Category Archives: Leading by Being

Peter Thiel and the Singularity

Posted on by
5

I am just back from the Singularity Summit that took place in NY during the week-end of 3-4 Oct 2009.

banner_125x125

I will make a separate report on the rest of the event, but i was completely blown away by the 30 min speech by Peter Thiel and following panel discussion with Venture Capitalists.

PeterThiel

Peter Thiel is president of Clarium, a global macro hedge fund. He is also the founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies, a national security software firm, and a founding investor and board member of Facebook, which serves more than 200 million active users. He helps launch many other new technology companies as a founder and partner of the Founders Fund. Previously, he was founder and CEO of PayPal, which manages more than 175 million financial accounts.

Peter Thiel has philosophy and law degrees from Stanford University, where he occasionally teaches on globalization and sovereignty and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution. He funds research in artificial intelligence and life extension technologies.

See for his other investments on the above link to Wikipedia. It also becomes very apparent what a fine crew must have been at the basis of PayPal. Many of the ex-PayPallers have created very successful companies.

Also his philanthropic endeavors in the Singularity Institute, the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation (Michael Rose himself was also at the conference) and Dr. de Grey’s work on extending human life span are some examples where Thiel’s long term vision is. I will come back later in this blog post on “time horizons”

But back to his 30 min speech at the Singularity Summit.

First his appearance. He made me immediately think about Steve Ballmer: his eyes are hypnotizing. His body language shows "withhold energy”. His jaws and mouth tense. Ready to explode. Clearly fit and in top shape. Laser sharp attention when somebody asks a question. Always listening and answering with respect.

And he delivered his speech without any supporting slide, and – as far as i could see – without any notes nor an autocue or something like that. Wow !

The title of his speech last Sunday was “Macroeconomics and Singularity”.

He started his speech with letting the crowd choose between a number of catastrophe scenarios: from bio-terrorism, to nuclear war, global warming, and a couple more like that.

His thesis was that the biggest disaster that could happen would be that the Singularity does not happen quickly. It was the start of a staggering discourse on why innovation – and especially disruptive innovation – is key to the continuation of our society. And in a grandiose move, he interweaved the financial crisis in to all of this.

Credit only works against a background of growth. But if claims of the future (singularity is a good example) don’t realize, that has a big impact on credit, on to be expected returns (which he claims are way too high for non-risk taking investments), and on the basis (growth) of our society at large. Society would still be “functioning” by fixes such as working till the age of 80, or earn less, or have low returns on capital, but that’s not what we understand with progress.

Investing in “tech” firms like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and even Google is betting that they will churn their revenues and profits in the foreseeable future. In other words, this is betting that nothing disruptive is going to happen.

A lot of this is driven by short term return horizons. We seem to fix the short term problems, but are stuck with the chronic long term problems.

Having a longer time horizon may be the biggest Chinese advantage.

Some other interesting quotes from his speech and following panel discussion:

    • The short run becomes the long run
    • All experts are biased in a positive direction, especially when presenting their start-up to VC’s
    • The risk of the return of fascism is very underestimated (this is about the emergence of a totalitarian regime trying to control AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in a (pre)-Singularity time-frame.
    • I tend to invest in companies that will loose money for a long time, and a look for disruption
    • For every dollar that the government invests in opera, art, etc i want to see a dollar go to technology
    • We need to dramatically re-invest in technology education, even at primary school
    • I don’t like Darwinism, i prefer guaranteed survival. I could not resist a smile as right after this panel discussion there was Dr. de Grey himself on the agenda.

And about companies to invest in:

    • I am mainly looking at the team. And the potential of the people in that team to stay together for the long run, before founders start to argue and have a “farm" shoot-out”
    • And whether this team is capable to attract excellence. (I personally love this one as a measure for running a successful company)
    • He took his investment in Palantir Technologies as an example for this, where hiring seems to be organized around these themes. Co-incidentally, i had a meeting with Palantir the day before the Singularity Summit. I have mentioned them already several times in my blog and i would like to get them to Innotribe at Sibos 2010.

