No. 41: A process to create the future
Predicting the future or creating the future are two different things.
Join us to explore the new world of work and learning in an automated AI world.
First, some numbers:
6% - Residents of the American West are asked to conserve water, but residential water use is only 6% of total water usage. Who’s using the other 94%?
72% - of U.S. adults are worried about a future where robots and computers do many human jobs.
8 of 10 - Medicare Advantage insurers have submitted inflated bills, according to federal audits.
Creating the future by working backwards
Podcast interviewer, Lex Fridman, explores the process of predicting the future with Ray Kurzweil.
Fridman: You’ve talked about how you use lucid dreaming to think, to come up with ideas as a source of creativity. Can you maybe talk through that? You’ve invented a lot of things. You’ve come up with and thought through some very interesting ideas. What advice would you give, or can you speak to the process of thinking, how to think creatively?
Kurzweil: Sometimes I will think through in a dream and try to interpret that, but I think the key issue that I would tell younger people is to put yourself in the position that what you’re trying to create already exists. And then you’re explaining…
Fridman: …how it works?
Kurzweil: Exactly.
Fridman: That’s really interesting. You paint a world that you would like to exist, you think can exist, and reverse engineer that.
Kurzweil: And then you actually imagine you’re giving a speech about how you created this. Well you’d have to then work backwards about how you created it to make it work.
Fridman: That’s brilliant, and that requires some imagination, too, some first principles thinking. You need to visualize that world. That’s really interesting.
Kurzweil: And generally when I talk about things that we’re trying to invent, I would use the present tense as if it already exists. Not just to give myself that confidence, but everybody else that’s working on it. We just have to do all of the steps to make it actual.
Read further in The Enchanted Notebook via Not Boring
Your anti-library reveals your curiosity
For Umberto Eco, a private library is a research tool. The goal of an antilibrary is not to collect books you have read so you can proudly display them on your shelf; instead, it is to curate a highly personal collection of resources around themes you are curious about. Instead of a celebration of everything you know, an antilibrary is an ode to everything you want to explore.
The vastness of the unknown can feel terrifying, which is why many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of accumulating books they haven’t read. But embracing the unknown is what drives discovery. As Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell once said: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
An antilibrary is a reminder of everything we don’t know.
Read Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books via Ness Labs
The demand and shortage of machine learning talent
Talent Capture. Any field as young as deep learning means there is a thin bench of practitioners. The growth in supply of ML talent cannot keep up with demand, and ML has been so good (so profitable) for a few companies they've completely drained the ecosystem. In addition, because these internet companies are large enough to be an ecosystem in and of themselves, the people in them have less natural exposure to outside business problems. I am repeatedly introduced to brilliant researchers who are exercising entirely new muscles when thinking of interesting "downstream tasks" outside of ads, spam & abuse, recommender systems, or benchmarks. Finally, many product leaders assume it will take a large team to ship ML products in addition to the data scientists (data engineering, full-stack, MLOps). However, AI now dominates concentrations for college computer science programs and tools are improving.
Excerpted from “Software 3.0” for Everyone by Sarah Guo
Follow-up: Cohort-based learning, part 2
In Issue No. 40 where we covered the growth of Cohort-Based Learning (CBL), Micro Saas Idea newsletter follows up with 14 more CBL courses in Part 2 of their series.
Till next time…
It’s not data or intuition; it’s data and intuition.
— Ivy Ross, via Build
Book image: Tim Wildsmith