Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes last week!
I received notes from many of you… some of which came with direct feedback on what you’d like to see more of in this newsletter, which was even more appreciated :)
Its clear that you would like to hear more of my voice throughout (less article sharing, more synthesizing, in essence). I will work to incorporate my voice more going forward - bear with me!!
✋ One more thing ✋
>> For those interested in getting more involved with #thebalance (beyond the weekly digests), I am excited to announce that I will be launching a community group in the coming month whereby connections will be facilitated, knowledge will be shared, and meetups will be had…. hit reply and respond with a ‘✋’ if you are interested!
Why? Well because, in the spirit of bursting echo chambers, we have a diverse set of readers from all over the world and I think its time we get to know one another a little more intimately.
❤️ Likes, shares, and ‘my contacts’ adds are appreciated! It helps others discover what they have been missing out on while ensuring gmail doesn’t junk this thing either :)
⬇️ #thinkingthings, #followerthings, and #otherthings ⬇️
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🤔🤔 #thinkingthings
🟥 >>>> The Generative Age, an essay by Arram Sabeti
We really are in the attention economy. And it might only be the 1st inning.
Its hard to imagine a world in which content is endless…. oh wait, that world is already here. Its just going to look, feel and be much different in this next phase of entertainment, which will be AI-powered as the below essay argues.
Know that movie or song recommendation algorithm on Netflix or Spotify? Well, that is just the beginning folks. We are entering the next phase of entertainment with AI-powered virtual reality entertainment that is personally aligned with your preferences… whether in VR, AR or plain old digital, its coming much much faster than you might think.
But don’t take my word for it (or the below author’s for that matter), just check out the most recent Black Mirror series episode, Bandersnatch.
“you’ll not only be able to change anything about what you’re watching but also insert yourself into the story.”
I mean… what’s better than an endless array of custom designed entertainment in a quarantined society??? I might never want to go outside again.
Side note: if you haven’t heard about GPT-3, I wrote about it here in a previous issue and also included my GPT-3 TL;DR below.
AI can already create photorealistic faces, objects, and landscapes. Video isn’t far behind. We can already recreate any voice. GPT-3 can already write dialogue and movie plots almost indistinguishable from ones written by humans. Even generated music is making fast progress.
It’s only a matter of time until we’re generating entire movies and shows. It’s startling to realize that Hollywood movies that cost $300M to produce today might be generated for a few cents within our lifetimes.
When the cost of something drops by a factor of a billion we should expect to see qualitatively different uses. It’d be a different medium. Not only would there be endless content; there’d be endless content for any specific movie or TV show you could want. Generally speaking, AI will do for production what the internet did for distribution.
One of the amazing things about AI is how you can work at a high level of abstraction. Imagine adjusting sliders on your favorite movie to make it more gritty or funny. Or asking the AI to show you what Starwars would look like as directed by Christopher Nolan.1 The same way you can use GPT-3 to write a Taylor Swift song about Harry Potter, you could make a new Harry Potter movie starring Taylor Swift.
Language models already create new kinds of interactivity. One of the surprisingly fun things I’ve done with GPT-3 is to insert out of character behavior in the middle of a scene and watch the characters try to make sense of what happened.
Imagine a video form of this with your favorite characters.
Once we can generate high definition video and audio in real-time, these generative movies will become a different medium again – one you can inhabit.
There are already companies working on replacing 3D game engines like Unity with neural nets. In the limit, movies and games could merge into a single medium we might call Generative Reality.
I don’t mean to say people will stop consuming passive entertainment. Just that the same software will create both, and that at any time you’ll not only be able to change anything about what you’re watching but also insert yourself into the story.
What we’ll probably see first are virtual people that are indistinguishable from real people – at least for short conversations. The technology is almost there, and for some people, it is there. People are getting real emotional support from chatbots, and they’ll be a lot more appealing when talking to them is indistinguishable from doing a video call with a friend (or with Abraham Lincoln or Professor Dumbledore). GPT-3 is already good at impersonating people. I expect licensing fictional and celebrity chatbots like Tony Stark or Lady Gaga will be a big business.
