How Conway's "Game of Life" changed the way that I view reality
When I was an undergraduate, I became interested in the prospects for machine intelligence. Not only was this a fascinating topic in itself, but I was excited by the notion that our attempts to engineer intelligent machines could tell us more about the nature of our own intelligence. As part of my reading on the topic, I came across a simple computer program called "Conway's game of life" that was an amazing revelation to me.
The reason why it was such a revelation was that it shows a "bottom up" view of intelligence as something that can emerge from a few simple rules. It shows how amazing things can come from simple beginnings, how complexity can "bootstrap itself" and hints at the powerful forces at work in evolution. It's a visceral explanation for why our own intelligence did not need to be a "gift" handed down from a super-intelligence greater than us, but could be the result of "emergent complexity" whereby a few simple rules beget increasingly complex systems.
Before seeing Conway's game of life I had been skeptical of the idea that a mere machine could ever achieve something akin to conscious thought. Afterwards, I began to understand how this could come about.
When will climate change start to impact coastal real-estate values?
As this recent piece by the BBC shows, there are a large number of global coastal cities that will have significant climate-change related costs by the year 2050 and New York City is definitely one of them. A key tipping point in people waking up to climate change will come when people start to pay a premium for homes that are NOT in a likely flood zone. Over time, your "hurricane zone" may start to have an impact on real-estate values as the inevitability of climate change really starts to sink in.
It should be added that in the case of places like New York, the term "likely flood zone" may well turn out to have a different meaning that it does in less densely populated areas. This is for the simple reason that we can expect the city to start investing in coastal flood protection sooner rather than later. If the defenses go ahead, then areas of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and adjacent areas of New Jersey that ought to be very high risk for flooding might well be sound real estate investments when compared to that Long Island beach property.
Of course, all of this raises a rather interesting question of the ethics of all of this... Should the tax payer foot the bill to protect the homes of those on lower, more exposed properties? In the case of New York, the answer is probably "yes" as to cede critical areas to the advancing seas would put citywide infrastructure at risk in a way that would ultimately cause all to suffer. Where the city is concerned the adage of "not paying people to make dumb decisions about where to live" does not really hold in the same way that it does in your typical low-lying beach town. There's simply too much at stake for everyone who's invested their resources, lives and businesses into New York.