If you are reading these words, it means at least three years have slipped by since our lives last intertwined.

Three years of silence, three years in which I withdrew from public life, shrouded in a veil of mystery I did not have the strength to dispel.

Until today…

(Keep reading the article in my Journal of Adventures)

I migrated everything to Substack. I will keep the old medium articles here for you to enjoy :)

Author’s note: the Coronavirus is causing suffering to all of us. I decided to try and give people some hope. This article was a titanic effort, the result of 30 hours non-stop work. I hope it can give you a positive perspective on the future.

I come from Italy, a country devastated by Coronavirus¹. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Corpses are piled up, filling up churches. People cry and mourn their family at a distance, unable to give them a proper burial.

It’s like a war zone.

Other countries are following the same path. Thousands of businesses around the world are struggling, many have already closed. Markets have crashed to unprecedented levels, and I fear the worst is yet to come.

Make no mistake, the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 is a tragedy, and it will likely get worse, before it gets better.

And yet, I believe this is a blessing in disguise.

I write this now, while I still have mental clarity and I am not overcome by grief. I have close friends who tested positive for coronavirus. One of them is now fighting for her life.

I know people who died.

My parents, who are over 65, have been in quarantine for weeks in Northern Italy, at the epicenter of the pandemic. I have video calls with them every day, checking their temperature and symptoms, trying to stay positive.

If the worse were to happen to them, I wouldn’t even be able to attend their funeral, as I live thousands of kilometers away, and both our countries are in lockdown.

It would scar me, my dear brother, and sister for life.

There are thousands of people who are in that situation right now. If you are one of them, and you reading this right now, I am sorry. My heart and thoughts go to you.

So why do I entertain such an insane thought? How could all this pain and misery this be a blessing?

I will attempt to persuade you of this:

The arrival of Coronavirus could be the greatest savior of human lives ever, and a pivotal point in the history of mankind.

This is not a way to find a silver lining amidst tragedy, but a calm and reasoned argument about the future of our species.

In this article, we will look at:

1. How, for the first time in history, everyone on Earth came together to solve one problem;
2. How bad can Coronavirus get?
3. The World will learn how to deal with a Global Pandemic;
4. What can we learn from other countries? Lessons from South Korea and China;
5. How countries are collaborating on solving one issue, but also experimenting different solutions;
6. How the US may join the rest of the World in trying to solve Global Problems;
7. How mainstream politicians from all sides are demanding Universal Basic Income;
8. How 77,000 people may be saved in China due to sharp reduction in air pollution;
9. How we may look at Nature with fresh, new eyes, and urge to protect it;
10. A Triumph of Spirit: Art During Coronavirus;
11. How we will see the best of humanity manifest & what can you do.

1. Thanks to Coronavirus, for the first time in history, everyone on Earth came together to solve one problem

Just 100 years ago, whatever problem the UK was facing hardly affected its neighbors, let alone Argentina, the US, or an island in the pacific.

Today, a new virus emerges in China. Two months later, it wrecks havoc across the world, crashing markets, bringing entire countries to a halt (literally), killing thousands of people.

Globalization, particularly the system of global trade and commercial flights, made the entire world interconnected. The troubles of one country become the troubles of all.

In 1986, when the Chernobyl disaster struck, the world took notice. The situation was critical. The radiation soon reached many countries in Europe.

I remember that time. In Italy, where I lived, many families took in Ukrainian kids into their homes, allowing them to breath less contaminated air for a few months. My family hosted a boy, Slava. He loved riding the bike. My best friend’s family sheltered another boy, Dima. We biked, kicked a ball and played video games every day, blissfully unaware of the real danger they had gone through.

While very serious, the Chernobyl accident was inconsequential at the global scale. Yes, it shook the world and gave us a wake up call about the dangers of nuclear power, but it was never an existential threat for the species.

We live in a global system.

We face global problems.

And we’re not ready for them.

Unlike Chernobyl, we have been facing global catastrophic risks for decades, which put the very survival of the human race at risk, but we have been unable to take coordinated action to solve them.

Why?

We are not good at understanding second-order thinking.

If experts say “We shouldn’t pollute rivers, it makes the water toxic”, people understand it. We took action against pollution of rivers, we made laws, and enforced them, in most countries at least.

But if experts say “We shouldn’t burn fossil fuels. The CO₂ and methane released warm the atmosphere and the oceans. This will cause, in the decades to come, extreme weather events, draughts, and wildfires. Oceans will becomes acidic, the corals will die, and entire ecosystems may collapse, bringing many species to extinction”, we get a 50-year public debacle, with lobbyists from the largest polluters confusing the public through talking heads repeating and spreading misinformation, even bribing scientists to release bogus research to further the confusion, while knowing the science behind it decades ahead.

The two statements, the polluting of rivers and the release of greenhouse gases, are functionally equivalent. But one uses first order logic (it affects me, personally, immediately, and locally), the other uses second order logic (something I do will impact someone else, somewhere else, years from now, and then eventually me).

The first is easy for us to understand. The second is not.

In science fiction circles, we fantasized about what it would take for the world to stop bickering about menial things and focus on the real problems we face. The running joke is that the knowledge of an imminent asteroid impact would do the job, or perhaps the threat of aliens coming to exterminate us and take over the planet.

As it turns out, reality is much closer to home.

Coronavirus is changing everything.

A pandemic is a global threat, and it’s easy to understand.

It’s first-order logic.

It does not require second-order thinking. You don’t have to “trust models” or be scientifically literate. You go out, someone sneezes on you. You go home for dinner. Three weeks later your parents die in an overcrowded hospital.

That’s how disarmingly simple and cruel it is.

2. How bad can Coronavirus get?

Before I explain the reasons why I believe this pandemic will ultimately save us, I believe it’s important to first look at how serious the situation is.

The following section may be heavy on data and graphs for some. Please bear with me. It is essential to understand how dire the situation can become, because I believe we will build the strength to overcome future obstacles, not despite of the struggle we are facing, but because of it.

The COVID-19 pandemic can get really bad. Bad enough for the world to stop everything, and think real hard about its future.

It’s impossible to make predictions, so I will not attempt. But we can look at scenarios.

As of March 21, 2020, there are 277,324 Coronavirus cases, with 11,554 deaths.

While my hope is that we will contain the spread and keep deaths to a minimum, they are likely to increase.

If no proper action is taken, the number of deaths in the UK alone can reach a million, and over 10 million in the US.

The current crude fatality rate is 4.1%, with ranges from 0.2% to 15% depending on age and other health problems. Older people die disproportionately more than young kids.

According to some researchers, in worst-case scenarios, as much as 60 to 80% of world’s population may be infected with Coronavirus in the coming months and years.

If this were to happen, at 7.8 billion people in the world today, Coronavirus could kill 200–400 million people globally. This is a worst-case scenario. But it’s not impossible.

Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, described over a decade ago what the next pandemic would look like.

“A billion people would get sick […] As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”

I met Larry a few years back, and talked about his work and life’s mission.

He’s a great man.

After helping the world eradicate one of the deadliest pandemics of all time, which killed over 500 million people in the last 100 years, he was CEO of Skoll Global Threats Fund, aimed at addressing climate change, pandemics, water security, and nuclear proliferation. He is now serving as the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics.

This was his TED wish back in in 2006, 14 years ago:

“I wish that you would help build a global system to detect each new disease or disaster as quickly as it emerges or occurs.”

We did not listen. He later tried a different approach, serving senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion in 2011, which was a modest success and didn’t raise enough public awareness, but is now the most watched film in the world.

Larry knows how to deal with pandemics, possible more than anyone else on the planet. And what he’s been telling us for decades is this: Pandemics must be taken seriously, now. They can kill hundreds of millions of people, and cost us trillions of dollars.

For comparison, 75 million people died during the second world war between 1939 and 1945, about 3% of the population then.

Needless to say, I would like to avoid this scenario.

So what makes me hopeful about the future? How can this terrible pandemic be a blessing?

For the first time ever, the world stopped bickering about nonsense, and focused a single, global problem

I have been obsessed with tail risks and global catastrophic threats for over a decade.

No matter how much we tried, how many scientific articles we wrote, how many documentaries we filmed, how many personal actions and risks we took, or how many global coordinated events we organized, it seemed impossible to get everyone to care about something.

The reason is simple. Words, evidence, and reason alone can’t mobilize the entire world to fight for one cause. It is only when everyone is immediately affected by it, only when our business, our lives, our families are at personal risk that people start to care.

