Aza Raskin discusses discoveries in animal vocalizations and naming behavior that inspired the founding of the Earth Species Project.
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2030
Raskin: ESP will have capability to contact non-human cultures within six years
“In the next six years we will make contact or have the technical capability of making contact with these thirty four million year old cultures.”
Insight
Raskin: Winning the social media race against China yielded societal polarization
“You don't want to let your rivals define the nature of the race you're in. Like, we beat China to social media, which means we beat China to sort of a misinformed, polarized society with mental health issues. We, instead, what we want to do is figure out how d…”
Insight
Raskin: AI Embedding Spaces Share a Universal Geometric Shape Across Languages
“The core insight is that you could build a shape that represents English, a shape that represents German, and just rotate one shape on top of the other to do translation. And even though there are words in one that don't exist in the other, the point which is …”
Assertion Contradicted
Raskin: Democrats overestimate Republican anti-Muslim sentiment by 70 points
“If you ask Democrats what percentage of Republicans think all Muslims are bad, Democrats will estimate it's like 85%, but if you actually ask Republicans, it's less than 15%,”
Insight
Raskin: US should allocate 1% of AI spending to governance
“If we as a US are gonna spend a trillion dollars in the next couple years on AI capabilities, shouldn't we at least be spending one percent of that on upgrading governance itself? Like, the US was founded on the idea that a group of people could come together,…”
Assertion Contradicted
Raskin: Whales have transmitted vocal culture for 34 million years
“It turns out whales have been passing down culture for like Thirty-four million years, vocally. Human beings have been doing it for what, like a 100,300 thousand? So this is a culture that has lasted longer, 85 times longer than our entire species.”