Before we get AI that can autonomously generate a full movie we’ll have increasingly powerful tools where humans guide the AI by selecting and combining the best outputs. This is the stage we’re at now with GPT-3. It’s generally coherent for only a paragraph or two, but if you have a human generating multiple paragraphs and picking the best one you can end up with surprisingly good results.
Ira Glass talks about how when you get started as a maker, your taste exceeds your grasp because you lack technical proficiency. As AI tools become more powerful the technical skill required will decrease until good taste is all you need to make great art. Eventually though AI will create content that won’t be improved by human intervention.4
What timeline should we expect? The first tools for making generative movies (as well as real-time virtual people) seem only a matter of improvements on existing technology and putting them all together in a useable way.
One researcher I talked to told me I was underselling the whole thing and that fully generative movies could be here in under five years. That seems very fast to me, but what’s clear is that this is all closer than most people realize. Progress in AI has been frighteningly rapid in the last five years. When I first started sharing samples of text generated by GPT-3 the main reaction I got was disbelief. Most people thought it was a hoax and that there was no way an AI could have written that.
Combine photorealism with convincing virtual people and endless personalized stories and worlds to explore and it’s hard to imagine a more entertaining form of entertainment. We’d have the kind of simulated reality that philosophers have long built thought experiments around.
This will be addictive. Thousands of people were depressed after watching Avatar because their real lives weren’t as appealing. It’s simultaneously exciting and worrying to imagine what would happen if people could live inside the movie.
It’ll be especially addictive if we use AI to discover what we want. By watching us interact with content, it could learn what we want better than we understand it ourselves.
I hesitate to predict this is the end of civilization since that sort of prediction is famously usually wrong, but it’s worrying to imagine alternate realities so compelling that people no longer engage with the real one.6 Most animals, including humans, are susceptible to superstimulus. When Google tried using AI to develop the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, the solution it converged on was to make the cookie out of solid chocolate.
What I’m describing isn’t just a single superstimulus, but an entire reality made of superstimuli. What will reality look like when it’s made out of solid chocolate? We might find out.
>>> GPT-3 TL;DR
GPT-3 is a Machine Learning model that generates text. You give it a bit of text related to what you’re trying to generate, and it does the rest.
Machine Learning models let you make predictions based on past data, and generation (creating text) is a special case of predicting things
OpenAI, a non-profit research group, has been working on this model for years – this is the third aptly-named version after GPT and (gasp) GPT-2
The GPT-3 model is trained via few shot learning, an experimental method that seems to be showing promising results in language models
GPT-3 has picked up a lot of buzz for how good it is - it can generate entire published articles, poetry and creative writing, and even code
🟥 >>>> The Divided Age and the Western World
Trying something a little different this week by sharing a video as opposed to an article.
This one is a lecture (with amazingly clever illustrations) narrated by psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist about the divided brain and how it has informed western society as we know it. What follows is a highly interesting 10 minute video I came across while perusing a random conversation on Twitter over the weekend about finding “flow state” (in the context of software development… don’t ask, ha. I am a bit of a nerd, no need to remind me haha).
There is a lot to unpack in this vid (I swear he crammed the whole book in here), but after watching it a few times, I came away with the following takeaways:
🤯 flow state is an actual state and can be measured
🧠 the human brain exudes a paradoxical relationship by evolutionary design in the way it functions between the left / right hemispheres controlling the left / right parts of the body. Our brain’s frontal lobe function is the great inhibitor and frees us up to take a step back from the experience happening real time, thus making us more thoughtful when making decisions
🌎 the two hemisphere delicately manage a tension of different functions or as Iain puts it, “the master and the servant” and offer two versions of the world; As Albert Einstein once said, “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
😈 the right hemisphere is the devil’s advocate (in a good way!) and deals with the “embodied world,” … a world of evolving things, or uncertainty, which I found fascinating; the world of the left hemisphere yields clarity and the power to manipulate lifeless, static things. It is powered by logic.
