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Read Volume 73: 19Th April 2015 Read Volume 73: 19th April 2015 Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking !1 Read Volume 73: 19th April 2015 Content Page3: Existential Risk: A Conversation With Jaan Tallinn Page 13: From “Economic Man” to Behavioral Economics By Justin Fox Page 24: Why C.E.O. Pay Reform Failed By James Surowiecki Page 28: The anatomy of discovery: a case study By David Field Chetan Parikh Prashant Patel Arpit Ranka Compiled & Edited by Prashant Patel “The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.” — Charlie Munger Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking !2 Read Volume 73: 19th April 2015 Existential Risk: A Conversation With Jaan Tallinn JAAN TALLINN is a co-founder of The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at University of Cambridge, UK as well as The Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, MA. He is also a founding engineer of Kazaa and Skype. Jaan Tallinn's Edge Bio Page INTRODUCTION by Max Tegmark I find Jaan Tallinn remarkable in more ways than one. His rags-to-riches entrepreneur story is inspiring in its own right, starting behind the Iron Curtain and ending up connecting the world with Skype. How many times have you skyped? How many people do you know who created a new verb? Most successful entrepreneurs I know went on to become serial entrepreneurs. In contrast, Jaan chose a different path: he asked himself how he could leverage his success to do as much good as possible in the world, developed a plan, and dedicated his life to it. His ambition makes even the goals of Skype seem modest: reduce existential risk, i.e., the risk that we humans do something as stupid as go extinct due to poor planning. Already after a few short years, Jaan’s impact is remarkable. He is a key supporter of a global network of non-profit existential risk organizations including The Future of Humanity Institute, The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at University of Cambridge, and The Future of Life Institute, the last two of which he co-founded. I’ve had the pleasure to work with him on The Future of Life Institute from day one, and if you’ve heard of our recent conference, open letter and well-funded research program on keeping artificial intelligence beneficial, then I’d like to make clear that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for Jaan’s support. If you’re an intelligent life form reading this text millions of years from now and marvel at how life is flourishing, you may owe your existence to Jaan. MAX TEGMARK is a Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Founder, Future of Life Institute; Author, Our Mathematical Universe. Max Tegmark's Edge Bio Page EXISTENTIAL RISK Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking !3 Read Volume 73: 19th April 2015 I split my activity between various organizations. I don't have one big umbrella organization that I represent. I use various commercial organizations and investment companies such as Metaplanet Holdings, which is my primary investment vehicle,to invest in various startups, including artificial intelligence companies. Then I have one nonprofit foundation called Solenum Foundation that I use to support various so-called existential risk organizations around the world. I was born behind the Iron Curtain, in Soviet-occupied Estonia, and looked forward to a pretty bleak life in some scientific institute trying to figure out how to kill more Americans. Luckily though, the Soviet Union collapsed shortly before I was ready for independent life. The year 1990, when I went to university, was also in the middle of big turmoil, where the Soviet Union collapsed and various countries, including Estonia, became independent. When I went to university, I studied physics there. The reason I studied physics was that I was into computer programming already, since high school or even a little bit earlier, so I thought I should expand my horizons a little bit. And I do think it has helped me quite a lot. If you look around in the so"called existential risk ecosystem that I support, there's, I would say, an over-representation of physicists, because physics helps you to see the world in a neutral manner. You have a curiosity that helps you to create the world model rather than you try to model the world in a way that suits your predispositions. After having studied physics, I worked with computers throughout my entire period of university. We jokingly called ourselves the "computer games industry of Estonia," because we were really the only commercial computer games development studio in Estonia. After spending a decade developing computer games, I gave one talk where I described my life as surfing the Moore's Law. Interesting turning points in my life have coincided with things that Moore's Law has made possible or has made no longer feasible. For example, we exited the computer games industry when graphics cards came along, thus enabling much more powerful storytelling capabilities and therefore reducing the importance that programming played in computer games. Because we, being mostly good at programming, didn't have a good comparative advantage in this new world, we ended up exiting the computer games business and going into Internet programming. At this point we met Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who eventually became the main founders of Skype. Together with them, we first did the Kazaa file sharing application, which Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking !4 Read Volume 73: 19th April 2015 got us into a bunch of legal trouble. After Kazaa, we did a few smaller projects, and eventually ended up doing Skype. The way we got into the games industry was almost by accident. The nice thing about starting your computer career with computers that are really slow is that you have to do work in order to make them do something interesting. These days I see that my children, for example, have a tough time starting programming because YouTube is just one click away. Just trying to figure out how to make interesting games was a natural step of evolution for a programmer. It was in 1989 when I teamed up with a couple of my classmates to develop a simple graphical action-based computer game, and we managed to sell that game to Sweden. We earned a little hard currency—Swedish kronor—as a result, which, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union when the Russian ruble was in freefall, was a fortune. I think we made $5,000 based on that, which was an incredibly big sum back then. Hence, we were hooked and thought, okay, we can do something that other people are willing to pay money for, and ended up developing bigger and bigger games and spent about one decade in games. People do ask me quite a lot, what is the secret of Estonia when it comes to advancing digital ideas, and programming and technology in general. It's hard to track this down to one cause, but there are a few contributing factors. One thing was that even during Soviet times there was this big scientific center called the Institute of Cybernetics, in Tallinn, that hosts many scientists who developed things like expert systems and early precursors of AI. I'm proud to say that Skype has played quite a big role in the Estonian startup ecosphere, for various reasons. One is that Estonia is a small place, so people know each other. I half-jokingly say that quite a lot of people just knew "the Skype boys," as we were called in Estonia, and they think, if they can do it, well, so can I. The other nice side effect of Skype is that it's a fairly big company in Estonian context, so it works as a training ground. A lot of people meet there and get their experience working there, working in an international context. Skype is no longer a startup, but we used to have a strong startup culture there. Even now, I have invested in three or four companies that are just made by Skype alumni, so there's a strong startup culture there. Finally, the Estonian government has gotten into a nice positive feedback loop, where they have done a few digital innovations in the domain of e-governance. They had gotten very good positive feedback based on their achievements in Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking !5 Read Volume 73: 19th April 2015 things like digital voting and paperless government office. Whenever humans get into a positive feedback loop, they want to do more of the things that they get praise for. Indeed, the latest project was called Estonian digital E-residency, so you can go to an Estonian consulate—as far as I understand—and get a chip card that will give you the ability to give digital signatures that have the power of law in Estonia, and hence in the EU. Skype started as a project within another company. The other company was called Joltid, founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Within that company, we first did various projects, including the back end for Kazaa file sharing network. Skype was started in late 2002 as a project within that company, but just a few months later it was spun off into a separate company, and seven people got founding shares in this new company called Skyper Limited. The name Skyper came from "sky peer", because the original idea wasn't actually to do a Voice over IP client.
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