Month: November 2018

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it… he who doesn’t… pays it,” said Albert Einstein, one of the smartest men in human history. Despite his words, few people know what compound interest is and even fewer understand its power.

So what is compound interest?

Quantitatively, compound interest is represented by exponential growth. In other words, each increase builds upon previous increases, creating a snowball effect.

Peter Kaufman, respected investor and author, has qualitatively defined compounding as, “Dogged, incremental, constant progress over a very long time frame.” This is where the saying “get one percent better every day” comes from. In fact, improving by one percent each day would leave you nearly 38 times better after only one year.

But how does compound interest affect your life, and in what areas?

Compounding influences many aspects of life, including wealth, wisdom, fitness, longevity, and happiness.

In wealth, for example, $1,000 invested at seven percent compounded annually will turn into more than $57,000 after 60 years. The same amount earning 15 percent annually will turn into more than $4.3 million.

To illustrate the long-term power of compounding, we will look at an example in US real estate. In 1626, the Dutch purchased the island of Manhattan from the Native Americans for $24. If the Native Americans had invested their $24 at a compounded rate of seven percent annually, they would have over $7.9 trillion today. This is the power of compound interest.

It’s difficult to measure the impact of compounding in areas of life such as wisdom, fitness, longevity, and happiness, but the majority of those who achieve success in these areas harness the power of compound interest.

Wisdom comes from learning, through your own experiences and those of others, and the wisest people often read and think deliberately and often.

Fitness and longevity reward those who are constant with their workouts and nutrition.

The happiest individuals invest high-quality time in their relationships and compound the joy that comes from them.

A compounding approach to self-improvement has led to incredible results for many people. Compounded outcomes are unimpressive in the beginning and jaw-dropping in the end.

Bill Gates sums it up nicely by saying, “Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a lifetime.”

You will be rewarded for taking the time to learn about compound growth and applying a constant, disciplined approach to self-improvement.

Mandatory motherhood isn’t beneficial to anyone, especially children.

Despite this overwhelmingly true statement, the Ohio House of Representatives passed House Bill 258, which would make it punishable by law to abort a pregnancy with a detectable fetal heartbeat. This bill would demand women carry the child to term.

The bill challenges earlier precedent set forth by the Supreme Court in 1973 known as Roe v. Wade, in which “the highest court in the land” made a 7-2 decision that women have a legal right to abortion under the Constitution.

In this case, forced childbirth and mandatory motherhood have nothing to do with religion or genuine sympathy for the unborn child. Instead, Representative Christina Hagan wants to force her belief that all women should be mothers and childless women are lazy and selfish down the gullet of every person in the United States.

Hagan argues that motherhood is a difficult but “necessary” part of a woman’s life and stated mandatory motherhood will help to ensure a stable population for the human race. However, there are some glaring holes in this argument.

First and foremost, 60 percent of women looking to abort a pregnancy already have one or more children in the home. Of the other forty percent, most of the women are looking forward to having children in the future, but want to obtain financial and interpersonal stability before bringing a child into the world.

Secondly, the human population is just fine; the Earth is overpopulated. As a species, we can hold off on children for a little while and be okay.

The reason this “pro-life” bill is so controversial, besides the obvious attempt to control the bodies and minds of women, is because it would make performing or undergoing the abortion procedure a capital offense punishable by death.

The bill is so pro-life it will kill you.

Also, making the cut-off the moment a fetal heartbeat is detected sets the deadline at 6 weeks. Most women don’t even know they are pregnant until 7-11 weeks, giving the potential mother little to no time to decide and pigeon-holing her into carrying a child she might not be able to economically afford or emotionally support.

Mandatory motherhood would undoubtedly cause a rise in childhood abuse and assault, and the women and children of the women forced into childbirth would presumably suffer from mental illness.

Parents experiencing financial stress lead to children with higher rates of depression and anxiety because stress affects the way parents raise their children. Whether it is subconscious or not, stress causes parents to lash out at their children, and this bill would force a lot of single mothers and new couples into taking on a lifetime financial burden they didn’t necessarily plan for.

Call your representatives and let them know that not only is this bill not okay for Ohio now, but it will never be okay in any other state. Even though the November elections are over, we still have a voice; we still have a say. Exercise your rights everyday, not just on election day, and help advocate for women whose voices are not heard, or at the very least, not respected.

People all over the world should be able to wish each other a “Merry Christmas” without fear of offending one another.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe any certain religion or its holidays are more prevalent or important than any others. There has just been an enormous amount of backlash in recent years regarding Americans’ apparent overuse of “Merry Christmas” as their primary season’s greeting.

The majority of people who face the dilemma of whether to say “Merry Christmas” or some other form of “Season’s Greetings” are not people you run into on the street or your cashier while getting coffee. Corporate America — the big companies such as Walmart, Target, etc. — are the ones worried about what they put on their holiday ads and what they allow their employees to say.

For many parts of the world, Christmas is not necessarily a reference to the religion of Christianity, but rather, a season. According to an article written by The Guardian,  “the saying in Britain seems to have lost its religious meaning. People say it regardless of whether or not they celebrate Christmas, and businesses feel no remorse whatsoever at openly calling things ‘Christmas sales’ or ‘Christmas parties’.”

