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Great question! Many of us feel that in order to be successful, we just need to have a good idea, work hard, and have a bit of luck.But the world just doesn't work that way. All of these traits are necessary, but not enough to be truly world-class.For example, as of today in 2015, according to Forbes, there are 1,826 billionaires in the entire world. Right now, there are 7.3 billion people in the world. That means that the probability of someone being randomly born anywhere in the world and becoming a billionaire is .000025%.Seeing those numbers, it’s easy to wonder, “Are there some big secrets to becoming extremely successful and impactful that we can copy?”Well, I recently came across one such “secret” from billionaire Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner, and he has an approach to business that I haven’t seen talked about anywhere else, but that has been followed by many world-class entrepreneurs we all admire.Countless books and articles have been written about Warren Buffett. He shares most of how he operates his businesses openly. Surprisingly though, very few have been written about his business partner of over the 40 years, Charlie Munger.Munger has stayed out of the public eye, giving only a small number of public talks, and he’s rarely been covered in the media. At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder’s meetings, he lets Buffett answer the questions, often times commenting, “I have nothing to add.”For two months, I read everything I could get my hands on about, said by, and written by Munger over his 70-year career, and what I found blew me away. His model for success, backed by research, is simple and game-changing. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom on career success.How This One Life Hack From A Self-Made Billionaire Leads To Exceptional SuccessA great deal has been written about how deliberate practice over 10,000 hours within a specific area of expertise is the key to success.While Munger has certainly worked long and hard to become one of the world’s top investors, the signature of his success is different. According to his own account, rather than focusing on investment theory like a laser, he has studied widely and deeply in many fields, including microeconomics, psychology, law, mathematics, biology, and engineering, and applied insights from them to investing.Bill Gates has said of Munger, “He is truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered. From business principles to economic principles to the design of student dormitories to the design of a catamaran he has no equal… Our longest correspondence was a detailed discussion on the mating habits of naked mole rats and what the human species might learn from them.” Munger has, in short, been the ultimate expert-generalist.The Rise Of The Expert-GeneralistThe rival argument to the 10,000 hour rule is the expert-generalist approach. Orit Gadiesh, chairman of Bain & Co, who coined the term, describes the expert-generalist as:“Someone who has the ability and curiosity to master and collect expertise in many different disciplines, industries, skills, capabilities, countries, and topics., etc. He or she can then, without necessarily even realizing it, but often by design:Draw on that palette of diverse knowledge to recognize patterns and connect the dots across multiple areas.Drill deep to focus and perfect the thinking.”The concept is commonly represented by this model of the “T-shaped individual”:While the 10,000 hour rule works well in areas with defined rules that don’t change such as sports, music, and games, the rules of business constantly and fundamentally change. Being an expert-generalist allows individuals to quickly adapt to change. Research shows that they:See the world more accurately and make better predictions of the future, because they are not as susceptible to the biases and assumptions prevailing in any given field or community.Have more breakthrough ideas, because they pull insights that already work in one area into ones where they haven’t been tried yet.Build deeper connections with people who are different than them because of understanding of their perspectives.Build more open networks, which allows them to serve as a connector between people in different groups. According to network science research, having an open network is the #1 Predicator of SuccessCharlie Munger’s Approach To Being An Expert-GeneralistIn connecting the dots across the disciplines, Munger has developed a set of what he calls models, which he uses to assess investment opportunities. In fact, he’s identified over 100 of these models that he uses frequently as of the publication of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. No doubt he continues to develop and perfect them.What are these models exactly?The best way to explain is to take the case of one he uses constantly, which he calls Two-Track analysis. It combines insights from psychology, neuroscience and economics about the nature of human behavior. This model instructs that when analyzing any situation in which decision-making by people is involved, which of course covers every business situation, he must consider two tracks:How they would act if they behaved rationally, according to their true best interests.How they would succumb to the pull of a number of irrational psychological biases that seem to be “programmed” into the human brain. Researchers have identified a host of them, and Munger has incorporated twenty-five of them into his Two-Track analysis model.Another example is classical conditioning developed by Ivan Pavlov in the early 20th century. Pavlov discovered that with the right conditioning, dogs would salivate not just when eating food, but also in anticipation of it when he walked into the laboratory. Munger applies the same logic to business. In his book, he gives the example of how Coca-Cola (one of Berkshire Hathaway’s largest holdings) conditions its customers with the right frequency and type of advertising while using their logo as the trigger.The following is a summary of his rules on being an expert-generalist in his own words, excerpted and condensed from the various talks he’s given:Rule #1: Learn Multiple Models“The first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models.”