The effect of his speech was obvious. Where all other speakers at the event got max 2 rows of 4 people queuing for asking questions, there was immediately a row of 15 people of the auditorium eager to ask questions. You could feel the electricity in the air with each response from Peter Thiel.

This guy is sharp. Has vision. Has cred. Has Clout. Is a super-entertaining speaker. Has a story to tell to the financial industry. Peter Thiel would be an ideal keynote speaker for next year’s Sibos in Amsterdam 25-29 Oct 2010. It’s the first thing on my list today: go and see the organizing committee for Sibos 2010.

Of course, he would be great as well for the first event next year of our little Think Tank on Long Term Future (see previous blog posts).

The age of the unthinkable

Posted on by
Reply

Some weeks ago, i had the opportunity to listen to a fantastic speech by Joshua Cooper Ramo, writer of the book “The Age of the Unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it”.

This is the sort of guy that when he takes the stage, you immediately know you’re in for something special.

Some personal notes on this great speech:

Our world has now more actors, more groupings. The unpredictability is part of the system. It will be a given part of our future. He talks about:

SHAPESHIFT

Our world offers more options. We have a spectrum choice between no options –> limited options –> unlimited options. You can’t predict what people are going to do with these unlimited options.

YOU CAN’T PREDICT

Our world is more networked. It also means it is easier to share and spread risk

So far the analysis. How can we manage this unpredictability ?

One eye-opener was a visual showing how differently western and eastern people look at a picture: western people mainly look at the object, eastern people mainly at the surrounding environment of that object. So, understanding of unpredictability has a lot to do with understanding the environment.

It will also require resilience. But not resilience as we know it from messaging networks like SWIFT. More a resilience deeply integrated in the ecosystem, a bit like Hezbollah integrates resilience in every little piece of its organization.

Periods of change are not the exception but the rule.

You have to surf the wave, not try to predict the wave, but

look at how the wave can help you.

It will be ever easier to disrupt. The question is how to empower people to disrupt for the good. This is really about innovation driven by a set of values. Oh boy, how close is all this to the ideas of our Think Tank on Long Term Future.

Innovation in big companies can NOT take the lead. They have NOT been instrumental in the shifts from magazines to online, from Microsoft desktops to web2.0 cloud, from Financial Institutions to… un-banked payment and financial solutions.

The speech was delivered as part of an Oracle conference. So, i found it a bit “cheap” to say that Oracle was innovative and Microsoft not. The rationale being that Oracle “buys and integrates” and Microsoft buys “tons” of innovation but does nothing with it, does not integrate. Was a bit too close to the Oracle conference message of acquire and integrate.

He then went further on the theme of personal responsibility (i am free to smoke) and the balance with a certain set of basic rights (for ex healthcare). And that in the USA, everything is about rights (and maintaining that state) not about personal responsibility and that that has to change.

About maintaining states: Twitter is all about maintaining state in a constant changing environment.

And that there is hope.

And that

FEAR is an easy commodity to sell when

people are confused

during disruptive change. And that in these circumstances simple answers are usually dangerous answers.

Or the closing topic: never invest in people older than 25 years, as they are not used to live in constant change.

The speech was great. The book reads “like a train”.


Just a pen and a camera

Posted on by
Reply

After all these weeks of technology extravaganza, time for some relaxation with a piece of music: “Doorways” by Dan Bull.

For those who like visualizations or have a role as Chief Executive Officer of Happiness, this will make your day 🙂

“Using a single sheet of paper and a bolex camera, Michel drew images a line at a time and photographed the progression so that when played back, the images looked like they were drawing themselves.”

Found via http://www.midasoracle.org/2009/09/28/dan-bull-safe/

Enjoy. Inspires to dream…

How Bill Gates destroyed the universe

Posted on by
Reply

The Singularity Summit is coming on 3-4 Oct 2009 in NYC. See the impressive list of speakers here.

