Not only does this help us see far away systems that we've never seen before, but it also provides detail to the things we have seen.
First, bring order to chaos …. Then, wisdom comes from making finer distinctions. With that in mind, I'm excited to see how this drives the future of science.
Here's a brief video from Neil Degrasse Tyson on the new telescope.
While simple, the wheel worked well (and still does). Consequently, the phrase "reinventing the wheel" often is used derogatorily to depict needless or inefficient efforts.
But how does that compare to sliced bread (which was also a pretty significant invention)?
Despite being a hallmark of innovation, it still took more than 300 years for the wheel to be used for travel. With a bit more analysis, it makes sense. In order to use a wheel for travel, it needs an axle, and it needs to be durable, and loadbearing, requiring relatively advanced woodworking and engineering.
All the aforementioned products created before the wheel (except for the flute) were necessary for survival. That's why they came first.
As new problems arose, so did new solutions.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Unpacking that phrase is a good reminder that inventions (and innovation) are often solution-centric.
Too many entrepreneurs are attracted to an idea because it sounds cool. They get attracted to their ideas and neglect their ideal customer's actual needs. You see it often with people slapping "AI" on to their product and pretending it's more helpful.
If you want to be disruptive, cool isn't enough. Your invention has to be functional, and it has to fix a problem people have (even if they don't know they have it.) The more central the complaint is to their daily lives the better.
Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Innovation means thinking about and anticipating wants and future needs.
Your customers may not even need something radically new. Your innovation may be a better application of existing technology or a reframe of best practices.
Uber didn't create a new car, they created a new way to get from where you want with existing infrastructure and less friction. Netflix didn't reinvent the movie, they made it easier for you to watch one.
As an entrepreneur, the trick is build for human nature (meaning, give people what they crave or eliminate the constraint they are trying to avoid) rather than the cool new tech that you are excited about.
Human nature doesn’t seem to change much … Meanwhile, the pace of innovation continues to accelerate.
The challenge is to focus on what people want rather than the distraction of possibility.
Intellectual Property is an important asset class in exponential industries.
Why? Because I.P. is both a property right (that increases the owner's tangible and intangible value) and a form of protection.
They say good fences make good neighbors. But you are also more willing to work to build an asset if you know that your right to use and profit from it is protected.
As a result of that thinking, Capitalogix has numerous patents - and we're developing a patent strategy that goes far into the future. So, it's a topic that's front of mind for me.
Consequently, this visualization of which companies got the most patents last year caught my eye. In 2021, the U.S. granted over 327,000 patents. Here is who got them.
While IBM isn't the public-facing industry leader they once were, they've been topping the list for most patents for the past three decades. Their patents this past year cover everything from climate change to energies, high-performance computing, and A.I..
What ideas and processes do you have that are worth patenting? And, what processes are worth not patenting - to keep from prying eyes?
Recently I had a chance to talk with Josh Elledge on his Thoughtful Entrepreneur podcast. We talked about AI's inevitable influence on trading as well as my experience as an entrepreneur.
Despite mis-spelling Capital Logix ... it's Capitalogix ... the conversation we had is worth a listen.
Just like VR is getting a new lease on life, despite its age, AI-generated art is getting another 15-minutes of fame.
This past week, a new model called Dall-E Mini went viral. It creates images based on the text prompts you give it – and it's surprisingly good. You even can give Dall-E absurd prompts, and it will do its best to hybridize them (for example, a kangaroo made of cheese).
While the images themselves aren't fantastic, the tool's goal is to understand and translate text into a coherent graphic response. The capabilities of tools like this are growing exponentially (and reflect a massive improvement since I last talked about AI-generated images).
Part of the improvement is organic (better hardware, software, algorithmic evolution, etc.), while another part comes from stacking. For example, Dall-E's use of GPT-3 has vastly increased its ability to process language.
However, the algorithms still don't "understand" the meaning of the images the way we do ... they are guessing based on what they've "seen" before. That means it's biased by the data it was fed and can easily get stumped. The Dall-E website's "Bias and Limitations" section acknowledges that it was trained on unfiltered internet data, which means it has a known, but unintended, bias to be offensive or stereotypical against minority groups.
It's not the first time, and it won't be the last, that an internet-trained AI will be offensive.
Currently, most AI is essentially a brute force application of math masquerading as intelligence and computer science. Fortunately, it provides a lot of value even in that regard.