“It’s like the old saying, ‘To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world.”Rule #2: Learn Multiple Models From Multiple Disciplines“And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.”Rule #3: Focus On Big Ideas From The Big Disciplines (20% Of Models Create 80% Of The Results)“You may say, ‘My God, this is already getting way too tough.’ But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”Rule #4: Use A Checklist To Ensure You’re Factoring in the Right Models“Use a checklist to be sure you get all of the main models.”“How can smart people be wrong? Well, the answer is that they don’t…take all the main models from psychology and use them as a checklist in reviewing outcomes in complex systems.”Rule #5: Create Multiple Checklists And Use The Right One For The Situation“You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies. I can never make it easy by saying, ‘Here are three things.’ You have to drive it yourself to ingrain it in your head for the rest of your life.”The Expert-Generalist Approach In Different FieldsWhether or not you decide to follow Munger’s particular approach, one clear takeaway is the value of gaining a wide breadth of knowledge while also drilling deeply into your area of specialty.Many of the top scientists, business leaders, inventors and artists throughout time have also achieved their breakthrough successes by being an expert-generalist. Albert Einstein was trained in physics, but to formulate his law of general relativity, he taught himself an area of mathematics far removed from his expertise, Riemannian geometry. James Watson and Francis Crick combined discoveries in X-ray diffraction technology, chemistry, evolutionary theory and computation to solve the puzzle of the double helix. Steve Jobs, of course, drew on insights from his study of calligraphy and a rich understanding of design to create a new breed of computing devices.Here is an infographic I created with 25 of the top expert-generalists throughout history:Copyright Michael Simmons 2015. All Rights Reserved.Bain & Company chairman, Orit Gadiesh, attests to the value of being a voracious reader across many domains in her own career, saying:“Being an expert-generalist has helped Bain see things for our clients that others miss, as we provide unique insights from one industry into another. The approach has differentiated Bain from its competitors.”“I bring into my work everything I do; all of my past consulting projects, all of my readings [100+ books a year]. I read novels. I read about physics, mathematics, history, biographies, art. One reason I work well in Germany is that I’ve read a lot of German literature, German philosophers, German history, etc., even though I’m Israeli. They’re great writers. Likewise, I can work in France because I’ve read their literature. I’ve read Japanese literature, Korean literature, English literature, American literature, Israeli literature, and on and on. I bring all of that somehow into my work. And I think that makes me better at what I do. It also makes life more interesting.”What’s more, those who can bridge the gaps between silos are becoming more valuable than ever as the amount of knowledge in the world and its fragmentation continue to accelerate.Being An Expert-Generalist Will Become More And More ValuedThe discipline known as scientometrics is the science of science; it studies the evolution of scientific knowledge. Two of the key findings of this field are:The amount of academic research is doubling every 9 years (left image)The number disciplines is growing exponentially (right image).As disciplines emerge and mature, they develop their own cultures and languages. Each has its own terminology along with its own journals and annual conferences. This specialization has already become so extreme that those who are specialists in one subfield of a discipline often know little to nothing about the work going on in other subfields.Consider the increasing specialization that has led to one important new area of science, epigenetics. Epigenetics is essentially the study of how environmental factors affect how our genes are expressed. When biology emerged as a field of its own out of medicine and natural history in the 19th century, it would have been possible for any biologist to gain a good grasp of the whole field. Today, many geneticists would tell you they don’t have any real understanding of the findings in epigenetics.Given this state of affairs, many professionals have determined the best approach is to go into sub, sub, sub specialties, where they can hope to become one of the best if they follow the 10,000 rule. That can indeed be fruitful. But opportunities also abound for those who instead develop an aptitude for building connections across disciplines.Expert-generalists face far less competition. The more fields you can pull from, the fewer people you’ll find taking the same approach. When it comes to drilling into one domain,the competition is generally fierce. Narrowly specializing also leaves you vulnerable to the ever-more daunting forces of change. Orit Gadiesh offers insight in this regard:“As technology, globalization, geopolitical challenges, and competition accelerate the disruption of business, people are confronted with challenges, customs, and issues they have never experienced before. I find that experts – someone with deep knowledge limited to just one area – often lack the flexibility needed to adapt to change and can be easily flustered or, worse, be completely derailed.”Curiouser and CuriouserThe business world has placed great emphasis on focus, and rightly so. It is a vital ingredient of success. But more emphasis must now be placed on curiosity. Too often, we are so pressed by the day-to-day demands of work that we aren’t making time for exploration, diving into areas entirely outside our range of experience, letting our minds run, and finding inspiration from encountering new ideas with uncertain payoffs.So, when you find yourself pushing back, the inner voice of work overload screaming that you don’t have time to be reading that book you just picked up about the physics of time travel or the novel someone recommended by the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner, remember this: Bill Gates recalls that the longest correspondence he’s had with Charlie Munger wasn’t about an investment, it was about the mating habits.-Charlie Munger’s deepest secret to success wasn’t his investment strategy, his relationship with Warren Buffett, or even how he held meetings. It was in how he gained unique insights as a result of being a generalist.Have you worked on becoming an expert generalist? Or are you considering taking that step forward? I’d love to hear your experiences on the topic!Comment below!P.S., as a resource for this answer, I put together a 27-page report you can download at no cost. It summarizes the psychological biases that Munger has identified throughout his 70-year career. I put it together because I didn’t see another summary anywhere else that was easy to comprehend or apply.--This Quora answer is a modified version of an article I originally wrote for Forbes.

