk is smart as fuck and insanely ambitious-but that's not why he's beating everybody. What makes Musk so rad is that he's a software outlier. A chef in a world of cooks. A science geologist in a world of flood geologists. A brain software pro in a world where people don't realize brain software is a thing.

That's Elon Musk's secret sauce.

Which is why the real story here isn't Musk. It's us.

The real puzzle in this series isn't why Elon Musk is trying to end the era of gas cars or why he's trying to land a rocket or why he cares so much about colonizing Mars-it's why Elon Musk is so rare.

The curious thing about the car industry isn't why Tesla is focusing so hard on electric cars, and the curious thing about the aerospace industry isn't why SpaceX is trying so hard to make rockets reusable-the fascinating question is why they're the only companies doing so.

We spent this whole time trying to figure out the mysterious workings of the mind of a madman genius only to realize that Musk's secret sauce is that he's the only one being normal. And in isolation, Musk would be a pretty boring subject-it's the backdrop of us that makes him interesting. And it's that backdrop that this series is really about.

So...what's the deal with us? How did we end up so scared and cook-like? And how do we learn to be more like the chefs of the world, who seem to so effortlessly carve their own way through life? I think it comes down to three things.

Anytime there's a curious phenomenon within humanity-some collective insanity we're all suffering from-it usually ends up being evolution's fault. This story is no different.

When it comes to reasoning, we're biologically inclined to be cooks, not chefs, which relates back to our tribal evolutionary past. First, it's a better tribal model for most people to be cooks. In 50,000 BC, tribes full of independent thinkers probably suffered from having too many chefs in the kitchen, which would lead to too many arguments and factions within the tribe. A tribe with a strong leader at the top and the rest of the members simply following the leader would fare better. So those types of tribes passed on their genes more than other tribes. And now we're the collective descendants of the more cook-like people.

Second, it's about our own well-being. It's not in our DNA to be chefs because human self-preservation never depended upon independent thinking-it rode on fitting in with the tribe, on staying in favor with the chief, on following in the footsteps of the elders who knew more about staying alive than we did, and on teaching our children to do the same-which is why we now live in a cook society where cook parents raise their kids by telling them to follow the recipe and stop asking questions about it.

Thinking like cooks is what we're born to do because what we're born to do is survive.

But the weird thing is, we weren't born into a normal human world. We're living in the anomaly, when for many of the world's people, survival is easy. Today's privileged societies are full of anomaly humans whose primary purpose is already taken care of, softening the deafening roar of unmet base needs and allowing the nuanced and complex voice of our inner selves to awaken.

The problem is, most of our heads are still running on some version of the 50,000-year-old survival software-which kind of wastes the good luck we have to be born now.

It's an unfortunate catch-22-we continue to think like cooks because we can't absorb the epiphany that we live in an anomaly world where there's no need to be cooks, and we can't absorb that epiphany because we think like cooks and cooks don't know how to challenge and update their own software.

This is the vicious cycle of our time-and the secret of the chef is that they somehow snapped out of it.

So how do we snap out of the trance?

I think there are three major epiphanies we need to absorb-three core things the chef knows that the cook doesn't:

Epiphany 1) You don't know shit.

The flood geologists of the 17th and 18th centuries weren't stupid. And they weren't anti-science. Many of them were just as accomplished in their fields as their science geologist colleagues.

But they were victims-victims of a religious dogma they were told to believe without question. The recipe they followed was scripture, a recipe that turned out to be wrong. And as a result, they proceeded on their path with a fatal flaw in their thinking-a software bug that told them that one of the undeniable first principles when thinking about the Earth was that it began 6,000 years ago and that there had been a flood of the most epic proportions.

With that software bug in place, all further computations were moot. Any reasoning tree that puzzled upwards with those assumptions at its root had no chance of finding truth.

Even more than being victims of any dogma, the flood geologists were victims of their own certainty. Without certainty, dogma has no power. And when data is required in order to believe something, false dogma has no legs to stand on. It wasn't the church dogmathat hindered the flood geologists, it was the church mentality of faith-based certainty.

That's what Stephen Hawking meant when he said, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Neither the science geologist nor the flood geologist started off with knowledge. But what gave the science geologist the power to seek out the truth was knowing that he lacked knowledge. The science geologists subscribed to the lab mentality, which starts by saying "I don't know shit" and works upwards from there.

If you want to see the lab mentality at work, just search for famous quotes of any prominent scientist and you'll see each one of them expressing the fact that they don't know shit.

Here's Isaac Newton: To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

And Richard Feynman: I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

And Niels Bohr: Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

Musk has said his own version: You should take the approach that you're wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong. 12

The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that as scientists, they're aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. They firmly believe that reasoning of all kinds should take place in a lab, not a church.

If we want to become more chef-like, we have to make sure we're doing our thinking in a lab. Which means identifying which parts of our thinking are currently sitting in church.

But that's a hard thing to do because most of us have the same relationship with our own software that my grandmother has with her computer: 10 It's this thing someone put there, we use it when we need to, it somehow magically works, and we hope it doesn't break. It's the way we are with a lot of the things we own, where we're just the dumb user, not the pro. We know how to use our car, microwave, phone, our electric toothbrush, but if something breaks, we take it to the pro to fix it because we have no idea how it works.

But that's not a great life model when it comes to brain software, and it usually leads to us making the same mistakes and living with the same results year after year after year, because our software remains unchanged. Eventually, we might wake up one day feeling like Breaking Bad's Walter White, when he said, "Sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own... choices. I mean, my entire life it just seems I never... had a real say about any of it." If we want to understand our own thinking, we have to stop being the dumb user of our own software and start being the pro-the auto mechanic, the electrician, the computer geek.

If you were alone in a room with a car and wanted to figure out how it worked, you'd probably start by taking it apart as much as you could and examining the parts and how they all fit together. To do the same with our thinking, we need to revert to our four-year-old selves and start deconstructing our software by resuming the Why game our parents and teachers shut down decades ago. It's time to roll up our sleeves, pop open the hood, and get our hands dirty with a bunch of not-that-fun questions about what we truly want, what's truly possible, and whether the way we're living our lives follows logically from those things.

With each of these questions, the challenge is to keep asking why until you hit the floor-and the floor is what will tell you whether you're in a church or a lab for that particular part of your life. If a floor you hit is one or more first principles that represent the truth of reality or your inner self and the logic going upwards stays accurate to that foundation, you're in the lab. If a Why? pathway hits a floor called "Because [authority] said so"-if you go down and down and realize at the bottom that the whole thing is just because you're taking your parent's or friend's or religion's or society's word for it-then you're in church there. And if the tenets of that church don't truly resonate with you or reflect the current reality of the world-if it turns out that you've been working off of the wrong recipe-then whatever conclusions have been built on top of it will be just as wrong. As demonstrated by the flood geologists, a reasoning chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Astronomers once hit a similar wall in their progress trying to calculate the trajectories of the sun and planets in the Solar System. Then one day they discovered that the sun was at the center of things, not the Earth, and suddenly, all the perplexing calculations made sense, and progress leapt forward. Had they played the Why game earlier, they'd have run into a dogmatic floor right after the question "But why do we know that the Earth is in the center of everything?"

People's lives are no different, which is why it's so important to find the toxic lumps of false dogma tucked inside the layers of your reasoning software. Identifying one and adjusting it can strengthen the whole chain above and create a breakthrough in your life.

The thing you really want to look closely for is unjustified certainty. Where in life do you feel so right about something that it doesn't qualify as a hypothesis or even a theory, but it feels like a proof? When there's proof-level certainty, it means either there's some serious concrete and verified data underneath it-or it's faith-based dogma. Maybe you feel certain that quitting your job would be a disaster or certain that there's no god or certain that it's important to go to college or certain that you've always had a great time on rugged vacations or certain that everyone loves it when you break out the guitar during a group hangout-but if it's not well backed-up by data from what you've learned and experienced, it's at best a hypothesis and at worst a completely false piece of dogma.

And if thinking about all of that ends with you drowning in some combination of self-doubt, self-loathing, and identity crisis, that's perfect. This first epiphany is about humility. Humility is by definition a starting point-and it sends you off on a journey from there. The arrogance of certainty is both a starting point and an ending point-no journeys needed. That's why it's so important that we begin with "I don't know shit." That's when we know we're in the lab.

Epiphany 2) No one else knows shit either.

Let me illustrate a little story for you.

Yes, it's an old classic. The Emperor's New Clothes. It was written in 1837 by Hans Christian Andersen 11 to demonstrate a piece of trademark human insanity: the "This doesn't seem right to me but everyone else says it's right so it must be right and I'll just pretend I also think it's right so no one realizes I'm stupid" phenomenon.

My favorite all-time quote might be Steve Jobs saying this:

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again. 12

This is Jobs' way of saying, "You might not know shit. But no one knows shit. If the emperor looks naked to you and everyone else is saying he has clothes, trust your eyes since other people don't know anything you don't."

It's an easy message to understand, a harder one to believe, and an even harder one to act on.

The purpose of the first epiphany is to shatter the belief that all that dogma you've memorized constitutes personal opinions and wisdom and all that certainty you feel constitutes knowledge and understanding. That's the easier one because the delusion that we know what we're talking about is pretty fragile, with the "Oh god I'm a fraud who doesn't know shit" monster never lurking too far under our consciousness.

But this epiphany-that the collective "other people" and their conventional wisdom don't know shit-is a much larger challenge. Our delusion about the wisdom of those around us, our tribe, and society as a whole is much thicker and runs much deeper than the delusion about ourselves. So deep that we'll see a naked emperor and ignore our own eyes if everyone else says he has clothes on.

This is a battle of two kinds of confidence-confidence in others vs. confidence in ourselves. For most cooks, confidence in others usually comes out the winner.
I'm a huge believer in taking feedback. I'm trying to create a mental model that's accurate, and if I have a wrong view on something, or if there's a nuanced improvement that can be made, I'll say, "I used to think this one thing that turned out to be wrong-now thank goodness I don't have that wrong belief."
To swing the balance, we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public, your tribe's dogma, and society's conventional wisdom. We have a bunch of romantic words for the world's chefs that sound impressive but are actually just a result of them having lost this respect. Being a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there's no good reason not to change the rules. Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to blaze yourself a new one. Being a groundbreaker is just knowing that the ground wasn't laid by anyone that impressive and so feeling no need to keep it intact.

Not respecting society is totally counterintuitive to what we're taught when we grow up-but it makes perfect sense if you just look at what your eyes and experience tell you.

There are clues all around showing us that conventional wisdom doesn't know shit. Conventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for a good reason-and history is one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again, every time some chef comes around and changes things.

And if you open your eyes, there are other clues all through your own life that the society you live in is nothing to be intimidated by. All the times you learn about what really goes on inside a company and find out that it's totally disorganized and badly run. All the people in high places who can't seem to get their personal lives together. All the well-known sitcoms whose jokes you're pretty sure you could have written when you were 14. All the politicians who don't seem to know more about the world than you do.

And yet, the delusion that society knows shit that you don't runs deep, and still, somewhere in the back of your head, you don't think it's realistic that youcould ever actually build that company, achieve that fabulous wealth or celebrity-status, create that TV show, win that senate campaign-no matter whatit seems like.

Sometimes it takes an actual experience to fully expose society for the shit it doesn't know. One example from my life is how I slowly came to understand that most Americans-the broader public, my tribe, and people I know well-knew very little about what it's actually like to visit most countries. I grew up hearing about how dangerous it was to visit really foreign places, especially alone. But when I started going places I wasn't supposed to go, I kept finding that the conventional wisdom had been plain wrong about it. As I had more experiences and gathered more actual data, I grew increasingly trusting of my own reasoning over whatever Americans were saying. And as my confidence grew, places like Thailand and Spain turned into places like Oman and Uzbekistan which turned into places like Nigeria and North Korea. When it comes to traveling, I had the epiphany: other people's strong opinions about this are based on unbacked-up dogma and the fact that most people I talk to feel the same way means nothing if my own research, experience, and selective question-asking brings me to a different conclusion. 13 When it comes to picking travel destinations, I've become a chef.

I try to leverage what I learned as a traveler to transfer the chefness elsewhere-when I find myself discouraged in another part of my life by the warnings and head-shaking of conventional wisdom, I try to remind myself: "These are the same people that were sure that North Korea was dangerous." It's hard-you have to take the leap to chefdom separately in each part of your life-but it seems like with each successive cook → chef breakthrough, future breakthroughs become easier to come by. Eventually, you must hit a tipping point and trusting your own software becomes your way of life-and as Jobs says, you'll never be the same again.

The first epiphany was about shattering a protective shell of arrogance to lay bare a starting point of humility. This second epiphany is about confidence-the confidence to emerge from that humility through a pathway built on first principles instead of by analogy. It's a confidence that says, "I may not know much, but no one else does either, so I might as well be the most knowledgeable person on Earth."

Epiphany 3) You're playing Grand Theft Life

The first two epiphanies allow us to break open our software, identify which parts of it were put there by someone else, and with confidence begin to fill in the Want and Reality boxes with our own handwriting and choose a goal and a strategy that's right for us.

But then we hit a snag. We're finally in the lab with all our tools and equipment, but something holds us back. To figure out why, let's bring back our emperor story.

When the emperor struts out with his shoulder hair and his gut and his little white junk, the story only identifies two kinds of people: the mass of subjects, who all pretend they can see the clothes, and the kid, who just says that the dude is obviously naked.

But I think there's more going on. In an emperor's new clothes situation, there are four kinds of people:

1) Proud Cook. Proud Cook is the person drinking the full dogma Kool-Aid. Whatever independent-thinking voice is inside of Proud Cook was silenced long ago, and there's no distinction between his thoughts and the dogma he follows. As far as he's concerned, the dogma is truth-but since he doesn't even register that there's any dogma happening, Proud Cook simply thinks he's a very wise person who has it all figured out. He feels the certainty of the dogma running through his veins. When the emperor walks out and proclaims that he is wearing beautiful new clothes, Proud Cook actually sees clothes, because his consciousness isn't even turned on.

2) Insecure Cook. Insecure Cook is what Proud Cook turns into after undergoing Epiphany #1. Insecure Cook has had a splash of self-awareness-enough to become conscious of the fact that he doesn't actually know why he's so certain about the things he's certain about. Whatever the reasons are, he's sure they're right, but he can't seem to come up with them himself. Without the blissful arrogance of Proud Cook, Insecure Cook is lost in the world, wondering why he's too dumb to get what everyone else gets and trying to watch others to figure out what he's supposed to do-all while hoping nobody finds out that he doesn't get it. When Insecure Cook sees the emperor, his heart sinks-he doesn't see the clothes, only the straggly gray hairs of the emperor's upper thighs. Ashamed, he reads the crowd and mimics their enthusiasm for the clothes.

3) Self-Loathing Cook. Self-Loathing Cook is what Insecure Cook becomes after being hit by Epiphany #2. Epiphany #2 is the forbidden fruit, and Self-Loathing Cook has bitten it. He now knows exactly why he didn't feel certain about everything-because it was all bullshit. He sees the tenets of conventional wisdom for what they really are-faith-based dogma. He knows that neither he nor anyone else knows shit and that he'll get much farther riding his own reasoning than jumping on the bandwagon with the masses. When the emperor emerges, Self-Loathing Cook thinks, "Oh Jesus...this fucktard is actually outside with no clothes on. Oh-oh and my god these idiots are all pretending to see clothes. How is this my life? I need to move."

But then, right when he's about to call everyone out on their pretending and the emperor out on his bizarre life decision, there's a lump in his throat. Sure, he knows there are no clothes on that emperor's sweaty lower back fat roll-but actually saying that? Out loud? I mean, he's sure and all-but let's not go crazy here. Better not to call too much attention to himself. And of course, there's a chance he's missing something. Right?

Self-Loathing Cook ends up staying quiet and nodding at the other cooks when they ask him if those clothes aren't just the most marvelous he's ever seen.

4) The chef. The kid in the story. The chef is Self-Loathing Cook-except without the irrational fear. The chef goes through the same inner thought process as Self-Loathing Cook, but when it's time to walk the walk, the chef stands up and yells out the truth.

A visual recap:

We're all human and we're all complex, which means that in various parts of each of our lives, we play each of these four characters.

But to me, Self-Loathing Cook is the most curious one of the four. Self-Loathing Cook gets it. He knows what the chefs know. He's tantalizingly close to carving out his own chef path in the world, and he knows that if he just goes for it, good things would happen. But he can't pull the trigger. He built himself a pair of wings he feels confident work just fine, but he can't bring himself to jump off the cliff.

And as he stands there next to the cliff with the other cooks, he has to endure the torture of watching the chefs of the world leap off the edge with the same exact wings and flying skills he has, but with the courage he can't seem to find.

To figure out what's going on with Self-Loathing Cook, let's remind ourselves how the chefs operate.

Free of Self-Loathing Cook's trepidation, the world's chefs are liberated to put on their lab coats and start sciencing. To a chef, the world is one giant laboratory, and their life is one long lab session full of a million experiments. They spend their days puzzling, and society is their game board.

The chef treats his goals and undertakings as experiments whose purpose is as much to learn new information as it is to be ends in themselves. That's why when I asked Musk what his thoughts were on negative feedback, he answered with this:

To a chef in the lab, negative feedback is a free boost forward in progress, courtesy of someone else. Pure upside.

As for the F word...the word that makes our amygdalae quiver in the moonlight, the great chefs have something to say about that too:

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. -Henry Ford

Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. -Winston Churchill 13

I have not failed 700 times. I've succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a lightbulb. -Thomas Edison

There's no more reliable corollary than super-successful people thinking failure is fucking awesome.

But there's something to that. The science approach is all about learning through testing hypotheses, and hypotheses are built to be disproven, which means that scientists learn through failure. Failure is a critical part of their process.

It makes sense. If there were two scientists trying to come up with a breakthrough in cancer treatment, and the first one is trying every bold thing he can imagine, failing left and right and learning something each time, while the second one is determined not to have any failures so is making sure his experiments are similar to others that have already been proven to work-which scientist would you bet on?

It's not surprising that so many of the most wildly impactful people seem to treat the world like a lab and their life like an experiment session-that's the best way to succeed at something.

But for most of us, we just can't do it. Even poor Self-Loathing Cook, who is so damn close to being a chef-but somehow so far away.

So what's stopping him? I think two major misconceptions:

Misconception 1: Misplaced Fear

We talked about the chef's courage actually just being an accurate assessment of risk-and that's one of the major things Self-Loathing Cook is missing. He thinks he has become wise to the farce of letting dogma dictate your life, but he's actually in the grasp of dogma's slickest trick.

Humans are programmed to take fear very seriously, and evolution didn't find it efficient to have us assess and re-assess every fear inside of us. It went instead with the "better safe than sorry" philosophy-i.e. if there's a chance that a certain fear might be based on real danger, file it away as a real fear, just in case, and even if you confirm later that a fear of yours has no basis, keep it with you, just in case. Better safe than sorry.

And the fear file cabinet is somewhere way down in our psyches-somewhere far below our centers of rationality, out of reach.

The purpose of all of that fear is to make us protect ourselves from danger. The problem for us is that as far as evolution is concerned, danger = something that hurts the chance that your genes will move on-i.e., danger = not mating or dying or your kids dying, and that's about it.

So in the same way our cook-like qualities were custom-built for survival in tribal times, our obsession with fears of all shapes and sizes may have served us well in Ethiopia 50,000 years ago-but it mostly ruins our lives today.

Because not only does it amp up our fear in general to "shit we botched the hunt now the babies are all going to starve to death this winter" levels even though we live in an "oh no I got laid off now I have to sleep at my parents' house for two months with a feather pillow in ideal 68º temperature" world-but it also programs us to be terrified of all the wrong things. We're more afraid of public speaking than texting on the highway, more afraid of approaching an attractive stranger in a bar than marrying the wrong person, more afraid of not being able to afford the same lifestyle as our friends than spending 50 years in meaningless career-all because embarrassment, rejection, and not fitting in really sucked for hunters and gatherers.

This leaves most of us with a skewed danger scale:

Chefs hate real risk just as much as cooks-a chef that ends up in the Actually Dangerous territory and ends up in jail or in a gutter or in dire financial straits isn't a chef-he's a cook living under "I'm invincible" dogma. When we see chefs displaying what looks like incredible courage, they're usually just in the Chef Lab. The Chef Lab is where all the action is and where the path to many people's dreams lies-dreams about their career, about love, about adventure. But even though its doors are always open, most people never set foot in it for the same reason so many Americans never visit some of the world's most interesting countries-because of an incorrect assumption that it's a dangerous place. By reasoning by analogy when it comes to what constitutes danger and ending up with a misconception, Self-Loathing Cook is missing out on all the fun.

Misconception 2: Misplaced Identity

The second major problem for Self-Loathing Cook is that, like all cooks, he can't wrap his head around the fact that he's the scientist in the lab-not the experiment.

As we established earlier, conscious tribe members reach conclusions, while blind tribe members are conclusions. And what you believe, what you stand for, and what you choose to do each day are conclusions that you've drawn. In some cases, very, very publicly.

As far as society is concerned, when you give something a try-on the values front, the fashion front, the religious front, the career front-you've branded yourself. And since people like to simplify people in order to make sense of things in their own head, the tribe around you reinforces your brand by putting you in a clearly-labeled, oversimplified box.

What this all amounts to is that it becomes very painful to change. Changing is icky for someone whose identity will have to change along with it. And others don't make things any easier. Blind tribe members don't like when other tribe members change-it confuses them, it forces them to readjust the info in their heads, and it threatens the simplicity of their tribal certainty. So attempts to evolve are often met with opposition or mockery or anger.

And when you have a hard time changing, you become attached to who you currently are and what you're currently doing-so attached that it blurs the distinction between the scientist and the experiment and you forget that they're two different things.

We talked about why scientists welcome negative feedback about their experiments. But when you are the experiment, negative feedback isn't a piece of new, helpful information-it's an insult. And it hurts. And it makes you mad.And because changing feels impossible, there's not much good that feedback can do anyway-it's like giving parents negative feedback on the name of their one-month-old child.

We discussed why scientists expect plenty of their experiments to fail. But when you and the experiment are one and the same, not only is taking on a new goal a change of identity, it's putting your identity on the line. If the experiment fails, youfail. You are a failure. Devastating. Forever.

I talked to Musk about the United States and the way the forefathers reasoned by first principles when they started the country. He said he thought the reason they could do so is that they had a fresh slate to work with. The European countries of that era would have had a much harder time trying to do something like that-because, as he told me, they were "trapped in their own history."
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Shouldn't Care What Other People Think Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel Your Life in Weeks And the other posts in this series:
I've heard Musk use this same phrase to describe the big auto and aerospace companies of today. He sees Tesla and SpaceX like the late 18th century USA-fresh new labs ready for experiments-but when he looks at other companies in their industries, he sees an inability to drive their strategies from a clean slate mentality. Referring to the aerospace industry, Musk said, "There's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering."

Being trapped in your history means you don't know how to change, you've forgotten how to innovate, and you're stuck in the identity box the world has put you in. And you end up being the cancer researcher we mentioned who only tries likely-to-succeed experimentation within the comfort zone he knows best.