☯️ The history of western culture began with a wonderful balancing of these two hemispheres but has since gone more left hemisphere in its view… the world is paradoxical now and our daily lives are made more subjective by networks of small complicated rules - we have more information than ever, yet arguably have less understanding about ourselves.
>> Iain cites 3 reasons for the shift: left hemisphere talk is very convincing - if it doesn’t fit the model, cut it out - i.e. the “Berlusconi of the brain” - its the one that controls the media, very vocal on its own behalf; hall of mirrors effect - the more we know the more we get trapped in our cycles of information. We need to return to balance and take the right hemisphere into an account - we are more passionate in the right hemisphere, more empathetic, and its important we view our decisions from a broader, downstream context, thinking through the grey areas more thoroughly - because if there is only one certainty in the world, its that things are uncertain. 2020 anyone??
>> “There is no way that you can rationally prove that rationality is a good way to look at the world. The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits in rationality.”
📗 I have since gone out an purchased Iain’s book, The Master and his Emissary, check it out if you’re interested! Otherwise give the below vid a watch, its only 10 min
🟥 >>>> Two Kinds of Momentum by Seth Godin
If you don’t follow Seth’s daily snippets by now, I highly recommend. Seth sends daily tidbits early morning M-F that are always insightful. The best part is that it takes no more than 60 seconds to read his daily posts.
The below is from his post on my birthday last week and it is surprisingly relevant to what I am currently up against in my own life as I work to build my business (and laying the foundation for my life more broadly).
Constant demands on my time. Infinite strategic choices. Unlimited fires to light. Just gotta keep going. Stay the course. A regular cadence of excellent execution.
Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do. But it takes a lot of time and energy to build something out of nothing and forward momentum is absolutely critical to that.
In my mind, forward momentum is the sum of positive, self-reinforcing habits. So, in that case, one could say I live for momentum. But sometimes I just refer to it as balance or flow….
Enjoy Seth’s tidbit of wisdom:
There’s the unalterable momentum of physical objects as understood by physics: objects in motion tend to remain that way. A fast-moving baseball hitting your head hurts more than lobbed one.
But usually, momentum is only conceptual, and it’s based on our habits and our difficulty in understanding (and ignoring) sunk costs. We stick with a pattern, a leader, an employee or a project much longer than we should.
The behavior that keeps someone from getting hired is trivial compared to what it takes to get fired. And at some level, that makes sense. When we’re not committed yet, the cost of looking around and switching our choice is small. But once we’ve emotionally committed to a cause or a project or a person, the cost of change is high, partly because it involves feeling as though we made a mistake.
But compounding that initial choice by doubling down on it is the actual mistake.
Digging a deeper hole rarely gets us to the other side.
📲🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻 #followerthings
This is on par with what’s celebrated in our culture… the focus on early achievement. I like the thinking here in terms of allocation, but also believe there is something to be said about patience and being a late bloomer… recommend this book if you are interested in learning more: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
^This is the 2020 version of dating
^some more 🤔 from the above generative AI article
📚⏯️🎤 #otherthings
I have gotten great feedback from several of you on my evolving playlist… will keeep adding to it through the end of the month. Check it out below!
FALL FLOW 10/20: The playlist has more of an overall chill flow vibe, with some of my timeless favorites sprinkled in. It only felt right to name it ‘fall flow’ given this being the year of ebbs and flows… 2020 has been a balancing act for many of us no doubt.
Give it a listen 👂, fade out, and find yo’ flow.
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Stay safe out there. Peace and love to all y’all.
Curiously,
-Block
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About me:
My friends call me Block. I am the CSO & Cofounder at Alkemi.Network, a company focused on bridging digital finance for institutions. This newsletter is my passion project.
I am endlessly curious and blissfully dissatisfied. I love new ideas, obsessed with all things technology, and am always seeking to broaden my perspective while striving for balance, of course.
I am a futurist, investor, entrepreneur, builder, advisor, life long learner, hockey player, traveler, podcast addict, hip-hop head, e-newsletter junkie, event planner, and comedic-short producer. Follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here.
“Find a question that makes the world interesting.” - Paul Graham