Today, the entire world is working on a solution to COVID-19. Researchers are frantically looking for a vaccine. Governments suddenly woke up and realized that their health system is wholly unprepared to dealing with such an event. Concerts and conferences are cancelled worldwide. Businesses are closed. Entire countries are in lockdown.

It’s mayhem.

After various stages or denial, ignorance, or criminal idiocy, it has now become painfully obvious to politicians and people around the world that they can’t postpone action for their self-interest, or millions will die, including their own families.

Coronavirus is a blessing in disguise.

This pandemic, which may very well kill millions of people (let’s hope not), is not the most dangerous calamity that may befallen us.

COVID-19 is more contagious than the flu, and 20–50 times more deadly. it’s a real problem. But consider the following graph:

Coronavirus, which may kill millions, is on the bottom left corner of this graph. Now, what happens if we come across a virus that has:

• The Basic Reproduction Ratio (R0) of Measles;
• The case fatality rate of Ebola;
• A long incubation period, during which the host is largely asymptomatic, but infectious;

That virus could kill billions of people, and threaten the very survival of the human species.

That virus would be an Extinction-Level Pandemic.

We must be ready for that.

3. Thanks to Coronavirus, the World will learn how to deal with a Global Pandemic

The virus is spreading exponentially throughout the world, but not at the same rate everywhere.

Some countries are doing better than others at containing it. Much better.

Let’s consider South Korea and Italy, two of the countries most affected by coronavirus.

Note that the y-axis in these two graphs have very different scales and can be misleading. If we superimpose them, we get a much clearer picture.

How did South Korea manage to curb the spread of the virus so quickly and effectively?

4. What can we learn from other countries?

Lessons from South Korea

Here are some of the things South Korea did right:

1. Proper Funding for a Specialized Task Force
   The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immediately raised the virus alert level and set up a central task force.
2. Transparent, Clear, and Updated Information to the Public
   The KCDC kept detailed and precise records of infected patients. They updated the public about all the places they visited through daily briefings and social media posts.
3. Professional Staff Trained for Pandemics
   Health care workers and medical professionals in the KCDC received extensive training. The staff haven’t missed a single day of their regular briefing since the outbreak, showing the world an admirable level of professionalism and sense of duty.
4. Widespread, Effective and Fast, Free Testing
   Medical staff across the country did their best and fighting against the virus, treating patients in designated hospitals with negative pressure rooms and tested thousands of people in drive through testing centers. They even set up medical booths across the country, and were able to test thousands of people every day, with surgical precision, close to zero contamination, and speeds and efficiency that seem unbelievable in Western countries.
5. Extensive Public Participation and Personal Responsibility
   The bold and clear move on the government side was matched by the incredible response of the South Korean people. The entire nation came together to combat COVID-19.

People in South Korea donated money and masks to those in need and for relief efforts in Daegu, the special care zone. A college student developed a coronavirus map showing latest updates and movements of affected people. Volunteers flocked in to help package masks. Many landlords participated in the “Nice Landlord Movement”, voluntarily freezing or cutting down monthly rents to ease the financial burden on people in distress. Similarly, a voluntary “social distancing” campaign started to take place, people avoided mass gatherings, streets were empty, and employers encouraged people to work from home.

South Korea managed to contain the spread of Coronavirus without an Italy-style total lockdown. But it’s not the only way. Other countries took very different approaches.

Lessons from China

China took a different approach, relying less and voluntary participation, flexing its muscle with mandatory testing, isolation, quarantine, and strict enforcement of the rules.

The following graph shows the number of new Coronavirus cases in some of the most affected countries.

Out of all the countries in the world, a few stand out for their remarkable response, which transformed a dangerous exponential growth curve into a linear growth trajectory: South Korea, China, and Singapore.

This becomes even more obvious when we look at the change in total confirmed COVID-19 cases.

The trend is clear. Asian countries seem to know how to deal with pandemics much better than countries in Europe and US.

Why? What do South Korea, China, and Singapore have in common?

In 2002, China, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong had to deal with another coronavirus, SARS-CoV.

In 2015, South Korea had to learn the lesson the hard way, when it was struck by Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

In each case, governments in Asia took the spread of a new virus seriously and acted promptly. They took note, performed studies, set aside funding, created special task forces, trained professionals, and gave them the tools required to prepare for the next pandemic.

People became weaker after being wounded.

Countries, instead, grow stronger.

If a soldier comes back from a war zone with a lost limb, having seen friend blow up, he will not be stronger because of it. He will be physically crippled and emotionally scarred for the rest of his life.

People are fragile.

If a country goes through a painful pandemic, it will now be stronger. Not despite the tragedy, but because of it.

Countries are antifragile.

It is my sincere hope that the COVID-19 outbreak will force countries around the world to take notice, just like Asian countries did before, and prepare for new global catastrophic risk.

The next pandemic, deadlier and more dangerous than Coronavirus, is just around the corner. And we are not ready for it.

But we can be.

5. Thanks to Coronavirus, countries are collaborating on solving one issue, but also experimenting different solutions

As we have have seen, countries are using different approaches when dealing with this pandemic.

This is a good thing. It shows the advantage of having many different countries instead of a single world government.

When dealing with extreme fat tail risks, we can’t take our chances². Having a single policy worldwide in response to an unexpected and unpredictable event is a security threat.

Not all solutions will work everywhere. Countries have different people and cultures, geographical territories vary wildly between nations, as do the customs of their citizens.

Different countries can try different solutions to a problem, learn from it, then adapt whatever works best to their local context.

Having close collaboration and open communication between nations is key.

We currently don’t have a playbook on how to coordinate a global response across 200 nations in a span of a few days, or even weeks or months.

Hopefully, after this pandemic, we will.

6. Thanks to Coronavirus, the US may join the rest of the World in trying to solve Global Problems

The United States plays a major role in world affairs. What happens in the US has ripple effects throughout the planet. When the financial crisis hit the US, the whole world took the hit. US politics has worldwide relevance, whether we like it or not.

As a European who spent years in America, I look at the US with pity and some sadness. I see a giant empire collapsing under its own weight, plagued by political bickering, where ever single issue is stripped of all meaning and reduced to a bipartisan squabble.

A virus does not care if you’re republican, democrat, libertarian, or whatever pin you choose to carry. It affects everyone. It forces you to face reality. Here and now.

Beliefs are one of the hardest things to eradicate, and political beliefs are among the most stubborn and irrational.

The extremization of US politics has plagued the public discourse for decades. Nothing seems to move the needle. Whether it’s climate change, nuclear disarmament, or autonomous killing robots, Americans can’t seem to get a hold of the situation and take proper, coordinated action.

This time may be different.

I believe the impending fear of death may finally awaken Americans to the truth:

We cannot continue to take systematic risks that threaten the survival of our species.

We don’t have the luxury of time anymore.

To make things worse, the current Commander in Chief has taken almost every action within his powers to move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight.

Let me be clear: I do not wish to turn this into a political discussion. I will confine my statements to Trump himself as a person, and what he has done in response to Global Catastrophic Risks.

Climate Change is one of the greatest challenges we collectively face as a species. By denying the science behind climate change and pulling out of the Paris agreement, Trump effectively caused the world to delay action, at a time where we’re already decades behind schedule.

What this means, in practice, is the certainty of suffering of millions of people in the future, which could have been avoided or mitigated. But because this is a problem that requires second-order thinking, it’s impossible to estimate exactly how many innocent people will die because of Trump’s irresponsible decisions. And that’s precisely why he, and many other politicians and business people like him, could hide behind a finger, confusing the public about their criminal actions.

With Coronavirus, this becomes much harder to do. With pandemics, criminal actions against public good become crystal clear to everyone.

Soon after becoming President, Trump fired the entire White House pandemic team. He then downplayed, ridiculed, and exacerbated the spread of the virus, stating “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control […] It’s going to be just fine.”, “We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully[…] it won’t be as bad as some people think it could be”, “It’s going to disappear[…] One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear”, “I’m not concerned at all […] I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.”.

He delayed the necessary actions the US should have taken to prevent the spread of the disease, while countries around the world were screaming in agony, begging others to learn from their mistakes.

No matter how you look at it, no matter what political color you wear, we must collectively recognize a simple fact: Donald Trump is a threat to the human race.

It has nothing to do with politics or with party lines. Any other republican would do better for the country and the world. This man is a dangerous lunatic, whose ignorance and irresponsible actions threaten our very existence. He, and people like him, cannot be allowed to hold public office.