It's for this reason that Steve Jobs looks back on his firing from Apple in 1986 as a blessing in disguise. He said: 14 "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." Being fired "freed" Jobs from the shackles of his own history.

So what Self-Loathing Cook has to ask himself is: "Am I trapped in my own history?" As he stands on the cliff with his wings ready for action and finds himself paralyzed-from evolving as a person, from making changes in his life, from trying to do something bold or unusual-is the baggage of his own identity part of what's holding him back?

Self-Loathing Cook's beliefs about what's scary aren't any more real than Insecure Cook's assumption that conventional wisdom has all the answers-but unlike the "Other people don't know shit" epiphany, which you can observe evidence of all over the place, the epiphany that neither failing nor changing is actually a big deal can only be observed by experiencing it for yourself. Which you can only do after you overcome those fears...which only happens if you experience changing and failing and realize that nothing bad happens. Another catch-22.

These are the reasons I believe so many of the world's most able people are stuck in life as Self-Loathing Cook, one epiphany short of the promised land.

The challenge with this last epiphany is to somehow figure out a way to lose respect for your own fear. That respect is in our wiring, and the only way to weaken it is by defying it and seeing, when nothing bad ends up happening, that most of the fear you've been feeling has just been a smoke and mirrors act. Doing something out of your comfort zone and having it turn out okay is an incredibly powerful experience, one that changes you-and each time you have that kind of experience, it chips away at your respect for your brain's ingrained, irrational fears.

Because the most important thing the chef knows that the cooks don't is that real life and Grand Theft Auto aren't actually that different. Grand Theft Auto is a fun video game because it's a fake world where you can do things with no fear. Drive 200mph on the highway. Break into a building. Run over a prostitute with your car. All good in GTA.

Unlike GTA, in real life, the law is a thing and jail is a thing. But that's about where the differences end. If someone gave you a perfect simulation of today's world to play in and told you that it's all fake with no actual consequences-with the only rules being that you can't break the law or harm anyone, and you still have to make sure to support your and your family's basic needs-what would you do? My guess is that most people would do all kinds of things they'd love to do in their real life but wouldn't dare to try, and that by behaving that way, they'd end up quickly getting a life going in the simulation that's both far more successful and much truer to themselves than the real life they're currently living. Removing the fear and the concern with identity or the opinions of others would thrust the person into the not-actually-risky Chef Lab and have them bouncing around all the exhilarating places outside their comfort zone-and their lives would take off. That's the life irrational fears block us from.

When I look at the amazing chefs of our time, what's clear is that they're more or less treating real life as if it's Grand Theft Life. And doing so gives them superpowers. That's what I think Steve Jobs meant all the times he said, "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

And that's what this third epiphany is about: fearlessness.

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So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives-to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what's possible, and less afraid of things that don't matter.

It's a good plan-but also, ugh. Right? That's a lot of stuff to try to do.

Usually at the end of a post like this, the major point seems manageable and concrete, and I finish writing it all excited to go be good at shit. But this post was like, "Here's everything important and go do it." So how do we work with that?

I think the key is to not try to be a perfect chef or expect that of yourself whatsoever. Because no one's a perfect chef-not even Elon. And no one's a pure cook either-nothing's black and white when you're talking about an animal species whose brains contain 86 billion neurons. The reality is that we're all a little of both, and where we are on that spectrum varies in 100 ways, depending on the part of life in question, the stage we're in of our evolution, and our mood that day.

If we want to improve ourselves and move our way closer to the chef side of the spectrum, we have to remember to remember. We have to remember that we have software, not just hardware. We have to remember that reasoning is a skill and like any skill, you get better at it if you work on it. And we have to remember the cook/chef distinction, so we can notice when we're being like one or the other.

It's fitting that this blog is called Wait But Why because the whole thing is a little like the grown-up version of the Why? game. After emerging from the blur of the arrogance of my early twenties, I began to realize that my software was full of a lot of unfounded certainty and blind assumptions and that I needed to spend some serious time deconstructing- which is the reason that every Wait But Why post, no matter what the topic, tends to start off with the question, "What's really going on here?"

For me, that question is the springboard into all of this remembering to remember-it's a hammer that shatters a brittle, protective feeling of certainty and forces me to do the hard work of building a more authentic, more useful set of thoughts about something. Or at least a better-embraced bewilderment.

And when I started learning about Musk in preparation to write these posts, it hit me that he wasn't just doing awesome things in the world-he was a master at looking at the world, asking "What's really going on here?" and seeing the real answer. That's why his story resonated so hard with me and why I dedicated so much Wait But Why time to this series.

But also, Mars. Let's all go, okay?

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If you're into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we'll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!

If you're interested in supporting Wait But Why, here's our Patreon.

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If you liked this post, you'll probably like these too (they're shorter don't worry):

Part 1: Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man
Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World
Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars

Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop
Extra Post #3: SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket - The Full Story

And a new one, written in 2017, about a whole new Elon company: Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future

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The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why

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This is the last part of a four-part series on Elon Musk's companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1.

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I have a new word for you. Cluey. Let me explain.

My father once told me a mundane little anecdote from his youth. It involved his father-my late grandfather-and one of the happiest and most loving people I've ever known.

One weekend day, my grandfather went to the store and brought a new board game home for the family: Clue.

He excitedly asked my father and his sister (who were 7 and 9 at the time) if they wanted to play. They did. They joined him at the kitchen table as he opened up the game, read the instructions and explained to them how to play, divided up the cards and put all the pieces where they go.

Just as they were about to start, the doorbell rang. It was the neighbor kids, who said they were on their way outside to play some outdoor game they all used to play. Without a second thought, my dad and aunt jumped up from their seats and left with their friends.

A few hours later, they came back to the house. The game had been put back in the closet.

At the time, my dad didn't think much of it-pretty normal day in their lives. But later on, he found himself remembering that day, and he always felt bad about it. He pictured his father sitting there at the table, now alone, with all the cards and pieces laid out. He pictured him waiting for a little while before accepting that it wasn't gonna happen today, then collecting all the pieces and cards he had laid out, putting them back in the box, and putting the box back in the closet.

Pretty random story for my dad to tell me, right? The reason he did was because it was part of a conversation where I was trying to articulate a certain thing I suffer from, which is feeling incredibly bad for certain people in certain situations-situations in which the person I feel bad for was probably barely affected by what happened. It's an odd feeling of intense heartbreaking compassion for people who didn't actually go through anything especially bad.

When I explained this, my dad said, "I know what you're talking about," and offered up the Clue story. Devastating. My grandfather had been excited about playing, and he was being such a good, loving dad, and he ended up let down and disappointed. He sat there all by himself with the game board, and finally he put all the cards and pieces back in the box because no, the game wasn't happening anymore because his kids would rather play with their friends than him.

My grandfather fought in World War II. He probably lost friends. He probably shot people. He might have been shot himself, who knows. But the image of him quietly putting all the Clue pieces back in the box? That's not fucking okay. And now, thanks to my dad sharing this memory, I live every day haunted by this image:

It's not just my dad doing this to me. Tell me how I'm supposed to handle this fucking story, where the grandfather made 12 burgers for six grandkids and only one showed up.

Full Clue situation. And the story includes literally the clueiest picture I've ever seen.

As I read the story, I started picturing this NICE FUCKING MAN buying all the ingredients in the grocery store, in a good mood with anticipation for the night, then coming home and making each of the 12 patties by hand- maybe even adding carefully-thought-out spices into them-toasting the buns, and timing everything to be done at just the right time. He even made homemade ice cream. Clue up the dick. It continues, if you imagine what happened at the end of the night. Either he wrapped up eight uneaten burgers, one by one, and put them in the fridge, ensuring that he's later reminded of the rejection each time he heats one up to eat it, or, even worse, he just threw them in the trash.

The only thing that prevented me from taking my own life while reading the story is that the one granddaughter-bless her soul-showed up. Because just imagine.

And then there's this 89-year-old grandmother, who got dressed nicely and put her paintings up for display at an art showing, and guess what? No one fucking came. Then she packed up her paintings and drove home, feeling "foolish." You know what that is? It's cluey as shit. Especially her choice of the word foolish in particular. I really don't need this in my life.

Movies know all about clueyness and use it to their advantage. Remember that super cluey old man neighbor in Home Alone? Who was so nice and lonely and misunderstood? The writers literally invented him to inflict clueyness on the audience so they could then release the burden of that clueyness at the end by showing him in happy reunion with his family. Cheapest trick in the book.

Clueyness doesn't only apply to old people. One time about five years ago, I was in a shitty mood and in a rush when I hastily walked out of my apartment building. A FedEx man was standing outside the building with his cart of packages, and he wanted to get in so he could leave the packages on top of the communal mailbox (I assume the package recipient wasn't home, so he had had no luck being buzzed in). As I walked out, he reached for the door as it closed behind me but it shut before he could grab it. After the door re-locked, he let out a frustrated exhale, and then he turned to me and asked, "Can you please open the door so I can drop these off?" I was already 10 steps away though, and late, so I said, "Sorry I can't right now" and turned back towards where I was going. Before I did, I briefly saw his reaction to my refusal to help. He had the face on of a nice person who the world had been mean to all day. The snapshot of that dejected face he made bothered me more and more throughout the day, and now it's five years later and I still think about it.

If someone asks me what my biggest regret is, I have to lie, because how weird would it be if I answered, "The FedEx man incident. I'm a monster."

Clueyness is a strange phenomenon. My grandfather probably forgot about the Clue incident an hour after it happened. The FedEx man probably forgot about what I did to him five minutes later. I literally got cluey about a dog the other day, when he was super excited to play and I was busy and nudged him away with my foot and he looked at me confused and taken aback and then went to the side of the room and laid down-and dogs aren't even real. The weight of my heartache in these cases outweighs the actual tragedy like 10,000:1.

But knowing that it's totally irrational doesn't make clueyness any less excruciating-something I'm reminded of every time my night is ruined by post-Uber-ride-when-the-friendly-driver-tried-to-start-a-conversation-and-I-wasn't-in-the-mood-so-I-gave-curt-answers-until-he-finally-got-the-hint-and-then-felt-embarrassed-and-stopped guilt.

I'm just destined for a life of feeling cluey about things. But at least I can take solace in a little headline I came across recently:

Sad Papaw No Longer Sad: Thousands Wait in Line for Burgers at His Cookout

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If you're feeling cluey right now, three other Wait But Why posts to make it worse:
- An intense reality check

- How good a person are you?

- If this is all a bit heavy for you, here are some creatures you should absolutely not ever feel cluey for

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Clueyness: A Weird Kind of Sad - Wait But Why

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I have a new word for you. Cluey. Let me explain. My father once told me a mundane little anecdote from his youth. It involved his father-my late grandfather-and one of the happiest and most loving people I've ever known. One weekend day, my grandfather went to the store and brought a new board game home for the family: Clue.

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Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.
And here's a G-rated version of the post, appropriate for all ages.

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Last month, I got a phone call.

Okay maybe that's not exactly how it happened, and maybe those weren't his exact words. But after learning about the new company Elon Musk was starting, I've come to realize that that's exactly what he's trying to do.

When I wrote about Tesla and SpaceX, I learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies by zooming both way, way in and way, way out. In, on the technical challenges facing the engineers, out on the existential challenges facing our species. In on a snapshot of the world right now, out on the big story of how we got to this moment and what our far future could look like.

Not only is Elon's new venture-Neuralink-the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I'm convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies aim to redefine what future humans will do-Neuralink wants to redefine what future humans will be.

The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink's mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around-but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I'm here to tell you that it's even weirder than we expect.

But before I can bring you in the time machine to show you what I found, we need to get in our zoom machine-because as I learned the hard way, Elon's wizard hat plans cannot be properly understood until your head's in the right place.

So wipe your brain clean of what it thinks it knows about itself and its future, put on soft clothes, and let's jump into the vortex.

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Part 1: The Human Colossus

600 million years ago, no one really did anything, ever.

The problem is that no one had any nerves. Without nerves, you can't move, or think, or process information of any kind. So you just had to kind of exist and wait there until you died.

But then came the jellyfish.

The jellyfish was the first animal to figure out that nerves were an obvious thing to make sure you had, and it had the world's first nervous system-a nerve net.

The jellyfish's nerve net allowed it to collect important information from the world around it-like where there were objects, predators, or food-and pass that information along, through a big game of telephone, to all parts of its body. Being able to receive and process information meant that the jellyfish could actually react to changes in its environment in order to increase the odds of life going well, rather than just floating aimlessly and hoping for the best.

A little later, a new animal came around who had an even cooler idea.

The flatworm figured out that you could get a lot more done if there was someone in the nervous system who was in charge of everything-a nervous system boss. The boss lived in the flatworm's head and had a rule that all nerves in the body had to report any new information directly to him. So instead of arranging themselves in a net shape, the flatworm's nervous system all revolved around a central highway of messenger nerves that would pass messages back and forth between the boss and everyone else:

The flatworm's boss-highway system was the world's first central nervous system, and the boss in the flatworm's head was the world's first brain.

The idea of a nervous system boss quickly caught on with others, and soon, there were thousands of species on Earth with brains.

As time passed and Earth's animals started inventing intricate new body systems, the bosses got busier.

A little while later came the arrival of mammals. For the Millennials of the Animal Kingdom, life was complicated. Yes, their hearts needed to beat and their lungs needed to breathe, but mammals were about a lot more than survival functions-they were in touch with complex feelings like love, anger, and fear.

For the reptilian brain, which had only had to deal with reptiles and other simpler creatures so far, mammals were just...a lot. So a second boss developed in mammals to pair up with the reptilian brain and take care of all of these new needs-the world's first limbic system.

Over the next 100 million years, the lives of mammals grew more and more complex, and one day, the two bosses noticed a new resident in the cockpit with them.

What appeared to be a random infant was actually the early version of the neocortex, and though he didn't say much at first, as evolution gave rise to primates and then great apes and then early hominids, this new boss grew from a baby into a child and eventually into a teenager with his own idea of how things should be run.

The new boss's ideas turned out to be really helpful, and he became the hominid's go-to boss for things like tool-making, hunting strategy, and cooperation with other hominids.

Over the next few million years, the new boss grew older and wiser, and his ideas kept getting better. He figured out how to not be naked. He figured out how to control fire. He learned how to make a spear.

But his coolest trick was thinking. He turned each human's head into a little world of its own, making humans the first animal that could think complex thoughts, reason through decisions, and make long-term plans.

And then, maybe about 100,000 years ago, he came up with a breakthrough.

Soon there were words for all kinds of things, and by 50,000 BC, humans were speaking in full, complex language with each other.

The neocortex had turned humans into magicians. Not only had he made the human head a wondrous internal ocean of complex thoughts, his latest breakthrough had found a way to translate those thoughts into a symbolic set of sounds and send them vibrating through the air into the heads of other humans, who could then decode the sounds and absorb the embedded idea into their own internal thought oceans. The human neocortex had been thinking about things for a long time-and he finally had someone to talk about it all with.

A neocortex party ensued. Neocortexes-fine-neocortices shared everything with each other-stories from their past, funny jokes they had thought of, opinions they had formed, plans for the future.

But most useful was sharing what they had learned. If one human learned through trial and error that a certain type of berry led to 48 hours of your life being run by diarrhea, they could use language to share the hard-earned lesson with the rest of their tribe, like photocopying the lesson and handing it to everyone else. Tribe members would then use language to pass along that lesson to their children, and their children would pass it to their own children. Rather than the same mistake being made again and again by many different people, one person's "stay away from that berry" wisdom could travel through space and time to protect everyone else from having their bad experience.

The same thing would happen when one human figured out a new clever trick. One unusually-intelligent hunter particularly attuned to both star constellations and the annual migration patterns of wildebeest 1 herds could share a system he devised that used the night sky to determine exactly how many days remained until the herd would return. Even though very few hunters would have been able to come up with that system on their own, through word-of-mouth, all future hunters in the tribe would now benefit from the ingenuity of one ancestor, with that one hunter's crowning discovery serving as every future hunter's starting point of knowledge.

And let's say this knowledge advancement makes the hunting season more efficient, which gives tribe members more time to work on their weapons-which allows one extra-clever hunter a few generations later to discover a method for making lighter, denser spears that can be thrown more accurately. And just like that, every present and future hunter in the tribe hunts with a more effective spear.

Language allows the best epiphanies of the very smartest people, through the generations, to accumulate into a little collective tower of tribal knowledge-a "greatest hits" of their ancestors' best "aha!" moments. Every new generation has this knowledge tower installed in their heads as their starting point in life, leading them to new, even better discoveries that build on what their ancestors learned, as the tribe's knowledge continues to grow bigger and wiser. Language is the difference between this:

And this:

The major trajectory upgrade happens for two reasons. Each generation can learn a lot more new things when they can talk to each other, compare notes, and combine their individual learnings (that's why the blue bars are so much higher in the second graph). And each generation can successfully pass a higher percentage of their learnings on to the next generation, so knowledge sticks better through time.

Knowledge, when shared, becomes like a grand, collective, inter-generational collaboration. Hundreds of generations later, what started as a pro tip about a certain berry to avoid has become an intricate system of planting long rows of the stomach-friendly berry bushes and harvesting them annually. The initial stroke of genius about wildebeest migrations has turned into a system of goat domestication. The spear innovation, through hundreds of incremental tweaks over tens of thousands of years, has become the bow and arrow.

Being able to speak to each other also allowed humans to form complex social structures which, along with advanced technologies like farming and animal domestication, led tribes over time to begin to settle into permanent locations and merge into organized super-tribes. When this happened, each tribe's tower of accumulated knowledge could be shared with the larger super-tribe, forming a super-tower. Mass cooperation raised the quality of life for everyone, and by 10,000 BC, the first cities had formed.

According to Wikipedia, there's something called Metcalfe's law, which states that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system." And they include this little chart of old telephones: 1

But the same idea applies to people. Two people can have one conversation. Three people have four unique conversation groups (three different two-person conversations and a fourth conversation between all three as a group). Five people have 26. Twenty people have 1,048,555.

So not only did the members of a city benefit from a huge knowledge tower as a foundation, but Metcalfe's law means that the number of conversation possibilities now skyrocketed to an unprecedented amount of variety. More conversations meant more ideas bumping up against each other, which led to many more discoveries clicking together, and the pace of innovation soared.

Humans soon mastered agriculture, which freed many people up to think about all kinds of other ideas, and it wasn't long before they stumbled upon a new, giant breakthrough: writing.

Historians think humans first started writing things down about 5 - 6,000 years ago. Up until that point, the collective knowledge tower was stored only in a network of people's memories and accessed only through livestream word-of-mouth communication. This system worked in small tribes, but with a vastly larger body of knowledge shared among a vastly larger group of people, memories alone would have had a hard time supporting it all, and most of it would have ended up lost.

If language let humans send a thought from one brain to another, writing let them stick a thought onto a physical object,like a stone, where it could live forever. When people began writing on thin sheets of parchment or paper, huge fields of knowledge that would take weeks to be conveyed by word of mouth could be compressed into a book or a scroll you could hold in your hand. The human collective knowledge tower now lived in physical form, neatly organized on the shelves of city libraries and universities.

These shelves became humanity's grand instruction manual on everything. They guided humanity toward new inventions and discoveries, and those would in turn become new books on the shelves, as the grand instruction manual built upon itself. The manual taught us the intricacies of trade and currency, of shipbuilding and architecture, of medicine and astronomy. Each generation began life with a higher floor of knowledge and technology than the last, and progress continued to accelerate.

But painstakingly handwritten books were treated like treasures, 2 and likely only accessible to the extreme elite (in the mid 15th century, there were only 30,000 books in all of Europe). And then came another breakthrough: the printing press.

In the 15th century, the beardy Johannes Gutenberg came up with a way to create multiple identical copies of the same book, much more quickly and cheaply than ever before. (Or, more accurately, when Gutenberg was born, humanity had already figured out the first 95% of how to invent the printing press, and Gutenberg, with that knowledge as his starting point, invented the last 5%.) (Oh, also, Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press, the Chinese did a bunch of centuries earlier. Pretty reliable rule is that everything you think was invented somewhere other than China was probably actually invented in China.) Here's how it worked:

It Turns Out Gutenberg Isn't Actually Impressive Blue Box

To prepare to write this blue box, I found this video explaining how Gutenberg's press worked and was surprised to find myself unimpressed. I always assumed Gutenberg had made some genius machine, but it turns out he just created a bunch of stamps of letters and punctuation and manually arranged them as the page of a book and then put ink on them and pressed a piece of paper onto the letters, and that was one book page. While he had the letters all set up for that page, he'd make a bunch of copies. Then he'd spend forever manually rearranging the stamps (this is the "movable type" part) into the next page, and then do a bunch of copies of that. His first project was 180 copies of the Bible, 3 which took him and his employees two years.

That' s Gutenberg's thing? A bunch of stamps? I feel like I could have come up with that pretty easily. Not really clear why it took humanity 5,000 years to go from figuring out how to write to creating a bunch of manual stamps. I guess it's not that I'm unimpressed with Gutenberg-I'm neutral on Gutenberg, he's fine-it's that I'm unimpressed with everyone else.

Anyway, despite how disappointing Gutenberg's press turned out to be, it was a huge leap forward for humanity's ability to spread information. Over the coming centuries, printing technology rapidly improved, bringing the number of pages a machine could print in an hour from about 25 in Gutenberg's time 4 up 100-fold to 2,400 by the early 19th century. 2

Mass-produced books allowed information to spread like wildfire, and with books being made increasingly affordable, no longer was education an elite privilege-millions now had access to books, and literacy rates shot upwards. One person's thoughts could now reach millions of people. The era of mass communication had begun.

The avalanche of books allowed knowledge to transcend borders, as the world's regional knowledge towers finally merged into one species-wide knowledge tower that stretched into the stratosphere.

The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity's collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism-the Human Colossus-rose into existence.

With the entire body of collective human knowledge in its brain, the Human Colossus began inventing things no human could have dreamed of inventing on their own-things that would have seemed like absurd science fiction to people only a few generations before.

It turned our ox-drawn carts into speedy locomotives and our horse-and-buggies into shiny metal cars. It turned our lanterns into lightbulbs and written letters into telephone calls and factory workers into industrial machines. It sent us soaring through the skies and out into space. It redefined the meaning of "mass communication" by giving us radio and TV, opening up a world where a thought in someone's head could be beamed instantly into the brains of a billion people.

If an individual human's core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus's core motivation to create value, which means it tends to want to invent newer and better technology. Every time it does that, it becomes an even better inventor, which means it can invent new stuff even faster.

And around the middle of the 20th century, the Human Colossus began working on its most ambitious invention yet.

The Colossus had figured out a long time ago that the best way to create value was to invent value-creating machines. Machines were better than humans at doing many kinds of work, which generated a flood of new resources that could be put towards value creation. Perhaps even more importantly, machine labor freed up huge portions of human time and energy-i.e. huge portions of the Colossus itself-to focus on innovation. It had already outsourced the work of our arms to factory machines and the work of our legs to driving machines, and it had done so through the power of its brain-now what if, somehow, it could outsource the work of the brain itself to a machine?

The first digital computers sprung up in the 1940s.

