Extracts from a Diary

Nihilism: The Case for No Inherent Meaning to Life Two anchoring sets of facts: We’re on a pale blue dot called Earth that orbits a modest-sized star, barely noticeable in an otherwise average galaxy containing 10 11 other stars. This galaxy is part of a supercluster containing 100,000 other galaxies. There are probably about 10 million other superclusters in the observable universe. The universe began about 13.8 billion years ago. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. Modern Humans appeared around 300,000 years ago (~0.0067% of Earth’s current age), and all of written history — and any named human — are from less than 10,000 years ago (~0.00022% of Earth’s current age). These timelines and scales are so huge that they are humanly incomprehensible. People realise this and move in either direction — incredible religious awe as well as those around rejecting it. You could be like the young protagonist of Annie Hall (1977 movie), who on hearing that the universe is expanding ( 45 seconds ...

“AI is coming for your job!” “Government will need to step in and give a universal basic income (UBI) to everyone!” “There will be mass unemployment and civil unrest!” Or so I keep hearing these days in different groups. I am a bit more sceptical. I am simultaneously hyped about and underwhelmed by AI. Image generated using ChatGPT Some Famously Wrong Predictions We overestimate what can happen in the short run and underestimate what does in the long run. There are predictions from the 1950s, attributed to IBM’s then chairman, estimating the market size of computers to be 5 units. Not 5 million, not 5 thousand. Just 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. IBM, probably in the 1980s, thought it would be mind-boggling if there were a use case of more than 128KBs memory. Bill Gates thought there was little commercial potential for this thing called the internet in 1990s, and predicted the end of spam emails “in two years,” in 2004. The prediction about the internet was echoed by subsequent Nobel laureate in E...