There was a fun Twitter convo about strong AI between Patrick Collison and Marc Andreessen. I also love speculating about this topic but before I engage in that I want to point out that from an employment perspective this is a red herring. A car is not a horse. And yet cars replaced horses in transportation. A tractor is not a horse. And yet tractors replaced horses in agriculture. A tank is not a horse. And yet tanks replaced horses in war. It is irrelevant from an employment perspective as ...

There was a fun Twitter convo about strong AI between Patrick Collison and Marc Andreessen. I also love speculating about this topic but before I engage in that I want to point out that from an employment perspective this is a red herring. A car is not a horse. And yet cars replaced horses in transportation. A tractor is not a horse. And yet tractors replaced horses in agriculture. A tank is not a horse. And yet tanks replaced horses in war. It is irrelevant from an employment perspective as ...

During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large steel companies dominating the market (at least until the rise of mini mills which made steel from scrap). The defensibility of scale in the information age is a lot less clear. Why? Because there are companies that are providing scale to others. Am...

During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large steel companies dominating the market (at least until the rise of mini mills which made steel from scrap). The defensibility of scale in the information age is a lot less clear. Why? Because there are companies that are providing scale to others. Am...

I haven’t been posting much the last couple of weeks. There are a variety of reasons for that including spending extra time reading and learning new things but the main reason is that I am trying to understand better where we are today. What do I mean by that? I have been making the argument that we are facing a transition as big as the one from agrarian society to industrial society (and from hunter gatherer to agrarian before that). Are we near the beginning of this transition or somewhere ...

I haven’t been posting much the last couple of weeks. There are a variety of reasons for that including spending extra time reading and learning new things but the main reason is that I am trying to understand better where we are today. What do I mean by that? I have been making the argument that we are facing a transition as big as the one from agrarian society to industrial society (and from hunter gatherer to agrarian before that). Are we near the beginning of this transition or somewhere ...

Susan and I are looking for a personal assistant to help with many different organizational tasks. If you know someone who might be interested, please point them to our Craigslist ad. We built a simple video application process using Ziggeo and Firebase to help screen candidates (will open source after finishing).

Susan and I are looking for a personal assistant to help with many different organizational tasks. If you know someone who might be interested, please point them to our Craigslist ad. We built a simple video application process using Ziggeo and Firebase to help screen candidates (will open source after finishing).

The definition of a commodity is a good that is “supplied without qualitative differentiation." You can’t charge more than others for crude oil, you have to turn it at least into gasoline. And if you really want to charge a lot more you have to turn it into a plastic product. CPU cycles and memory are the crude oil of our times. If you want to charge more for them you have to add value. If you are SaaS company that provides a complete solutions you are adding a lot of value (plastic product)....

The definition of a commodity is a good that is “supplied without qualitative differentiation." You can’t charge more than others for crude oil, you have to turn it at least into gasoline. And if you really want to charge a lot more you have to turn it into a plastic product. CPU cycles and memory are the crude oil of our times. If you want to charge more for them you have to add value. If you are SaaS company that provides a complete solutions you are adding a lot of value (plastic product)....

Marc Andreessen recently wrote a post titled “This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs …” – like all of Marc’s posts it is full of good ideas and worth reading. I agree with many of the points including the benefits of technology driven deflation and being long on human creativity to find interesting things for us to do. There is, however, a critical distribution question that Marc mostly avoids but is at the crux of the transition. Marc writes:Ima...

Marc Andreessen recently wrote a post titled “This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs …” – like all of Marc’s posts it is full of good ideas and worth reading. I agree with many of the points including the benefits of technology driven deflation and being long on human creativity to find interesting things for us to do. There is, however, a critical distribution question that Marc mostly avoids but is at the crux of the transition. Marc writes:Ima...

I recently finished Dave Eggers’s “The Circle” which provided a good challenge to my baseline view that more transparency is good and that data protection is a futile effort. One of the systems in the novel is an easy to deploy camera that anyone can point at anything and provide a livestream. Called “SeeChange” the promoters argue that it will provide for reduced crime, increased safety and just additional information all around. The detractors are either smeared (with planted information) o...

I recently finished Dave Eggers’s “The Circle” which provided a good challenge to my baseline view that more transparency is good and that data protection is a futile effort. One of the systems in the novel is an easy to deploy camera that anyone can point at anything and provide a livestream. Called “SeeChange” the promoters argue that it will provide for reduced crime, increased safety and just additional information all around. The detractors are either smeared (with planted information) o...

I have referred to a basic income many times here on Continuations so now it is time to flush out a bit more how this could ever possibly work. Many people do simple back of the envelope math like saying there are 319 million people in the US, so if you paid each of them $10K per year that would be $3.2 trillion which exceeds the annual federal tax base (which is about $2.7 trillion) and then quickly conclude that the whole thing is a lost cause. My basic contention though is that the amounts...

I have referred to a basic income many times here on Continuations so now it is time to flush out a bit more how this could ever possibly work. Many people do simple back of the envelope math like saying there are 319 million people in the US, so if you paid each of them $10K per year that would be $3.2 trillion which exceeds the annual federal tax base (which is about $2.7 trillion) and then quickly conclude that the whole thing is a lost cause. My basic contention though is that the amounts...

Following the publication of Jill Lepore’s “The Disruption Machine” and Clayton Christensen’s vigorous response in an interview there has been a healthy debate around the merits and even existence of disruption in many posts and tweets. I had been busy preparing for and then teaching a computer bootcamp for our children and some friends so I had mostly ignored this debate. It is of course highly relevant to my claim that we are at the beginning of a massive transition from industrial to infor...

Following the publication of Jill Lepore’s “The Disruption Machine” and Clayton Christensen’s vigorous response in an interview there has been a healthy debate around the merits and even existence of disruption in many posts and tweets. I had been busy preparing for and then teaching a computer bootcamp for our children and some friends so I had mostly ignored this debate. It is of course highly relevant to my claim that we are at the beginning of a massive transition from industrial to infor...

Today was the second day of our mini computer bootcamp for friends and family. The goal was to have a functioning and hosted website up and running. We started out by using nslookup to find the IP address of a web server – we use ziggeo.com as an example. If you are on Mac OS you can simply do this in terminal (which we learned about yesterday and used again extensively today – I am not sure what the easiest way to do this is on Windows, but if you have your Raspberry Pi handy from yesterday ...

Today was the second day of our mini computer bootcamp for friends and family. The goal was to have a functioning and hosted website up and running. We started out by using nslookup to find the IP address of a web server – we use ziggeo.com as an example. If you are on Mac OS you can simply do this in terminal (which we learned about yesterday and used again extensively today – I am not sure what the easiest way to do this is on Windows, but if you have your Raspberry Pi handy from yesterday ...