markjgsmith

Here’s a infiniti No! total reality inversion classic example that happened to me yesterday afternoon:

It’s raining and wet everywhere. It‘s been raining for about 5 minutes. I'm walking to a sandwich shop, carrying all 3 of my bags, which are all quite full and heavy. As I walk / clamber around a tricky part in the pavement where there's a lamp post, a man on a motorbike pulls up close to me, veering towards me unexpectedly, asking me ‘where you go?’ motioning to get on his motorbike. It's bysy heavy traffic everywhere.

That’s already quite unusual though not unheard of, but as I look at him I realise he is western. That really is VERY unusual. He repeats himself, he had a French accent. I politely decline, but it’s very awkward because the curb is very high where I am walking, and remember it’s raining, and I’ve got these heavy bags, and I’m now having to deal with this surprise offer. I stumble, my foot slips on the enormous curb, I go flying directly into some parked motorbikes, with enormous momentum because of the heavy bags.

I’ve fallen over previously a few times with these bags and it’s really really dangerous, your legs literally buckle under you, so when it happens this time I get flash backs of previous times it happened. Miraculously I don’t fall to the ground, I stabilise myself with the parked motorbike, that I imagine are scratched by my bags after crashing into them.

I instinctively say out loud "careful mate", because well, his manoeuvre was frankly bloody dangerous given the conditions. He looks very annoyed at me and shouts ‘No!’, then drives off. No sorry, no ‘are you ok’, no help getting back stable on my feet. Just a loud somewhat angry 'No!'. Like the entire thing is my fault. He then drives off.

I finally get to the shop, buy what I went there for, and just before I walk off the girl working there, who historically is very often on a warpath, shouts ‘liar’. I call her a thief, she immediately says thank you in Vietnamese, like she was expecting me to say that, I’m completely exhausted and spent after continuous bullying all morning in every location and walk away, a few meters down the road I gather my thoughts and tell the world to stop stealing from me.

I notice that on the top shelf of the items I was buying, that come in various sizes, the top shelf now has a size that’s 1/2 as big as the previous smallest size. Note there has been both 1/2 size food portion anger goading, as well as large butch women suddenly turning up and running all the sandwich shops along side the previous, often very moody, non-butch sandwich shop staff.

This is what it has come to. The level of pettiness is such that people would quite happily consume an entire universe of resources just to win an argument on why a neutrino was out of place by a distance of one neutrino.

The odd thing is that the girl and bloke from this sandwich shop always give off a sort of french vibe, in the way they behave, the things they say, perhaps they used to live there or something, but I always got a French vibe from them. What are the chances? #

Competition for criminals

As we all know by now, not only is the technology industry right in the middle of an AI revolution, but the repercussions are starting to be felt in the rest of the industry as the jobs market is impacted by companies able to do much more with significantly less staff. The AI revolution stands to put many people out of a job.

It occurred to me yesterday while reading about the new powerful generative AI tools now available on all consumer smart phones, that the displacement will affect criminals in much the same way. Whereas previously creating fake photographs was the exclusive of a select few well trained operators, incredibly realistic fakes can now be done by literally anyone. That means criminals who would previously been able to pay photoshop artists to create fakes, and who enjoyed a relatively uncrowded market, will potentially be faced with a tidal wave of wanabe crime kiddies, who can probably create better fakes than they ever even imagined.

While we get out the smallest violins in the universe, it’s worth considering that this could actually change existing power structures and the unseen part of the econony significantly. Those photo editing tools are pretty darn amazing. Imagine what kind of crazy alternate realities people will create to infiniti pawn each other. #

Bitcoinifying arguments

Bitcoin is famous for being a distributed system. That's one of the properties that make it censorship resistant. When you look at it‘s underlying architecture it turns out that it’s a market of markets. The reason it’s done this way is to setup an incentive structure that is fair to all participants. I wonder if other things could be architected in this way.

What about for example, a similar architecture for decision exploration and decision making? This might be a way to ensure that all sides of an argument are covered. People would be free to take up any side of an argument, and highlight all the important aspects. It wouldn’t necessarily mean that that person held thise views, but would ensure that much bigger possibilities spaces were explored for products, or government policies or new ideologies.

A sort of mechanical turk for idea workshoping, where anyone could participate, all run on the blockchain, not owned by anyone.

Would that even be a usefull, non-dangerous thing to do? #

The real vs digital assets equilibrium

I wrote at the weekend about the future of crypto and high end NFTs. Some market analysts are predicting based on passed trends, that the coming bull markets in the crypto space will necessarily increase the marketcap by approximately $8tn by 2030. That’s a large amount of value that will accrue.

The thesis by people like Raoul Pal is that, as with previous generations, the winners in these spaces will want to invest the money they make into property and art. Historically speaking, these have been the assets that the rich have bought to preserve their wealth in the face of currencies that get debased. He believes that they will want to invest in the digital equivalents of property & art, namely Bitcoin & high end NFTs.

I think he’s identified something very interesting, but I’m not completely convinced by his conclusions. It’s true that norms in this generation of money managers are different, they will certainly be more into crypto & NFTs, but why wouldn’t they just buy hard assets just like their predecessors? Why didn’t their predecessors buy their own financial instruments?

Well I bet they did buy quite a lot of their own financial instruments, as well as real physical assets. It would be very interesting to see the numbers on this dynamic, because perhaps there is already a sort of equilibrium between how nuch the winners put back into the system and how much they take out into hard assets. Isn’t it likely that the very same equilibrium is passed down into the next generation of the financial system?

What’s more, isn’t it the case that if a country finds itself flip floping from hard left to hard right governments, that this equilibrium is seriously miss balanced? #