Nick Samoylov

We have a model of the world in our mind. It guides us and helps to plan ahead. But it tends to grow beyond what we need for the task at hand and takes the resources that might be needed for the survival. Does it weaken us as a species? Professor Hoffman thinks so.

The growing world complexity requires better prepared minds. One of the sources of such minds is gaming community. The whole generation has grown up playing on-line since the very tender age, and now some of this generation are applying themselves to the challenges of the real world.

If we add to the mix the ability to share our thoughts directly (without using any words), then we can cooperate creatively (and without moral judgment) and become much more productive.

Future is happening faster than we thought. It is happening now…

That’s the argument Dutch author Rutger Bregman uses in support of a universal basic income: “The most important obstacle for basic income is a moral obstacle. It is in the ideas that we still have about work. We still work with a very outdated definition of what work is. We define work by getting a […]

Udo Gollub summarized his impressions from visiting Singularity University summit in Berlin on April 20-21, 2016 and posted them on Facebook. The presenters on the summit (and Udo) try to look into the future. They made many very specific predictions. I liked and could relate to several of them, so here I reprint some of […]

Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Peter Principle: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out […]

When I traveled to the western Europe the first few times, I had the bitter feeling of not being able to answer this question: why they lived so much better than we did? I could not accept the simple “because they are smarter” or “because they work better” or “because their government less corrupt”. I […]

Ecologist Dwayne Moore wrote in his article “The Principle Applied to Ecological Risk Assessments of Multiple Stressors”, published in 2001: “Successful ecological risk assessments are all alike; every unsuccessful ecological risk assessment fails in its own way. Tolstoy posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family […]

Our planet and solar system belong to Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light years across with a supermassive black hole in the center. Average distance between stars is 5 light years (29 trillion miles) approximately. Imagine that the distance from the earth to the sun (93 mln miles, or about 8 light minutes) is […]