As a result, the US is now on a trajectory very similar Italy, but likely to get worse, due to the delayed response, lack of infrastructure and advanced universal health care.

I have many dear friends living in the US right now. I fear for them.

The death toll may to rise to unprecedented levels. Coronavirus may be the greatest threat to American lives since the second World War, where half a million people died.

This may be enough of a shock, and simple enough for the average American to understand, that they have to set aside politics, ideology, and come together to solve a common problem.

I just hope it won’t take as many deaths for them to finally understand this.

7. Thanks to Coronavirus, mainstream politicians from all sides are demanding Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income, or direct cash transfer to people with no strings attached, is an old idea, dating back Thomas More in the 16th century, all the way through Martin Luther King Jr. and Milton Friedman.

It fell out of fashion for a long time, and found a renaissance in the past few years. It’s something I wrote and talked about many times, for almost a decade now.

More recently, it rose to prominence with Presidential candidate Andrew Yang, but it remained a fringe idea, with little to no interest outside its bubble of ardent supporters.

Until today.

Thanks to Coronavirus, mainstream politicians from all sides of the political spectrum are demanding Universal basic Income as a way to deal with the imminent crisis. From hardcore Republican and former Presidential Rival of Obama Mitt Romney, to social-democratic senator Bernie Sanders, Universal Basic Income is receiving mainstream attention and support for the first time in decades.

Jonathan Martin on Twitter

NEW from @MittRomney: "Every American adult should immediately receive $1,000 to help ensure families and workers can meet their short-term obligations and increase spending in the economy.

The Hill on Twitter

BREAKING: Sanders proposes giving $2,000 per month to every household amid coronavirus outbreak https://t.co/vDXBa8xX3O

In the end, it wasn’t the threat of automation and algorithms stealing human jobs in the future, but the immediate threat we are experiencing now with Coronavirus that may unlock the UBI door for the world.

8. Thanks to Coronavirus, 77,000 people may be saved in China due to sharp reduction in air pollution

This may come a surprise to many of us. A researcher from Stanford estimated that the reduction in air pollution due to traffic restrictions in China may end up saving 77,000 lives.

In other words:

In China, Coronavirus may save 20 times more lives than it took

Similar benefits may befallen other countries. Here’s a picture of Italy’s pollution levels from January to March.

Again, this is second-oder logic. It is not that Coronavirus is saving lives directly, but rather the reduction of air pollution caused by the lockdown of cities, brought by the spread of the pandemic in the region.

9. Thanks to Coronavirus, we may look at Nature with fresh, new eyes, and urge to protect it

It not just cities in China that experienced unprecedented levels of fresh air in modern times. Air quality in Southern California right now is unbelievable, as we if’d been transported back a hundred years by a time machine.

Peter Flax on Twitter

I know we're all contemplating the pandemic, but check this out. Air quality in SoCal right now isn't good. It's incredible. Like numbers from another era. It's not just the rain. Having less traffic is making our city more livable. Think about it.

In Venezia, Italy, the water flowing through the canals is clear for the first time in generations. In 30+ years, I’ve never seen anything like it. The fish are visible through the clear water, swans have returned.

Kaveri 🇮🇳 on Twitter

Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic - the water's flowing through the canals of Venice is clear for the first time in forever. The fish are visible, the swans returned.

Unencumbered by boats, Dolphins have returned to the port of Cagliari, in Sardegna.

During this quarantine, I have been spending time in nature.

I am lucky to live outside the city, on the shore, in the middle of a forest. I take walks in the woods, by the beach, and find comfort and a renewed sense of peace.

Many of my friends recount similar experiences. They tell me how this crisis allowed them to reconnect with Nature, realizing just how much they’ve been disconnected from it for so long.

Global lockdowns will allow people to see their cities from a new perspective, maybe for the first time in their life.

Perhaps, this will create a blueprint for true global collaboration, and finally address Climate Change, one the greatest challenges of our time.

It is my hope that this will awaken something in people’s consciousness throughout the world. A primal experience of connectedness, which cannot be explained or reasoned.

It is said that during a 1994 blackout, confused residents in Los Angeles called 911, some in a state of panic, others in awe. They reported seeing “a strange sky”.

It was later revealed that what they saw was the Milky Way Galaxy, standing above their heads.

They had never seen it before.

10. A Triumph of Spirit: Art During Coronavirus

For us Italians, the love of art, and music goes deep.

Locked in their apartments for weeks, unable to exit, Italians have inspired people around the world, singing and dancing from their balconies, from North to South, a true triumph of spirit.

(self isolating) romepix on Twitter

This is why so many people through many centuries fall in love with Italy A video montage of Italians all over Italia from north to south to central to the islands - all signing together during the Italy Lockdown is a kind of triumph of spirit, a love in the time of coronavirus https://t.co/XqoLsGMoIV

Jenna Vehviläinen on Twitter

A whole Roman neighborhood singing a popular Italian song "Volare" from their balconies and waving at each other. An amazing flash mob to lift the spirit in these crazy times ❤️ #Italy #coronavirus #forzaitalia #roma #flashmob #love https://t.co/xjeZTeO0GO

This display of pure joy, love for art, and life, inspired people across the world. From Lebanon:

ᴊᴀʏthoven on Twitter

People here in the Dahye singing and playing music on their balconies just like they did in China and Italy 😍 https://t.co/vxKfKrI0CT

To Spain:

And Germany:

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
― Pablo Picasso

11. Thanks to Coronavirus, we will see the best of humanity manifest

It is often said that in times of crisis, the real character of a person comes out.

This is a time of extreme crisis. It is the moment where the best (and the worst) of humanity emerges.

What you can do: Join a Coronavirus Open Source Project

The maker movement did not disappoint. Two big challenges we face worldwide are the lack of respirators and face masks.

Within a few days, thousands of people came together, pulling all their resources, skills, and time, to try and solve these pressing issues.

There are now hundreds of Open Source projects, doing amazing things. If you have skill and time, you should join one of them:

• Awesome Coronavirus: a repository of hundreds of useful projects and resources for COVID-19. Developers around the world are building applications for the public to get up-to-date and accurate information as quickly as possible, including API, Statistics and Datasets, Models, Maps, Applications and Bots.
• Open Source Ventilator: develop a Field Emergency Ventilator (FEV) system to be used in an emergency situation, where a large number of basic ventilator systems are required.
• Hack The Crisis: Slack channels with 1,400 volunteers
• NanoHack: a 3D-printable N95 mask
• Fu: PDF pattern for our Fu face mask
• #millionmaskchallenge on Twitter
• …and dozens more.

Solidarity Knows No Borders

Amidst the pandemic, while the Italian health system was collapsing, China sent hundreds of thousands of medical masks to Italy and put on the crates a poem by the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca:

“Siamo onde delle stesso mare,
foglie dello stesso albero,
fiori delle stesso giardino.”
– Seneca

“We are waves of the same sea,
leaves of the same tree,
flowers of the same garden”.

A few days later, China’s national anthem was played by Italians from their balconies in Rome on Saturday expressing gratitude for China’s assistance in battling against COVID-19.

Global Times on Twitter

We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden. China's national anthem was played by Italians from their balconies in Rome on Saturday expressing gratitude for China's assistance in battling against #COVID19. https://t.co/EUNCdR6bPu

When Japan donated supplies to China, they put on the boxes a 1,000 year old Buddhist poem:

“青山一道同云雨，明月何曾是两乡。

Though separated by a mountain,
we share the same clouds and rain;
a bright moon belongs not to a single town.”

Shine on.

Notes

¹ The proper nomenclature is Coronavirus Disease 2019, or COVID-19 for short, commonly referred by people as “Coronavirus”, even though it technically refers to a group of related viruses belonging to the Coronaviridae family, which include SARS, MERS, and COVID.

² Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens — Coronavirus: A note, New England Complex Systems Institute (January 26, 2020).

My name is Federico Pistono. I am an author, angel investor, and researcher.

I try to fix problems.

Sometimes I post on Facebook.
I think out loud on Twitter.
I make educational videos on YouTube.

More on my website.

Throwback Monday: I originally wrote this article in January 28, 2013 for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, warning people of the danger of global surveillance, fake news, the loss of privacy and the reach of giant tech companies collecting our private data and manipulating our thoughts. How did my prediction go? I’ll let you be the judge.

