And captions, there we go. Greetings everyone. Greetings. Hey, Barry, good to see you. We are in Denver where overnight it's no big fluffy flakes with no wind. So the trees are just holding up a whole bunch of snow. It's really beautiful outside. I had picked as a topic and can be easily steered in other directions if other people are more interested in things, but I added a thought a couple of weeks ago to my brain called, we are in a post-GPT world. Already? Yeah, yeah. And what I mean by what I meant by doing that was GPT had been out for a while, we're on GPT-3. Chant GPT is based on 3.5. There's Dolly and there was a whole bunch of fuss about making synthetic art imagery and that was going on. And then it seemed to me that when chat GPT-3 hit, there was a change in kind, a change in tone, a change in energy, a change of some sort where all of a sudden at least many of my communities were just humming and buzzing. A lot of my friends were busy experimenting and doing cool stuff. And there were a whole bunch of articles and other kinds of things out in the world where it seemed like the realm of possibilities of what's happening, what's going on was kind of breaking open. Rick, I think I've got some background noise from your mic, I'm gonna mute you. And so that's the premise behind we are in a post-GPT world. And I'm wondering, and partly I'm wondering, what does that even mean? How are you all experiencing it? Do you agree? Does this just seem like yet another day on the islands trying to see who gets voted off next? Scott, please. I'll jump in from the visual side. So you were talking about the generated art that's coming out of all sorts of places. And I'm following that for a couple of reasons. One, I'm in the art creation world. Two, I have a number of illustrator friends who became concerned that they found their art as part of the source art.  But what I saw recently, and I haven't finished reading the article, was an interesting comment that it has forever changed the way that software is being built because what happened was in the space of a month or so, the internet was flooded with AI generated images. And that's where the images came from that were the sources for training the software. And so it's created this loop where now the people who are doing serious work in this are unable to get a pure signal because the images that they would, how do you separate from an AI generated image from an actual image? You can't anymore because they're so well done. And so it's created this loop, which I think would relate also to the text that you're talking about. So that's just a way to kick that off is that maybe I think Gil, you had said post as in, are we already passed, you know, and if I understood that correctly, it feels like at least in the image world, we may be in a post because it has been posted and everywhere. And so anyway, that was an interesting thing I had come across. Thanks, Scott. And a way that I'm phrasing, I think what you just said is that for me, the boundary between reality and synthetically generated stuff is getting blurry. That it's harder to identify what's human generated than what's not human generated. I'm not gonna say what's real and what's not because what's artificially generated becomes just as real the moment it's in our sphere. So I don't know that this is necessarily about reality, although it kind of is because what we think of as real, the real world is kind of now squishy in some way. That may be a more interesting philosophical conversation. I think you grasped what I was saying and what I think is interesting is that now it's created these loops where I grab source material as a human and use it to create something which then a computer can grab and use as source material. So is it necessarily bad? I don't know because I know that people have talked about at least in Photoshop, they have AI filters that I use. I control as a human and select remove background. Well, all right. So have I now, I have a prosthetic limb, you know, it's a mouse and it's creating this, I'm using that. So I don't know if it's a line between human created and not, but I think it does create that loop. Your loop image makes me think of the uroboros which is the snake eating its own tail. It's like society has suddenly started eating its own tail and we're ingesting as inputs things that were busy creating moments earlier and that gets weird. Mike, then Gil. A couple of quick comments as you know, I care a lot about words and the impression they leave. And I would say that post-GPT is not the phrase to use. I mean, we're gonna be playing with it for a long time. We're not after the fact. It's not like- I mean, post-GPT as in the world has been changed by GPT, I don't mean that GPT is behind us in any way at all. I mean- Well, that's the point is that saying post in many people's mind feels it's, oh, that phase is over or it's declining. We used to talk about the post-PC world and PCs didn't go away, but we sure played a lot more with phones and other devices. And the PC became kind of passe. So I have edited the font name per your advice right now. Thank you, Mike. Yeah, but the other point though is I'm a little selfish here. I don't get to come in on the topic Thursdays very often because I usually have a conflict. I would love to use GPT as the seed for a broader discussion about predictions for 2023. And maybe you were planning to do that in two weeks, but I think the most fun thing about GPT is thinking about how it's gonna be used next and what the impact will be. But I think there's a couple other things that are gonna cause some radical changes in the coming year as well. And the new way we approach crypto and the new skepticism, I mean, there's just a bunch of really big changes coming in the next 18 months. But I think I'm happy to start with GPT, but I'd encourage people to think forward rather than just stories, share stories about what they've done already. You know, I've been impressed and perplexed by the different articles I've read on GPT. Larry Maggard wrote a really interesting Facebook post. He asked chat GPT to write a poem about Facebook. And it was kind of pedestrian poetry, but it had some real insights on the dangers of Facebook. It was really quite deep. I'll see if I can find it. Well, I just did a quick Google and it didn't turn it up and I'm sure somebody will find it. And my intention was to look forward with it. I think we need to tell some stories of what's possible just so that we're sort of on the same page of OMG. But I like what you're doing, what you're saying, Mike. And also it's a great idea to do some looking ahead for 2023, which is a good thing to do at the turn of the year. Gil, then Doug, then Patty. Then Doug. Yeah, thanks. Good morning, everybody. Happy holidays. And Mike, thank you for that. I agree with everything that you said. Starting with the post, that was my reaction to post. And I think with that clarification story, maybe it's a different word. But I think the instinct is an important one. A few random thoughts on this. It seems that every time a major new technology has entered the world, people have been freaked out by it and thought there's a terrible thing and it's going to ruin everything. And maybe that's been right going back to the wheel, but this is another one of those. So that's one thing. The IP questions loom large for me because everybody's work is now scooped up into this one and how creators are honored and rewarded and we've already, we're already long past the hope of micropayments sustaining regular folks. And this is another blow to that, it seems. And I'm willing to be surprised. I resonated very much with what Scott, you said about no more pure signal. And I look at that in the light of the COVID stories of the last few years. I had a dialogue yesterday with a friend who's an extremely intelligent coach and thoughtful former engineer, former emergency room physician who told me that he's not taking any more vaccines. And I asked him for his sources and his sources were YouTubes of deniers talking, which is fine, but gave me no reference points into research data documentation. It's hard, if sourcing is there in YouTube and interviews, it's very hard to find. And I'm kind of old fashioned. I wanna look at something and see a site and follow it and see the data and see the graphs. And so long diversion. So here he is in a world of how did he form his instinct and intuition and judgment? And this I'm asking of a guy who I deeply respect. If the provenance of the signal is obscured by the GPT, how do we ever do that again? How do we distinguish between grounded and original information and the other stuff that comes? So that's sort of one thread of question. Another thread of question is that this feels like the folks who just announced that private companies that's proceeding on global climate intervention to shield the planet from the sun. No asking for permission, no authorization from anybody, no peer review, they got the bucks and they're gonna do it. So that's happening. And so I feel a parallel of the GPT, ice nine dropped into the oceans of the world and it happens and there we are. And not to leave on that sour note, I think an interesting question for us is what possible impacts and value could this stuff have for us as OGM? How does it contribute to what we're trying to do? How does it thwart what we're trying to do? I'm fascinated by the power of it, by the mediocrity of the work that it's generating. But that's what happened with desktop publishing back at the beginning also. And I was gonna say, and part of my attraction to it is it seems like having at my fingertips now and a massive army of research assistants who I normally couldn't afford. I don't have an emeritus professorship with dozens of those folks at my fingertips. But for folks like us, we could ask a question and get six months of research in six seconds and then filter it through smart human beings and conversation and so forth and elevate the level of the game. So as an adjunct, it's interesting. My wife has long argued against the term artificial intelligence. She prefers to call it simulated intelligence which I think is kind of an interesting provocation but in this case, it's maybe augmented intelligence and that is an interesting prospect. In the hands of global capitalism, maybe not so much but good stuff for us to chew into. Thanks Gil, two things I think. One on a list I'm on Christopher Allen basically explained how he used chat GPT to outline and I'm gonna mess up the details here but basically he wanted to create a science fiction series and he asked it to create characters and a plot and a 600 word blog post about it and six alternate titles or 10 alternate titles and a bunch of other things. And then he showed us in a long email like what that did and it wasn't perfect. It wasn't done. It's not gonna put script writers out of work tomorrow but OMG, it was a rich and interesting starting point for speeding up that process enormously. And my eyebrows were like glued to my hairline just from that and a few stories like it. And now if you could internalize that and as a human who apparently can't multitask but if you could multitask to have several of these things out doing your work for you at the same time concurrently and manage that concurrency in some way, I can't fully imagine what a human with that capacity would be doing or could be doing or could produce. It's like crazy. So yes, OMG, OGM, exactly.  