It can also play grandmaster chess.

I was at the DreamIt funding day demos today (which was great) and I was talking with some of the guys about the Singularity. Most of them didn’t know what it is, but a few of them did. Still, the ones that knew about it didn’t totally buy into it - they said it hadn’t really made an impact on their day-to-day decisions. I told them that it has totally changed my thinking.
And so now I am reading this article about Peter Thiel, and “the Paypal Mafia”, and I read this quote from Elon Musk:

“Peter, Max, and I are not directly aligned philosophically,” he says. “Peter’s philosophy is pretty odd. It’s not normal. He’s a contrarian from an investing standpoint and thinks a lot about the singularity. I’m much less excited about that. I’m pro-human.”

That made me laugh.
Peter also has a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, which is doing really well. He’s also a tournament chess master (currently rated 2287 USCF and 2199 FIDE). He hasn’t really played recently - his last big match was the 104th US Open in LA 5 years ago - but it looks like he only played two games and then dropped out (he won both of the games).
The oldest tournament record that USCF has for Thiel is the Mc Ilrath Memorial in Burlingame, CA way back in 1992. He went 5-0 to take clear 1st place.
By the way, I totally agree with his view of chess:

“Taken too far, chess can become an alternate reality in which one loses sight of the real world,” he says. “My chess ability was roughly at the limit. Had I become any stronger, there would have been some massive tradeoffs with success in other domains in life.”

I think it is a great tool for analytical thinking and strategy training. But it takes a lot of time and thought and eventually you need to be productive and put away the pieces and apply that training. Plus, there’s no money in it. And computers are way better. But it is great for children and young adults and it is a very beautiful game.

Professor Peter Weyand thinks that humans will soon be able to greatly enhance our strength with gene therapy, which would “enable speeds of 45 miles per hour and 5 seconds times for 100 meters”:

The fast four-legged runners or quadrupeds do seem to be advantaged versus bipeds in terms of the mechanics allowed by their anatomy. So to go even faster would require people to successfully adopt the running mechanics of four legged animals (running on hands and feet).

DARPA is also spending 3 billion to enhance strength and endurance. So endurance enhancements combined with the muscle speed enhancements could allow sprinting for an entire mile run. This would mean 80 seconds to run one mile. 1 minute and 20 seconds. It could also mean about 40 minutes to run a marathon.

The post also provides links to some articles about cognitive enhancement.

Another recent interview with Vernor Vinge:
part1:

part2:

It is fun to play with a puppy and teach it tricks - even one that lives in a computer screen. People enjoy it - dogs are “man’s best friend.”
But what if we hook all of the little cute puppies together into a central server somewhere on the internet. Now, all of the puppies are connected and are learning separately - and together. This way, they can learn a lot and quickly. And then you will have one really smart puppy.
That’s the plan of Novamente, a privately owned company that last year donated 1% of its stock to the Methuselah Foundation:

A virtual dog powered by Novamente’s AI, Goertzel says, would develop its own quirks. At the same time, each individual dog’s AI is connected to a greater whole, so anything it learns can be ready for all the others in almost real time. Balancing the collective dog AI with the individual dog’s AI to maintain each dog’s unique personality is a tricky problem. Goertzel says Novamente has it basically solved. But dogs are just the start.

The medium-term goal, Goertzel says, is a virtual parrot that talks. The natural language processing technology is not ready, but if it gets there, having widely distributed but interconnected virtual talking parrots could be a great way to train an AI to comprehend speech.

Goertzel argues that if virtual world behavior aligns at all with real world behavior, people will spend time and effort to get their virtual parrots to say the right things. The feedback loop described above would make each parrot more appealing to humans and make the AI increasingly capable of understanding speech.

Oil has put in a top - last month was the highest it will ever be in the entire future of humanity. Or if not last month, then soon.
Or at least in 5-10 years.
Who will buy oil when we can harness the power of the sun?

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for one year.

Oil represents the past. It has had a nice run, but it won’t go up forever.

No need to give Weev your social security number, as he likely will already have it. From the New York Times article and his blog, it seems that he is in to commodities trading (and also interested in “online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets”).
From his blog:

if you agree with my vision of the future, are an “accredited investor” according to the SEC’s regulations or just an investor who is not a US citizen and would like me to start you a private investment trust, you can email gluttony@gmail.com to chat (minimum startup capital, 700k).

