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Quote:

What book most shaped your conception of the future?

Virginia Postrel’s “The Future and Its Enemies.”

She almost perfectly laid out what battles about the future of technological progress and technology, in general, would look like. She identified two camps of thinking about the future, “dynamists” and “stasists.” The stasis mindset defends the status quo, and values the present, or a particular potential future, and is willing to utilize certain legal or social instruments to try to hold the status quo in place. Whereas the dynamists are willing to embrace an uncertain, messy future where there are a lot of unknowns.

This is now playing out in the AI wars, in a huge way. At the Brookings event I was just debating people who were very concerned about what the future might hold, but unable to show conclusively how their fears might happen. They were saying, based on a hypothetical, worst-case scenario, we should freeze progress in certain ways, or at least regulate it very aggressively. I'm more of the mind that we should take every day as it comes and allow trial and error to work its magic. This book laid all this out, at a time when the internet was just being born

template<size_t BitDepth>
using bgrx_pixel = gfx::pixel<
	gfx::channel_traits<gfx::channel_name::B,(BitDepth/4)>,
    gfx::channel_traits<gfx::channel_name::G,((BitDepth/4)+(BitDepth%4))>,
    gfx::channel_traits<gfx::channel_name::R,(BitDepth/4)>,
	gfx::channel_traits<gfx::channel_name::nop,(BitDepth/4),0,(1<<(BitDepth/4))-1,(1<<(BitDepth/4))-1>    
>;