Oz Agar

I think there are two areas - qualitative improvements, and regulatory hurdles - that are interesting to think about in the context of this (excellent!) summary.  These are some fairly loose thoughts without any real conclusions.

First are qualitative improvements.  These may be difficult to define - is the smartphone a truly qualitative improvement?  Some cyborg theory says yes (provides audiovisual transfer, eases access to vast repositories of information, etc), but smartphones are certainly far less useful than the internet.

In the near future, I'm very optimistic about recent protein folding simulation advances (Google's DeepMind) significantly speeding up drug research.  A good historical case might be the development of well defined physical measurements (metric... (read 555 more words →)

I would recommend a revision (close to a re-write) of the second vow for four reasons:

First, negotiations theory has progressed past game theory solutions to a more psychologically based methodology.  This approach has been demonstrated to be more effective in two well tested and well studied environments: FBI hostage negotiations (I'd recommend starting with Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss as a light, entertaining but still useful introductory work), and intelligence community asset recruitment. You can look up the transition from the relatively explanatory MICE - money, ideology, compromise, ego - to RASCLS - reciprocity, authority, scarcity, consistency, liking, social proof.  Note that in RASCLS all approaches essentially link to ego,... (read 503 more words →)