SPEED OF CREATION

March 26th, 2021

One way to define technology is the discrepancy between creation and imagination.  More specifically the speed at which each comes to fruition.  

Good ideas are not rare.  In fact, they are as common as coffee.  Regular and unremarkable people have good ideas everyday.  But execution is everything.  Imagination is the human superpower, our birthright to the future - one that might be spectacular, strange, but at the very least, very different.

But the speed at which that brilliant or terrible new future arrives is not dependant on imagination, it has everything to do with execution, with execution, and innovation and technology is what speeds up that process.

It was only a few years ago that an entire room of draftsmen were required to produce schematics for a three dimensional machine.  Now that sort of thing can be generated at comparatively warp speed by a single individual who knows a cad program inside and out.  Proficiency in the program isn’t even necessary.  A few years ago I had an idea for an item that I could knock together in a 3d printer and had the thing materialized in a cad program I’d never used within about twenty minutes.  The longest part of the process from idea to using the actual product was the shipping time required to receive the 3D printer.

This is what technology does - it extends our ability to manifest imagination faster and faster.  No code platforms make the same promise.  Even a phenomenally talented coder requires a good deal of time to throw together a complex app, but even this will get faster  as time goes on and technology invents a better ratchet to tune itself with.

While predicting the future is a finicky business, one thing we can be fairly confident about is that our abilities will increase, and they will grow faster with time, meaning that even if we do head down a dark pathway, our ability to pivot toward something radically better, much faster will come with that trembling territory.

MODES OF SELF

March 25th, 2021

Have you ever had an argument with yourself?  Surely we’ve all been in this position.  But, if it’s possible, then, who exactly is the other person?

We talk about multiple personality disorder, but doesn’t the concept also imply there is such a thing as multiple personalities that are properly ordered?

Each of us have the experience of being a different version of ourselves in different circumstances, be it the company of an old friend who brings out a childhood version of our personality, or a boss from work who evokes a more professional one.  The most likely interpretation is like a tint.  Each ‘version’ isn’t really a different entity, but simply viewed or expressed through a slightly different flavor or tint.    However, what’s the likelihood we are just comforting ourselves with a metaphor that reassures our sense that there is one immutable ‘person’ at the core of it all?  What is there really are substantially different people bundled up in who we are?

If our versions really were just subtle variations on the same thing, would we really be able to surprise ourselves?k. Who exactly is getting surprised?  And doesn’t a surprise imply that there. Was something hidden?  Something unavailable?  This implies a pretty significant division between who we are consciously, and who we find ourselves to be through action.  

Another way to approach this shaky sense of self is to ask what percentage of your body is aware of you as the person identified by your name.  Are the skin cells on the back of your hand aware of the person you think yourself to be?  Most likely, not.  Only a tiny subset of neurons in your brain are likely aware and even responsible for the fact that you even know your name and that it’s frivolously connected to the haze of notion you have when you think of yourself.  

What if the idea of ‘self’ is simply a bad term, one that is conveniently vague enough for everyone to map it on to ineluctable experience.  A term with similar vagueness is ‘god’.  Even ask people of the same religious faith what that term means and the explanations will be as varied as the people themselves.  We may even find that the two terms are more closely related than we might first realize, and that one is simply a mode of the other, and each can have many modes, depending, of course, on who you ask.

BUNDLING

March 24th, 2021

Software eats the world.  We hear this, but what exactly does it mean? We hear about our ‘data’ being gathered, used, sold, and worry about an obscure relation to privacy.  We hear about automated jobs and the cries of Neo-luddites.  But what what exactly is the main mechanism which software consumes right now?

The most common and one of the most useful forms of software consumption is best understood through the idea of unbundling and re-bundling.   Take Instagram for example.  Where did all our photos exist before Instagram?  Or rather, how many places did our photos exist before Instagram, and how accessible were those places.  The answer, of course is that photos existed in endlessly numerous places and had virtually zero accessibility.  But that set of photos still represents a particular human dataset.  It just wasn’t organized, and it was scattered.  What a platform like Instagram does is it unbundles that dataset, that is it creates an incentive for that data to be gathered, and then it re-bundles that data in an organized and very accessible way.  

Most software eats the world by unbundling an unorganized or inaccessible analog dataset and re-bundling it into an ultra-accessible form that is highly organized, often in conveniently flexible ways.

While everyone is looking for ‘the next great idea’, the digital revolution is probably better thought of as an episode of spring cleaning for the human species.   We are slowly unpacking the messy closet and reorganizing it in a way that doesn’t take up so much space, and most importantly, makes all that stuff at lot more useful.

The brilliant marketing slogan for the iPod perhaps encapsulates the whole idea the best:

1,000 songs in your pocket.

FOR FUTURE YOU

March 23rd, 2021

Tomorrow, you’ll be a slightly different person.  You’ll have memories you don’t have now, and you’ll have memory consolidation and learning advancements that occur in sleep that you haven’t yet undergone.  Tomorrow you’ll understand things you don’t today.  Tomorrow you’ll have abilities you don’t have right now.  But only if you put in the effort right now.

It is possible that tomorrow you’ll be a lesser version of yourself.  In sleep your brain will have no new important and pressing memories to consolidate, no new learning to run through again.  Sleep is a bit like an opportunity to underscore parts of your life experience, to make sure those experiences properly inform a future version of yourself.  But if another day passes without that tedium and pain we associate with the difficult new, than that opportunity is squandered.

Each and every day we have the chance to gift a better life, a better mind, and a better body to the person we will find ourselves living as tomorrow.  How many of these days are squandered, leaving a future version of who we are with less ammunition, less ability and less knowledge than might help that person incarnate to finally level up life to one that is more productive or fulfilling, more loving or serene.

All of these adjectives are very achievable goals.  Each has a crowd of information and tactics that is now freely available for anyone with the internet and some time. 

The problem is the present and our inability to leverage it for tomorrow.  If we can harvest the moment in the name of the future, we leave the gift of a higher platform upon which we wake.  But, of course, not every day goes to plan.  Not each moment can be seized.  We flail and stumble, but every time we can break away from the norm of distraction and plug in a unit of effort for tomorrow, it eventually allows our efforts to compound, and then distant goals get slowly reeled in.

HEDONIC PRIMNG

March 22nd, 2021

“It’s so amazing, you just have to see it.” 

In the age of constant novelty and entertainment, the good recommendation is both highly sought after and a superpower that is nearly equally pleasurable to dispense.  Though, how many times does something highly recommended turn out to be a bit of a let down?

The recommendation we give often rolls out with the emotional resonance of our total reaction to the film or book, or restaurant meal.  Of course, this creates a disconnect that we rarely think about: before venturing into the experience, did we have the same expectations that we now create in another when we gush hyperbolically about the value of this or that experience?

So what is the result when we prime a friend with the idea that something is so so good?  We create an expectation and now for the film or book or meal to have the same effect it now has to exceed that expectation in the same way it did for our own self, when perhaps we had no expectation at all.  This most likely sets a person up for disappointment. 

We have a cute little paradox: how do we make enough of an impression to convince someone to have the experience without ruining the effect?

The solution hides in the fact that less is more, and mystery and the creation of curiosity and wonder requires a lack of information as opposed to an abundance of it. 

A simple recommendation to not pass on something carries all the conviction of an extravagant suggestion but keeps the slate of expectation blank, leaving others to have their own genuine reaction.