The State of the NonZero Media Empire
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the first NonZero Newsletter of 2025! Most of the NZN team is still recovering from holiday overindulgence, so it fell upon me to generate some Friday content. And here it is: My annual (assuming I do this again next year) State of NonZero and of the World Address. (My SONZAOTW Address, as it will be called in mainstream media accounts upon second reference.) The video version is below, and below that is the transcript. And, if you’d rather absorb my wisdom without having to look at me (though tbh I think my new eyewear has upgraded my visual appeal), this monologue is also available in the Nonzero Podcast feed.
Plus there’s this bonus: The transcript of my conversation with Google’s most powerful AI, “Gemini 2.0 Experimental Advanced,” about the prospects for the human species. I summarize the conversation in my SONZAOTW Address, but it goes by pretty fast, so you may want to check out the transcript itself. And, finally, here is my 2021 piece on the cognitive bias known as attribution error, which I also mention; this piece captures something important, even critical, about the modern conception of attribution error that seems to have eluded Gemini 2.0.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, happy new year. This is my state of non-zero address, and also at no extra charge, my state of the world address. |
| 0:11.5 | First, the state of the non-zero media empire is good. Now, empire may be a slight exaggeration, but we have seen growth over the past year, |
| 0:23.0 | growth in the amount of content we produce and in the size of our audience. |
| 0:27.7 | And in the coming year, we hope to continue that expansion. |
| 0:31.0 | And to that end, we will be expanding our team here at non-zero and we'll be saying more about that next week. |
| 0:39.2 | Meanwhile, I want to thank everybody who subscribes to the non-zero newsletter and or the |
| 0:44.7 | non-zero podcast and especially to those of you who are non-zero members. There are now |
| 0:50.6 | 2,400 of you and there are 49,000 total newsletter subscribers, by the way. |
| 0:56.4 | But 2,400 paid subscribers and these paid subscriptions to the newsletter are absolutely vital. |
| 1:03.0 | They help keep us going. |
| 1:04.4 | And I just really want to say how much I appreciate those of you who are supporting us that way. |
| 1:10.9 | Okay, enough about the non-zero media empire. |
| 1:14.4 | Now we will move on to the state of the world. |
| 1:16.6 | That is a more complicated story. |
| 1:18.4 | There is definitely some bad news on that front, |
| 1:21.0 | but I promise to find what good news I can try to cheer you up. |
| 1:25.8 | I'll try to do that honestly, |
| 1:27.0 | which will put some ceiling on how much cheer I can generate to cheer you up. I'll try to do that honestly, which will put some ceiling |
| 1:29.0 | on how much cheer I can generate, but I will do my best. Okay, I'm going to start out with a quote |
| 1:34.5 | from a famous artificial intelligence researcher that may seem to be just about artificial |
| 1:40.2 | intelligence, but is actually in a way about the whole mission of the non-zero newsletter |
| 1:45.1 | and the non-zero podcast, as I will explain. Now, this quote is from a talk given by |
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