25. Epoch

Sunday Evening Edition

(4-minute read

Much has been written about ChatGPT since its release.? Curiosity leads to fascination and experimentation. As I have been posting over the last several weeks, my work with Mario (a 49-year-old male with Asperger's based in Belgium) launched both of us into incorporating both open.ai tools - ChatGPT and DALL-E into our working sessions.?

The inputs and outcomes were startling in that we were able to showcase how a divergent mind could show up in different personas and or languages.? How would a neurotypical person receive an Asperger person's humor without being offended and vice versa???

Mario already had an aptitude for ai and what was possible, but he is moving to a higher order of use and application.? He has in fact launched a new Narrative North Star - Awakening Aspergers Language as a separate language to go along with the four foreign languages he already speaks.???

This moment in time feels epoch. It takes me back to my first true discovery of the internet when we were launching Pathfinder at Time Inc. My team was responsible for introducing the bleeding-edge technologies that we were pitching to our clients, which meant I got a front-row seat to the earliest players who were attempting to figure out this new ecosystem.

I remember the distinct moment when I realized the game had changed.? I had just met Jeff Bezos at a cocktail party - there were only 6 people in the company and they had just launched this thing called Amazon.? I struggled to understand why, when there were Barnes and Noble everywhere.

A few days later I read about a book in Fortune Magazine called The Dream Society by Rolf Jensen, a Director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. (I still have this book on my bookshelf). I went on Netscape to search for Rolf and found myself in Copenhagen reading a website in Danish and English. When I found the book on the site, it sent me back to Amazon to buy it.? I had just experienced my first round-trip journey.? It changed my life.

That was immediately followed by meetings with Pointcast.? A concept that I totally could not understand at the time.? But, I managed to get a beta account and started playing on it. Within a few days, I got called by our IT department asking what the hell I was doing on the computer because I was impacting the delivery of content on our corporate intranet pipes!

I remember the awe of those moments.? The realization that everything I knew up to that point was about to be disrupted.? I didn’t know the magnitude, but I knew the feeling because The Full Service Network was having that kind of impact on my client discussions.?IPTV on the Information Highway was that outer node.

Fifteen years later I got to experience that feeling again when we introduced Aha Radio as the first cloud-based streaming infotainment service in the vehicle. The constraints of radiowaves and one-way- satellite delivery of radio into the vehicle were no longer a limit.? Interactive audio was now possible and the targeting variables had just radically changed.?

I see that same phenomenon about to happen with ai.? We are much more advanced in how we receive and adjust to new technologies today.? That is ever more true by generational boundaries as the new Alpha group coming up will know no different.? Ai will be how they learn about the world.? How they will formulate their art lessons and interpretations of the masters while simultaneously becoming the new masters.? A new “Lost Generation” of artists that will reimagine those who lived in Paris 100 years ago.

I can already see the legacy entities getting their protective backs up.? Educational institutions will start to put up walls and likely ban ai for use in school when in reality they should be doing the opposite.? But, fear and survival will fight the inevitable shift that is about to take place.?

Epoch is defined as the beginning of a distinctive period in the history of someone or something. It is also the end of what was - as we know it.? We are here again. It is time to find your beginner's mind.

NOW (How you are realizing this today)

1. I am now devoting an hour a day to learning ai. Experimenting with the various approaches to learn how to think about using these tools.?

NEW (How you will realize this tomorrow)

1. What will you publish or create for your ai experiment?
2. Are you searching out early adopters to accelerate your learning curve?
3. Have you signed up for a class, conference, or meetup yet?
4. Your best teacher may be under 15 years old - reverse mentorship will be prime.?

NEXT (I see a world in which)?

I see a world in which ai will challenge our norms, mores, and understanding of what we deem to be truth over non-truth.? Our “infobese” world will now take on a new layer of complexity that was not even on our radar a mere 90 days ago.?

What I am reading, listening to, and viewing to shape my Next thinking.

• People and Algorithms newsletter, by Troy Young
• Stratechery, by Ben Thompson
• Lex Friedman YouTube Channel, by Lex Friedman

The Payoff?

“If you see the future as an obstacle, you are walking in the wrong direction.” ~ Rolf Jensen, The Dream Society, 1999.?

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