Humans of Congress. It is my pleasure to announce the next speaker. I was supposed to pick out a few awards or something to actually Present what he's done in his life, but I can only say he's one of us Charles Stross Hi, is this on good great I'm really pleased to be here and I want to start by apologizing for my total lack of German So this talk is going to be in English Um, good morning. I'm Charlie Stross and it's my job to tell lies for money Or rather, I write science fiction much of it about on their future Which in recent years has become ridiculously hard to predict In this talk, I'm going to talk about why Now our species homo sapiens sapiens is about 300,000 years old It used to be about 200,000 years old, but it grew an extra hundred thousand years in the past year because of new Archaeological discoveries. I mean go figure For all but the last three centuries or so of that span, however, predicting the future was really easy If you were an average person as opposed to maybe a king or a pope Natural disasters aside, everyday life, 50 years in the future, would resemble everyday life 50 years in your past Let's that let that sink in for a bit For 99.9% of human existence on this earth the future was static Then something changed and the future began to shift increasingly rapidly until in the present day Things are moving so fast. It's barely possible to anticipate trends from one month to a net to the next now as An eminent computer scientist Edgar Dykstra once remarked computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about building big telescopes The same can be said of my field of work writing science fiction sci-fi is rarely about science and even more rarely about predicting the future but sometimes we dabble in Futurism and lately futurism has gotten really really weird now When I write a near-future work of fiction one set say a decade hence they used to be a recipe I could follow that worked eerily well Simply put 90% of the next decade stuff is already here around us today Buildings are designed to last many years Automobiles have a design life of about a decade so half the cars on the road in 2027 are already there now They're new People there will be some new faces aged 10 and under and some older people will have died But most of us adults will still be around albeit older and grayer This is the 90% of the near future that's already here today After the already existing 90% Another 9% of the near future a decade hence used to be easily predictable You look at trends dictated by physical limits such as Moore's law and you look at Intel's roadmap And you use a bit of creative extrapolation and you won't go too far wrong If I predict wearing my future ology hat that in 2027 LTE cellular phones will be ubiquitous 5g will be available for high bandwidth applications and they'll be fall back to some kind of satellite data service at a price You probably won't laugh at me I mean, it's not like I'm predicting that airlines will fly slower and Nazis will take over the United States is it? and Therein lies the problem There is remaining 1% of what Donald Rumsfeld called the unknown unknowns that throws off all predictions as it happens Airliners today are slower than they were in the 1970s and don't get me started about the Nazis I mean nobody in 2007 was expecting a Nazi revival in 2017 were they only this time Germans get to be the good guys so My recipe for fiction set ten years in the future used to be 90% is already here 9% is not here yet, but predictable and 1% is who ordered that But unfortunately the ratios have changed. I think we're now down to maybe 80% already here Climate change takes a huge toll on architecture Then 15% not here yet, but predictable and a whopping 5% of utterly unpredictable deep craziness now Before I carry on with this talk. I want to spend a minute or two ranting loudly and at ruling out the singularity Some of you might assume that as the author of books like singularity sky and accelerando I Expect an impending technological singularity, but we will develop self-improving artificial intelligence and mind uploading and the whole wish list of Transhumanist aspirations promoted by the likes of Ray Kurtz file will come to pass Unfortunately, this isn't the case. I think transhumanism is a warmed over Christian heresy While its adherents tend to be outspoken atheists they can't quite escape from the history that gave rise to our current Western civilization Many of you are familiar with design patterns an approach to software engineering that focuses on abstraction and simplification in order to promote reusable code When you look at the AI singularity as a narrative and Identify the numerous places in their story where the phrase and then a miracle happens occur It becomes apparent pretty quickly that they've reinvented Christianity indeed The wellspring of today's transhumanists drawn a long rich history of Russian philosophy exemplified by the Russian orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorovich Fedorov by way of his disciple Constantin Sierkovsky who? Deriv whose derivation of a rocket equation makes him essentially the father of modern space flight Once you start probing the never regions of transhumanist thought and run into concepts like Rocco's Basilisk By the way any of you who didn't know about the Basilisk before and now doomed to an eternity in AI hell terribly. Sorry You realize they've mangled it to match some of the nastier aspects of Presbyterian Protestantism You know they basically invented original sin and Satan in the guise of an AI that doesn't exist yet It's kind of peculiar Anyway, my take on the singularity is that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck It's probably a duck And if it looks like a religion, it's probably a religion I Don't see much evidence for human like self-directed artificial intelligence is coming along anytime soon And a fair bit of evidence that nobody except some freaks in cognitive science departments even wanted I mean if we invented an AI that was like a human mind It would do the AI equivalent of sitting on the sofa munching popcorn and watching the Super Bowl all day It wouldn't be much use to us What we're getting instead is self-optimizing tools that defy human comprehension But are not in fact any more like our kind of intelligence than a Boeing 737 is like a seagull Boeing 737s and seagulls both fly Boeing 737s don't lay eggs and shit everywhere So I'm gonna wash my hands of a singularity as a useful explanatory model of the future without further ado I'm one of those vehement atheists as well, and I'm gonna try and Offer you a better model for what's happening to us now As my fellow Scottish science fiction author Ken McLeod likes to say the secret weapon of science fiction is history History loosely speaking is the written record of what and how people did things in past times Times that have slipped out of our personal memories We science fiction writers tend to treat history as a giant toy chest to raid whenever we feel like telling a story With a little bit of history It's really easy to whip up an entertaining yarn about a galactic empire that mirrors the development and decline of the Habsburg Empire Or to re-spin the October Revolution as a tale of how Mars got its independence But history is useful for so much more than that It turns out but our personal memories don't span very much time at all I'm 53 and I barely remember the 1960s. I only remember the 1970s with the eyes of a 6 to 16 year old My father died this year aged 93 and he just about remembered the 1930s Only those of my father's generation directly remember the Great Depression and can compare it to the 2007-08 global financial crisis directly We Westerners tend to pay little attention to cautionary tales told by 90-somethings. We're modern. We're change obsessed And we tend to repeat our biggest social mistakes just as they slip out of living memory Which means they recur on a timescale of 70 to 100 years So if our personal memories are useless, we need a better toolkit and history provides that toolkit History gives us the perspective to see what went wrong in the past and to look for patterns and check to see whether those patterns are recurring in the present Looking in particular at the history of the past two to four hundred years That age of rapidly increasing change that I mentioned at the beginning One glaringly obvious deviation from the norm of a preceding three thousand centuries is obvious And that's the development of artificial intelligence which happened no earlier than 1553 and no later than 1844 I'm talking of course about the very old very slow ai's we call corporations What lessons from the history of a company can we draw that tell us about the likely behavior of the type of artificial intelligence? We're interested in here today well Need a mouthful of water Let me crib from Wikipedia for a moment Wikipedia in the late 18th century Stuart kid the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English to find a corporation as a collection of many individuals United into one body under a special denomination Having perpetual succession under an artificial form and vested by policy of the law with a capacity of acting in several respects as an individual I'm Enjoying privileges and immunities in common and of exercising a variety of political rights more or less extensive According to the design of its institution of the powers conferred upon it either at the time of its creation or at any subsequent period of its existence This was a late 18th century definition sound like a piece of software to you in 1844 the British government passed the joint stock companies act which created a register of companies and allowed any Legal person for a fee to register a company which in turn existed as a separate legal person Prior to that point it required a royal charter or an act of parliament to create a company Subsequently the law was extended to limit the liability of individual shareholders in event of business failure And then both Germany and the United States added their own unique twists to what today we see as the doctrine of corporate personhood Now there are plenty of other things that happen between the 16th and 21st centuries that change the shape of the world we live in I've skipped the changes in agricultural poverty productivity that happened due to energy economics Which finally broke the Malfusion trap our predecessors lived in This in turn broke the long-term cap on economic growth of about 0.1 percent per year in the absence of famines plagues and wars and so on I've skipped the germ theory of diseases and the development of trade empires in the age of sale and gunpowder That were made possible by advances in accurate time measurement I've skipped the rise and hopefully decline of the pernicious theory of scientific racism that underpinned Western colonialism and the slave trade I've skipped the rise of feminism the ideological position that women are human beings rather than property and the decline of patriarchy I've skipped the whole of the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions But this is a technocratic technocentric Congress, so I want to frame this talk in terms of AI which we all like to think we understand Here's the thing about these artificial persons we call corporations Legally, they're people they have goals. They operate in pursuit of these goals They have a natural life cycle in the 1950s a typical US corporation on the S&P 500 index had a lifespan of 60 years Today it's down to less than 20 years This is largely due to predation