š„ AI & Go's relevance; Twitter's future; peak hipster; open-source futures; Windows XP++ #47
Does it matter that DeepMindās AlphaGo can beat a human? Do robots mean low-interest rates? Have we reached peak hipster? Can Twitter stay relevant? Does the Dunbar number hold in social networks? So many interesting questions. Some answers.
Please recommend EV to your social network: Twitter (fish) | Facebook (chicken)
Dept of the near future
š” Will robots herald an era of permanently low inflation and low-interest rates? SHORT, INSIGHTFUL
š„ Open-source has become the dominant software methodology. How will its next chapter unfold?Ā EXCELLENTĀ by @nayafia
š The future of media is the influencer-curator. What happens to media in the age of abundance is fundamental shift.**Ā GREAT INSIGHT**
š¦Ā Have we reached peak hipster? SUPERB analysis of the business & economics of the hipster. h/t @shehnaz_s
šĀ Will machines eliminate us? Q&A with Facebookās Yoshua Bangio. A wonderful riposte to this is in this tweet. (Read the tweet a couple of times, it prompts some thinking.)
Dept of Artificial intelligence
It has been quite a week. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of AI, passed away aged 88. Here are three good reads on a groundbreaking human.
* Thought-provoking Minsky quotes
* The NY Times obituaryĀ | Financial Times obituary
Also,Ā fascinating week in the field of AI as seen through the lens of the battle between Facebook & Google. Googleās Deepmind demonstrated AlphaGo which finally bested a professional human player.
MUST READ: DeepMindās blog post on the topic.
One of the key points is that Deepmind combined different schools of AI, neural net approaches with symbolic approaches, to make this breakthrough.
š”Ā Gary Marcusā take on this announcement is EXCELLENT: āThe real question is whether the technology developed there can be taken out of the game world and into the real worldā
Love this AI research stream: augmenting human driving safety by predicting our likely ānext actionsā. The question is whether it will arrive before fully autonomous driving does.
Artificial intelligence is being used more heavily in hedge funds.Ā The algorithmic battle space is hotting up.
My former colleague, Ferenc Huszar, now head of research at Magic Pony Technology, provokes: āDeep learning is easier, try something harder.ā RECOMMENDED
Dept of social networks
šĀ How Facebook squashed Twitter. Ben Thompsonās analysis is really excellent and to the point. For non-specialists, the Twitter is struggling to hold on to its widespread relevanceĀ and seems to be in an unrecoverable position compared to Facebook in terms of market share. (See this report: Twitterās US users fall by a third over two years.)
Twitter has $3bn enough to finance losses for a long time. The company isnāt going to disappear anywhere soon. The question is whether Twitter can ever meet Wall Streetās expectations and not whether Twitter is a useful product or project for a sub-set of people. (See Anthony De Rosa elide on this topic.)
My take is that the core premise of Twitter is exceptionally useful to a small number of people. People who are interested in topics, subjects and areas of expertise so much so that they are willing to go out and find that information rather than waiting for mainstream media filters like newspapers and Edgerank to get it to them. Those people are probably like Exponential View readers, small in number, but for whom Twitter is valuable.
Apple provides a cursory precedent for Twitter. Back in 2002 it faced a declining market share and a cash pile in excess of $4bn. However, Steve Jobs approach to solving Appleās problems have been different to those at Twitter. Some may remember that Jobs took a saw to Appleās product lines, axing multiple confusing and overlapping desktop and laptop ranges; eliminating the profitable printer unit and weird appendages (like online services and their software-based modem.) A good review of how Jobs simplified Apple is here.
This relentless focus on a few things allowed Apple to stabilise and only five later it was a hugely more complex business with an iPod unit, a phone unit and a media distribution business.
Apple, of course, has a more robust business model than twitter. It sold something which had a margin on it, rather than trading on the less tangible quality, user attention. However it strikes me that Twitterās recent moves have been to complicate and bloat the product (Moments, anyone?) and continue to be complicated by the fact that revenue-driving activities (brand partnerships) run head-on to the process of figuring out exactly how to give the people who keep Twitter relevant what they need.
Is it possible to laser in on subject-oriented geeks & info-junkies and keep Wall Street happy in the short-term? Almost certainly not. But hard choicesā¦.
If Jackās listening, Iād encourage him to look deep into the core of Twitterās most loyal users and build out from them. It could maintain the firms relevance which is the foothold from which you can build a long-term success. (Below Nova Spivack has a slightly different take.)
Back in 2002, I commented on Apple: āRelevance isnāt something that appears on a balance sheet⦠Relevant firms rarely die. Far from it, they flourish.ā
Elsewhere:
Social media is a trap. Short insightful interview with 90-year-old sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman.
The Dunbar number seems to hold even for heavily connected users of social networks: āas originally proposed by the social brain hypothesis, there is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communication advantages of online media are unable to overcomeā
Short morsels for dinner parties
š« Understanding the myriad of new gender pronouns. FASCINATING
Using the brainās electrical signals to predict what people are seeing.
š© Nearly 30% of AirBNBās revenue comes from perma-shares, a trend the hotel industry calls āalarmingā.
āĀ Startups are breathing new life into nuclear fusion. (A colleague of mine worked on a nuclear fusion project which has a 70-year long project timeline. If startups can bring a modicum of agility to this industry, it could benefits us all.)
The Tesla Model 3 will cost $35k. Great news.
Contactless payments are soaring in the UK. Cash seems poised to be relegated to second place.
Britainās fleet of Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines run Windows XP. Still it could be worse, it could be Windows Vista)
A robot can solve the Rubikās cube is less than 2 seconds.
What you are up to
The material soul. EV reader, Prof Anil Seth, on ā what neuroscience can ā and canāt ā tell us about consciousness.ā
How Twitter could be 1000x more awesome by EV subscriber Nova Spivack. Nova gets into quite some product depth.
End note
Yes - very focussed on AI this week. There as just a lot going on, so it pushed out material on other topics. Will adjust in future.
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