I just finished my first week of Purple Space, “a community of practice for creators, entrepreneurs, and line managers” founded by Seth Godin.
Like any new community, things got off to a somewhat awkward start…feeling a bit disoriented and sheepish. Who is who? Where am I supposed to sit? What is normal here? How am I expected to engage? Do I want to be here?
Today was a big inflection point. Seth organized a “Round Robin Chat” this morning, which consisted of about 50 people who were split into pairs for 5 minutes. There were 5 rounds, interspersed with a bit of commentary from Seth. The whole thing lasted less than an hour. I’m feeling inspired.
It’s a really simple container which can be easily implemented by Zoom. I found this “speed dating” format to be really energizing. In 5 minutes you almost always end up getting cut-off mid-sentence when the breakout room ends. This might sound frustrating but it’s super fun. There’s a cliff-hanger. It’s hard to get bored in 5 minutes. You’re left curious about what could have been if the interaction were longer.
Afterwards, I couldn’t help but think of how different the round robin “set and setting” was than most professional gatherings I’ve been to. The juxtaposition that immediately came to mind was a community/conference/company “happy hour” - there might be some conversations you’re really trying to get out of, someone you’re anxious/excited about approaching, someone you really want to avoid, that new person who joins in late and now the whole story has to be told again, someone buys you a beer and now you feel like you have to talk to them, someone offers to buy you a beer and now you feel like you have to drink, and on and on…
The Zoom round robin is less organic, more mechanical. There isn’t the opportunity to go very deep. But that’s what’s fun about it. Who goes first? How do I present myself in just a minute? How can I help someone in just a couple of minutes? Who wouldn’t want to learn about the intricacies of alpaca fur for five minutes?
Aside from just being a great way to meet five new people in the online community, I left feeling inspired to create community. I couldn’t help but recall of the different types of events I’ve hosted in the past. Remembering that skill, that possibility, that muscle.
Indra’s Web, or Indra’s Net, is a cosmic net laced with jewels that hang over the palace of Indra, the king of gods in Hindu mythology.
The net is infinite, and at each of its junction points there is a jewel that infinitely reflects the others. This is said to symbolize the infinite interconnectedness of all phenomena. Just as each jewel contains the reflections of all the others, each phenomenon in the universe contains within it all other phenomena. Nothing exists independently, but rather everything arises dependent on causes and conditions.
What got me thinking about Indra’s Net was the idea of building my own internal wiki for different things that I’m referencing often. For example if I’m referencing a particular book regularly, instead of just having the link/title/author, I could have my RAW.works edition wiki about that book, here on the site.
Generative AI makes this easier than ever. So while that might have taken hours of time to do in the past, you could do it in a few minutes now. You could potentially even automate the creation of the wiki, pulling data from various internal and external locations to curate a “showcase” wiki entry for the book.
What I’m excited about here is the possibility to create really engaging experiences that are more than just a recommendation and a link to go somewhere else. My next thought immediately terrified me.
If you think filter bubbles are a problem now, this is gonna make them even worse. So for example, Google could functionally summarize the entire internet with AI in a way that you will never leave Google. And you can see that they’re already doing this. With certain types of questions, you get the response as a snippet in the top search results of Google. (Not necessarily link to another website, but an official “Google answer.)
You can imagine taking that one step further, where the user literally never leaves Google. So you start on Google and when you ask it for stuff, it doesn’t give you the link to the other person’s website. It gives you the summary that it wants you to see.
I’m not sure Google will ever actually implement this to the fullest extreme, because all of their money comes from selling ads via the cost per click. The traffic leaving Google and going to other people’s websites is their main cash cow business. But it’s not hard to imagine a version of Google where there are no organic search results, only the Google AI summaries and paid ads.
If not Google, someone with less ad revenue. Microsoft Bing I’m sure makes some money on ads, but it’s not really the lifeblood of the organization. Or Amazon can create its own version of the internet that is constantly making sure that you see the version that maximizes as many of the physical and digital products that they sell as possible.
Maybe we’re already living in a version of Indra’s web. In the context of books, Amazon is already the number one platform for physical books, digital books, audiobooks, and now they own Goodreads…so it’s kind of hard not to be in Amazon’s version of the web when you’re talking about books.
Interdependent. Interconnected. Addicted to shiny jewels.
As amazing as Midjourney is, the one thing it is notoriously bad at is spelling. It doesn’t understand words as text. When OpenAI recently teased DALL·E 3 with their avocado therapy cartoon, my immediate reaction was “OMG it can spell!”
Aside from some goofyLinkedInposts - I was really struggling to see how Midjourney could be used for my business. It was a fun toy, and clearly a very powerful one, but it didn’t seem practical for business use.
I’m sure that there are plenty of Midjourney diehards who are proving me wrong on a daily basis, but for me something about the lack of spelling just gave me the sense that Midjourney would be more trouble than it was worth for our professional digital marketing use cases.
So the real question is: can DALL·E 3 actually spell? (As of this writing, the only way I know how to access it is through the Bing Image Creator, which makes me question my $20/mo OpenAI “ChatGPT Plus” subscription. (Microsoft must really have OpenAI by the balls.))
I’ll let you decide for yourself. (All typos courtesy Microsoft via Bing Image Creator)
Do you know whose job AI is not going to be replacing anytime soon? My plumbers.
