fun fact about myself is that I grew up playing online poker. my closest friend became a professional heads up player and i became a founder. many years ago, when libratus and later pluribus released, me and 3 friends (2 programmers and a top rated professional poker player) spent a month on this problem. we rented a flat, studied and researched, and we had so much fun! i have many stories about the life of professional poker players. from the age of 17 to 21 i visited a lot of poker houses, which is basically the same concept as a hacker house but instead of coding everyone is playing online poker and learning from each other. in fact there are many things in common! my friend had a poker player accelerator, similar to YC but for poker, where you would be given money and taught for 3 months and later on you’d share profits. another fun fact is they had gpus and bought data, so they could study how to play gto (game theory optimal). my friends would pay 50k for datasets of other professional poker players. the world hasn’t changed that much if you are doing state of the art! another anecdote i remember is that the best player amongst my friends had a random digital dice in his laptop giving a new number every hand he played. he used it to slightly modify his behavior towards more passiveness or aggressiveness, because he acknowledged that even if he was one of the best players in the world, the best players (human or ai) could detect his patterns if he didn’t introduce external non biased inputs in his decision making! i can tell you that being a founder is very very similar to becoming a top rated poker player! hard work, iq and risk taking anyway, have fun young players! may the odds be with you

When jobs get automated through technology, the displacement causes upheaval, but eventually most of the affected people move to other areas of employment. If you automate people, then there is no other work. In the future, new jobs we can't yet imagine will be created, but AI will be able to do those jobs better than any human can retrain. There is a fundamental difference with this change that we are not talking about enough; we are attempting to replace intelligence. That encapsulates logic, planning, learning, reasoning, the whole human gambit. We are attempting to create something which is on par with humans at a cognitive level and eventually surpasses it. This isn't so much a new technology but an attempt to create our general ability as humans. From a job's perspective, AI won't just replace certain jobs; it will replace humans themselves. History is littered with examples of inflection points where we fall into these new paradigm shifts rather than plan towards them, which usually ends up causing extreme hardship for the majority. We can't afford to wait until time horizons narrow enough that actions are reactive, but instead, we need to be proactive now.

Norm Macdonald on Gambling @normmacdonald