We keep coming back to it. It's like a bad term. I'll post a little video that I created some years ago trying to distinguish between neural networks, AI, machine learning and a few other things. I tend to say machine learning or machine intelligence is even a pesky word. So machine learning is sort of like a good blanket for these things, but I'll post that. Let's just add one other thing. I just thought of a project that I'm willing to try this thing out on. I've got a whole bunch of legacy writing so I've been wanting to turn into an anthology, which are, you and I have an open loop to talk about that and tools for doing that. But I'm wondering if I turn chat GPT three lutes, whatever it's called. If I turn this thing loose on like 30 or 40 articles and said, turn this into a book. I wonder what it would do. So we'll find out. I'll let you know. Totally agree. Doug B. Yeah, Gil, where you left off, I've been spending way too much immersive time with Carl, but the Doug Engelbart human augmentation, this is sort of that, welcome Carl. This is sort of that writ large. And I think, you know, the legal question because I'm a lawyer, sort of fallen lawyer, but I'm a lawyer. The whole IP schema based on ownership, control and scarcity made no sense for a while. And this, I think sort of blows that, you know, sort of lands that and reveals the intrinsic challenge and problem with that going forward. But consistent with Doug's vision of sort of chained provenance being captured and welded to the human being. The thing, the property, the content. As an aggregative history being written, which sort of has reflective dimensions of what, you know, crypto and the tale of previous transactions, you know, sort of mirrors and ties into that somehow in terms of keeping track of a growing, aggregative and alive chain of provenances associated with things built on top of things built on top of things. So all of that sort of is starting to, for me, there's sort of a center of gravity somewhere in there for what the new paradigm might be. And the last pieces were, Farinanda had added a comment to somebody's post but had referred to the fact that she used it as a polisher. It sort of made her end product better. But she or somebody else in that same thread alluded to the fact that most of what it would generate left up to its own devices where the modest product was pedestrian, but every once in a while, there would be a line that was just magnificent and that would energize the rest. And so there is this kismet dimension of out of the pedestrian comes, you know, true sparks, which doesn't seem all that different to me from human ahas and intuitions occurring randomly. And what's our percentage of, quote, genius out of the massive stuff that's generated, that doesn't, I have the same, and just to end, I have the same issue with artificial intelligence, which implies a level of thinking understanding as opposed to very advanced pattern matching correlations that in a purely Doug Engelbart augmentation frame, these technologies make everybody empowered and better for their being made easy to use for as many people as humanly possible to enable everybody to be a better creator or to be a faster or more efficient generator. You know, what to do with the exponential increase in volume and output, you know, I have no idea. And I'm with that, I'm complete. Thanks, Doug. Pete was making the point in the chat a moment ago that we are now leveled up with expert chops on playing instruments, using paints, whatever else it might be. I mean, you can offer a text prompt and a country Western, it'll be like whose line is it anyway, like full time for everybody, although not as funny.  Patty, you were next in my queue but you fell out and came back in.  And then we'll go to Doug C. Carl, Mike. Thanks. Thanks, Jerry. Yeah, I hate to slow the conversation down, but I would love the opportunity to understand chat GBT a little better as been following the email chains that have been circulating. And I saw the information from what Tibet posted and the conversation that they'd had with this chat GBT and I can relate to Jerry's feeling of the eyebrows being like, I what am I seeing? And so, but beyond that, I don't really feel like I have much of a frame of reference as to how large this thing is. How is this different than things we've seen in the past? And I would love it if we could spend a couple minutes. I would just love to hear from anyone who cares to share, how's this different from things you've seen in the past, general fears, anxieties about whatever this thing is and do we, it sounds like I'm picking up that there's a positive potential here. I just don't have much of a frame of reference for what this thing is, so. Thanks, Patty. Also, if anybody wants to share really good what is chat GBT articles in the chat, that would be helpful. I can only get as far as like neural networks as opposed to expert systems, as opposed to other things and so forth. I don't have a sense for the volume with which this was trained, et cetera, et cetera. Anybody in the room feel up to an explanation? None of us. I think Pete is in chat only mode, listen only mode today. He could probably take a swing at that. But I'm trying to figure out how we might do that. I'm curious, Patty, if you could clarify what level of technical depth you're looking for here. Shallow layman's terms, thank you. Thank you for asking that question. Yeah, yeah, shallow depth preferably. Not, I don't have a lot of language or deep understanding of technology. And so I'm thinking perhaps, Jerry, we're not looking for this as the next level of GPT too, but rather what is this as a category? Yeah, but also like one of the breakthroughs here is that TP3 is able to hold as its pattern knowledge, a large mass of human works, but only up to a certain date I think in 2021 and it has no connection to current search engines. So chat GPT at some point doesn't know any events that happened after a particular date because they're not in its training repertory. Also one thing I learned a long time ago because I was a neural networks analyst in 1990 and when I was a tech industry trends analyst in the second lifetime of neural networks, the first lifetime was back in the 50s and 60s and ended with a book titled Perceptrons that was written by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert who were wrong but managed to chill all research into neural networks for more than a decade because they said neural networks are impossible and they were only right about single layered neural networks where you're trying to simulate how neurons work in the head kind of electrochemically in some sense and what happened was people started to get more computational power and much more sophistication and you've got what's why we call it deep learning is that now you have layers of simulated neurons that are all set up in really interesting sort of architectures which is why these models can now absorb and hold that much information and they're creating patterns. As far as I understand it, these systems are not remembering or storing clips of what they learned, they're just absorbing all of the things that they're trained on and then forming patterns that model, oh, okay, these words in sequence make sense and are apparently a terrific article and a good way to make pros. Then the other lesson I had back in the day when I was trying to help corporations figure out whether or not to use any of these technologies was. Some problems that look relatively simple are actually a sequence of problems. First, you have to identify characters, then you have to parse out the words, then you have to make sense and here, what we're seeing is a system that has the ability to take our random generated English sentences and turn that into some sort of query into the system. That itself is difficult. Then speaking it back to us in very elegant prose in some organized sense is really important and works differently. I'll point here to, there was a point a couple of years ago where Google swapped out the backend of Google translate and they swapped it from a more traditional, let's parse sentences, let's do sentence structure, let's then translate and then let's reassemble into more of a neural network, a large language model and all of a sudden the beauty and comprehensibility of their translations leaped. Last unfortunately, the training body that they used was professional translators translated works and there were a whole bunch of professional translators who were really pissed off because their works had been sort of absorbed into this thing as training and all of a sudden there was a system that was automated that was pretty good at doing this. That's one swing at this. Anybody else? I'll come back to the queue in a second but anybody else raise your hand if you wanna add to the explanations about chat GBT and where we are. Also, Pete is posting some things in the chat that are worth looking at. Obviously. Mr. Homer. I don't claim any expertise in this area but I've read a few articles and one thing that stood out for me is that because it's searching the web, we have the old garbage in garbage out. It is not discerning about what it takes in so you can get a lot of crappy stuff in there.  So it's just important to bear that in mind. It doesn't have the discernment to say, this is true, this is appropriate. Microsoft fielded an artificial virtual character called K some years ago and put it out on the web for people to come interact with. 4chan got a hold of it and trained it up on a whole bunch of really crappy stuff and Microsoft had to pull it down in a hurry because it suddenly started suing like Nazi philosophy and whatever else. So these things are only as good as what they're absorbing. And if you have a sexist misogynist and otherwise strange society and those are the things you're feeding into the system then the system is going to mirror a lot of that in ways that are maybe hard to detect and control. Go ahead Ken. And you get clippy. And you get clippy, exactly. Poor clippy suffered such a bad fate. Hope that helps Patty and if anybody else comes up with more on that we'll just jump back into it as we go through the conversation. Let me go to Doug Carmichael. So I'm assuming we're past the stage of negotiating what the topic is. So I'll go along with the one that we seem to be on. And my view is the big inner world surrounded by images, music and words that are created by machines is not very attractive. If I think of the rows of books behind me everyone has the real person who wrote that book and I know a lot of them. That's a very different experience. And I think it's like suddenly we're going to be surrounded by an alien species that's putting out images, words and music and architecture and government agencies and other stuff that can be created artificially. I don't think I want to live in that world. I want to hide out somewhere. Doug, thank you.  