Literally every week there is a new advancement in generative AI that gets us one step closer to AI that can achieve the “Turing Test equivalent output” for many functional roles within an organization.
A friendly agent to help you sift through the documentation and clarify any questions? You can set that up in less than an hour.
How about write a blog? That was so 2022.
What about someone who could provide a quick sounding board to test your ideas, or an intern you can research different business opportunities? This is all easy to do with tools that are either free or cost as much for a monthly subscription as a human might charge per hour or even per 15 minutes.
I have been following these developments relatively closely and I have yet to see an AI that can replace copper piping, install a water heater, or shut off the water if a pipe bursts under my house. While a huge number of programmers have been laid off here in the Bay Area, my plumber is doing just fine.
With LLMs accelerating daily, the value of “knowing about” something is approaching zero. To use an example that is relevant to my business polySpectra: previously it might have been valuable to be the person on your team or in your company that knows about “resin 3D printing”. In about 90 seconds I just tested (via Poe) GPT 4, Claude-2, Llama-2-70b, and PaLM 2. They all “know about” resin 3D printing (see below for examples).
If someone knows how to spell the thing you are curious about - they can get a pretty good overview of a topic instantaneously and for free. So your value as the person who “knows about” the topic isn’t very high, because in the time it would take me to find you, I already have the answers I need.
So how is a mere human supposed to stay ahead of the curve? Perhaps you can know something that is fundamentally unknowable to AI. Perhaps you can do something better and faster and cheaper than anyone else. (“Knowing how” is clearly infinitely more valuable than “knowing about”.)
Or perhaps you can choose a few things or maybe even just one thing - you can choose a topic on which you are going to be the absolute foremost expert in the entire world. Not a topic that you “know about”, a topic that you know in your bones, a topic that you live every single day.
There is something that always bothered me about the advice of productivity gurus. It has taken me a while to figure out what it is. I think a big part of it is that I was never particularly impressed with their examples.
A common example, especially when someone is writing a productivity book, would be examples of authors. The first problem with this is that I’m not particularly interested in writing a book (although maybe someday I will be). More over, the specific act of writing a book is not necessarily difficult or impressive.
It is definitely a lot of work to write a book. (Or was, before generative AI took off.) And I’m sure that if you actually want anyone to read your book, it is even more work. And if you actually want to make the book successful enough to make any money, it is even more work. But the example of the author who just writes for some specified period of time or some specified number of pages every single day really didn’t resonate with me.
Maybe the other piece of it is that the majority of the people giving advice on productivity themselves aren’t doing anything or achieving anything that I find particularly impressive or applicable to my own life. Especially where their profession now is simply writing books about methods for how to be more efficient at writing books. Again, I’m sure that is valuable for a lot of aspiring authors, but it never really stuck with me.
For me, I have always been more interested in the advice of operators and doers. For example, I am much more curious about Warren Buffett’s advice on investing because he is actively investing and has built up his expertise on the topic through doing it (well) for decades. His advice might get him a little bit of publicity, but it really isn’t his business model to be giving advice. His business model is to be a smart investor.
On the other hand, you have people like Jim Cramer, whose primary job is giving investment advice every single day on TV. That’s what he gets paid to do. And yes, he also had a hedge fund at one point. I won’t pretend to know anything about it, but I don’t think it was particularly successful. Regardless, his profession is giving advice about investing, not investing.
I tend to be more interested in productivity tips from people who are focused on doing and achieving things, not just talking about it. The hard-won learnings of an operator are richer and more rooted in reality.
I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!
The fundamental challenge of a machine reading handwritten postal addresses was solved before 1998. So why can’t even the most advanced AI algorthims from the top tech companies read a handwritten note in 2023? (This is not a rhetorical question.)
Optical character recognition (OCR) for digital text is ubiquitous, free, and fast. The built-in camera app on your iPhone will scan digitally-printed text basically in real-time. Google Translate will overlay the translation of signs/receipts/packaging in augmented reality.
Ironically, one of the classic tutorials in machine learning education is recognizing handwritten digits. Apparently only the US Postal Service has the talent to put this into production. Either that, or no one can think of a way that handwriting OCR would make them money. An efficient way to digitize pen and paper means that people would spend less time on their phones/computers/tablets, which would mean fewer notifications and less ad revenue. It would also mean that a plain piece of paper might displace the need for a $1500 tablet with a cool “pencil” to boot…and that’s bad for hardware sales. (Not to mention less data to spy on.)
I’ve been obsessed with finding the best tools for handwriting OCR, as a way of digitizing my analog notes (with the goal of reducing my screen time). Ironically, my journey thus far has only added to my screentime, trying to find and try “handwriting to text” tools that might unlock this workflow for me.
My conclusion as of today: the best handwriting OCR tools are already built into your phone. For iOS, use the “Scan Documents” feature inside of Notes. For Android, it’s called Google Lens. Don’t waste your time or money on any of the other apps for this — they all suck. Adobe gets a dishonorable mention for how terrible their OCR is for handwriting. (Given that they have monopolized PDF and “regular” OCR forever, they should be the best, not the worst.)
If you find a handwriting OCR app that doesn’t suck, please contact me immediately. I am hoping that maybe in 15 more years, I can finally digitize my handwritten notes.
