Thursday, February 9, 2017

minds blown

the last time I entitled a post "minds blown" it was about food... this time it is much more intellectual and less a sensory experience.  This afternoon we attended a lecture and discussion on artificial intelligence  - and WOW! is all we can say about the livey discussion and the two terrific lecturers -


so I am not sure the description of the afternoon does it justice because the discussion was all over the map/planet/universe

the first words spoken to us - after good afternoon- were that "nearly all the time our thinking about the future is shaped by our current reality and that in order to really expand into the possibilities one would need to let go of this restricted thinking" - just as hunter gatherers couldn't imagine an agraian society, and the agraian society couldn't imagine the industrial revolution, we have difficulty imagining the life of the future.

then they did a little bit of background on the development of machine thinking - it was built by humans and is like clothes (artificial skin) or glasses (artificial sight) or HVAC (artificial heat)... you get the drift - because it is "man-made" human made

but here are some slides and my comments along the way-


loved this quote- and the two speakers seemed to think this was very close to how things will go-

they see the future as one where machines do the work and humans do creative things - the thinking and the things that create what we know as culture-

but of course they acknowledge that there will be some who will be left behind because they refuse to come along - and there is another quote in the later slides from Toffler that addresses that point-




Watson- wins at Jeopardy - LOL - "he/she" looks quite bright LOL




here is the Toffler quote - those who will be left behind will those who refuse to adapt- and it wasn't lost on this audience that we are already in the midst of this issue-


I took some notes along the way and although they were cryptic things I put in my phone I will add them to this post because mostly they were interesting tidbits that I was astounded by -

  • More people have cell phones than indoor plumbing (YES and by quite a majority!)
  • Data creation doubles every three days right now and will get exponentially larger faster from now on...
  • We have moved from a time of innovation to disruption. 
  • ever wondered what “creative destruction” feels or looks like, we are now living in one of those times.
  • Physiological need to have machines to crunch all the data- humans can no longer do the job of analysis of all this data that is being created each and every day- 
  • Creativity and design is the area where the growth will be largest. 
  • Ringling grads at CIA to interpret the data via GUI (ha here's the future- these graphic design grads are now being used to create graphical images of the data that the computers now crunch for us so it can be understood- the ultimate GUI  (graphical user interface)
  • Data scientist. Not linear thinking. 
  • Kids now being ranked on how quickly they can access info/knowledge rather than holding it in their brains
  • Nanopharmacist? Lunar tour guide? Virtual lawyer? Robotic ethics consultant? 
  • 85% of the jobs that today's learners will do have not been invented yet. And they will have 8-10 jobs by the time they are 38 - according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
  • Science fiction has addressed these issues for years 
  • Dependency? it all stops when the computer fails (a woman's story from the late 70s before the Internet and its diffuse hosting mechanism and the cloud and available redundancy) 
  • Hamlet's Blackberry - how to live an analog life in a digital world (a recommended book)
  • We are IN media - it is no longer the message- we are now fully immerse and there is no turning back
  • Consciousness conscience cognition- we have no way of predicting when or whether the machine learning will get to the point that it may develop consciousness or conscience but it is already well into the cognition stage of how we define "human intelligence"
  • Safest time in human history ratio of war dead to population but is also the most dangerous
  • AI parsed across a broad range of activities and application is the future 
  • "The future is already here it's just unevenly distributed" (a quote from someone- I didn't write down)
  • Who controls the data?
  • Bit coin = future global currency (won't have issues of Brexit and currency fluctuations by country)
  • Rethinking food chain completely. already in development - individual growing pods/boxes/containers where your food is produced and you harvest what you need for any given meal... 

The thing they fear the most - that keeps them up at night- that could create no future at all- CLIMATE CHANGE...



Chris Bishop (below)-  Right after graduating from Bennington College with a degree in German literature, I toured and recorded with a country-rock band called McKendree Spring. Then, moving to New York, I became a sought-after session musician, working with many famous artists including Robert Palmer, Darius Brubeck, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Realizing that by working in advertising, musicians could sleep in their own beds at night and get off the road, I broke into the jingle business, first as a bass player and then as a composer and producer. 

In 1995, after becoming captivated by the Internet, I taught myself enough about this new technology to get hired as a Web producer at several seminal interactive agencies in New York-including CKS Partners and Eagle River Interactive. Then, in 1998, after being invited to what I fully expected would be an awkward if not embarrassing interview, IBM asked me to join their Corporate Internet Programs team. I left IBM in June of 2013 after 15 years. While there, I worked in a variety of roles including new media production, as a business strategy consultant, and in various communications and social media-related jobs.

Specialties: multi-modal work transitions, improvising careers, metacognitive learning strategies, global socio-cultural transformations driven by technology (from linked in)


David Houle photo below-

David Houle (born 1948) is a futurist, keynote speaker, and author of The Shift Age. He coined the phrase "The Shift Age" and identified this new age as the successor to the Information Age in 2007.  David Houle is a renowned futurist, thinker, and speaker. David has won numerous awards including Speaker of the Year award from Vistage International, the leading organization of CEOs in the world. He is often called the “CEOs’ futurist” having spoken to or advised 2,500+ CEOs and business owners in the past seven years.

he has a blog and a recent post addressed his thoughts on the current view of what the future holds - given the new president- if you have interest- you can find it here:

http://davidhoule.com/forecasts-for-2017/2017/01/03/first-look-2017-high-level-thoughts



This was an amazingly far ranging discussion - and it was a discussion because they presented for about 30 minutes and the interactive session was more than an hour long- and probably could have gone on for twice as long given how much people had to ask and share about!  Terrific use of two hours of our time! worth the drive to Temple Beth Sholom for the presentation.

and as aside because Watson was a part of this discussion I thought about how terrific The Watson Intelligence was at Theater Wit... and it was reviewed here in case you might want to revisit that one-

http://blog.semifreelife.com/2015/10/why-we-go-to-plays.html

so on we go- friends are coming tonight and we are off this weekend to visit Angela & Lee... so stay tuned

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