Second Week of January '24: Transhumanism, Ai Writer and Philosophy

1/7/2024 - 1/14/2024

table of contents

1. Working out of Founders Inc

2. Building Ai SAAS progress

3. New Ideas for Ai Startups

4. On Self Knowledge

5. Transhumanism

6. On reading Ken Wilber

7. On watching The Return To the Source: Philosophy in the Matrix.

8. AGI House hackathon

Working out of Founders Inc

In the first week I spent more time working in this kind of incubator space in Fort Mason. It was officially my second to last week. It was cool to see other founders there, and the free snacks and lunch was great. The place is really legendary, with a lot of successful companies being incubated here. I didn’t find myself being productive there. Working in the open office meant there was a lot of distractions. There is always someone walking by, conversations happening, very bright and lots of activity. Being there at night where it was quiet felt very unproductive too, in the big empty space, and being there at night felt like it was a bit questionable about the safety. The fact that it cost like $3 and 40 minutes to get there one way was another major downside. The next week I found a quiet spot in my place that was much more productive. I learned that a quiet room, where I am alone, is the perfect environment for doing deep work. The incubator offers a lot of opportunities for connecting with like minded people, and sharing insights into the startup launching process. I want to stay part of this community and maybe be part of the incubator but commuting there and working in an open office setting are reasons I wouldn’t work out of there. Unless I had a private office there and lived closer.

Building Ai SAAS progress

This week I spent really focused on coding my Ai assistant startup. I implemented the stripe payment system. New landing page. Saving user credits in the database and updating them.
A few new ideas for products kept tugging at me, that they were still not created or were not that good. First it was a ‘text with an Ai Coach.’ This chatbot can set your goals, help you stay on track, record progress in a log, send you reminders of your goals and commitments. Does research for you. Another is an Ai generated images with face swap, so that you can create stories, and imagine yourself in different situations, this would expand your conception of what you’re capable of. Another is a tool that does automated we searches as you type your article. Then you can quickly and easily integrate the new research into your writings.

On Self Knowledge

What is your life story? We are much like LLMs that we have a limited context window. If we are able to condense, or summarize, our life story, then we are better able to understand ourselves, know ourselves, and to direct our lives with real clarity and direction. This can help you discover, what moves you, what is your state of development as a human, do you have a conception of life, of God, of philosophy, do you have a moral compass, what is your true story, are you forgetting your deepest dreams, ideas and curiosities?

My current narrative is something like: In 2016 I started to learn to code, which changed my life and I rediscovered my purpose. In 2021 I bought an investment property. In 2021 I left my home to travel the world as a digital nomad and do hackathons. In 2023 I moved to SF to pursue my dream of building a startup that pushes humanity forward on a scale such as Steve Jobs.

I dream about building Ai startups that improve the world, that augment our intelligence, that amplify our thinking.

Transhumanism

This Wednesday I attended a reading night event at an Ai community space in Twin Peaks called the AGI House SF (its the real one). I choose a group of books on Transhumanism and an Ai generated book. The Ai generated book was surprisingly engaging, it carried my attention from scene to scene, it felt like reading a soap opera that could go on and on. It was convincing, it was engaging, it was entertaining. The book on Transhumanism: Engineering the Human Condition was really interesting. I felt like I found a new obsession. Indeed it was like this was really the true thing that was underlying all of my interests and motivations.

One writer and thinker very central to the movement that was covered was William Sims Bainbridge, who wrote Religions for a Galactic Civilization and Religions for a Galactic Civilization 2. How this author studied religions, and claims that the best solution for us is to create a new religion that will inspire us to build transhumanist technology that allows us to transcend death, and colonize the stars. The end goal of transhumanists is to create infinite complexity as ‘cosmic engineers’ (yes that is my biggest dream and happy life), to live endless life, this is made possible by continued scientific exploration, discoveries and new engineering creations. He claims that “our path to the stars halted, mainly because sociological reason, we lack a strong, quasi-religious fervor towards space-colonization and spacefaring.” I realized that I am a Transhumanist after all, that I need to dig deeper into this, that I need to not let go or forget of this truth. Without this kind of big picture realization, I am stuck in the weeds, working on small things that don’t connect to the big movements of the world, and this is going slow, and that ‘slow is fake’ as Nat Friedman pointed out so well on his website.

On reading Ken Wilber

On Sunday I went to the writing club in the morning where I wrote the first draft of this and in the afternoon to the center. Where I read an essay by Ken Wilber called “A spirituality that transforms” that was published on Patricia Mou’s substack.

It outlined the difference between the surface conception of spirituality in America, and the truth about those that really pursue it, why they talk about it, why they do it. How sometimes it may come out wrong, by they have this courage and sense of necessity to do it anyway, because they have sensed something deeply profound, a truth about life. To not try to articulate it, would be living inauthentically, living not faithfully to their truth. It really spoke to me and I read it with great attention.

Ken Wilber was a name I knew but didn’t know of his work that much. Then I went down the rabbit hole of his writings and biography. It was fascinating, this philosopher in modern times that I actually thought was really good, clear, sharp. It is in stark contrast to most. Then I discovered that he appeared in the documentary The Return To the Source: Philosophy in the Matrix. I watched this documentary (have seen it many years ago, but only in parts) with great interest. I refreshed my great admiration and love for the Matrix, it is a true masterpiece, a work of art of the highest order. I rediscovered this conception of what it is to be good, it is like Neo, to be true to yourself. In the Animatrix, Ken Wilber points out how it is “vain and corruption” that causes the fall of man, and the war with the machines. And that one man, like Jesus, had to come and show people their true potential, to show them what it is to be good, to be true, and what is beauty. I was really moved when I rediscovered this. My life goes in cycles, as the cycles of civilization, and we forget these fundamental truths. Maybe sometimes we hide them form ourselves to protect ourselves, or to try to fit in with people around us, or try to liked by them. The true north of my moral compass was again revealed to me, this was a big moment, again realizing that my sense of what is right and wrong, is really functioning properly, that indeed I have a good sense of direction. I felt encouraged in my path. I felt I found that the path that I was on was right all along, and I no longer had doubts about my self. I have characteristics of Neo in me, as we all do, we all have this battle between self doubt and self love. The division between the man and machine is within us all, and we all try to find inner harmony that allows us to live truly and deeply.

AGI House hackathon

On Sunday I took the Bart and bus to Hillsborough for the “Fine-tuning vs RAG on OSS at AGI House” hackathon. It was sponsored by Together.ai, Weights & Biases and LangChain. The highlight was that I got to talk to Harrison Chase about LangChain, research agents and reflection paper. His morning presentation was real interesting, about building research agents, and reflection method. I asked him about how to implement it in Javascript. He gave me some text prompts that outlined the implementation, and gave recommendations, use the LangChain chains for agents decision making, look into the LangChain JS repository. I only stayed there until around 7PM as I wasn’t feeling well. I stayed up all night the before and I didn’t have a good place to work, I was in the back dining area where it was very distracting, a lot of traffic, and it was very cold there. I felt that I couldn’t really build anything interesting there to show everyone and it would be best to go home to rest.

Conclusion

This week was about working on my Ai startup, Transhumanism, learning about research agents and reading on philosophy.

I made this Drone Film:

My favorite song of the week was:

Yes, behind all of these day to day events I am thinking about Ukraine war and following the news closely. This is the most important event in our life times and we need to be aware of what is happening and how all democratic nations must work together to defend themselves.

Peace out✌️