One kind of brain labor computers could do was the work of information storage-they were remembering machines. But we already knew how to outsource our memories using books, just like we had been outsourcing our leg labor to horses long before cars provided a far better solution. Computers were simply a memory-outsourcing upgrade.

Information- processing was a different story-a type of brain labor we had never figured out how to outsource. The Human Colossus had always had to do all of its own computing. Computers changed that.

Factory machines allowed us to outsource a physical process-we put a material in, the machines physically processed it and spit out the results. Computers could do the same thing for information processing. A software program was like a factory machine for information processes.

These new information-storage/organizing/processing machines proved to be useful. Computers began to play a central role in the day-to-day operation of companies and governments. By the late 1980s, it was common for individual people to own their own personal brain assistant.

Then came another leap.

In the early 90s, we taught millions of isolated machine-brains how to communicate with one another. They formed a worldwide computer network, and a new giant was born-the Computer Colossus.

The Computer Colossus and the great network it formed were like popeye spinach for the Human Colossus.

If individual human brains are the nerves and muscle fibers of the Human Colossus, the internet gave the giant its first legit nervous system. Each of its nodes was now interconnected to all of its other nodes, and information could travel through the system with light speed. This made the Human Colossus a faster, more fluid thinker.

The internet gave billions of humans instant, free, easily-searchable access to the entire human knowledge tower (which by now stretched past the moon). This made the Human Colossus a smarter, faster learner.

And if individual computers had served as brain extensions for individual people, companies, or governments, the Computer Colossus was a brain extension for the entire Human Colossus itself.

With its first real nervous system, an upgraded brain, and a powerful new tool, the Human Colossus took inventing to a whole new level-and noticing how useful its new computer friend was, it focused a large portion of its efforts on advancing computer technology.

It figured out how to make computers faster and cheaper. It made internet faster and wireless. It made computing chips smaller and smaller until there was a powerful computer in everyone's pocket.

Each innovation was like a new truckload of spinach for the Human Colossus.

But today, the Human Colossus has its eyes set on an even bigger idea than more spinach. Computers have been a game-changer, allowing humanity to outsource many of its brain-related tasks and better function as a single organism. But there's one kind of brain labor computers still can't quite do. Thinking.

Computers can compute and organize and run complex software-software that can even learn on its own. But they can't think in the way humans can. The Human Colossus knows that everything it's built has originated with its ability to reason creatively and independently-and it knows that the ultimate brain extension tool would be one that can really, actually, legitimately think. It has no idea what it will be like when the Computer Colossus can think for itself-when it one day opens its eyes and becomes a real colossus-but with its core goal to create value and push technology to its limits, the Human Colossus is determined to find out.

___________

We'll come back here in a bit. First, we have some learning to do.

As we've discussed before, knowledge works like a tree. If you try to learn a branch or a leaf of a topic before you have a solid tree trunk foundation of understanding in your head, it won't work. The branches and leaves will have nothing to stick to, so they'll fall right out of your head.

We've established that Elon Musk wants to build a wizard hat for the brain, and understanding why he wants to do that is the key to understanding Neuralink-and to understanding what our future might actually be like.

But none of that will make much sense until we really get into the truly mind-blowing concept of what a wizard hat is, what it might be like to wear one, and how we get there from where we are today.

The foundation for that discussion is an understanding of what brain-machine interfaces are, how they work, and where the technology is today.

Finally, BMIs themselves are just a larger branch-not the tree's trunk. In order to really understand BMIs and how they work, we need to understand the brain. Getting how the brain works is our tree trunk.

So we'll start with the brain, which will prepare us to learn about BMIs, which will teach us about what it'll take to build a wizard hat, and that'll set things up for an insane discussion about the future-which will get our heads right where they need to be to wrap themselves around why Elon thinks a wizard hat is such a critical piece of our future. And by the time we reach the end, this whole thing should click into place.

This post was a nice reminder of why I like working with a brain that looks nice and cute like this:

Because the real brain is extremely uncute and upsetting-looking. People are gross.

But I've been living in a shimmery, oozy, blood-vessel-lined Google Images hell for the past month, and now you have to deal with it too. So just settle in.

We'll start outside the head. One thing I will give to biology is that it's sometimes very satisfying, 5 and the brain has some satisfying things going on. The first of which is that there's a real Russian doll situation going on with your head.

You have your hair, and under that is your scalp, and then you think your skull comes next-but it's actually like 19 things and then your skull: 3

Then below your skull, 6 another whole bunch of things are going on before you get to the brain 4:

Your brain has three membranes around it underneath the skull:

On the outside, there's the dura mater (which means "hard mother" in Latin), a firm, rugged, waterproof layer. The dura is flush with the skull. I've heard it said that the brain has no pain sensory area, but the dura actually does-it's about as sensitive as the skin on your face-and pressure on or contusions in the dura often account for people's bad headaches.

Then below that there's the arachnoid mater ("spider mother"), which is a layer of skin and then an open space with these stretchy-looking fibers. I always thought my brain was just floating aimlessly in my head in some kind of fluid, but actually, the only real space gap between the outside of the brain and the inner wall of the skull is this arachnoid business. Those fibers stabilize the brain in position so it can't move too much, and they act as a shock absorber when your head bumps into something. This area is filled with spinal fluid, which keeps the brain mostly buoyant, since its density is similar to that of water.

Finally you have the pia mater ("soft mother"), a fine, delicate layer of skin that's fused with the outside of the brain. You know how when you see a brain, it's always covered with icky blood vessels? Those aren't actually on the brain's surface, they're embedded in the pia. (For the non-squeamish, here's a video of a professor peeling the pia off of a human brain.)

Here's the full overview, using the head of what looks like probably a pig:

From the left you have the skin (the pink), then two scalp layers, then the skull, then the dura, arachnoid, and on the far right, just the brain covered by the pia.

Once we've stripped everything down, we're left with this silly boy: 5

This ridiculous-looking thing is the most complex known object in the universe-three pounds of what neuroengineer Tim Hanson calls "one of the most information-dense, structured, and self-structuring matter known." 6 All while operating on only 20 watts of power (an equivalently powerful computer runs on 24,000,000 watts).

It's also what MIT professor Polina Anikeeva calls "soft pudding you could scoop with a spoon." Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described it to me more scientifically, as "somewhere between pudding and jello." He explained that if you placed a brain on a table, gravity would make it lose its shape and flatten out a bit, kind of like a jellyfish. We often don't think of the brain as so smooshy, because it's normally suspended in water.

But this is what we all are. You look in the mirror and see your body and your face and you think that's you-but that's really just the machine you're riding in. What you actually are is a zany-looking ball of jello. I hope that's okay.

And given how weird that is, you can't really blame Aristotle, or the ancient Egyptians, or many others, for assuming that the brain was somewhat-meaningless "cranial stuffing" (Aristotle believed the heart was the center of intelligence). 7

Eventually, humans figured out the deal. But only kind of.

Professor Krishna Shenoy likens our understanding of the brain to humanity's grasp on the world map in the early 1500s.

Another professor, Jeff Lichtman, is even harsher. He starts off his courses by asking his students the question, "If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?" He says students give answers like three-quarters of a mile, half a mile, a quarter of a mile, etc.-but that he believes the real answer is "about three inches." 8

A third professor, neuroscientist Moran Cerf, shared with me an old neuroscience saying that points out why trying to master the brain is a bit of a catch-22: "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

Maybe with the help of the great knowledge tower our species is building, we can get there at some point. For now, let's go through what we do currently know about the jellyfish in our heads-starting with the big picture.

Let's look at the major sections of the brain using a hemisphere cross section. So this is what the brain looks like in your head:

Now let's take the brain out of the head and remove the left hemisphere, which gives us a good view of the inside. 9

Neurologist Paul MacLean made a simple diagram that illustrates the basic idea we talked about earlier of the reptile brain coming first in evolution, then being built upon by mammals, and finally being built upon again to give us our brain trifecta.

Here's how this essentially maps out on our real brain:

Let's take a look at each section:

The Reptilian Brain: The Brain Stem (and Cerebellum)

This is the most ancient part of our brain: 10

That's the section of our brain cross section above that the frog boss resides over. In fact, a frog's entire brain is similar to this lower part of our brain. Here's a real frog brain: 11

When you understand the function of these parts, the fact that they're ancient makes sense-everything these parts do, frogs and lizards can do. These are the major sections (click any of these spinning images to see a high-res version):

The medulla oblongata

The medulla oblongata really just wants you to not die. It does the thankless tasks of controlling involuntary things like your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, along with making you vomit when it thinks you've been poisoned.

The pons

The pons's thing is that it does a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It deals with swallowing, bladder control, facial expressions, chewing, saliva, tears, and posture-really just whatever it's in the mood for.

The midbrain

The midbrain is dealing with an even bigger identity crisis than the pons. You know a brain part is going through some shit when almost all its functions are already another brain part's thing. In the case of the midbrain, it deals with vision, hearing, motor control, alertness, temperature control, and a bunch of other things that other people in the brain already do. The rest of the brain doesn't seem very into the midbrain either, given that they created a ridiculously uneven "forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain" divide that intentionally isolates the midbrain all by itself while everyone else hangs out. 12

One thing I'll grant the pons and midbrain is that it's the two of them that control your voluntary eye movement, which is a pretty legit job. So if right now you move your eyes around, that's you doing something specifically with your pons and midbrain. 7

The cerebellum

The odd-looking thing that looks like your brain's scrotum is your cerebellum (Latin for "little brain"), which makes sure you stay a balanced, coordinated, and normal-moving person. Here's that rad professor again showing you what a real cerebellum looks like. 8

The Paleo-Mammalian Brain: The Limbic System

Above the brain stem is the limbic system-the part of the brain that makes humans so insane. 13

The limbic system is a survival system. A decent rule of thumb is that whenever you're doing something that your dog might also do-eating, drinking, having sex, fighting, hiding or running away from something scary-your limbic system is probably behind the wheel. Whether it feels like it or not, when you're doing any of those things, you're in primitive survival mode.

The limbic system is also where your emotions live, and in the end, emotions are also all about survival-they're the more advanced mechanisms of survival, necessary for animals living in a complex social structure.

In other posts, when I refer to your Instant Gratification Monkey, your Social Survival Mammoth, and all your other animals -I'm usually referring to your limbic system. Anytime there's an internal battle going on in your head, it's likely that the limbic system's role is urging you to do the thing you'll later regret doing.

I'm pretty sure that gaining control over your limbic system is both the definition of maturity and the core human struggle. It's not that we would be better off without our limbic systems-limbic systems are half of what makes us distinctly human, and most of the fun of life is related to emotions and/or fulfilling your animal needs-it's just that your limbic system doesn't get that you live in a civilization, and if you let it run your life too much, it'll quickly ruin your life.

Anyway, let's take a closer look at it. There are a lot of little parts of the limbic system, but we'll keep it to the biggest celebrities:

The amygdala

The amygdala is kind of an emotional wreck of a brain structure. It deals with anxiety, sadness, and our responses to fear. There are two amygdalae, and oddly, the left one has been shown to be more balanced, sometimes producing happy feelings in addition to the usual angsty ones, while the right one is always in a bad mood.

The hippocampus

Your hippocampus (Greek for "seahorse" because it looks like one) is like a scratch board for memory. When rats start to memorize directions in a maze, the memory gets encoded in their hippocampus-quite literally. Different parts of the rat's two hippocampi will fire during different parts of the maze, since each section of the maze is stored in its own section of the hippocampus. But if after learning one maze, the rat is given other tasks and is brought back to the original maze a year later, it will have a hard time remembering it, because the hippocampus scratch board has been mostly wiped of the memory so as to free itself up for new memories.

The condition in the movie Memento is a real thing-anterograde amnesia-and it's caused by damage to the hippocampus. Alzheimer's also starts in the hippocampus before working its way through many parts of the brain, which is why, of the slew of devastating effects of the disease, diminished memory happens first.

The t halamus

In its central position in the brain, the thalamus also serves as a sensory middleman that receives information from your sensory organs and sends them to your cortex for processing. When you're sleeping, the thalamus goes to sleep with you, which means the sensory middleman is off duty. That's why in a deep sleep, some sound or light or touch often will not wake you up. If you want to wake someone up who's in a deep sleep, you have to be aggressive enough to wake their thalamus up.

The exception is your sense of smell, which is the one sense that bypasses the thalamus. That's why smelling salts are used to wake up a passed-out person. While we're here, cool fact: smell is the function of the olfactory bulb and is the most ancient of the senses. Unlike the other senses, smell is located deep in the limbic system, where it works closely with the hippocampus and amygdala-which is why smell is so closely tied to memory and emotion.

The Neo-Mammalian Brain: The Cortex

Finally, we arrive at the cortex. The cerebral cortex. The neocortex. The cerebrum. The pallium.

The most important part of the whole brain can't figure out what its name is. Here's what's happening:

The What the Hell is it Actually Called Blue Box

The cerebrum is the whole big top/outside part of the brain but it also technically includes some of the internal parts too.

Cortex means "bark" in Latin and is the word used for the outer layer of many organs, not just the brain. The outside of the cerebellum is the cerebellar cortex. And the outside of the cerebrum is the cerebral cortex. Only mammals have cerebral cortices. The equivalent part of the brain in reptiles is called the pallium.

The neocortex is often used interchangeably with "cerebral cortex," but it's technically the outer layers of the cerebral cortex that are especially developed in more advanced mammals. The other parts are called the allocortex.

In the rest of this post, we'll be mostly referring to the neocortex but we'll just call it the cortex, since that's the least annoying way to do it for everyone.

The cortex is in charge of basically everything-processing what you see, hear, and feel, along with language, movement, thinking, planning, and personality.

It's divided into four lobes: 14

It's pretty unsatisfying to describe what they each do, because they each do so many things and there's a lot of overlap, but to oversimplify:

The frontal lobe (click the words to see a gif)handles your personality, along with a lot of what we think of as "thinking"-reasoning, planning, and executive function. In particular, a lot of your thinking takes place in the front part of the frontal lobe, called the prefrontal cortex -the adult in your head. The prefrontal cortex is the other character in those internal battles that go on in your life. The rational decision-maker trying to get you to do your work. The authentic voice trying to get you to stop worrying so much what others think and just be yourself. The higher being who wishes you'd stop sweating the small stuff.

As if that's not enough to worry about, the frontal lobe is also in charge of your body's movement. The top strip of the frontal lobe is your primary motor cortex. 15

Then there's the parietal lobe which, among other things, controls your sense of touch, particularly in the primary somatosensory cortex, the strip right next to the primary motor cortex. 16

The motor and somatosensory cortices are fun because they're well-mapped. Neuroscientists know exactly which part of each strip connects to each part of your body. Which leads us to the creepiest diagram of this post: the homunculus.

The homunculus, created by pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, visually displays how the motor and somatosensory cortices are mapped. The larger the body part in the diagram, the more of the cortex is dedicated to its movement or sense of touch. A couple interesting things about this:

First, it's amazing that more of your brain is dedicated to the movement and feeling of your face and hands than to the rest of your body combined. This makes sense though-you need to make incredibly nuanced facial expressions and your hands need to be unbelievably dexterous, while the rest of your body-your shoulder, your knee, your back-can move and feel things much more crudely. This is why people can play the piano with their fingers but not with their toes.

Second, it's interesting how the two cortices are basically dedicated to the same body parts, in the same proportions. I never really thought about the fact that the same parts of your body you need to have a lot of movement control over tend to also be the most sensitive to touch.

Finally, I came across this shit and I've been living with it ever since-so now you have to too. A 3-dimensional homunculus man. 17

Moving on-

The temporal lobe is where a lot of your memory lives, and being right next to your ears, it's also the home of your auditory cortex.

Last, at the back of your head is the occipital lobe, which houses your visual cortex and is almost entirely dedicated to vision.

The Why Brains Are So Wrinkly Blue Box

As we've discussed, the evolution of our brain happened by building outwards, adding newer, fancier features on top of the existing model. But building outwards has its limits, because the need for humans to emerge into the world through someone's vagina puts a cap on how big our heads could be. 9

So evolution got innovative. Because the cortex is so thin, it scales by increasing its surface area. That means that by creating lots of folds (including both sides folding down into the gap between the two hemispheres), you can more than triple the area of the brain's surface without increasing the volume too much. When the brain first develops in the womb, the cortex is smooth-the folds form mostly in the last two months of pregnancy: 18

Cool explainer of how the folds form here.

If you could take the cortex off the brain, you'd end up with a 2mm-thick sheet with an area of 2,000-2,400cm ²-about the size of a 48cm x 48cm (19in x 19in) square. 10 A dinner napkin.

This napkin is where most of the action in your brain happens-it's why you can think, move, feel, see, hear, remember, and speak and understand language. Best napkin ever.

And remember before when I said that you were a jello ball? Well the you you think of when you think of yourself-it's really mainly your cortex. Which means you're actually a napkin.

The magic of the folds in increasing the napkin's size is clear when we put another brain on top of our stripped-off cortex:

So while it's not perfect, modern science has a decent understanding of the big picture when it comes to the brain. We also have a decent understanding of the little picture. Let's check it out:

Even though we figured out that the brain was the seat of our intelligence a long time ago, it wasn't until pretty recently that science understood what the brain was made of. Scientists knew that the body was made of cells, but in the late 19th century, Italian physician Camillo Golgi figured out how to use a staining method to see what brain cells actually looked like. The result was surprising:

That wasn't what a cell was supposed to look like. Without quite realizing it yet, 11 Golgi had discovered the neuron.

Scientists realized that the neuron was the core unit in the vast communication network that makes up the brains and nervous systems of nearly all animals.

But it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists worked out how neurons communicate with each other.

An axon, the long strand of a neuron that carries information, is normally microscopic in diameter-too small for scientists to test on until recently. But in the 1930s, English zoologist J. Z. Young discovered that the squid, randomly, could change everything for our understanding, because squids have an unusually huge axon in their bodies that could be experimented on. A couple decades later, using the squid's giant axon, scientists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley definitively figured out how neurons send information: the action potential. Here's how it works.

So there are a lot of different kinds of neurons- 19

-but for simplicity, we'll discuss the cliché textbook neuron-a pyramidal cell, like one you might find in your motor cortex. To make a neuron diagram, we can start with a guy:

And then if we just give him a few extra legs, some hair, take his arms off, and stretch him out-we have a neuron.

And let's add in a few more neurons.

Rather than launch into the full, detailed explanation for how action potentials work-which involves a lot of unnecessary and uninteresting technical information you already dealt with in 9th-grade biology-I'll link to this great Khan Academy explainer article for those who want the full story. We'll go through the very basic ideas that are relevant for our purposes.

So our guy's body stem-the neuron's axon-has a negative "resting potential," which means that when it's at rest, its electrical charge is slightly negative. At all times, a bunch of people's feet keep touching 12 our guy's hair-the neuron's dendrites-whether he likes it or not. Their feet drop chemicals called neurotransmitters 13 onto his hair-which pass through his head (the cell body, or soma) and, depending on the chemical, raise or lower the charge in his body a little bit. It's a little unpleasant for our neuron guy, but not a huge deal-and nothing else happens.

But if enough chemicals touch his hair to raise his charge over a certain point-the neuron's "threshold potential"-then it triggers an action potential, and our guy is electrocuted.

This is a binary situation-either nothing happens to our guy, or he's fully electrocuted. He can't be kind of electrocuted, or extra electrocuted-he's either not electrocuted at all, or he's fully electrocuted to the exact same degree every time.

When this happens, a pulse of electricity (in the form of a brief reversal of his body's normal charge from negative to positive and then rapidly back down to his normal negative) zips down his body (the axon) and into his feet-the neuron's axon terminals-which themselves touch a bunch of other people's hair (the points of contact are called synapses). When the action potential reaches his feet, it causes them to release chemicals onto the people's hair they're touching, which may or may not cause those people to be electrocuted, just like he was.

This is usually how info moves through the nervous system-chemical information sent in the tiny gap between neurons triggers electrical information to pass through the neuron-but sometimes, in situations when the body needs to move a signal extra quickly, neuron-to-neuron connections can themselves be electric.

Action potentials move at between 1 and 100 meters/second. Part of the reason for this large range is that another type of cell in the nervous system-a Schwann cell-acts like a super nurturing grandmother and constantly wraps some types of axons in layers of fat blankets called myelin sheath. Like this (takes a second to start): 20

On top of its protection and insulation benefits, the myelin sheath is a major factor in the pace of communication-action potentials travel much faster through axons when they're covered in myelin sheath: 14 21

One nice example of the speed difference created by myelin: You know how when you stub your toe, your body gives you that one second of reflection time to think about what you just did and what you're about to feel, before the pain actually kicks in? What's happening is you feel both the sensation of your toe hitting against something and the sharp part of the pain right away, because sharp pain information is sent to the brain via types of axons that are myelinated. It takes a second or two for the dull pain to kick in because dull pain is sent via unmyelinated "C fibers"-at only around one meter/second.

Neurons are similar to computer transistors in one way-they also transmit information in the binary language of 1's (action potential firing) and 0's (no action potential firing). But unlike computer transistors, the brain's neurons are constantly changing.

You know how sometimes you learn a new skill and you get pretty good at it, and then the next day you try again and you suck again? That's because what made you get good at the skill the day before was adjustments to the amount or concentration of the chemicals in the signaling between neurons. Repetition caused chemicals to adjust, which helped you improve, but the next day the chemicals were back to normal so the improvement went away.

But then if you keep practicing, you eventually get good at something in a lasting way. What's happened is you've told the brain, "this isn't just something I need in a one-off way," and the brain's neural network has responded by making structural changes to itself that last. Neurons have shifted shape and location and strengthened or weakened various connections in a way that has built a hard-wired set of pathways that know how to do that skill.

Neurons' ability to alter themselves chemically, structurally, and even functionally, allow your brain's neural network to optimize itself to the external world-a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Babies' brains are the most neuroplastic of all. When a baby is born, its brain has no idea if it needs to accommodate the life of a medieval warrior who will need to become incredibly adept at sword-fighting, a 17th-century musician who will need to develop fine-tuned muscle memory for playing the harpsichord, or a modern-day intellectual who will need to store and organize a tremendous amount of information and master a complex social fabric-but the baby's brain is ready to shape itself to handle whatever life has in store for it.

Babies are the neuroplasticity superstars, but neuroplasticity remains throughout our whole lives, which is why humans can grow and change and learn new things. And it's why we can form new habits and break old ones-your habits are reflective of the existing circuitry in your brain. If you want to change your habits, you need to exert a lot of willpower to override your brain's neural pathways, but if you can keep it going long enough, your brain will eventually get the hint and alter those pathways, and the new behavior will stop requiring willpower. Your brain will have physically built the changes into a new habit.

Altogether, there are around 100 billion neurons in the brain that make up this unthinkably vast network-similar to the number of stars in the Milky Way and over 10 times the number of people in the world. Around 15 - 20 billion of those neurons are in the cortex, and the rest are in the animal parts of your brain (surprisingly, the random cerebellum has more than three times as many neurons as the cortex).

Let's zoom back out and look at another cross section of the brain-this time cut not from front to back to show a single hemisphere, but from side to side: 22

Brain material can be divided into what's called gray matter and white matter. Gray matter actually looks darker in color and is made up of the cell bodies (somas) of the brain's neurons and their thicket of dendrites and axons-along with a lot of other stuff. White matter is made up primarily of wiring-axons carrying information from somas to other somas or to destinations in the body. White matter is white because those axons are usually wrapped in myelin sheath, which is fatty white tissue.