The simple version of this story is that Saudi Arabia had a curious over-reaction to a pair of very Canadian tweets.The more interesting story concerns the underlying forces driving actions on both sides, and what they tell us about modern geopolitics.As a note for what follows, I’m by no means a foreign policy expert. It just so happens that I’ve been reading quite a bit on modern Saudi Arabia of late. Little of what I have to say is original analysis. I’m just condensing what I’ve learned so as to give a better sense of context. Lastly, I’m Canadian. While not quite a homer, I do identify with my country’s primary values.That in mind, let’s start at the beginning…Enter, Player OneThe first thing to understand is that Saudi Arabia is, for all intents and purposes, under fresh leadership. Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) was appointed Crown Prince last summer. While his father, King Salman, is still ruler by title, the 82 year-old is widely believed to be suffering from dementia. Most decisions regarding the kingdom’s military and economic assets now flow through MbS.That the crown has fallen to MbS is a matter of some surprise and controversy. From the time that Abdulaziz (aka Ibn Saud) founded Saudi Arabia as a formal kingdom in 1932, all six of its subsequent monarchs have been his sons. For obvious reasons, power had to pass down to the next generation eventually. But that MbS would be this inheritor was only recently considered even plausible. Abdulaziz had 45 sons, who bore him some 1,000 grandchildren. MbS is the 7th son of Abdulaziz’s 25th son, and is even now just 32 years old.But what MbS lacked in age and pedigree, he more than made up for in cleverness and ambition. Of course, said qualities can be double-edged swords. Not a few outside observers worried that anyone with the required wherewithal to make a leap that size would, by logical extension, be someone other than a modern western democrat. Many analysts began referring to the situation as “Saudi Arabia’s Game of Thrones”. And as MbS began his rise in late 2015, Germany’s foreign intelligence service felt concerned enough to break rank and release a memo that included the following commentary:Saudi Arabia wants to prove that it is ready to take unprecedented military, financial and political risks in order not to fall into a disadvantageous position in the region. […]The concentration of economic and foreign policy power on Mohammed bin Salman contains the latent danger that, in an attempt to establish himself in the royal succession while his father is still alive, he could overreach with expensive measures or reforms that would unsettle other members of the royal family and the population.As suspected, some of those family members were indeed unsettled. Not being blind to this, MbS did what those with designs on crowns have always done: he played the game to win. While it’s impossible to say from the outside exactly what happened, there’s a deep reading list suggesting that it involved a non-trivial number of seizures, arrests, disappearances, and sudden demotions.What’s important from all this in relation to our current subject is that, while MbS has won the crown, he’s far from having secured his rule. Palace intrigue aside, he has the public to reckon with. As the old saying goes, “dictators ride atop the backs of tigers they dare not dismount”. Even if MbS would prefer to be something more benevolent than a dictator, he’s inherited a dictator’s problem all the same. Saudi Arabia is a very young (50% under 25), very male (1.22 males per female in the 15-64 bracket), very ideological country — one that happens to be facing a future where oil will not always be gold and men will not always rule.Put another way, if he indeed has a progressive agenda, he needs to figure out how to push it within a kingdom that’s been fed on regressive norms and narratives for a very long time.This is no easy thing.Entering From Stage LeftAs it concerns Canada’s involvement in this brouhaha, two figures are important:Justin Trudeau: the man elected as Prime Minister of Canada largely on account of his family legacy (very pro rights) and his own stances on social justice issues (very pro rights).Chrystia Freeland: the woman selected as Trudeau’s Minister of Foreign Affairs largely on account of her negotiating chops and human rights leadership.As you may have spotted as the running theme, both are pretty passionate about humans rights, especially as it concerns women. And while I don’t think it at all likely that either embellish said interests for political points, these are platforms you need to double down on if you want to maintain credibility — especially when eyes are watching.And, as it happens, eyes are watching. Canada’s intensifying bid for global moral leadership aside, we’ve also been gearing up to host the 5th almost-annual conference of the Equal Rights Coalition. This means next to zero wiggle room for soft stances on obvious human rights issues. When they arise, Trudeau and Freeland are expected to speak, and to speak firmly.Much of what else I could say about them is best summed by Freeland’s own comments (from her acceptance speech for Foreign Policy’s 2018 Diplomat of the Year):Since the end of the Second World War, we have built a system that championed freedom and democracy and prevented regional conflicts from turning into total war. Canada for one is going to stand up in defense of that system. We will not escalate and we will not back down.Triggering the SnowpeopleAs part of his “Vision 2030” for the kingdom, MbS promised a certain amount of liberalization on gender issues. Unsurprisingly, his execution of said promises has been something other than clean and straight-forward. While Saudi Arabia did finally lift their ban on women’s right to drive on June 24th, they also locked up no fewer than eight activists a month earlier, all of whom had been campaigning on that specific issue (along with ending the enduring indignity of mandatory male guardianship).Those original detentions back in May had led Freeland’s office to release the following statement at the time, which was subsequently re-tweeted by Canada’s embassy in the KSA (i.e., Kingdom of Saudi Arabia).Canada is deeply concerned about arrests of several activists in #SaudiArabia. It is crucial that the rule of law and #humanrights be respected. