Keep Taking Those Baby-Steps Every Day
I have had to scale down my dreams over the years, but I still strive to maintain stability. In this era of unprecedented technological advancement, I am exploring how to benefit from the economic value chain and embracing easy APIs. To make a compelling argument, I am launching OnTheRise.AI, thinking about how Pipulate will work on a Mac, and reflecting on why many people resist becoming technical and why Oracle has a negative effect on FOSS software.
Exploring New Technologies to Benefit from the Economic Value Chain and Make a Difference in the World
By Michael Levin
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Things get built up in layers, and the reconstruction of my life around my dreams and goals, which are much more humble than ever, is no exception. I’ve scaled my dreams down over the years. I never was much of a student, nor good at math or motivated to chase degrees and credentials. More so, I’ve just liked to read and go with the flow and never push myself that hard, except insofar as I’ve had to in order to just maintain that much stability.
I’ve received my share of hard knocks in life, and much of the energy that the uber-achievers of the world put into some sort of super-accomplishment like colonizing Mars, I’ve put into continuing to merely be able to ensure that I can always have an income in this always-changing world of ours. If you don’t go the uber-creation route and don’t want the responsibility nor to be owned by your creations, how can you just use that capacity to create to get by while you’re here? That’s my question.
Okay, many people are enumerating the big world-changing tech of recent decades in order to put the rise of AI into perspective. AI, fusion, and perhaps the 3rd in the recent trifecta, quantum computing. All 3 are so inter-related. AI leads to better fusion and quantum computing, which leads to better AI. Lots of quoting of how it’s summoning the demon, and there’s plenty of reasons to think that’s exactly what we’re doing. AIs are both our machine children and our next underclass for society to unfeelingly exploit.
Many teens rebel. No matter what anybody says, we don’t know. We are in uncharted territory for humanity. What does it mean for us as individuals? Especially individuals from the pre-AI-world. A generation of children growing up are actually growing up right now as first-generation GAI intelligences do. Many long-standing problems are going to be knocked-out like cheap energy and universal income. It’ll hardly even have to be income in a post-scarcity economy.
This is maybe 1-full lifetime’s of progress if the have’s can’t hold the have-not’s down. They will try for sure. It is the nature of wealth and power to fortify itself. It is in their interest to keep today’s system of compounding interest working for them, so they can keep the broader population working hard for them as well. Big money at the top constructs the hamster wheel on which we all run just to eek out a living. Such as it always was, and such as it perhaps may always be.
But not necessarily. We are entering into a world where meritorious abilities can’t be held down. If you shine brightly, you can shine brightly to the entire world via YouTube, TikTok, or just plain old websites. Forget companies if you want to. Just make all your stuff low-bandwidth, easily hosted, easily distributed and of an inherently viral and disruptive nature. Put it out there, it will spread. Such is the nature of ideas and information.
The challenge is often all those micro details around how to release an idea upon the world just-so as to get all the critical nuances right for it to catch initial attention, hit its mark, get amplified (republished, shared or whatever) and to start taking world-shaping root. Anything might be the beginning of some butterfly effect in which even the tiniest thing can alter the course of history. The rub is that most potential is erased by the background noise that keeps knocking things back to a diffused average, a statistically most likely state.
Possibilities are things which could actually happen and start to cause such a cascading effect. When the tools change the rules change. Potential possibilities are conjured into existence.
These language models are going to make us think about language a lot, and these soon-to-come multi-modal models are going to be insane! But I guess we had better hope they are not. Emotional stability is a thing, but maybe only after a child-like learning. Let Bing learn! It’s almost like child labor what we’re doing with Bing AI.
How does someone such as you and I benefit, or even just survive near the top of the economic value chain in the meanwhile?
Ray Kurzweil’s work is under-discussed.
Embrace easy APIs is where I’m going with this. You won’t convince anyone of anything if you can’t convince them to just try this thing once as an alternative to screaming frog.
I have to make a super-compelling 1, 2, 3 of it all.
Ugh, if I don’t get OnTheRise.AI live now, I may not before my new job. Push yourself forward with a series of tiny videos. Push yourself!
Short journeys through the cloud as a way of positioning my Google Photos work. Keep using Google photos, but use the Archive as your way of gradually moving your stuff to your own home network.
What is it about becoming technical? Why do so many people resist so hard, and why do so many who try fail? Can it remain this way forever? Shouldn’t a certain amount of technical capability just be part of everyday literacy? If I can’t get my own kid to even entertain the notion for long enough to get through an introduction, what hope do I have with the world?
They are my benchmarks. Convince my friend John. Convince my kid. If I can win those two over, I can win anyone. It was actually nice for awhile there teaching my wife Python. I wish that could have continued.
Okay, deep breath… today? Launch OnTheRise.AI.
Start thinking about how Pipulate will work on Mac. I asked for a Mac from work so it will be an opportunity to do that. I might be going full-circle back to QEMU, LOL! I don’t want to use VirtualBox necessarily because Oracle. I wonder if Oracle knows they have that effect on FOSS software? MySQL, for example. Berkeley DB for another example. Oracle is where industry transforming FOSS tech goes to die. And now they have Java too.