End of Big Data, Learning Together–a Forgotten Art, Dishonest Entrepreneurs Under 30, Big idea=OS Upgrade
End of Big Data, Learning Together–a Forgotten Art, Dishonest Entrepreneurs Under 30, Big idea=OS Upgrade
The End of Big Data? Not yet!
The End of Big Data by James Bridle makes us realize how much we depend on and are influenced by data collected about us by many digital players. Bridle is a journalist, and this is his first scifi story. Published on Vice as part of the Terraform collection, here’s what they say:
“It’s the world after personal data: all identifying information is illegal. No servers, no search records, no social, no surveillance. A pair of satellites, circling the planet, make sure the data centers are turned off—and stay off.”
A dream world? Maybe yes, maybe no. Lots to think about here.
James Bridle’s website. He is a writer, artist, journalist, and technologist and has written many articles of interest.
The effect of technology?
With all the current talk about ChatGPT, it may be helpful to think of Amara’s law,
“ We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run . ”
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
Regarding the short run, here’s an example that should make us nervous:
ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law prof as the accused
The AI chatbot can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even citing a fake Washington Post article as evidence.
The Washington Post, April 5, 2023. Article.
Learning together - a forgotten art
I discovered this example of people learning together, through exploration, with no teacher. It happened in India, and is about a computer and a mouse in the wall from over 20 years ago. In an early experiment by educational pioneer Sugata Mitra, he broke a hole in the wall between his office and a slum in India and made a computer available to children who had never before seen one.
It shows how a leader emerges in a co-learning context. I wrote about it here and you can see the original BBC article from 2005 here.
I remember how in the past in our schools, there was one computer for an entire class, or one for 3, 4, or 5 people if we were lucky.
We needed to share discuss what we were doing together. Co-learning!
The big mistake we made, which we thought it was progress, was to have one computer per student. Then the co-learning disappeared. Worse still, learning in schools is going downhill as books are being banned in some places today. That’s a whole other story for another article.
Dishonest entrepreneurs under 30. Why no due diligence?
30 under 30-year sentences: why so many of Forbes’ young heroes face jail, an article in The Guardian by Arwa Mahdawi
Is there something magic, glamorous, exciting about young entrepreneurs? The illusion of youth? Lucrative investments?
The Forbes article has several recent examples: Charlie Javice, Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Martin Shkreli, Elizabeth Holmes,… and summarizes by saying:
The problem is the vision of success that we’ve been sold and the fetishizing of youth. 30 Under 30 isn’t just a list, it’s a mentality: a pressure to achieve great things before youth slips away from you. The pressure can lead certain ambitious people to take shortcuts. And, in fact, shortcuts are encouraged: millennials, after all, grew up being told to “fake it till you make it”,
Each time a new story comes out, I’m surprised. When will I stop being surprised?
Big Idea = Operating System Upgrade
from my LinkedIn newsletter Inside Outsider
“Each big idea is an operating system upgrade.”
From Kat, a character from Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. She says we have the same brains as people did a thousand years ago: “We have the same hardware, but not the same software.”
A big new idea is like software evolving, like operating systems in computers.
A big idea we need to assimilate is that the world inside our organizations and the world outside are becoming one.
Continue reading on Inside Outsider
What are your takeaways? What have you experienced that you can share with us?
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