Juan Orbea

For the modern world, questions about the nature of humanity would be viewed on par with the struggle among the Lilliputians about the correct way to cut open an egg. Hobbes, the first truly modern philosopher, boasted of how he deserted and ran away from fighting in a religious war; a cowardly life had become preferable to a heroic but meaningless... See more

Before considering further the implications of the Singularity, let’s examine the wide range of technologies that are subject to the law of accelerating returns. Given that the electrons have less distance to travel, the circuits also run twice as fast, providing an overall quadrupling of computational power. After sixty years of devoted service,... See more

This happens slowly because while public markets trade daily and prices then adjust instantly, private markets don’t get reset until follow-on financing rounds happen which can take 6–24 months.

So far, I’ve been talking about the hardware of computing. The requisite hardware capacity is a necessary but not sufficient condition. A key advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that machines can easily share their knowledge. We exposed it to thousands of hours of recorded speech, corrected its errors, and patiently improved its performance.... See more

Domesticated type – has the ability to coordinate much larger groups of people than the wild type, and he does this by taking consciousness and culture and making a move that simplifies both of them, while maintaining a substantial portion of their capacity to generate synergistic capabilities, and enabling social systems to scale. We move from... See more

Presumably, parents in the past cared as much about their kids' safety as parents today do. But they took far fewer precautions than parents today, and exerted far fewer controls over kids' behavior. Perhaps they thought it was important that children learn to take risks in order to develop courage. Or perhaps they thought that getting into scrapes... See more

Founders Fund recently hosted a panel on defense: a conversation at the intersection of the U.S. government and the technology industry, or D.C. vs. Silicon Valley. Moderated by Dan Primack, and featuring Chris Lynch, Heather Podesta, and Trae Stephens.