George Kao

Bitcoin, ai, liberty... plus #SoulpreneurFuture, dispatches from the singularity. Elsewhere I write on authentic marketing and joyful productivity.

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

BAN ALL DOOMERS

ok not really since free speech is important, but at least, dear reader, let's mute/block them on X and everywhere else.

Not @Dan_Jeffries1 he's got great stuff, eg this post:

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

Not only I am tired of these wild AI speculations of impeding doom from self important people:

I resent them.

I actively resent people proposing to crash the economy or proposing authoritarian control over my life and other people's lives with idiotic and dangerous ideas like chip control or bans or tracking researchers.

Every idiot in history who's taken the approach of "the ends justify the means" to solve an imaginary future disaster created the very disaster they wanted to stop.

See Population Bomb leading to the one child policy and Communism leading to Mao's mass famines and Fascism leading to the death of tens of millions of people and war.

These solutions are evil and worse than any disease that they propose to solve.

It you believe you can actually predict the end of the world then you are as insane as the Heaven's Gate cult that killed themselves in the 90s thinking UFOs were coming to transcend them.

Not only should we not take your policies and fear mongering seriously, we should actively throw out any and all of your proposed solutions because they come from a place of delusion.

I don't give a shit that you work in the industry or think you saw something or that you want to virtue signal on X. You are actively contributing to a horrible future based on baseless speculation that has no grounding in reality.

Don't confuse expertise in a domain with ability to predict impact of that domain or frankly to make predictions a decade out better than a dart throwing monkey.

They are orthagonal skills.

How's Hinton's "we don't need to train Radiologists anymore" working out? How did the Population Bomb work out? The global cooling second ice age? Peak oil?

Just because someone is a bridge engineer does not mean they can predict the impact of bridges on society or that they have any actually useful insight at all on the complex, ever changing system called life.

There are people dying in wars right now. Children starving. Homelessness. Dictatorships.

In short, real problems. And we're supposed to drop everything to stop a made up problem in your head?

Pound sand.

We don't care. And we are not going to remake society based on you scary monsters under the bed delusion.

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

Claude tried a form in my admin twice, failed both times, and wrote "this can't be automated" into my playbook.

I handed the same job to GPT-6. It clicked the dropdown like a person would and finished in 247 seconds, one attempt.

Then I asked GPT-6 to audit what I'd written about all this. It disagreed with four of my claims. Those corrections are in the guide now, and the byline says so.

Six new rules on two AIs sharing one browser:

https://t.co/2kr3zaaR1C

[Derya Unutmaz, MD @DeryaTR_]

This is an extraordinarily important investigation and report into an incredibly sophisticated and well-funded anti-AI operation that blew up yesterday by an ex-Anthrophic employee, then amplified by another current Anthropic employee and other well-known characters.

Make no mistake: this is an ideological battle over the future of America, supported by billions in wealth and foreign actors and ironically power of AI, but would have impact to all humanity. The forces behind it are pushing toward a deeply dystopian, controlled future, with extreme levels of fear-mongering. This is the real existential threat to whatever hopes we have for the golden age of humanity.

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

#SoulpreneurFuture Q2 2028:

A reader's AI compares three excellent offers on their screen. One is "objectively" better and recommended by the ai... yet, the human still renews with the coach whose newsletter they have read for years.

Technology is changing much faster than buying habits. People keep buying from those they already bought from, who gave them a good experience, even when many other strangers have built better offers (often done with AI).

That habit is both protection and barrier: your existing readers are likely to stay with you, while new readers are harder to reach. This is a reason to tend what you have, not assume it will stay.

Marketing can become a spiritual practice here: paying attention to the humans already in your orbit, rather than endlessly producing more to impress strangers.

Today's rep, in 2026: open your comments/emails and respond to three humans you meant to return to, because a relationship stays real when attention moves both ways.

[Luke Burgis @lukeburgis]

This stuff is totally ridiculous. Kill "all" humans. How about 1 million humans? 10 million humans? 100 million humans? what are the odds of that? how about a single human? this is the most morally deformed and confused, consequentialist industry in human history, which speaks about a sincere belief in extinction level events in a flippant, exclamation-marked quote tweet. there should be zero tolerance for this.

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

Please let Ai cure cancer first. Then we can talk about slowing down.

