In the recent craze about the discovery of a new superconductor, there’s a bunch of tweets that stood out around that story (yeah, I refuse to call them x’s for now). Those were tweets about some site called Manifold Markets.
At first I thought it was some kind of crypto bullshit so didn’t pay much attention to it. I’m actually interested in crypto, but I’m really wary of anything that smells like it, because of all the shady stuff that orbits around it.
Turns out Manifold Markets has nothing to do with that. This site is more like some sort of game. You get fake money (called Mana), and are supposed to bet it by answering all kinds of questions suggested by other users.
There is no way to redeem or get any goods for that money, so ultimately it’s not about the money at all. The idea is that by playing the game users will try to optimize their answers to make as much mana as possible. You get to test your prediction skills against reality itself.
Every question in the app behaves like a market, and in the end the answers are supposed to converge to the actual chances of that question answer being «yes» or «no». By betting more mana you increase your risk, and by doing so the market updates to reflect your decision. By observing how the markets evolve you can either increase your stakes or get out of it and search another question in which to bet.
I’ve become absolutely addicted to the site. It’s extremely rewarding to get right the answer of a question that many people got wrong, and also humbling to realize that my vision in many questions was not as precise as I thought. Observing the convergence of answers and how they update when new information appears is a great way to get informed and have a glimpse into potential futures.
According some random definition found on Google, a Black Swan event is: an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.
Classic examples of Black Swan events are inventions or discoveries like computers and the Internet, Steam machines, electricity or fire. Each of these changed the course of history forever, and no one could have ever predicted them.
Black Swan events are a beautiful paradox: you can’t reasonably expect them, but they need to be accounted for if one wants to make precise predictions about the future. You can’t really know what will be the one thing that changes everything, but you’ll be a fool to think that nothing will change everything at some point.
I think this is an interesting thought because Black Swan events are often overlooked by most people. Whenever we try to predict how things will be in the future, people have a tendency to focus in the current state of things and ignore any kind of technological development that could potentially happen in the future. To some people, any kind of tech improvement is a Black Swan event: that’s the reason why people fail to see the innovation in developments like the smartphone (when they came out) or electric vehicles.
It’s really hard to envision a world where everybody drives an electric vehicle if you do so in the current context. There’s no way to charge an electric vehicle nowadays in 5 minutes, just like we do with petrol cars, and we don’t have the necessary infrastructure to feed our whole current vehicle pool only from our current electric grid, let alone energy sources. But it’s foolish to think that this is how we’re supposed to do such a transition.
To envision the future we need to acknowledge how society, habits, and technology are going to reshape in the following years. We’re going to change how we get energy, distribute it and spend it. Energy generation and storage, at the current rate (we don’t even need a Black Swan event here) is going to get progressively cheaper in the following years. Electric vehicles, an obscene luxury only with lots of inconvenients a few years ago, are nowadays already commonly seen in the streets, and are only subjectively more expensive than a combustion model with similar characteristics. This will only get better in the following years.
A Black Swan event, like the potential discovery of a room temperature superconductor material, could accelerate all of it exponentially. If the current studies on superconductor materials are fruitful, we could see a similar or bigger reshape of our reality than the one caused by the Internet or television. We could see electric vehicles that charge almost instantly or electric infrastructure that generates no heat or resistance at all. For now this is just speculation, of course, but we could
Another, more realistic, example of a Black Swan event is the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). They’ve actually been around for a few years already. I had the chance to experiment with the precursor of ChatGPT a few years ago, and now use LLMs everyday for all sorts of daily tasks.
Before, if you wanted to communicate with a computer, first you needed certain knowledge about computer science. You needed to know the extremely specific way of telling the computer what you wanted. Otherwise, you needed someone who could develop an interface that was easier to understand, and then you still needed to learn how to use such an interface.
Now, with Natural Language Processing, you can just tell what you need and expect your computer to just understand it and act accordingly. The ability of not only understanding commands, but also context, is going to (and already is) change dramatically the way we interact with computers during the next decade.
We’re going to witness a race to integrate this technology into all kinds of applications. It really is so good, that any existing application could see potential benefits in implementing it. Even if it means the market gets saturated for some time, as we’re also seeing lately.
It’s for sure an exciting time to be alive. The current context is the prefect breeding ground for all sorts of developments that could reshape our life in the following years.
Daniel Barca 