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.— Foreign Policy CAN (@CanadaFP) May 23, 2018Bringing things to the current timeline, those activists still haven’t been released. It isn’t actually clear that all have even been formally charged. It’s believed that they’re likely to appear before a counter-terror court at some point, where sentencing tends to be severe. Then, compounding all this, two more female activists were arrested in late July.Excerpting from an August 1st Amnesty International press release:Samar Badawi and Nassima al-Sada were detained earlier this week, Amnesty International has learned. They have both been repeatedly targeted, harassed, and placed under travel bans for their human rights activism.Samar Badawi has been repeatedly targeted and interrogated by the Saudi Arabian authorities for her human rights activism. In 2014, she was subjected to a travel ban and was also arrested in 2016 for her human rights work. She is the sister of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for setting up a website for public debate.Nassima al-Sada has campaigned for civil and political rights, women’s rights and the rights of the Shi’a minority in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia for many years. She stood in municipal elections in 2015, but was banned from participating. She has also campaigned for the right of women to drive and for the end of the repressive male guardianship system. Nassima al-Sada was also subject to a travel ban prior to her detention.[Side-note: I’ve heard it suggested that Raif Badawi didn’t actually receive the 1,000 lashes — just an initial set of 50, for the public’s sake.]So, yeah, as news of this travelled, Canada didn’t take it super well.Very alarmed to learn that Samar Badawi, Raif Badawi’s sister, has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Canada stands together with the Badawi family in this difficult time, and we continue to strongly call for the release of both Raif and Samar Badawi.— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) August 2, 2018(As a point of context, “Canada stands together with the Badawi family” is a somewhat literal statement. Raif Badawi’s wife and children have been living in Canada for years, having fled Saudi Arabia after a fatwa was issued against him. They were made citizens last month, on Canada Day.)Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in #SaudiArabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful #humanrights activists.— Foreign Policy CAN (@CanadaFP) August 3, 2018This last message was then re-tweeted by the Canada’s KSA Embassy, who also posted a direct translation in Arabic two days later:تشعر كندا بقلق بالغ إزاء الاعتقالات الإضافية لنشطاء المجتمع المدني ونشطاء حقوق المرأة في #السعودية ، بما في ذلك #سمر_بدوي . نحث السلطات السعودية على الإفراج عنهم فوراً وعن جميع النشطاء السلميين الآخرين في مجال #حقوق_الانسان.— Canada in KSA (@CanEmbSA) August 5, 2018How outrageous and unprecedented was this language? So much so that it had never been heard from the mouth of Canadian diplomat since — well, like a month earlier, in relation to the same subject, using almost identical words.Canada is deeply concerned about #Iran’s recent arrests of #humanrights activists. We strongly condemn the arrest of prominent women’s rights defender Nasrin Sotoudeh and call for her immediate release.— Foreign Policy CAN (@CanadaFP) June 15, 2018Of course, that was different, because, um, it was about Iran and not the Saudis? And it isn’t like the latter are going to get offended about foreign intervention or moral lectures directed towards the Iranians. Hell, the KSA has entire comm teams dedicated to exactly that.A Reasonable, Totally Not Disproportionate ResponseSo, how did the Saudis take this effrontery from the meddling Canadians?Well, I’ll let them speak for themselves…#Statement | We have been briefed by what the #Canadian foreign minister and the Canadian embassy to the #Kingdom released on what they named "civil society rights activists", and we affirm that this negative and surprising attitude is an incorrect claim.— Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) August 5, 2018#Statement | The Canadian position is a grave and unacceptable violation of the Kingdom's laws and procedures. In addition to violate the Kingdom's judiciary and a breach of the principle of #sovereignty.— Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) August 5, 2018#Statement | Using the phrase (immediately release) in the Canadian statement is very unfortunate, reprehensible, and unacceptable in relations between States.— Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) August 5, 2018#Statement | The KSA announces the summoning of the ambassador of the Kingdom of #SaudiArabia to #Canada.— Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) August 5, 2018(Just a quick interjection to question the logic of “we are allowed to interfere in Canada’s internal affairs.” Does that mean that they’re going to act as some external watchdog and send tweets about the moral failures of the Canadian government? If so, great! More sunlight is always welcome. But I wonder if that’s what they really mean by “interference”…)Statement | The KSA announces the freezing of all new trade and investment transactions between the KSA and Canada. The KSA reserves its right to take further action.