The Technium: Your Most Improbable Life
*Lifestream
*The Technium
*Cool Tools
*True Films
*Extrapolations
*Screen Pub
*Quantified Self
*New Rules
*Street Use
*Asia Grace
*Silver Cord
*WINK
FEEDS
Archive "
MOST POPULAR POSTINGS
1,000 True Fans
You Are Not Late
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
The Myth of a Superhuman AI
Better Than Free
Scenius, or Communal Genius
The Thinkism Fallacy
12 Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life
Some Contemporary Heresies
The Post-Productive Economy
ARCHIVES
Your Most Improbable Life
The Emergent Self Loop
Our Uncertain Uncertainties
A Catechism for Robots
Three Modes of Cognition
Six Selfish Reasons to Have Kids
The March of Nines
How Will the Miracle Happen Today?
Essentials for Independent Travel in China
Paying AIs to Read My Books
The Periodic Table of Cognition
The Trust Quotient (TQ)
Emotional Agents
Everything I Know about Self-Publishing
No Limit for Better
Artificial Intelligences, So Far
An Audience of One
Epizone AI: Outside the Code Stack
Best Thing Since Sliced Bread?
Public Intelligence
The Unpredicted vs the Over-Expected
The Self-Domesticated Ape
The Handoff to Bots
50 Years of Travel Tips
101 Additional Advices
Type 2 Growth
Rights / Responsibilities
The Scarcity of the Long-Term
Hill-Making vs Hill-Climbing
Future Embarrassments
The Trust Flip
Things We Didn’t Know About Ourselves
The Boredom Device
Levels of Wealth
The Tradeoffs in AI
God, the Superposition
The Best Since Sliced Bread
Jobs of the Future
The Slow Frontier of Genetic Choice
How to Walk-and-Talk
Paying people to have children
The Missing Monuments of Silicon Valley
The Sphere, a new platform
Dreams are the Default for Intelligence
Cringeworthy in the Future
China’s Immigrant Energy, Underappreciated
12 Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life
Overcoming Bias Against Bigness
The Need For a Body
Wishful Worries
Creative Commons
Your Most Improbable Life
Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. This is true whether you favor traditional humanist directions or work on a frontier.
The strategy of seeking the most improbable life begins at the Big Bang. As far as we know there are two unbreakable laws in the universe: 1) Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, and 2) Everything runs down over time toward an end state of absolute uniformity. This motionless destination “without difference”, is also known as heat death, or entropy. With universal entropy, everything moves toward sameness and the totally predictable.
Physics says a major caveat to universal entropy and sameness is that if you are able to accelerate the generation of entropy in some places, you can create systems that reverse entropy around it in a local region. Instead of running down, these pockets run up, gaining order, structure, organization, and unpredictableness, or what is called exotropy. The most celebrated system accelerating entropy and increasing exotropy, is life. The first bit of life was highly improbable, and each species of life it evolved increases its quotient of improbability.
If you take a deck of cards, throw them into the air, then gather them back into a deck, the order of those cards are highly, highly improbable. When you shuffle a deck of 52 cards the order of those cards will never be repeated again in the history of the universe, no matter how fast you shuffle. But if you take the deck of cards and throw them into the air, the chances of them falling into a tower of 52 cards resting on their edges stacked in 5 rows, as a child might build, is fundamentally near zero. Cards arranging themselves into a tower need an improbable system (a human) to accomplish this.
In the same way as cards, the self-improving system of life re-arranges random atoms in the universe into very improbable shapes we call proteins and amino acids. The same system arranges these unexpected molecules into very improbable organs, which are arranged into very improbable bodies. So long as they are alive, life maintains that improbable arrangement, keeping the whole body far from the dull sameness of entropy. That suspended relief from entropy is removed upon death, when the atoms in a dead body quickly revert to randomness.
Even more amazing, evolution is an additional system that keeps elevating the improbable. Over long periods of time evolution creates more complexity, more structure, and installs more information in living bodies, thereby increasing the flow of energy through them (which increases its rate of generating entropy), and thus upping their unlikeliness. The more complex a creature, the more improbable it is.
The grand arc of evolution moves...