It's like this looks like a dicey venture and there doesn't seem to be a lot of adult supervision. Well, maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But a whole lot of things are up for grabs in ways that we don't have a lot of choice over. So I hear you and I'm with you. Well, and I want to add, this group like so many groups is doing something very interesting. It's not talking about climate change. This seems to be a kind of universal pathology. And it's really worth exploring. Thanks, Doug. Carl? Yeah, I posted a couple of links. There was that edge.org site and John Brockman had organized some really fascinating articles in there. But Doug and I had actually met taking a how to wrangle course back in 2013 and stuff. But I wasn't seeing the direct thing, but I remember seeing a conversation between Patty Nates and how a wrangle and maybe it gets into that. There's that intelligence augmentation. And then they also talk about amplification. And I think that's one of the problems with the stuff that the amplification doesn't have the filters. It's just type of stuff. So I think that's. And then Ben Snyderman, I've been going back and looking at some of his work. And he came out with a book back in February on human-centered artificial intelligence. And he likened it to a second Copernican revolution is needed. We need to have the algorithms revolving around humans in the way around it. So that's a few things to regarding this. I'm not a big fan of it. I've been at some meetings with like on his name now, the architect of Siri and stuff, talking about code in the wild and stuff. And it's just really scary stuff as far as I'm concerned, because there are no breaks. Thanks Carl. Two things I just wanted to add. One is that we're using the term hallucinations to represent things that chat GPT and things like it come up with that it thinks are real, but are not real. And it, but it treats it as real and often will even sort of convincingly argue for as being real. And one of the threads I saw was a guy who said he was in a chat with chat GPT which claimed that there was a Pablo Neruda poem and then quoted it. And then when probed insisted that this poem exists but he's pretty sure this poem has never existed any place and was basically a hallucination of another poem with a similar but not exactly the same title, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's really interesting. And then the second thing is chat GPT is from open AI and Google I think almost certainly has similar capacity except it has a real-time search engine. So this is based on nothing but my conjecture but I'm willing to bet that Google can match what's being done with chat GPT right now and also tie it to fact-checking kind of real-time search which you could think about as another feature to add to what this thing can do. So right now we're all worried that chat GPT is hallucinating and can't fact-check and all that that's kind of true about the current architecture of the current thing which is blowing all of our minds already. You start to glue these things together and then do a little bit better policing on what came out and you could have much more complete and reliable results from some of these searches I think. And I think that one of Google's issues over time is how do we release what we have and what we know and the power tools we've got in a way that doesn't scare people, doesn't create unintended consequences that are really negative, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know whether and how this might come out but my hunch is they can match what chat GPT is doing and probably do it one better from internal work. And Carl is pointing out that Adam Chires is the Siri guy and he put a post in the chat. Thank you. Mike. Just a few things. First off, regarding copyright, I posted a really useful article in the latest issue of the Economist. It's their special double issue at the end of the year and it's all about how much material is falling out of public domain. And then it goes a little deeper to say how are we going to train the mega AI of the future that needs to know everything about everything if large parts of human knowledge is cordoned off behind paywalls. And so I think this is the fundamental issue and the country that gets copyright right and reforms it for the machine learning era is gonna have a huge advantage. And we'll see whether anybody does that. That apparently the Russians are kind of pulling back on copyright enforcement since they're at war and they don't wanna pay all the copyright royalties that Western firms are demanding. But a couple of other things. We've talked about adult supervision and right now open AI is providing some adult supervision. And if you ask chat GDP to do certain things, it will refuse. Moshe Vardy posted something where he said, write a really nasty insulting poem about Moshe Vardy. And it wrote back, oh, I don't do that. That would be unkind. So there is some kind of ethics loop in there, ethics filter. But I also just posted a link to a tweet about an open source implementation of GPT that could be used in all sorts of ways and might not have any adult supervision. The other thing to think about is that it's a pretty small step from where we are to having a chatbot that really does make people feel they're talking to somebody, at least somebody who's half drunk at the bar and making stuff up. And that might make a lot of lonely people in their seventies kind of happy. We've been waiting for this. The other thing that isn't too far off are the AI gen, where you can rather than asking for an essay on a topic you ask for a video on a topic. And then, let's have a question, Mike. Go ahead, Mike. What would it be like if instead of seeing the Zoom squares here, each one was a bot? And so the whole Zoom conversation would be between me and 20 bots. But I wanna do that. I think Mike's connection has just borked. No, I'm still here and video voice, I'm here. I think that would be incredibly useful for certain applications. It would be a great way for a novelist to play with dialogue, just frame a topic and put in a setting and have five people to talk to. And suddenly you have this rich dialogue, some of which you could steal and put into your novel. I don't know. Again, people who have dementia and are 87 years old in a nursing home are finding solace and comfort from these anthropomorphic seals and dogs. And they try to simulate animals and maybe there's also going to be some kind of machine learning generated three-year-old. Which again, an elderly person might find very interesting and simple enough to understand. Parents of autistic children have discovered that Siri and things like Siri are endlessly patient and good companions. And that's been really interesting in a very junior varsity version of where the future you're talking about, Mike. Stacey, then Ken. Yeah, I just wanted to quickly say that's a real ethical problem from what you were saying. The seals and the dog, you're talking to a seal and a dog. If you have somebody helping from memory or something like that, as long as the person knows it's a robot, that's one thing. But I've been spending a lot of times in singles groups listening to them speaking older people. And the only good thing about all this GP, all of this, it's making regular people a little bit more critical in their thinking. At least that's my hope that they're more critical and is this person real? Is this person not real? But what it does emotionally to a person to find out that somebody they thought was a real person and then find out they weren't? That's just horrible. And this whole notion of thinking, well, it's for their own good. For me, that's an old paradigm that I just wanted to say this. I'm not totally good with that. Stacey, I'm right there with you. Yeah, I was either, but I said it's happening. Yeah, I'm right there with you. Mike, I know you're describing what's going on in the world, but I just find it really sad that there's, we keep placing technology in the center where we need to be putting people. And there's plenty of people out there who would be happy to, if they had the economic incentive to be caring for elderly people and people on the spectrum and whatnot. And we're using machines instead. And I find that there's something just deeply disturbing to my soul when I hear that. It's not a criticism or anything. A view, Mike, is just the state like, man, I live here in California and we have this huge problem with sudden oak death. We've got all these huge numbers of oak trees that have died and all kinds of underbrush in the forest, which are feeding the fires. And there's plenty of people who would be happy to go out there and clean the forest and take these trees down and lower the fuel load. But there's no economic incentive for them to do so because it's considered that's too high a cost. So instead we'll let our forest burn to the point where they won't be able to regenerate because the fires are so hot now. So I just think we need to get people back in the center of our lens for how do we get together here and how do we get along? How do we take care of each other and how do I take care of this place? Thanks, Ken. Let's tilt ourselves toward 2023 and the future a bit. I'm sorry, I just had a funny thought that I'm... Please, Scott. So now I'm gonna go onto YouTube and I'm gonna see a video generated by some intelligence and all the comments are gonna be coming from other intelligences. So basically I'm just a passive observer and then they can go do what they're... Then I'll go outside and take a walk. So a piece of this turns into the ending of her, right? Where the intelligences have gotten better than us and are busy socializing and like, thanks, bye-bye. I don't know who iPhone is who's just come in but if you want to jump into the conversation. Oh, it's John, cool. Hi, yeah, I'm outside with my phone and you know what that's like. I just a note, this may have... I came in late so this may have already been mentioned a good dramatic exploration of the use of robots in the form of surrogate humans is a movie called Marjorie Prime, which you can see for free. And it's obviously a human written script and there are lots of signs that it is a human written script, attempting to simulate what a future might be like where loved ones who have passed are regenerated holographically and given large chunks of the memory of the person who passed and then engage in dialogue with the still living about their relationship and how it's going. I thought it was fascinating. It doesn't answer the questions that we're dealing with. It just gives you a lot more in the form of a wow understanding of the complicated potential of that sort of technology. There are already some startups that are trying to take somebody's email exchanges and sort of in order to simulate conversation with somebody who's passed away. That's a junior varsity version of that happening now already. And I hadn't heard of Marjorie Prime before this call so thanks Ken and John for pointing to it. Looks really interesting. Patty. Yeah, before we turn towards 2023, this might sound unrelated, but it's becoming, it's been coming up for me throughout a conversation. Personally, how I feel I would like to work on developing my own critical thinking skills as we're talking about all these other, it's been something I've been curious about for a while but it continues to feel like it's grabbing my attention more and more. And I would love to be pointed towards resources if anyone has any about maybe spaces, places or books that would be supportive in practicing that and developing critical thinking skills. If I don't have access to going to like a community college and taking a class, you can message me personally or put it in the chat but you seem like a good group to, I trust that there would be some information here. So if anyone cares to share, they'd be appreciated. Thanks Patty. And the link I just posted in the chat is the link to critical thinking in my brain which might be a place to browse around. And I will go look there for more resources but others who have thoughts, raise your hand if you've got anything directly or put it in the chat. Ken is gonna come up in a moment. So let's go Gildan Ken. Yeah, on the theme of Marjorie Prime and the thing being trained on people's emails to simulate conversations and so forth which sounds inordinately creepy to me but I just read yesterday about an indigenous culture somewhere. I do not have the link where the culture is built around shaman enhanced conversations with ancestors. And apparently it's a large part of the life of that culture.  