Over the last week or so, I’ve enjoyed the following blog posts / twitter threads.
Edge interview with Kai-Fu Lee
The Edge interview with Kai-Fu Lee is very good. He is one of the original A.I. researchers and has worked in the industry for most of the big name technology companies.
He discusses the history of A.I., the current situation involving Deep Learning, and goes on to talk about the future."We're all going to face a very challenging next fifteen or twenty years, when half of the jobs are going to be replaced by machines. Humans have never seen this scale of massive job decimation."
Dreams and Visualisation
This morning I was wondering why my dreams can be almost indistinguishable from reality, yet when I visualise something, it lacks vividness and clarity. Not only that but I often get distracted when I visualise something - I vanish down a stream of consciously only to snap out of it a few seconds later and realise that I had lost focus.
Quote from Moonwalking with Einstein
"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives." -- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
How different will we be?
I read an interesting post yesterday, about how much we change over the course of our lives. Yet, when we look forward at our future, we project forward the same person we are now. We don't expect ourselves to change much at all.
More Notes on Changing Behaviour
I wrote up a post this morning on micro-behaviours, triggers and rewards. Later on I was checking out Hacker News when I stumbled on this post by Alex Coleman, on how to get stuff done. Both posts refer to the same original work by Dr Fogg on micro-behaviours. In my post I emphasize using “triggers” to trigger the new habit, which may be an existing habit or environmental cue. In Alex's post, he puts a lot of emphasis on setting up a routine or schedule. The time itself becomes the trigger.
Bret Dunlap, Runner
There is a wonderful story over at Runner's World about Bret Dunlap, a guy who was badly injured when he was a kid. His brain and body are damaged. It's about how he moves on and adapts. How his mother helps him recover and build a life. How he discovers running and it helps change his life. The story is poignant and well written. It's definitely worth reading.
What Google Glass might soon be like
There is an interesting clip over on YouTube, that shows what having Google Glass (or something similar) might someday be like.
A Poignant Account of Depression
There is a poignant account of a person falling into depression over at Hyperbole and a Half. It is beautifully illustrated too. The author explains how you can't externally induce happiness in someone who is depressed. This really struck home for me, as someone who is obnoxiously upbeat. There is actually a light at the end of the rather long blog post.
Before I die. Cool project
Candy Chang has created a fantastic project called "Before I Die". She took a derelict building and painted a wall with blackboard paint. There are spaces where people can write down one thing they want to do before they die. Very cool.