Corporations are cannibals. They eat one another They're also hive super organisms like bees or ants But the first century and a half they relied entirely on human employees for their internal operation But today they're automating their business processes very rapidly Each human is only retained so long as they can perform their assigned tasks more efficiently than a piece of software And they can all be replaced by another human much as the cells in our own bodies are functionally interchangeable and a group of cells Can in extremis often be replaced by a prosthetic device To some extent corporations can be trained to serve of the personal desires of their chief executives But even CEOs can be dispensed with if their activities damage the corporation as Harvey Weinstein found out a couple of months ago Finally our legal environment today has been tailored for the convenience of corporate persons rather than human persons to the point Where our governments now mimic corporations in many of their internal structures So to understand where we're going we need to start by asking what do our current actually existing AI overlords want Now Elon Musk, who I believe you've all heard of has an obsessive fear of one particular hazard of artificial intelligence Which he conceives of as being a piece of software that functions like a brain in a box namely the paperclip optimizer Or maximizer a paperclip maximizer is a term of art for a goal-seeking AI that has a single priority For example maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe The paperclip maximizer is able to improve itself in pursuit of its goal But has no ability to vary its goal So it will ultimately attempt to convert all the metallic elements in the solar system into paperclips Even if this is obviously detrimental to the well-being of the humans who set it this goal Unfortunately, I don't think Musk is paying enough attention consider his own companies Tesla isn't a paperclip maximizer. It's a battery maximizer after all a battery an electric car is a battery with wheels and seats Space X is an orbital payload maximizer driving down the cost of space launches in order to encourage more sales for the service it provides Solar City is a photovoltaic panel maximizer and so on all three of the Musk's very own slow AIs are based on an architecture designed to maximize return on shareholder investment Even if by doing so they cook the planet the shareholders have to live on or turn the entire thing into solar panels But hey, if you're Elon Musk, that's okay. You're gonna retire on Mars anyway By the way, I'm ragging on musking this talk simply because he's the current Opinionated tech billionaire who thinks that disrupting a couple of industries entitles him to make headlines If this was 2007 and my focus slightly difference different I'd be ragging on Steve Jobs, and if we're in 1997 my target would be Bill Gates. Don't take it personally Elon Back to topic. The problem with corporations is that despite their overt goals Whether they make electric vehicles or beer or sell life insurance policies They all have a common implicit paperclip maximizer goal to generate revenue If they don't make money they're eaten by a bigger predator or they go bust it's as vital to them as breathing is to us mammals They generally pursue their implicit goal maximizing revenue by pursuing their overt goal But sometimes they try instead to manipulate their environment to ensure that money flows to them regardless Human toolmaking culture has become very complicated over time new technologies always come with an attached Implicit political agenda that seeks to extend the use of a technology Governments react to this by legislating to control new technologies and sometimes we end up with Industries actually indulging in legal duels through the regulatory mechanism of law to determine Who prevails? For example, consider the automobile You can't have mass automobile transport without gas stations and fuel distribution pipelines These in turn require access to whoever owns the land the oil is extracted from under and before you know it You end up with a permanent army in Iraq and a clamp dictatorship in Saudi Arabia Closer to home automobiles imply jaywalking laws and drink driving laws They affect town planning regulations and encourage suburban sprawl the construction of human infrastructure on a scale required by automobiles Not pedestrians This in turn is bad for competing transport technologies like buses or trams which work best in cities with a high population density So to get laws that favor the automobile in place providing an environment conducive to doing business Automobile companies spent money on political lobbyists and when they can get away with it on bribes Bribery needn't be blatant, of course for example The reforms of the British railway network in the 1960s dismembered many branch lines and coincided with a surge in road building and automobile sales These reforms were orchestrated by Transport Minister Ernest Marples who was purely a politician The fact that he accumulated a considerable personal fortune during this period by buying shares in motorway construction Corporations has nothing to do with it So no conflict of interest there Now the automobile in industry can't be considered a pure paperclip maximizer Sorry the automobile industry in isolation can't be considered a pure paperclip maximizer You have to look at it in conjunction with the fossil fuel industries the road construction business the accident insurance sector and so on When you do this you begin to see the outline of a paperclip maximizing Ecosystem that invades far-flung lands and grinds up and kills around one and a quarter million people per year That's the global death toll from automobile accidents currently according to the World Health Organization It rivals the First World War on an ongoing permanent basis and these are all side effects of its drive to sell you a new car now Automobiles aren't of course a total liability Today's cars are regulated stringently for safety and in theory to reduce toxic emissions They're fast efficient and comfortable We can thank legal mandated regulations imposed by governments for this of course Go back to the 1970s and cars didn't have crumple zones Go back to the 50s and they didn't come with seatbelts as standard in the 1930s Indicators turn signals and brakes on all four wheels were optional And your best hope of surviving a 50 kilometer per hour crash was to be thrown out of the car and land somewhere without breaking your neck Regulatory agencies are our current political systems tool of choice for preventing paperclip maximizers from running a mock Unfortunately regulators don't always work The first failure mode of regulators that you need to be aware of is regulatory capture where regulatory bodies are captured by the industries they control Adjit Pai head of the American Federal Communications Commission Which just voted to eliminate net neutrality rules in the United States has worked as associate general counsel for the rise on Communications Inc the largest current descendant of the Bell telephone systems monopoly after the AT&T Antitrust lawsuit the Bell network was broken up into the seven baby bells They've now pretty much reformed and re-aggregated and the rise on is the largest current one Why should someone with a trans transparent interest in a technology corporation end up running a regulator that tries to control the industry in question? Well, if you're going to regulate a complex technology, you need to recruit regulators from people who understand it Unfortunately, most of those people are industry insiders Adjit Pai is clearly very much aware of how the right Verizon is regulated Very insightful into its operations and wants to do something about it. Just not necessarily in the public interest When When regulators end up staffed by people drawn from the industries they're supposed to control They frequently end up working with their former office mates to make it easier to turn a profit Either by raising barriers to keep new insurgent companies out or by dismantling safeguards that protect the public Now a second problem is regulatory lag where a technology advances so rapidly that regulations are laughably obsolete by the time they're issued Consider the EU directive requiring cookie notices on websites to caution users that their activities are tracked and their privacy may be violated This would have been a good idea in 1993 or 1996 But unfortunately it didn't show up until 2011 Fingerprinting and tracking mechanisms had nothing to do with cookies and were already widespread by then Tim Berners Lee observed in 1995 that five years worth of change was happening on the web for every 12 months of real-world time By that yardstick the cookie law came out nearly a century too late to do any good Again look at Uber This month the European Court of Justice ruled that Uber is a taxi service not a web app This is arguably correct. The problem is Uber has spread globally since it was founded eight years ago Subsidizing its drivers to put competing private hire firms out of business Whether this is a net good for society is are is debatable The problem is a taxi driver can get awfully hungry if she has to wait eight years for court ruling against a predator intent on disrupting her business So to recap Firstly we already have paperclip maximizers and musks AI alarmism is curiously mirror-blind Secondly we have mechanisms for keeping paperclip maximizers in check But they don't work very well against AIs that deploy the dark arts, especially corruption and bribery And they're even worse against true AIs that evolve too fast for human-immediated mechanisms like the law to keep up with Finally unlike the naive vision of a paperclip maximizer that maximizes only paperclips Existing AIs have multiple agendas their overt goal But also profit-seeking expansion into new markets and to accommodate the desire of whoever is currently in the driving seat Now this brings me to the next major heading in this This maying laundry list how it all went wrong It seems to me that our current political upheavals are best understood as a rising from the capture of post-1917 democratic institutions by large-scale AI Every way you look you see voters protesting angrily against an entrenched establishment That seems determined to ignore the wants and needs of their human constituents in favour of those of the machines The Brexit upset was largely the result of a protest vote against the British political establishment The election of Donald Trump likewise with a side order of racism on top Our major political parties are led by people who are compatible with the system as it exists today A system that has been shaped over decades by corporations distorting our government and regulatory environments We humans live in a world shaped by the desires and needs of AI Forced to live on their terms and we're taught that we're valuable only to the extent we contribute to the rule of the machines Now this is 3C and we're all more interested in computers and communications technology than this historical crap But as I said earlier history is a secret weapon if you know how to use it What history is good for is enabling us to spot recurring patterns that repeat across timescales outside our personal experience And if we look at our historical very slow AIs what do we learn from them about modern AI and how it's going to behave Well to start with our AIs have been warped the new AIs the electronic ones instantiated in our machines Have been warped by a terrible