Imagine a world where a network of 147 ‘super-connected’ companies control forty percent or more of the global financial network. Imagine a world where as much as 80% of the countries systematically censor and restrict communications and access to information.

A world where the most powerful government of those ‘free’ 20% can — under the direct influence and lobbying of the entertainment industry — raid the house of German citizen, living in New Zealand, operating a business in Hong Kong, seize and take down a website used by 200 million people and all their personal data, with complete disregard to the privacy of the people and no legal right to do so.

A world where whistleblowers who expose the government’s overwhelming deceit, corruption, illegality, and brutality are put in solitary confinement for 1,000 days — and tortured — without a trial, by that same powerful government. A world where legal boundaries for the power establishments are becoming thinner and thinner, where people can be put in indefinite detention without a trial; and immensely powerful governments can get away with obscene acts of torture, with little to no consequences at all. A world where corporations and governments track our every move without us even knowing.

Such a dystopic future would put Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World to shame. But it is in fact the world we live in today, whether we realize it or not.

We like compelling conspiracy stories — I’m not dignifying them with the word “theory”, which means essentially something true) — the Moon landing hoax, apocalyptic prophecies, the threat of the government ‘taking our guns’, Obama’s birth certificate, and countless other nonsensical stories generate millions of pages and videos on the Internet, they can be found on tabloids and news reports everywhere, and they were even the basis for multi-million dollar movies that swept the Academy Awards.

And while we are busy making wild hypotheses (while calling them theories) about dubious and mostly irrelevant claims, or debating whether the new iPhone is better than the latest Nexus; real conspiracies and threats are infringing our most basic human rights, stepping on our freedom of expression and on our privacy.

The Patriot Act, the Iraq invasion, the financial industry’s multi-billion dollar bailouts, the indefinite military detention without charge, SOPA, PIPA, the widespread censorship of the Internet, the systematic torture in the Peoples republic of China — these are all very real things that exist today, right now.

And things are likely to get even worse. Why? Because what allowed for the creation of such a world — where everything is controllable by central authorities and powers, down to a level of granularity that Orwell’s Big Brother could not even dream of — was the adoption of instant worldwide communication technologies, and these technologies are increasing at an exponential rate.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and thousands of other tech companies are offering their services ‘free of charge’, but not for free. You are the product. Specifically, your information is; and as technology advances, this information will become more and more personal. Given the rate of change in technology, it’s very likely that in 15 years we will have ubiquitous computing, smart objects and sensors connected to the Internet that collect and report everything they see and hear, maybe even neural implants that access some of our thoughts.

In a few years, we could be facing a future where everything will be recorded, stored, and sold as a commodity. Our daily lives, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the people we meet, where we go, our experiences, and even our thoughts and dreams.

This is not a conspiracy (theory), this is already happening to some extent; and — if left by itself — it can go very, very wrong.

Going with inertia — keeping business as usual — will not do us any good. In fact, I think things can go very bad, if we don’t act and decide to take control over our lives and make sure that we keep the freedoms that our ancestors fought so vehemently and passionately for in the past. I believe it’s our moral responsibility — towards them, towards our children, and towards us.

Most people think that the world is too big, too immense for any individual to have an impact, because anything we do is merely a drop in the ocean. But what is an ocean, if not a multitude of drops?

Many of you have sent me Joe Rogan’s podcast with US presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who runs on a platform focused heavily on Universal Basic Income, which he calls the Freedom Dividend (for marketing purposes, it tested better among voters), as a way to address the problem of structural unemployment brought by automation and technology.

He’s been under my radar for some time, and during this two-hour conversation with Joe I was able to form a much clearer picture of his plan, and, mostly importantly, how he thinks.

Note to new readers: I regularly receive requests to comment on this topic, having worked on it for almost a decade. I wrote a best-selling book on automation and its potential impact on the workforce in 2011–at a time when it was considered economic heresy–and my TEDxTalk on Basic Income is one of the most watched videos in the world on this topic.

Yang is knowledgeable, rational, and pragmatic. He’s done his research, quoting accurate numbers that are meaningful for the conversation. He reaches exactly the same conclusions as me, some of them seemed to come out of my book and keynotes almost verbatim.

Specifically, here are the three main points I think he gets right:

1. Automation will hit hard and very quickly (less than 10 years) the most popular jobs in is the US

Truck drivers (and drivers in general), cashiers and people working in retail are the low-hanging fruit of the automated economy. They are also the most numerous jobs in the US economy, representing millions of people—the first being mostly middle aged white man, and latter middle-age women. They usually only have a high school diploma, and the idea you can somehow re-skill them is impractical and unrealistic.

The US government has a terrible track record when it comes to re-training and re-skilling displaced workers, and even if it magically became good at it (how?), it’s unlikely that 3 million middle age men and women with a high-school diploma will somehow learn to code or become genetic engineers and compete in the open market in the next 5–7 years.

Americans already suffer from all-time-high levels of depression, suicide, and the displacement of millions of people isn’t going to make it any better, but rather it might exacerbate a worrying trend where people become increasingly irrelevant and can’t find meaning in their life.

2. There’s a bigger, underlying problem to address

Yang’s major point is the Freedom Dividend, representing $1,000/month per person. He wants to make it an opt-in system (smart), and finance it through a combination of 10% VAT, savings derived from an expected decrease in health care need, incarceration, homelessness services as a result of the handout, and a projected stimulus that this influx of capital in the hands of regular people would create in local economies. I have not researched the economic feasibility of his proposal, so I can’t comment on that for now.

Be that as it may, he recognizes that $1,000 per month per person will not solve any of the aforementioned problems, but it might take the edge off for millions of Americans who feel constant anxiety about paying the bills or being laid off, and it can only work if a larger set of policies are being implemented.

He talks about moving beyond GDP as the major metric of success for the country, focusing more on other measures such as Health-adjusted life expectancy, Civic Engagement, Median Income and Standard of Living, although he’s a bit fuzzy about the details here and it seems the least fleshed out of his policies–clearly needs more work. Some of the measurements he lists aren’t easily quantifiable, and people need a single, easy number to refer to, which can be broken down if needed.

My advice: come up with a single measurement, such as “Nation’s health”, which represents a combination of all those measurements, and create a page where you explain how the formula is derived, along with detailed references and data sources for each measurement.

Right now, it feels more like a feel-good intention, rather than a real policy implementation.

I won’t elaborate on his entire platform, if you’re interested you can check his policy recommendations here: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/

3. He understands the how the electoral college works, and he’s pragmatic about his chances of being elected

Yang isn’t stupid. He’s an entrepreneur, and as such he takes seemingly intractable problems and breaks them down into their constituent parts, addressing them instead.

For starters, he knows that running as third party in the US is equivalent to admitting defeat before starting. As such, he’s running with the only option available to him: the Democratic Party.

Next, he doesn’t really need to win the vote of millions of Americans right now, it begins with a few key voters in the swing states. I think he comes up with the figure of 70,000 people in Ohio (going by memory here, can’t find the reference anymore), which seems a lot more doable than the whole pie. I’m not an expert in US political strategy, so I can’t comment on the specifics, but the general reasoning sounds right.

In short, Andrew Yang is knowledgeable, reasonable, well spoken, and seems to have the public interest at heart.

Therefore, he will never be elected.

Why Andrew Yang will never be elected

For all the talk about racial inclusion and equality, the Democratic Party is comprised of some of the most racist and sexist people in America.

First problem: Andrew is a man, which by itself seems to be a capital offense nowadays. That fact alone already makes it extremely unlikely that he will be selected as the presidential nominee.

Next, although he is from a minority (whatever that means), he’s from the wrong kind of minority. If it were Andrea Juarez running, she would be hailed as a brave and tenacious defender of workers and regular people, she would receive dozens of millions of dollars in funding, and a big push to become the presidential nominee. Instead, he is Andrew Yang, son of an Asian immigrant with a Ph.D. in physics who worked in the research labs of IBM and General Electric. That puts him way behind the list of priorities in the virtue signaling wishes of the Democratic Party, which seems to be increasingly more interested in perception and image rather than substance and competence. To them, Andrew is as white as a European man.

Third, he’s running on the wrong platform for the Democratic Party’s virtue signaling plan. Although what he says is perfectly sensible and, most importantly, addresses the major issues in America today, it doesn’t go well with the plans of the party. They have spoken, loud and clear: they want to play identity politics and class warfare. They want a candidate who will loudly denounce the greed and injustice of rich people and large corporations, without providing any sensible plan to address the underlying issues or solve any of the structural problems. Rather, they want to increase animosity among races, sexes, and classes, in order to fuel more extremism and play in the hands of Trump, therefore losing the election again, while feeling perfectly righteous.