One of the speakers is Ben Goertzel, who will speak about “Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence: Virtual Pets, Robot Children, Artificial Bioscientists, and Beyond”.

BenGoertzel

When talking about Robot Children, i would not be surprised if he used the following video made by his 12 year old daughter. Found it via Accelerating Future.

Is this what a 12 year old is thinking about ?

  • Grand Pa’s dying, and let’s upload his brain onto the computer ?
  • It’s uploaded on a Windows computer… do kids care ?
  • Is Grand Pa dead together with all the files on my computer ?
  • A universe with Windows does not deserve to exist ?

If you can believe the credits at the end of the video, at least 12-year old Scheherazade Goertzel does.

image

In this case  – among many other things – Scheherazada’s father is the originator of the OpenCog open-source AGI framework, as well as the proprietary Novamente Cognition Engine AGI system.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an emerging field aiming at the building of "thinking machines", that is, general-purpose systems with intelligence comparable to the human mind. Good starting point to learn more about AGI is http://agi-network.org/

You see what happens when kids get this sort of ideas served with the mothermilk 😉 We recently presented another mothermilk example when we spoke about Aza Raskin, now Head of User Experience at Mozillla Labs. His father was Jeff Rasking, one of the big minds behind the Apple user interface.

Very curious to see what how this Generation-M will move up the ladders, and one day be our leaders. Any other wizkids you are aware of ?

Mobile Vein Identity

Posted on by
Reply

We all know that userid’s and passwords are not good enough anymore.

That’s why more and more companies move to two-factor authentication, using those little contact-less “calculators” that generate one-time password, or contact-ful solutions like smartcards, USB-tokens, etc or other concepts such as OpenID or Microsoft’s CardSpace (i still prefer the old name “InfoCard”).

Only a couple of days ago there was a whitepaper on Open Government published by the OpenID Foundation and The Information Card Foundation.

In one of my previous life, i was involved in the Belgian Electronic Identity (eID) project, that uses a smartcard containing 2 certificates issued and certified by the Belgian government. One for signing and one for authentication.

image

For a latest on Belgian eiD have a look at:http://welcome-to-e-belgium.be/.

image

The Belgian eID has now been rolled out to roughly 8 million citizens over a period of about 5 years.

But, the card requires a card-reader and a driver.

But what about mobile ? Yesterday, i shared the post about teenagers online behavior. 99% have a mobile. Also, there are roughly 4 times more mobiles in the world than bank-accounts !

And yes, i have seen those card reader “sliders” for some PDA’s. Then you have a slick PDA, and now you need a slider that’s twice the size of your PDA.

There must be a better way !

What about one of the contesters of TechCrunch Japan Tokyo Camp ?

prev05 mobile_vein_universal_robot

Universal Robot’s (JP) compact mobile vein authentication software (40KB core module) can be installed on cell phones, for example, and uses the camera to scan your wrist vein for identification. The technology seems to have many advantages: It works fast (I tried it myself), it’s completely software-based, compatible to a variety of CPUs and operating systems, usable for persons doing hard manual labor (who can’t use fingerprints), and most importantly extremely accurate (the company speaks of a false accept ratio of 0.001% and of a false reject ratio of less than 0.1%). The award-winning software works even with cameras with a 1MP sensor or lower.

Some good identity blogs are Kim Cameron’s www.identityblog.com and Dave Birche’s Digital Identity Forum. To get a broader perspective on identity based on information shadows, see also my recent post on MIT Personas Project.

Digital Identity will become the cornerstone of our online experiences. That’s why identity should be one of the key research areas of our Think Tank on Long Term Future. We have the experience in Belgium of having rolled out the first generation, let’s now also be leaders in defining and rolling out the next generation.

Ted, Bill, Steve, Larry: The way it is

Posted on by
Reply

From the Andy Kessler blog of 20 July 2009 with my choice of extracts and highlights…

The 70s were a smog-filled haze. Upward mobility was a pipedream. Stock markets stagnated and all the moon-walking Space Age dreams of the 60s were shattered with layoffs and plant closings and Rust Belts and urban unrest.