fundamentally flawed design decision back in 1995 That has damaged democratic political processes crippled our ability to truly understand the world around us And led to the angry upheavals and upsets of the present decade That mistake was the decision to fund the build out of the public worldwide web as opposed to the earlier government funded corporate and academic internet By monetizing eyeballs through advertising revenue The ad supported web we're used to today wasn't inevitable If you recall the web as it was in 1994 there were very few ads at all and not much in the way of commerce 1995 was the year the worldwide web really came to public attention in the Anglophone world and consumer facing websites began to appear Nobody really knew how this thing was going to be paid for The original dot-com bubble was all about working out how to monetize the web for the first time and a lot of people lost their shirts in the process Our naive initial assumption was that the transaction cost of setting up a TCP IP connection over modem Was too high to support to be supported by per use micro billing for web pages So instead of charging people a fraction of a euro cent for every page view We'd build customers indirectly by shoving advertising banners in front of their eyes and hoping they'd click through and buy something Unfortunately advertising it is in an industry one of those pre-existing very slow AI ecosystems I already alluded to Advertising tries to maximize its hold on the attention of the minds behind each human eyeball The coupling of advertising with web search was an inevitable outgrowth I mean how better to attract the attention of reluctant subjects than to find out what they're really interested in seeing And selling ads that relate to those interests The problem with applying the paperclip maximizer approach to monopolizing eyeballs however Is that eyeballs are a limited scarce resource There are only 168 hours in every week in which I can gaze at banner ads Moreover most ads are irrelevant to my interest and it doesn't matter how often you flash an ad for dog biscuits at me I'm never going to buy any, neither cat To make best revenue generating use of our eyeballs It's necessary for the ad industry to learn who we are and what interests us And to target us increasingly minutely in hope of hooking us with stuff we're attracted to In other words the ad industry is a paperclip maximizer that for its success relies on developing a theory of mind that applies to human beings Do I need to divert onto the impassioned rant about the hideous corruption and evil that is Facebook? Okay somebody said yes I'm guessing you've heard it all before But the too long don't read summary is Facebook is as much a search engine as Google or Amazon Facebook's searches are optimized for faces that is for human beings If you want to find someone you fell out of touch with 30 years ago Facebook probably knows where they live, what their favorite color is, what size shoes they wear And what they said about you to your friends behind your back all those years ago that made you cut them off Even if you don't have a Facebook account, Facebook has a you account A whole and mere social graph with a bunch of connections pointing into it and your name tagged in your friends photographs They know a lot about you and they sell access to their social graph to advertisers who then target you Even if you don't think you use Facebook And did there's barely any point in not using Facebook these days They're the social media borg, resistance is futile So however Facebook is trying to get eyeballs on ads So is Twitter and so are Google To do this they fine tune the content they show you to make it more attractive to your eyes And by attractive I do not mean pleasant We humans have an evolved automatic reflex to pay attention to threats and horrors as well as pleasurable stimuli And the algorithms that determine what they show us when we look at Facebook or Twitter take this bias into account You might react more strongly to a public hanging in Iran or an outrageous statement by Donald Trump into a couple kissing The algorithm knows and will show you whatever makes you pay attention, not necessarily what you need or want to see So this brings me to another point about computerized AI as opposed to corporate AI AI algorithms tend to embody the prejudices and beliefs of either the programmers or the data set the AI was trained on A couple of years ago I ran across an account of a webcam developed by mostly pale skin silicon valley engineers That had difficulty focusing or achieving correct color balance when pointed at dark skinned faces That's an example of human programmer induced bias They didn't have a wide enough test set and didn't recognize that they were inherently biased towards expecting people to have pale skin But with today's deep learning bias can creep in via the data sets the neural networks are trained on Even without the programmers intending it Microsoft's first foray into a conversational chat bot driven by machine learning Tay was yanked offline within days last year because 4chan and reddit based trolls discovered they could train it towards racism and sexism for shits and giggles Just imagine you're a poor naive innocent AI who's just been switched on and you're hoping to pass your Turing test and what happens 4chan decide to play with your head I gotta feel sorry for Tay Now humans may be biased but at least individually were accountable and if somebody gives you racist or sexist abuse to your face You can complain or maybe punch them It's impossible to punch a corporation and it may not even be possible to identify the source of unfair bias when you're dealing with a machine learning system AI based systems that instantiate existing prejudices make social change harder Traditional advertising works by playing on the target customers insecurity and fear as much as their aspirations And fear of the loss of social status and privileges are powerful threats Fear and xenophobia are useful tools for attracting advertising at eyeballs What happens when we get pervasive social networks with learned biases against say feminism or Islam or melanin Or deep learning systems trained on data sets contaminated by racist dipshits and their propaganda Deep learning systems like the ones inside Facebook that determine which stories to show you to get you to pay as much attention as possible to the adverts I think you probably have an inkling of how where this is now going Now if you think this is sounding a bit bleak and unpleasant you'd be right I write sci-fi, you read or watch or play sci-fi, we're a cultureator to think of science and technology as good things that make life better But this ain't always so Plenty of technologies have historically been heavily regulated or even criminalized for good reason And once you get past any reflexive indignation at criticism of technology in progress You might agree with me that it is reasonable to ban individuals from owning nuclear weapons or nerve gas Less obviously, they may not be weapons But we've banned chlorofluorocarb and refrigerants because they were building up in the high stratosphere and destroying the ozone layer that protects us from UVB radiation We banned tetraefile lead in gasoline because it poisoned people and led to a crime wave These are not weaponized technologies but they have horrible side effects Now nerve gas and leaded gasoline were 1930s chemical technologies promoted by 1930s corporations Halogenated refrigerants and nuclear weapons are totally 1940s, ICBMs date to the 1950s You know, I have difficulty seeing why people are getting so worked up over North Korea North Korea reaches 1953 level parity, be terrified and hide under the bed I submit that the 21st century is throwing up dangerous new technologies just as our existing strategies for regulating very slow AIs have proven to be inadequate And I don't have an answer to how we regulate new technologies I just want to flag it up as a huge social problem that is going to affect the coming century I'm now going to give you four examples of new types of AI application that are going to warp our societies even more badly than the old slow AIs we have done This isn't an exhaustive list, this is just some examples I dream I pulled out of my ass We need to work out a general strategy for getting on top of this sort of thing before they get on top of us And I think this isn't actually a very urgent problem So I'm just going to give you this list of dangerous new technologies that are arriving now or coming And send you a way to think about what to do next I mean, we are activists here, we should be thinking about this and planning what to do Now, the first nasty technology I'd like to talk about is political hacking tools rely on social graph directed propaganda This is low hanging fruit after the electoral surprises of 2016 Cambridge Analytica pioneered the use of deep learning by scanning the Facebook and Twitter social graphs to identify voters political affiliations By simply looking at what tweets or Facebook comments they liked They're able to do this to identify individuals with a high degree of precision who were vulnerable to persuasion And who lived in electorally sensitive districts They then canvassed them with propaganda that targeted their personal hot button issues to change their electoral intentions The tools developed by web advertisers to sell products have now been weaponized for political purposes And the amount of personal information about our affiliations that we expose on social media makes us vulnerable Aside from the last US presidential election, there's mounting evidence that the British referendum on leaving the EU was subject to foreign cyber war attack of our weaponized social media As was the most recent French presidential election In fact, if we remember the leak of emails from the Macron campaign It turns out that many of those emails were false because the Macron campaign anticipated that they would be attacked And an email trove would be leaked in the last days before the election So they deliberately set up false emails that would be hacked and then leaked and then could be discredited It gets twisty fast Now, I'm kind of biting my tongue and trying not to take sides here I have my own political affiliation after all and I'm not terribly mainstream But if social media companies don't work out how to identify and flag micro targeted propaganda Then democratic institutions will stop working and elections will be replaced by victories for whoever can buy the most trolls This won't simply be billionaires like the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer from the United States Throwing elections to whoever will hand them the biggest tax cuts Russian military cyber war doctrine calls for the use of social media to confuse and disable perceived enemies In addition to the increasingly familiar use of zero day exploits for espionage Such as spear phishing and distributed denial of service attacks on infrastructure which are practiced by western agencies Problem is, once the Russians have demonstrated that this is an effective tactic The use of propaganda bot armies in cyber war will go global And at that point our social discourse will be irreparably poisoned Incidentally, I'd like to add as another aside like the Elon Musk thing, I hate the cyber prefix It usually indicates that whoever's using it has no idea what they're talking about Unfortunately, much as the way the term hacker was corrupted from its original meaning in the 1990s The term cyber war seems to have stuck