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ADAPT #14 - Be Unrealistic

ADAPT #14 - Be Unrealistic

Gus Balbontin
December 01, 2023

By Gus Balbontin

Yew!

I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week :-)
Stay adaptable and on top of your game!

Let´s go!

Today:

Awe: multiple futures
Deal Flow: a blend of trees and tech
Action: just applaud
Personal: be unrealistic
Toy: create worlds beyond your own

Read time: 3 min 02 sec

AWE

On AI…

I came across a clever table in the book “Life 3.0” (which I told you I am reading).

It describes many scenarios if we get to AGI (remember: Artificial General Intelligence is the holy grail) and how it can all pan out for humans.

Check it out:

Credit: Life 3.0 Max Tegmark

The amazing thing about this table is that I had never sat down to actually think how many different ways it could go and how crazy each one could be.

So have a look, I can almost guarantee any scenario we come up with will either turn into a book or a movie if it hasn’t already!

DEAL FLOW

Planting trees is not a solution that will get us out of the pickle we are in.

It’s nice and symbolic and important but, don’t be under any illusion that it’s what we need to decarbonise.

It’s slow (as in we have ~10 max ~20 years to fix this, and trees are nice but take way too long to grow) it’s not super efficient, etc.

And also we can plant them, let alone grow them, as fast as we cut them.

(We globally chop down about a football field of trees per second… yep, by the time you finish reading this newsletter we chopped down like 300 football fields… INSANE!!!)

Anyway, this is the first company I came across that thinks about tree planting differently: Air Seed Tech.

When manually we can plant about 800 trees, their drones can plant 40,000!

80% cheaper as well, which makes it far more economical and therefore better to take up.

They reckon we can plant almost 1 billion hectares without affecting cities or agriculture - that’s also clever.

Check them out (after you finish reading this newsletter!): www.airseedtech.com

ACTION

Talking to the kids about being on stage and how rewarding, humbling and simply epic it is to be applauded, I told them we should applaud each other more often.

Say at dinner time someone shares a story from the day and the rest of the family just joins into a spontaneous applause.

If one starts applauding the rule is that everyone has to join in and cheer.

WHY?
No other reason than to celebrate a little more and to make people around you feel awesomely applauded!

Try it!

PERSONAL

This week my son came home from school and in my unlearning - relearning process, he tells me that they had to do an exercise in creative thinking and the theme was transport.

My son started riffing with mates on a lift to space, a pipe to the outer atmosphere to transport CO2… only to be stopped by the teacher, told he wasn’t being realistic and that transport clearly refers to transporting humans…

My son challenged with “I think transporting CO2 is kinda important?”

She offered instead “how about trams without rails?”
My son naively responded “isn’t that buses Miss?” Hahaha

Anyway, we soft launched a foundation a few years ago.

Check it out and let me know what you think about it!

www.unrealisticfoundation.org

TOY

Ahhh the pleasure of toys and playfulness!

This weekend go and buy a toy.

Pick the one you like best.

Play with it!

Do it, engage that imaginary skill and create worlds beyond your own.