I don't know who's doing that a lot but that's happened in a bunch of places. That was what we were talking about this that it seems to be, it's not just an occasional ceremonial thing but a part of the daily life that's in the lived experience of the people and somehow amplified or enhanced by the shaman element in that culture. So that feels very much parallel to what you just described and yet deeply, deeply different. And I'm intrigued by the difference in how we, not to Ken Homer, we the global culture of now tends to alive that kind of difference in its pursuit of algorithms for everything. Also, it's funny. The book, The Healing Wisdom of Africa by Malodomus Omei taught me, showed me that in many cultures, indigenous cultures, shamans and other sorts of people, that's sort of a bad collective noun but are the gatekeepers between this world and other worlds which to those cultures are as real as the reality, the Mac book that I'm talking to you through and that in Western culture, we've sort of deprecated and gotten rid of all that kind of stuff, which I think maybe limiting our ability to perceive a whole bunch of things that matter a lot. And I don't know, messing with reality in all these ways could make that worse, could make that better. And maybe there's ways that things get opened up. I don't know. Ken. Last week on this call, someone put a link to a Peter Elbow paper in the chat, which I took me a couple of days to get to but I found it really amazing. I did post it to the OGM list. It's called The Believing Game and I actually copied it out and put it into a Word document. So, Pat, if you just DM me your email, I'll be glad to send that to you. It's kind of the critical compliment to critical thinking. Critical thinking is the doubting game and it's how we apply our doubts. And the believing game is, what if we actually entered into somebody's world and took on their beliefs and tested them to see how well that would work for us? It doesn't mean we'd take them, as we're going to just totally absorb it. It means we're gonna try it out. And I just thought it was an amazing paper. So, if you haven't had a chance to read it, it's quite extraordinary. And whoever, I don't remember who posted, I remember Jerry put the link and I remember who raised it, but thank you because it really lit me up for a while. Appreciate it. Yeah, actually, I posted it several times. Things, one of the things I'm looking to is actually organized event. And what I'm looking for people who are certified in the six thinking hats method for facilitation method, because I see the believing game kind of being the yellow hat thinking and then the doubting game is the black hat thinking. So, trying to find a group of people who are skilled in facilitating processes, a group I'm looking to engage to help organize that event. Thanks Carl. And I just realized that I had my mute on a moment ago. The link that I put in was the Peter Elbow essay that Carl showed us and Ken was mentioning a moment ago. So, let's turn the search light sort of forward into 2023. What 2022 was really interesting in a lot of the ways that we've been talking about so far, never mind a lot of much more tragic ways like Russia invading Ukraine, et cetera. What does anyone think about 2023? Bueller? Bueller? Mike. I am horrified with what I'm seeing coming out of China. It's almost like the leadership has decided, well, this is our way to really show that we control everything.  But it's also a way to impose probably permanently an incredible surveillance state. The kind of thing that they have in Northwest China to control a million Uighurs is now gonna be used to control a billion people in every corner of China. And I just, it seems dystopian. Maybe I'm reading the wrong things. Maybe they're gonna get through it okay. But I just, it's horrifying. And I'm reading a tweet from somebody who said, for weeks I didn't know anybody who had COVID. Now everybody in my building has COVID, everybody in my child's school has COVID. Wow. It's just, and they're not even testing, it's just everybody has the symptoms. It's just running around. I was on a call yesterday where people were talking about the digital yuan, basically central bank digital currencies, CBD seeds or whatever that is. But in particular, China's move toward that where they will have a programmable official currency. They wanna move everybody to it. And once you've got a programmable currency, you can begin to detect and clamp down on illicit transactions that use that digital currency. You can begin to trace everybody and every use of it. You can create a dystopian crazy future that may make it very efficient. I mean, you'd have to then, and I learned about inside money and outside money and private money, terms I had never heard before. And private money is money that is sort of outside the system and where you can sort of go make deals. Outside money is money outside of the normal system like gold or cryptocurrencies. And so I think all those things are up for grabs and have tremendous privacy implications.  The digital currency is fascinating because it's gonna save enormous amount of money on prisons because you won't have to arrest people. You just cut off their money and let them drift. The massive control. What strikes me about China is the glaring defect of authoritarian systems. I keep coming back to Russ Ashby's law of requisite variety.  Massive decisions without enough information and nuance and it will be held to the United States is just starting to lockdown travel in from China. Companies are disinvesting. Lord knows where this will go. And it recalls from me our old friend, Max Headroom who had is what was it 40th anniversary this year, Max and the world of the blanks. You know, the people who lived outside the digital systems somehow whether it's gonna be possible in China or not. I don't know. I think there's a non-zero chance of Xi losing his lifetime premiership in the next 12 months but who knows. I have time I call. Yeah, this is so complicated. I think we misperceived China. And I would, here's a thumbnail sketch of the recent Chinese history. What they did is went through a major period of raising the income of a large part of the country. She says, okay, we did that but we have two problems. Inequality is still very powerful and corruption is very powerful. So I'm devoting my career, the rest of it, to correcting those two things. World economy is impacting China in a way that's making it harder for him to govern. But what's striking to me is that he does have a social policy. We don't. We have no view of where we're going and we have no agreement on what the major problems are. So I would say that there's a chance that China is in a better place than the U.S. is to deal with climate change, which might require things like lots of surveillance, a lot of uncomfortable authoritarian moves. I don't want to go there, but I don't want to go to the other place either. That is where we just keep drifting, which is what we're doing. And how we in this conversation get out of the drift about climate change seems to me like a serious problem. Just to build on what Doug says, two things. One is very few Westerners have done a real survey of Chinese history over the past 5,000 years. And it's a very different story than what we glean from our mass media. It's a complex and rich and longstanding civilization with a long history of internal battles and authoritarianism and such. And as Doug said, an absolutely astounding transformation in the last 50 years in terms of poverty. Just absolutely astounding. The other thing that China has, which is pretty much unknown in the West, is an ecological society policy. This was adopted by Central Committee two or three or maybe four or five year plans ago. And it's important to look at China's moves. And people's skepticism about China's climate policy and still reliance on coal and so forth in the context of a top level commitment to ecological society, which in some ways is the things that many of us have been dreaming about for decades. In the context of an authoritarian state though it's unhappy for us hippies and Democrats, but there's something very profound in the background of what's happening in China that we are pretty much blind to. Gail, I'm really interested by, and I think it has a lot to do with OGM-ness and all that, what you're saying in China relative to the US, for example, and one of the things that I said, I've said in conversation a few times in the last month or two, are that it's weird that in the US we're busy trying to keep the US from becoming the handmade's tale instead of collaborating to address things that like have dug up every, dug Carmichael up all the time and trying to steer us toward and everybody else worried. And is that just because democracy is messy? Is that just because politics is broken? Is that because we can't sort things out or people aren't being clear? Like how do we get closer to, and I don't know that we can have and organize the method for all of this that we could have rules of fair play that might make it a lot easier to move forward, right? I would, yeah, and there's a big conversation to have there and let's keep that up maybe for two weeks from now when I would just say that yet democracy is messy and it always has been, but democracy in the context of Citizens United where bribery has been legalized, where the ratio of lobbyists to electeds has gone like what two orders of magnitude difference in the last 50 years and where at latest count, there are three people in the United States who have the wealth of half of the United States. So in that context, democracy is real messy because it's warped. So when we talk about democracy, we have to talk about the one we have now and the one we have if it were regulated to control the distortions of wealth, China's chosen a different direction, which is very much in their tradition as democracy is in its various forms in our tradition. So we're not gonna be them and they're not gonna be us, but to Doug's point, we have to play together and that playing together is sort of moved back off the table, I think in the recent events. Tick-tock as well as COVID, right? Thank you, Scott, go ahead. Very quick comment. You had said something about government and politics, I believe that I did a quick search in my own brain and I found a quote, pre-speech allows the public discussion necessary for democratic self-government. And to me, that's connecting back to where we started with one of the reasons that being able to post to everyone is a good thing is that all of our opinions get out there and so we can collectively see where we are, where things should move. And when those opinions, because everyone's post is their own perspective, their own opinion, when those get muddled with artificially generated content that has, I think even the creators of those applications would say, it has no place in that discussion.  If that public discourse is sullied with a lot of content that is, well, remember that classic essay on bullshit, I think, which I think is, it's a wonderful piece where it says that people who do that liars know that they're telling a lie but the bullshitter doesn't care. They just are saying whatever it is they need to say to get in the moment. So it's just an interesting thought that occurred to me that, well, who cares if there's all this language out there that's useful for us and that we can incorporate in things? Well, what if it's all, if what we're doing is trying to gather the thoughts of other people around us and now we can't because those are, there's not a fellow citizen, shall we say? I don't know if that's the right term. Anyway. So much of this is about things like citizenship and being citizens instead of being consumers and all that. I've been spreading around this for a long time. Michael, what was yours? I've been back and forth in the conversation. So I might be a little off topic, but I think this relates to what Scott was just saying and certainly to some things that came earlier. I wanna present a slightly optimistic view of what chat GPT could do in the coming months and years. And in terms of political dialogue, I think things like chat GPT are not as good because they're not as good as at stuff like sarcasm and shaming and all the nasty stuff that goes on in the Twitter sphere and just making dumb snarky comments. The idea that a roomful of people you could converse with would be able to be the sum of, we talked about dead people, but let's talk about putting together the logical points of certain people with different political points of view to try to thrash out issues on your own without getting into the who's wearing a red and who's wearing a blue jersey to work out a problem. And I think there's a lot of potential for that for people dealing with personal issues as well. Would people be willing to deputize a digital twin to have a non-heated conversation with a business partner or a life partner or a parent or something to just putting feelings aside, hash out something a little bit and then bring the results to each other in political context, personal context, business context, et cetera, I think there's some potential there. And I hope that with full transparency with people knowing what they're doing that it's more useful than people sitting there and honing their own arguments for themselves for their political marketplace effect. So yeah, that's just my thought. Thank you, Michael. 