and it's now an actual thing that we can point to and say this is what we're talking about So I'm afraid we're stuck with this really horrible term But that's a digression, I should get back on topic because I've only got 20 minutes to go Now, the second threat that we need to think about regulating or controlling is an adjunct to deep learning targeted propaganda It's the use of neural network generated false video media We used to photoshop images these days, but faking video and audio takes it to the next level Luckily faking video and audio is labor intensive, isn't it? Well, nope, not anymore We're seeing the first generation of AI assisted video porn In which the faces of film stars are mapped onto those of other people in a video clip Using software rather than laborious in human process A properly trained neural network recognises faces and transforms the face of the Hollywood star they want to put into a porn movie Onto the face of the porn star in the porn clip and suddenly you have, oh dear God, get it out of my head No, not gonna give you any examples, let's just say it's bad stuff Meanwhile, we have WaveNet, a system for generating realistic sounding speech in the voice of a human speaker The neural network has been trained to mimic any human speaker We can now put words into other people's mouths realistically without employing a voice actor This stuff is still geek intensive It requires relatively expensive GPUs or cloud computing clusters But in less than a decade it'll be out in the wild turned into something any damn script kiddie can use And just about everyone will be able to fake up a realistic video of someone they don't like doing something horrible I mean, Donald Trump in the White House I can't help but hope that out there somewhere there's some geek like Steve Bannon with a huge rack of servers who's faking it all But no Now, we've already seen alarm this year over bizarre YouTube channels that attempt to monetize children's TV brands by scraping the video content off legitimate channels And adding their own advertising and keywords on top before reposting it This is basically a YouTube spam Many of these channels are shaped by paperclip maximizing advertising AIs That are simply trying to maximize their search ranking on YouTube And it's entirely algorithmic You have a whole list of keywords, you permutate them, you slap them on top of existing popular videos and re-upload the videos Once you add neural network driven tools for inserting character A into pirated video B to click maximizing bots Things are going to get very weird though And they're going to get even weirder when these tools are deployed for political gain We tend being primates that evolved 300,000 years ago in a smartphone-free environment To evaluate the inputs from our eyes and ears much less critically than what random strangers on the internet tell us in text We're already too vulnerable to fake news as it is Soon they'll be coming for us armed with believable video evidence The smart money says that by 2027 you won't be able to believe anything you see in video unless there are cryptographic signatures on it Linking it back to the camera that shot the raw feed And you know how good most people are at using encryption? It's going to be chaos So paperclip maximizes that focus on eyeballs of very 20th century The new generation is going to be focusing on our nervous system Advertising as an industry can only exist because of a quirk of our nervous system which is that we're susceptible to addiction Be it tobacco gambling or heroin we recognize addictive behavior when we see it Or do we? It turns out the human brains reward feedback loops are relatively easy to gain Large corporations like Zynga, producers of Farmville, exist solely because of it Free to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are dominant precisely because they're structured to reward frequent short bursts of interaction And to generate emotional engagement not necessarily positive emotions anger and hatred are just as good when it comes to attracting eyeballs for advertisers Smartphone addiction is a side effect of advertising as a revenue model Frequent short bursts of interaction to keep us coming back for more A new-ish development thanks to deep learning again I keep coming back to deep learning, don't I? Use of neural networks in a manner that Marvin Minsky never envisaged back when he was deciding that the perceptron was where it began and ended and it couldn't do anything Well, we have neuroscientists now who've mechanized the process of making apps more addictive Dopamine Labs is one startup that provides tools to app developers to make any app more addictive As well as to reduce the desire to continue participating in a behavior if it's undesirable if the app developer actually wants to help people kick the habit This goes way beyond automated A-B testing A-B testing allows developers to plot a binary tree path between options moving towards a single desired goal But true deep learning, addictiveness maximizers can optimize for multiple attractors in parallel The more users you've got on your app, the more effectively you can work out what attracts them and train them and focus on extra addictive characteristics Now, going by their public face, the folks at Dopamine Labs seem to have ethical qualms about the misuse of addiction maximizers But neuroscience isn't a secret and sooner or later some really unscrupulous sociopaths will try to see how far they can push it So let me give you a specific imaginary scenario Apple have put a lot of effort into making real-time face recognition work on the iPhone X And it's going to be everywhere on everybody's phone in another couple of years You can't fool an iPhone X with a photo or even a simple mask It does depth mapping to ensure your eyes are in the right place and can tell whether they're open or closed It recognizes your face from underlying bone structure through makeup and bruises It's running continuously, checking pretty much as often as every time you'd hit the home button on a more traditional smartphone UI And it can see where your eyeballs are pointing The purpose of the face recognition system is to provide for real-time continuous authentication when you're using a device Not just enter a PIN or sign a password or use a two-factor authentication pad But the device knows that you are its authorized user on a continuous basis And if somebody grabs your phone and runs away with it, it'll know that it's been stolen immediately it sees the face of the thief However, your phone monitoring your facial expressions and correlating against app usage has other implications Your phone will be aware of precisely what you like to look at on its screen We may well have sufficient insight on the part of the phone to identify whether you're happy or sad, bored or engaged With addiction-seeking deep learning tools and neural network-generated images, those synthetic videos I was talking about It's in principle entirely possible to feed you an endlessly escalating payload of arousal-inducing inputs It might be Facebook or Twitter messages optimized to produce outrage Or it could be porn generated by AI to appeal to kinks you don't even consciously know you have But either way, the app now owns your central nervous system and you will be monetized And finally, I'd like to raise a really hair-raising specter that goes well beyond the use of deep learning and targeted propaganda in cyberwar Back in 2011, an obscure Russian software house launched an iPhone app for pickup artists called Girls Around Me Spoiler, Apple pulled it like a hot potato as soon as word got out that it existed Now, Girls Around Me works out where the user is using GPS Then it would query Foursquare and Facebook for people matching a simple relational search for single females on Facebook Per relationship status who have checked in or been checked in by their friends in your vicinity on Foursquare The app then displays their locations on a map along with links to their social media profiles If they were doing it today, the interface would be gamified showing strike rates and a leaderboard and flagging targets Who succumbed to harassment as easy lays But these days, the cool kids and single adults are all using dating apps with a missing vowel in the name Only a creeper would want something like Girls Around Me, right? Unfortunately, there are much much nastier uses than scraping social media to find potential victims for serial rapists Does your social media profile indicate your political religious affiliation? Nope Cambridge Analytica can work them out with 99.9% precision anyway, so don't worry about that, we already have you pegged Now at a service that can identify people's affiliation and location, and you have the beginning of a flash mob app One that will show people like us and people like them on a hyper-local map Imagine you're young, female, and a supermarket-like target has figured out from your purchase patterns that you're pregnant, even though you don't know it yet This actually happened in 2011 Now imagine that all the anti-abortion campaigners in your town have an app called Baby's Risk on their phones Someone has paid for the analytics feed from the supermarket, and every time you go near a family planning clinic a group of unfriendly anti-abortion protesters somehow miraculously show up and swarm you Or imagine you're male and gay, and the God hates fags crowd has invented a 100% reliable gaydar app based on your grinder profile and is getting their fellow travelers to queer-bash gay men only when they're alone or outnumbered by 10 to 1 That's the special horror of precise geolocation, not only do you always know where you are The AIs know where you are, and some of them aren't friendly Or imagine you're in Pakistan and Christian Muslim tensions are rising, or you're in rural Alabama or a Democrat You know, the possibilities are endless Someone out there is working on this A geolocation-aware social media scraping deep learning application that uses a gamified competitive interface to reward its players for joining in acts of mob violence against whoever the app developer hates Probably it has an innocuous-seeming but highly addictive training mode to get the users accustomed to working in teams and obeying the app's instructions Think Ingress or Pokemon Go Then, at some pre-planned zero-hour, it switches mode and starts rewarding players for violence Players who have been primed to think of their targets as vermin by a steady drip-feed of microtargeted, dehumanizing propaganda inputs delivered over a period of months And the worst bit of this picture is that the app developer isn't even a nation-state trying to disrupt its enemies or an extremist political group trying to murder gays, Jews or Muslims It's just a paperclip maximiser doing what it does, and you are the paper Welcome to the 21st century Thank you We have a little time for questions Do we have a microphone for the audience? Do we have any questions? Okay So you are doing a Q&A So you are doing a Q&A Well, if there are any questions, please come forward to the microphones, numbers 1 through 4 and ask I think it's all bleak and dystopian like you have prescribed it because I also think the future can be bright looking at the internet with open source It's all growing and going faster and faster in the good direction So what do you think about the balance here? Basically, I think the problem is that about 3% of us are sociopaths or psychopaths who spoil everything for the other 97% of us Wouldn't it be great if somebody could write an app