Happy Sunday Friends! Here is 1 quote I’m musing, 2 Ideas, 3 of my favorite things from the week, and 1 question. If you find it useful or interesting, please feel free to forward this along to some friends or others!

One Quote I’m Musing

“What ought one to say then as each hardship comes? I was practicing for this, I was training for this.”

-Epictetus

Humans are builders and users of tools. Many people that I’ve talked with have found something that’s amazing and then turned it into a religion: productivity, organizations, books, music, public speakers, etc.

They’re tools. Things for humans to use in furthering our goals and ideas. Tools, tactics, techniques, procedures, like anything else, wear down, lose effectiveness over time if we don’t innovate and renew them.

There are things that have withstood the test of time, that created an inflection point in history. The wheel, gunpowder, harnessing electricity, aviation, nuclear technology, and (of course) computers and the internet.

Our ability to create tools to amplify our abilities it what made us the predominant species. Take just over a minute and listen to Steve Jobs describe the potential of computers as tools.

I remember reading an Article when I was about 12 years old, I think it might have been in Scientific American, where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B, and the condor won: it came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation.

But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human riding a bicycle blew away the condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders, and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes, and so for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.

I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool, very early stages, and we’ve come only a very short distance, and it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes, but I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next 100 years.

I think that Jobs’ prediction of enormous future changes raises questions about the “bicycle for the mind” analogy. As we delve ever so much more quickly into the world of Artificial Intelligence we are gaining speed in capability. We are roughly 15 years ahead of what many of the experts thought we would be in 2024. Is the future one that will look like the 20th century, where a small number of entities “own” AI, and we use it (or are used by it) on their terms?

Or is it not the gate-kept world of the 20th century but one where democratization coupled with a flattening of the technological ownership (personal/privatized AI) is not the elimination of vitality but the tilling of the ground so that something new can be created.

How does this relate to Cyber and the stuff I do? Great question.

Marcus Aurelius said that we will meet the future with the same weapons of reason that arm us against the present.

The keynote here is reason not tools. We didn’t stick with faster propeller planes; we didn’t just build bigger punch-card holders with longer abilities to read the cards. We changed, fundamentally, the way we did things.

The next wars won’t look just like WWII but with better technology. Like gunpowder, combustion engines, and aviation changing the way we operate; AI, robotics, and advanced computing capabilities applied in the fifth domain will change the way we do business. A first war in the digital and cognitive spaces ahead of the second (kinetic) war if there is a second “war” at all.

In business, statecraft, or military endeavors; the idea is to have a mind elastic enough to ponder the potentials of tomorrow and discover the ways to succeed before they arrive. So that when they arrive, we can say “I’ve been waiting for this”.

Two Ideas From Me

Find the unfair advantage. Finding the unfair advantage is how we excel. We don’t choose to do the worst possible way of accomplishing our goals willingly; we find methodologies that suit us. If you disagreed with Mike Tyson, you wouldn’t opt to go rounds in a boxing match. You’d find an area that put you in the most favorable position.
Feedback is important. I’ve answered a few calls for response on dealing with poorly received feedback. Here’s my thoughts Feedback should be:
1. Made more appealing
2. Applicable
3. Short
4. Necessary

Three Favorite Things From Others

“A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.” | Naval Ravikant
“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.” | Marguerite Yourcenar
“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” | Viktor Frankl - Holocaust survivor

One Question

If your life was a book, what would your current chapter be titled and what’s the title of your next chapter?

Have a wonderful week,

I’ll see you Sunday.
-e