The Future

For your Sunday morning (or daytime) reading, take a look at Tyler Austin Harper’s article in The Atlantic titled What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works . Since coming out of hibernation, I’ve had many bizarre conversations with non-tech people who misunderstand entirely what “AI”, as the tech industry currently calls it, actually is. This doesn’t surprise me, as the tech hype cycle around AI is extreme. However, several of these conversations, especially with political leaders, have highlighted the issue this article addresses. ...

I’m tired (today’s Whoop recovery score of 15). Almost everyone in my virtual universe is tense, tired, frustrated, angry, annoyed, exasperated, irked, or outraged. Fortunately, the only person in my physical world – and there is only one (Amy) – is generally calm. While we each have our moments, our morning coffee resets both of us for the day ahead and syncs up our energy as we simply begin again . ...

Amy has a birthday coming up. We spent some time this morning talking about her next year. Since the two of us are together all day every day, we also discussed how I’m spending my time over the upcoming year that begins at her birthday. A few hours later, I stumbled upon Your Life in Weeks on Wait But Why , one of my favorite blogs. The following are the number of weeks (measured in boxes) that a typical 90-year-old human has on this planet. ...

On Monday, I wrote a post titled Look Up and Don’t Give Up that included the 2:48-second video of a mama bear and her cub struggling across a steep cliff covered with snow. 20+ million people have also looked at it and, I expect, found inspiration from it as I did. I didn’t think very hard about this until this morning when I read The Atlantic article titled The Problem Behind a Viral Video of a Persistent Baby Bear: What appears to be a life-affirming triumph is really a cautionary tale about drones and wildlife. ...

The past is ungraspable, the present is ungraspable, the future is ungraspable. – Diamond Sutra Now that it’s 2018, the inevitable predictions for 2018 are upon us. I’m not a predictor. I never have been and don’t expect I ever will be. However, I do enjoy reading a few of the predictions, most notably Fred Wilson’s What Is Going To Happen In 2018 . Unlike past years, Fred led off this year with something I feel like I would have written. ...

An amazing book . But a dark, dark future. Or not, depending on whether or not you believe we are actually living in a computer simulation already.

If we fund an early stage startup company today and it’s hugely successful, it’ll be coming into its own in 2025. Ponder that for a moment. That’s how our business – and entrepreneurship – really works. With all of the excitement around entrepreneurship in the past few years, there has been a lot of shorter term thinking. I’m seeing and hearing a lot more of it these days. This is dangerous, especially for founders. ...

I’ve decided to read a bunch of old science fiction as a way to form some more diverse views of the future. I’ve been reading science fiction since I was a kid. I probably started around age ten and was a voracious reader of sci-fi and fantasy in high school. I’ve continued on as an adult, estimating that 25% of what I read is science fiction. My early diet was Asimov, Heinlein, Harrison, Pournelle, Niven, Clarke, Sterling and Donaldson. When I was on sabbatical a few years ago in Bora Bora I read about 40 books including Asimov’s I Robot , which I hadn’t read since I was a teenager. ...

If you are over 80 years old, you experienced the transition from the non-dial telephone to the dial telephone, which included the magic “finger stop.” If you are 30, imagine what you will be reflecting on 50 years from now.

The 2015 Defrag Conference is happening on November 11-12. Early bird pricing ends tomorrow. For a taste of what you’ll get if you attend, following is a guest post by Ramez Naam , the author of 5 books including the award-winning Nexus trilogy of sci-fi novels. I’m a huge fan of Ramez and his books – they are in my must read near term sci-fi category. A shorter version of this article first appeared at TechCrunch . The tech has advanced, even since then. ...