2023, all the thoughts. So if we do this a year from now, are we gonna be shocked at how dramatic changes were in 2023 or is it gonna be another year sort of like this one where, wow, this showed up, wow, that showed up? I think we'll be shocked by a couple of the examples of where GPT gets supplied. I mean, there were a lot of mechanics were shocked to see how quickly their students were writing term papers. Yeah, hey, it's like the guy who outsourced his job a couple of years ago into the gig economy and sat playing games at his desk while other people did his work. Doug B, then Ken, then Doug C. And you're muted. So a slightly different orientation point to your question. If any given present moment holds unlimited opportunity and potential, the question for me more is what do I do with 2023? And like that really came in in the last week as a result of a couple of conversations and feeling sense into what I was feeling was needed, you know, that eternal question like what's needed right now. And I'm, and really, you know, resonanced with Doug about like what's needed right now is a global wakeup like immediate wakeup and how to trigger that. And cause the kind of viral spontaneous shift out of what we've been doing to what we need to be doing differently. And so that's like burning for me. And I think 2023 is soon to be the present moment and now and what do we do with it? How do we make sure it's not the same in a year from now? We're not sitting in the same position but with bearer cupboards and more social unrest and millions and millions and millions of people around the world starving it out. So it's a much more vital proactive inquiry to me. And what can I slash we do or what can I do to galvanize a group of people who's turned it into what we're doing in service to turning that into a greater group of people doing to change the course. Anyone with pragmatic suggestions to answer Doug's question right now, please get in the queue and then Doug see. Somewhere back in the 90s in context magazine there was something published called the Innovation Diffusion Game which conceives of culture as an amoeba. And the way amoebas move is they sort of put out a pod and they start to gravitate sort of that pod but sometimes on the opposite end another pod will go out in the opposite direction and then it gets pulled and in some instances the amoeba will actually split into two. So I've just always felt that was a really great metaphor for culture change and because it allows you to see things that are happening very positively and very negatively in the same thing without them being untreated, it's just the way things are moving.  And I, oh, thanks, Jerry. That just lifted my spirits tremendously because it's like, I trust evolution. I think that humans are really stupid collectively and very brilliant individually but I also trust that evolution did not bring our intelligence into the world in order for us to take ourselves out of it and somehow we're gonna get there. I have no idea how, I really don't. It's like, it's too big for me to see but I just, that's my foundation and I found that if I don't have that foundation then I'm very wobbly in the world so I just have to trust that things are gonna, somehow in the end it will work out. There may be enormous suffering, there might be billions of us lost, I don't know and certainly there's already been incalculable damage to the biosphere and we'll spend the rest of our existence trying to repair that or a good portion of it but I'm just looking around, yeah, evolution's lots of dead ends.  Learning is required, survival is optional and I'm trusting that we're gonna come to a better level of understanding individually and collectively. I look at stuff like Braver Angels which is doing a great job of helping to depolarize blue and red people or whatever you wanna label them and one of the things I was reading in a newsletter for them recently was Amanda said, you know, there are too many people who have a vested interest in turning us against each other. We need to recognize that. There are way more people who are interested in working together than there are in dividing us and yet divide and conquer has been a wonderful way for people to assume power for, I don't know, a thousand years so I'm hopeful that we're gonna start to see a lot more of that waking up and saying, you know, who's benefiting here by turning me against my neighbor? Certainly not us. So that's just one of the things that I'm focused on for 2023 is less volatility in the social media sphere. I think people are really tired of finding fault and trolling and creating all this horrible stuff.  They wanna actually work and find ways to make things work. I might be Pollyanna here, I don't know, but it's what keeps me going. And Ken, part of my belief system is that a lot of what's going on right there is intentional, it's strategy. And I'm busy trying to figure out how do you undermine, diffuse, dampen, mitigate or otherwise pop that strategy. And one of the ways is to give people a real path for authentic lives with meaning and enough stuff around them that they don't wanna lose it, including community. So I think there's a lot of that. Doug C. Sorry, Ken, you wanted to jump back in? Go ahead. I was just gonna say one of the things in dawn of everything was I came away meaning much more towards anarchy than I had been in the past. Because they mentioned, you know, for the Woodland Indians in the Northeast of the US in the 17th, 18th centuries, there was proper property. The men owned their own hunting implements, women owned their means of farming and whatnot, but they shared the bounty of the harvest and the hunt. And so everyone had the means for an autonomous life. And once everyone is guaranteed the means for an autonomous life, then you can have tremendous variety and individuality. And if we would just say, all right, we're gonna make sure everybody has the means for an autonomous life, then that would change the game tremendously. And I actually think we might be moving towards that. There's much more embrace of universal basic income and, you know, tax the billionaires back to middle-class status. And so I'm hopeful. If we can solve for that, we solve a lot of things. I'm gonna pass the con to Ken and say happy new year. And thank you so much, but thanks. We'll see you in the next year. Thank you, Jerry. Happy new year. We're hosting these calls, all this. And everything you do to curate them, it's a big thing in my life that makes me feel good and happy, I really appreciate you. I appreciate that very much. Thank you, Ken. Thanks everybody. All right, Doug Carmichael. Okay, I think it's very hard to get to a positive scenario about the future without acknowledging the negative scenarios because they are the ground in which we're gonna be trying to put together something that's better. The most obvious negative scenario to me is that we're not gonna do anything. We're gonna drift and the temperature is gonna continue to rise until it leads to some kind of social breakdown. In that context, can we pull out a positive scenario? I think we can, but we've got to acknowledge the negative ones first. They're much more probable. We've got to, I think, end up working for improbable scenarios to try and make them work and that's gonna be really hard. Do you have any advice for people who are working on making the improbable possible? I think we live in a world where right now everybody wants to get from where we are to a better place. I think we're gonna have to go through a worse place first. There's got to be some falling apart before we can put things together. How far that goes is not clear. I would just say to people who wanna work on this, that they'd be honest with their own feelings and be willing to work on more complex futures. Thanks, Doug. Stacy. Yeah, earlier, Jerry used the phrase about playing by the rules and I just wanted to say that people play by their own sets of rules and I found that, well, first of all, I think it's, I don't think we're ever going to get everybody to play by the same set of rules and I don't know that it's even meant to be like that anyway. So for me, it's about finding people who want to play by the same set of rules and are consistent in it. So they don't play by one set when they're with one group of people or in one situation. And going into 2023, what I'd like to do, I'd do it anyway, but what I really would like to do more of is start having more conversations about our own ethics and our own morals and almost play with these, what would you do if?  I'd rather, I'd rather just see where my soul goes next. And I'm complete. Thanks, Stacy. I just want to make one comment on that. Now that I have Jerry's seat, I get to comment on people. So, Michael Meade talks about the Gnostic move. The Gnostic move is the spiritual move that says, we're all one. If we could just see we're all one, everybody get along and our problems will be solved. And the problem is the spiritual move is disembodied. It gets up above everything and it sees it as all one, but the in-soul embodied move is when you recognize there's self and other. And everybody has this pull of individuality and collective within them. And we have to recognize that there are, there is one species, but there are many people, there are many tribes. And until we can legitimize the people who's the tribes that we say, we don't like your way of that you tribe.  