#221: Welcome to Your Intellectual Caravan
The way to handle continuous and significant change is to reorganise your mindspace.
If you were born in the year 1768, you would have grown up in what was one of the most dramatic periods of civilisation. A time of epochal change, with science, technology, communications, political systems, and societies all evolving at a never-before speed all around you. Within the first 10 years of your life, James Watt would have created his steam engine, Lavoisier would have articulated the law of conservation of mass, Adam Smith would have published his Wealth of Nations treatise, giving birth to the field of Economics, and the US would have signed the declaration of independence from Britain. Also in this period the first vaccination to treat small pox would have been invited as well as the spinning Jenny, which would lead to the mechanisation of the textile industry. And yet, if you started your working career in 1768, most of your working life would have likely been spent without any significant disruption. The first Luddite incident was still over 40 years away. James Watt’s invention would lead to the evolution of railway networks but in the first couple of decades, the only people impacted would be a few shipping business employees. Also, because the telegraph was still half a century away, and there were no newspapers (and often literacy) for the common people, by and large you would be dependent on word of mouth for news and information. It’s therefore quite probable that as a mill worker, you would know nothing of James Watt let alone Adam Smith or Lavoisier for most of your life.
If you were born 300 years later, in 1968, as I was, there is an argument to suggest that there would be many bigger changes in your life. Equally, an argument that your life might not change all that much could also hold water. After all there are plenty of professions such as trucking which are not only resilient but often one of the areas where labour shortages still abound. You would definitely have witnessed a shift to a services based world, and a spate of globalisation accelerated by the Internet. The Cold War would have ended and the world would first make a beeline for globalisation before turning back towards nationalism. But the combined impact of internet, mobile telephony, smart phones, and the steady march of healthcare innovation would certainly have created a bigger sense of change. One of the implications of such change is the mismatch between your accumulated skills and your future roles.
As a stark example, when I was 26 and finishing business school, I had not heard about the Internet. And yet almost all of my career has been spent on areas connected with Internet business. In other words, you could argue that despite getting university degree and a masters equivalent, my education did not really prepare me for my work, however strong it was, foundationally. Obviously this was true for most people of my cohort, and so it boiled down to learning ‘on the job’ and through much of my career, and a willingness to change. Since my first job in the internet industry, I’ve worked in websites, eCommerce ‘click and mortar’ models, content management systems, marketplace models, digital media convergence, IPTV, mobile apps and models, IoT and sensors, Wearables, and AI, to name a few. I’ll admit to being pro-change and and early adopter of many technologies. But what if I was a care worker doing the same job in largely the same way for the past three decades? You could argue that it’s quite normal for many professions, or you might say that I was on the brink of being ‘disrupted’ by tech. Remember, for most people, disrupted doesn’t necessarily mean losing your job, it means doing it differently. There’s probably 20% that can’t make the change and that change marks the end of the line for them. And there are 20% who flourish with the change. The rest of the people change, willy nilly.
If you analyse metrics such as the time taken to reach a million users, though, you can’t but see a picture of accelerating change. You’ve all seen a version of this chart above that shows the time taken to reach a mass audience for consecutive technologies. The path to 50 million users was 68 years for airlines, all the way to 4 years for iPods. You could say this is just about the speed of technology spread rather than invention. But the two are obviously connected we know now that invention and progress builds on each other. The bottom line is that broadly speaking a key invention or product that changes your work significantly, is likely to happen much more frequently. Back in 1768, your life expectancy was around 40 years, so your working life was likely to be about 20-25 years. If a significant change to your work happened once every 50 years in that period, it meant that every 2 generations, would experience one significant shift. Today, with most careers spanning over 50 years, and change happening more frequently, such a change may happen multiple times within one career.
Here’s an interesting reference for the way things are changing. Let’s consider ChatGPT 3, 4, and 5. The first 2 were launched in Jan 2022, and March 2023 respectively. ChatGPT5 is expected in late 2024. While there was roughly a 10x increase in the number of parameters used, the effective intelligence of ChatGPT 4 was much higher than 3, with its multimodal ability and reasoning power. ChatGPT5 may be 100x more intelligent still. And all of this has happened in 3 years. Just by comparison, the average length of home ownership in the UK is 20 years. The average marriage lasts 13 years. The average job lasts 5 years. Cars are owned for 4 years and smart phones for between 3 and 4 years, typically. We are now talking about having access to tools that get a hundred times smarter faster than we will change our smartphones.
How do we deal with such change? In general, we tend to think of change as a period of disruption between two steady states. Think of the unsettled period while you change houses - eating out of a half finished kitchen, bathing at a friends place, or living out of cartons. You know its temporary and you’ll go back to the new normal soon. But at some point as change gets faster, you will perpetually be in change mode. I like to use the example of changing houses because if that’s the traditional view of change, what we’re getting to is the equivalent of selling your house and moving to a caravan. It’s possible that your job may not exactly change that dramatically. But nonetheless you must know intellectually that there are incredible tools being created to improve your ability to make decisions every day. This idea of the the intellectual caravan is critical to how we need to operate. The intellectual caravan can move at short notice. You can change your worldview frequently. There are few if any fixed points in this new normal.
