Warren Buffett’s final shareholder letter emphasising the importance of kindness.

One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them. You can start with Tom Murphy; he was the best.

Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior.

Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.

Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.

I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.

This thought provoking article from Ahmed on the current state of AI’s onslaught on the job market.

This is where I keep coming back to a phrase that has been rattling around my brain for the past month: out of distribution humans.

Most work lives in the fat middle of a bell curve. Tasks repeat with small variations. Most graduate schemes are built around that fact. You take reasonably bright people, give them a handbook and a mentor, and let them climb a well mapped gradient. Shared service centres, call centres, warehouses, junior consulting rotations, entry level software roles, even a lot of legal and accounting work, all sit in that comfortable hunk of the curve where yesterday’s data is a very good guide to tomorrow’s tasks.

Models feast on that part of the curve. That is what they are trained on: logs, emails, historical cases, recordings of someone else doing the job, code repositories, scanned documents. If your work looks a lot like a large pile of past episodes, it is a short hop from playing them back to imitating them. The central question for future labour markets is not whether you are clever or diligent in some absolute sense. It is whether what you do is ordinary enough for a model to learn or strange enough to fall through the gaps.

An out of distribution human, in my head, is someone whose job sits far enough in the tail of that curve that it does not currently compress into training data. Maybe they work with genuinely novel problems. Maybe they operate at small scales or in messy physical situations where we do not yet have enough sensors. Maybe they have taste that is not easily reduced to click logs. They are not safe; nothing is. They are simply late on the automation curve. The system needs them until it can watch them for long enough and in enough detail that it can flatten what they do into data.

This reminds me of Zara Zhang’s observation.

Swiss cheese always had holes in it. The holes from which Jerry would emerge. But some time back Swiss cheese started losing holes. This video by Tim Scott explains why and how they managed to get it back.

The bacteria that are responsible for making these holes produce propionate, acetate and carbon dioxide, and this carbon dioxide is produced in the cheese and aggregates all around impurities. The more the bacterium produces this carbon dioxide, it accumulates and builds these holes. These impurities capture the carbon dioxide, and then a bubble forms and grows.

They found that the milk was too clean, so we didn’t have any dust in it, and this was because we had closed milking systems, so the dust could not get into the milk. Everything improved the last decade, so the milking process is hermetically closed now. And then, in former times, in the barn, you had always this hay dust everywhere, and it came also into the milk. We tried different particles to put into the milk to see if the holes are growing again. Hay powder is the best one, and we really could see that the whole formation was dependent on the concentration of the hay powder.

Somehow this reminds me of a dialogue from Tron: Legacy.

The thing about perfection is that it is unknowable, it’s impossible, but its also right in front of us, all the time

John Steele highlighting the irony of how farming sea food strips the sea itself.

In the cold waters of the Pacific, the anchoveta once shimmered in swarms so vast that sailors described them as turning the sea into a river of quicksilver. They were small, unassuming fish, yet the abundance of the ocean rested upon their delicate bones. Seabirds wheeled overhead in their millions, sea lions and whales dove into their depths, and predatory fish rose through the blue to feed on them. In those shoals lived the vitality of the sea itself. But in our age, the anchoveta, along with sardines and menhaden, have been transformed from living threads in an ancient web into bags of meal and casks of oil. Ninety percent of the forage fish caught by human hands are not eaten by us but ground down to feed salmon being raised in the cold fjords of Norway and shrimp and fish in the tropical ponds of Southeast Asia.

It is one of the great ironies of our time. To farm the sea, we strip the sea. We take from the ocean’s foundation to build its surface anew, and in the process we imperil both.

But all is not lost. There are some innovative solutions in the horizon.