News

Blog — November 7, 2019

Reporting Back from the COSM Conference

Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance. Instead, by inventing new technologies we rewrite the plan of the world. Peter Thiel, Zero to One. And we were off, for a three-day tour of the COSM, rewriting the plan of the world in time-money theory, 5G communications vision, artificial intelligence (AI), and crypto-internet architecture. It was my COSM conference at the Westin hotel in Bellevue, across the water and an ideological gulf from downtown Seattle. The conference began with the incandescence of Peter Thiel, declaring his belief in a fully human future that we choose and endow rather than in a machine singularity that chooses us and shunts us aside. Followed…

Blog — November 4, 2019

Severing the Link: Cutting Ties with China

I want to tell you more about the COSM — our technology summit last month outside Seattle. Among many high points, several Mount Rainier moments stand out a week later. And I’ll get to the TikTok threat soon enough. First, I recall Microsoft’s former Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie’s report of a major AI breakthrough just a month ago in mastering the exquisite complexities of protein folding. This advance opens the way to huge biotech gains in custom-built protein molecules adjusted for particular people with particular needs or diseases. It is the most significant biotech invention since the complementary CRISPR method for editing strands of DNA. Our biotech portfolio companies from Matt Scholz will benefit, as will the entire industry.…

Speakers — October 10, 2019

A Silicon Valley Insider Asks the Awkward Questions

How would you respond if PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel asked you his favorite interview question:“Tell me something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.” Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, speaking at COSM in October, has a history of challenging Valley orthodoxies.

Crypto — August 14, 2019

A Radical Cosmic Reboot Has Commenced

Hello, COSM! This is the name of my coming cosmic tech conference in Seattle, October 23-25. There I will try to explain China to Peter Thiel and crypto to my 101-year-old mother, and maybe in a long shot to some folks who spend time around President Trump. As I am learning this week in Silicon Valley, COSM has now become a bigger deal than even Peter Thiel and my mother. It is the name of the new Internet architecture being developed for Intel corporation by telecom innovator and consultant, Daniel Berninger. And as Berninger puts it, We’re going to have to throw out the cue ball world. This is the frictionless Internet ball we reside on with no time or…

News — October 8, 2018

United States CTO, Michael Kratsios, to Speak at COSM

Michael Kratsios, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Deputy Assistant to the President on Science and Technology Policy has been confirmed to speak at the COSM Technology Summit. Convened by Discovery Institute and chaired by author, economist, and futurist George Gilder, COSM is an intimate, exclusive summit on the converging technologies remaking the world.