So how do we create containers where different tribes can come together and talk through what they need to feel safe in order to work together? Can I just say a thing real quick? Please, please. Yeah, I just wanna say, forget about the tribes. It starts with just your friends because even with people you're close to, there are going to be aspects of each other that you're gonna see as being wrong or not right and not recognizing that there's something else you're not seeing. So my suggestion would be, forget about the other tribes. Let's just deal with what's right in front of us. Like you brought up the mild situation. That was a terrible situation. I disagree with how that went down. We can save that for another time. But if we can't do that with people we know, who are we to say what other tribes, about other tribes? Exactly. Yeah. Thanks. Mr. Friend. Ken, I appreciate that you're slowing down the rhythm of the conversation a little bit. Thank you for that. You know, the Zen monkeys talk about not one, not two. We're not separate. We're not the same. How do we live in that paradox? I just, Neal's board told me yesterday. What did he tell me? He said, how wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. So, you know, there we are living in that. I wanna roll back to a couple of things. Yeah, Doug. Doug C, working for impossible scenarios is an attractive provocation. I dropped a Sun Rock quote in the chat. The possible has been tried and failed. Now it's time to try the impossible. So maybe that can go into your stupod here. I'm backing up a few minutes and I'm reminded of the Arundhati Roy quote, which people know about another world is coming. I can hear her breathing. But the other part of the quote that's rarely cited, she says, they be few and we be many. They need us more than we need them. So that orbits in this conversation for me. I came across an article, I guess it was last week from Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister and self-identified libertarian Marxist an interesting guy who offered a theory of change that I was surprised is a lot like what I've been, not so consciously operating with for the past 50 years, which he says, look, with regard to climate, we know a lot of what needs to be done. We have a lot of the tools and technologies and systems and policies somewhere on this planet, working at some level and development at some level. So number one, let's push those forward as far as we can. Number two, share them so that people can adopt them and use them and taste them and feel them and like them and say, I want this, I want this technology, I want this future. Step two, I know step three, they realize they can't have it in the world that we're in, they can't have that, they can't have that to the degree that they want. And then the question is, why not? What's in the way of that? Who's in the way of that? How do we move on that? So that's three steps stack, I thought was very cogent and powerful and is a lot of what many of us are doing anyway, but it gave a name to it that I thought was very powerful. And I see Doug sees hand up. I don't believe that we have the knowledge that we need. And the forefront is we need to cut the burning of fossil fuels. We have no plan on how to do that at scale. I'm saying and he's saying that we have the technology to do that at scale. We don't, I don't believe we do. It's not a technology problem, it's a stopping the burning of fossil fuels. Go ahead, Gil. This is probably more detail we want to go far into this conversation, but for example, if we put, you know, when California was innovating with the $12 per ton carbon fee price, Sweden was at $160 a ton. The United States government was 35. The US did a bottom up analysis of what's the social cost of carbon, how we mitigate that. Sweden said, what price do we need for carbon in order to drive the society to carbon free? So there's a technology called a real price on carbon, whether it's $160 a ton or $1,600 a ton. We know what that is politically, we can't do that at this point. We know how to build carbon neutral buildings. A friend of mine was just in a school in Austria, 500 student school built a passive house standard.   And for the rest of the week, the school was heated by the bodies of the students at lower first cost, lower capital cost than building a normal school. We know how to do that stuff. We ain't doing it. And so the point Doug, it's not that we have all of it but we have enough of it to push the provocation to have people, if people know about this to say, why can't we have that? And then we get into the more complicated social and political questions. Anyhow. Building the carbon neutral school, we know how to do. What we don't know how to do is that the building of the carbon neutral school uses a tremendous amount of carbon and mining and materials and transportation and so on. We do not have a solution to that problem. Well, that's next. I think one of the challenges is we have this end goal of carbon neutrality and then there's the scaffolding and the bridging technologies that will get us there and there's no one single thing, path like we're gonna do this and we'll get there. There's gonna be a whole bunch of things coming from multiple areas and it makes it very hard to see but I'm with Gil. I think we have an awful lot of the technologies available maybe not everyone but enough to make a significant shift and it's getting the political will or a political system capable of acting on a will that is going to actually move us in that direction that is the really hard problem and that is actually a social problem not a technology problem. And that's where the viral focus thing I think is key because if we say to people, we want you to make this enormous effort and all these sacrifices for a future that we can't describe to you that we can't help you imagine and that you have no sense of whether it's possible or not that's a very difficult political challenge and if we can give people a taste of it and they say, I like this, I want this then the next challenge isn't it? You're right, there are many layers of challenges to do this but motivating the will from hopelessness and despair and nihilism to I can taste the world that I want and I can imagine it and I can imagine bringing pieces out forward with the people that I live with to me that holds much more possibility. Anyhow, I don't want to monopolize conversation here. Before I go to you, I saw Stacy put her hand up briefly to Stacy, do you want to say something? Yeah, real quick. And I'm asking this question for a specific reason I think Barry might appreciate it. I just want to know and I'm going to use electric cars as an example. Is there an actual study where it showed if we replaced all the cars we have now with electric cars, doesn't matter how if miraculously it was all replaced and everything were being operated what the differences would be because I know what happens, you know people just argue and they don't have numbers and I see Gil wants to answer me but this has to do with political will because so many uninformed people are creating all this noise that nothing ever gets done. Guilt that you want to say, go ahead. Yes, there are lots of studies. To those who say electric cars are more polluting not true, it obviously depends on the power source that's providing electricity, but no, not true. To Doug C's point, the resources required to replace the current worldwide fleet in terms of steel and rubber and everything else is vast and it's a perfect example of why it's not just a choice between A and B but it could be a choice between why not cities that don't require everybody to have their own personal car or two or three to live their lives and invest in public transportation and walkable cities and so forth that mean a lot less cars to replace the current fleet of fossils. And yes, there's extensive work on that. I'm happy to connect you with it if you want to dive in. No, no, no, my point was just that sometimes we get the answers but we don't get the little details in between so that people could come up with alternative approaches and it becomes an all or nothing thing. That's really where I was in Barry also, I see. Let's throw a detail out there if you want it. Harry? Yeah, I'll get to you in a second. Just to add a detail, the sun delivers 1500 kilowatts per square meter to the surface of the earth, which is a lot of energy but we don't have really good technologies for capturing that energy and putting it to good use. If we could somehow develop the technology for solar capture, solar photon capture, there's more than enough energy. So that's the one problem that has to be solved and then you have all the energy you needed without carbon. I want to get back to one other thing that Stacey brought up and that's about different communities have different rules and so you have this issue of like with set of rules that I might have liked to play by in a given community. And that concept that there is a rule-based framework that could work if we only had the right set of rules, that's a common axiom in our culture. But if you study the mathematics and the dynamics of rule-based systems, if you really want to get to a culture of ethical best practices where everybody is trying to work out ethical best practices in the moment and you say, I want to reduce that down to a framework of rules, you're lost because rule-based systems are not powerful enough to support ethical best practices. In fact, what rules support are games and dramas and chaotic dynamics. And that belief that rule-based systems suffice if you only had the right set of rules that is a mathematical falsehood that humans adopted some 6,000 years ago. 20th century mathematics showed us that the rule-based systems are inherently chaotic. They define games and drama. And yes, you can evolve from rule-based frameworks to a framework of ethical best practices which requires them advanced mathematics and system models. How are we ever gonna get there with our population of homo-schluppians is beyond me. Thanks, Barry. Doug B. Yeah, I just, there's a 3,000 pound gorilla which is the controlling force in our, in the global economy is the economy is money and private wealth and private interest. And historically anybody that's thought about hitting that machine affecting significant change in that machine is dead. And that's sort of a bigger problem. That's sort of a bigger problem because everything that's been said works if it were a rational, transparent, truly democratic and egalitarian context and it isn't. Now it's pulling a group of people around a table to figure out how to crack that nut which isn't about something polar or adversarial. It's about negotiation with the few in service to the all. They're gonna have to be given something that leaves them feeling safe and secure in their privilege on the far side for them to let go of the totalitarian control that they exert in fact over things not changing. And if that isn't part of the equation then nothing changes. We are at time. Is there anybody who'd like to say anything for a week go? So it's happy new year. Or some other happy tweet. I do have a poem. Realize I needed to grab a poem. So this is Zimborska again, Vistava Zimborska. It's called the Contribution to Statistics. I think it's somehow related to what we're talking about here today. Out of 100 people, those who always know better, 52. Doubting every step, nearly all the rest. Glad to lend a hand if it doesn't take too long. As high as 49. Always good because they can't be otherwise. Four, well maybe five. Able to admire without envy, 18. Suffering illusions induced by fleeting youth, 60, give or take a few. Not to be taken lightly, 40 and four. Living in constant fear of someone or something, 77. Capable of happiness, 20 something tops. Harmless, singly, savage in crowds, half at least. Cruel when forced by circumstances, better not to know even ballpark figures. Wise after the fact, just a couple more than wise before it. Taking only things from life, 30, I wish I were wrong. Hunched in pain, no flashlight in the dark. 83, sooner or later. Righteous, 35, which is a lot. Righteous and understanding, three. Worthy of compassion, 99. Mortal, 100 out of 100. Thus far this figure still remains unchanged. Worthy of compassion, 99. That line always jumps out at me. Out of 100, there's one that actually is not worthy of compassion and if we allow ourselves to be tricked into thinking that they are, we get trapped into some very bad stuff. So I know you're all worthy of compassion. I've really enjoyed spending time with you on these calls and I just want to appreciate at the stage of my life where little things mean a lot. And at the end of the year, I like to reflect on what I value and I have valued hearing from each and every one of you and those that I've created relationships with. Thank you so much. I don't have a link to that Gil, it's in my library but I'll send it to you if you like. Love it. I'll post it to the OGM list so everybody can have access to it that way. So I wish you all well in the coming year and look forward to seeing you on these calls and just have a great, safe time. Excellent. Thank you everybody. Happy New Year. Thank you. Happy New Year. Take care. Bye bye. Happy New Year all.