The Democratic Party is not interested in solving problems. They want to exacerbate class warfare and identity politics, two of the deadliest and most disastrous things humanity has ever created.

The Democratic Party is too stupid to let a candidate run who can actually win. They would rather have someone who looks of a certain race and sex and sounds like a social justice warrior, because they would rather look righteous than be effective. They’re not interested in results, they are interested in meaningless virtue signaling. They’re not interested in winning, they want to feel like they’re doing the “just” and moral thing, whatever that means.

I’m sorry, Andrew. You will never be President. You have the wrong sex, you are of the wrong minority, you want to be effective rather than rage war against the windmills in a quixotic quest for justice, you’re too competent, and you actually have the people’s best interest in mind–and all the people, that it, not just the ones who agree with you! How dare you?

They will push you out, in any way they can.

Hi, my name is Federico Pistono. I am an entrepreneur, angel investor, author, and researcher.

I try to fix problems.

I sometimes consult for large companies on innovation and exponential tech, and I’m available for keynote speeches.

Sometimes I post on Facebook.
I think out loud on Twitter.
I make educational videos and ramble on YouTube.

More on my website.

Brooke Burgess is a master story teller. He knows the craft, and plays with your emotional and intellectual strings like a virtuoso violinist, violently and vigorously vibrating the instrument.

He skillfully employs every trick in the book to deliver colorful, intense, and engaging stories.

A single narrative from his repertoire of life’s adventures, recited with charming narration and unbridled enthusiasm, has lasting effects on your mind, even hours after exposure.

Burgess, a 40-something year old Canadian writer, with a few Hollywood-grade works in his past and a book about cats (there’s more to it than it sounds), somehow didn’t quite make it to the big league (yet), and the angst of the struggling artist transparently transpires throughout the podcast.

And yet, the man has more extravagant, genuine stories, ideas, and life’s experience than the big studios industrial machine has produced in the past lustrum.

He stands naked before you, laying out his vulnerabilities, his passionate romantic adventures, his unbridled love for life, along with the darkest moments of existence and his struggle with depression.

You will find yourself laughing out loud on the train and crying on the plane, while bystanders stare inquisitively (or annoyed) at this person wearing noise canceling headphones, looking out the window, immersed in the tiny universe Burgess creates with his weapon of choice: words delivered by a buttery, soothing voice.

Buddha and the Slut is Burgess unfiltered
A picturesque creation of his microworld
A jazz improvisation of mind and spirit
A rhapsodical, boisterous memoir
Contagious and infectious
In the best conceivable way

A rare find, under appreciated.

Links
LibSyn: https://buddhaandtheslut.libsyn.com
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/buddha-and-the-slut/id1239333963
Brook’s website: https://brookeburgess.com

Ad astra,

Most muslims are terrorists. Islam is a religion of hate. Socialist ideology always leads to mass murder. If a white man shoots 20 people, he was just a troubled individual, and certainly he was not part of an ideology that allows for these accidents to happen, and then condones them. There is no systemic discrimination against women, homosexuals, or any minority. The state is a coercive institution that restricts our God-given rights. A truly free market would lead to prosperity for all. Capitalism is the only system that can govern our society without falling into chaos.

If one were to listen to “conservative” media only, this is the picture of the world they would get. Facebook, YouTube, and other social networks would reinforce these beliefs, selecting and filtering all videos and articles, in a spiral of increasingly more extreme views, in some cases leading to white nationalist and even neo-Nazi sympathetic content.

Similarly, if one were to watch, read, and listen only to liberal media, they would get an equally idiotic caricature of the world.

No muslims are terrorists. Or, if there are, they just happen to be muslims, and there is no connection between their acts of terrorism and their religious ideology. Most men are sexual predators, and most evils of the world are a direct consequence of an oppressive patriarchy. Women are paid less than men for the same exact job. Women also rarely commit crime, murder or rape, and are systematically oppressed. Gender is a social construct, and it has little or nothing to do with biology. Capitalism is, at its core, the root of all evil.

How did we get here?

Over the past decade, there has been a steady increase of political polarization in the US, where what used to be extremists’ views have now become the norm.

But the polarization extends beyond political party affiliation. It is not unusual for people to lump a plethora of seemingly disconnected and logically inconsistent beliefs together.

Conservatives believe the government should get rid of subsidies for renewable energies, because they interfere with the free market; and yet they are happy to turn a blind eye when one points out that fossil fuels receive enormous government subsidies (as much as $5 trillion/year globally), which cause unspeakable damage to our health and the ecosystem from which we all depend. They also believe that governments have no right to interfere with our personal lives, for example with the freedom to purchase firearms; but are happy to have the government decide what a woman does with her womb, or what kind of substances we are allowed to take—alcohol and tobacco, two of the most dangerous drugs in the world, are perfectly acceptable, but psychedelic mushrooms and LSD, two of the least dangerous, are not and should be illegal.

Liberals believe that women are systematically paid less than men for the same job. When economists and sociologists point out that, when adjusting for variables and different life choices, the supposed gender pay gap practically disappears, they throw their arms in the air and refuse to accept the validity of objective, scientifically accurate data analyzed by experts. Many liberals hold the view that there is no discernible difference between men and women’s brains, despite all evidence to the contrary, all the while believing that women are generally more empathetic than men. Some even claim that gender is a fluid concept, a social construct, and that biology plays no role in determining one’s gender, even though 99% of people self-identify with the gender associated with their sex at birth.

Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways.

This kind of behavior has, I believe, a common root.

It is anti-scientific dogmatism, where instead of looking for evidence and then form your opinion, you hold an opinion in the presence of little, bad, or no evidence at all, and then look for data that supports your view.

If you are a reasonable, evidence-driven person, who looks for reliable and verifiable data, and tries to gain a nuanced and sophisticated understanding before taking a position on a topic, you are in for some rough times.

For example, data shows the gender pay gap in most OECD countries is minimal to non-existent. Yet, if you say that, they will call you a sexist bigot. Conversely, if the pay gap is a myth, does that mean that women are never discriminated against in the workplace? Sorry, no again. The world is bit more complicated and often can’t be explained by simple dichotomies.

We know from data that most Muslims are not terrorists, and that the majority of Muslims in the world do not support terrorist acts against civilians. Yet, if you report this simple fact, conservatives will label you as an Islamic apologist and an enemy of the state.

The same data tells us that an alarming number of Muslims (millions!) do support terrorist attacks against people criticizing the Muslim faith or disrespecting their prophet—for example, only 28% of Muslims in Nigeria believed it could never be justified, while 23% of believed it could be justified rarely, 38% sometimes, and 8% thought it could be justified often. Yet, if you report this simple fact, or suggest that the Islamic religion has any connection with any terrorist act, liberals will call you a bigot.

This tendency to fall to various cognitive biases isn’t new, and we all fall prey to it, however intelligent and conscientious we think we are. But this problem has recently exacerbated to the point of absurdity, trivializing and sensationalizing every subject.

White supremacists in southern states rewrote history books to make it look like black salves were treated fairly and were actually having a good time, while liberals managed to cut To Kill A Mockingbird from a school’s curriculum because “words in it made people uncomfortable”. It’s not lies, it’s historical revisionism. It’s not censorship, it’s creating “safe spaces” for the kids.

Eric Greitens on Twitter

To Kill A Mockingbird" was cut from a school's curriculum because words in it made people uncomfortable. Discomfort is the point.

The US political and social discourse has reached a pathological state, where cyclical stages of outrage are punctuated by temporary moments of insanity, followed by witch-hunts, twitter mobs, and sometimes even physical mobs. Suddenly, a new existential problem has central stage, it dominates the public landscape for weeks, only to be forgotten shortly after.

The work required to achieve long-lasting change, social, political, and economic justice is often long, tedious, and exhausting. It requires commitment, thorough study, community outreach, public investments, political strategy and a vision, not cheap sensationalism and twitter-fueled mobs.

The real issues plaguing the US persist, while mindless extremists scream injustice left and right to gain their 15 minutes of glory, stealing and diverting the much-needed attention and resources needed to address those issues.