There are two main regions of gray matter in the brain-the internal cluster of limbic system and brain stem parts we discussed above, and the nickel-thick layer of cortex around the outside. The big chunk of white matter in between is made up mostly of the axons of cortical neurons. The cortex is like a great command center, and it beams many of its orders out through the mass of axons making up the white matter beneath it.

The coolest illustration of this concept that I've come across 15 is a beautiful set of artistic representations done by Dr. Greg A. Dunn and Dr. Brian Edwards. Check out the distinct difference between the structure of the outer layer of gray matter cortex and the white matter underneath it (click to view in high res):

Those cortical axons might be taking information to another part of the cortex, to the lower part of the brain, or through the spinal cord-the nervous system's superhighway-and into the rest of the body. 16

Let's look at the whole nervous system: 23

The nervous system is divided into two parts: the central nervous system-your brain and spinal cord-and the peripheral nervous system -made up of the neurons that radiate outwards from the spinal cord into the rest of the body.

Most types of neurons are interneurons -neurons that communicate with other neurons. When you think, it's a bunch of interneurons talking to each other. Interneurons are mostly contained to the brain.

The two other kinds of neurons are sensory neurons and motor neurons-those are the neurons that head down into your spinal cord and make up the peripheral nervous system. These neurons can be up to a meter long. 17 Here's a typical structure of each type: 24

Remember our two strips? 25

These strips are where your peripheral nervous system originates. The axons of sensory neurons head down from the somatosensory cortex, through the brain's white matter, and into the spinal cord (which is just a massive bundle of axons). From the spinal cord, they head out to all parts of your body. Each part of your skin is lined with nerves that originate in the somatosensory cortex. A nerve, by the way, is a few bundles of axons wrapped together in a little cord. Here's a nerve up close: 26

The nerve is the whole thing circled in purple, and those four big circles inside are bundles of many axons (here's a helpful cartoony drawing).

So if a fly lands on your arm, here's what happens:

The fly touches your skin and stimulates a bunch of sensory nerves. The axon terminals in the nerves have a little fit and start action potential-ing, sending the signal up to the brain to tell on the fly. The signals head into the spinal cord and up to the somas in the somatosensory cortex. 18 The somatosensory cortex then taps the motor cortex on the shoulder and tells it that there's a fly on your arm and that it needs to deal with it (lazy). The particular somas in your motor cortex that connect to the muscles in your arm then start action potential-ing, sending the signals back into the spinal cord and then out to the muscles of the arm. The axon terminals at the end of those neurons stimulate your arm muscles, which constrict to shake your arm to get the fly off (by now the fly has already thrown up on your arm), and the fly (whose nervous system now goes through its own whole thing) flies off.

Then your amygdala looks over and realizes there was a bug on you, and it tells your motor cortex to jump embarrassingly, and if it's a spider instead of a fly, it also tells your vocal cords to yell out involuntarily and ruin your reputation.

So it seems so far like we do kind of actually understand the brain, right? But then why did that professor ask that question- If everything you need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked in this mile?-and say the answer was three inches?

Well here's the thing.

You know how we totally get how an individual computer sends an email and we totally understand the broad concepts of the internet, like how many people are on it and what the biggest sites are and what the major trends are-but all the stuff in the middle-the inner workings of the internet-are pretty confusing?

And you know how economists can tell you all about how an individual consumer functions and they can also tell you about the major concepts of macroeconomics and the overarching forces at play-but no one can really tell you all the ins and outs of how the economy works or predict what will happen with the economy next month or next year?

The brain is kind of like those things. We get the little picture-we know all about how a neuron fires. And we get the big picture-we know how many neurons are in the brain and what the major lobes and structures control and how much energy the whole system uses. But the stuff in between-all that middle stuff about how each part of the brain actually does its thing?

Yeah we don't get that.

What really makes it clear how confounded we are is hearing a neuroscientist talk about the parts of the brain we understand best.

Like the visual cortex. We understand the visual cortex pretty well because it's easy to map.

Research scientist Paul Merolla described it to me:
The visual cortex has very nice anatomical function and structure. When you look at it, you literally see a map of the world. So when something in your visual field is in a certain region of space, you'll see a little patch in the cortex that represents that region of space, and it'll light up. And as that thing moves over, there's a topographic mapping where the neighboring cells will represent that. It's almost like having Cartesian coordinates of the real world that will map to polar coordinates in the visual cortex. And you can literally trace from your retina, through your thalamus, to your visual cortex, and you'll see an actual mapping from this point in space to this point in the visual cortex.
So far so good. But then he went on:
So that mapping is really useful if you want to interact with certain parts of the visual cortex, but there's many regions of vision, and as you get deeper into the visual cortex, it becomes a little bit more nebulous, and this topographic representation starts to break down. ... There's all these levels of things going on in the brain, and visual perception is a great example of that. We look at the world, and there's just this physical 3D world out there-like you look at a cup, and you just see a cup-but what your eyes are seeing is really just a bunch of pixels. And when you look in the visual cortex, you see that there are roughly 20-40 different maps. V1 is the first area, where it's tracking little edges and colors and things like that. And there's other areas looking at more complicated objects, and there's all these different visual representations on the surface of your brain, that you can see. And somehow all of that information is being bound together in this information stream that's being coded in a way that makes you believe you're just seeing a simple object.
And the motor cortex, another one of the best-understood areas of the brain, might be even more difficult to understand on a granular level than the visual cortex. Because even though we know which general areas of the motor cortex map to which areas of the body, the individual neurons in these motor cortex areas aren't topographically set up, and the specific way they work together to create movement in the body is anything but clear. Here's Paul again:
The neural chatter in everyone's arm movement part of the brain is a little bit different-it's not like the neurons speak English and say "move"-it's a pattern of electrical activity, and in everyone it's a little bit different. ... And you want to be able to seamlessly understand that it means "Move the arm this way" or "move the arm toward the target" or "move the arm to the left, move it up, grasp, grasp with a certain kind of force, reach with a certain speed," and so on. We don't think about these things when we move-it just happens seamlessly. So each brain has a unique code with which it talks to the muscles in the arm and hand.
The neuroplasticity that makes our brains so useful to us also makes them incredibly difficult to understand-because the way each of our brains works is based on how that brain has shaped itself, based on its particular environment and life experience.

And again, those are the areas of the brain we understand the best. "When it comes to more sophisticated computation, like language, memory, mathematics," one expert told me, "we really don't understand how the brain works." He lamented that, for example, the concept of one's mother is coded in a different way, and in different parts of the brain, for every person. And in thefrontal lobe-you know, that part of the brain where you really live-"there's no topography at all."

So with our brain background tree trunk built, we're ready to head up to our first branch.

Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces

Let's zip back in time for a second to 50,000 BC and kidnap someone and bring him back here to 2017.

This is Bok. Bok, we're really thankful that you and your people invented language.

As a way to thank you, we want to show you all the amazing things we were able to build because of your invention.

Alright, first let's take Bok on a plane, and into a submarine, and to the top of the Burj Khalifa. Now we'll show him a telescope and a TV and an iPhone. And now we'll let him play around on the internet for a while.

Okay that was fun. How'd it go, Bok?

Yeah we figured that you'd be pretty surprised. To wrap up, let's show him how we communicate with each other.

Bok would be shocked to learn that despite all the magical powers humans have gained as a result of having learned to speak to each other, when it comes to actually speaking to each other, we're no more magical than the people of his day. When two people are together and talking, they're using 50,000-year-old technology.

Bok might also be surprised that in a world run by fancy machines, the people who made all the machines are walking around with the same biological bodies that Bok and his friends walk around with. How can that be?

This is why brain-machine interfaces-a subset of the broader field of neural engineering, which itself is a subset of biotechnology-are such a tantalizing new industry. We've conquered the world many times over with our technology, but when it comes to our brains-our most central tool-the tech world has for the most part been too daunted to dive in.

That's why we still communicate using technology Bok invented, it's why I'm typing this sentence at about a 20th of the speed that I'm thinking it, and it's why brain-related ailments still leave so many lives badly impaired or lost altogether.

But 50,000 years after the brain's great "aha!" moment, that may finally be about to change. The brain's next great frontier may be itself.

___________

There are many kinds of potential brain-machine interface (sometimes called a brain-computer interface) that will serve many different functions. But everyone working on BMIs is grappling with either one or both of these two questions:
1) How do I get the right information out of the brain? 2) How do I send the right information into the brain?
The first is about capturing the brain's output-it's about recording what neurons are saying.

The second is about inputting information into the brain's natural flow or altering that natural flow in some other way-it's about stimulating neurons.

These two things are happening naturally in your brain all the time. Right now, your eyes are making a specific set of horizontal movements that allow you to read this sentence. That's the brain's neurons outputting information to a machine (your eyes) and the machine receiving the command and responding. And as your eyes move in just the right way, the photons from the screen are entering your retinas and stimulating neurons in the occipital lobe of your cortex in a way that allows the image of the words to enter your mind's eye. That image then stimulates neurons in another part of your brain that allows you to process the information embedded in the image and absorb the sentence's meaning.

Inputting and outputting information is what the brain's neurons do. All the BMI industry wants to do is get in on the action.

At first, this seems like maybe not that difficult a task? The brain is just a jello ball, right? And the cortex-the part of the brain in which we want to do most of our recording and stimulating-is just a napkin, located conveniently right on the outside of the brain where it can be easily accessed. Inside the cortex are around 20 billion firing neurons-20 billion oozy little transistors that if we can just learn to work with, will give us an entirely new level of control over our life, our health, and the world. Can't we figure that out? Neurons are small, but we know how to split an atom. A neuron's diameter is about 100,000 times as large as an atom's-if an atom were a marble, a neuron would be a kilometer across-so we should probably be able to handle the smallness. Right?

So what's the issue here?

Well on one hand, there's something to that line of thinking, in that because of those facts, this is an industry where immense progress can happen. We can do this.

But only when you understand what actually goes on in the brain do you realize why this is probably the hardest human endeavor in the world.

So before we talk about BMIs themselves, we need to take a closer look at what the people trying to make BMIs are dealing with here. I find that the best way to illustrate things is to scale the brain up by exactly 1,000X and look at what's going on.

Remember our cortex-is-a-napkin demonstration earlier?

Well if we scale that up by 1,000X, the cortex napkin-which was about 48cm / 19in on each side-now has a side the length of six Manhattan street blocks (or two avenue blocks). It would take you about 25 minutes to walk around the perimeter. And the brain as a whole would now fit snugly inside a two block by two block square-just about the size of Madison Square Garden (this works in length and width, but the brain would be about double the height of MSG).

So let's lay it out in the actual city. I'm sure the few hundred thousand people who live there will understand.

I chose 1,000X as our multiplier for a couple reasons. One is that we can all instantly convert the sizes in our heads. Every millimeter of the actual brain is now a meter. And in the much smaller world of neurons, every micron is now an easy-to-conceptualize millimeter. Secondly, it conveniently brings the cortex up to human size-its 2mm thickness is now two meters-the height of a tall (6'6") man.

So we could walk up to 29th street, to the edge of our giant cortex napkin, and easily look at what was going on inside those two meters of thickness. For our demonstration, let's pull out a cubic meter of our giant cortex to examine, which will show us what goes on in a typical cubic millimeter of real cortex.

What we'd see in that cubic meter would be a mess. Let's empty it out and put it back together.

First, let's put the somas 19 in-the little bodies of all the neurons that live in that cube.

Somas range in size, but the neuroscientists I spoke with said that the somas of neurons in the cortex are often around 10 or 15µm in diameter (µm = micrometer, or micron: 1/1,000th of a millimeter). That means that if you laid out 7 or 10 of them in a line, that line would be about the diameter of a human hair (which is about 100µm). On our scale, that makes a soma 1 - 1.5cm in diameter. A marble.

The volume of the whole cortex is in the ballpark of 500,000 cubic millimeters, and in that space are about 20 billion somas. That means an average cubic millimeter of cortex contains about 40,000 neurons. So there are 40,000 marbles in our cubic meter box. If we divide our box into about 40,000 cubic spaces, each with a side of 3cm (or about a cubic inch), it means each of our soma marbles is at the center of its own little 3cm cube, with other somas about 3cm away from it in all directions.

With me so far? Can you visualize our meter cube with those 40,000 floating marbles in it?

Here's a microscope image of the somas in an actual cortex, using techniques that block out the other stuff around them: 27

Okay not too crazy so far. But the soma is only a tiny piece of each neuron. Radiating out from each of our marble-sized somas are twisty, branchy dendrites that in our scaled-up brain can stretch out for three or four meters in many different directions, and from the other end an axon that can be over 100 meters long (when heading out laterally to another part of the cortex) or as long as a kilometer (when heading down into the spinal cord and body). Each of them only about a millimeter thick, these cords turn the cortex into a dense tangle of electrical spaghetti.

And there's a lot going on in that mash of spaghetti. Each neuron has synaptic connections to as many as 1,000-sometimes as high as 10,000-other neurons. With around 20 billion neurons in the cortex, that means there are over 20 trillion individual neural connections in the cortex (and as high as a quadrillion connections in the entire brain). In our cubic meter alone, there will be over 20 million synapses.

To further complicate things, not only are there many spaghetti strands coming out of each of the 40,000 marbles in our cube, but there are thousands of other spaghetti strings passing through our cube from other parts of the cortex. That means that if we were trying to record signals or stimulate neurons in this particular cubic area, we'd have a lot of difficulty, because in the mess of spaghetti, it would be very hard to figure out which spaghetti strings belonged to our soma marbles (and god forbid there are Purkinje cells in the mix).

And of course, there's the whole neuroplasticity thing. The voltages of each neuron would be constantly changing, as many as hundreds of times per second. And the tens of millions of synapse connections in our cube would be regularly changing sizes, disappearing, and reappearing.

If only that were the end of it.

It turns out there are other cells in the brain called glial cells-cells that come in many different varieties and perform many different functions, like mopping up chemicals released into synapses, wrapping axons in myelin, and serving as the brain's immune system. Here are some common types of glial cell: 28

And how many glial cells are in the cortex? About the same number as there are neurons. 20 So add about 40,000 of these wacky things into our cube.

Finally, there are the blood vessels. In every cubic millimeter of cortex, there's a total of a meter of tiny blood vessels. On our scale, that means that in our cubic meter, there's a kilometer of blood vessels. Here's what the blood vessels in a space about that size look like: 29

The Connectome Blue Box

There's an amazing project going on right now in the neuroscience world called the Human Connectome Project (pronounced "connec-tome") in which scientists are trying to create a complete detailed map of the entire human brain. Nothing close to this scale of brain mapping has ever been done. 21

The project entails slicing a human brain into outrageously thin slices-around 30- nanometer-thick slices. That's 1/33,000th of a millimeter (here's a machine slicing up a mouse brain).

Anyway, in addition to producing some gorgeous images of the "ribbon" formations axons with similar functions often form inside white matter, like-

-the connectome project has helped people visualize just how packed the brain is with all this stuff. Here's a breakdown of all the different things going on in one tiny snippet of mouse brain (and this doesn't even include the blood vessels): 30

(In the image, E is the complete brain snippet, and F-N show the separate components that make up E.)

So our meter box is a jam-packed, oozy, electrified mound of dense complexity-now let's recall that in reality, everything in our box actually fits in a cubic millimeter.

And the brain-machine interface engineers need to figure out what the microscopic somas buried in that millimeter are saying, and other times, to stimulate just the right somas to get them to do what the engineers want. Good luck with that.

We'd have a super hard time doing that on our 1,000X brain. Our 1,000X brain that also happens to be a nice flat napkin. That's not how it normally works-usually, the napkin is up on top of our Madison Square Garden brain and full of deep folds (on our scale, between five and 30 meters deep). In fact, less than a third of the cortex napkin is up on the surface of the brain-most is buried inside the folds.

Also, engineers are not operating on a bunch of brains in a lab. The brain is covered with all those Russian doll layers, including the skull-which at 1,000X would be around seven meters thick. And since most people don't really want you opening up their skull for very long-and ideally not at all-you have to try to work with those tiny marbles as non-invasively as possible.

And this is all assuming you're dealing with the cortex-but a lot of cool BMI ideas deal with the structures down below, which if you're standing on top of our MSG brain, are buried 50 or 100 meters under the surface.

The 1,000X game also hammers home the sheer scope of the brain. Think about how much was going on in our cube-and now remember that that's only one 500,000th of the cortex. If we broke our whole giant cortex into similar meter cubes and lined them up, they'd stretch 500km / 310mi-all the way to Boston and beyond. And if you made the trek-which would take over 100 hours of brisk walking-at any point you could pause and look at the cube you happened to be passing by and it would have all of this complexity inside of it. All of this is currently in your brain.

Part 3A: How Happy Are You That This Isn't Your Problem

Totes.

Back to Part 3: Brain-Machine Interfaces

So how do scientists and engineers begin to manage this situation?

Well they do the best they can with the tools they currently have-tools used to record or stimulate neurons (we'll focus on the recording side for the time being). Let's take a look at the options:

With the current work that's being done, three broad criteria seem to stand out when evaluating a type of recording tool's pros and cons:

1) Scale - how many neurons can be simultaneously recorded

2) Resolution - how detailed is the information the tool receives-there are two types of resolution, spatial (how closely your recordings come to telling you how individual neurons are firing) and temporal (how well you can determine when the activity you record happened)

3) Invasiveness - is surgery needed, and if so, how extensively

The long-term goal is to have all three of your cakes and eat them all. But for now, it's always a question of "which one (or two) of these criteria are you willing to completely fail?" Going from one tool to another isn't an overall upgrade or downgrade-it's a tradeoff.

Let's examine the types of tools currently being used:

Scale: high (it shows you information across the whole brain)

Resolution: medium-low spatial, very low temporal

Invasiveness: non-invasive

fMRI isn't typically used for BMIs, but it is a classic recording tool-it gives you information about what's going on inside the brain.

fMRI uses MRI-magnetic resonance imaging-technology. MRIs, invented in the 1970s, were an evolution of the x-ray-based CAT scan. Instead of using x-rays, MRIs use magnetic fields (along with radio waves and other signals) to generate images of the body and brain. Like this: 31

And this full set of cross sections, allowing you to see through an entire head.

Pretty amazing technology.

fMRI ("functional" MRI) uses similar technology to track changes in blood flow. Why? Because when areas of the brain become more active, they use more energy, so they need more oxygen-so blood flow increases to the area to deliver that oxygen. Blood flow indirectly indicates where activity is happening. Here's what an fMRI scan might show: 32

Of course, there's always blood throughout the brain-what this image shows is where blood flow has increased (red/orange/yellow) and where it has decreased (blue). And because fMRI can scan through the whole brain, results are 3-dimensional:

fMRI has many medical uses, like informing doctors whether or not certain parts of the brain are functioning properly after a stroke, and fMRI has taught neuroscientists a ton about which regions of the brain are involved with which functions. Scans also have the benefit of providing info about what's going on in the whole brain at any given time, and it's safe and totally non-invasive.

The big drawback is resolution. fMRI scans have a literal resolution, like a computer screen has with pixels, except the pixels are three-dimensional, cubic volume pixels-or "voxels."

fMRI voxels have gotten smaller as the technology has improved, bringing the spatial resolution up. Today's fMRI voxels can be as small as a cubic millimeter. The brain has a volume of about 1,200,000mm ³, so a high-resolution fMRI scan divides the brain into about one million little cubes. The problem is that on neuron scale, that's still pretty huge (the same size as our scaled-up cubic meter above)-each voxel contains tens of thousands of neurons. So what the fMRI is showing you, at best, is the average blood flow drawn in by each group of 40,000 or so neurons.

The even bigger problem is temporal resolution. fMRI tracks blood flow, which is both imprecise and comes with a delay of about a second-an eternity in the world of neurons.

Scale: high

Resolution: very low spatial, medium-high temporal

Invasiveness: non-invasive

Dating back almost a century, EEG (electroencephalography) puts an array of electrodes on your head. You know, this whole thing: 33

EEG is definitely technology that will look hilariously primitive to a 2050 person, but for now, it's one of the only tools that can be used with BMIs that's totally non-invasive. EEGs record electrical activity in different regions of the brain, displaying the findings like this: 34

EEG graphs can uncover information about medical issues like epilepsy, track sleep patterns, or be used to determine something like the status of a dose of anesthesia.

And unlike fMRI, EEG has pretty good temporal resolution, getting electrical signals from the brain right as they happen-though the skull blurs the temporal accuracy considerably (bone is a bad conductor).

The major drawback is spatial resolution. EEG has none. Each electrode only records a broad average-a vector sum of the charges from millions or billions of neurons (and a blurred one because of the skull).

Imagine that the brain is a baseball stadium, its neurons are the members of the crowd, and the information we want is, instead of electrical activity, vocal cord activity. In that case, EEG would be like a group of microphones placed outside the stadium, against the stadium's outer walls. You'd be able to hear when the crowd was cheering and maybe predict the type of thing they were cheering about. You'd be able to hear telltale signs that it was between innings and maybe whether or not it was a close game. You could probably detect when something abnormal happened. But that's about it.

Scale: high

Resolution: low spatial, high temporal

Invasiveness: kind of invasive

ECoG (electrocorticography) is a similar idea to EEG, also using surface electrodes-except they put them under the skull, on the surface of the brain. 35

Ick. But effective-at least much more effective than EEG. Without the interference of the skull blurring things, ECoG picks up both higher spatial (about 1cm) and temporal resolution (5 milliseconds). ECoG electrodes can either be placed above or below the dura: 36

Bringing back our stadium analogy, ECoG microphones are inside the stadium and a bit closer to the crowd. So the sound is much crisper than what EEG mics get from outside the stadium, and ECoG mics can better distinguish the sounds of individual sections of the crowd. But the improvement comes at a cost-it requires invasive surgery. In the scheme of invasive surgeries, though, it's not so bad. As one neurosurgeon described to me, "You can slide stuff underneath the dura relatively non-invasively. You still have to make a hole in the head, but it's relatively non-invasive."

Scale: low

Resolution: medium-low spatial, high temporal

Invasiveness: very invasive

Okay here's where we shift from surface electrode discs to microelectrodes-tiny needles surgeons stick into the brain.

Brain surgeon Ben Rapoport described to me how his father (a neurologist) used to make microelectrodes:
When my father was making electrodes, he'd make them by hand. He'd take a very fine wire-like a gold or platinum or iridium wire, that was 10-30 microns in diameter, and he'd insert that wire in a glass capillary tube that was maybe a millimeter in diameter. Then they'd take that piece of glass over a flame and rotate it until the glass became soft. They'd stretch out the capillary tube until it's incredibly thin, and then take it out of the flame and break it. Now the capillary tube is flush with and pinching the wire. The glass is an insulator and the wire is a conductor. So what you end up with is a glass-insulated stiff electrode that is maybe a few 10s of microns at the tip.
Today, while some electrodes are still made by hand, newer techniques use silicon wafers and manufacturing technology borrowed from the integrated circuits industry.

