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WHY FOLLOWING TRENDS IS HURTING HUMANITY?

In the initial stages of our civilization, humans primarily indulged in agriculture. But then people branched out to other activities like astrology, science, warfares, etc. Diversifying knowledge helped humanity and facilitated all the advancement you see now. It demanded a lot of out-of-the-box thinkers and risk seekers to explore new opportunities. But in my opinion, this is slowly eroding as the social and monetary incentives of following what is trending have increased. This may come back at us, and we already see some of the effects. This article will discuss how following trending things is plateauing humans’ ingenuity. The NETFLIX problem Netflix is a pioneer in streaming services and is believed to be the market maker for streaming movies and shows with a subscription fee. It is well regarded worldwide and enjoyed unprecedented growth during COVID-19. But in the recent reports for the first quarter of 2022, Netflix lost around 200,000 subscribers and nearly 700,000 Russians as...
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THE ECONOMICS OF WAR AND WHY WAR DOESN’T MAKE SENSE FINANCIALLY

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WHY WE SHOULD KEEP GOING TO SPACE

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On 25th December 2021, NASA launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study exoplanets and our outer solar systems. This program took 35 years and $10 billion to develop, and it will be operational for ten years. This thing is going to unfold itself into that hexagonal thing about 1.5 million kilometres away, isn’t it crazy! Also, in September 2021, SpaceX launched the Inspiration4, where four non-astronauts went to space for two days. During this time, there was a record of the maximum number of people in space simultaneously, that is 16. Yes, 7.5 Billion on the Earth and 16 people in space. Space flights are long-term projects and capital intensive. These are generally funded by taxpayers money, and lately, we are seeing more inflow of private capital in the industry. But we have so many problems on Earth, is it wise to invest taxpayers money in these projects? How about diverting that capital to eliminate poverty? Let’s try to answer some of these questions. A WAR WITH SPACE Cri...
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  WHY CONSPIRACIES WORK SO WELL? Conspiracies are alternate forms of base reality or we can say stories from other multiverses. They have been part of our lives, even medieval humans devised conspiracy theories against monarchs and the establishment. Our complex and advanced brain is able to come up with narratives that may or may not be part of reality. So as “Conspiracy theorists of conspiracy theorists”, let us try to unravel what goes into a conspiracy and why we love them. WHY HUMANS HAVE A PROCLIVITY FOR CONSPIRACY ? In the book, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, he discussed Homo Sapiens (ancients of present-day humans) have an affinity towards myth . “ You can never convince a monkey to give up his banana in the promise that after he dies and reaches heaven, he will get 3 crore bananas from seemingly different persons , it is only possible with humans. ” But this belief helped us in our survival and establishing dominance, sapiens are at the top of the food chain and rulers of ...
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  THE REAL THREATS OF AI (PART-I) Andrew Ng, a machine learning educator and researcher said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new electricity. Like the dot com stock exchange crash of 2000, there probably will be an AI stock exchange crash in the near future as companies are slapping the “AI” tag to their product lines, we can say companies are “AI” ing their way out of products. Samsung in its 30 minutes CES-2021 keynote, used the term AI, Machine learning and deep learning at least 25 times. Nevertheless, the development of these technologies is growing exponentially, so we need to be abreast of this field and be aware of the threats it possesses. Before the AI revolution, the computers were explicitly told what to do by software programs. Thus computers were limited in their functionality. But AI helped computers to “think” by themselves. Here we feed in real-world data to the system along with target labels. Then we let the model establish a relation between the input d...
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  THE REAL THREATS OF AI ( PART - II) Glad you are with me and I hope that you went through the first part. In the first part, we introduced AI naively and went through some common fears of AI and why they might be far-fetched. So in this part, we will talk about the real threats of AI and its consequences. Let’s dive in. CONSOLIDATION OF AI DEVELOPMENT: Your AI is as good as the data it is trained on. Data collection, refinement, pre-processing and cleaning takes the major portion of AI projects timeline. Consumer-facing AI’s need data from a large pool of the population and needs to be diversified which would make our algorithm generalizable. So who has access to such a large user base? Certainly, the big tech. People’s social and business life depends on these applications which are free to get into. I will reiterate the famous line “ If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product ”. Platforms make it easy for you to get into their applications and due to intense...
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  2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS: A STORY In the early 2000s, Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System sold the “American dream” by lowering interest rates which were never seen before. Everyone can buy a car, a big house thus would drive up consumer consumption and standard of living. Due to a lower barrier of entry, more people started living the American dream, until it came crashing in the midst of 2008. Many things went wrong, and it is hard to comprehend for someone without some esoteric financial concepts. So, let’s try to understand what lead to the global financial crisis, with a story. Welcome to the town of Winesville People of winesville, drink wine (it’s in the name) which gives them the strength to do their work. Yes, just like Popeye and his spinach drink. There is a winesville farm, which has the responsibility to prepare wine for the general public. The wine is made up of some key elements like Mortgagium, Student-Loanciu...
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