You were told to do well in school and maybe you could get an entry level job at a big company and wear a white short-sleeved shirt and work your way up over twenty or so years, so you could buy that little house in the suburbs and squeeze out 2.3 kids and afford a station wagon and … well, that’s the way it is.

Someone else has all the money and you don’t.

That’s the way it is.

Unknown forces control your life.

That’s the way it is.

Governments are corrupt.

That’s the way it is.

Society is divided into classes, and you’re stuck in yours.

That’s the way it is.

Instead, what it took was a few little microchips (Ted Hoff at Intel), and a couple of funky pieces of code (Bill Gates at Microsoft) and a few smart people (Steve Jobs at Apple and Larry Ellison at Oracle and thousands of others), who weren’t content working for The Man. Each of them dislodged "the way it is" and got a few people asking "why is it this way?" and declaring "think different" and "eat my dust," and

bang,

the status quo crumbled.

Hoff1Bill_gates_011  Jobs_and_wozniak_1975-7564451 Larry_Ellison

You could create your own future. Power shifted out of the hands of conglomerates like Gulf & Western and Engulf and Devour and away from centralized bureaucrats running faceless government operations. Instead, power ended up in your hands, my hands, all of our hands. To do what we wanted.

To change the world, for the better, increase the size of the pie, bring the rest of the world onto our wealth grid. And not by building huts in Costa Rica but by taking down those obstructing progress, those leeching off the rest of us, holding us back, milking the present for their own benefit rather than standing aside and letting wealth-creating innovation increase everyone’s living standard.

Those "that’s the way it is" types needed to move over.

But they didn’t move on their own, so we either had to wait for them to die or just destroy them. Seek and Destroy. Music companies. Travel agents. Insurance brokers. And we’re not done–the hard work has just started.

It took me a long time, well into my life, to get Cronkite’s words out of my head and realize that not only is anything possible (thank you Kevin Garnett), but that I was the one that had to make it happen. There were no gifts, no trailblazers to follow.

We all have to invent the future

by destroying the past.

Sadly, the old mentality is back.

Citibank is too big to fail.

That’s the way it is.

The government needs to bail out the automakers.

That’s the way it is.

Taxes are going up.

That’s the way it is.

Carbon dioxide will boil the oceans so we need to live in cities and walk to work.

That’s the way it is.

Elites like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman and Al Gore will tell you what you’ll be paid, how much health care you’ll get, how much risk you can take, what kind of car you can drive, how much water you can use to flush your toilet, because …

That’s The Way It Is.

 

It does NOT have to be that way.

 

Inspire people to dream,

and to realize their dreams.

15 years and counting to 51

Posted on by
1

Not that recent anymore: Morgan Stanley Research Europe published mid July 2009 a report on Media & Internet “How Teenagers Consume Media”.

image

What’s cool is they asked a 15 year old summer work intern, Matthew Robson, to describe how he and his friends consume media.

There is a lot to do about this report, as Twitter co-founder Stone does not care that teens are NOT interested in Twitter.

biz-stone

Also the New-York Times jumped on the bandwagon and said:

As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.

Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.

That’s interesting, especially in the context of the Think Tank for Long Term Future we are putting together – starting up later this year from Flanders: in that Think Tank we want to include upfront young people between 15-25 years old today, who will be our future leaders in 20 years from now (2030 timeframe).

So what is all the fuss about in the Morgan Stanley report  ? I took the pain to download the report and read it myself to have an unbiased opinion and share it with you.

I found the report via the site of the Financial Times. Download here.

First, it is important to understand that the report does not have any representation or statistical accuracy, as it is just the opinion of one 15 year old. It is also very UK centric referring to BBC services and Virgin Media as provider.

The paragraph where all the fuss is about is the following:

Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they release that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.

No wonder that Stone does not care very much. A lot to do about nothing.

