Editor’s note: Besides following developments in tech, our author is also a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. This piece is called “Piratical Early Scat.”
“Harvesting Infinity” embodies the concept of limitless innovation and coincides with the mindset of abundance that is popular in Silicon Valley. This mindset holds that small, innovative groups can create scalable and valuable enterprises, continually generating what is needed from an infinite pool of possibilities. Silicon Valley’s influence contrasts with traditional views of finite resources; it challenges the notion of scarcity and represents a significant cultural shift, especially in the post-pandemic era. Although some of the earliest college courses in Artificial Intelligence were offered forty-five years ago in New England, adherence to this abundance model has enabled West Coast companies from Silicon Valley to build the economic engine that drives the entire planet.
But the Silicon Valley perspective is spreading. In the post-pandemic era, AI-assisted telecommunications are playing a pivotal role in sustaining virtual professional and personal relationships This technological advancement is making the dissemination of the “Harvesting Infinity” mindset more rapid and widespread, enabling a future of boundless innovation.
Ai is making it possible to increase context, and that has a large impact on the value of information, which is worth a lot more than data. Data is a string of numbers without units. 22, 41, 46, and 51 have no value, but if I told you they were temperatures, then all of a sudden they are worth more. Adding even more context by saying these temperatures occurred in Florida in July of 1993 and were twenty degrees colder than typical temperatures in June of 2023 would imply something very screwy is going on, and these numbers would be moving up the food chain from data to information to knowledge. Context makes a big difference. Fifty years ago, resistance to technology would have made no difference to the professional prospects of a person living near a big city. Today, though, an anti-technology person living 50 miles south of San Francisco or 100 north of New York City would have a hard time getting a job. An anti-AI scarcity mindset coupled with an aversion to empirically determining value and relevancy would constitute a severe professional handicap.
AI, in particular, plays a crucial role in promoting the abundance mindset by processing vast amounts of data quickly and accurately and by identifying new opportunities and solutions that might not be visible to human analysts. This capability enables businesses to innovate more rapidly and efficiently, breaking down traditional barriers to growth and resource utilization. By automating routine tasks, AI frees up human creativity and problem-solving abilities for more complex and innovative endeavors. It predicts trends, personalizes user experiences, optimizes supply chains, and improves decision-making processes. By democratizing access to sophisticated analytical tools, AI empowers even small startups to compete with established companies, fostering an environment where innovation can thrive regardless of scale.
Historically, many pioneering computer companies were based on the East Coast, such as IBM, Remington Rand, Sperry Rand, RCA, Burroughs, and Honeywell. These companies laid the groundwork for the technology industry. The transition from East Coast conservatism to West Coast innovation reflects broader cultural and economic shifts, emphasizing a move from scarcity to abundance. The innovation mindset of ‘Harvesting Infinity’ embraces risk and failure as integral parts of the scientific method, seeing failure as a necessary step towards progress. This acceptance of failure as part of the process of moving forward is especially interesting and should help reassure and encourage the public that results have been empirically proven.
We have all been subjected to a lot of perception manipulation about new tools. This has led to considerable fear and apprehension about AI. We have been told that it will make us more susceptible to being scammed or to losing our jobs. The way to make ourselves more comfortable with AI is to spend some time looking into it to determine how it might be helpful to us. This is not rocket science. You do not have to invent AI to use it, just like you did not have to invent the automobile or computer to use them, but you do need to know how to drive and how to operate a computer. Just as automobiles and motorcycles provide the means to broadly explore our physical world, computers and mobile devices provide the means to explore our mental worlds, and many companies are exploring ways to integrate AI into both categories.
Even though most of us have decades of experience doing things mostly without AI, the AI tidal wave rapidly moving toward our shores is clearly visible, and its arrival is imminent. You have to get ready, for this is as big as the internal combustion engine, and it will change the size of each of our worlds just as much. This sense of urgency should motivate us to adapt and prepare for the inevitable impact of AI.
If you have been sitting on the fence or saying you are too busy, or this does not concern me, think again. AI is right now showing up in the next versions of everything from word processors to phones, cars, refrigerators, washers and dryers, and every single app and operating system you can imagine. Yes, I know it is a pain when these popup windows tell you to click here and try the AI features, and we cannot possibly spend the time trying all of them.
How do you determine which ones to click on? Next week’s column will be about how to be conscious of these options and how to marry your unconscious understanding to your conscious awareness, as our unconscious minds know a lot more than our conscious minds and also operate a lot faster. Not only do we know more than we think we do, but how we think about things tremendously impacts our health, our likelihood of succeeding, and the rate at which we grow and assimilate new capabilities, all of which are critical to sustaining ourselves.
Don’t be like those East Coast tech companies mentioned above, which were all eclipsed by Silicon Valley’s Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel Corporation, Apple, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Fairchild Semiconductor, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics (SGI), Atari, and Xerox PARC. These West Coast companies laid the foundation for Silicon Valley’s ascent as a global tech hub, shaping the digital world we know today. The people at the Western companies were neither better educated nor initially technologically ahead of the East Coast companies, but they did have a very different attitude. They believed in abundance instead of scarcity and were unafraid to do the experiments, even when they failed. This permitted them to empirically determine how to proceed.
