Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• It’s been getting easier and easier to destroy something thanks to technology
  • The destructive powers arrive long before the protective powers (creating destructive power is actually a lot easier)
    • Think – From the moment we first split the atom to the first nuclear bomb was a much shorter trip to the first nuclear power plant
• Commercial air travel will eventually come to an end because weaponized drones will just be too prevalent
  • Remember the airplane that went down and landed in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of geese?
    • Now just imagine a ton of miniaturized drones doing the same thing
  • A few important points:
    • The drones don’t have to launch until a plane takes off – which makes them even more effective
    • The person/group operating the drones wouldn’t even have to expose themselves
• A nightmare future scenario – Automated assassination markets
  • What’s an assassination market?
    • You build a piece of code that lives peer-to-peer in the dark web
    • People can then go there and contribute small amounts of money in untraceable ways (like with crypto) and essentially bid up assassinations on people they don’t like
      • This would allow for the crowd-funding of assassinations
• The potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) are huge, but we need to be very, very cautious of the negative scenarios that might also play out
• On mass shootings and mass murders:
  • In the future, as technologies advance and proliferate, the types of people who do these things could have access to some terrifying capabilities – thus the death tolls would only rise
• But one of the most important points:
  • With the above, on a long enough time scale, all of these negative things are likely to happen
• One more quote to get you thinking:
  • “At any given time on the planet, there’s a few people, and one is too many…. if you gave them a button that would end the planet, they would press that button” – Naval

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org



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Naval & I discuss a horrifying risk. We questioned whether to post this. Might it give someone ideas? Well, the bad guys already HAVE ideas. And cataclysms are only averted if we face them. There’s still time.