The way local field potentials (LFP) work is simple-you take one of these super thin needles with an electrode tip and stick it one or two millimeters into the cortex. There it picks up the average of the electrical charges from all of the neurons within a certain radius of the electrode.

LFP gives you the not-that-bad spatial resolution of the fMRI combined with the instant temporal resolution of an ECoG. Kind of the best of all the worlds described above when it comes to resolution.

Unfortunately, it does badly on both other criteria.

Unlike fMRI, EEG, and ECoG, microelectrode LFP does not have scale-it only tells you what the little sphere surrounding it is doing. And it's far more invasive, actually entering the brain.

In the baseball stadium, LFP is a single microphone hanging over a single section of seats, picking up a crisp feed of the sounds in that area, and maybe picking out an individual voice for a second here and there-but otherwise only getting the general vibe.

A more recent development is the multielectrode array, which is the same idea as the LFP except it's about 100 LFPs all at once, in a single area of the cortex. A multielectrode array looks like this: 37

A tiny 4mm x 4mm square with 100 tiny silicon electrodes on it. Here's another image where you can see just how sharp the electrodes are-just a few microns across at the very tip: 38
Single-Unit Recording
Scale: tiny

Resolution: super high

Invasiveness: very invasive

To record a broader LFP, the electrode tip is a bit rounded to give the electrode more surface area, and they turn the resistance down with the intent of allowing very faint signals from a wide range of locations to be picked up. The end result is the electrode picks up a chorus of activity from the local field.

Single-unit recording also uses a needle electrode, but they make the tip super sharp and crank up the resistance. This wipes out most of the noise and leaves the electrode picking up almost nothing-until it finds itself so close to a neuron (maybe 50µm away) that the signal from that neuron is strong enough to make it past the electrode's high resistance wall. With distinct signals from one neuron and no background noise, this electrode can now voyeur in on the private life of a single neuron. Lowest possible scale, highest possible resolution.

By the way, you can listen to a neuron fire here (what you're actually hearing is the electro-chemical firing of a neuron, converted to audio).

Some electrodes want to take the relationship to the next level and will go for a technique called the patch clamp, whereby it'll get rid of its electrode tip, leaving just a tiny little tube called a glass pipette, 22 and it'll actually directly assault a neuron by sucking a "patch" of its membrane into the tube, allowing for even finer measurements: 39

A patch clamp also has the benefit that, unlike all the other methods we've discussed, because it's physically touching the neuron, it can not only record but stimulate the neuron, 23 injecting current or holding voltage at a set level to do specific tests (other methods can stimulate neurons, but only entire groups together).

Finally, electrodes can fully defile the neuron and actually penetrate through the membrane, which is called sharp electrode recording. If the tip is sharp enough, this won't destroy the cell-the membrane will actually seal around the electrode, making it very easy to stimulate the neuron or record the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron. But this is a short-term technique-a punctured neuron won't survive long.

In our stadium, a single unit recording is a one-directional microphone clipped to a single crowd member's collar. A patch clamp or sharp recording is a mic in someone's throat, registering the exact movement of their vocal cords. This is a great way to learn about that person's experience at the game, but it also gives you no context, and you can't really tell if the sounds and reactions of that person are representative of what's going on in the game.

But given their limitations, these tools have taught us worlds about the brain and led to the creation of some amazing early BMIs. Here's what's already out there-

The BMIs we already have

In 1969, a researcher named Eberhard Fetz connected a single neuron in a monkey's brain to a dial in front of the monkey's face. The dial would move when the neuron was fired. When the monkey would think in a way that fired the neuron and the dial would move, he'd get a banana-flavored pellet. Over time, the monkey started getting better at the game because he wanted more delicious pellets. The monkey had learned to make the neuron fire and inadvertently became the subject of the first real brain-machine interface.

Progress was slow over the next few decades, but by the mid-90s, things had started to move, and it's been quietly accelerating ever since.

Given that both our understanding of the brain and the electrode hardware we've built are pretty primitive, our efforts have typically focused on building straightforward interfaces to be used with the areas of the brain we understand the best, like the motor cortex and the visual cortex.

And given that human experimentation is only really possible for people who are trying to use BMIs to alleviate an impairment-and because that's currently where the market demand is-our efforts have focused so far almost entirely on restoring lost function to people with disabilities.

The major BMI industries of the future that will give all humans magical superpowers and transform the world are in their fetal stage right now-and we should look at what's being worked on as a set of clues about what the mind-boggling worlds of 2040 and 2060 and 2100 might be like.

Like, check this out:

That's a computer built by Alan Turing in 1950 called the Pilot ACE. Truly cutting edge in its time.

Now check this out:

As you read through the examples below, I want you to think about this analogy-

-and try to imagine what the blank looks like. And we'll come back to the blank later in the post.

Anyway, from everything I've read about and discussed with people in the field, there seem to be three major categories of brain-machine interface being heavily worked on right now:

Early BMI type #1: Using the motor cortex as a remote control

In case you forgot this from 9,000 words ago, the motor cortex is this guy:

All areas of the brain confuse us, but the motor cortex confuses us less than almost all the other areas. And most importantly, it's well-mapped, meaning specific parts of it control specific parts of the body (remember the upsetting homunculus?).

Lift your hand up. Now put it down. See? Your hand is like a little toy drone, and your brain just picked up the motor cortex remote control and used it to make the drone fly up and then back down.

The goal of motor cortex-based BMIs is to tap into the motor cortex, and then when the remote control fires a command, to hear that command and then send it to some kind of machine that can respond to it the way, say, your hand would. A bundle of nerves is the middleman between your motor cortex and your hand. BMIs are the middleman between your motor cortex and a computer. Simple.

One barebones type of interface allows a human-often a person paralyzed from the neck down or someone who has had a limb amputated-to move a cursor on a screen with only their thoughts.

This begins with a 100-pin multielectrode array being implanted in the person's motor cortex. The motor cortex in a paralyzed person usually works just fine-it's just that the spinal cord, which had served as the middleman between the cortex and the body, stopped doing its job. So with the electrode array implanted, researchers have the person try to move their arm in different directions. Even though they can't do that, the motor cortex still fires normally, as if they can.

When someone moves their arm, their motor cortex bursts into a flurry of activity-but each neuron is usually only interested in one type of movement. So one neuron might fire whenever the person moves their arm to the right-but it's bored by other directions and is less active in those cases. That neuron alone, then, could tell a computer when the person wants to move their arm to the right and when they don't. But that's all. But with an electrode array, 100 single-unit electrodes each listen to a different neuron. 24 So when they do testing, they'll ask the person to try to move their arm to the right, and maybe 38 of the 100 electrodes detect their neuron firing. When the person tries to go left with their arm, maybe 41 others fire. After going through a bunch of different movements and directions and speeds, a computer takes the data from the electrodes and synthesizes it into a general understanding of which firing patterns correspond to which movement intentions on an X-Y axis.

Then when they link up that data to a computer screen, the person can use their mind, via "trying" to move the cursor, to really control the cursor. And this actually works. Through the work of motor-cortex-BMI pioneer company BrainGate, here's a guy playing a video game using only his mind.

And if 100 neurons can tell you where they want to move a cursor, why couldn't they tell you when they want to pick up a mug of coffee and take a sip? That's what this quadriplegic woman did:

Another quadriplegic woman flew an F-35 fighter jet in a simulation, and a monkey recently used his mind to ride around in a wheelchair.

And why stop with arms? Brazilian BMI pioneer Miguel Nicolelis and his team built an entire exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to make the opening kick of the World Cup. 25

The Proprioception Blue Box

Moving these kinds of "neuroprosthetics" is all about the recording of neurons, but for these devices to be truly effective, this needs to not be a one-way street, but a loop that includes recording and stimulation pathways. We don't really think about this, but a huge part of your ability to pick up an object is all of the incoming sensory information your hand's skin and muscles send back in (called "proprioception"). In one video I saw, a woman with numbed fingers tried to light a match, and it was almost impossible for her to do it, despite having no other disabilities. And the beginning of this video shows the physical struggles of a man with a perfectly functional motor cortex but impaired proprioception. So for something like a bionic arm to really feel like an arm, and to really be useful, it needs to be able to send sensory information back in.

Stimulating neurons is even harder than recording them. As researcher Flip Sabes explained to me:
If I record a pattern of activity, it doesn't mean I can readily recreate that pattern of activity by just playing it back. You can compare it to the planets in the Solar System. You can watch the planets move around and record their movements. But then if you jumble them all up and later want to recreate the original motion of one of the planets, you can't just take that one planet and put it back into its orbit, because it'll be influenced by all the other planets. Likewise, neurons aren't just working in isolation-so there's a fundamental irreversibility there. On top of that, with all of the axons and dendrites, it's hard to just stimulate the neurons you want to-because when you try, you'll hit a whole jumble of them.
Flip's lab tries to deal with these challenges by getting the brain to help out. It turns out that if you reward a monkey with a succulent sip of orange juice when a single neuron fires, eventually the monkey will learn to make the neuron fire on demand. The neuron could then act as another kind of remote control. This means that normal motor cortex commands are only one possibility as a control mechanism. Likewise, until BMI technology gets good enough to perfect stimulation, you can use the brain's neuroplasticity as a shortcut. If it's too hard to make someone's bionic fingertip touch something and send back information that feels just like the kind of sensation their own fingertip used to give them, the arm could instead send some other signal into the brain. At first, this would seem odd to the patient-but eventually the brain can learn to treat that signal as a new sense of touch. This concept is called "sensory substitution" and makes the brain a collaborator in BMI efforts.

In these developments are the seeds of other future breakthrough technologies-like brain-to-brain communication.

Nicolelis created an experiment where the motor cortex of one rat in Brazil was wired, via the internet, to the motor cortex of another rat in the US. The rat in Brazil was presented with two transparent boxes, each with a lever attached to it, and inside one of the boxes would be a treat. To attempt to get the treat, the rat would press the lever of the box that held the treat. Meanwhile, the rat in the US was in a similar cage with two similar boxes, except unlike the rat in Brazil, the boxes weren't transparent and offered him no information about which of his two levers would yield a treat and which wouldn't. The only info the US rat had were the signals his brain received from the Brazil rat's motor cortex. The Brazil rat had the key knowledge-but the way the experiment worked, the rats only received treats when the US rat pressed the correct lever. If he pulled the wrong one, neither would. The amazing thing is that over time, the rats got better at this and began to work together, almost like a single nervous system-even though neither had any idea the other rat existed. The US rat's success rate at choosing the correct lever with no information would have been 50%. With the signals coming from the Brazil rat's brain, the success rate jumped to 64%. (Here's a video of the rats doing their thing.)

This has even worked, crudely, in people. Two people, in separate buildings, worked together to play a video game. One could see the game, the other had the controller. Using simple EEG headsets, the player who could see the game would, without moving his hand, think about moving his hand to press the "shoot" button on a controller. Because their brains' devices were communicating with each other, the player with the controller would then feel a twitch in his finger and press the shoot button.

Early BMI type #2: Artificial ears and eyes

There are a couple reasons giving sound to the deaf and sight to the blind is among the more manageable BMI categories.

The first is that like the motor cortex, the sensory cortices are parts of the brain we tend to understand pretty well, partly because they too tend to be well-mapped.

The second is that in many early applications, we don't really need to deal with the brain-we can just deal with the place where ears and eyes connect to the brain, since that's often where the impairment is based.

And while the motor cortex stuff was mostly about recording neurons to get information out of the brain, artificial senses go the other way- stimulation of neurons to send information in.

On the ears side of things, recent decades have seen the development of the groundbreaking cochlear implant.

The How Hearing Works Blue Box

When you think you're "hearing" "sound," here's what's actually happening:

What we think of as sound is actually patterns of vibrations in the air molecules around your head. When a guitar string or someone's vocal cords or the wind or anything else makes a sound, it's because it's vibrating, which pushes nearby air molecules into a similar vibration and that pattern expands outward in a sphere, kind of like the surface of water expands outward in a circular ripple when something touches it. 26

Your ear is a machine that converts those air vibrations into electrical impulses. Whenever air (or water, or any other medium whose molecules can vibrate) enters your ear, your ear translates the precise way it's vibrating into an electrical code that it sends into the nerve endings that touch it. This causes those nerves to fire a pattern of action potentials that send the code into your auditory cortex for processing. Your brain receives the information, and we call the experience of receiving that particular type of information "hearing."

Most people who are deaf or hard of hearing don't have a nerve problem or an auditory cortex problem-they usually have an ear problem. Their brain is as ready as anyone else's to turn electrical impulses into hearing-it's just that their auditory cortex isn't receiving any electrical impulses in the first place, because the machine that converts air vibrations into those impulses isn't doing its job.

The ear has a lot of parts, but it's the cochlea in particular that makes the key conversion. When vibrations enter the fluid in the cochlea, it causes thousands of tiny hairs lining the cochlea to vibrate, and the cells those hairs are attached to transform the mechanical energy of the vibrations into electrical signals that then excite the auditory nerve. Here's what it all looks like: 40

The cochlea also sorts the incoming sound by frequency. Here's a cool chart that shows why lower sounds are processed at the end of the cochlea and high sounds are processed at the beginning (and also why there's a minimum and maximum frequency on what the ear can hear): 41

A cochlear implant is a little computer that has a microphone coming out of one end (which sits on the ear) and a wire coming out of the other that connects to an array of electrodes that line the cochlea.

So sound comes into the microphone (the little hook on top of the ear), and goes into the brown thing, which processes the sound to filter out the less useful frequencies. Then the brown thing transmits the information through the skin, through electrical induction, to the computer's other component, which converts the info into electric impulses and sends them into the cochlea. The electrodes filter the impulses by frequency just like the cochlea and stimulate the auditory nerve just like the hairs on the cochlea do. This is what it looks like from the outside:

In other words, an artificial ear, performing the same sound-to-impulses-to-auditory-nerve function the ear does.

Check out what sound sounds like to someone with the implant.

Not great. Why? Because to send sound into the brain with the richness the ear hears with, you'd need 3,500 electrodes. Most cochlear implants have about 16. 27 Crude.

But we're in the Pilot ACE era-so of course it's crude.

Still, today's cochlear implant allows deaf people to hear speech and have conversations, which is a groundbreaking development. 28

Many parents of deaf babies are now having a cochlear implant put in when the baby's about one year old. Like this baby, whose reaction to hearing for the first time is cute.

There's a similar revolution underway in the world of blindness, in the form of the retinal implant.

Blindness is often the result of a retinal disease. When this is the case, a retinal implant can perform a similar function for sight as a cochlear implant does for hearing (though less directly). It performs the normal duties of the eye and hands things off to nerves in the form of electrical impulses, just like the eye does.

A more complicated interface than the cochlear implant, the first retinal implant was approved by the FDA in 2011-the Argus II implant, made by Second Sight. The retinal implant looks like this: 42

And it works like this:

The retinal implant has 60 sensors. The retina has around a million neurons. Crude. But seeing vague edges and shapes and patterns of light and dark sure beats seeing nothing at all. What's encouraging is that you don't need a million sensors to gain a reasonable amount of sight-simulations suggest that 600-1,000 electrodes would be enough for reading and facial recognition.

Early BMI type #3: Deep brain stimulation

Dating back to the late 1980s, deep brain stimulation is yet another crude tool that is also still pretty life-changing for a lot of people.

It's also a type of category of BMI that doesn't involve communication with the outside world-it's about using brain-machine interfaces to treat or enhance yourself by altering something internally.

What happens here is one or two electrode wires, usually with four separate electrode sites, are inserted into the brain, often ending up somewhere in the limbic system. Then a little pacemaker computer is implanted in the upper chest and wired to the electrodes. Like this unpleasant man: 43

The electrodes can then give a little zap when called for, which can do a variety of important things. Like:

Reduce the tremors of people with Parkinson's Disease

Reduce the severity of seizures

Chill people with OCD out

It's also experimentally (not yet FDA approved) been able to mitigate certain kinds of chronic pain like migraines or phantom limb pain, treat anxiety or depression or PTSD, or even be combined with muscle stimulation elsewhere in the body to restore and retrain circuits that were broken down from stroke or a neurological disease.

___________

This is the state of the early BMI industry, and it's the moment when Elon Musk is stepping into it. For him, and for Neuralink, today's BMI industry is Point A. We've spent the whole post so far in the past, building up to the present moment. Now it's time to step into the future-to figure out what Point B is and how we're going to get there.

Part 4: Neuralink's Challenge

Having already written about two of Elon Musk's companies- Tesla and SpaceX -I think I understand his formula. It looks like this:

And his initial thinking about a new company always starts on the right and works its way left.

He decides that some specific change in the world will increase the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. He knows that large-scale world change happens quickest when the whole world-the Human Colossus-is working on it. And he knows that the Human Colossus will work toward a goal if (and only if) there's an economic forcing function in place-if it's a good business decision to spend resources innovating toward that goal.

Often, before a booming industry starts booming, it's like a pile of logs-it has all the ingredients of a fire and it's ready to go-but there's no match. There's some technological shortcoming that's preventing the industry from taking off.

So when Elon builds a company, its core initial strategy is usually to create the match that will ignite the industry and get the Human Colossus working on the cause. This, in turn, Elon believes, will lead to developments that will change the world in the way that increases the likelihood of humanity having the best possible future. But you have to look at his companies from a zoomed-out perspective to see all of this. If you don't, you'll mistake what they do as their business for what they do -when in fact, what they do as their business is usually a mechanism to sustain the company while it innovates to try to make that critical match.

Back when I was working on the Tesla and SpaceX posts, I asked Elon why he went into engineering and not science, and he explained that when it comes to progress, "engineering is the limiting factor." In other words, the progress of science, business, and industry are all at the whim of the progress of engineering. If you look at history, this makes sense-behind each of the greatest revolutions in human progress is an engineering breakthrough. A match.

So to understand an Elon Musk company, you need to think about the match he's trying to create-along with three other variables:

I know what's in these boxes with the other companies:

And when I started trying to figure out what Neuralink was all about, I knew those were the variables I needed to fill in. At the time, I had only had the chance to get a very vague idea of one of the variables-that the goal of the company was "to accelerate the advent of a whole-brain interface." Or what I've come to think of as a wizard hat.

I had a lot of questions.

Luckily, I was on my way to San Francisco, where I had plans to sit down with half of Neuralink's founding team and be the dumbest person in the room.

The I'm Not Being Self-Deprecating I Really Was Definitely the Dumbest Person in the Room Just Look at This Shit Blue Box

The Neuralink team:

Paul Merolla, who spent the last seven years as the lead chip designer at IBM on their SyNAPSE program, where he led the development of the TrueNorth chip-one of the largest CMOS devices ever designed by transistor count nbd. Paul told me his field was called neuromorphic, where the goal is to design transistor circuits based on principles of brain architecture.

Vanessa Tolosa, Neuralink's microfabrication expert and one of the world's foremost researchers on biocompatible materials. Vanessa's work involves designing biocompatible materials based on principles from the integrated circuits industry.

Max Hodak, who worked on the development of some groundbreaking BMI technology at Miguel Nicolelis's lab at Duke while also commuting across the country twice a week in college to run Transcriptic, the "robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences" he founded.

DJ Seo, who while at UC Berkeley in his mid-20s designed a cutting-edge new BMI concept called neural dust -tiny ultrasound sensors that could provide a new way to record brain activity.

Ben Rapoport, Neuralink's surgery expert, and a top neurosurgeon himself. But he also has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, allowing him to see his work as a neurosurgeon "through the lens of implantable devices."

Tim Hanson, whom a colleague described as "one of the best all-around engineers on the planet" and who self-taught himself enough about materials science and microfabrication methods to develop some of the core technology that'll be used at Neuralink.

Flip Sabes, a leading researcher whose lab at UCSFhas pioneered new ground in BMIs by combining "cortical physiology, computational and theoretical modeling, and human psychophysics and physiology."

Tim Gardner, a leading researcher at BU, whose lab works on implanting BMIs in birds, in order to study "how complex songs are assembled from elementary neural units" and learn about "the relationships between patterns of neural activity on different time-scales." Both Tim and Flip have left tenured positions to join the Neuralink team-pretty good testament to the promise they believe this company has.

And then there's Elon, both as their CEO and a fellow team member. Elon being CEO makes this different from other recent things he's started and puts Neuralink on the top tier for him, where only SpaceX and Tesla have lived. When it comes to neuroscience, Elon has the least technical knowledge on the team-but he also started SpaceX without very much technical knowledge and quickly became a certifiable rocket science expert by reading and by asking questions of the experts on the team. That'll probably happen again here. (And for good reason-he pointed out: "Without a strong technical understanding, I think it's hard to make the right decisions.")

I asked Elon about how he brought this team together. He said that he met with literally over 1,000 people in order to assemble this group, and that part of the challenge was the large number of totally separate areas of expertise required when you're working on technology that involves neuroscience, brain surgery, microscopic electronics, clinical trials, etc. Because it was such a cross-disciplinary area, he looked for cross-disciplinary experts. And you can see that in those bios-everyone brings their own unique crossover combination to a group that together has the rare ability to think as a single mega-expert. Elon also wanted to find people who were totally on board with the zoomed-out mission-who were more focused on industrial results than producing white papers. Not an easy group to assemble.

But there they were, sitting around the table looking at me, as it hit me 40 seconds in that I should have done a lot more research before coming here.

They took the hint and dumbed it down about four notches, and as the discussion went on, I started to wrap my head around things. Throughout the next few weeks, I met with each of the remaining Neuralink founders as well, each time playing the role of the dumbest person in the room. In these meetings, I focused on trying to form a comprehensive picture of the challenges at hand and what the road to a wizard hat might look like. I really wanted to understand these two boxes:

The first one was easy. The business side of Neuralink is a brain-machine interface development company. They want to create cutting-edge BMIs-what one of them referred to as "micron-sized devices." Doing this will support the growth of the company while also providing a perfect vehicle for putting their innovations into practice (the same way SpaceX uses their launches both to sustain the company and experiment with their newest engineering developments).
We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years.
As for what kind of interface they're planning to work on first, here's what Elon said:

The second box was a lot hazier. It seems obvious to us today that using steam engine technology to harness the power of fire was the thing that had to happen to ignite the Industrial Revolution. But if you talked to someone in 1760 about it, they would have had a lot less clarity-on exactly which hurdles they were trying to get past, what kinds of innovations would allow them to leap over those hurdles, or how long any of this would take. And that's where we are here-trying to figure out what the match looks like that will ignite the neuro revolution and how to create it.

The starting place for a discussion about innovation is a discussion about hurdles-what are you even trying to innovate past? In Neuralink's case, a whole lot of things. But given that, here too, engineering will likely prove to be the limiting factor, here are some seemingly large challenges that probably won't end up being the major roadblock:

Pew recently conducted a survey asking Americans about which future biotechnologies give them the shits the most. It turns out BMIs worry Americans even more than gene editing: 44
To a scientist, to think about changing the fundamental nature of life-creating viruses, eugenics, etc.-it raises a specter that many biologists find quite worrisome, whereas the neuroscientists that I know, when they think about chips in the brain, it doesn't seem that foreign, because we already have chips in the brain. We have deep brain stimulation to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease, we have early trials of chips to restore vision, we have the cochlear implant-so to us it doesn't seem like that big of a stretch to put devices into a brain to read information out and to read information back in.
Neuralink co-founder Flip Sabes doesn't get it.