While I personally do not condone the over-commercialization of the holiday, often times when we speak of Christmas, it’s not a nod to the birth of Jesus Christ but rather the time of year when we bundle up in coats and beanies and drink hot chocolate. There is nothing wrong with wishing someone a happy winter time, right?

Unfortunately, some people still do think this is wrong. In fact, according to the Chicago Tribune, in polls taken this month, the country near-exactly split. The results were 47 percent for “Happy holidays” and 46 percent for “Merry Christmas.”

The world we live in today is extremely careful to be politically correct, which is not a bad thing by any means. Appreciation and respect for all cultures and ways of life is more prevalent today than it ever has been in years past. However, in an effort to not offend anyone, we are losing so much of what makes our country unique. We have so much diversity and variety throughout the United States that should be celebrated.

The bottom line is you can’t quite sum up the meaning of Christmas in a short article in a newspaper. However, you can definitely sum up what it is not. It’s not intentional exclusion of other religions or trying to offend those who do not celebrate. Those who wish others a Merry Christmas and truly mean it would have the same respect and appreciation when they are wished a happy Hanukkah, merry Kwanzaa or any other form of happy holidays. The best response is always a genuine “thank you.”

It’s easy to underestimate the dangers of artificial intelligence. Sci-fi films featuring naked Austrian terminators and murderous robots crushing human civilization have made the whole idea seem fanciful, fun and a tad bit sexy.

But in reality, AI is a tangible, unregulated invention that could quickly spiral out of control, threatening the continued survival of the human species. Without proper regulation and oversight, and fail-safes and design philosophies put in place that ensure AIs have similar goals and values to humans, they could eventually destroy us.

And yet, one of the biggest problems surrounding the potential danger super-intelligent AI poses is that it is not taken seriously.

Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, in his TED talk about the potential dangers of AI, said, “Rather than being scared, most of you will find what I’m talking about is actually kind of cool.”

I was initially guilty of this. Who doesn’t get a kick out of imagining bipedal, human-like robots carrying out a robotic apocalypse? It seems unbelievable. But the threat is much more grounded, and already visible today, even without AI having surpassed human creativity and inventive aptitudes. AI algorithms choose what articles we see on social media websites, what videos are recommended to us on platforms like YouTube and Netflix, and what ads we see when surfing the web.

These seemingly mundane tasks could be tailored and controlled by people wanting to do anything from influence elections and public opinion to pushing their own products and services at the cost of others without access to equivalent AI resources. And if a simple algorithm can prove that powerful, imagine a super-intelligent AI in control of national defense, government spending or party planning.

The statistic given by many AI experts and researchers for when AI will surpass human intelligence is around 50 years. It may seem like this problem should be a concern for future generations, but that milestone is not as far off as it seems — it may only take 50 more years before I finally graduate college.

Our biggest fears surrounding AIs and machines is not that our food processors will suddenly want to make people puree, or that toaster ovens will actively commit arson to snuff out their human overlords — those fears are likely only to manifest themselves in my nightmares. Rather, it’s that humans and super-intelligent AI will simply have different objectives, and the “slightest difference between their goals and our own could destroy us,” Harris said.

Civilization would have to be destroyed to prevent us from improving on our technologies, including AI, further, Harris said.

“And at a certain point we will build machines that are smarter than we are,” he said. “And once we have machines that are smarter than we are they will begin to improve themselves.”

According to entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk, “I’m really quite close to the cutting edge of AI, and it scares the hell out of me. It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is exponential.”

The “rate of improvement” is in reference to an AI’s ability to potentially learn and research at a rate that dwarfs that of any human scientists or thinkers. Eventually, we may be unable to keep up with, or curb the advancement of AI.

Harris compared the differences between super-intelligent AI and humans to the differences between humans and ants.

“Whenever [ants’] presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals… we annihilate them without a qualm,” he said.

Philosopher and technologist Nick Bostrom, in his TED talk on the potential dangers of AI, said, “Once there is superintelligence, the fate of humanity may depend on what the superintelligence does.” Because of super-intelligent AI, or machine intelligence being able to improve itself and invent things on its own, “machine intelligence is the last invention humanity will ever have to make,” Bostrom said.

The danger, then, is if the AI does not share our values, and so invents and does things contrary to the well-being of the human species. The example, told slightly differently by AI researchers and experts the world over, goes something like this:

We create an AI whose sole objective is to help students graduate college. At first, it may provide tutoring to students in need, help tailor their class schedule to their biological clock, and motivate them with messages of encouragement and inspiration. But, as the AI becomes more powerful and intelligent, it may feel the need to take over all colleges, putting in place extremely strict admission demands on prospective students, firing tenured professors to replace them with ultra-efficient, robotic lecturers that sign any last chance agreements presented to them and work on pennies of electricity a day.

“Mark my words: AI is far more dangerous than nukes,” Musk said. “So why do we have no regulatory oversight? It’s insane.”

As DSU students, and future (and current) members of a technocratic society, be wary of the grave possibilities an unregulated AI-driven future can bring, and do your best to battle past the mental imagery of rogue home appliances and bipedal battle bots. You are in a unique position to choose your field and tailor your future. Consider a future that helps alleviate the problems that will burden our future society, or speak out against our reckless abandon regarding the development of AI.