Hello there. So today I'm going to give a bit of a continuation. So I made a video a couple of videos ago where I talked about my situation where I'm a freelancer and my wife isn't. And so about some of the issues that can come up when basically you're a freelancer and your partner, your spouse, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your significant other is not. And how to deal with it. And then in response, my sister made a video because she and her husband are both freelancers. And and some of the things to look out for when you have a situation where both of you are freelancers. And so yeah, check out that video if you're in the situation like that. But anyway, got me thinking about a couple more things and maybe you know, more of a preliminary approach of how to, of how to handle this.  And because as I mentioned before, in theory, it should be fine. You do your thing, they do their thing and then that's it. But in reality, obviously that's not the case. And so there are quite a few issues that you have to deal with. And so I just kind of wanted to touch upon them. So let's do that now. First of all, so the first thing you should do is you should have the talk. If you're with someone, it's a serious relationship, whatever, then you should have the talk. By the talk, I don't mean a relationship talk or something, but I mean about your life. I'm doing what I'm doing. You're doing what you're doing. How is this going to play out? What would an ideal situation be? What would a likely scenario be? You know, and how is this going to work out?  So that means they have to stay there. How's that going to work out? Maybe you're working for yourself so you can spend more time with kids, but then your spouse would like to spend time with kids or not, or maybe it works out perfectly that way. Or maybe, I don't know, whatever the situation might be, at least talk about it because there are a couple things. First of all, it'll make you readdress what you want to do because let's face it. If you decide, I'd like to be a freelancer and that's it. You might not become a freelancer, but if you give yourself set goals and you give yourself a timeline and you give yourself certain constraints, you're more likely to achieve that, right? And the main constraint for most people is money. You're like, I'd like to be a freelancer, but I need to earn money.  And same here, if your constraint is the situation with your spouse and you need to figure something out, it forces you to kind of make a more of a concrete plan, which is good. Pretty much always. I mean, always, I think it's good to have a concrete plan that you can follow. Plans always change, but it's good to have something you can follow. And this forces you to do that. And then it forces you to have this conversation with your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend, because at this point, at least you can make sure you're on the same page. You're going to be having this discussion at some point. The further down the line it is, the worse it's going to be. And so have it sooner rather than later. And I know everyone's thinking, well, further down the line, I'll be making my millions. And so it doesn't matter. Yeah, have that conversation anyway, because even if you are making your millions, maybe your spouse wants to keep working. And that means your spouse is going to stay in the place he or she is in.  She loves to work, but she likes to work for a company. She likes to work as part of a bigger thing where she gets to interact with other people all day and gets to go somewhere and do all that. And I get it. I mean, I don't really get it, because I don't like that. But I see where she's coming from. But yeah, that does put up certain constraints. And so you need to see what your situation is and be honest about it and then talk to your significant other. The other thing is you being the freelancer and the other person not being the freelancer, you're going to have to ask them to be more open minded. Because let's face it, you're kind of the anomaly. They're doing the normal thing. You get a job, you work for someone and that's it. You're doing something a bit different. So you kind of need to explain in a way why you do what you do. Maybe it is because you have a certain talent. You want to pursue it. Maybe it is your best opportunity. Maybe it is because you want to be location dependent and you can show them how that can work for them. And that's kind of what happened with me and my wife, because she worked for a company. She was working as a consultant and doing quite well as well. But it was really not good for her. I mean, it was not good for her health. She had to keep going to the doctor. She was having issues. She was working late night, she was getting stressed out. It really was affecting her health. And so I told her, I was like, well, quit. Because obviously that job, you have a job to earn money. You earn that money to have a better life. If you're already having a worse life for that job, then it kind of defeats the whole purpose. And so she did quit the job.  Now I need to figure out some way to provide for her or something. But what happened was, A, we got to live all over the place and work all over the place as well. And B, her health got a lot better. And in fact, her doctor was amazed. I mean, he was surprised when she went for a follow-up checkup. And he's like, all the issues you had are kind of gone. He's like, let's keep it on this, but this is really good. And so yeah, and we both learned from it. So she works again now, but she was very careful to find a job that didn't have all the crap she had to deal with before. So anyway, find out what your situation is, be honest about it, and ask your significant other, your partner to be open-minded about it. Because you are in your situation for certain reasons. You're either forced there or you want to be in there. And honestly, a lot of people say, oh, it's so risky to be a freelancer. I find it a lot less risky, quite frankly, because if you can find a way to make money for yourself, you don't need to rely on another company to give you a job. You don't need to have that. You can just earn money in any situation, basically. Like as long as you have an internet connection for me. But anyway, have that conversation, be honest about it, be open about it. The earlier you have it, the better.  And at least having that conversation is good. Even if there are no formal conclusions from it, have it. That's good. Okay. Second point is, I feel like I rambled on a bit. Well, the second point, okay, so these two things tie in a bit together. So what I started off with, with my wife, you know, back when it was my girlfriend as well, you know, she worked in an office and I worked on my own and she would ask me if I could run some errands for her, stuff like that, because I could make my own hours. And I kind of refused. And this was on purpose because I needed her to develop more of a mentality of taking my time seriously, my work time seriously. Even though I don't go into an office, I don't have a boss breathing down my neck. I take my work time seriously and I needed her to as well. The fact is every now and then I probably could have done some shopping, but I didn't on purpose because I wanted her to take the work time seriously. And so what I ended up doing was I was like, well, we'll go shopping together. First of all, it couldn't be an activity that we can do together. Second of all, the fact is we ended up going shopping on the weekend, which a thing I love about working for myself is I don't have to go shopping with a huge crowd on the weekend. But I would do it anyway just because I'm trying to show that point. So now we've obviously, now we've married, we've been together for a while. And so I will do some shopping sometimes. In fact, usually what ends up happening is if I'm coming back from a conference or a meeting or something on the way, you know, I'm happy to pick stuff up. And that's usually what ends up happening. Anyway, you can find your own sweet spot. But at the beginning, you kind of have to insist. As I mentioned many times before, you have to take your work seriously. No one else will take it as seriously as you do. So you may have to make sure you take it seriously. And a lot of that will have to be setting up boundaries.  In fact, I think at the beginning, most of all the time, you're going to have to put your foot down. But this also means, by the way, when your partner comes back from work, you shouldn't be there hanging out with friends, drinking beer, stuff like that. I mean, you've been working or at least during your work hours, you're actually working. And I actually work through my work hours and I'm very, I've spent a lot of my time trying to figure out how to be more productive. And so that's not a problem for me. But you do need to take it seriously and show your partner that you're taking it seriously. And so along those lines, you also need to be able to turn it off. Your spouse, if they're working in an office, when they come home, they want to relax. They want to, you know, have a compari, as my sister mentioned growing up, we would, I mean, not when we were young, but yeah, you know, we have compari o'clock. And so at a certain point we have our compari and then or your wine or beer, whatever it is, and then you, and then, and then you relax. And so especially people working in an office, when they get home, they don't want to think about office stuff. And they want to relax. And so once my wife comes home for dinner, that's what I try to do.  And we talk about our day, we talk about stuff we want to do and stuff like that. But I'm not dealing with any work. And obviously meal times and meal times in general, I'm pretty insistent that we both sit down and we have a meal as a couple. And we're not just eating at our desk or anything like that. You know, when we're both having meals in the same place, which it's usually dinner and breakfast. And so it's important to be able, because as a freelancer, many times you're always on call. And you like, so I like what I do. And I like the fact that I can reply to this as soon as I think of replying to that or, you know, deal with that. But A, I'm, well, I'm trying to partition it and trying to give each task its own time. A, because it's better for me in terms of productivity, but B, because I do try to shut off when my wife comes around. But likewise, she understands also on the weekends every now and then, or if I have a big assignment or something like that, I will be working. And look every now and then she has to work overtime as well. And that's, and so it works out for both of us. But you do need to be able to turn it off and give your partner the time he or she wants to just be a couple and, and to do things on your own without having to worry about work. Look, a lot of people who work in offices have the same problem.  But I think for us freelancers and people who work for yourselves, entrepreneurs, stuff like that, it can be especially hard to do that. And so I, for your spouse's sake and for their benefit, I think you should find a way to do that just so you can spend time together. These were a couple of things that came to my mind and that I realized it was, were things that I had to deal with with my wife and that I think are quite important. Once again, they especially apply if you are a freelancer, entrepreneur, work for yourself, and your spouse's significant other boyfriend, girlfriend does not, because then you're both living sort of different worlds. And so you kind of need to find a way to bring them together. And that's about it. I hope you found this useful. If you did, please don't forget to give a thumbs up. So I know what you guys find useful. And don't forget to subscribe if you haven't. And I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. Bye.