The uses continue to get more elegant and complex as time passes ... but we're still coding the elegance.
This week, there was a U.S. congressional hearing on the existence of UFOs. While there wasn't any proof of aliens, they did admit to phenomena that they couldn't explain with their current information.
There are many stories (or theories) about how we have encountered aliens before and just kept them secret. For example, in 2020, a former senior Israeli military official proclaimed that Aliens from a Galactic Federation have contacted us - and that not only is our government aware of this, but they are working together.
In contrast, I have found it more realistic and thought-provoking to consider theories about why we haven't seen aliens until now.
For example, the Fermi Paradox considers the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and the various high probability estimates for their existence.
Let's simplify the issues and arguments in the Fermi Paradox. There are billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy (which is only one of many galaxies). Each of these stars is similar to our Sun. Consequently, there must be some probability of some of them having Earth-like planets. Further, it isn't hard to conceive that some of those planets should be older than ours, and thus some fraction should be more technologically advanced than us. Even if you assume they're only looking at evolutions of our current technologies - interstellar travel isn't absurd. Thus, based on the law of really large numbers (both in terms of the number of planets and the length of time we are talking about) ... it makes the silence all the more deafening and curious.
If you are interested in the topic "Where are all the aliens?" Stephen Webb (who is a particle physicist) tackles that in his book and in this TED Talk.
In the TED talk, Stephen Webb covers a couple of key factors necessary for communicative space-faring life.
Habitability and stability of their planet
Building blocks of life
Technological advancement
Socialness/Communication technologies
But he also acknowledges the numerous confounding variables, including things like imperialism, war, bioterrorism, fear, moons' effect on climate, etc.
Essentially, his thesis is that there are numerous roadblocks to intelligent life - and it's entirely possible we are the only planet that has gotten past those roadblocks.
What do you think?
Here are some other links I liked on this topic. There is some interesting stuff you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand or enjoy.
Just because something is overhyped, doesn’t mean it’s bad. Gartner's hype cycle is a great example of this. Every technology goes through inflated expectations and a trough of disillusionment, regardless of whether they're a success or failure. Sometimes a fad is more than a fad.
Humans are pretty bad at exponential thinking. We're not bad at recognizing periods of inflection, but we're very bad at recognizing the winners and losers of these regime changes.
There are countless examples. Here's a funny one from Maximum PC Magazine in 2008. It shows that hype isn't always a sign of mistaken excess. This list purported to show things that were getting too much attention in 2008. Instead of being a list of has-beens and failures, many of these things rightfully deserved the attention.
It's been 14 years since this came out. How did the predictions hold up?
Facebook has become Meta, and is one of the big five. The iPhone has sold more than 2.2 billion phones, and accounts for more than half of Apple's total revenue. And the list keeps going. Multiple GPU video cards, HD, 64-bit computing, and downloading movies from the internet ...
It's hard to believe how poorly this image aged.
The trend is your friend while it continues. Just because something is overhyped - doesn't mean you shouldn't be excited about it.
You could argue that I got my start in AI with my most recent company - Capitalogix - which started almost 20 years ago. You could also say that my previous company - IntellAgent Control - was an early AI company, and that's where I got my start. By today's standards, the technology we used back then was too simple to call AI ... but at the time, we were on the cutting edge.
You could go further back and say it started when I became the first lawyer in my firm to use a computer, and I fell in love with technology.
As I look back, I've spent my whole life on this path. My fascination with making better decisions, taking smarter actions, and a commitment to getting better results probably started when I was two years old (because of the incident discussed in the video).
Ultimately, the starting point is irrelevant. Looking back, it seems inevitable. The decisions I made, the people I met, and my experiences ... they all led me here.
However, at any point in the journey, if you asked, "Is this where you thought you'd end up?" I doubt that I'd have said yes.
I've always been fascinated by what makes people successful and how to become more efficient and effective. In a sense, that's what AI does. It's a capability amplifier.
When I switched from being a corporate securities lawyer to an entrepreneur, I intended to go down that path.
Artificial Intelligence happened to be the best vehicle I found to do that. It made sense then, and it makes sense now.
Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - July 17th, 2022
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
Lighter Links:
Trading Links:
Posted at 07:59 AM in Business, Current Affairs, Film, Gadgets, Games, Ideas, Just for Fun, Market Commentary, Personal Development, Science, Trading, Trading Tools, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
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