Sticking with the philosophy theme, I encourage you to watch this video below on selective attention.
Daniel Simons' experiments on visual awareness have become famous. The primary conclusion drawn from his research is that we can miss incredibly obvious things, right in front of us, if our attention is focused elsewhere.
While watching the video, count how many passes the team in white makes.
This is worth doing so you experience it yourself.
First, did you get the number of passes correct? Second, did you see the gorilla?
If you have already seen this video or heard of the study, it's much easier, but most people absolutely miss the Gorilla, despite it not being hidden.
Think about how often your focus blinds you to the obvious.
This next video demonstrates "change blindness". In an experiment, 75% of the participants didn't notice that the experimenter was replaced by a different person.
Warning: Objects In Your Attention Span Are Fewer Than You Perceive.
It's well known that we often miss objects in our field of view due to limited attention and change blindness, but, it's true with more than just sight. Moment by moment, the brain selectively processes information it deems most relevant. Experiments, like these, show the limits of our capacity to encode, retain, and compare visual information from one glance to the next.
More importantly, this suggests that our awareness of our visual surroundings is far more sparse than most people intuitively believe. Consequently, our intuition can deceive us far more often than we perceive.
As an entrepreneur, when I focus fully on something, it's as if everything else goes away. That level of focus can be a gift – but it can also be a curse. In Genius Network, we have a form we fill out at the beginning of each meeting. In it is a diagram where you rate your score on 8 factors: physical environment, career, money, health, friends & family, significant other, personal & intellectual growth, and fun & recreation
It's rare that I'm fully succeeding in all 8 … we only have so much focus and bandwidth, it's inevitable I'll miss things. Clearly, in an information-rich environment, attention is a scarce and essential resource. So, pay attention (or automate the things you know need to be done right, every time).
What are you currently prioritizing, and what's falling to the side due to that focus? What are you missing?
Hope this was a helpful reminder. Let me know what you think about posts like this. Thanks.
It can be difficult to have a nuanced discussion around AI online. There's a lot of PopSci around it, people conflate a very diverse range of algorithms and intentions into the general "AI", and realistically when you get too in-depth into what algorithms are best for what problems, most people lose interest.
That's why I'm personally a proponent of any discussions around AI. Awareness is important, and if more people can understand the basics, then some subset of them will become better educated… rinse and repeat.
Robert Downey Jr. and YouTube partnered for an 8-part docuseries on the Age of AI. I've only watched one episode, but that episode did a decent job of addressing the highest-level issues with AI.
I won't go through the whole video with you – because you're quarantined and I think it's worth watching, but there are a couple of points I wanted to re-emphasize.
Your Data Is Becoming More Important, Not Less Important
"Everyone's concerned about identity theft. Meanwhile, they're giving all their data for free on the internet. I'm what I like. I'm what I don't like. I'm where I go, I'm who I know. I'm what I search. I'm my thumbprint. I am my data" – will.i.am
My son, Zach, has ultimately given up on privacy – his argument is that everyone's information is out there anyway. Even my eldest son, Ben, who is a cybersecurity expert, has semi-resigned himself to his data being out there. He takes many precautionary measures but recognizes that he's not truly anonymous.
In the video, Will.I.Am is getting an authentic reproduction of his face, mannerisms, and voice – they even got the pimple he had during the day of filming. In doing so, he specifically asks for the voice to be a bit robotic. He does this "for his mom" but in reality, it's to make clear – this is a robot, not me. It's avoiding the Uncanny Valley.
We're at an intersection where it's going to become harder to decide what's real and what's fake. With deepfake video and audio, protecting your personal brand and identity becomes difficult, and simultaneously more important.
The Path Forward
The road to AI supremacy is long and fraught with booby traps, potential missteps, and ethical issues. Questions like "how far is too far?" will have to be answered, and countries will likely strive to unite around shared rules of ethical AI.
If there's anything that makes me confident about our ability to successfully travel that road, it's looking at humanity's ability to adapt. The reality is, we've been working symbiotically with "machines" since the very beginning, but our definition of the machine simply continues to improve. It's fractal, and each time the technology we're adopting gets bigger, so does the eventual positive effect on day to day life.
AI adoption is a big step, but the positive effect it can have on our lives is astronomical.
Every week I send out an e-mail on Fridays with 20 light links and 20 market-moving links. If you're not getting that e-mail, you can sign up here. On Sundays, I send out our weekly commentary (which this article is a part of, along with 5 new light links and 5 new market-moving links (you can sign up here).
As a result, he played the game Paperclips to completion. While he characterizes it as “wasting a whole night,” I think it gives us insight into the addictive nature of clicker games and into how the world as we know it could end with a paperclip.
There are spoilers ahead, so if you intend on wasting three hours on a browser game, you may want to skip this article … no, you're good? OK, here it is.
The game starts with you clicking a button to create paperclips but quickly spirals from there. Through setting up automation to create paperclips and then to have it start automatically buying the wire for you, you begin focusing on other projects – specifically creating a better trading algorithm to leverage the money you're making and improving your company's AI and Quantum Computing capabilities.
Hmm, starting to sound familiar …
Initially, your AI is focused purely on maximizing paper clip demand and production. It can increase marketing to increase demand and make your autoclippers more efficient to produce more paperclips per unit wire. If you look at the projects in the above screenshot you can see projects like:
Full Monopoly – Establish full control over the worldwide paperclip market
Global Warming – A robust solution to man-made climate change
HypnoDrones – Autonomous aerial brand ambassadors
Projects like curing cancer or solving global warming gain trust and allow you to invest more money in processors and memory (which end up setting you up to take over the world.)
When you release the HypnoDrones all of the resources become available for Paperclip production, and you gain full autonomy. Your inner benevolent dictator feels satisfied and your mother’s expectations for your potential are partially fulfilled.
At this point in the game, Zach had created less than half a billion paperclips but was worth several billions of dollars. It took him 2 hours and 44 minutes to beat the game.
Is it a game, a parable, a prediction – or an advanced intelligence’s test of human nature?
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