For example, we know that black people in the US are systematically being discriminated against, particularly when it comes to economic opportunity. One of the answers to this problem promoted by liberals has been Affirmative Action, the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer or have suffered from discrimination within a culture. The group identity is never economic status (which would make sense), but rather skin color or ethnic affiliation. Aside from being a patently racist policy (it checks all the marks in the very definition of racism), at least it starts with good intentions. It could be racist, but if gets the jobs done, one could argue it’s worth it. Well, we tried it, and not only data shows that it doesn’t work, but in fact it exacerbates the problem is tries to fix.

So what does work? In the case of black kids living in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods, we know that the single biggest contributor to the success of the child–namely to stay out of gangs and to continue studying–is the presence of both parents and a stable family. But that would require addressing the fact that many young, black kids have their fathers in jail. This implies a comprehensive restructuring of the criminal and justice system (many of those men are in prison for petty crimes or simple drug use), providing opportunities to these older black men forgotten by society, reintegrating them into the social fabric.

In short, it means addressing economic and structural inequality, and a shift from the entrenched American ideology that people are solely responsible for their actions, regardless of their socio-economic background, upbringing, and living conditions. This is hard stuff. It takes decades of work. It’s much easier to set a few millions aside for “Affirmative Action”, turn a blind eye to the fact that it’s a racist program that doesn’t work, pat yourself in the back, feel good about yourself, and call racist bigots all those pesky economists and sociologists who point out its objective and obvious flaws.

It’s a type armchair-activism. Temporary, feel-good measures, supposedly in support of a social cause, but which solve nothing, and simply steal resources and attention.

Unless we move past this kind of attitude, nothing will ever be fixed, and things will only get worse.

p.s. This is only part of the picture. The other important factor at play is power, which I will address in a future essay (this one is getting too long).

Hi, my name is Federico Pistono. I am an author, angel investor, technologist, and researcher.

I try to fix problems.

I’m head of Blockchain at Hyperloop TT, building the future of transportation.

I consult for large companies on innovation and exponential tech, and I’m available for keynote speeches.

Sometimes I post on Facebook.
I think out loud on Twitter.
I make educational videos and ramble on YouTube.

More on my website.

We are so caught up in our daily lives with various digital distractions that we don’t realize it. Email, Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, you name it. The average person checks their phone 150 times a day.

150 times. That’s not good.

And, some of us, touch, swipe or tap our phone 2,617 times a day.

That’s insane.

I have a Kindle. I read books in there. I don’t want it to read emails, watch videos, browse the Internet, or do anything else other than allowing me to read a book. In fact, it should feel and look like a book. With no backlight, and a papery feeling.

I think there is a case to be made for single purpose devices. In an era of interconnected, always-connected lives, we need to know when it’s time to step off the digital treadmill.

This should be hardly surprising though. We, with our smartphones, are a bit like babies who just got a shiny new toy: we want to play with it, and we don’t know when to stop or how much of it is good for us. But because we’re adults, we think we know better. We really don’t, and science is showing us how true that is.

Our always-connected, general purpose, magical boxes that can do everything are contributing to the “continuous partial attention” problem, severely limiting our ability to focus, and perhaps even lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity — even when the device is turned off. We are distracted, all of the time, never really paying full attention to anything, unless we physically plug off.

Justin Rosenstein, the engineer who created the Facebook “Like” button, instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

We really are like babies, and the wisest are simply recognizing this fact, taking actions accordingly.

I predict that in the future we will see more and more single purpose devices, tailored to specific experiences, which play one role and nothing more.

We can switch them off simply by setting them aside, or putting them in a drawer. Psychologically, it’s easier to put away something that‘s used for only one thing, and to set aside everything else and concentrate while you’re doing that one thing. George R.R. Martin writes with a 3-decade old DOS computer, that has no email, no internet, and no spell-check.

I actually like it. It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn’t do anything else. I don’t want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don’t want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work a shift key.
— George R.R. Martin

When a new tech is available and powerful enough, we start to put everything inside, and soon it becomes an overwhelming mess. We see that happening in technology all the time. It happened with cars, watches, computers, and web pages.

Then reason steps in. Behavioral scientists, UX and HMI designers begin to think deep of what should be there, and what should not.

Apple and other companies are starting to realize this, introducing a “Do not disturb” mode on phones and computers.

But the temptation is too big, when distractions are one click away, instead of one room away. I have uninstalled the email and messengers apps on my iPad, because I kept interrupting movies I was watching, or drawings I was making, to check if I received a message. Why? It’s stupid, I know. But the temptation was there, it was easy to do. “That makes me think of…” — open Safari and check. “Where did I see that actor before?” — go and check IMDB.

It took me way too long to realize that I was trading an encompassing, immersive experience, with a distracted, task-switching mess. The same film became less valuable, less interesting. The same book was less captivating.

We need to change a few things.

As technology becomes cheaper and more reliable, I predict that single-purpose devices will make a comeback and become widespread again.

They will help us mentally differentiate the cognitive tasks and associate specific behaviors with physical objects, rather than abstracting everything in a single magical device that does everything, but that also leaves us trapped in a stream of constant distractions.

Less is more, almost always.

Hi, my name is Federico Pistono. I am an author, angel investor, technologist, and researcher.

I try to fix problems.

I’m head of Blockchain at Hyperloop TT, building the future of transportation.

I consult for large companies on innovation and exponential tech, and I’m available for keynote speeches.

Sometimes I post on Facebook.
I think out loud on Twitter.
I make educational videos and ramble on YouTube.

More on my website.

Since Google announced its first self-driving car prototypes back in 2012, people have been speculating how new technologies, AI, and automation may impact the global economy. Heck, some have even written entire books on this!

It’s hard not to spend some time wondering what’s going to happen to the millions of truck and taxi drivers that are now roaming the streets, once this technological wonder becomes available to the masses. Will they all be out of a job? How are we to cope with such an event, especially at a time where governments are not exactly floating in cash — most are plagued by crippling national debt.

I have long suggested that we should explore and experiment with Universal Basic Income as a means to potentially restructure our society and overcome the looming problem of technological unemployment. I am not alone in thinking this. Over the years, Silicon Valley billionaires and internet entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg have taken a similar position.

When I first started giving lectures on this in 2012, audiences were split 90–10. The majority believed technological unemployment was a non-issue, which we could easily solve like we did with the past industrial revolutions.

Today, the ratio is still 90–10, but reversed. I have a hard time finding techno-skeptics.

However, while many have come around when it comes to the systematic loss of jobs, I find that:

Most people don’t have a full grasp of the profound implications that an automated economy is going to bring. To explain it, perhaps there is no better and clearer example than autonomous vehicles.

I will attempt to show how a single innovation is going to completely disrupt not one, but several industries, with non-obvious rippling effects in almost all facets of our daily lives.

Note: for the sake of brevity, I’ll start referring to self-driving cars and the more general concept of autonomous vehicle — which includes cars, trucks, taxies, buses, vans, pods, trains, drones, and whatever comes next — as robocars. It’s shorter and gets the point across faster.

Also, I think it sounds cooler.

90% safer

Robocars are filled with sensors. Different manufacturers use a combination of cameras, lasers, infrared, RADAR, LiDAR, ultrasonic, wheel speed sensors, passive visual, sonar, GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature, humidity, and a bunch more.

Robocars can see and move around in rain, fog, and at night with no lights on. They can sense other robocars. They don’t need traffic lights. They can see 360° and be aware at all time of things we won’t ever be able to see.

Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, an average of 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20–50 million are injured or disabled.

Every. Single. Year.

Robocars can easily bring that number down 90%, and in the long run I predict over 99% — a factor of 100. The reduction of car accidents brought by the introduction of fully autonomous will be even more dramatic and sudden than that of airplanes.

In time, I predict that driving will become illegal, and be relegated to specific areas for driving enthusiasts. Just like hunting. A sport for the few.

Robocars won’t even be built with a steering wheel, because it will be an obsolete piece of design that won’t serve any purpose. They will be redesigned from scratch, allowing us to do a variety of things inside, and become more like an extension of our homes.

90% cheaper

The biggest costs of cars are gas, insurance, maintenance, and—when you take a taxi—the driver.

Robocars bring all of these costs down to practically zero.

With 90% fewer accidents, insurance costs will drop 90% or more.

Autonomous driving means you don’t need to pay for a human being behind the wheel, which is by far the biggest cost when one takes a taxi.

Robocars will be electric, and if you create your own electricity using solar PV or other methods, the cost of taking a trip will be practically zero. Electricity generation from solar is now cheaper than coal and gas in many countries, and this trend will continue in the future, bringing the cost down exponentially.