And after learning all about chips in the brain, I agree-and when Americans eventually learn about it, I think they'll change their minds.

History supports this prediction. People were super timid about Lasik eye surgery when it first became a thing-20 years ago, 20,000 people a year had the procedure done. Then everyone got used to it and now 2,000,000 people a year get laser eye surgery. Similar story with pacemakers. And defibrillators. And organ transplants-which people at first considered a freakish Frankenstein-esque concept. Brain implants will probably be the same story.

Our non-understanding of the brain
If it were a prerequisite to understand the brain in order to interact with the brain in a substantive way, we'd have trouble. But it's possible to decode all of those things in the brain without truly understanding the dynamics of the computation in the brain. Being able to read it out is an engineering problem. Being able to understand its origin and the organization of the neurons in fine detail in a way that would satisfy a neuroscientist to the core-that's a separate problem. And we don't need to solve all of those scientific problems in order to make progress.
You know, the whole "if understanding the brain is a mile, we're currently three inches in" thing. Flip weighed in on this topic too:
The flip side of saying, "We don't need to understand the brain to make engineering progress," is that making engineering progress will almost certainly advance our scientific knowledge-kind of like the way Alpha Go ended up teaching the world's best players better strategies for the game. Then this scientific progress can lead to more engineering progress. The engineering and the science are gonna ratchet each other up here.
If we can just use engineering to get neurons to talk to computers, we'll have done our job, and machine learning can do much of the rest. Which then, ironically, will teach us about the brain. As Flip points out:

Tesla and SpaceX are both stepping on some very big toes (like the auto industry, the oil and gas industry, and the military-industrial complex). Big toes don't like being stepped on, so they'll usually do whatever they can to hinder the stepper's progress. Luckily, Neuralink doesn't really have this problem. There aren't any massive industries that Neuralink is disrupting (at least not in the foreseeable future-an eventual neuro revolution would disrupt almost every industry).

Neuralink's hurdles are technology hurdles-and there are many. But two challenges stand out as the largest-challenges that, if conquered, may be impactful enough to trigger all the other hurdles to fall and totally change the trajectory of our future.

Major Hurdle 1: Bandwidth

There have never been more than a couple hundred electrodes in a human brain at once. When it comes to vision, that equals a super low-res image. When it comes to motor, that limits the possibilities to simple commands with little control. When it comes to your thoughts, a few hundred electrodes won't be enough to communicate more than the simplest spelled-out message.

We need higher bandwidth if this is gonna become a big thing. Way higher bandwidth.

The Neuralink team threw out the number "one million simultaneously recorded neurons" when talking about an interface that could really change the world. I've also heard 100,000 as a number that would allow for the creation of a wide range of incredibly useful BMIs with a variety of applications.

Early computers had a similar problem. Primitive transistors took up a lot of space and didn't scale easily. Then in 1959 came the integrated circuit-the computer chip. Now there was a way to scale the number of transistors in a computer, and Moore's Law-the concept that the number of transistors that can fit onto a computer chip doubles every 18 months-was born.

Until the 90s, electrodes for BMIs were all made by hand. Then we started figuring out how to manufacture those little 100-electrode multielectrode arrays using conventional semiconductor technologies. Neuralink co-founder Ben Rapoport believes that "the move from hand manufacturing to Utah Array electrodes was the first hint that BMIs were entering a realm where Moore's Law could become relevant."

This is everything for the industry's potential. Our maximum today is a couple hundred electrodes able to measure about 500 neurons at once-which is either super far from a million or really close, depending on the kind of growth pattern we're in. If we add 500 more neurons to our maximum every 18 months, we'll get to a million in the year 5017. If we double our total every 18 months, like we do with computer transistors, we'll get to a million in the year 2034.

Currently, we seem to be somewhere in between. Ian Stevenson and Konrad Kording published a paper that looked at the maximum number of neurons that could be simultaneously recorded at various points throughout the last 50 years (in any animal), and put the results on this graph: 45

Sometimes called Stevenson's Law, this research suggests that the number of neurons we can simultaneously record seems to consistently double every 7.4 years. If that rate continues, it'll take us till the end of this century to reach a million, and until 2225 to record every neuron in the brain and get our totally complete wizard hat.

Whatever the equivalent of the integrated circuit is for BMIs isn't here yet, because 7.4 years is too big a number to start a revolution. The breakthrough here isn't the device that can record a million neurons-it's the paradigm shift that makes the future of that graph look more like Moore's Law and less like Stevenson's Law. Once that happens, a million neurons will follow.

Major Hurdle 2: Implantation

BMIs won't sweep the world as long as you need to go in for skull-opening surgery to get involved.

This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word "non-invasive" or "non-invasively" came out of someone's mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team.

On top of being both a major barrier to entry and a major safety issue, invasive brain surgery is expensive and in limited supply. Elon talked about an eventual BMI implantation process that could be automated: "The machine to accomplish this would need to be something like Lasik, an automated process-because otherwise you just get constrained by the limited number of neural surgeons, and the costs are very high. You'd need a Lasik-like machine ultimately to be able to do this at scale."

Making BMIs high-bandwidth alone would be a huge deal, as would developing a way to non-invasively implant devices. But doing both would start a revolution.

Today's BMI patients have a wire coming out of their head. In the future, that certainly won't fly. Neuralink plans to work on devices that will be wireless. But that brings a lot of new challenges with it. You'll now need your device to be able to send and receive a lot of data wirelessly. Which means the implant also has to take care of things like signal amplification, analog-to-digital conversion, and data compression on its own. Oh and it needs to be powered inductively.

Another big one-biocompatibility. Delicate electronics tend to not do well inside a jello ball. And the human body tends to not like having foreign objects in it. But the brain interfaces of the future are intended to last forever without any problems. This means that the device will likely need to be hermetically sealed and robust enough to survive decades of the oozing and shifting of the neurons around it. And the brain-which treats today's devices like invaders and eventually covers them in scar tissue-will need to somehow be tricked into thinking the device is just a normal brain part doing its thing. 29

Then there's the space issue. Where exactly are you gonna put your device that can interface with a million neurons in a skull that's already dealing with making space for 100 billion neurons? A million electrodes using today's multielectrode arrays would be the size of a baseball. So further miniaturization is another dramatic innovation to add to the list.

There's also the fact that today's electrodes are mostly optimized for simple electrical recording or simple electrical stimulation. If we really want an effective brain interface, we'll need something other than single-function, stiff electrodes-something with the mechanical complexity of neural circuits, that can both record and stimulate, and that can interact with neurons chemically and mechanically as well as electrically.

And just say all of this comes together perfectly-a high-bandwidth, long-lasting, biocompatible, bidirectional communicative, non-invasively-implanted device. Now we can speak back and forth with a million neurons at once! Except this little thing where we actually don't know how to talk to neurons. It's complicated enough to decode the static-like firings of 100 neurons, but all we're really doing is learning what a set of specific firings corresponds to and matching them up to simple commands. That won't work with millions of signals. It's like how Google Translate essentially uses two dictionaries to swap words from one dictionary to another-which is very different than understanding language. We'll need a pretty big leap in machine learning before a computer will be able to actually know a language, and we'll need just as big a leap for machines to understand the language of the brain-because humans certainly won't be learning to decipher the code of millions of simultaneously chattering neurons.

How easy does colonizing Mars seem right now.

But I bet the telephone and the car and the moon landing would have seemed like insurmountable technological challenges to people a few decades earlier. Just like I bet this-

-would have seemed utterly inconceivable to people at the time of this:

And yet, there it is in your pocket. If there's one thing we should learn from the past, it's that there will always be ubiquitous technology of the future that's inconceivable to people of the past. We don't know which technologies that seem positively impossible to us will turn out to be ubiquitous later in our lives-but there will be some. People always underestimate the Human Colossus.

If everyone you know in 40 years has electronics in their skull, it'll be because a paradigm shift took place that caused a fundamental shift in this industry. That shift is what the Neuralink team will try to figure out. Other teams are working on it too, and some cool ideas are being developed:

Current BMI innovations

A team at the University of Illinois is developing an interface made of silk: 46

Silk can be rolled up into a thin bundle and inserted into the brain relatively non-invasively. There, it would theoretically spread out around the brain and melt into the contours like shrink wrap. On the silk would be flexible silicon transistor arrays.

In his TEDx Talk, Hong Yeo demonstrated an electrode array printed on his skin, like a temporary tattoo, and researchers say this kind of technique could potentially be used on the brain: 47

Another group is working on a kind of nano-scale, electrode-lined neural mesh so tiny it can be injected into the brain with a syringe: 48

For scale-that red tube on the right is the tip of a syringe. Extreme Tech has a nice graphic illustrating the concept:

Other non-invasive techniques involve going in through veins and arteries. Elon mentioned this: "The least invasive way would be something that comes in like a hard stent like through a femoral artery and ultimately unfolds in the vascular system to interface with the neurons. Neurons use a lot of energy, so there's basically a road network to every neuron."

DARPA, the technology innovation arm of the US military, 30 through their recently funded BRAIN program, is working on tiny, "closed-loop" neural implants that could replace medication. 49

A second DARPA project aims to fit a million electrodes into a device the size of two nickels stacked.

Another idea being worked on is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which a magnetic coil outside the head can create electrical pulses inside the brain. 50

The pulses can stimulate targeted neuron areas, providing a type of deep brain stimulation that's totally non-invasive.

One of Neuralink's co-founders, DJ Seo, led an effort to design an even cooler interface called " neural dust." Neural dust refers to tiny, 100µm silicon sensors (about the same as the width of a hair) that would be sprinkled through the cortex. Right nearby, above the pia, would be a 3mm-sized device that could communicate with the dust sensors via ultrasound.

This is another example of the innovation benefits that come from an interdisciplinary team. DJ explained to me that "there are technologies that are not really thought about in this domain, but we can bring in some principles of their work." He says that neural dust is inspired both by microchip technology and RFID (the thing that allows hotel key cards to communicate with the door lock without making physical contact) principles. And you can easily see the multi-field influence in how it works: 51

Others are working on even more out-there ideas, like optogenetics (where you inject a virus that attaches to a brain cell, causing it to thereafter be stimulated by light) or even using carbon nanotubes-a million of which could be bundled together and sent to the brain via the bloodstream.

These people are all working on this arrow:

It's a relatively small group right now, but when the breakthrough spark happens, that'll quickly change. Developments will begin to happen rapidly. Brain interface bandwidth will get better and better as the procedures to implant them become simpler and cheaper. Public interest will pick up. And when public interest picks up, the Human Colossus notices an opportunity-and then the rate of development skyrockets. Just like the breakthroughs in computer hardware caused the software industry to explode, major industries will pop up working on cutting-edge machines and intelligent apps to be used in conjunction with brain interfaces, and you'll tell some little kid in 2052 all about how when you grew up, no one could do any of the things she can do with her brain, and she'll be bored.

I tried to get the Neuralink team to talk about 2052 with me. I wanted to know what life was going to be like once this all became a thing. I wanted to know what went in the [Pilot ACE : iPhone 7 :: Early BMIs : ____] blank. But it wasn't easy-this was a team built specifically because of their focus on concrete results, not hype, and I was doing the equivalent of talking to people in the late 1700s who were feverishly trying to create a breakthrough steam engine and prodding them about when they thought there would be airplanes.

But I'd keep pulling teeth until they'd finally talk about their thoughts on the far future to get my hand off their tooth. I also focused a large portion of my talks with Elon on the far future possibilities and had other helpful discussions with Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist friend of mine who works on BMIs and thinks a lot about the long-term outlook. Finally, one reluctant-to-talk-about-his-predictions Neuralink team member told me that of course, he and his colleagues were dreamers-otherwise they wouldn't be doing what they're doing-and that many of them were inspired to get into this industry by science fiction. He recommended I talk to Ramez Naam, writer of the popular Nexus Trilogy, a series all about the future of BMIs, and also someone with a hard tech background that includes 19 software-related patents. So I had a chat with Ramez to round out the picture and ask him the 435 remaining questions I had about everything.

And I came out of all of it utterly blown away. I wrote once about how I think if you went back to 1750-a time when there was no electricity or motorized vehicles or telecommunication-and retrieved, say, George Washington, and brought him to today and showed him our world, he'd be so shocked by everything that he'd die. You'd have killed George Washington and messed everything up. Which got me thinking about the concept of how many years one would need to go into the future such that the ensuing shock from the level of progress would kill you. I called it a Die Progress Unit, or DPU.

Ever since the Human Colossus was born, our world has had a weird property to it-it gets more magical as time goes on. That's why DPUs are a thing. And because advancement begets more rapid advancement, the trend is that as time passes, the DPUs get shorter. For George Washington, a DPU was a couple hundred years, which is outrageously short in the scheme of human history. But we now live in a time where things are moving so fast that we might experience one or even multiple DPUs in our lifetime. The amount that changed between 1750 and 2017 might happen again between now and another time when you're still alive. This is a ridiculous time to be alive-it's just hard for us to notice because we live life so zoomed in.

Anyway, I think about DPUs a lot and I always wonder what it would feel like to go forward in a time machine and experience what George would experience coming here. What kind of future could blow my mind so hard that it would kill me? We can talk about things like AI and gene editing-and I have no doubt that progress in those areas could make me die of shock-but it's always, "Who knows what it'll be like!" Never a descriptive picture.

I think I might finally have a descriptive picture of a piece of our shocking future. Let me paint it for you.

The budding industry of brain-machine interfaces is the seed of a revolution that will change just about everything. But in many ways, the brain-interface future isn't really a new thing that's happening. If you take a step back, it looks more like the next big chapter in a trend that's been going on for a long time. Language took forever to turn into writing, which then took forever to turn into printing, and that's where things were when George Washington was around. Then came electricity and the pace picked up. Telephone. Radio. Television. Computers. And just like that, everyone's homes became magical. Then phones became cordless. Then mobile. Computers went from being devices for work and games to windows into a digital world we all became a part of. Then phones and computers merged into an everything device that brought the magic out of our homes and put it into our hands. And on our wrists. We're now in the early stages of a virtual and augmented reality revolution that will wrap the magic around our eyes and ears and bring our whole being into the digital world.

You don't need to be a futurist to see where this is going.

Magic has worked its way from industrial facilities to our homes to our hands and soon it'll be around our heads. And then it'll take the next natural step. The magic is heading into our brains.

It will happen by way of a "whole-brain interface," or what I've been calling a wizard hat-a brain interface so complete, so smooth, so biocompatible, and so high-bandwidth that it feels as much a part of you as your cortex and limbic system. A whole-brain interface would give your brain the ability to communicate wirelessly with the cloud, with computers, and with the brains of anyone with a similar interface in their head. This flow of information between your brain and the outside world would be so effortless, it would feel similar to the thinking that goes on in your head today. And though we've used the term brain-machine interface so far, I kind of think of a BMI as a specific brain interface to be used for a specific purpose, and the term doesn't quite capture the everything-of-everything concept of the whole-brain interface. So I'll call that a wizard hat instead.
1) The intensely mind-bending idea 2) The super ridiculously intensely mind-bending idea
Now, to fully absorb the implications of having a wizard hat installed in your head and what that would change about you, you'll need to wrap your head around (no pun intended) two things:

We'll tackle #1 in this section and save #2 for the last section after you've had time to absorb #1.

Elon calls the whole-brain interface and its many capabilities a "digital tertiary layer," a term that has two levels of meaning that correspond to our two mind-bending ideas above.

The first meaning gets at the idea of physical brain parts. We discussed three layers of brain parts-the brain stem (run by the frog), the limbic system (run by the monkey), and the cortex (run by the rational thinker). We were being thorough, but for the rest of this post, we're going to leave the frog out of the discussion, since he's entirely functional and lives mostly behind the scenes.

When Elon refers to a "digital tertiary layer," he's considering our existing brain having two layers-our animal limbic system (which could be called our primary layer) and our advanced cortex (which could be called our secondary layer). The wizard hat interface, then, would be our tertiary layer-a new physical brain part to complement the other two.
We already have a digital tertiary layer in a sense, in that you have your computer or your phone or your applications. You can ask a question via Google and get an answer instantly. You can access any book or any music. With a spreadsheet, you can do incredible calculations. If you had an Empire State building filled with people-even if they had calculators, let alone if they had to do it with a pencil and paper-one person with a laptop could outdo the Empire State Building filled with people with calculators. You can video chat with someone in freaking Timbuktu for free. This would've gotten you burnt for witchcraft in the old days. You can record as much video with sound as you want, take a zillion pictures, have them tagged with who they are and when it took place. You can broadcast communications through social media to millions of people simultaneously for free. These are incredible superpowers that the President of the United States didn't have twenty years ago. The thing that people, I think, don't appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You're already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You're already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, "how long do you want to be away from your phone?" and-particularly if you're a teenager or in your 20s-even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it's like missing limb syndrome. I think people-they're already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.
If thinking about this concept is giving you the willies, Elon has news for you:

This is a hard point to really absorb, because we don't feel like cyborgs. We feel like humans who use devices to do things. But think about your digital self-you when you're interacting with someone on the internet or over FaceTime or when you're in a YouTube video. Digital you is fully you-as much as in-person you is you-right? The only difference is that you're not there in person-you're using magic powers to send yourself to somewhere far away, at light speed, through wires and satellites and electromagnetic waves. The difference is the medium.

Before language, there wasn't a good way to get a thought from your brain into my brain. Then early humans invented the technology of language, transforming vocal cords and ears into the world's first communication devices and air as the first communication medium. We use these devices every time we talk to each other in person. It goes:

Then we built upon that with another leap, inventing a second layer of devices, with its own medium, allowing us to talk long distance:

Or maybe:

In that sense, your phone is as much "you" as your vocal cords or your ears or your eyes. All of these things are simply tools to move thoughts from brain to brain-so who cares if the tool is held in your hand, your throat, or your eye sockets? The digital age has made us a dual entity-a physical creature who interacts with its physical environment using its biological parts and a digital creature whose digital devices-whose digital parts -allow it to interact with the digital world.

But because we don't think of it like that, we'd consider someone with a phone in their head or throat a cyborg and someone else with a phone in their hand, pressed up against their head, not a cyborg. Elon's point is that the thing that makes a cyborg a cyborg is their capabilities-not from which side of the skull those capabilities are generated.
You're already digitally superhuman. The thing that would change is the interface-having a high-bandwidth interface to your digital enhancements. The thing is that today, the interface all necks down to this tiny straw, which is, particularly in terms of output, it's like poking things with your meat sticks, or using words-either speaking or tapping things with fingers. And in fact, output has gone backwards. It used to be, in your most frequent form, output would be ten-finger typing. Now, it's like, two-thumb typing. That's crazy slow communication. We should be able to improve that by many orders of magnitude with a direct neural interface.
We're already a cyborg, we already have superpowers, and we already spend a huge part of our lives in the digital world. And when you think of it like that, you realize how obvious it is to want to upgrade the medium that connects us to that world. This is the change Elon believes is actually happening when the magic goes into our brains:

In other words, putting our technology into our brains isn't about whether it's good or bad to become cyborgs. It's that we are cyborgs and we will continue to be cyborgs-so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.

A whole-brain interface is that upgrade. It changes us from creatures whose primary and secondary layers live inside their heads and whose tertiary layer lives in their pocket, in their hand, or on their desk-

-to creatures whose three layers all live together.

Your life is full of devices, including the one you're currently using to read this. A wizard hat makes your brain into the device, allowing your thoughts to go straight from your head into the digital world.

Which doesn't only revolutionize human- computer communication.

Right now humans communicate with each other like this:

And that's how it's been ever since we could communicate. But in a wizard hat world, it would look more like this:

Elon always emphasizes bandwidth when he talks about Neuralink's wizard hat goals. Interface bandwidth allows incoming images to be HD, incoming sound to be hi-fi, and motor movement commands to be tightly controlled-but it's also a huge factor in communication. If information were a milkshake, bandwidth would be the width of the straw. Today, the bandwidth-of-communication graph looks something like this:

So computers can suck up the milkshake through a giant pipe, a human thinking would be using a large, pleasant-to-use straw, while language would be a frustratingly tiny coffee stirrer straw and typing (let alone texting) would be like trying to drink a milkshake through a syringe needle-you might be able to get a drop out once a minute.

Moran Cerf has gathered data on the actual bandwidth of different parts of the nervous system and on this graph, he compares them to equivalent bandwidths in the computer world:

You can see here on Moran's graph that the disparity in bandwidth between the ways we communicate and our thinking (which is at 30 bits/second on this graph) is even starker than my graph above depicts.

But making our brains the device cuts out those tiny straws, turning all of these:

To this:

Which preserves all the meaning with none of the fuss-and changes the graph to this:
There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That's what language is-your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it's got to listen as well, and decompress what's coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you're doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you're simultaneously trying to model the other person's mind state to understand where they're coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they're trying to communicate to you. ... If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person.
We'd still be using straws, but far bigger, more effective ones.

But it's not just about the speed of communication. As Elon points out, it's about the nuance and accuracy of communication as well:

This makes sense-nuance is like a high-resolution thought, which makes the file simply too big to transfer quickly through a coffee straw. The coffee straw gives you two bad options when it comes to nuance: take a lot of time saying a lot of words to really depict the nuanced thought or imagery you want to convey to me, or save time by using succinct language-but inevitably fail to transfer over the nuance. Compounding the effect is the fact that language itself is a low-resolution medium. A word is simply an approximation of a thought-buckets that a whole category of similar-but-distinct thoughts can all be shoved into. If I watch a horror movie and want to describe it to you in words, I'm stuck with a few simple low-res buckets-"scary" or "creepy" or "chilling" or "intense." My actual impression of that movie is very specific and not exactly like any other movie I've seen-but the crude tools of language force my brain to "round to the nearest bucket" and choose the word that most closely resembles my actual impression, and that's the information you'll receive from me. You won't receive the thought-you'll receive the bucket-and now you'll have to guess which of the many nuanced impressions that all approximate to that bucket is the most similar to my impression of the movie. You'll decompress my description-"scary as shit"-into a high-res, nuanced thought that you associate with "scary as shit," which will inevitably be based on your own experience watching other horror movies, and your own personality. The end result is that a lot has been lost in translation-which is exactly what you'd expect when you try to transfer a high-res file over a low-bandwidth medium, quickly, using low-res tools. That's why Elon calls language data transfer "lossy."

We do the best we can with these limitations-and over time, we've supplemented language with slightly higher-resolution formats like video to better convey nuanced imagery, or music to better convey nuanced emotion. But compared to the richness and uniqueness of the ideas in our heads, and the large-bandwidth straw our internal thoughts flow through, all human-to-human communication is very lossy.

Thinking about the phenomenon of communication as what it is-brains trying to share things with each other-you see the history of communication not as this:

As much as this:

Or it could be put this way:

It really may be that the second major era of communication-the 100,000-year Era of Indirect Communication-is in its very last moments. If we zoom out on the timeline, it's possible the entire last 150 years, during which we've suddenly been rapidly improving our communication media, will look to far-future humans like one concept: the transition from Era 2 to Era 3. We might be living on the line that divides timeline sections.

