For a couple of years I was annoyed by the need to unlock my iPhone with the passcode, as I am wearing a mask most of my workday as a beekeeper. Just now I learned that all I need to do banish this small but frequent inconvenience is to train the face recognition software with my mask on.
Here is the procedure: go to Settings > Face ID &Passcode > turn on Face ID with a Mask.
Super simple, yet a great time saver. Makes me think how many other small hindrances and frictions I have in my life which I could remove in such a simple way. Probably not that many, but still an intriguing thought.
How o use AI for your own benefit? Here is one example. I have this practice of writing 10 ideas per day. Since I feel lazy sometimes and would like to get some input from outside my mind, why not use GPT-3 to get some ideas?
Elon Musk just keeps confirming who he is and what he thinks about people. Makes a bad decision, buys a company he really does not want or need, fires half of employees in a brutal manner in a cold email. Is this the vision of future he has, him being an omnipotent being controlling everyone/everything, and throwing away everyone who disagrees? Well that really isn’t a future I like or appreciate. So thank you Musk for explaining that “social media” like Twitter is just another website. There are many, many others. And whoever does not like his approach can easily go somewhere else. I went to Mastodon. Nz
According to Jakob Nielsen who is a major figure in UX : “Only 5% of users (worldwide) are truly empowered by technology and are capable of putting together things and solve their own problem”.
To me, this is mind boggling and shockingly low. This means that there are massive opportunities out there. It is like we are not even at the beginning of the beginnings of the internet.
Interesting sci fy book. Noot only about cool space stuff like interstellar travel, AI, nanotech etc but also about humans, human work, power, dominance and resistance.
Interesting view on AI and humans as both enslaved for some other purpose than their own. Being scared of overdeveloped technology and the sanctity of direct work/manual laboour. About the need to experience things first hand as that is what it takes and what makes us human. It is not good enough just to release wast computer and techno power, humans need to tend gardens with their own hands, work the fields, plants and soil. Really interesting.
Also about how one group of humans clone/grow another group of humans to have them work for them almost llike slaves, not in harsh conditions but with no say about their future. They do have a similar approach to AI despite it being a conscious entity. In the end political struggle, bit of violence and nonviolence helps the groups to find a common interest. Ancient story of human politics, emotions and deeds just with the background of spacefaring and high technology. Interesting and thought provoking.
Mathias Sundin CEO of Warp News Executive Chairman of Warp Institute
Here is my short response
I do not agree. First of all, there is what 8 billion people on the planet? It is like saying one person is more important than billions of others. It is like saying one pc is better than billions of others. Not true. One supercomputer is pointless without the rest of the network. He is important don’t get me wrong. But not an idol, not someone we should all bow to. Just a smart and successful person. There are many, many others. Boring company wont work. There is no self driving ( I hope it will come eventually. Space x is not spreading human consciousness. Neuralink does not work and I think it never will. Interesting idea though.
Space X is a good thing but it rests on the shoulder of giants (US, SSSR etc). He ( Musk), is a libertarian techno dude. Their goal is to be superpowerfull and uber rich. Rest of us should become serfs. No, thank you. Oposes build back better infrastructure for US. Of course, he will live in his little bubble, the rest of us he doesn’t give a dime about. And so on and so fort.And perhaps the worst, not his guilt per se, but if he is such an ubermensch, what are rest of us, useless pawns? I don’t think so. Everyone of us needs to build and invent. One person is nothing, billion inventors can get human civilisation to a Star Trek TNG level civilisation at warp speed.
This is a theme I am extremely interested in. Besides my interest in past, in history, I am also curious about the future, especially the kind of future which will be important to me personally and to people I care about. Future of work is one of such topics where volumes have been written about. OK perhaps not volumes but certainly quite a few books have been written about it. It is interesting how the past intersect with the future through the present of course.
How fast is the world changing? Let me see. My grandmother was born in a mountainous village, never finished school learnt to read on her own. My father was born in ww2 in a refuge among a bloodbath of Yugoslavia in ww2. I lived through the death of Yugoslavia at the end of the 20th century. Now I am in New Zealand, working as a beekeeper and educating my self online through an e learning campus, Open Polytechnic. So much has changed, incredibly much. We went from a village, through industrialization to modern knowledge economy in three generations.
When my grandmother was born there was no electricity. When she passed on, the internet was just starting to grow. When my kids were born the internet was already big. Now it is massive, with all its good and all its bad parts included (conspiracies, anti waxers, extremism, echo chambers). Also we are supposedly on the edge of a new revolution. The AI revolution which according to some will surpass all our inventions taken together.
Well see I guess. One thing I worry is that change is painful. Big change is even more painful. Extreme change might be extremely painful. This conclusion comes from my personal experience of living through the fall of the Berlin wall, eg the end of socialism/communism in former Yugoslavia. It was unbelievably horrible and painful.
Anyways that is a long way from the future of work which I wanted to write a bit about. Actually I will be very short. Short as in a couple of sentences. Actually as the images are better than words here are a couple of images which might or might not better illustrate my view.
First image: the garbage collection. One person in a truck, it takes him/her about 5-10 seconds to pick up the garbage from the bin. In my hometown in Serbia this job is being done by three people and it takes them way longer.
Second image a petrol pump without people. It a self service and there are zero employees at the site. A bit confusing and a kind of scarry. At least a couple of jobs gone, permanently.
Third image a cute but pointless robot on Christchurch airport. He/she/it can match your hand gestures. Sweet but useless.
My conclusion: not worried about robots or software taking my job. I want it/them to take it so that I can do something easier and hopefully more profitable. I just don’t want to be kicked out of mu job and left with nothing to do. In fact I would love to have a robot which does my job while I get my pay. That is the solution.
Or why not say it in real terms? My note taking system.
I would say that this concept might be one of most profound ideas I have stumbled up in a last couple of years. The concept is quite simple: there is an enormous amount of information flowing out there. Books, podcasts, articles, news, videos, how-to’s, ideas you name it. I tend to spend large amount of my time connected to this information flow in one form or the other. But what do you do with all this information? Does it go one way in then the other way out? If so, you are not alone. I do not doubt that some of sticks in your brain and in your life, but how much and of what quality? Your brain is not an information retention machine. It is good at creating new ideas but not so good at idea retention. WIkipedia has it covered if you would like to learn more. There are plenty of ways your for your memories to not form well and plenty of ways for memories to fade out.
Anyways, it is simple to some degree to retain some of that, whit some kind of note taking system. The thing is, don’t just dump your information into a notebook. If you are just a knowledge collector, it wont work that well. You will just have a info storage which you will rarely use and benefit only slightly from if at all. This is exactly how I used Evernote.
There is another way and I believe a better way. Something Tiago Forte talks about as a second brain or in fancy language Exocortex, exo as in external and cortex as in part of the brain. The External brain.
The idea, like most good ideas is really a simple one. Write down all interesting ideas, thoughts, inspirational quotes anything that captures your attention and you think is valuable and write it down. Note: do not copy and past a whole article. The system works on the premise that you capture just one small idea. One idea/concept is one note. It is the essence which you want to keep, organize and revise. This saves time and attention and collects your important insights. From there on, this notes will hold your insights indefinitely. By revising them, connecting them and traveling up and down through them, you will remember, create new ideas, form new and unexpected connections and hopefully become a better thinker.
My current setup is Drafts for capturing ideas and The Archive for storing and organizing them. This is a book often recommended which goes in depth on this system. Note: I did not read the book yet, but it does look like a useful read.
Sasha's blog 