Recently in a conversation with Saman Farid, the CEO of Formic, we touched on TRIZ. It isn’t as well known as Design Thinking, Six Sigma, Lean, etc., but a very powerful approach to systematic inventing. The author (Genrich Altshuller, a prolific inventor himself) reviewed 40k+ patents in the 50s and…

Problem: An asteroid is about to destroy Earth. Humanity has built a spaceship that can fit a fraction of the population. There are two lotteries, you can participate in one only. Both are supposed to have a 1 in 100 chance of you getting a ticket, but you discovered that…

While modern AI systems demonstrate quite impressive results in tasks ranging from image recognition to playing Go and even explaining jokes, these are still the early days, and there are multiple areas for improvement, some of which are listed below [1]. …

The purpose of this note is to suggest a framework for evaluating different types of players/use cases in the Public Blockchain Ecosystem (BCE) and their viability at the current stage of the BCE development. It is done by identifying key value drivers (KVDs) of the BCE, applying KVDs to find…

The evolution of Machine Intelligence (or Artificial intelligence, AI) is one of the main trends shaping the future of humanity. It is a critical piece in addressing the aging population, stagnating productivity rates, and falling efficiency of energy production. It will also be crucial to our expansion beyond Earth. …

In this note, we look at network integrity/total fees dynamics as a driver of a multichain environment. We suggest that it’s not the difference in blockchain features that will ultimately define the winners, as features can and will be copied, but the perceived integrity. We also suggest that integrity is…

Replacing fossil fuels as a source of energy is important for several reasons: energy independence, for places with limited reserves; climate change; and countering the inevitable increase in costs of extraction of fossil fuels. Below we discuss multiple elements of our future transition to the net-zero emissions (NZE) world. This…

This is an overview of our situation with climate change in 2021. It covers what is happening, why it is happening, where we are now, and where it all currently going. What is happening? Earth is changing because of global warming, which is a global average temperature increase over preindustrial times (1850–1900). …

Updated: December 2022 In this note, our goal is to zoom out and analyze the key long-term trends shaping our future. We first talk about the triangle: Intelligence — Technology — Energy, which we believe has been powering humanity's history and identify 5 trends shaping our near-term future: Energy and…