And because indirect communication requires third-party body parts or digital parts, the end of Era 2 may be looked back upon as the era of physical devices. In an era where your brain is the device, there will be no need to carry anything around. You'll have your body and, if you want, clothes-and that's it.

When Elon thinks about wizard hats, this is usually the stuff he's thinking about-communication bandwidth and resolution. And we'll explore why in Part 6 of this post.

First, let's dig into the mind-boggling concept of your brain becoming a device and talk about what a wizard hat world might be like.

___________

One thing to keep in mind as we think about all of this is that none of it will take you by surprise. You won't go from having nothing in your brain to a digital tertiary layer in your head, just like people didn't go from the Apple IIGS to using Tinder overnight. The Wizard Era will come gradually, and by the time the shift actually begins to happen, we'll all be very used to the technology, and it'll seem normal.

Supporting this point is the fact the staircase up to the Wizard Era has already started, and you haven't even noticed. But there are thousands of people currently walking around with electrodes in their brain, like those with cochlear implants, retinal implants, and deep brain implants-all benefiting from early BMIs.
The first use of the technology will be to repair brain injuries as a result of stroke or cutting out a cancer lesion, where somebody's fundamentally lost a certain cognitive element. It could help with people who are quadriplegics or paraplegics by providing a neural shunt from the motor cortex down to where the muscles are activated. It can help with people who, as they get older, have memory problems and can't remember the names of their kids, through memory enhancement, which could allow them to function well to a much later time in life-the medically advantageous elements of this for dealing with mental disablement of one kind or another, which of course happens to all of us when we get old enough, are very significant.
The next few steps on the staircase will continue to focus on restoring lost function in different parts of the body-the first people to have their lives transformed by digital brain technology will be the disabled. As specialized BMIs serve more and more forms of disability, the concept of brain implants will work its way in from the fringes and become something we're all used to-just like no one blinks an eye when you say your friend just got Lasik surgery or your grandmother just got a pacemaker installed.

Elon talks about some types of people early BMIs could help:

As someone who lost a grandfather to dementia five years before losing him to death, I'm excited to hear this.

And as interface bandwidth improves, disabilities that hinder millions today will start to drop like flies. The concepts of complete blindness and deafness-whether centered in the sensory organs or in the brain 31 -are already on the way out. And with enough time, perfect vision or hearing will be restorable.

Prosthetic limbs-and eventually sleek, full-body exoskeletons underneath your clothes-will work so well, providing both outgoing motor functions and an incoming sense of touch, that paralysis or amputations will only have a minor long-term effect on people's lives.

In Alzheimer's patients, memories themselves are often not lost-only the bridge to those memories. Advanced BMIs could help restore that bridge or serve as a new one.

While this is happening, BMIs will begin to emerge that people without disabilities want. The very early adopters will probably be pretty rich. But so were the early cell phone adopters. 52

That's Gordon Gekko, and that 1983, two-pound cell phone cost almost $9,000 in today's dollars. And now over half of living humans own a mobile phone-all of them far less shitty than Gordon Gekko's.

As mobile phones got cheaper, and better, they went from new and fancy and futuristic to ubiquitous. As we go down the same road with brain interfaces, things are going to get really cool.

Based on what I learned from my conversations with Elon, Ramez, and a dozen neuroscientists, let's look at what the world might look like in a few decades. The timeline is uncertain, including the order in which the below developments may become a reality. And, of course, some of the below predictions are sure to be way off the mark, just as there will be other developments in this field that won't be mentioned here because people today literally can't imagine them yet.

But some version of a lot of this stuff probably will happen, at some point, and a lot of it could be in your lifetime.

Looking at all the predictions I heard, they seemed to fall into two broad categories: communication capabilities and internal enhancements.

The Wizard Era: Communication

"Communication" in this section can mean human-to-human or human-to-computer. Motor communication is all about human-to-computer-the whole "motor cortex as remote control" thing from earlier, but now the unbelievably rad version.

Your car (or whatever people use for transportation at that point) will pull up to your house and your mind will open the car door. You'll walk up to the house and your mind will unlock and open the front door (all doors at that point will be built with sensors to receive motor cortex commands). You'll think about wanting coffee and the coffee maker will get that going. As you head to the fridge the door will open and after getting what you need it'll close as you walk away. When it's time for bed, you'll decide you want the heat turned down and the lights turned off, and those systems will feel you make that decision and adjust themselves.

None of this stuff will take any effort or thought-we'll all get very good at it and it'll feel as automatic and subconscious as moving your eyes to read this sentence does to you now.

People will play the piano with their thoughts. And do building construction. And steer vehicles. In fact, today, if you're driving somewhere and something jumps out in the road in front of you, what neuroscientists know is that your brain sees it and begins to react well before your consciousness knows what's going on or your arms move to steer out of the way. But when your brain is the one steering the car, you'll have swerved out of the way before you even realize what happened.

Thought communication
If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn't need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that's difficult to conceive of right now.
This is what we discussed up above-but you have to resist the natural instinct to equate a thought conversation with a normal language conversation where you simply hear each other's voices in your head. As we discussed, words are compressed approximations of uncompressed thoughts, so why would you ever bother with any of that, or deal with lossiness, if you didn't have to? When you watch a movie, your head is buzzing with thoughts-but do you have a compressed spoken word dialogue going on in your head? Probably not-you're just thinking. Thought conversations will be like that.

Elon says:

That's the thing-it's difficult to really understand what it would be like to think with someone. We've never been able to try. We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that's all we can imagine.

Even weirder is the concept of a group thinking together. This is what a group brainstorm could look like in the Wizard Era.

That type of communication would have a huge impact on the pace of innovation, as scientists and engineers could work more fluidly together. And it's just as likely to have a transformative effect on the public sphere, in the same way that email, blogs, and Twitter have successively changed public discourse.
And of course, they wouldn't need to be in the same room. This group could have been in four different countries while this was happening-with no external devices in sight.

Ramez has written about the effect group thinking might have on the world:

The idea of collaboration today is supposed to be two or more brains working together to come up with things none of them could have on their own. And a lot of the time, it works pretty well-but when you consider the "lost in transmission" phenomenon that happens with language, you realize how much more effective group thinking would be.

I asked Elon a question that pops into everyone's mind when they first hear about thought communication:

"So, um, will everyone be able to know what I'm thinking?"

He assured me they would not. "People won't be able to read your thoughts-you would have to will it. If you don't will it, it doesn't happen. Just like if you don't will your mouth to talk, it doesn't talk." Phew.

You can also think with a computer. Not just to issue a command, but to actually brainstorm something with a computer. You and a computer could strategize something together. You could compose a piece of music together. Ramez talked about using a computer as an imagination collaborator: "You could imagine something, and the computer, which can better forward predict or analyze physical models, could fill in constraints-and that allows you to get feedback."

One concern that comes up when people hear about thought communication in particular is a potential loss of individuality. Would this make us one great hive mind with each individual brain as just another bee? Almost across the board, the experts I talked to believed it would be the opposite. We could act as one in a collaboration when it served us, but technology has thus far enhanced human individuality. Think of how much easier it is for people today to express their individuality and customize life to themselves than it was 50 or 100 or 500 years ago. There's no reason to believe that trend won't continue with more progress.

Multimedia communication

Similar to thought communication, but imagine how much easier it would be to describe a dream you had or a piece of music stuck in your head or a memory you're thinking about if you could just beam the thing into someone's head, like showing them on your computer screen. Or as Elon said, "I could think of a bouquet of flowers and have a very clear picture in my head of what that is. It would take a lot of words for you to even have an approximation of what that bouquet of flowers looks like."

How much faster could a team of engineers or architects or designers plan out a new bridge or a new building or a new dress if they could beam the vision in their head onto a screen and others could adjust it with their minds, versus sketching things out-which not only takes far longer, but probably is inevitably lossy?

How many symphonies could Mozart have written if he had been able to think the music in his head onto the page? How many Mozarts are out there right now who never learned how to play instruments well enough to get their talent out?

I watched this delightful animated short movie the other day, and below the video the creator, Felix Colgrave, said the video took him two years. How much of that time was spent dreaming up the art versus painstakingly getting it from his head into the software? Maybe in a few decades, I'll be able to watch animation streaming live out of Felix's head.

Emotional communication

Emotions are the quintessential example of a concept that words are poorly-equipped to accurately describe. If ten people say, "I'm sad," it actually means ten different things. In the Wizard Era, we'll probably learn pretty quickly that the specific emotions people feel are as unique to people as their appearance or sense of humor.

This could work as communication-when one person communicates just what they're feeling, the other person would be able to access the feeling in their own emotional centers. Obvious implications for a future of heightened empathy. But emotional communication could also be used for things like entertainment, where a movie, say, could also project out to the audience-directly into their limbic systems-certain feelings it wants the audience to feel as they watch. This is already what the film score does-another hack-and now it could be done directly.

Sensory communication

This one is intense.

Right now, the only two microphones that can act as inputs for the "speaker" in your head-your auditory cortex-are your two ears. The only two cameras that can be hooked up to the projector in your head-your visual cortex-are your two eyes. The only sensory surface that you can feel is your skin. The only thing that lets you experience taste is your tongue.

But in the same way we can currently hook an implant, for example, into someone's cochlea-which connects a different mic to their auditory cortex-down the road we'll be able to let sensory input information stream into your wizard hat wirelessly, from anywhere, and channel right into your sensory cortices the same way your bodily sensory organs do today. In the future, sensory organs will be only one set of inputs into your senses-and compared to what our senses will have access to, not a very exciting one.

Now what about output?

Currently, the only speaker your ear inputs can play out of is your auditory cortex. Only you can see what your eye cameras capture and only you can feel what touches your skin-because only you have access to the particular cortices those inputs are wired to. With a wizard hat, it would be a breeze for your brain to beam those input signals out of your head.

So you'll have sensory input capabilities and sensory output capabilities-or both at the same time. This will open up all kinds of amazing possibilities.

Say you're on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem-just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he's there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze and smells the trees and jumps when a bug lands on your arm. You two share the equivalent of a five-minute discussion about the scene-your favorite parts, which other places it reminds you of, etc. along with a shared story from his day-in a 30-second thought session. He says he has to get back to what he was working on, so he cuts off the sense connections except for vision, which he reduces to a little picture-in-picture window on the side of his visual field so he can check out more of the hike from time to time.

A surgeon could control a machine scalpel with her motor cortex instead of holding one in her hand, and she could receive sensory input from that scalpel so that it would feel like an 11th finger to her. So it would be as if one of her fingers was a scalpel and she could do the surgery without holding any tools, giving her much finer control over her incisions. An inexperienced surgeon performing a tough operation could bring a couple of her mentors into the scene as she operates to watch her work through her eyes and think instructions or advice to her. And if something goes really wrong, one of them could "take the wheel" and connect their motor cortex to her outputs to take control of her hands.

There would be no more need for screens of course-because you could just make a virtual screen appear in your visual cortex. Or jump into a VR movie with all your senses. Speaking of VR-Facebook, the maker of the Oculus Rift, is diving into this too. In an interview with Mark Zuckerberg about VR (for an upcoming post), the conversation at one point turned to BMIs. He said: "Touch gives you input and it's a little bit of haptic feedback.Over the long term, it's not clear that we won't just like to have our hands in no controller, and maybe, instead of having buttons that we press, we would just think something."

The ability to record sensory input means you can also record your memories, or share them-since a memory in the first place is just a not-so-accurate playback of previous sensory input. Or you could play them back as live experiences. In other words, that Black Mirror episode will probably actually happen.

An NBA player could send out a livestream invitation to his fans before a game, which would let them see and hear through his eyes and ears while he plays. Those who miss it could jump into the recording later.

You could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later-or, if you're not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience. (Needless to say, the porn industry will thrive in the digital brain world.)

Right now, you can go on YouTube and watch a first-hand account of almost anything, for free. This would have blown George Washington's mind-but in the Wizard Era, you'll be able to actually experience almost anything for free. The days of fancy experiences being limited to rich people will be long over.

Another idea, via the imagination of Moran Cerf: Maybe player brain injuries will drive the NFL to alter the rules so that the players' biological bodies stay on the sidelines, while they play the game with an artificial body whose motor cortex they control and whose eyes and ears they see and hear through. I like this idea and think it would be closer to the current NFL than it seems at first. In one way, you'll still need to be a great athlete to play, since most of what makes a great athlete great is their motor cortex, their muscle memory, and their decision-making. But the other component of being a great athlete-the physical body itself-would now be artificial. The NFL could make all of the artificial playing bodies identical-this would be a cool way to see whose skills were actually best-or they could insist that artificial body matches in every way the biological body of the athlete, to mimic as closely as possible how the game would go if players used their biological bodies like in the old days. Either way, if this rule change happened, you can imagine how crazy it would seem to people that players used to have their actual, fragile brains on the field.

I could go on. The communication possibilities in a wizard hat world, especially when you combine them with each other, are endless-and damn fun to think about.

The Wizard Era: Internal Control

Communication-the flow of information into and out of your brain-is only one way your wizard hat will be able to serve you.

A whole-brain interface can stimulate any part of your brain in any way-it has to have this capability for the input half of all the communication examples above. But that capability also gives you a whole new level of control over your brain. Here are some ways people of the future might take advantage of that:

Win the battle in your head for both sides

Often, the battle in our heads between our prefrontal cortex and limbic system comes down to the fact that both parties are trying to do what's best for us-it's just that our limbic system is wrong about what's best for us because it thinks we live in a tribe 50,000 years ago.

Your limbic system isn't making you eat your ninth Starburst candy in a row because it's a dick-it's making you eat it because it thinks that A) any fruit that sweet and densely chewy must be super rich in calories and B) you might not find food again for the next four days so it's a good idea to load up on a high-calorie food whenever the opportunity arises.
Consider eating a chocolate cake. While eating, we feed data to our cognitive apparatus. These data provide the enjoyment of the cake. The enjoyment isn't in the cake, per se, but in our neural experience of it. Decoupling our sensory desire (the experience of cake) from the underlying survival purpose (nutrition) will soon be within our reach.
Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex is just watching in horror like "WHY ARE WE DOING THIS."

But Moran believes that a good brain interface could fix this problem: 53

This concept of "sensory decoupling" would make so much sense if we could pull it off. You could get the enjoyment of eating like shit without actually putting shit in your body. Instead, Moran says, what would go in your body would be "nutrition inputs customized for each person based on genomes, microbiomes or other factors. Physical diets released from the tyranny of desire." 54
We know that stimulating the right centers in the brain can induce sleep or alertness, hunger or satiation, ease or stimulation, as quick as the flip of a switch. Or, if you're running code, on a schedule. (Siri: Put me to sleep until 7:30, high priority interruptions only. And let's get hungry for lunch around noon. Turn down the sugar cravings, though.)
The same principle could apply to things like sex, drugs, alcohol, and other pleasures that get people into trouble, healthwise or otherwise.

Ramez Naam talks about how a brain interface could also help us win the discipline battle when it comes to time: 55
Pharmaceuticals enter the brain and then spread out randomly, hitting whatever receptor they work on all across your brain. Neural interfaces, by contrast, can stimulate just one area at a time, can be tuned in real-time, and can carry information out about what's happening.
Take control of mood disorders

Ramez also emphasized that a great deal of scientific evidence suggests that moods and disorders are tied to what the chemicals in your brain are doing. Right now, we take drugs to alter those chemicals, and Ramez explains why direct neural stimulation is a far better option: 56

Depression, anxiety, OCD, and other disorders may be easy to eradicate once we can take better control of what goes on in our brain.

Want to hear what a dog hears? That's easy. The pitch range we can hear is limited by the dimensions of our cochlea-but pitches out of the ear's range can be sent straight into our auditory nerve. 32

Or maybe you want a new sense. You love bird watching and want to be able to sense when there's a bird nearby. So you buy an infrared camera that can detect bird locations by their heat signals and you link it to your brain interface, which stimulates neurons in a certain way to alert you to the presence of a bird and tell you its location. I can't describe what you'd experience when it alerts you, so I'll just say words like "feel" or "see," because I can only imagine the five senses we have. But in the future, there will be more words for new, useful types of senses.

You could also dim or shut off parts of a sense, like pain perhaps. Pain is the body's way of telling us we need to address something, but in the future, we'll elect to get that information in much less unpleasant formats. 33

Increase your knowledge

There's evidence from experiments with rats that it's possible to boost how fast a brain can learn-sometimes by 2x or even 3x-just by priming certain neurons to prepare to make a long-term connection.

Your brain would also have access to all the knowledge in the world, at all times. I talked to Ramez about how accessing information in the cloud might work. We parsed it out into four layers of capability, each requiring a more advanced brain interface than the last:

Level 1: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info-like Googling something with my brain-and the answer, in text, appears in my mind's eye. Basically what I do now except it all happens in my head.

Level 2: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info, and then a second later I just know it. No reading was involved-it was more like the way I'd recall something from memory.

Level 3: I just know the fact I want to know the second I want it. I don't even know if it came from the cloud or if it was stored in my brain. I can essentially treat the whole cloud like my brain. I don't know all the info-my brain could never fit it all-but any time I want to know something it downloads into my consciousness so seamlessly and quickly, it's as if it were there all along.

Level 4: Beyond just knowing facts, I can deeply understand anything I want to, in a complex way. We discussed the example of Moby Dick. Could I download Moby Dick from the cloud into my memory and then suddenly have it be the same as if I had read the whole book? Where I'd have thoughts and opinions and I could cite passages and have discussions about the themes?

Ramez thinks all four of these are possible with enough time, but that the fourth in particular will take a very long time to happen, if ever.

So there are about 50 delightful potential things about putting a wizard hat on your brain. Now for the undelightful part.

The scary thing about wizard hats

As is always the case with the advent of new technologies, when the Wizard Era rolls around, the dicks of the world will do their best to ruin everything.

And this time, the stakes are extra high. Here are some things that could suck:

Trolls can have an even fielder day. The troll-type personalities of the world have been having a field day ever since the internet came out. They literally can't believe their luck. But with brain interfaces, they'll have an even fielder day. Being more connected to each other means a lot of good things-like empathy going up as a result of more exposure to all kinds of people-but it also means a lot of bad things. Just like the internet. Bad guys will have more opportunity to spread hate or build hateful coalitions. The internet has been a godsend for ISIS, and a brain-connected world would be an even more helpful recruiting tool.

Computers crash. And they have bugs. And normally that's not the end of the world, because you can try restarting, and if it's really being a piece of shit, you can just get a new computer. You can't get a new head. There will have to be a way way higher number of precautions taken here.

Computers can be hacked. Except this time they have access to your thoughts, sensory input, and memories. Bad times.

Holy shit computers can be hacked. In the last item I was thinking about bad guys using hacking to steal information from my brain. But brain interfaces can also put information in. Meaning a clever hacker might be able to change your thoughts or your vote or your identity or make you want to do something terrible you normally wouldn't ever consider. And you wouldn't know it ever happened. You could feel strongly about voting for a candidate and a little part of you would wonder if someone manipulated your thoughts so you'd feel that way. The darkest possible scenario would be an ISIS-type organization actually influencing millions of people to join their cause by altering their thoughts. This is definitely the scariest paragraph in this post. Let's get out of here.

Why the Wizard Era will be a good thing anyway even though there are a lot of dicks

Physics advancements allow bad guys to make nuclear bombs. Biological advancements allow bad guys to make bioweapons. The invention of cars and planes led to crashes that kill over a million people a year. The internet enabled the spread of fake news, made us vulnerable to cyberattack, made terrorist recruiting efforts easier, and allowed predators to flourish.

And yet-

Would people choose to reverse our understanding of science, go back to the days of riding horses across land and boats across the ocean, or get rid of the internet?

Probably not.

New technology also comes along with real dangers and it always does end up harming a lot of people. But it also always seems to help a lot more people than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive.

People also love to hate the concept of new technology-because they worry it's unhealthy and makes us less human. But those same people, if given the option, usually wouldn't consider going back to George Washington's time, when half of children died before the age of 5, when traveling to other parts of the world was impossible for almost everyone, when a far greater number of humanitarian atrocities were being committed than there are today, when women and ethnic minorities had far fewer rights across the world than they do today, when far more people were illiterate and far more people were living under the poverty line than there are today. They wouldn't go back 250 years-a time right before the biggest explosion of technology in human history happened. Sounds like people who are immensely grateful for technology. And yet their opinion holds-our technology is ruining our lives, people in the old days were much wiser, our world's going to shit, etc. I don't think they've thought about it hard enough.

So when it comes to what will be a long list of dangers of the Wizard Era-they suck, and they'll continue to suck as some of them play out into sickening atrocities and catastrophes. But a vastly larger group of good guys will wage war back, as they always do, and a giant "brain security" industry will be born. And I bet, if given the option, people in the Wizard Era wouldn't for a second consider coming back to 2017.

___________

I always know when humanity doesn't know what the hell is going on with something when all the experts are contradicting each other about it. 34

The timeline for our road to the Wizard Era is one of those times-in large part because no one knows to what extent we'll be able to make Stevenson's Law look more like Moore's Law.

My conversations yielded a wide range of opinions on the timeline. One neuroscientist predicted that I'd have a whole-brain interface in my lifetime. Mark Zuckerberg said: "I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn't made some progress towards thinking things to computers." One prediction on the longer end came from Ramez Naam, who thought the time of people beginning to install BMIs for reasons other than disability might not come for 50 years and that mass adoption would take even longer.
I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability ... It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities.
"I hope I'm wrong," he said. "I hope that Elon bends the curve on this."
Genetics is just too slow, that's the problem. For a human to become an adult takes twenty years. We just don't have that amount of time.
When I asked Elon about his timeline, he said:

During another discussion, I had asked him about why he went into this branch of biotech and not into genetics. He responded:

A lot of people working on this challenge have a lot of different motivations for doing so, but rarely did I talk to people who felt motivated by urgency.
Part 6: The Great Merger
Elon's urgency to get us into the Wizard Era is the final piece of the Neuralink puzzle. Our last box to fill in:

With Elon's companies, there's always some "result of the goal" that's his real reason for starting the company-the piece that ties the company's goal into humanity's better future. In the case of Neuralink, it's a piece that takes a lot of tree climbing to understand. But with the view from all the way up here, we've got everything we need for our final stretch of the road.

Imagine an alien explorer is visiting a new star and finds three planets circling it, all with life on them. The first happens to be identical to the way Earth was in 10 million BC. The second happens to be identical to Earth in 50,000 BC. And the third happens to be identical to Earth in 2017 AD.

The alien is no expert on primitive biological life but circles around all three planets, peering down at each with his telescope. On the first, he sees lots of water and trees and mountains and some little signs of animal life. He makes out a herd of elephants on an African plain, a group of dolphins skipping along the ocean's surface, and a few other scattered critters living out their Tuesday.

He moves on to the second planet and looks around. More critters, not too much different. He notices one new thing-occasional little points of flickering light dotting the land.

Bored, he moves on to the third planet. Whoa. He sees planes crawling around above the land, vast patches of gray land with towering buildings on them, ships of all kinds sprinkled across the seas, long railways stretching across continents, and he has to jerk his spaceship out of the way when a satellite soars by him.

When he heads home, he reports on what he found: "Two planets with primitive life and one planet with intelligent life."

You can understand why that would be his conclusion-but he'd be wrong.

