As they reopen, it's important to think about a new normal. I'm excited about what we'll accomplish on the backside of this pandemic.
It challenged what we do and how we do it. In many ways, the thing that doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
With that said, I saw this video, and it struck a chord. It shows a famous orchestra playing the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey updated for 2020's social distancing. You’ve got classical music played by classical musicians – together, but only via technology. This new form borrows from the past but creates something new. As a result, we experience a new dawn.
I encourage you to think about what the Quarantine made better for you, your family, your business, the country, or the world?
Sure, there are things that suck ... but there are things that surprised!
Think about the things that you did more of during this period. Are there new things that will make sense to continue as we move back to normal? Are there things that you did less of – and it somehow made things better (or made room for better things)?
How can you combine the best of the old with the best of the new to create something even better?
Things are going back to normal ... but you get to decide your new normal ... and it can be better than your past.
For most, being quarantined means significantly more screen-time.
Whether you're using it productively or unproductively, you're likely consuming much more media than before.
That can be a double-edged sword. It has the potential to increase your understanding of events – but also increases the likelihood of echo chambers and the intake of misinformation (aka fake news).
So, in this quarantine, what exactly are people looking at, and how are they staying informed?
VisualCapitalist put together various infographics on how different generations are consuming content.
Unsurprisingly, younger generations are playing games, and millennials are focusing on food (cooking recipes and staying healthy while quarantined). Meanwhile, the older generations are still sticking primarily to broadcast TV.
Regardless of where you're consuming, it's important to manage what you're consuming, and how much you're consuming. You need to make sure you're using reliable resources and managing your time and energy. Too much can leave you worse off.
It's hilarious – and a great reminder that it doesn't matter how simple something is (if the stakes are high enough) and the environment is distracting enough.
That's where automation comes in. Enjoy.
Eliminating fear and greed are great steps to take in the pursuit of eliminating discretionary mistakes.
Think about how many other places this video explains the "why" behind disappointing results.
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.
The answer is .... not as close as I would have thought. Nonetheless, they just hit a Trillion Dollar market cap. So, they must have gotten something right!
It's interesting to think about which factors or missing innovations caused the difference between their imagined vision and reality.
They really bought into scaleable, HD, transparent, touch screen displays being not only available, but located in everything by now ... which suffice to say, isn't the case.
The reality is ...
A lot of these innovations actually have little use - Not every situation needs a transparent monitor - they're worse than standard monitors in almost every way. You end up using absurdly expensive screens to display a digital version of a post it note or handwriting. The desk/monitor hybrid would be covered in sheets of paper, office supplies, and your coffee. A boarding pass being a screen is highly inefficient for so many reasons - and so is a digital newspaper. We have those - they're called phones.
They assumed batteries would be way farther along - The thinner your monitor, the more transparent, the harder it is to create a high-performance high-fidelity battery to maintain it. Unfortunately, batteries haven't had nearly the boom like the rest of our tech (though they are getting better).
IoT Adoption/Security - One of the biggest problems with IoT is that the more these pieces communicate the harder it is to prevent hacks. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link - and a smart coffee maker isn't nearly secure as your computer.
Fingerprints (Glass) - I get this isn't a "real" concern - but every piece of technology they showed was transparent/glass. On top of being very breakable (see Samsungs new foldable phones) Could you imagine how smudged/dirty everywhere would appear? Imagine a New York subway with this technology.
Expense v. Convenience - A lot of technologies are feasible - but aren't cost-effective. Look at the slow adoption of Solar cells as their efficiency per cost went up.
Making everything a device/screen means more opportunity for companies to serve you ads and retarget you ad infinitum.
Ultimately, I find this perceived "modern digital office environment" very inefficient. A lot of these "innovations" are less dynamic and easy to use than their analog counterparts. Mechanical keyboards serve a purpose.
In reality, a lot of the trends we've adopted to increase collaboration and sharing have been counterproductive. Not every office needs an open floor plan - not every team needs 15 subteams with 4 bosses - and using 20 different productivity tools actually decreases productivity.
That being said, we've come a long way in 10 years. Think about the quality of your phone in 2009 or your desktop computer - whirring loudly as it tried to access the disk, or the internet, or anything really.
What we have now isn't perfect - but it's leaps and bounds ahead of where we were. A lot of technology seems like science fiction - like the Babel fish from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing. - Frodo seeing Sauron through the Mirror of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring
The Event Horizon Telescope just released the first-ever image of a black hole ... specifically a supermassive black hole with a mass 6.5 billion times heavier than our sun. This behemoth of a black hole is over 50 million light-years away in a galaxy we call M87. The little blob (in the picture below) is 25 billion miles across, and the bright part is brighter than all of the billions of other stars in that galaxy combined. To put it in context ... the black hole, shown below, is larger than our entire Solar System.