Hard as it is for us to change individually, remember that businesses are far harder to change. For a large organisation even getting the right people into a room for a discussion may take weeks and months. And many businesses are locked into their 3 year plans often at the risk of ignoring the change happening around them. Regulation goes even slower as lawmaking is a process designed for deliberation and risk aversion. The societal impact of this high change environment is trickier. Some people resist change. They hang on to the way the world was. Others leap ahead with the technology. This sets up a debate between the pastorals and the prometheans. Society increasingly fragments when faced with rapid change. This also sets up new battle grounds - as interest groups are able to self mobilise better, and conspiracy theories and memes travel faster than any kind of formal or intellectual message. Amongst other things, this leads to fundamentalism on both the left and right of political debates.
So how should we navigate these times? Let me try and answer that through the metaphor of the intellectual caravan I introduced earlier. The intellectual caravan by its very nature is far more mobile than a house (however comfortable and palatial the house is). So I believe that we need to be permanently conscious of :
Where we park our intellectual caravan: when we have the option, what point of view do we opt to see? What do we choose to explore and engage with? Only the ones that make us comfortable? What is familiar? Or do we select points of view that are different, even difficult? The fundamentalism across many areas of our lives prevents us from engaging, very often and we have to get past that, by engaging with views we disagree with, sometimes even those that offend us.
Keeping our intellectual caravan moving, so we can get multiple perspectives: this is true of both time and space in a sense. Often, no one perspective gives us the whole picture. And what we thought was true yesterday might not be tomorrow. This can sound exhausting if you find constant environment scanning a drain on your energy, but the truth is this has to become a part of your daily routine, and is in fact one of the big differences between a permanent intellectual residence, and the caravan version.
Corollary 1: one of the most important aspects of the shift to a caravan is that you jettison a lot of your possessions. Intellectually, this means you gather or keep very few permanent artefacts. Fewer firm beliefs, and fewer unshakeable truths.
Corollary 2: opportunities arise faster than ever before (as do risks and threats) - this kind of intellectual agility opens up many avenues for new ideas, including many that can be productive or lucrative. Equally, it allows us to identify new threats earlier, rather than have them creep up in our blind spot.
PS: You might have seen this picture before - it’s a useful timeline of some of the significant technological milestones in history and possible projections.
AI Reading
Customer Service: Klarna has announced that its AI assistant has had 2.3m conversations amounting to 2/3 of its customer service in its first month. Which means that it is doing the work of 700 full-time agents. In terms of performance it equals human scores in customer experience scores, but it enables a 25% drop in repeat inquiries, and takes 2 minutes to complete calls rather than the previous average of 11 minutes. Are we still wondering if AI is transformative? (Klarna)
Chief AI Officer: Is it time for every company to have one? Short answer, opinions vary. This piece does include inputs from our CTO Harrick Vin. (FT)
Healthcare: How AI will make healthcare more efficient? Can it bring down the massive cost of healthcare in the US, for example? Initiatives such as Google’s Med-Palm2 LLM which is designed for healthcare may be part of the answer. (Economist)
Robotics
Robotics’ Great Challenge: In the last newsletter, I asked whether this might be the year of robotics, and it seems like the MIT Tech Review concurs, asking whether robotics is about to have its own ‘chatGPT moment’. Here’s a summary: One of the most difficult things about robotics is what is known as Moravec’s paradox - what is hard for humans is easy for robots, and vice versa. The difficulty of dealing with a ‘messy world’ is very real. Think of enabling a robot to do a simple task such as put a plate into the sink in the kitchen. Should be straightforward but in the real world, it would have to deal with doors, pets, transition strips on floors, and the occasional toddler, for instance. This makes it hard for general purpose home robots, but that’s exactly what we might be heading towards. One of the drivers is the ability to integrate AI and machine learning into robotics, to create a general purpose robot brain which can learn. The learning itself could be from data or from observation (replication learning). For data, Google’s initiative called Open X-Embodiment Collaboration seeks to create datasets that would accelerate robotic learning, similar to what the availability of data did for AI models. For observation, we’re seeing the evolution of vision-language-action models, which as the name suggests translate visual inputs to robotic language, and action. (MIT Tech Review)
Apple Robots: even Apple seems to agree that the time is right for robots. Following its abandonment of the car project, Apple seems to be looking to build a home robot. (Bloomberg)
Build me a robot: A team from Northwestern University has created an AI that can design a robot from scratch - literally. As this piece says “But the AI program is not just fast. It also runs on a lightweight personal computer and designs wholly novel structures from scratch.” (Northwestern University)
Other Reading
Research drives beauty: new molecules that prevent skin cancer and block UV, senescence blocking peptides that slow down skin ageing, and other products that are using science to create better skin and beauty products. (Fast Company)
Starbucks Store Redesign: Starbucks is redesigning its stores with acoustic inputs, so there’s less shouting and apparently they won’t get your name wrong any more. I’m almost going to miss that feature. (QZ)
Billy Joel: A long and lovely read about the life and work of Billy Joel - a musician who I think described urban angst better than anybody else I know. (New Yorker)