Anand Sridharan talking about how predicting future events cannot help us predict the future consequences.

Herein lies the true unknowability of the messy world around us. It is not just we cannot predict major events. It is that, even if we could, we have no idea how their consequences will play out. It is impossible to reliably unravel a chain of future events in a manner that is useful in real-world decision making.

I used a 2-level thought experiment merely to illustrate that the world is unknowable at many levels. There is no reason to stop at two levels. Cause-and-effect plays out at many more levels, often with feedback loops tying certain consequences back to original events. In fact, in the real world, it is far from clear what the original causes are for whatever transpires around us.

This thread by Dror Poleg about how technology has the power to turn in-person work into scalable work.

In 1930, the union of American singers spent the equivalent of $10m on a campaign to stop people from listening to recorded music and watching movies with sound.

When films were silent, theatres employed local musicians to accompany each screening. But once films gained a soundtrack, local musicians were no longer necessary. The economic implications were significant: In 1927, around 24,000 musicians were employed in theatres across the US and Canada. But then came the first talking film — The Jazz Singer.

By 1930, some 7,200 musicians lost their jobs — 30% of the pre-talkie total. In some markets, such as New York and Cincinnati, musician unemployment reached 50-75%.

Over time, all theatre musicians were eliminated, and recorded soundtracks became par for the course.

The advent of records, radio, and talking films made creative work scalable: “300 musicians in Hollywood supply all the ‘music’ offered in thousands of theatres. Can such a tiny reservoir of talent nurture artistic progress?”

A hundred years ago, it seemed improbable that “canned music” would replace “real” music. Joseph N. Weber, president of the American Federation of Music, predicted that the public will not always accept “like-less, soulless, synthetic music.”

Edward More, the Chicago Herald Tribune music critic, agreed with Weber, stating that “the films have a long way to go before they can duplicate living musicians”

Films never managed to “duplicate” living musicians. They didn’t have to.

Disruptive technology doesn’t seek to “replicate.” More often, it sidesteps and makes old standards and processes redundant.

Records and talking films made music cheaper and accessible to a much larger audience. Most of the audience didn’t care about traditional quality.

As a result, we tend to underestimate technology’s power to turn in-person work into scalable work. In many “creative” professions, fewer people can already capture a larger share of the market than ever.

Such professions include programmers and designers, but also teachers and fitness instructors. A Peloton instructor earns about 12 times more than an offline competitor — and can service many more clients at the same time.

We assume that most professions cannot be scaled in the same way. But there is already evidence to the contrary. Many things that seem ridiculous to us now will seem obvious to our grandkids.

This comment by godelski on Hacker News about how folks in the long tail, who seem least productive, are the ones who end up changing the world.

You can’t have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm.

How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).

Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They’re probably the “most productive”.

Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it’s incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren’t leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.

But then there’s those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the “least productive”. Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.

Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I’m willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.

In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I’m not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.

This reminds me of the book Slack by Tom DeMarco.

Becca Caddy talking about the future humans in the Pixar movie Wall-E and how that future now looks scary.

I’ve been researching how AI shows up in sci-fi for an article I’m writing, and I keep coming back to Wall-E. Compared to The Terminator or The Matrix, nothing overtly terrifying happens. There’s no war between humans and machines, no extinction event, no malevolent intelligence plotting our downfall. 

And yet, Wall-E feels more disturbing than most AI dystopias, at least to me.

Because in Wall-E’s imagined future, humans aren’t enslaved by machines – at least not in the Matrix-y sort of way we usually imagine. But they’re gradually enfeebled by them. 

Enfeeblement is a really useful world here. It doesn’t mean oppression or domination. It means becoming exhausted, debilitated and weakened by lack of use. Muscles atrophy, skills fade and agency dulls. 

It’s not quite the same as the idea of learned helplessness, but it’s hard not to think of it. Those experiments where animals stop trying to escape from a threat, like drowning. And it’s not because they’re restrained either, but because they’re learned that effort no longer matters.

That’s exactly what happens in Wall-E. Systems move for humans, think for them, decide for them. Until people barely use their bodies, their attention and their capacity to choose at all. Life becomes effortless, deeply comfortable, completely frictionless and smooth.

Wall-E is one of my favourite movies. I still can’t imagine how Pixar pulled it off with no dialogues and only facial features of Wall-E to communicate emotions.

Wall-E came out in 2008, one year after iPhone launch. AI and robots were a far away future. But the movie had the foresight about how AI and robots will transform humans when they become a reality. And now that AI and robots are becoming a reality, the future that Wall-E showed also seems to be becoming a reality. Unbelievable.

Ted Lamade explaining how our imperfections give us character.

Perfection, or the perception of it, has become the goal. We curate our lives on YouTube through highlight reels and post our airbrushed photos from vacation on Instagram. It’s why people are increasingly using artificial intelligence to “perfect” nearly everything they do. And yes, it’s why people are increasingly buying artificial Christmas trees….because they are easier to set up, cleaner to maintain, and “perfect” in so many ways.

But here’s the question:

By attempting to remove all the imperfections in life, are we removing the stories? The moments that make us laugh? The mistakes and imperfections that make us uniquely human?

I don’t know. Maybe I sound like the Grinch. Maybe I am overly nostalgic for the past. Maybe I just need to accept that this is what progress looks like. Or maybe, just maybe, there is something special about the tree with the flat top. The one that leans a little. The one with “character.” The one you talk about for weeks, if not years later. The one that reminds you that since perfection is impossible, you might be better off simply embracing life’s imperfections.

I love RSS. No algorithms showing me ads. No infinite scroll. Just blogs that I have chosen to follow showing up in NetNewsWire. 

And yet, at times, RSS also gives me anxiety. I follow around 150 blogs and open up NetNewsWire every single day in the morning. I dip in and out, read what catches my eye, and keep myself updated on the topics I care about. 

But then life happens. A busy week. A vacation. Essentially a stretch of time where reading isn’t the priority. 

And when I come back, open NetNewsWire, I am greeted with 200+ unread posts. Suddenly the thing that was supposed to reduce noise feels overwhelming.

The feeling is oddly specific: “I am going to miss something important. I carefully chose these blogs. If I don’t read them, what was the point?”

But overtime I have come to accept the uncomfortable reality—I will never read all the great posts that exist. Never. Once I accepted that reality it became easier to hit that “Mark all as read” button. A clean slate to begin with. And I have come to a realisation that if something was truly great it resurfaces, sooner or later, through another medium. Great posts never disappear forever.

PS: Do not use this strategy on your work emails when coming back from vacation. Else you might be forced to take another vacation.