Fake news was scary enough … but now it is going to a new level. Technology is going to make it harder to find the “signal” in the “noise”.
Here is a preview of tech solutions (which already exist) that are likely to create a new set of problems and challenges for us in the future.
Replica is a company whose goal is to replicate celebrity voices. They see this as enabling creative applications of their voices without the commitment of the celebrity – of course the owner of the voice that's being replicated would control when/where it could be used.
Combine that ability to simulate voices with deepfake technology (which can alter video in many ways, including to look like the mouth in the video is is saying the words that were simulated) and the potential for confusion or deception skyrockets.
My guess is that you will hear a lot more about this soon because of upcoming elections. It will also become increasingly relevant in everyday life, business, trading, and legal situations.
A picture used to be worth a thousand words, but this may change that equation forever.
On Tuesday, for less than an hour, early in the workday, it felt like the internet was down for many. The cause? Cloudflare went down. Cloudflare offers web services to over 16 million websites. That includes sites like HubSpot, Medium, UpWork, 9gag, Discord, Sirius XM, Shopify, Coinbase, Canva, Soundcloud, Buzzfeed, and Capitalogix.
That means when Cloudflare went down, so did a non-trivial portion of the internet. W3techs reports approximately 10% of the internet was affected by Cloudflare being down.
There was a massive spike in CPU utilization. At the time, it looked like a DDOS attack. People were speculating that it was a Chinese attack trying to mess with the Hong Kong protests.
Turns out, it was bad code – specifically, a single misconfigured rule within their firewall services. They did a global rollout of the code, and so it affected everyone.
This shows the importance of staged rollouts – testing your releases live with test groups before being released globally.
The reality is, using a CDN is still helpful, Cloudflare's downtime doesn't mean you shouldn't use them.
It does mean we should be thinking about what failsafes are needed to keep the internet infrastructure working in the event of attacks or failures.
Attacks are becoming more common, and as we now expect constant improvements/releases to software, we can expect more company errors as well. Facebook had similar issues on Wednesday.
Think of how much relies on the internet as a backbone. It's crazy to think about the impact sustained downtime would have; billions of dollars in business not happening, banking systems down, etc. Realistically, if the entire internet goes down we likely have bigger issues to worry about, but this event shows that large swaths of the internet could be affected at once.
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” – Thomas Edison
It doesn't make sense to challenge a bigger and better-funded competitor in an area where they have an asymmetric advantage. In other words, don't compete with giants at their own game.
Choose to play a game you expect to win.
Playing a different game is a theme at Capitalogix. We believe that you control the game you're playing, that you control the rules, how you keep score, and even how you evaluate success. These things inform where you spend time, where you invest money, and even what looks like an opportunity to you.
Wouldn't you rather compete in areas where you can create a unique sustainable competitive advantage? Personally, I want to invest in extending an edge that lets us win.
Why?
Mediocrity Is Expensive!
What you lack in size or computer power, you can make up for in creativity, agility, and innovation.
Capitalogix sought to create a niche in the investment industry, not through computing power, but through unique approaches to age-old problems. We use AI and data science to enhance decision-making.
We have an incredibly narrow and consistent focus. Within that area, we are willing to take on problems others avoid and pursue goals that others say are impossible.
Our niche limits risk and lets us fail faster … and learn faster. This allows us to take confident action while others are tentative.
Most big companies – and most of our competitors – are afraid to be wrong. They have to protect their infrastructure, cash-cows, and short-term performance metrics. It makes sense (from their perspective) that playing it safe means that you're secure in your position. – but that's not how it works.
You can't challenge the status quo when you are the status quo.
10x Improvement Is Often Easier To Achieve Than 10%
Incremental change is hard – it's finding new ways to do the same thing, and you often end up competing in very red oceans – saturated markets where you're competing on price. Moonshots sound harder, but you end up with your own niche and the constraints of a new idea force creativity and energy. If you're going after a goal that no one has accomplished before, it's impossible to be in a red ocean, and it's easier to mobilize a team around something exciting and new than decreasing some arbitrary metric 2%.
There are a couple of important lessons to keep in mind when pursuing the unknown.
Forget what you know – self-reported "experts" are limited by their world view. If you're trying to get a different result, you won't do it by playing by the same rules your predecessors followed. Heuristics are great for making life easier – but they're very limiting when trying to create something new.
Attack the hardest problems first – your biggest problems are your biggest opportunities. If you don't deal with the big problems now, you'll never get around to it, and you'll waste time, energy, and potentially realize you have to pivot much too late.
Be comfortable being uncomfortable – Most people find failure taboo, and they're deathly afraid of it. Tony Robbins talks about our tendency to avoid pain more actively than we pursue pleasure, and it's true in business. But failure is a part of business. The people I consider most successful got there through incredible pain tolerance and increasingly intense problems that they continued to conquer.
Have a short memory for pain - Focus on the gain, not the pain. People often focus on not enough money, not enough time, not enough. That scarcity mindset is dangerous and can lead to getting lost in pain and fear. Learning to acknowledge the pain/fear and move forward from a place of abundance and opportunity helps create opportunities.
As well, a clear identity is important. You have to understand what you're pursuing, and how you want to attack the problem. At Capitalogix, we've gotten very in tune with our goals.
We invent techniques that identify and adapt to what happens in markets. We apply the lessons learned from past experiences, data science breakthroughs, and hard work to eliminate the fear, greed, and discretionary mistakes that are the downfall of most traders and decision-makers.
Small businesses don't have a monopoly on these mindsets and these opportunities, but companies like Y Combinator, X, or HeroX are few and far between.
Those businesses that have the scale and these approaches are great to model, and there's enough innovation out there for both of you.