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

By the way, it’s very easy to say that the 1200 humans dying in horrible pain every hour from cancer are unimportant if you or one of your loved ones isn’t lying there wearing a colostomy bag and unable to avoid screaming if they aren’t doped up on a tremendous dose of opiates. Ten million people die of cancer per year, and those are usually awful deaths. Blithely dismissing their suffering is a bit callous.

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

@EvanHub This is the first post that makes me seriously want to stop using Claude 😑

[X Freeze @XFreeze]

Socialism is virtue signaling
Capitalism is hardworking people building things

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

Never heard much of Marco Rubio speaking. Didn't know he was this articulate

[Lewis Miles @Maga4liberty]

Rubio just blew my mind‼️ The man who understood communism the most, just explained it to the least of us.

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

"The American people need to know that foreign adversaries are investing substantial resources into weaponizing social media specifically to manufacture opposition to key technologies and undermine our national interests."

[Adam Dorr @adam_dorr]

OK, about China's propaganda campaign to astroturf opposition to AI and datacenters among the American public, let me spell out the meaning and stakes of the situation for the benefit of anybody who thought I was unfairly maligning the news media about its lack of coverage of this story.

Less than 2 years ago, the most advanced AI models were being openly mocked for making boneheaded math errors like 9.9 < 9.11.

Today, OpenAI announced that its unreleased next-gen model solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize challenge. For those not aware, this was a 90-year-old open unsolved math problem with a $1 million bounty.

This is the power and potential of AI.

It is impossible to know exactly what capabilities AI will unlock over the next 10 years. But here are a few examples, just to stimulate your imagination:

- Humanoid robots that can do any task a human can do for 1% of today's US minimum wage
- A peptide or similar drug that reliably boosts a child's IQ by 20 points
- 99% effective personalized cancer vaccines
- A rejuvenation therapy that makes you 30 years younger in 6 weeks
- A physics discovery that makes it possible to build a nuclear bomb out of a microwave oven and $500 of supplies from Home Depot
- A biology discovery that makes it trivial to tune a lethal strain of influenza to a specific ethnic group

We in the technology sphere have been screaming from the rooftops for 25+ years: whoever wins the AI race wins the world.

China and the CCP understand this perfectly. And if you think they're going to stand idly by and let America claim this prize without a fight, you are utterly delusional.

Now to the propaganda campaigns.

Imagine it is 1880. Electricity has been understood as a phenomena for a few decades, and is in its earliest infancy being deployed as an actual service. The scientific community and national leadership understand its potential to transform society over the next 100 years. The details are fuzzy, but its overall impact will be totally transformative.

By 1980, electricity is the basis of modern life. Without it most of the people across society have no affordable access to indoor lighting, indoor plumbing and running water, safe chlorinated drinking water. Refrigeration is a costly luxury. Air conditioning doesn't exist. Telecommunications do not exist. Computers do not exist. Most pharmaceuticals don't exist, including antibiotics and vaccines. Modern hospitals do not exist. Air travel and space travel are outlandish science fiction.

Now imagine that instead of achieving all that progress over a century between 1880 and 1980, a country could achieve it 10-20 times faster - by 1890, or even 1885.

And finally, imagine rival nations in an electricity technology arms race compressed from a century into less than a decade.

What cognitive warfare tactics might we expect from them?

And this brings us to AI today. A country with a 2-year lead in AI is like a country with a 50 year lead in electricity.

So how should the news media be covering anti-AI propaganda efforts among US adversaries today? The discovery of Chinese bot farms has been disclosed by OpenAI and X over the last few months. But are these disclosures likely to be the complete list of propaganda activities? Or just the tip of the iceberg? What is it worth to China to slow American progress in AI down, in order to stay in the race? What amount of spending on this strategy is justified?

Remember, there is little incentive among social media platform operators to fully disclose how foreign adversaries are weaponizing them to manipulate the public. What incentive does Meta have to share details about how foreign governments are using hundreds of thousands or millions of bots on Facebook to stoke fear and outrage among Americans around key strategic issues?

It is virtually impossible to distinguish between manufactured and authentic public opinion. That is the nature, and indeed much of the point, of this kind of cognitive warfare.

So what should the news media be doing about all this?

Their job: telling us about it.

