Eno Reyes

I find it increasingly odd that I "am" something (as far as I can tell). Our brains are astonishing and still fairly indecipherable. Language Models offer alternative ways to understand many of the things we used to call intelligence. What is it like to be a bat? Will there be functional interpretability of human brains anytime soon? Do all learning algorithms converge on the same high dimensional shape as data converges?

Software ate the world. Software is the lever that moves the world. What can we do to accelerate good software being built? We live on software made by fewer than 50 million aggregate humans. What will the software made by billions look like? What problems are not bottlenecked by software today?

Industrial policy seems to be generally quite important in many historic cases. What are the useful frameworks to understand the development of a country? How can we design better industrial policy across the planet? What ways can technology aid in the development of civilization—and what harm reduction methods should we introduce to deal with the externalities of technology?

Meaning can come from the satisfaction of fulfilling a purpose larger than yourself. The largest shared purpose we all have is understanding the world we all participate in. What if we could unify around shared purpose? We treat our economic systems as though they're the whole picture, when they're a small part of a much larger ecological one. What would it look like to augment and upgrade our theories of capital, markets, and society? How do we foster genuine empathy at scale before we unlock the most dangerous technologies? What organizational systems actually push us towards ecological prosperity rather than just economic growth? Can we build a global order guided by shared goals over the next 100 years?

It generally seems like art compounds as humans build layers and layers on top of it. It is a beautifully self-referential, self-exploratory, and compelling topic to explore. Science and technology can only be built by minds that share more than just information. They need to share broad ranges of experience, which requires culture and art. I would love to understand how we can better appreciate art in society, better create new aesthetics, expand on our understanding of the contemporary through art, and discover more about the bounds of human experience.

It's pretty funny that I'm only "fairly sure" aliens are not currently on the planet. I'm interested in the sociology, the mystique, and the odd storytelling that aliens (and other similar phenomena) have played on humans as far back in the archaeological record as things go. What would make us more certain we've never encountered aliens? What gain do governments and institutions have by interacting, perpetuating, or stifling conversation around aliens? Why do some people in power feel so strongly about aliens? How close—in time or space—could a species of intelligence like ours be to us before we notice? Do we live in a dark forest, pre-grabby aliens, or is light speed just hard? A civilization that's mastered gravitational manipulation would see our radio signals the way we see ant pheromones. Maybe 70% of the universe's mass-energy being invisible to our instruments is a clue we're missing something fundamental.