Most people don't spend money on freemium games. These games rely on a small subset of "whales" to survive – players that spend absurd amounts of money on their games. Gacha games let players pay to "roll the dice" to unlock rare characters and collectibles similar to a "Loot Box" mechanic.
Now, the US is trying to make this mechanic illegal for taking advantage of children with their "pay-to-win" mechanics.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
I was just in Maine at Camp Kotok, a private gathering of economists, fund managers, and other financial industry professionals.
There was no cell phone service … so people had to talk with each other. Everyone went outside. And, people continued to fish, even when it rained. Craziness.
AI is removing the fear, greed, and discretionary mistakes from financial decision making. We’re at the beginning of a cycle of progress that is hard to imagine … and easy to underestimate.
Ultimately, I think AI will transform the planet much like electricity did. What about you?
Lots of cool discussions up there. Call me if you want to talk about it.
I'm a big fan of picking a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (sometimes called a "BHAG") and taking actions that move you in that direction.
I'm also a big fan of Strategic Coach'sBigger Future exercise. It is a 20-year planning exercise where you plan out your commitments and goals to yourself, your family, your career, and your legacy.
While doing this, I realized that my ideal next 20 years involves taking Capitalogix to the next level (and beyond).
As a result, I recently held a two-hour town hall session with everybody in Capitalogix. You'll find a 5-minute compilation of highlights at the end of this article.
Before I share with you, I want to take time to bring you up to speed on Capitalogix's history. Some may know the story, but many of you are new. It's important context for the video and for Capitalogix's future.
A Brief History of Capitalogix
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future. – Walt Disney
In the 90's, I left a corporate securities law practice to start a company that was an early pioneer in automation, intelligent agents, and rule-based processing.(it is almost embarrassing to compare that to AI today). Nonetheless, we ended up on the Inc. 500 list, won lots of awards and had a great time. Little did I know how important that would be to what we are doing now.
Life intervened … and 1999 was a rough year for me. My dad died of cancer, I got divorced, and I sold my company. That year inspired my TED Talk on the Time Value of A Life Worth Living, and has inspired the past 20 years of my life.
I threw myself into trading. At first, I was a fundamental trader. But I quickly threw myself into Elliott Wave theory, technical analysis, quantitative analysis, and everything else I could get my hands on. I spent hours on end marking up charts and creating early algorithmic trading systems – predecessors to how we trade today.
I also hired my first two employees – Gabriel and Sean. My dining room became their office. I started to view trading as a business, rather than a hobby. The thought forms that would become our framework for understanding markets were starting to gel.
By 2015, we had 20+ employees working out of my house, and I realized we'd outgrown my home. Here is a picture from the dining room before the move.
After a brief time with employees in three different offices (including one of our partner's offices) we found our current office.
Moving in to our new office represented a positive shift in culture and focus – and another step toward our goals.
Where We Are Today
The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present. – Eckhart Tolle
We are committed to revolutionizing decision science (making better decisions faster). We're creating the future we've envisioned.
Yet, for all we've accomplished, we're driven every day to be better than we were yesterday. That drive comes from that big hairy audacious goal and that 20-year vision.
It comes from knowing who we want to be tomorrow.
Committing To The Future
It means that we're going to have to have new people and new ways of doing things because the recipe for getting here isn't the recipe for getting there. As much as I respect and love you for "here." I respect and love you enough to hold you accountable for "there." – Howard Getson
It hasn't always been easy – but building Capitalogix has been an intensely rewarding passion.
Over the next 20 years, there are a ton of people I want to impact and a lot of goals I want to accomplish. Capitalogix is the way I intend to do that.
I look forward to you all being a part of it as well.
This year, I spent some extra time thinking about my father – and his influence on me and countless others. It's been 20 years since my last Father's Day with him.
My Dad was incredibly loving and demanding. I recognize how much his vision of what I could become helped shape me.
For example, after winning the State Championship in the shot put, my dad came down from the stands onto the field. He hugged me and told me that he knew I could do it. Then, he looked deeply into my eyes and asked whether I was a little disappointed? "Disappointed?" I asked. "But, Dad, I won." He looked at me and said, "Yeah, winning is great … but you didn't throw a personal best." He was proud and he loved me. He recognized that winning was important … but he wanted to remind me that the other throwers weren't my real competition.
In life, to be and do your best, the competition is really with yourself; and we both knew I could do better.
My Dad believed in setting high standards. He taught me that most people's lives are defined by their minimum standards. Why? Because once those standards get met, it is easy to get distracted and complacent.
One of his favorite sayings was "The difference between good and great is infinitesimal." This applies to many things. For example, people who are good take advantage of opportunities; people who are great create them. The point is that setting higher standards is one of the best ways to ensure a better life.
As time goes on, I recognize how much of him is inside me.
Many of the lessons he taught me became the lessons I taught my children – and my company. It's easy to focus on the big stories and the big lessons – but as I look back and consider what had the biggest impact, it was what happened in between … It was his incredibly consistent and unconditional love and his focus on what was possible.
The standards I hold people to are high, and it can be tough for them to meet those standards. Hopefully, they understand that it's because I love them (as my dad loved me) and that I see the greatness in them and available to them.
I'm surprised how often I see people who are bearish on Artificial Intelligence. Many are stuck in science fiction's depictions – sentience, personification, etc.. Modern AI is very different from science fiction predictions, but is still exciting. (Here's an infographic debunking 8 common AI myths)
Modern AI does many things and has many applications, but ultimately it's relatively faceless. It works in the background, impacts everything it touches, and silently collects vast lakes of data. AI may not be Star Trek's "Data," but it is transforming our economy at warp speed.
TechJury has put together an infographic on the history of AI until today. It highlights a number of key inflection points, AI's impact on today's economy, and which countries and companies are leading the pack.
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