— Foreign Ministry 🇸🇦 (@KSAmofaEN) August 5, 2018Per Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, “further action” seems to involve the cancelling of international flights to Toronto and the re-routing of some 7-8,000 students (plus accompanying family members) to schools in more compliant countries (like the US and UK, apparently).But that wasn’t quite all, either.Now deleted, here a screenshot of the threatening Saudi "infographic" featuring an airliner headed for the Toronto skyline. pic.twitter.com/LrkCLxxjFk— Tobias Schneider (@tobiaschneider) August 6, 2018The quasi-official Twitter account that posted said picture later issued an apology, suggesting that this wasn’t in fact a 9/11 callback, but simply an illustration of the Canadian ambassador returning to Canada (even though our national government is not, in fact, housed in Toronto). The page was then removed from the internet entirely.What’s It All About, Alfie?As to this Saudi over-response, we have two possible interpretations:MbS would prefer to free said activists, but hasn’t figured out how to do so without risking his still-tenuous grasp on power. He has thus reluctantly encouraged this over-reaction as a sad necessity.MbS wants them in lockup, and his government’s response is a clear signal that true liberalism is not immediately forthcoming.If the first were true, Freeland’s comments may have forced MbS into a corner. Even with his levels of gained control, letting perceived agitators walk free would be an exceptionally bold step. Striking back fast and hard at Canada could be his way of preemptively warning other western democracies (whose relationships are more important to Saudi interests) that they need to let progress happen on his timetable.I’m in no place to judge how reasonable this argument might be. All I can say with confidence is that while Canada is a relatively easy country to scapegoat in this sense (marginal mutual trade + existing reputation for liberalism), Canada’s government is about the least likely to flinch in response, much less capitulate. They have their political pressures too, which are unrelenting on this issue.As Trump is learning the hard way, Trudeau and Freeland are the opposites of easy lunches. Criticize them on other dimensions how you will, but getting them to back down on core values is both antithetical to their political fortunes and incompatible with everything we know about them as people. These are the mild-mannered folks who would never start a fight, but who somewhat relish the idea of someone bringing them a just opportunity to make a stand.In Freeland’s own words:We will not escalate and we will not back downSummaryIf interpretation #1 is true, it’s still to Canada’s gain. Sure, the lost tuition fees and trade (mostly KSA oil exports and Canadian arms manufacturing) will hurt, but not enough to serve as meaningful leverage. Trudeau and Freeland will ride this issue into an election year, and to Canada’s advancement on the global stage. They’ll have gained the high ground that other major nations can only match by making much larger sacrifices.If argument #2 is true, little changes. Team Canada would do the same thing, likely with even more conviction. (If MbS is indeed taking these measures against his own desires, that knowledge will reveal itself to Freeland at some point, who will presumably de-escalate somewhat without retracting.)For the good of the world, I do hope it’s #1. I want to believe that MbS is reaching out via backchannels to explain, and that Canada will respond with a balance of wisdom and integrity. That said, the one thing I can’t reconcile to that narrative is the removal of all those students. That’s an extraordinary step. Either MbS feels that those women ought to be in jail, that his pride is this important, or that his hold on power is so fragile that the only tool he has for mediating these clashes of values is a cannon.None of those options portend well in the short-term.EDIT #1: As pointed out by Viola Yee, the original estimates re: numbers of Saudi students in Canada (15,000-16,000) were likely incorrect. The CBC now puts them at 8,300. Inside Higher Ed suggests 7,000 or so. None are quite sure how many attendant family members may also be affected.EDIT #2: The New Yorker had this take:M.B.S.’s motive may also be part of a strategy to challenge nations that advocate a U.N.-led inquiry into Saudi abuses in Yemen, including air strikes that killed civilians. “Timing of Saudi crown prince’s lashing out at Canada for protesting his repression suggests his real aim is to dissuade governments next month from continuing the UN investigation of Saudi-led war crimes in Yemen,” Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted, on Tuesday. “Time to redouble support for the UN probe.” The U.N. General Assembly, attended by dozens of heads of state, opens next month in New York.I left the Yemeni conflict out of what I said above, as I don’t see it as a black-and-white situation. That said, reports of war crimes and human rights abuses therein have been recurrent. Even so, I lack the expertise to judge any of it, so I’m appending this with a bit of misgiving. Caveat emptor.EDIT #3: The CBC did a nice round-up of Canada’s past efforts to work with the Saudis to secure Raif Badawi​’s release. This extended back to the Harper government, and has long been firm in language.[…] in April 2015, the Canadian House of Commons had passed unanimously a motion stating "that the House denounce(s) the reprehensible treatment of Raif Badawi, and call(s) on the government of Saudi Arabia to cease his punishment and release him from prison immediately."The only real argument I can see here that would legitimize the Saudi response is that Canada’s KSA embassy went as far as tweeting their “immediately release them” line into Arabic, where some say it carried a more barking tone. That said, this feels like a soft argument for two reasons:Virtually everyone in higher positions within the KSA can read English. Is the translation really that different?This was hardly the first time that said embassy had translated something into Arabic that would have been considered offensive.https://t.co/dFDMta7emeبمناسبة اليوم العالمي للمرأة #IWD2018 عشرة أسباب لماذا نحتاج إلى سياسة خارجية نسوية. هذه آراء عشرة من كبار المفكرين و السياسيين و الصحفيين و النشطاء و ما تعنيه لهم السياسة الخارجية النسوية #MyFeminism #humanrights #Canada @CanadaFP— Canada in KSA (@CanEmbSA) March 8, 2018This tweet linked to an article that included this line:There is a clear conflict between Sweden’s strong standpoint for women’s rights and democracy and its weapons export to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Thailand.Calling attention to something like this in Arabic seems higher on the offense scale that calling for the release of human rights advocates.