The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun
In my opinion, the black hole image is even more amazing when you zoom out and see the entire m87 galaxy. The little black dot inside the orange is the black hole.
via NASA/CXC/VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY/J. NEILSEN
To take a step back, a black hole is a celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that light cannot escape it and that is believed to be created especially in the collapse of a very massive star. It warps spacetime and superheats all surrounding materials.
“In space no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear.” ― Stephen Hawking
Before today, black holes had only been observed indirectly. We had math that "proved it." Now, we have direct, observable, and corroborated evidence for everyone to see.
Do you understand the gravity of that?
In my lifetime, Black holes have gone from a fringe theory to a possibility, to a probability, and now, to reality.
It is amazing to think about how right Einstein's theory of general relativity was ... especially considering that he did the math in 1915, before we had the technology and science to back it up. The basic idea is that the relative velocity of light doesn't change, therefore it must be a constant in our universe. Using his math, we were able to predict how a black hole would "look", and it was supported by the Event Horizon Telescope's image.
Veritasium puts understanding the image into better perspective. Check it out.
For a side note, the first proposal of black holes actually goes back to John Michell in 1784
"If there should really exist in nature any bodies, whose density is not less than that of the sun, and whose diameters are more than 500 times the diameter of the sun, since their light could not arrive at us; or if there should exist any other bodies of a somewhat smaller size, which are not naturally luminous; of the existence of bodies under either of these circumstances, we could have no information from sight; yet, if any other luminous bodies should happen to revolve about them we might still perhaps from the motions of these revolving bodies infer the existence of the central ones with some degree of probability, as this might afford a clue to some of the apparent irregularities of the revolving bodies, which would not be easily explicable on any other hypothesis; but as the consequences of such a supposition are very obvious, and the consideration of them somewhat beside my present purpose, I shall not prosecute them any further."
It took a massive amount of work to produce the photos of the black hole shown in this post. The ingredients: 200 researchers, 20 years, over 9 petabytes of data, 8 telescopes, and immense vision. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it also took the 104 years of research since Einstein's theory.
Here's a TED talk from Dr. Katie Bouman in 2017, about taking a photo of the black hole. Katie went to MIT and led the creation of a new algorithm that helped produced today's image.
One thing that Deep Learning excels in is analyzing pictures & videos, and creating facsimiles or combining styles. If you want to create art with deep learning look no further than the Deep Dream Generator or deepart.io which use Convolutional Neural Networks to combine your photo with an art style (if you want to do it on your phone another cool tool to check out is Prisma).
Deepfake is it's exactly what it sounds like ... the use "Deep Learning" to "Fake" a recording. For example, a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial Network can be used to superimpose images onto a source video. That is how they made this fun (and disturbing) Deepfake of Jennifer Lawrence and Steve Buscemi.
While this is a fun example, Deepfakes create very real concerns. They're often used for more "nefarious" purposes (e.g., to create fake celebrity or revenge porn and to otherwise make important figures say things they never said). It's likely you've seen videos of Trump or Obama created with this technology. But it is easy to imagine someone faking evidence used at trial, trying to influence business transactions, or using this to support or slander causes in the media.
The Show Must Go On (But In VR)
Several states are conditionally reopening.
As they reopen, it's important to think about a new normal. I'm excited about what we'll accomplish on the backside of this pandemic.
It challenged what we do and how we do it. In many ways, the thing that doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
With that said, I saw this video, and it struck a chord. It shows a famous orchestra playing the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey updated for 2020's social distancing. You’ve got classical music played by classical musicians – together, but only via technology. This new form borrows from the past but creates something new. As a result, we experience a new dawn.
via Opera North
I encourage you to think about what the Quarantine made better for you, your family, your business, the country, or the world?
Sure, there are things that suck ... but there are things that surprised!
Think about the things that you did more of during this period. Are there new things that will make sense to continue as we move back to normal? Are there things that you did less of – and it somehow made things better (or made room for better things)?
How can you combine the best of the old with the best of the new to create something even better?
Things are going back to normal ... but you get to decide your new normal ... and it can be better than your past.
Stay safe and enjoy the ride,
Posted at 06:36 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Film, Ideas, Market Commentary, Personal Development, Science, Trading Tools, Travel, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
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