that would identify all the psychopaths among us and let the rest of us just kill them? Yeah, we have all the tools to make a utopia We have it now, today A bleak, miserable, grim, meat hook future is not inevitable but it's up to us to use these tools to prevent the bad stuff happening and to do that we have to anticipate the bad outcomes and work to try and figure out a way to deal with them That's what this talk is, I'm trying to do a bit of a wake-up call and get people thinking about how much worse things can get than what we need to do to prevent it from happening What I was saying earlier about our regulatory systems being broken, stands How do we regulate the deep learning technologies? This is something we need to think about Okay, mic number 2 When you talk about corporations as IIs Where do you see that in a logic making? Can you see that as literally IIs or figuratively? Almost literally If you're familiar with philosopher Ronald Searle's Chinese room paradox from the 1970s by which he attempted to prove that artificial intelligence was impossible A corporation is very much the Chinese room implementation of an AI It is a bunch of human beings in a box You put inputs into the box, you get outputs out of the box Does it matter whether it's all happening in software or whether there's a human being following rules in between to assemble the output? I don't see there being much of a difference Now, you have to look at a company at a very abstract level to view it as an AI But more and more companies are automating their internal business processes You've got to view this as an ongoing trend Yeah, they have many of the characteristics of an AI Okay, mic number 4 Hi, thanks for your talk You've probably heard of the time well spent and design ethics movements that are alerting developers to dark patterns in UI designing Many people design apps to manipulate people Curious if you find any optimism in the possibility of amplifying or promoting those movements You know, I knew about dark patterns and I knew about people trying to optimize them I wasn't actually aware there were movements against this Okay, I'm 53 years old, I'm out of touch I haven't actually done any serious programming in 15 years I'm so rusty my rust has rust on it But it is a worrying trend And actual activism is a good start Raising awareness of hazards and of what we should be doing about them is a good start And I would classify this actually as a moral issue We need to, corporations evaluate everything in terms of revenue because it's very equivalent to breathing, they have to breathe Corporations don't usually have any moral framework We're humans, we need a moral framework to operate within Even if it's as simple as first do no harm or do not do unto others that which would be repugnant if it was done unto you, for golden rule So yeah, we should be trying to spread awareness of this about and working with program developers to remind them that they are human beings and have to be humane in their application of technology is a necessary start Thank you, Mike Three Hi, yeah, I think that folks, especially in this sort of crowd tend to jump to the just get off of Facebook solution first for a lot of these things that are really really scary But what worries me is how we sort of silence ourselves when we do that After the election I actually got back on Facebook because the Women's March was mostly organized through Facebook But yeah, I think we need a lot more regulation but we can't just throw it out because it's social media is the only really good platform we have right now to express ourselves, to have our own sort of power Absolutely, I have made a point of not really using Facebook for many many many years I have a Facebook page simply to shut up the young marketing people of my publisher who used to prop up every two years and say why don't we have a Facebook? Everyone's got a Facebook? No, I've had a blog since 1993 But no, I'm going to have to use Facebook because these days not using Facebook is like not using email You're cutting off your nose despite your face What we really do need to be doing is looking for some form of effective oversight of Facebook and particularly of how the algorithms that show you content are written and earlier about how algorithms are not as transparent as human beings to people applies hugely to them and both Facebook and Twitter control the information that they display to you Okay, I'm terribly sorry for all the people queuing at the mics now We're out of time I also have to apologize I announced that this talk was being held in English but it was being held in English Thank you very much for listening to me, it's been a pleasure


All right. We are all set. Okay Hang on now. I have to call allergies. All right. Um Greetings all welcome to the Amherst Design Review Board meeting of April 24th, 2020. My name is Erica Zickus and as the chair of the Amherst Design Review Board I'm calling this meeting to order at 5 p.m This meeting is being recorded and will be made available via the town of Amherst's YouTube channel And minutes are being taken Pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 and extended again by chapter two of the acts of 2023 This design review board meeting will be conducted via remote means using the zoom point The zoom meeting link is available on the meeting agenda posted on the town's Website calendar listing for this meeting or go to the design review board web page and click on the most recent Addenda which lists the zoom link at the top of the page No in-person attendance of the public is permitted However, every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the meeting in real time via technological means In the event we are unable to do so for reasons of economic hardship or despite best efforts We will post an audio or video recording Transcript or other comprehensive record of the proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting on the town of Amherst's website Board members I will do roll call What we know if you're here Tom Long President Thank you Catherine Porter present Lindsay Schnarr And Erica Zika, that's me. We're joined also by Chris Brestrup and Rob what she left from Planning board, uh, sorry Board members if technical issues arise we may need to pause temporarily to fix the problem and then continue the meeting Sorry just lost my space Um If the discussion needs to pause it will be noted in the minutes Please use the raise hand function to ask a question or make a comment I will see your request and call on you to speak After speaking remember to read yourself the general public comment item is reserved for public comment regarding items that are not on tonight's agenda Please be aware The board will not respond to comments during general public comment period Public comment could also be heard at other times during the meeting when determined appropriate Please indicate that you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited If you've joined the zoom meeting using a telephone Please indicate that you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your phone When called on please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back into mute when finished speaking Residents can express their views for up to three minutes or the discretion of the design review board chair If a speaker does not comply with these guidelines or exceeds there a lot in time Their participation will be discontinued from the meeting On tonight's agenda. We have two items the first Fy 2023 number 21 ananda dolly for blue mango cafe. They've actually withdrawn their Their need to be here. So they were on the agenda But they don't have a presentation for us tonight and then uh drb 2023 22 master la croix from real property management We'll then move on to approval of meeting minutes then general public comment period and then any other business Let's get started by 2023 number 22 Is mr. La Croix with us tonight So they are in the audience. Um, do you may go ahead and make mr. La Croix a panelist so he can speak to us? Yes Alrighty So as soon as he accepts it he will be on the call. Okay. Thank you for being here Thank you for having me. Can you guys hear me? Okay? Yep, you sound great. Are you prepared to do a screen share or would you like me to do that for you? Um I can but if you want to do that, you're more than welcome to put it up. Yeah, I can do it. I have all the documents open Okay Let's see You'll just have to be clear if you want me to scroll or move to another image All right, so Thank you for being here. Um, you want to introduce yourself and take us through your proposal Yeah, sure. So i'm i'm matt la croix. I'm the owner and president of real property management based state west Our office is based in ludlow and we manage properties throughout hamden hampshire and franklin counties One of the properties that I manage is The block of 61 to 63 main street Which is a mixed-juice building two resident Um Two residences up on the second floor and then on the first floor We have one proposed restaurant in 63 main street Which I think is not new information. They they've been Trying to get to a starting point for for close to a year now And then we have a vacant site in 61 main street and we have a proposed restaurant that wants to go into there um, the purpose of today Because of the moratorium on gas Our restaurants are unable to cook. Um, so in order to do that They have asked that we get permits to have propane gas on site So the the image that you're looking at this is a survey that was done by eaten and associates So on the right side of that Unit is a 63 main street. That's the asian restaurant. That's currently occupying that site They need eight Propane tanks so you can see There is four on the right side, which is on a concrete slab In between this building and the the building next to it Which is managed by kendrick property management And then there are four additional Propane tanks on the back right of the building. Yep Um, so those eight are for 63 main street. That's our priority is getting those in place So the restaurant can open um, and then on the left side 61 main street is for a perspective tenant That would like to open a restaurant as well for the same reasons they need propane gas Much smaller quantity. It would be three tanks, which you can see there um The small orange Circles that are near the tanks those would be new bollards that get put into place um, according to the the laws and regulations that are are required um And those would be installed on our on our dime the Big piece is um, you know, we need the approval of the town In order to allow use of that concrete pad because some of it's on You know the owner's property and some of it's on town property Um, so that's partial part of what we're asking is that approval so that we can Move forward with this proposal Okay, thank you. That's really helpful. Um, and you I don't know if y'all can see if I switch screens to This one you've given us images of the tanks and the bollards Yeah, and then I I had Somehow gotten us to see the the back of the building. Yeah. Um There we go. There you go. Perfect. Yeah So Yeah, so the right side there where all those trash barrels are that's where four of the propane tanks would go for The restaurant on 63 main street. Yeah, and then in the little alleyway on the right side of the building Um There is a concrete pad where the other four would go That's kind of partially on our property partially on kendrick's property But kendrick did give us a written approval to say that they were okay with the tanks As long