The report contained however some other interesting elements. I am just picking a couple that surprised myself. I don’t have a 15 year old at home. My daughter is 3 1/2, so i guess all this is coming my way big time :-). Also, when reading those statements, i feel 15 again as sharing the same feelings. But for my age you have to invert the digits :-/

My personal top-10:

  1. Fast.FM: can choose the songs they want instead of listening to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses
  2. Online TV allows them to watch shows when they want
  3. Don’t read newspapers
  4. Teenagers never use real directories (hard copy catalogues such as yellow pages).
  5. Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content.
  6. Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.
  7. Music: They are very reluctant to pay for it (most never having bought
    a CD) and a large majority (8/10) downloading it illegally from file sharing sites.
  8. 99% of teenagers have a mobile phone and most are quite capable phones
  9. Nearly all teenagers’ computers have Microsoft office installed, as it
    allows them to do school work at home. Most (9/10) computers owned by teenagers are PCs, because they are much cheaper than Macs and school computers run Windows, so if a Mac is used at home compatibility issues arise.
  10. Games Consoles: Close to 1/3 of teenagers have a new (<2 ½ years old) games console, 50% having a Wii, 40% with an Xbox 360 and 10% with a PS3.

The summary of the report says it all:

What is Hot?

•Anything with a touch screen is desirable.
•Mobile phones with large capacities for music.
•Portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones)
•Really big tellies

What Is Not?

•Anything with wires
•Phones with black and white screens
•Clunky ‘brick’ phones
•Devices with less than ten-hour battery life
…

image

I really would be interested to find recent and statistically relevant sources of information on 15-25 years old internet behavior, and more importantly on the typical value kit of teenagers, if anything as such exists. Or are we now talking about Generation-M ?

Cluetrain

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes you hit a site and you’re blown away. Here is one like that:

www.cluetrain.com

It’s like finding your home.

This thing exists for 10 years now.

And nobody hinted me to hit. Never heard about it. It feels like having missed some cultural and existential dimension in my life.

image

I feel so inspired by this. It also brings me very close to the purpose of this bog. See very first blog entry on

“Inspire others to dream”.

Or the “elevator rap”

image

There is a new conversation !

Or some of the 95 themes, just some examples here:

2) Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

14) Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

29) Elvis said it best: "We can’t go on together with suspicious minds."

41) Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

50) Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

78) You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

84) We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?

Who are those pretty cool people online that want to come out and play ?

90) Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we’ve been seeing.

95) We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

Damn. And this is 10 years old. And i thought being quite up-to-date.

Who can help me getting up to speed on this interesting movement ?

Yes. Movement.

That is what this is.

Robonomics

Posted on by
Reply

3838440758_2143b4757b

Really great post by Jamais Caisco on FastCompany blog.

Very much in line with my last posts on massive manias, booms and busts. I have not added much here: just mixing some different sources. But some folks told me i am not that bad in mashing-up stuff 😉

Think you can’t be replaced by a machine? Think again.

Definitely read this article in more depth. Key passage in ‘Think Again”:

Structural Shifts

The issue of a future in which there are large parts of the economy that are underemployed, unemployed, or unemployable is a serious issue. And the data already suggests this:

(source) Notice how after the last recession in 2001 the number shifted upwards. The boom year of 2006 have an additional 5% long-term unemployed than the boom years of 1998. If you go back even further in that graph, to the 1960s, you see an even larger structural shifts upwards. Here’s University of Chicago Economist Kevin Murphy thinking through this issue.

Robots are becoming more dextrous, able to do a growing number of tasks requiring precision and strength, and computer systems are becoming smarter, able to tackle jobs needing pattern-matching and creative skills.

Humans are still cheaper, for now, but this puts downward pressure on wages–and the old rule that new technology opens up entirely new fields of human labor won’t hold true forever. Smarter, more capable machines will snap up those jobs, too.

Robonomics: If robots and digital systems can do everything, let them–but let human society skim value from the result. This becomes a technologically-driven version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, or even a life of indolence. Or they can get one of the remaining human jobs, jobs that may pay much more than they do now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn’t want the work.

Picture Credits:
Money, courtesy Jamais Cascio, Creative-Commons Licensed