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the inevitable
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209431-the-inevitable
the only constant is change
- technology is always changing, hard to predict what will come from it
- the most important thing that came out from the last century is scientific method which became the process/blueprint to create all these new inventions
- no one cared to buy domains when the internet was in the early stages
- new frontiers will always be there. in 2016, whatever invented will be akin to domains back in the days looking back from 2050
- "Google is an AI company, not a search company" - Brin at a party before its IPO
- when electricity was discovered, the business model is taking a tool and electrify it
- now it's take x and add AI
- cognified - music, laundry, marketing, real estate, nursing, construction, ethics, toys, sports, knitting, etc.
- AI breakthroughs now because we have: cheap parallel computation, big data, and better algorithms
- robots will blend into ours lives and take away old jobs but new jobs will be created
- jobs humans can do but robots can do even better
- jobs humans can't do but robots can
- jobs we didn't know we wanted done
- jobs only humans can do - at first
- internet is like world's largest copy machine and copies will flow freely through the network forever
- humans like to create based on what we know
- initial computers had a "desktop" with "folders" and "files"
- then the web turned it into a "browser" with "pages"
- now we have a "stream" with "channels", adding "tags", "likes", only present, no past or future
- first industry disrupted by this was music
- universal law of economics - the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts
- electrical lighting was new and scarce, the poor burned candles
- electricity became common and almost free, candles became a sign of luxury
- what can't be copied? Trust
- add generative qualities to the free product:
- immediacy
- personalization
- interpretation
- authenticity
- accessibility
- embodiment
- patronage
- discoverability
- 4 stages of flowing:
- fixed / rare
- free / ubiquitous
- flowing / sharing
- opening / becoming
- from people of the word -> people of the book -> people of the screen
- books will be linked like the web (sort of like wikipedia)
- universal library like the library of alexandria
- the screens will become smaller and smaller
- from noun to verb, product to service, ownership to rental
- 5 deep technological trends:
- dematerialization - software eats the world, SaaS
- real-time on demand - rethink the ways to service, uber for X
- decentralization - bitcoin
- platform synergy - apple appstore, software ecosystems
- clouds - dynamically distributed, final step: decentralized access (the cloud)
- digital social-ism - collaborative filtering and promote the best stuff
- 4 steps of social arrangements
- sharing - youtube, pinterest, foursquare, yelp
- cooperation - creative commons, tags
- collaboration - open source softwares and hardwares
- collectivism - openhub.net all work for free, paid by being allowed to stay in the commune
- google, facebook, twitter all benefited hugely from sharing
- bottom up is not enough, top down is needed too
- wikipedia, linux - only a small amount of elites get to make the big decisions
- hive-mind is good enough and scales up nicely
- crowd-funding for anything
- filters exist today: gatekeepers, intermediates, curators, brands, government, our cultural environment, our friends, ourselves
- danger of being rewarded with only what you like, filter bubble - "overfitting"
- suggest stuff that I don't like but would like to like
- large-scale personalization is coming for the masses (pills, clothing)
- in the future, people can copy your filter/recommendation and you'd get monetary value
- too much data, limited attention - the only scarce thing now
- attention is rather cheap (around $3/hr) since you always need to spend it
- google, facebook used data to match ads to users wonderfully with a bidding system
- new model could be - p2p ad creation network, pinterest like ads curation where the curator gets paid in microtransaction per view
- more things are being commoditized and decreasing in value but the experience economy is vibrant
- golden age of new mediums - remix out of old genres
- new genres -> remixed, unbundled, recombined into new genres
- upsetting the great asymmetry in all media - easier to read a book than to write, listen than compose, view than produce
- lucas changed the way movies are made from scenes shot to mock slowly edited bit by bit
- every scene is touched by digital manipulation
- more in common with the way books are written, paintings are painted
- books are references and citations but movies are still lacking that
- how to browse a film the way we browse a book?
- video summary (from porn invention)
- video findability is the holy grail - google is working on that by training AI to recognize photos which makes up a video
- rewindability is another ongoing revolution - shift from orals to books, now happening to movies, music, games and more
- material to intangible brings into question what ownership is
- house can only owned by one person, an idea can only be copied
- laws will be lagging behind but will follow suits to technology
- vr was first started in 1980s but never took off
- timothy leary compared vr to lsd
- vr's two benefits: presence and interaction
- eventually imax's cinema could be projected to your eyes with certain positioning of lighting
- from second life -> minecraft because too much computing power in the former game
- nano cameras to track your eye movement and displayed in vr environment
- eye tracking for auto-annotation if one gets stuck or auto-forward in a video if bored
- "trouble with computer is there's not enough africa in them"
- embed microphones, cameras and sensors to use your whole body as a controller
- eventually if something is not interactive, it's broken
- interaction expansion:
- more senses
- more intimacy
- more immersion
- vr world is under total surveillance, everything needs to be tracked
- identity will be an issue in the future
- your body will be your password - typing, heartbeat, gait, blink, voice - interaction as a password
- "quantified self" meetup where everything imaginable is tracked
- personally medicine maker box is possible with tracking
- evolve our senses with tracking
- track and share your lifestreams
- lifelogging with narrative clip to take photos every few moments
- audio lifelogging is better than visual
- every car manufactured after 2006 has a tiny obd chip mounted to track miles, speed, braking, etc.
- tracking will follow the same way of accessing - any data can be tracked, will be tracked
- ubiquitous tracking is inevitable
- government is tracking but doing it secretly which needs to be transparent
- vanity trumps privacy
- anonymity is like toxic substances. shouldn't be eliminated since it sustains life but should as close to zero as possible
- giga -> tera -> peta -> exa -> zetta -> yotta -> "unknown"
- there is a large magnitude of orders between each
- 54 billion sensors every year by 2020
- wikipedia and ebay shouldn't be possible but did
- criminals will use creative ways to use the new tools
- future will be streams of only the impossible moments
- interwoven between work and play online - a waking dream of sort
- more advanced tools answer questions but more questions pop out from the answer
- we really don't know much about the universe at all
- question <> answer paradigm is shifted - answers are a commodity now
- a good question is worth a million good answers
- quality of a good question:
- not concerned with a correct answer
- cannot be answered immediately
- challenges existing answers
- one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked
- creates new territory of thinking
- reframes its own answers
- is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business
- is a probe, a what-if scenario
- skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious
- cannot be predicted
- will be the sign of an educated mind
- is one that generates many other good questions
- may be the last job a machine will learn to do
- is what humans are for
- a cycle - a century-long process
- global system will not be utopia - will be like real-life with classes
- we are in the beginning right now with the shift from centralized to decentralized
- singularity - a frontier beyond which nothing can be known
- "hard" - super ai learns everything there is to know and take over
- "soft" - a complex interdependence
Last modified 4yr ago