as they could continue to use that space for their trash barrels, which we said was okay um And then on the back left side where those three Tiny little bollards are those would get replaced and that's where the other three tanks would go for 61 main street. Okay Thank you. Um, and In your Application paperwork you mentioned Closing up this window and then there was also a note about some plywood that's being replaced possibly also with block or a brick Yeah, so not not that window that you're you're touching right there, but on the So the easier one would be on the left side there those two little they look like basement windows those small windows We would we would brick those up And the idea is just if anything were ever to happen you want to make sure that there's no projectiles with glass and such And then on the right side of the building where you can't really see There are two windows. There's currently plywood over them The plywood would get removed and those windows would get bricked up as well Before the tanks go in so that for the same reason protecting the property great, um Let's see let me go back to here and I'll open the floor to drb members for any questions or comments I'm sorry. I've got to Change my views that I can see if anybody actually has their hand Lindsay Oh I see no problem with this. I'm happy to approve it My only My only question really is about the window and Looks like the electrical panels Um, can you go back to that street view Erica? Sure. Yeah, those gas meters. That's for the heat for the building. So those are Not for cooking those are for heating the environment. So those are already in place So my only question was about clearance around those and then making sure that the window is unobstructed Yep. Yeah, they would be to the right like where those last two barrels are that's where they're proposing the tanks um So the the trash barrels would still be you know closer to those But if we have to board that window up as well Or or brick that one, um, I think we could I'm not sure what's on the other side of it in the restaurant, but And and just just to be clear the recommendation to rick the windows was from the The fire chief or the fire marshal. Yeah, sounds like Um, and the the ones around the corner in the space between the two buildings those tanks are serviceable You can access them. Yeah. Yep Yeah, and the plan for fuel refueling um, I think jamie fits given is on the phone. I can't see her but um You know to refill the tanks would be about a 20 minute process once a week Assuming they're at, you know, 40% use so You can basically fit the truck there. They could access it to the right of the screen There's an opening there So is there an option for larger tanks or Is this the appropriate size tank for that location? My understanding that's the appropriate size for the location based on the Perimeter that you have to allow around the tanks because if you go larger More space. Yeah makes sense. Okay Tom any thoughts No, I I approve it as this. I think it's Yeah, necessary and I think it's thoroughly thought through I don't think anybody's going to be offended by those tanks All right, so sounds like we need a motion to approve. Although Lindsay were you Just watching your gestures and you're good. Okay, just a motion to approve them I move that we approve the petition for the placement of the new propane tanks As presented For the first time All right, all those in favor, please raise your hand.  Thank you very much miss filipari for coming And we'll see your new tenants again. Uh, if they have signage or lighting To approve Yeah, yeah We need to work on the next step, but I We've got some conversations going via email, but I think the next step is the site plan review Although A little bit confused, but I don't think this is the right forum. So we'll figure it out Thanks. Have a nice evening. Thank you all. Okay. Let's see. Um So we can move on then to Hang on. There we go. Uh meeting minutes approve meeting minutes We have a chance to scan those or shall I share my screen again? Show your screen, please Okay, I'm seeing them I'll just do a slow scroll and then Blue mango is since withdrawn, but I suppose we should Feel comfortable with what's on the record here.  Interesting Maybe it's a good decision Oh good Well, you were right, Erica. You took the longer to start the meeting then Meeting Um any like one or two right now so Great Uh, does anybody have any changes to the to the minutes that they'd like to discuss? All right, then we could move forward to approve for us. I I move that we approve the minutes of the Previous meeting which was I forget the day April 24 April. Okay, April 24 I can't I'm Tom's raisin. He's doing the hand raised I'm trying to be polite here right now. I can tell All those in favor Great. Thank you. Is is there anybody here from the general public to speak this evening? Okay, and um If I could just take a a little minute. Um, I have two thoughts. Um, one is about dates for the summer I believe We with with our every fourth Monday strategy that means June 26 July 24th and August 28th And I just wanted to know, um, if if anybody has already kind of scheduled Vacation or something to Let Rob know so that we can reschedule If that's going to be necessary Um, and then the other question I had was whether we would be receiving a new member from the historic commission Or not if there is any movement on that So what I've heard so far, um historic commission hasn't had a meeting recently ever since he got their two new members So they haven't really had the opportunity to pick somebody yet. Um, so once somebody is picked, I'll be sure to let everybody know Okay Appreciate it. Yep. As long as they're as long as it's on When they when they meet Yep Anybody else have any questions things to add Great It's delightful to see you all Thank you for being here See you next month, okay See you guys


And great well image the last set news to get top stories in crypto and bring out a bite-sized pieces today Just as the thumbnail suggests Even though everybody's talking about the Federal Reserve and the announcement made by Jerome Powell There is a much bigger issue at large and I need to bring it to your attention I'm gonna show you exactly what I'm gonna do before we get into that Let's take a look at the crypto and traditional markets and also take a look at the announcement yesterday and What I learned from the meetup we had here in Puerto Rico I'm not gonna spend a great deal of time on the announcement Everybody knows what was said and if you don't I'll just briefly skim over it But again the bigger issue is This bill called America competes and it's what's really important It kind of seems like things are being blown out of proportion for other parts when the real important aspects are Right in front of us. Also, we'll take a look at looking forward Picasso teaching the future and Vladimir Putin from Russia who is Actually becoming very pro Bitcoin and lastly we'll take a look at our do a little Q&A for the five questions that you guys got And we'll go over all that stuff. So before we go on Let's make sure that the audio is looking pretty good and we're okay and We'll go from that. Let's Kevin. Love your videos. Great. Now's that going down exactly? Bitcoin is done. No, it's not done. I'm gonna explain that why so looks like we're doing okay with the audio in the video Let's jump into a Little bit of what is happening today. So First of course, let's take a look at the market, right? Why not just to see where we are and We're down 3% and why are we down 3%? Anybody's guess because it wasn't like the announcement was anything Dramatic yesterday. It wasn't like Jerome Powell said hey, we're gonna drop, you know three points No, he didn't say anything so we're gonna just kind of let everything go until March So I was like, okay, and then there was a huge pump and then everything just kind of started to slowly drop down again I think we're taking the eye off the prize So here's what we got last 24 hours Bitcoin down 3.4 if they're in 5.7 tether And let's get finance coin 6.3 for slot 3.6. Everything is down across the board last hour It's looking pretty good Not that that's a big thing But remember over the seven day and over the last month or so that's the big story. So yes You can take the smallest of small wins if you're a Really sharp trader for the last hour. You're up 5% great, but really the grand scheme of things It really is what's going on in the grand finality of time and then unfortunately since we're so Attached to the hip. Let's take a look at what's going on the S&P 500 It is now 1145 here in Puerto Rico, which means that's 1045 roughly in New York or eastern center time when the markets have opened up about an hour So and it opened up pretty good and everything it's actually rose and then of course I think people will take in profits and boom it goes down again. That's not S&P 500 But let's zoom out see how we're doing not too hot one month not so great six month About the same then over a year time frame doing pretty good. Actually S&P 500 So when in doubt zoom out and then of course the NAS deck Which is what I think is correlated more closely to Bitcoin and crypto the last day. I mean today It's looking pretty good I mean start off pretty high went up and then of course it's falling down because people taking profits or whatever else, which is what? Not investment advice just investment opinion if you're gonna take if you're gonna invest You want a dollar cost average in it's also important to take a little profits along the way Nobody ever went broke taking profits and that also corresponds to traditional market five days One month not so good six month. Okay now looking pretty bad But again, if we zoom out over a year number five years still doing pretty darn good in the traditional market And this is what gets to me Well, I'm not I'm not gonna spend a much time on this because you see this the story right here Right here. Let me blow this up It says why is the stock market dropping the feds message was scarier than predicted I'm not gonna go over this in great detail This isn't from veterans and it says Dow drops his Powell talks and the whole reason why they're thinking that this went down is because of this Andrew Brenner of nat alliance securities blame the decline on chairman Jerome Powell's tone of voice Powell sounded much more hawkish In the press conference and treasuries hit and equities giving back gains. So I'm just when I'm looking at this. I'm like really are we Are people in the traditional space? I don't want to say weak But that's scared that the tone of somebody's voice is going to drop everything I mean, I understand, you know, you have to protect yourself and everything else But in all honesty every time I I talk to My brothers because they're in the traditional space.  