I suspect, if the event occurs in 2029 (as Kurzweil predicts), it will most likely be Facebook, or Russian/Chinese state social monopolies. I see A.I. to be monopolistic in nature.Also how do we define AGI?In many narrow fields of specialism, AI is already superhuman, and is able in many cases to generalise and transfer learning across specific tasks sets… However I suspect you’re referring to true AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. I see the breadth of AI’s generalisability widening such that it’s less noticeable, and one day we wake up to discover we’ve already surpassed the AGI frontier.Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns which has been provably accurate, at least within the required tolerances of my assertion, and he places the development of super-human general artificial intelligence around 2029.What comes after that is unknown, but I also believe the following line in film, The Matrix, spoken by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to be an accurate account of reality:-“We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.”-Morpheus (The Matrix, 1999)The rational for this belief is based upon more than just an interest in Hollywood sci-fi, but rather, it stems from two decades of my career in Search Engine Optimisation.As an SEO practitioner, I have been required to study Google closely. This consequentially led me, more recently to the intense study of A.I. for the last five years. Thankfully, all with the help and guidance of my good friend, Dr Suresh Manandhar, Head of A.I. Research, The University of York.Little had I considered what was developing in Europe and their new monopoly Commissioner Auntie Trust, aka Margrethe Vestager.It started as an open letter only to become this ongoing piece of a flow of consciousness, which i hope one day to edit into something singularly coherent. (Editorial assistance would be appreciate - [email protected])Margrethe Knows! as do her colleagues, who realise what the implications are.Morpheus’ reference to a point in time…“some point in the early 21st century,”If we were to consider super-human capabilities in the narrow sense, many of the examples we’re shown involve games. While Go and AlphaGo’s defeat of Lee Sedol was the most publicised AI landmark in 2016. There are a number of developments in A.I. during 2017 that deeply concern me. Moreover, the fact that the worrying capabilities which I’ll detail later, can only be implemented by very few organisations, organisations who themselves are monopolistic.In my opinion, the Morpheus Moment, as I’ll refer to it from here, happened sometime between August 25th 2017 to September 1st 2017. Let me explain where I’m coming from with this claim.A.I. Monopoly Out-Manoeuvres E.U. CommissionOn August 25th 2017, it was the conclusion of our team, having a month earlier been selected from the applicants to hold the required credentials and experience to participate in an EU Government tender.Our team was invited by the European Commission to tender for the role of Monitoring Trustee in the Monopoly Case against Google, to ensure their compliance following The Commission’s ruling and the accompanying fine of $2.4 Billion Euro (Case search - Competition - European Commission).On the 25th August, we concluded, that despite having the capability and resources to measure algorithmic bias within Google’s organic search, the task presented in this next phase of the tender to be impossible and unworkable, based upon the parameters detailed in: COMMITMENTS IN Case COMP/C-3/39.740 - Foundem and others.It was concluded that the task to be impossible for the following reasons.Neural Networks cannot be audited in any kind of traditional sense which may previously been applicable. One of the members of my team, a former Economics Advisor to the European Union - had a lot of experience in regulatory cases in which he had, on occasion, participated in dawn raids on Telcos in order to obtain forensic evidence. However in Google’s case, this option was no longer available, due to the Ranking Algorithm (RankBrain) to have been announced in October 2015 see Bloomberg Video: Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI MachinesInterpretability…. there’s not enough brains one the planet to look at it”-Yann LeCunnFormer Head of AI Research - Facebook presents the mechanics of this none negotiable handicap.The Great AI Debate - NIPS2017 - Yann LeCunISPs no longer have visibility - what had previously been a trivial method for regulators was no longer an option… The option to subpoena data from the IPSs was closed-off since Google had incentivised web-masters, as of on August 6th 2014, to switch to using secure HTTPs, in exchange for (at first) a modest boost in rankings (see HTTPS as a ranking signal) this ranking advantage was gradually increased to allow slow movers to transition without a dramatic impact on Search Engine result quality. The secure connection removed the opportunity for ISP level analysis of the ranking algorithm and detection of any anomalous artificial bias (ie Google favouring it’s own interests).Statistical machine learning - the third option, which trivial within Organic Search, is an approach which I have further developed over the last 5 years, having formulated the approach over the previous decade. This is based upon the variable position of web pages within a given search result set before and after the application of an algorithm update and uses probabilistic machine learning to identify the principal components distilled from data related to two groups:-Group A - Those pages which benefitted from the update.Group B - Those pages which suffered from the update.The algorithm update itself being easily identifiable as a peak in standard deviation across a result set or collection of result sets in a given country (or regional index - ie Google.co.uk, Google.com.au, Google.jp) - However: in this shopping case, the parameters of the analysis (detailed in COMMITMENTS IN Case COMP/C-3/39.740 - Foundem and others.) required the analysis to be performed on shopping results, for retail in general - rather than a subset of retail, such as mens shoes) in 11 countries, 13 languages. Since the team had access to some of the largest retail Adwords accounts from which to derive a regression model of the quality score derivation.The technology we developed for this purpose is designed to scale without limits, but the problem arises in how shopping search works- Multi-variant testing of landing pages- Split testing of ad creatives- day-parting strategies- massive initial search space of queries in retail… all of which balloon the numbers into a scale which would require bypassing Google reCaptcha v2, with additional unknown factor of what reCaptcha v3 might look like.Other additional complexities include:-- Personalised results and simulating logged in state- mobile vs desktop