I’ve got some deeply veiled gnosis to share about the nature of reality, about ancient Gods, and about the future of humanity. I had to watch the market carefully and also join several nearly dead religious cults to completely understand it all.

Before you invest, you should understand that Weev believes that the market, and all “reality,” is just a simulation. He also takes (or at least used to take, according to the NYT article) LSD and methamphetamines. Here are some of the ideas behind his commodity hedge fund:

So we’re at a new resource shortage. Global peak phosphorus happened in 1989. Phosphorus can be recovered though, so it isn’t too critical, but it is definitely bad for growing grain. We consistently as a planet consume more grain every year than we produce. Eventually those fat stockpiles are gonna hit bottom, and then shit hits the fan. We have already seen tortilla riots in Mexico, and commodities shortages and export controls in nearly half the world. Oil is going to become a little scarcer, but isn’t going to run out anytime soon. The Saudi fields have peaked and Kuwait’s are about to do so, but it doesn’t matter. There was a strategic decision to bleed the middle east dry of oil long ago. We still have plenty of shit we can drill elsewhere. America’s deserts have plenty of light sweet crude, I assure you.

So what resource are we going to run out of? There’s a very important one, one that is required to grow things. One that is required for human beings to survive. T Boone Pickens just put 200mil of his own money into securing rights to this resource. The first ETF for this resource appeared a couple years ago, and Sydney is opening the first futures market for this resource. My hedge fund heavily speculates in this resource.

Congratulations to Polaris for winning the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas. I knew you could do it. Polaris 2.0 won the event with 3 wins, 2 losses and 1 tie - beating Matt Hawrilenko and other competitors convincingly by winning both sides of a duplicate match.
Computers have long been the best chess players. How long before they are the best day traders? I would say there is a good chance that they already are.

“There are two really big changes in Polaris over last year,” said professor Michael Bowling, who supervised graduate students who programmed Polaris. “First of all, our poker model is much expanded over last year–its much harder for humans to exploit weaknesses. And secondly, we have added an element of learning, where Polaris identifies which common poker stratagy a human is using and switches its own strategy to counter. This complicated the human players ability to compare notes, since Polaris chose a different strategy to use against each of the humans it played,” Bowling said.

“Repeatedly, I heard players exclaim that they had never seen a human do that before,” said Bowling. “Switching strategies really threw the humans for a loop.”

Even though Polaris beat the humans in Las Vegas, the University of Alberta group said it expects to be asked for rematches by the vanquished pros as well as by other poker experts who will claim the win by Polaris was a fluke. “Even after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, there were still some skeptics, and I think the same is true here,” said Bowling. “Over the next year or so there are going to have to be several rematches before everyone is convinced that humans have been surpassed by machines in poker.”

I’ve been taking a high dose of resveratrol every day for about a year now, so I was happy to see this article in wired about new strong evidence of its benefits in anti-aging.

“For the first time, we can mimic caloric restriction in an otherwise healthy animal,” said study co-author David Sinclair, a Harvard University biologist and co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. “That’s been the goal of the field for decades. We didn’t know it was possible to let an animal eat whatever it wants, but still get the benefits. We now have evidence.”

Regardless of mouse weight and diet, resveratrol worked wonders. At two years of age, or the mouse equivalent of senescence, the mice were more coordinated than their non-dosed counterparts. Their bones were thicker and stronger, their eyes free of cataracts, their hearts beating strong. At the cellular level, tissues displayed gene-level changes almost identical to those produced by caloric restriction.

“The mice had tremendous health benefits from taking resveratrol,” said de Cabo. “If any of those parameters translate to humans, it will be tremendous.”

Dr. Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, says that we are due for an “economic singularity” (previous examples are the invention of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution) that will cause dramatic accelerations in growth.

If a new transition were to show the same pattern as the past two, then growth would quickly speed up by between 60‑ and 250-fold. The world economy, which now doubles in 15 years or so, would soon double in somewhere from a week to a month. If the new transition were as gradual (in power-law terms) as the Industrial Revolution was, then within three years of a noticeable departure from typical fluctuations, it would begin to double annually, and within two more years, it might grow a million-fold. If the new transition were as rapid as the agricultural revolution seems to have been, change would be even more sudden…

The invention of nanofactories will cause this to happen. Diamonds can now be created in labs - imagine when you will be able to create anything you want from your home nanofactory at the cost of basic raw materials?
I agree with Peter Thiel - that our only option is to bet aggressively long.