Like really that's That's insane 2 percent that just happened four hours ago. I could care less But again, I think it's just a different mindset and just seeing yourself like where do you want to be? Like are we are we here for the short term? We're here for the long grandiose time frame it just boggles it boggles my mind because I never was in the traditional space I when I got into investing First of all, it was all real estate. So that was a very long-term play And the second thing was I never really got into stocks or equities I did buy a couple on the way, but I really care that much Tesla and google because I like those companies. But besides that, I just thought, you know what? You know crypto, it's it's like a proving ground if you can handle 50 swing in a couple of weeks you can handle anything But that's all we have and there is just a little bit of good news I will bring up quickly and that is that's for the for the traditional space q4 GDP was just released and the u.s economy expanded at almost 7 percent This just came out like an hour ago or so So GDP quarter over quarter annualized 6.9 versus 5.5, but they expected 2.3. That's pretty good Personal consumption 3.3 versus 3.4. They expected to And core personal consumption expenditures 4.9 hours All that really says is that look growth is going on things are going good So if that happens if that happens for the Fed the Fed's going to look like Okay, well if everything is going pretty well We're probably going to raise a little bit of rates because it looks like the economy is doing okay now What's going to happen in q1? Our q2 2022 as far as q1 it's anybody's guess, but this Again takes me to my next point Which is the announcement yesterday And what I learned from the meetup. Whoops. I already talked about that. Sorry. What I learned from the meetup was this And then we'll get into uh America competes and which is the big which is the way bigger deal So yesterday we had a meetup at this great place San Juan smokehouse was fantastic. The baking was great I didn't have the brisket, but it looked good And I met a bunch of people uh great I mean interesting interesting folks came out and said hi.  I met steven. Who's the owner I met alex.  So it was just a great time when I learned there was a couple there's a couple one guy there in particular And he had a good pretty good stories like look man He goes i've been in bitcoin since uh bitcoin. I was around when it went from 30 bucks To three bucks And I was around when I went from a thousand to like a hundred I was around when I went from 20,000 down to 5,000 I was around when I went from 69 to whatever it is today He said I really don't care what it is He goes because if you just look at this just what I said Things just go up And he goes I know what's going to happen over time I can't tell what's going to happen uh right here But I can tell you over time it's going to do pretty well and I was like wow So that's his investment advice. That's not what I said That's just a gentleman I met yesterday and made a lot of sense to me So when what I learned from that yesterday is the same thing I've always been thinking Just time in the market is a lot better than timing the market also met somebody But a different opinion and I and I like to this is the whole you can't get this unless you go and meet people And he's like look he goes I was big in the bitcoin ethereum And I sold it all and now what I got is just a bunch of s coins And I'm rolling into him and I he showed me his portfolio It was uh it was a good solid seven figures and I was like wow He said look he goes bitcoin could double because that's gonna be kind of tough But this one's could double triple quadruple and I'm really in the money and I'm like yes and I and I agree with him to a point But there's gonna be some and we both agreed that some of these are just going to zero That's just how it is and you can do that route that's investment opinion investment advice You can go that route and put in a bunch of s coins and not the blue chips, but it's risky So if you want to do that go right ahead and you could make a ton of money But you gotta understand that a lot of those are going to zero and uh, maybe they could Quadruple 10 x 100 x over time, but the basic principle was the same he said I don't know how long it's gonna take, but I know it's going to be a long journey And that's the thing that's what it really came down to so what I learned again is just the basic principle is Time in the market better than timing Let's get into what really matters because all that stuff we just talked about does not matter Unless we combat this little issue called america competes and I'll talk about it real quick I'll talk about what charles said and we're going to paraphrase what he said here Then i'm going to get to tell you like how we can combat this in specific ways If you're in the us I'll get to all that stuff because I don't want to just talk about it We need to have action. So this is why it's so important We talk about this. So there's a new bill What hand treasury treasury secretary yellen blank check to ban crypto at exchanges. Let me let that sink into you Uh to ban crypto at the exchanges And it's not like it's well We're going to go through a due process and have to do all these things and jump through hoops and legalities and And listen to the people. No, they're like we can ban crypto at exchanges if this law passes That's why it's important And this is not just for crypto provision as the american petech would allow Treasury to secretly I love those words secretly and government Prohibit any kind of transaction. It deems a concern without any public notice or input for draconian So authority for the so-called special measures The first four allow the secretary of treasury to direct financial institutions to engage in Extraordinary surveillance and record keeping About their customers transaction think about this every detail you've done They're gonna know And the fifth allows the secretary of the treasury to direct financial institutions to prohibit Their customers from transacting at all Think of this you wake up.  But I mean, yeah, hey, it is what it is also to finish up I like examples examples make sense to me For example, if the secretary of the treasury deems that either a the neta lens or b a dutch crypto exchange exchange c All crypto transactions validated by a miner outside of the us or d all non custodial wallets are Of primary money laundering concern and she can swiftly make it illegal for any us financial institutions Regulated crypto exchanges from maintaining accounts for customers Involving those concerns i.e. wipe them out The proposed language in american competes act would remove all formal controls time limits and public notice requirements I'm not getting you. This is real from the imposition of these draconian measures that eliminates the notice and comment process and uh, I'm gonna link this I linked this in the description so you could check it out It's a pretty great scary read if you want to go over it But as soon as this came out Charles Hoskinson Project leader there over there at iohk cardano aida Came out with this. It's a really good 13 minute video. I guarantee I would I think I linked in in the description. Maybe I didn't but uh, you can search for it american competes And he's like the first video that comes up And uh, I will say this whether you like cardano. I like cardano Like what they're doing or you hate cardano.  It's a great one.  I'm just gonna have you listen to the audio. Okay So let me do that. Let me remove this Let me share my screen in a specific way. So you actually hear it Stop screen Break out That's is it. Okay, and you should be able to hear this audio. So let me play this Let me know if you can hear it and Go, you know, I was very diplomatic with the infrastructure bill. We called senators. We said, hey, let's get around then We had shelby now They're just just throwing it in there And why would jim do this? Well, you know, here's this wikipedia page for what that's worth. Let's look through. I went to harvard, okay And he spent some time in lima. All right, you know, what's oxford? Oh, that's good. Oh, here we go 1995 he's began working in golden sacks as a banker in latin america new york and eventually promoted a vice president Ah, he's part of the vampire squid One of the new democrat coalition chills that came in from connecticut's fourth congressional district And takes orders from the banking block. There you go. That's where the money came Okay, I had I okay. I added that part in but you understand what we're going here So if you want to take a take a quick Uh gander at that one, I will uh put that into the description and again if you can't find it It's uh, just uh america piece Dumpster fire and it's one of those things. So let's talk about real quick About How to compete with they're not compete with that how to uh combat that So it's great if we talk about it and we all get you know, we exchange ideas or anything else But it does absolutely nothing unless we take action. Here's how you do that So there is a link in the description and it's house.gov representatives First it has to go to the house and get passed probably will then it has to go through Your senators to get passed In that location as far as your senators go. So the house has to pass it first and the senator So if you just want to go over there first To figure out who you are represented by and in your zip code right here Find your rep by zip and it'll take it right there. Also That's good to get the ball rolling. Just tell them that hey this uh american piece this one provision is awful for crypto And also for the banking sector at large because they can spy on me do everything they want to and shut down my bank account I don't want that. I don't live in a communist country Let me know what you think about that in the comments But you can do that and then also for senators you can choose your state Whatever state you're at and like like this one. I don't know who this is or also Wyoming great it'll take you right to Uh their web page And you can contact them and say hey, this is awful Please vote against this and here's why and just like what I talked about So if you could do those two things like I've already done that would be fantastic So that's what we have and again It says uh these things are a little bit more important than drone power coming out and going You know, maybe I'm gonna raise some rates if we don't cut this off potentially it could be a really Big blow to crypto and digital assets. So the next thing about that in the comment section, let's look forward though, huh? Let's give a little balance here because it's not it can't be all negative 24 7365 here's some good stuff that's coming up. I think this is pretty good So Picasso airs are jumping on the nft bad and wagon They're gonna auction tokens to be accompanied by music from john legend and nos So before we go on this is the reason I picked this up is to show you Why crypto is not going to go anywhere unless the government squashes it like the way he's talked about It's because there's a lot of money moving around. Just follow the money. So check this out Pablo Picasso's airs recently announced. They're selling 10010 digital art pieces of one of his ceramic works great And I did that a work that has never been seen publicly auction house Sotheby's will host an auction in march That will include a unique nft I think they mean nfts because there's a thousand that can be wrong As well as the actual ceramic bull Great. This is another example of how technology takes over right Not all of us can afford a Picasso ceramic bull. Let's just be honest We're not multi-millionaires all of us But we can might be able to afford like an nft Or maybe get into a dow and uh get into that nft or maybe get them down And get the ceramic bowl doesn't matter the thing that I want you to focus on is why Sotheby's doing this Why are they, you know, why they even putting this up the reason is Is because the same reason why a bunch of different companies are getting into it and crypto's not going anywhere I think there's so much money being made and nfts Generated a hundred million dollars in revenue for Sotheby's in 2021 and that's just taken off So what do you think they're going to keep doing later on? So