What’s Next — AI, Electricity, Jobsby Jordan Gonen
by Jordan Gonen
Hey there 👋 Lots of interesting content in this week’s newsletter. Hope you learn something new!
9.25.2017
Articles to Read.
A Summarized FAQ About Bitcoin
For the past 365 days, I have taken exclusively cold showers. Water temperature has ranged between 6°C (43°F) in winter and 13°C (55°F) in summer.
On every work day, I get up at 6:30AM, wake up my teenage children and then immediately go to the shower. I minimize as much as possible the time between getting up and starting the shower in order to limit the self-talk that tries to convince me not to go into the cold.
The difficult part is not to take a cold shower on a typical day, it’s to take one every day without having an end date.
New Platforms, AI, & Evolving the Organization:
AI and deep learning will be a fundamental game changer, akin to the wave of innovation that was ushered in as “mobile” and “cloud” became major category enablers over the past decade.
In the same way that a brick & mortar company can’t just deploy a website and suddenly become an e-commerce business, it won’t be enough for traditional internet companies to build an array of neural networks and then morph into an “AI company.” The coming platform shift to AI will require new organizations, roles, and methodologies.
The Product Design Challenges of AR On Smartphones:
With the launch of ARKit, we are going to see augmented reality apps become available for about 500 million iPhones in the next 12 months, and at least triple that in the following 12 months — as we can now include the numbers of ARCore-supporting devices from Google.
It’s a new medium the way the web was different from print, different in kind, not in scale. In the same way that most of the first commercial websites were “brochure-ware,” where an existing print brochure was uploaded onto a website, the first AR apps will be mobile apps copied over to AR. They’ll be just as terrible as brochure-ware was, though they will be novel!
[product] Citizen:
The app gives every person technology that empowers them to make their family, their community, and their city safer. The need has never been greater for technology that informs and protects the public. We created Citizen to drive down crime and increase accountability. When everybody does their part, Citizen is a tool that could save your life.
[video] 21.co announces a token-based incentive program to get people to join its messaging platform (4 minute video)
Is this the future of communities?
How I Hacked Hundreds of Companies through their Helpdesk:
Months ago I discovered a flaw hackers can use to access a company’s internal communications. The flaw only takes a couple of clicks to potentially access intranets, social media accounts such as Twitter and Slack Teams.
Once inside, most company’s security is significantly weaker. Internal impact assessments showed employees pasted passwords, company secrets and customer information in channels everyone in the team had access to.
[video] AI is the New Electricity (20 minutes)
The Difference Between Closed and Open Minded People:
Why is it that some people seem to make constant progress in their professional and personal lives, while others appear to be doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over?
So which group are you in?
Before you smugly slap an open-minded sticker on your chest, consider this: closed-minded people would never consider that they could actually be closed-minded. In fact, their perceived open-mindedness is what’s so dangerous.
It’s a version of the Batesian Mimic Problem — are you the real thing or a copycat? Are you the real deal, or have you simply learned to talk the talk, to look the part?
The ability to change your mind is a superpower.
// my take — On the other hand, I also think it is a superpower to be able to have lots of conviction around your ideas.
If it’s a core skill, something that you can take with you from one job to another or one assignment to another, then it’s on you. Learn it through education, experience, or extra-curricular practice. I call those ‘trunk skills’. Some examples for a developer include using an IDE, using revision control (you knew I was going to bring that up!), learning functional programming, and writing concurrent code.
If it’s a non-core (“branch”) skill, something that may not be critical to your employability, something largely obsolete, or something your employer needs for a specific purpose, you can probably expect your employer to put some effort into training you. It would be great if you can pick it up quickly, all the same, but certainly isn’t something you should put any effort into outside of your regular work hours.
Tech Stocks as Career Obsolescence Insurance:
When US workers plow their retirement savings into the S&P 500, and in doing so they end up allocating more and more into the very technology companies that are rapidly displacing their jobs, perhaps they are doing something more than just investing.
More:
– [video] A Decentralized Future (Vitalik and Naval)
– [guide] How to Get What You Want Professionally
– The Problem with Politics
– Apple AR Developer Guidelines
– If I’d Known What We Were Starting (Bitcoin)
– How A Teenage Gamer Became an Icon for the Feminist Movement in KoreaCurrent Book I’m Reading — Thinking Fast and Slow (almost done)
Last Book I Read — Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of A Family and Culture in Crisis
See My Full Reading List
You made it to the end! Thanks for reading 👋
If you enjoyed, would really appreciate if you shared this link!
Want to read more? I write daily, and tweet too!
My Update:
– We’re launching Mesh super soon! Be sure to sign up for early access.
– I am thinking more and more about short versus long term mental models. How do you think about optimizing for one versus the other? Which is more important?
– What if I made a newsletter with 7 cool jobs/companies every week…would you be interested? Sign up and let me know.
– What can I help you with? Email me!
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Thanks for reading! Really hope you enjoyed! (If you did, would be really awesome if you could share this link with 5 friends)
– Jordan
Personal Website
By jordangonen on September 25, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.