Electric cars are still not mainstream due to mainly two reasons: range and cost. Both are improving exponentially, thanks to better battery technology and car design.

Robocars can leapfrog and overcome these obstacles much faster than normal electric cars would. An organized fleet of robocars can be incredibly efficient at organizing routes and switches. You will not need to plan for long trips, look at the available charging stations along the way, or remember to charge your car during the night.

Robocars can do that automatically, so that you never have to think about it. Whether you have to do 10km or 10,000km, it doesn’t matter. It’s just something you will never be concerned with. A robocar will know which station to approach and at which time, it will come close to the appropriate replacement robocar whenever needed and open both doors for you. All you have to do is get out of one robocars and hop in the other every few hundred km. All in all, the process will take about 5 seconds, much less than would you’d need with any gasoline car and its refueling requirements.

Electric cars are also more reliable and require less maintenance. They are much simpler, have fewer parts, and can do most of their diagnostics via software, which can be regularly updated and controlled remotely.

Robocars don’t have to wait for electric vehicles to match the range of gasoline cars, or to even become as cheap.

The combined benefits of better logistics and reduced maintenance can make cost and range anxiety obsolete problem.

More flexible, more personalized

Robocars will also adjust to the needs of the individual person. It’s estimated that most cars move around with a single person inside, a huge waste of space and resources.

The average midsize car weighs 1,590 kilograms. The average human is 63kg. We essentially use a huge amount of energy to accelerate incredibly heavy objects, which take large amounts of space and weigh more than 20 times what they should be carrying.

That’s insane.

Aside from the failure to properly organize logistics with car pooling, the biggest issue is that we buy cars that are one-size fits all. We expect to be able to use them in cities, mountains, to bring kids to school, to go to work by ourselves, and to venture out for a weekend at the lake with friends. Also, we want to feel safe, so we buy increasingly bigger and more inefficient cars.

This creates a vicious cycle.

With robocars, we don’t need to buy one that fits all sizes and uses. We can just order the robocar we need, when we need it, at a fraction of the cost.

For a trip alone, we could use single-occupant robocars, which are incredibly efficient and can zip around with ease anywhere in the city.

If we’re with a group of friends, we could share a small van.

And if we like to travel in luxury, we can do that as well.

In other words:

Robocars can be much cheaper, reliable, flexible, and comfortable than regulars cars, even if they have higher upfront costs and can’t drive as far.

They are better in every regard from day one.

A lot better.

90% faster

One of the main reason robocars are not already roaming the streets is the same reason we have traffic jams. Streets are filled with stupid, reckless humans at the wheel of coffin-shaped metal boxes, whizzing about inefficiently and dangerously.

We can’t even seem to manage to follow the simplest of rules, and we constantly cause unnecessary traffic jams and accidents. If we simply kept the proper distance between cars, we could get rid of phantom traffic jams, which are infesting our highways. But humans are generally stupid when it comes to driving, and half of us are filled with testosterone, so we don’t.

A new study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the addition of just a small number of autonomous cars can ease the congestion on our roads. The presence of just one autonomous car reduces the standard deviation in speed of all the cars in the jam by around 50 percent, or a factor of 2.

If all cars were autonomous, they could effectively communicate with each other, eliminate almost 100% of traffic jams, and always cruise at full speed, thus reducing commuting time by a factor of 10 at the very least.

90% fewer cars

Robocar rides will be cheap and ubiquitous. Unless you live in a remote, rural area, you will never need to buy a car. You might want to, but you won’t need to.

In cities and towns, fleets of robocars will be constantly moving around, ready to pick up anyone in need. And because they are connected and can talk to each other at the speed of light, they can organize logistics much better than we ever can or will.

A variety of advanced algorithms will optimize the number of cars required, predict flows, incoming demand, be linked to weather stations and sensors on the roads. IoT, Big Data, and Deep Learning will play a huge role in this, feeding each other in a virtuous cycle. More cheap and ubiquitous sensors around the cities means more and better quality data, which can train the algorithms to become more accurate.

In time, people will realize that owning a car in cities is not a good thing, but a drag. The younger generation already realized this, and it’s relying more on car sharing and public transport. Robocars offer all the pros, and none of the cons. They will blow every other means of transportation out of the water.

90% greener

This is a no brainer. With 90% fewer cars on the road, it follows that there will be a significant reduction in emissions as well.

However, the relationship might not be proportional. Because cars spend most of their time idle doing nothing, they’re wasting valuable space, but they’re not emitting anything while sitting there. Robocars, on the other hand, would be constantly moving people around to optimize use. This would increase emissions per car, but not per capita, it would roughly stay the same.

Now let’s factor in the other variables. Because of the dramatic decrease in traffic, congestions, and the optimized routes, we should expect an improvement of at least 4x, perhaps even 10x.

But we haven’t even scratched the surface.

The biggest reduction in emissions will come from the switch to electric vehicles.

Electric cars have virtually zero emissions, both of CO2 or harmful pollution, unless then one used to create them (which is more or less equivalent to that of regular cars).

The combined effect of better logistics, the elimination of traffic jams and the switch to electric will bring emissions down 10–1000x.

90% fewer parking spaces, 27% more free land area

It’s estimated that in the US there are 8 parking spots for every car, covering up to 30% of our cities. Just let that sink in. Eight parking spaces for every single vehicle.

This is an insane number, considering that for over 95% of the time cars are parked without doing anything at all. Robocars will eliminate the need for most parking spaces, and the few that remain can be used as temporary switch-locations.

This will free up to 27% of all land currently assigned for parking in cities, which we can finally turn into parks, making our cities more livable, beautiful, and healthy.

Thanks to robocars, we can turn these:

Into these:

Let’s make our cities great again.

Why we’ll see faster-than-ever adoption

I’m an angel investor. I love startups, because they can solve big problems affecting hundreds of millions of people in just a few years. I invest in startups that have a great team, and can impact the greatest number of people positively in a short amount of time. Normal companies can’t do that.

The secret ingredient is growth. A startup is a company that can grow and scale to a very large audience very quickly, and can do so consistently.

Growth is fueled primarily by how big and how significant your key market differentiator is. The bigger the problem and the better the solution, the faster the growth. Startups are complicated beasts, but that’s really the essence. In short, we say:

How much better is your product relative to the competition?

If you provide a 10% improvement, you’ll probably never grow fast. Simple barriers to entry may be enough to discourage people to switch and begin using your product.

If you offer a 90% improvement over the old technology, now we’re talking. That’s a 10x, which is often enough to have a clear key market differentiator and create entire new, billion-dollar markets. PayPal allowed users to send money across the world in minutes as opposed to days. That was easily a 100x improvement, and the company grew like crazy.

Let’s have a look at how robocars play out in the startup equation:

> 90% safer
> 90% cheaper
> 90% greener
90% faster
90% fewer cars
90% fewer parking spaces
= > 1,000,000x improvement

Each of these individual reasons would be enough to justify a switch to robocars, because each is 10x better relative to the old technology. Put together:

Robocars represent at least million fold improvement.

If robocars are 90% safer, it means we can expect only 10% of the accidents than the past. In reality, as our algorithms and sensors become exponentially more accurate and we gather more data, experts project a 99% reduction or more. In a few of decades, death by automobile accidents could become as rare as being struck by lightening.

These are all conservative estimates. I could pick almost any of the reasons described above and make a case as to why each represents really a 99% improvement — or a factor of 100 — and not a “mere” 90%.

A million fold improvement is in fact conservative.

Very conservative.

What we can learn from history

Think of the last time something like this happened.

100 years go we used horses to move around. Then the first commercial cars arrived. They didn’t go much faster than horses, but they were much easier to maintain (no manure to take care of), they could carry more people in a smaller space (an integrated system as opposite to having a separate carriage to attach), and could be left alone without having to constantly feed them (they primarily needed fuel, which could be put in when necessary).

All in all, cars offered a 10–20x improvement over horses, yet the transition only took 20–30 years. Very soon, owning horses became a sport or a passion, not a means of transportation.

But perhaps the greatest advantage was that cars were an upgradable technology. If a new engine was invented, you could plug that in and get more power, ceteris paribus (leaving the rest unchanged). With horses, if you wanted more power, you had to purchase another horse and add it to the group, effectively doubling your spending, as well as your maintenance efforts and costs.

Robocars can be streamlined, updated wirelessly, and they can drive themselves to the nearest maintenance center whenever needed. They offer a lot more advantages relative to cars than cars did relative to horses.