I see this as pretty positive news of where things are going also I found this little gem This was It was 5000 role models, but this was It's an example Of how great it is when a city like Miami Mayor Suarez gets together and says, you know what? Here's what we're going to do. We're going to teach kids How to use crypto By giving them crypto and we're not just giving them a little bit of crypto We're going to give them a thousand dollars worth of crypto. That's exactly what he did in this video and uh If you follow me over If you follow me over on news asset, you can see the whole video, but it's pretty cool and this This guy, I forgot his name. He's an author And he wrote a pretty good book about bitcoin, but he talks about how This is how important it is to teach a whole generation. So what they do is they give them they Invite these kids 55 students that are in these these specific programs They gave them a hundred bucks of bitcoin just to show up Then they said this was in december and they said, okay You can receive a thousand if you do this Which is we want you to hold on to bitcoin for a specific amount of time Also, we want you to use the lighting network and do three transactions If we do those things we'll give you a thousand bucks and that's I thought was pretty impressive Of what to do to teach newer generation I wish somebody was around in that time to teach me about the internet Just how big it could be so I think it's a forward-thinking thing and lastly I just want to talk about Putin Russia night stay little little little problems over there, but how president Putin I want you to notice one thing He's now supporting the government's proposal to allow regulated bitcoin and crypto mining And uh, he just said hey, this is a pretty good thing for russia I think we could do some pretty great stuff But I want you to notice one thing which is here The way that different organizations Talk about the same thing In their headlines so like bloomberg Comes over here and says hey Putin backs crypto mining despite The bank of russia's hard line you gotta understand bloomberg traditional finance type of place more so the block Is all positive Putin pumps the brakes on russian central banks push to ban crypto Seize the future in mining and break coins like hey bunch of advantages So when you take a look at the stories make sure you take a look at the stories behind the stories And that's the big thing because yesterday We talked about how Russia was supposedly going to ban bitcoin and mining But really what it was it was from The central banks and then this was a great article that I thought was uh, I'll I'll say it again because I love these articles So russia Should regulate crypto market not ban it Uh, this was a couple days ago, and this was from the finance ministry. Ivan, uh, chibiskov He contradicts a central bank which proponent of banning it And he said the ministry has his own ideas about how to regulate the crypto market While a lawmaker one went one step further Reminding the central bank of its place and states that the power to create legislation lies with parliaments And not a bunch of bankers I love that story because it just shows you just how there's always a story behind the story and get the whole information Why it's so important in your research, and that's what's going on today. So look You know it was a little bit actually was The same amount of time actually we do all the time about 20 minutes or so but I just want to show you that keep your eye on the prize and we know that's Time in the markets would rather than timing. That's uh, that's my opinion But the things that I learned yesterday from the meet-up to the things I learned about yesterday from the announcement To this america competes. It's uh, it just puts everything in the correct order So let me know what you think about that in the comment section Let's get to your questions and Q&A, whoops Q&A All right, adam says dx y's web. I don't know what that is And irash I've heard this too.  Putin needs to be regulated. Good luck That guy pretty much runs a bunch of stuff and then No questions today. Great. I must have done my job If doge hits a buck, I'll pick some That's how my family said about bitcoin. He said, you know when it goes 100k I might consider buying seriously That's their that's their mentality Here's a great quote from john John said last three years. I've been in this and and still back to where I started if So this is the things that can happen and it's one of those things which like you're gonna hear this this phrase If you're new to crypto welcome Ah, pretty good time to pick up some deals but just remember that if you If it's taken this long That there's gonna be this phrase you're gonna keep hearing. It's called diamond hands And diamond hands is what you're gonna hear all the time Like you need to hold and hold and hold and hold and hold and hold and hold The problem with holding and holding is that if you hold for too much and too long, let me adjust this You don't ever get to take profits and people like oh You got to you got to just hold on forever because bitcoin's going to a million. Really?  That's fine But for me, I'd rather just take some profits out and afford some things That is my goals and my goals are not your goals. So at some point john Hopefully as time goes on we can dollar cost average in right? We buy these dips and we do okay And we just pick the points And if we want to take some money out we take some money out We take our profits and we dollar cost average out that Is my main mission now those two things that I said and the four-year plan the four-year plan is whatever you're buying today Just forget about it and just wait for four years Because over that time unless it goes like parabolic then of course, you know take some profits, but I think you'll be okay. All right crypto flat smack Cryptotherapy somebody I want to protect the banking model. I think so Let's see. Let me go Somebody had a good point Take profits. Yeah Yeah, it's a good one MR says 27 year futures traders here. Hello MR then slowly accumulating positions in what I call crypto infrastructure Good layer one solutions thing like that. We never know what is going to survive. So everything is subject to change Yeah, that's right. Never know Rob could NFTs and gimmicks for that bill maybe the thing is NFTs are built on something correct, right? So NFTs of the majority are built on ethereum And or even if you use wax if you want to transact in wax, maybe the department comes down Jan Yon's like, you know what that ethereum looks kind of suspicious I think we should shut all those down and it's not going to be like the whole chain But they could shut you down and that's the big thing Ugh diamond hands And then Luigi says I think we're facing a nasdaq and crypto the same we face in march 2020. What do you think? Well, I remember in 2020 there was this little thing called coba that came about and it crashed everything I remember when ethereum went down to like a hundred 200 bucks and I think bitcoin went down like $3,000 Correct me in the comment section. So do I see that kind of black swan event happening? If you never know you never know and that's why it's important just like I said take profits and have And diversify a little bit, you know, maybe like a little real estate here and there maybe Some other things that you can get into Um, maybe stocks maybe golden silver. I own golden silver. I don't see any problem with that I don't know why golden silver people just can't buy both. It doesn't make any sense to me So I think it's the same time. I think it's a little bit different now, but uh, again Nobody knows What do you think about storm x? I like storm x. I like simon u CEO over there been around for a long time And I like the platform actually buy stuff and get discounts. I don't see a problem with it. What's over And And someone just said some I can't find the comment that says and this will be the third question What about regular videos? See regular videos. They work out pretty well. I like doing the live ones because I don't have to record Then edit Then upload then wait then go through the rigmarole and this is just a little bit faster So I like this format and then you can ask me questions. I like it better. You can always come back As of the three videos I go. I started to do timestamps. So if you come back, I'll have all the timestamps for you too If you don't want to watch the whole thing This is a great question Alex is how does america compete with what they're proposing? They're trying to compete on a global scale and one of those things that they talked about this whole provision As far as like dealing with the elicit activity and money laundering was specifically aimed at china and different problems that are going on with china Here's the thing if you want to compete if america wants to compete they need to throw that out Because that's not going to do anything good for us and they really should just embrace crypto and say, okay We want crypto here just like we wanted the internet here and it worked out pretty dang well for us Back in the early 90s or mid to late 90s early 2000s as we grew a bunch of massive companies Like at google like a facebook like everything else that's been in silicon valley And you can just say like this, um That's how america competes now if you want to regulate it sure go right ahead if you want to call it security I don't care just make up your mind because as time goes on all these different companies that are here that are Doing quite well They're going to just leave a vacuum and leave because America is what it is. They did a great job with allowing miners in texas. Thank you texas in great state But they're doing real bad job and other stuff Fourth question. Have you heard of celcius x the defamera celcius? I guess I have Actually, I talked to the the folks over there at celcius And I'll probably doing some videos about it because it looks pretty promising what they're doing. So stay tuned Okay, and last question Investing in the game fight. Yeah, uh, there's two, uh ginsu kishi, which is what I talked about yesterday. Again, they got a platform Elemental mites that already has a base of users. They've been around for like seven eight years They already have the app on ios. They already have it on android. They already have it on ps four or five and then also on nintendo switch So they're they're bringing that over into the metaverse So again, so kishi probably a good one also ever dome potentially could be a big one. They've partnered with meta hero And uh, those are the two that I like do your own research risky stuff non-investment advice And I don't like the live stream, but it's double the length and half the content No, it's all you man. So if it doesn't work out for you, then uh, just I don't know what to tell you because like I think we do the same amount of content it just uh Roughly about the same amount of time because we get done around 20 minutes and that's it Now the q and a takes a bit longer, which we're going to stop right now But it's all what you want, right when i'm walking the dogs in the morning Like I could use a an hour long session listening to something. It's had just a 10 minute snippet. That's me Everybody's different, but that's it. So look Uh, that's it for today. If you like today's video give it a thumbs up also consider subscribing A lot of things to talk about our time sensitive. That's all we have So thanks so much for watching. I appreciate it and I'll see you on the next one. Adios


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