So what I am going to do is, I am going to straight away start with some problems.  Yes. All right. So here comes, my friends, the first problem. Find the area, find the area lying above, lying above x axis and included between x square plus y square is equal to 8x and y square is equal to 4x. Question is clear to all of you. Find the area lying above the x axis. Mark these points, very important. And included between these two curves. Start solving this. And don't look at your screen till you have solved it. Because in the meanwhile, I will be also drawing some graphs. Okay. All right. So now you can look at the diagram at least. Is this the diagram that you have got? And is this the shaded area that we are talking about in this particular question? Yeah, yeah. Cool. Now a couple of things first. We need to identify the coordinates of P. So in order to get the coordinates of P, we need to simultaneously solve. We need to simultaneously solve the equation of the circle and parabola. Right? So all I can do is I can simply replace my y square as 4x into this particular equation. So I will get x square plus 4x is equal to 8x. Which means x square is equal to 8x minus 4x which is going to be 4x. That gives me 2 value of x which is 0 and 4. Which is quite obvious because they meet at 0, 0. And they will meet at a point P whose x coordinate will be 4. Y coordinate will also be 4. However, y coordinate is not of interest to me. I am not interested in the y coordinate. I am only interested in the x coordinate. Right? Now, again there are two ways to solve the problem. One is by taking vertical strips. Other is by taking horizontal strips. Right? Yes or no? Now let us solve it by taking, let's take vertical strips. Vertical strips. Okay? So let me make a green vertical strip like this. So I would need two types of vertical strips. That means one is like this and another would be like this. So there is a need to change the definition of the strip. Let me name it. It is a type 1 strip. This is a type 1 strip. This is type 2 strip. Okay? Now for type 1 strip, can somebody tell me the expression that I would be going to write to evaluate the area given by this particular zone. Given by this particular zone. This entire zone. Who will tell me the expression? Where is the, where is the upper part of the strip? The upper part of the strip is on the parabola, right? Now parabola is basically y square is equal to 4x. So there could be two possibilities that is y is plus minus 2 root x. Which one will I take with the plus sign or with a minus sign and y? Plus sign or plus? Yes, exactly. We will take the plus sign because I am dealing with positive y's. So I would integrate plus under root 2x from 0 to 4. That is from this point to this point. Correct? Yes or no? If you look at this strip, I am integrating upper minus lower with respect to x. What is upper here? It is a circle equation. Yes or no? Yeah. Right? But if I am little bit vigilant, I would require, I will see that you do not require integration for this. Because it is exactly quarter of a circle. Yes or no? Yes. What tells me it is a quarter of a circle? Very simple. If you see, this line is going to be perpendicular because it is also 4,4. This is 4,0. This is going to become a quarter of a circle. So frankly speaking, I do not need integration here. Okay? So I can directly say 1 fourth of pi r square. Yes or no? Which is going to be 4 pi? Yeah, 4 pi. Okay. Which integrated the normal way that you do? So 4 pi plus 2 times x to the power 3 by 2 divided by 3 by 2 will make it 2 by 3 from 4 to 0. Which will make it 4 pi plus 4 by 3 into 4 to the power 3 by 2 minus 0. Which is just going to give you? 4 by 3 into 8. Yes. It is just going to give you 4 root 4 into 4 which is going to be 16 into 232. Correct? 4 pi plus 32 by 3 square units. It is advisable to write square units because you are indicating the area. Make sense? Is that clear guys? All right. Now let us move on to another problem. Can I raise the screen now? Next is find the area bounded by, find the area bounded by y is equal to x cube minus x and y is equal to x square plus x. Please try this out. Again please do not look at the screen till you have made the graphs of these corresponding curves. All right. Now you can look at the screen. So basically I have drawn this as y is equal to x square plus x. Now I will tell you a way to draw it. It is basically you just have to notice that it is a parabola which opens upwards. Which opens upwards and secondly you just have to see where does it cut the x axis. So this cuts the x axis at 0 and minus 1. So if you factorize it and equate it to 0 it will cut the x axis at 0 and minus 1. Right? So in light of these two observations you can easily plot the parabola as you can see in red. All right? And how do you plot the cubic one? For the cubic one it is pretty simple see when you say y is equal to x cube minus x. Always remember a odd degree polynomial, a odd degree polynomial graph will always be starting from below and you know taking some turns and ending up. This is always a nature of a odd degree polynomial. A biggest example would be y equal to x cube. Right? It goes like this. Yes Sadaam. If the coefficient of x cube which is this coefficient if it is positive then it would be the other way round it would be like this. If the coefficient of x cube is negative. So these are some things which you need to keep in your mind when you are drawing the graph of a cubic polynomial. Is that okay? You could also know the sign by making your wavy curve. So that's doing the same thing actually. Now what are you doing? Any questions? I just had a doubt with the x cube minus x graph. Okay. I will do it on the GeoGebra as well. Okay. And where does it meet the x axis? So we simply equate x cube minus x to 0. Okay. And you can see that it can be factorized as x square minus x. And it can be further factorized as x plus 1 and x minus 1 equal to 0. So this gives you three points of intersection which is 1 minus 1 and 1. So as you can see here minus 1, 0 and 1. Is this clear so far to all of you? Now which area am I talking about? I am talking about the area which I have shaded in yellow. Okay. So let me just make some space for myself. Okay. Now I would need the coordinates of lot of points. First of all I would need the coordinates of this point. This point. Let me call this as point P. What would be the coordinate of that point B? Very simple. I need to simultaneously solve the parabola equation and the cubic polynomial equation. That means I need to equate this to this. So what do I get by doing that? 0 minus 1 and 2. Two of them is already visible. What are they? Minus 1 and 0. Correct. So if you write it as a cubic polynomial equation that is x cube plus x square plus 2x. Sorry. Minus 2x. x cube minus x square minus 2x equal to 0. You would realize that two of the roots is already known to me which is minus 1 and 0, isn't it? Aren't these two the roots? Only one root is supposed to be known. Now sum of the roots is going to be 1. Sum of the roots is going to be 1. How? Sum of the roots is minus B by A, right? And what is minus B here? Minus B is minus of minus 1 by A. A is also 1. Do you remember that this is minus B? This is B term. The coefficient of x cube is A term. See, whenever you write a cubic equation, we normally write it like this, right? Ax cube Bx square plus Cx plus B equal to 0. So if alpha, beta, gamma are the roots, the sum of the roots is going to be negative of the coefficient of x square by coefficient of x cube. So the sum of the root is going to be 1. So we already have minus 1, 0. So what is required here to give me 1? What is this question mark? You will say 2. So this point is going to be x equal to 2. Is it clear? Yes or no? Yes. So let's be a little smart while we are trying to find out the points because we don't want to waste too much of time finding the points, okay? So let me just make some space for myself. Now, can somebody guide me how many definition of the strips I need to cover up the entire area? So one type of strip that I need is the one which is like this. Yes, and the other type of strip which I need is the one which is like this. So I need two types of strips. So the green one will help me to get this area as you can see on your screen and the black one is going to help me get this area, correct? Now what should I write for the area which is covered up by the green strip? Can we have the expression for that? Focus on the upper minus lower always. What is the curve on the upper part of this? Is it the parabola or the cubic one? Cubic. Correct. So cubic minus, what is the curve on the lower part of the strip? The parabola, correct? And this integration has to be done from where to where? Such strips would be required from which point of X to which point of X? Minus 1 to 0. Excellent, minus 1 to 0, very good. Plus, now focus on the black strips. Let me choose the color black, yeah. Now upper part of this strip, what is the equation? Parabola. Parabola, excellent. Minus lower part of this strip, what is the equation? The cubic. This I have to integrate from which value of X to which value? 0 to 2. Right? Now just take one minute and give me the answer for this. So just check your answer, your answer should come out to be 37 by 12 square units.


Dear students, in this module, we're going to discuss the progressive alignment for multiple sequence alignment or simply progressive alignment for MSA. So, MSA involves progressive alignment by using pair-wise sequence alignment repeatedly. So, you initially align two sequences and you create such sequence alignment pairs and then you align the pairs in order to obtain an overall multiple sequence alignment. However, if you take notice of the iterative nature of MSA, it means it will take a lot of time. So, progressive alignment because you have to create all these alignment combinations takes a lot more time than a simple pair-wise alignment. So, the important thing is to understand how progressive alignment works. So, let's take a look at this. So, as a first step in progressive alignment for MSA, you perform pair-wise alignments on all sequences that is you take these sequences and you align sequence one with all other sequences. So, you will be aligning one with two, one with three, one with four and one with five. So, in this way, sequence two will also be aligned with all other sequences and then this process will continue until all the sequence alignment combinations are created. So, once you have these combinations of alignment, then you're ready to move to the second step. So, in the second step, what you do is you construct a guide tree or simply a dendogram using a distance matrix. So, here you need to understand what is a distance matrix and what is a guide tree. So, for instance, this is a dendogram or a guide tree for four sequences S1, S2, S3 and S4. So, to understand what this tree represents, you need to consider the length of these branches. So, here you can see that this branch and this branch is equal in length and this branch has a very long length. Also, these two branches are longer than these and the branch is smaller for these two. So, essentially it means that S4 and S2 are similar while S1 and S3 are similar to each other. So, how do you compute the distance matrix? Now that you know what is a guide tree. So, the distance matrix is simply the distance equals 1 minus the number of matches over number of comparisons. So, if you remember you have already performed the pairwise alignment here. So, you already know how many matches exist between S1 and let's say S2 as well as S1 and S3 and similarly S1 and S4. So, since you know the number of matches, as well as the number of comparisons, you can easily compute the distance between each one of these sequences. So, now you have computed the distance and now you want to move to the third step that is you need to create a branching order like this in order to represent the distances. So, as I just mentioned that similarity is all is equal to matches over comparison. So, if you look at this similarity matrix, then you can see that amongst all the values in this matrix, the highest value is 0.87 and this is between V1 and V3. So, V1 and V3 are very similar and the similarity score is 0.87. Next you have 0.62 which is the similarity between V3 and V4. So, note that this is the similarity and now you want to create a guide tree and you can see that V1 and V3 which had the most similarity are given here as present on the same branch and next V3 and V4 had a score of 0.62 which meant that they were slightly less similar to V1 and V3. So, V3 is here and V4 is next to V3 and in the end you have V2 which scored the least in comparison to the other sequences. So, in this way you have constructed something called a guide tree and you have put most similar sequences on the same branch followed by other sequences that are increasingly different from them. This approach however has some shortcomings. For instance, if you have performed an alignment as the first step which may be incorrect then your entire guide tree will be biased towards that. So, there is a lot of dependence on the first alignment that you employ to create the guide tree. Also, if the sequences that you use are dissimilar that then this can introduce an error in your alignment as well. And lastly to overcome this what you do is you create a guide tree and then you repeat the process to create better and improved version of the guide trees that is iteratively. So, in conclusion the progressive alignments can help you to perform multiple sequence alignment and that in progressive alignment you repeatedly align sequences to arrive at a guide tree using the similarity between sequences and then you create the relationship between the sequences. These approaches can help you to refine the results especially if the results need improvement you can iterate this process. You can repeat this process by using different pairs that you employ to start the progressive alignment in the MSA.