results- voice search…NOTE: most importantly a probabilistic model was required to return results with a minimum 90% confidence, in order for it to be viable, admissible evidence.I cover more detail in the book [edited for trademark reasons from “Google: The Penultimate Monopoly” to “Search: The Penultimate Monopoly” ] which I will have the PDF first edition finished by March this year.Email me for a preview copy - mail me [email protected] and I’ll ensure you get one (use PreviewBook in the subject line.We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AIThe team and I were disheartened with the non-result, having got so far as to qualify for the tender in the first place.The following month, our economics expert, based in Brussels, having attended the meetings related to the case at The Commission informed me that he had learned at the most recent meeting the following revelation:-None of the teams were able to make the numbers work.Here we have the first case of a Government agency being unable to ensure a monopoly ruling was being observed.Additionally, the ruling it’s self was made against an AI monopoly, which was being mistakenly considered to be simply a Search monopoly.This case was more important that many give credit. Throughout each technological evolution there always comes an associated monopoly case.IBM: 1969-1982 (U.S. v. International Business Machines Corp.).The thirteen-year legal battle was finally dropped by Reagan's Justice Department. The market share had declined from 70% to 62%.Microsoft: 1998-2001 (Final Judgment | ATR | Department of Justice). Overturned at appeal, with Microsoft settling to play nicely with other PC manufacturers.Google: 2015-2017 (European Commission - PRESS RELEASES - Press release - Antitrust: Commission fines Google €2.42 billion for abusing dominance as search engine by giving illegal advantage to own comparison shopping service). Google, the week following the final application for the Monitoring Trustee tender, announced an appeal against the 2.4 Billion Euro fine.As we see, the ruling against Google was the first tech monopoly case to result in such an outcome with credit to the fantastic work of Margrethe Vestager - European Commission.However this case, originally dates back to 2006 (http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem...) - to put that in context…The Apple iPhone had not been released to the public in 2006.Back in 2006 - Google was a search engine, but I’d argue that today, while the vast majority of Google’s revenues have mostly and are still derived from Search Adversiting (Google: ad revenue 2001-2016 | Statista )Google in 2017 is the world’s first AI monopolyGoogle’s monopolistic AI capabilities are enabled by the combination of near limitless computational capacity and instant access to the world’s information.I’ll explain the significance of this next part in more detail later. For now it’s important to remain mindful that Google’s actual compute capabilities remain unknown.Nowhere is it published how many servers and processors are available at any given time, moreover we are unable to estimate this public company’s aggregate compute capability based on Google’s financial records, for example by analysing their energy consumption.Google own the energy grid which supply many of their data-centres and good luck finding any information on Google Energy LLC. Google (as we now all take for granted) has aggregated, sorted and filtered the worlds public information and since Gmail started offering massive amounts of free storage, this now extends to much of the world’s private information.Enabling Viable Artificial IntelligenceThe two most important requirements which are driving AI advancements are the availability of data and compute. Which position Google as an AI superpower.Currently Google is an AI monopoly. The algorithms themselves, though they are now evolving rapidly, remain relatively unchanged since the 80s, and even earlier.The core innovations which led to neural network based AI, including Deep Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning and for the most part this also applies to statistical methods such as:-Support Vector MachinesRandom ForestsK-Nearest-NeighboursBig-O Notation Should Be Renamed To set(realismIndex(x)realismIndex(x))This computational challenge which relates the size of the data to the number of calculations required to perform a given function upon it is formalised in Big O notation.The following PDF shows how that applies specifically to a selection of machine learning algorithms: https://eferm.com/wp-content/upl...In summary: machine learning algorithms require increasing computational power per data-point and this requirement grows non-linearly as the volume of data-points increases.In order to solve the search engine scaling problem, Google had to solve many problems, which today enable many of the developments in AI. It is not unreasonable to assert that it was the field of Search that led to the success of A.I. - since Search and AI share a superset of technological problems, which have (in many cases) been solved.Google’s Jeff Dean[1], solved many of the problems related to indexing the world’s information, in his pioneering work which includes, Google’s Distributed File System, Map-Reduce and Bigtable and now leads the Google Brain project, Jeff continued much of the earlier work of Geoffrey Hinton, currently Professor of Computer Science University of Toronto, also currently he holds a position as and Engineering Fellow at Google. Hinton, co-invented the Boltzmann machine (Boltzmann machine - Wikipedia) in 1985 and is recognised as a one of the pioneers neural networks. Jeff, having worked with Google since mid 1999 designed and implemented many of the innovations at Google which include portions of the Advertising system but more relevant to our challenge as that he designed and implemented:MapReduce (https://static.googleusercontent...), a methodology whereby distributed computation may carried out over multiple machines in parallel.Bigtable (https://static.googleusercontent...), a distributed storage system for structured data designed to run on cheap commodity hardware connected via a network.In 2011, Jeff and a small team of engineers invented DistBelief. The following quote is taken from the original paper ["Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks"](https://static.googleusercontent...) which Jeff co-authored with his colleagues. Utilizing the tens of thousands