The American people need to know that foreign adversaries are investing substantial resources into weaponizing social media specifically to manufacture opposition to key technologies and undermine our national interests. They need to be reminded of this every day, to inoculate them against viral memes, so that when they see a post with bogus claims about how much water a datacenter will use (reality: not much) or how it will drive up electricity costs (reality: the opposite) they won't fall for the propaganda and play directly into the CCP's hands. Foreign adversaries don't need to invent concerns out of whole cloth, they simply need to amplify them. Again, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between manufactured and authentic public opinion, so the only defense is inoculation via awareness.

Reporters and columnists who say "I talked to an 'expert', there's nothing to see here" need to recognize the motives, resources, and above all the STAKES involved in this story.

If, after all of the above, the failure of the news media around this issue isn't clear enough, imagine if the news media failed to report on the following counterfactual examples:

"A gigantic army of hundreds of thousands of known (and likely millions total) social media bots operated by China was just discovered sowing false fears about...

... childhood vaccine efficacy
... illegal immigration
... police racial profiling
... food safety
... climate change
... union strikes
... election integrity

With the shoe on the other foot, would any of those be worth the news media reporting about?

For shame.

https://t.co/4ElyWzc9St

[Emad @EMostaque]

Why no bigger impact on GDP from genius AI?

It’s because

1. They just became genius
2. Orgs are slow to adapt
3. The economy, like genius, is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration

That’s why humanoids are the real economic impact

They don’t perspire

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Correction: It was closer to one third of the population killed by this people loving regime 🙏

Not a quarter. One third of all Cambodians – killed in four years by a regime that loved the people so deeply it could not stop liberating them from the burden of existing.

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

@brocology101 Well said

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

It's always nurture AND nature, but honestly probably more nature (except in extreme cases)

[William Meijer @williameijer]

Something I've observed from years of talking to high-IQ leftists is that it doesn't matter how high their IQ is; they simply cannot accept that genetics explain anything important. To them, any and all differences between people circle back to some just-so story about the environment. And if you corner them with evidence, they have a mental breakdown and call you mean, no matter how polite you are. I call this the Great Wall of Liberal Understanding. It leaves leftists with extremely overfitted models of reality, where every new data point requires a new bespoke explanation. Naturally, failed models lead to failed policies

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

@chcbearsfan Sorry about the drop in BTC price today. It's because I literally just bought some, after months of not 😆

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

@spakhm Fascinating, thanks for sharing

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

@NapierHolland That's awesome.

Does it notify you when it's ready to give you a report or do you have to remember to look for it?

[George Kao @GeorgeKao]

#SoulpreneurFuture Q3 2027:

A client asks their AI for a fresh approach to a stuck problem. The assistant returns fifty ideas, each one articulate... better than what most humans would produce on the spot.

The situation is the same for every coach who gets the same request. The fifty ideas are nearly identical...

So the client does not need better ideas. What they need is someone who can look at the list and point to the ONE idea that most resonates in their body, making sense with their actual history, and feels like a path they would actually walk.

By 2027, *taste* is not a preference. It is *the skill* that separates the work that gets paid for from the work that is free.

Today's rep, in 2026: set a timer for ten minutes. Ask your AI to generate twenty ideas for a client's real problem. Cross out every one that could have come from any thoughtful practitioner. The one or two left are where your taste lives.

[Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en]

Also note that the outliers (Singapore, Qatar) are authoritarian states. Which makes sense: the way to make low-trust populations rich is essentially to force on them the institutions that high-trust populations organically create at gunpoint.

Puts in perspective when members of the Davoisie claim we can't restrict immigration because of "democracy." The opposite is true: mass immigration *necessitates* authoritarian government policies as a coping mechanism.

Or, in the words of Renaud Camus: "I do not want to make Hell better policed. I want to return to civilization."

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The AI jobs prediction so far is playing out the opposite of what many thought.

The reason this is happening is because AI is bringing automation to areas that don’t have finite demand characteristics. AI allows companies to do far more than they could before, but agents still require human operators and oversight to generate value from them.

And not only has AI not replaced many of the types of jobs that theoretically would have been most affected by AI - engineers or lawyers - but AI is also creating or growing entire categories of jobs across the economy.

Cybersecurity, FDEs, agent operators, engineers in non-software domains, and tons of job categories are going to explode. It’s not clear if or when this trend will reverse because we keep discovering all new areas of demand that AI is going to open up.