In fact, it's the first planet that's the odd one out. Both the second and third planets have intelligent life on them-equally intelligent life. So equal that you could kidnap a newborn baby from Planet 2 and swap it with a newborn on Planet 3 and both would grow up as normal people on the other's planet, fitting in seamlessly. Same people.

And yet, how could that be?

The Human Colossus. That's how.

Ever wonder why you're so often unimpressed by humans and yet so blown away by the accomplishments of humanity?

It's because humans are still, deep down, those people on Planet 2.

Plop a baby human into a group of chimps and ask them to raise him, Tarzan style, and the human as an adult will know how to run around the forest, climb trees, find food, and masturbate. That's who each of us actually is.

Humanity, on the other hand, is a superintelligent, tremendously-knowledgeable, millennia-old Colossus, with 7.5 billion neurons. And that's who built Planet 3.

The invention of language allowed each human brain to dump its knowledge onto a pile before its death, and the pile became a tower and grew taller and taller until one day, it became the brain of a great Colossus that built us a civilization. The Human Colossus has been inventing things ever since, getting continually better at it with time. Driven only by the desire to create value, the Colossus is now moving at an unprecedented pace-which is why we live in an unprecedented and completely anomalous time in history.

You know how I said we might be living literally on the line between two vast eras of communication?

Well the truth is, we seem to be on a lot of historic timeline boundaries. After 1,000 centuries of human life and 3.8 billion years of Earthly life, it seems like this century will be the one where Earth life makes the leap from the Single-Planetary Era to the Multi-Planetary Era. This century may be the one when an Earthly species finally manages to wrest the genetic code from the forces of evolution and learns to reprogram itself. People alive today could witness the moment when biotechnology finally frees the human lifespan from the will of nature and hands it over to the will of each individual.

The Human Colossus has reached an entirely new level of power-the kind of power that can overthrow 3.8-billion-year eras-positioning us on the verge of multiple tipping points that will lead to unimaginable change. And if our alien friend finds a fourth planet one day that happens to be identical to Earth in 2100, you can be pretty damn sure it'll look nothing to him like Planet 3.

I hope you enjoyed Planet 3, because we're leaving it. Planet 4 is where we're headed, whether we like it or not.

__________

If I had to sum up the driving theme behind everything Elon Musk does, it would be pretty simple:

He wants to prepare us for Planet 4.

He lives in the big picture, and his only lens is the maximum zoom-out. That's why he's such an unusual visionary. It's also why he's so worried.

It's not that he thinks Planet 4 is definitely a bad place-it's that he thinks it could be a bad place, and he recognizes that the generations alive today, whether they realize it or not, are the first in history to face real, hardcore existential risk.

At the same time, the people alive today also are the first who can live with the actually realistic hope for a genuinely utopian future-one that defies even death and taxes. Planet 4 could be our promised land.

When you zoom way out, you realize how unfathomably high the stakes actually are.

And the outcome isn't at the whim of chance-it's at the whim of the Human Colossus. Planet 4 is only coming because the Colossus is building it. And whether that future is like heaven or hell depends on what the Colossus does-maybe over the next 150 years, maybe over only the next 50. Or 25.

But the unfortunate thing is that the Human Colossus isn't optimized to maximize the chances of a safe transition to the best possible Planet 4 for the most possible humans-it's optimized to build Planet 4, in any way possible, as quickly as possible.

Understanding all of this, Elon has dedicated his life to trying to influence the Human Colossus to bring its motivation more in line with the long-term interests of humans. He knows it's not possible to rewire the Human Colossus-not unless existential risk were suddenly directly in front of each human's face, which normally doesn't happen until it's already too late-so he treats the Colossus like a pet.

If you want your dog to sit, you correlate sitting on command with getting a treat. For the Human Colossus, a treat is a ripe new industry simultaneously exploding in both supply and demand.

Elon saw the Human Colossus dog peeing on the floor in the form of continually adding ancient, deeply-buried carbon into the carbon cycle-and rather than plead with the Colossus to stop peeing on the floor (which a lot of people waste their breath doing) or try to threaten the Colossus into behaving (which governments try to do, with limited success), he's creating an electric car so rad that everyone will want one. The auto industry sees the shift in consumer preferences this is beginning to create, and in the nine years since Tesla released its first car, the number of major car companies with an electric car in their line went from zero to almost all of them. The Colossus seems to be taking the treat, and a change in behavior may follow.

Elon saw the Human Colossus dog running into traffic in the form of humanity keeping all of its eggs on one planet, despite all of those tipping points on the horizon, so he built SpaceX to learn to land a rocket, which will cut the cost of space travel by about 99% and make dedicating resources to the space industry a much tastier morsel for the Colossus. His plan with Mars isn't to try to convince humanity that it's a good idea to build a civilization there in order to buy life insurance for the species-it's to create an affordable regular cargo and human transit route to Mars, knowing that once that happens, there will be enough value-creation opportunity in Mars development that the Colossus will become determined to make it happen.

But to Elon, the scariest thing the Human Colossus is doing is teaching the Computer Colossus to think. To Elon, and many others, the development of superintelligent AI poses by far the greatest existential threat to humanity. It's not that hard to see why. Intelligence gives us godlike powers over all other creatures on Earth-which has not been a fun time for the creatures. If any of their body parts are possible value creators, we have major industries processing and selling those body parts. We sometimes kill them for sport. But we're probably the least fun all the times we're just doing our thing, for our own reasons, with no hate in our hearts or desire to hurt anyone, and there are creatures, or ecosystems, that just happen to be in our way or in the line of fire of the side effects of what we're doing. People like to get all mad at humanity about this, but really, we're just doing what species do-being selfish, first and foremost.

The issue for other creatures isn't our selfishness-it's the immense damage our selfishness can do because of the tremendous power we have over them. Power that comes from our intelligence advantage.
I mean, you've got these two things where AlphaGo crushes these human players head-on-head, beats Lee Sedol 4 out of 5 games and now it will beat a human every game all the time, while playing the 50 best players, and beating them always, all the time. You know, that's like one year later.
So it's pretty logical to be apprehensive about the prospect of intentionally creating something that will have (perhaps far) more intelligence than we do-especially since every human on the planet is an amateur at creating something like that, because no one has ever done it before.

And things are progressing quickly. Elon talked about the rapid progress made by Google's game-playing AI:
What I came to realize in recent years-the last couple years-is that AI is obviously going to surpass human intelligence by a lot. ... There's some risk at that point that something bad happens, something that we can't control, that humanity can't control after that point-either a small group of people monopolize AI power, or the AI goes rogue, or something like that. It may not, but it could.
And it's on a harmless thing like AlphaGo right now. But the degrees of freedom at which the AI can win are increasing. So, Go has many more degrees of freedom than Chess, but if you take something like one of the real-time strategy competitive games like League of Legends or Dota 2, that has vastly more degrees of freedom than Go, so it can't win at that yet. But it will be able to. And then there's reality, which has the ultimate number of degrees of freedom. 35

And for reasons discussed above, that kind of thing worries him:

But in typical Human Colossus form, "the collective will is not attuned to the danger of AI."
I was trying to really sound the alarm on the AI front for quite a while, but it was clearly having no impact (laughs) so I was like, "Oh fine, okay, then we'll have to try to help develop it in a way that's good."
When I interviewed Elon in 2015, I asked him if he would ever join the effort to build superintelligent AI. He said, "My honest opinion is that we shouldn't build it." And when I later commented that building something smarter than yourself did seem like a basic Darwinian error (a phrase I stole from Nick Bostrom), Elon responded, "We're gonna win the Darwin Award, collectively."

Now, two years later, here's what he says:

He's accepted reality-the Human Colossus is not going to quit until the Computer Colossus, one day, wakes up. This is happening.

No matter what anyone tells you, no one knows what will happen when the Computer Colossus learns to think. In my long AI explainer, I explored the reasoning of both those who are convinced that superintelligent AI will be the solution to every problem we have, and those who see humanity as a bunch of kids playing with a bomb they don't understand. I'm personally still torn about which camp I find more convincing, but it seems pretty rational to plan for the worst and do whatever we can to increase our odds. Many experts agree with that logic, but there's little consensus on the best strategy for creating superintelligent AI safely-just a whole lot of ideas from people who acknowledge they don't really know the answer. How could anyone know how to take precautions for a future world they have no way to understand?
-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Elon also acknowledges he doesn't know the answer-but he's working on a plan he thinks will give us our best shot.

Abraham Lincoln was pleased with himself when he came up with the line:

Fair-it's a good line.
I think that the protection of the collective is important. I think it was Churchill who said, "Democracy's the worst of all systems of government, except for all the others." It's fine if you have Plato's incredible philosopher king as the king, sure. That would be fine. Now, most dictators do not turn out that way. They tend to be quite horrible.
The whole idea of "of the people, by the people, for the people" is the centerpiece of democracy.

Unfortunately, "the people" are unpleasant. So democracy ends up being unpleasant. But unpleasant tends to be a dream compared to the alternatives. Elon talked about this:

In other words, democracy is like escaping from a monster by hiding in a sewer.

There are plenty of times in life when it's a good strategy to take a risk in order to give yourself a chance for the best possible outcome, but when the stakes are at their absolute highest, the right move is usually to play it safe. Power is one of those times. That's why, even though democracy essentially guarantees a certain level of mediocrity, Elon says, "I think you're hard-pressed to find many people in the United States who, no matter what they think of any given president, would advocate for a dictatorship."

And since Elon sees AI as the ultimate power, he sees AI development as the ultimate "play it safe" situation. Which is why his strategy for minimizing existential AI risk seems to essentially be that AI power needs to be of the people, by the people, for the people.

To try to implement that concept in the realm of AI, Elon has approached the situation from multiple angles.

For the by the people and for the peopleparts, he and Sam Altman created OpenAI -a self-described "non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence."

Normally, when humanity is working on something new, it starts with the work of a few innovative pioneers. When they succeed, an industry is born and the Human Colossus jumps on board to build upon what the pioneers started, en masse.

But what if the thing those pioneers were working on was a magic wand that might give whoever owned it immense, unbreakable power over everyone else-including the power to prevent anyone else from making a magic wand? That would be kinda stressful, right?

Well that's how Elon views today's early AI development efforts. And since he can't stop people from trying to make a magic wand, his solution is to create an open, collaborative, transparent magic wand development lab. When a new breakthrough innovation is discovered in the lab, instead of making it a tightly-kept secret like the other magic wand companies, the lab publishes the innovation for anyone to see or borrow for their own magic-wand-making efforts.
Essentially, if everyone's from planet Krypton, that's great. But if only one of them is Superman and Superman also has the personality of Hitler, then we've got a problem.
On one hand, this could have drawbacks. Bad guys are out there trying to make a magic wand too, and you really don't want the first magic wand to end up in the hands of a bad guy. And now the bad guys' development efforts can benefit from all of the innovations being published by the lab. This is a serious concern.

But the lab also boosts the efforts of millions of other people trying to create magic wands. This generates a ton of competition for the secretive early pioneers, and it becomes less likely that any one inventor can create a magic wand long before others also do. More likely is that when the first magic wand is eventually created, there are thousands of others near completion as well-different wands, with different capabilities, made by different people, for different reasons. If we have to have magic wands on Earth, Elon thinks, let's at least make sure they're in the hands of a large number of people across the world-not one all-powerful sorcerer. Or as he puts it:

More broadly, a single pioneer's magic wand would likely have been built to serve that inventor's own needs and purposes. But by turning the future magic wand industry into a collective effort, a wide variety of needs and purposes will have a wand made for them, making it more likely that the capabilities of the world's aggregate mass of magic wands will overarchingly represent the needs of the masses.

You know, like democracy.
AI is definitely going to vastly surpass human abilities. To the degree that it is linked to human will, particularly the sum of a large number of humans, it would be an outcome that is desired by a large number of humans, because it would be a function of their will.
It worked fine for Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers and Alan Turing to jump-start revolutions by jumping way out ahead of the pack. But when you're dealing with the invention of something unthinkably powerful, you can't sit back and let the pioneers kick things off-it's leaving too much to chance.

OpenAI is an effort to democratize the creation of AI, to get the entire Human Colossus working on it during its pioneer phase. Elon sums it up:

So now you've maybe got early human-level-or-higher AI superpower being made by the people, for the people-which brings down the likelihood that the world's AI ends up in the hands of a single bad guy or a tightly-controlled monopoly.

Now all we've got left is of the people.

This one should be easy. Remember, the Human Colossus is creating superintelligent AI for the same reason it created cars, factory machines, and computers-to serve as an extension of itself to which it can outsource work. Cars do our walking, factory machines do our manufacturing, and computers take care of information storage, organization, and computation.

Creating computers that can think will be our greatest invention yet-they'll allow us to outsource our most important and high-impact work. Thinking is what built everything we have, so just imagine the power that will come from building ourselves a superintelligent thinking extension. And extensions of the people by definition belong to the people-they're of the people.

There's just this one thing-

High-caliber AI isn't quite like those other inventions. The rest of our technology is great at the thing it's built to do, but in the end, it's a mindless machine with narrow intelligence. The AI we're trying to build will be smart, like a person-like a ridiculously smart person. It's a fundamentally different thing than we've ever made before-so why would we expect normal rules to apply?

It's always been an automatic thing that the technology we make inherently belongs to us-it's such an obvious point that it almost seems silly to make it. But could it be that if we make something smarter than a person, it might not be so easy to control?

Could it be that a creation that's better at thinking than any human on Earth might not be fully content to serve as a human extension, even if that's what it was built to do?

We don't know how issues will actually manifest-but it seems pretty safe to say that yes, these possibilities could be.

And if what could be turns out to actually be, we may have a serious problem on our hands.

Because, as the human history case study suggests, when there's something on the planet way smarter than everyone else, it can be a really bad thing for everyone else. And if AI becomes the new thing on the planet that's way smarter than everyone else, and it turns out not to clearly belong to us-it means that it's its own thing. Which drops us into the category of "everyone else."

So people gaining monopolistic control of AI is its own problem-and one that OpenAI is hoping to solve. But it's a problem that may pale in comparison to the prospect of AI being uncontrollable.

This is what keeps Elon up at night. He sees it as only a matter of time before superintelligent AI rises up on this planet-and when that happens, he believes that it's critical that we don't end up as part of "everyone else."

That's why, in a future world made up of AI and everyone else, he thinks we have only one good option:

To be AI.
1) The intensely mind-bending idea 2) The super ridiculously intensely mind-bending idea
___________

Remember before when I said that there were two things about wizard hats we had to wrap our heads around?

This is where #2 comes in.

These two ideas are the two things Elon means when he refers to the wizard hat as a digital tertiary layer in our brains. The first, as we discussed, is the concept that a whole-brain interface is kind of the same thing as putting our devices in our heads-effectively making your brain the device. Like this:

Your devices give you cyborg superpowers and a window into the digital world. Your brain's wizard hat electrode array is a new brain structure, joining your limbic system and cortex.

But your limbic system, cortex, and wizard hat are just the hardware systems. When you experience your limbic system, it's not the physical system you're interacting with-it's the information flow within it. It's the activity of the physical system that bubbles up in your consciousness, making you feel angry, scared, horny, or hungry.

Same thing for your cortex. The napkin wrapped around your brain stores and organizes information, but it's the information itself that you experience when you think something, see something, hear something, or feel something. The visual cortex in itself does nothing for you-it's the stream of photon information flowing through it that gives you the experience of having a visual cortex. When you dig in your memory to find something, you're not searching for neurons, you're searching for information stored in the neurons.

The limbic system and cortex themselves are just gray matter. The flow of activity within the gray matter is what forms your familiar internal characters, the monkey brain and the rational human brain.

So what does that mean about your digital tertiary layer?

It means that while what's actually in your brain is the physical device-the electrode array itself-the component of the tertiary layer that you'll experience and get to know as a character is the information that flows through the array.
I think that, conceivably, there's a way for there to be a tertiary layer that feels like it's part of you. It's not some thing that you offload to, it's you.
And just like the feelings and urges of the limbic system and the thoughts and chattering voice of the cortex all feel to you like parts of you-like your inner essence-the activity that flows through your wizard hat will feel like a part of you and your essence.

Elon's vision for the Wizard Era is that among the wizard hat's many uses, one of its core purposes will be to serve as the interface between your brain and a cloud-based customized AI system. That AI system, he believes, will become as present a character in your mind as your monkey and your human characters-and it will feel like you every bit as much as the others do. He says:

This makes sense on paper. You do most of your "thinking" with your cortex, but then when you get hungry, you don't say, "My limbic system is hungry," you say, "I'm hungry." Likewise, Elon thinks, when you're trying to figure out the solution to a problem and your AI comes up with the answer, you won't say, "My AI got it," you'll say, "Aha! I got it." When your limbic system wants to procrastinate and your cortex wants to work, a situation I might be familiar with, it doesn't feel like you'rearguing with some external being, it feels like a singular you is struggling to be disciplined. Likewise, when you think up a strategy at work and your AI disagrees, that'll be a genuine disagreement and a debate will ensue-but it will feel like an internal debate, not a debate between you and someone else that just happens to take place in your thoughts. The debate will feel like thinking.

It makes sense on paper.

But when I first heard Elon talk about this concept, it didn't really feel right. No matter how hard I tried to get it, I kept framing the idea as something familiar-like an AI system whose voice I could hear in my head, or even one that I could think together with. But in those instances, the AI still seemed like an external system I was communicating with. It didn't seem like me.

But then, one night while working on the post, I was rereading some of Elon's quotes about this, and it suddenly clicked. The AI would be me. Fully. I got it.

Then I lost it. The next day, I tried to explain the epiphany to a friend and I left us both confused. I was back in "Wait, but it kind of wouldn't really be me, it would be communicating with me" land. Since then, I've dipped into and out of the idea, never quite able to hold it for long. The best thing I can compare it to is having a moment when it actually makes sense that time is relative and space-time is a single fabric. For a second, it seems intuitive that time moves slower when you're moving really fast. And then I lose it. As I typed those sentences just now, it did not seem intuitive.
The challenge is the communication bandwidth is extremely slow, particularly output. When you're outputting on a phone, you're moving two thumbs very slowly. That's crazy slow communication. ... If the bandwidth is too low, then your integration with AI would be very weak. Given the limits of very low bandwidth, it's kind of pointless. The AI is just going to go by itself, because it's too slow to talk to. The faster the communication, the more you'll be integrated-the slower the communication, the less. And the more separate we are-the more the AI is "other"-the more likely it is to turn on us. If the AIs are all separate, and vastly more intelligent than us, how do you ensure that they don't have optimization functions that are contrary to the best interests of humanity? ... If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn't be "other"-it would be you and with a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system.
The idea of being AI is especially tough because it combines two mind-numbing concepts-the brain interface and the abilities it would give you, and artificial general intelligence. Humans today are simply not equipped to understand either of those things, because as imaginative as we think we are, our imaginations only really have our life experience as their toolkit, and these concepts are both totally novel. It's like trying to imagine a color you've never seen.
We're going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet-you know, like a house cat or something-or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI.
That's why when I hear Elon talk with conviction about this stuff, I'm somewhere in between deeply believing it myself and taking his word for it. I go back and forth. But given that he's someone who probably found space-time intuitive when he was seven, and given that he's someone who knows how to colonize Mars, I'm inclined to listen hard to what he says.
A house cat's a good outcome, by the way.
Elon sees communication bandwidth as the key factor in determining our level of integration with AI, and he sees that level of integration as the key factor in how we'll fare in the AI world of our future:

Then, a second later:

Without really understanding what kinds of AI will be around when we reach the age of superintelligent AI, the idea that human-AI integration will lend itself to the protection of the species makes intuitive sense. Our vulnerabilities in the AI era will come from bad people in control of AI or rogue AI not aligned with human values. In a world in which millions of people control a little piece of the world's aggregate AI power-people who can think with AI, can defend themselves with AI, and who fundamentally understand AI because of their own integration with it-humans are less vulnerable. People will be a lot more powerful, which is scary, but like Elon said, if everyone is Superman, it's harder for any one Superman to cause harm on a mass scale-there are lots of checks and balances. And we're less likely to lose control of AI in general because the AI on the planet will be so widely distributed and varied in its goals.

But time is of the essence here-something Elon emphasized:
Yes, but increasing bandwidth by orders of magnitude would make it better. And it's directionally correct. Does it solve all problems? No. But is it directionally correct? Yes. If you're going to go in some direction, well, why would you go in any direction other than this?
The pace of progress in this direction matters a lot. We don't want to develop digital superintelligence too far before being able to do a merged brain-computer interface.

When I thought about all of this, one reservation I had was whether a whole-brain interface would be enough of a change to make integration likely. I brought this up with Elon, noting that there would still be a vast difference between our thinking speed and a computer's thinking speed. He said:

And that's why Elon started Neuralink.

He started Neuralink to accelerate our pace into the Wizard Era-into a world where he says that "everyone who wants to have this AI extension of themselves could have one, so there would be billions of individual human-AI symbiotes who, collectively, make decisions about the future." A world where AI really could be of the people, by the people, for the people.

___________

I'll guess that right now, some part of you believes this insane world we've been living in for the past 38,000 words could really maybe be the future-and another part of you refuses to believe it. I've got a little of both of those going on too.

But the insanity part of it shouldn't be the reason it's hard to believe. Remember-George Washington died when he saw 2017. And our future will be unfathomably shocking to us. The only difference is that things are moving even faster now than they were in George's time.

The concept of being blown away by the future speaks to the magic of our collective intelligence-but it also speaks to the naivety of our intuition. Our minds evolved in a time when progress moved at a snail's pace, so that's what our hardware is calibrated to. And if we don't actively override our intuition-the part of us that reads about a future this outlandish and refuses to believe it's possible-we're living in denial.

The reality is that we're whizzing down a very intense road to a very intense place, and no one knows what it'll be like when we get there. A lot of people find it scary to think about, but I think it's exciting. Because of when we happened to be born, instead of just living in a normal world like normal people, we're living inside of a thriller movie. Some people take this information and decide to be like Elon, doing whatever they can to help the movie have a happy ending-and thank god they do. Because I'd rather just be a gawking member of the audience, watching the movie from the edge of my seat and rooting for the good guys.

Either way, I think it's good to climb a tree from time to time to look out at the view and remind ourselves what a time this is to be alive. And there are a lot of trees around here. Meet you at another one sometime soon.

___________

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The clean version of this post, appropriate for all ages, is free to read here.

To print this post or read it offline, try the PDF.

___________

And here's the full Elon Musk post series:
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate Religion for the Nonreligious The Tail End
Part 1, on Elon: Elon Musk: The World's Raddest Man
Part 2, on Tesla: How Tesla Will Change the World
Part 3, on SpaceX: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4, on the thing that makes Elon so effective: The Chef and the Cook: Musk's Secret Sauce

If you're sick of science and tech, check these out instead :

Thanks to the Neuralink team for answering my 1,200 questions and explaining things to me like I'm five. Extra thanks to Ben Rapoport, Flip Sabes, and Moran Cerf for being my question-asking go-tos in my many dark moments of despair.

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Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future - Wait But Why

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Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here. And here's a G-rated version of the post, appropriate for all ages. _______________________ Last month, I got a phone call.

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