of CPU cores developed a parallelizable methodology to an object recognition task with [16 million images and 21k categories](see Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks)."In this paper, we consider the problem of training a deep network with billions of parameters using tens of thousands of CPU cores. We have developed a software framework called DistBelief that can utilize computing clusters with thousands of machines to train large models."In 2011, he led a team to generalising DistBelief into a library built upon a Python interface however despite Python being a relatively slow language, it is popular among developers, due to being relatively easy to learn. It currently is ranked fifth (at the time of writing) on the Tiobe Index, the software development hit parade for language popularity and adoption and time and as with all successful v1.0 software projects, v2.0 delivered dramatic improvements, Jeff Dean along with a team of scientists worked on a refactor of DistBelief, which became TensorFlow. (TensorFlow)Democratised Artificial IntelligenceDespite Python being a relatively slow language due to it's dynamic type system, TensorFlow remains unaffected by this performance limitation. TensorFlow's lower level architecture is based on the performant, compiled, statically-typed, C programming language.Further more, this low latency, C based interface merely bridges the gap between the popular, high-level, almost human readable Python language, and real work horses: CPUs and GPUs and more recently TPUs. This is where the computationally expensive operations take place.These innovations, along with unknown computation, near limitless budgets and the worlds data are very attractive the Artificial Intelligence researchers, especially since some working results seem to simply pop into existence then the number of iterations of an algorithm are passed. In late 1980s the algorithm for a working neural network existed, but when tested and left running for a week, yielded a non-result, if they had left the compute running for a year back in the late 80s, it would have been provably correct. This lack of available compute along with limited availability of training data led to a period known as The AI Winter and quite possibly the demise of programming languages like Lisp and Prolog, in favour of the performant C and later C++, which acted as a more favourable interface to the faster and faster hardware, CPU performance was, at the time, doubling in speed every 18 months, but has since reached it’s physical limit.Monopolising Intellectual ResourceThe following shows Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)’s 2017 accepted papers grouped by affiliation and filtered for industrial labs - note: this is misrepresentative as Russia’s Yandex and China’s Baidu appear to only present a token offering.Additionally, a point to note is that China and Russia’s search engines do not publish the names, positions and roles of their respective A.I. researchers, unlike the Major Western Industrial A.I. Labs, Google, Facebook and Microsoft for example.I’ve also aggregated DeepMind with the rest of Google’s divisions, but left D-Wave System separate due to it largely being akin to The Moon Mission, ie Vapourware. ;)A.I. Research Labs & Intellectual ResourcesI also took some time to scrape Research at Google , Facebook Research and Microsoft Research and constructed these charts which show the appropriation of intellectual resource by field of research (Oct 2017) and intend to show the migratory patterns of the named researched in the book I’m working on, Google: The Penultimate Monopoly.Microsoft Research, as we can see, and as expected, their research resources are mostly focusses on AI, which is more than double that of the next most heavily resourced field of research.Facebook Research, the most heavily resourced field being Human Computer Interaction and UX, perhaps semantics since Facebook distinguish a difference between Applied Machine Learning, Facebook AI Research, as well as Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing - there was actually only one guy listed under Artificial Intelligence, which begs the question, where are the boundaries.Google Research, both of the above research labs are dwarfed by the raw intellectual resources of Google, these include Geoff Hinton, the Godfather (some would say, of deep learning - though Geoff himself puts much of the credit with his predecessors), though we also know this is a moving target as we know there is currently a war taking place in the acquisition of this talent.The issues which concern me … I’ll add here shortly.Europes still considers Search monopolise over AI monopolies. The Singularity Von Neumann first coinedArguably it happened, the moment the Rosenblatt’s Perceptron was first verified as a provably valid, biologically inspired first attempt at a neural network.The New York Times wrote:The Navy last week demonstrated the embryo of an electronic computer named the Perceptron which, when completed in about a year, is expected to be the first non-living mechanism able to "perceive, recognise and identify its surroundings without human training or control."(source: Electronic 'Brain' Teaches Itself, New York Times, 1958)Perceptron algorithm wired and operational.History of the PerceptronConsider the possibility of the question…Is DNA a self-reproducing nanotechnology, described by John Von Neumann in “The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata”?It’s now clear we have passed the point of being able to hold an objective reality consistant with anything in history.DeepMind's Richard Sutton - The Long-term of AI & Temporal-Difference Learning"This is a really special time, and we can look forward now to doing an amazing thing which is maybe understanding the way that the mind works, this is a monumental event, not just this century, but for thousands of years, maybe in the history of the earth, when intelligent beings, animals, things that can replicate theselves finally come to understand the way they work well enough to, by design create intelligence... and so the big thing that's going to happen is that we're going to come to understand how the mind works, how intelligence can work, how it does work and just the fact of our understanding it, is going to change the world... It's a big event, and we should keep this in mind." - Professor Richard Sutton University of Alberta (July 2017)Footnotes[1] Jeffrey Dean - Research at Google