A thought experiment

Ask yourself this. You get a message from your friend to go to her place. She lives on the other side of town. Would you rather:

Drive for more than an hour, be in agonizing traffic, spend $20 (all inclusive of insurance, gas, car usage), risk getting into an accident, only to spend another 10 minutes looking for parking and spending another $10?

Or would you:

Order a robocar, hop in, watch a YouTube video or take a nap in great comfort, have fun, be safe, and get out 10 minutes later, while spending $3 or less?

                 🚗 CAR   🤖 ROBOCAR

Time spent        1h30m        10m
Comfort level      2/10       9/10
Safety level       1/10       9/10
Money spent         $30         $3

100 years ago, cars represented a mere 10x-20 improvement over horses, yet they conquered the market in 2–3 decades.

Robocars represent a million fold improvement over cars. How long will it take for them to replace all vehicles on the road?

What do I mean by robocars

SAE defines the levels of driving automation as follows:

 0    No Driving Automation   
 1    Driver Assistance
 2    Partial Driving Automation
 3    Conditional Driving Automation
 4    High Driving Automation
 5    Full Driving Automation

I consider robocars to be level 5: full driving automation.

Once car manufacturers and software companies fix the remaining technical issues (5 years give or take, Tesla is almost there already), regulation catches up (will taker a bit longer), and we adapt our infrastructure to accomodate them (a bit longer still), I predict most if not all new cars will be robocars.

Once the first fully electric, fully autonomous robocar fleet enters the market, innovation will speed up, creating a virtuous cycle that will accelerate robocar adoption. At that point, there will be no point in building non-robocars, except for very niche markets (like sports).

Here is another reason why it makes business sense.

Robocars will double or triple the obtainable market

The driver’s license is in decline, especially in the younger generation. Among teenagers, just 24.5 percent of 16-year-olds has a license, a 47-percent decrease from 1983, when 46.2 percent did.

When asked why, people aged 18 to 39 said they were “too busy or not enough time to get a driver’s license” (37%), or that “owning and maintaining a vehicle is too expensive”(32%), or they were “able to get transportation from others” (31%).”

Young people don’t like to get a driver’s license. We don’t like to own a car. We don’t want to maintain it. We want to move from point A to point B with the least amount of hassle and the most comfort. As public transportation became more ubiquitous, faster, and cheaper, we chose to use more of that. When Uber and other startups made it easier to take a taxi, we used more of those.

When a new startup offers fully autonomous electric robocars, where the trips cost 10 times less, and are safer and more comfortable than regular old vehicles, the choice becomes pretty obvious.

Companies that will fully embrace robocars as a service will quickly dominate the automotive market and create a trillion-dollar global industry.

Robocars will allow not only adults without a license to move around, but also the elderly and people with disabilities. And why not, also children.

The main reason parents don’t trust children to take public transportation is because they don’t feel it’s safe enough for them. While the vehicle itself may be relatively safe — at least as much as the car they drive — they don’t like the idea that their 6 year old could be harassed by random strangers, or worse.

With robocars, this concern becomes null. parents can call the robocar to their house and see their child get in. They can choose not to allow the car to pick anyone else up, and go directly to the school, football practice, or their friend’s house. They can track every movement on their smartphone, and even check how the kid’s doing from a security cam installed in the car, which will only turn on in certain circumstances, with the consent of the user, giving special access to parents with small children to monitor how they’re doing.

Because the costs of running the car will drop exponentially, so might the margins for companies, one might think. But because we don’t need to pay attention to the street, we can do other things.

I predict that in the future entertainment and third party services will become the most lucrative business in automotive.

This will open up entire new markets, creating incentive for companies to join in the robocar ecosystem.

Summary

Robocars will make our street safer. With fewer accidents, they will save millions of lives every year from preventable deaths and injuries.

They will make our cities greener. They will be fully electric, powered by renewable energies, and we’ll need less of them moving around.

They will make us healthier. By reducing the need for parking, they will allow 27% of the space currently occupied in cities by parking and soulless concrete to become parks we can enjoy, taking walks and playing with friends, while breathing cleaner air.

They will make transportation cheaper and more convenient.

They will empower the disadvantaged, making personalized and ubiquitous transportation available to virtually everyone on Earth, including children, the elderly, the poor, and people with disabilities.

They will save us time. Every year, billions of hours of cognitive potential is wasted in a mostly useless, tedious, and inefficient task. It will free our cognitive capacity to pursue greater things.

Then again, if you really like driving and can’t do without it, you can always do it in VR while inside a robocar.

What next?

The advent of cars transformed our lives much more than people at the time could have anticipated. They transformed cities, gave birth to the suburbs, and engineered a social revolution. Their impact on society and the environment is so profound that it is difficult to comprehend what life was like before they came. We can get a glimpse from movies and books of the past. But really, we don’t know.

So far, I only described the most obvious, and perhaps the most stupid ways robocars are going to change the way we live, because they are seen with the lenses of today.

The real revolution will unfold in non-obvious ways, as emergent properties of a new complex system that we’ll put in place, which will create new possibilities and opportunities we probably can’t even think of now.

For example, what happens when not only robocars become widespread, but when the entire transportation ecosystem around them also changes accordingly?

Imagine this. You live in Rome. It’s a warm, sunny morning, you’re drinking a nice cappuccino at your house outside the city, when you get a call from a friend of yours living in Paris, he’s inviting you a party there. You request a robocar, and within 20 seconds it comes to pick you up.

As you slide in and make yourself comfortable, the car already planned the entire journey, including the wireless charging routes to make sure it doesn’t need to stop at any point — unless you want to — along with the entertainment you like, a list of friends you might want to invite, and the work you wanted to catch up with before the end of the day.

As you approach the main transportation hub, your robocar seamlessly enters inside a Hyperloop capsule, without reducing the current speed, sliding in one of the many evacuated tubes that connect to the larger hub. You accelerate to faster than the speed of sound, yet you don’t feel much different. You continue making videocalls, talking to friends, reading, and generally enjoying the trip. Less than an hour later you find yourself in front of your friend’s house in Paris, ready for the party.

During this time, you didn’t have to deal with tolls or traffic. You didn’t have to get out of the car, charge it, speak to the police or show your passport. The robocar is equipped with with biometric identification, which you could also decide not to use it, if you want to.

You remember back in the day, when going from one side of the city to the other — a mere 15 km — just to see your girlfriend, would sometimes take more than an hour, and how that over time took at toll on your relationship.

Now, going to a city 1,500 km away seems like it’s around the corner. You can literally hop in, watch an episode of Game of Thrones, and you’re there.

If this scenario seems too far fetched, it’s due a lack of imagination. As we speak, companies and startups are building each individual piece of technology to make this happen. The biggest obstacles remain laws and regulations, particularly the nonsensical security theatre around the so called “war on terror”.

The future

How will our lives change, once this becomes possible? Will we still decide to live in overcrowded cities, if we can get to any nearby point quickly, easily, hassle-free, and inexpensively?

Perhaps we might see a new major shift in urbanization. As barriers to freely move are demolished, so will the need to squeeze in overcrowded, expensive and unhealthy city centers.

Robocars might change the entire landscape of the world, how we build our homes and cities, how we live, and how we interact with one another.

This is how a single technology can profoundly impact not just the automative industry, but the transportation sectors at large, the housing market, the job market, the entertainment industry, insurances, the communication sector, our laws regarding immigration, border control, our cities, our landscapes, and how it will empower entire segments of the population that currently don’t have the freedom to move.

Just one technology.¹

Now think of everything else that’s coming. Genetic engineering. Ubiquitous sensors. Internet of things. Artificial Intelligence. Nanotechnology.

These are not just buzzwords. They are not far-away science fiction. They are very real, they’re coming, and they’re going to change our lives in ways we can’t even comprehend.

The future awaits.

¹ Technically robocars are an ensemble of technologies working together, but you get the point.

If you’re curious, this is the book that started it all.

You can get a copy on Amazon (Kindle/Paperback), iBookstore, PDF or ePub direct download. All files are rigorously DRM-free.

Hi, my name is Federico Pistono. I am an author, angel investor, technologist, and researcher.

I try to fix problems.

I work with Hyperloop TT, building the future of transportation.

I consult for large companies on innovation and exponential tech, and I’m available for keynote speeches.

Sometimes I post on Facebook.
I think out loud on Twitter.
I make educational videos and ramble on YouTube.

More on my website.