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The Kamprad Test and Moravec’s Paradox

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An article in the Economist reports on efforts of AI researchers in Singapore to automatically assemble an IKEA chair. They call it the Kamprad test – named after the founder of IKEA:

COMPUTERS have already proved better than people at playing chess and diagnosing diseases. But now a group of artificial-intelligence researchers in Singapore have managed to teach industrial robots to assemble an IKEA chair

It took a pair of them, pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time.

Clearly Moravec’s paradox is that play here. The paradox is:

Moravec’s paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.

It can even explain the difficulties Elon Musk and Tesla face to fully automate their production line.

 

Centralization of data is not conducive to innovation

Unbundling the internet and data ownership

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I was reading the two articles below today. Their observations are correct, but their arguments are very technology driven. Technology is just an enabler, it’s ultimately successful business models which drive innovation and change.

The Missing Building Blocks of the Web

The web was designed so that everybody was supposed to have their own website, at its own address.  

An individual having a substantial website (not just a one-page placeholder) is pretty unusual these days unless they’re a Social Media Expert or somebody with a book to sell.

There are social barriers, of course — if we stubbornly used our own websites right now, none of our family or friends would see our stuff.

It’s time to rebuild the web

I’ve written several times (and will no doubt write more) about rebuilding the internet, but I’ve generally assumed the rebuild will need peer-to-peer technologies. Those technologies are inherently much more complex than anything Dash proposes. While many of the technologies I’d use already exist, rebuilding the web around blockchains and onion routing would require a revolution in user interface design to have a chance; otherwise it will be a playground for the technology elite

AOL used to be internet in the US, there was Minitel in France and i-mode in Japan. All of them were widely successful in their day but turned into obscurity when disrupted by more open and distributed solutions.

There’s a law which says something like “any institution always strives to become more powerful over time”. I can’t find the source of this law, but it applies to any organization – commercial or non-commercial. In their strive to become more dominant in a market or sector, they typically strive to centralization of power, influence, usage and product.

For companies this typically means they want to own part of the space they’re in and keep expanding that space. After AOL and their local competitors, the internet became more decentralized by lowering the barrier of entry for everyone. Now we’re back at a centralized internet where companies have a Facebook page with a gmail address instead of a website .

The problem with centralization is that it stifles innovation. It is an unintentional side-effect of the normal course of business, but the AOL platform and now the Facebook platform are not very fast-moving innovative places. Facebook’s mission is to sell ads and everything they do is focused on that single goal. For users this means that they want to get you to visit them as long and frequently as possible to show you ads. Don’t let Zuckerberg fool you when he talks about connecting people and creating communities. That’s just marketing, as a business they’ve just that one goal. It’s also understandable that Facebook wants to extend and protect their platform. As a company they do exactly what they should doing and their investors reward them for it handsomely.

If we step back though, only a small number of entities command 80% of your time on the internet today and this is the problem. At the same, I would argue this is the normal cycle of maturing platforms. In other contexts it’s often referred to as bundling and unbundling.

I’m a technology optimist and I’m confident this problem is going to be solved over time.Today, significant money is invested into blockchain and this could be a solution, but only if they can get it to work right. We’ve seen this before with peer-to-peer technology and that never really took off (besides downloading movies and music). Two main commercial examples of peer-to-peer technology were Spotify and Skype, but they both moved away to centralized systems – mostly because their implementations were in essence centralized, just their protocols were decentralized peer-to-peer. In those scenarios, it does not make a lot of sense. Now if Spotify would’ve been the repository of music and would allow anyone to make a client to access their database, it could’ve worked. The argument can be made for Skype. But the value in their perspective is owning the customer, the experience and the data.

The view on data and customer ownership is ultimately what needs to be disrupted for the internet to change. If companies can accept they don’t own your data or you (as a customer) and build successful business models around that concept, we can see a big shift from the centralized internet today to a more open decentralized internet.

Bye Medium and Squarespace

Back to the future – hello WordPress

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All of my twelve regular readers (hi mom! 👋) might have noticed that I’ve moved my blog again.

After a journey of a few years to Medium and then Squarespace, my blog is back on a self-hosted WordPress site.

I’ve been hosting my own website since 1995, but didn’t have my own domain until 2001. In 2001, I registered schouwenburg.nl. I remember that before 2001 you were not allowed to register a .nl internet domain as a person. Typical Dutch institutional thinking; why would a person need a internet domain? This can only lead to problems, let’s just prohibit it. It’s better that way. Of course some smart Dutch person founded a company called Ladot and offered to register the domains for you and then rent them back to you. A couple of years later SIDN (institute who manages .nl domains) came to their senses and changed their policies.

In 2001, my site run on Typo3 CMS on a Linux PC in my hallway closet – no joke.

I did this for 10 years. I even moved everything from The Netherlands to New York. It was offline for 5 weeks while my server was in a container traveling on a boat from Rotterdam to New York, but that’s ok right?

Somewhere in between I migrated from Typo3 to WordPress. In the early days WordPress was pretty ghetto. It got hacked all the time – even when you (tried to) kept up with all the updates. My site got defaced at least once a month.

In 2012, I moved to a shared host, but after years of neglect it became a administration nightmare. Upgrading was a problem because it broke my templates and not upgrading meant that my site got hacked. It happened a few times.

Sometime in 2015, Medium became a thing and it offered quite a nice place to bring your blog to life. One of their more interesting features was the ability to create a magazine. You could intersperse your own posts with posts from others and create an interesting reading experience. But when Medium grew, it became like all other social media platforms. They turned it into a feed like Twitter and Facebook. The magazine feature got scrapped. But the feed also creates problems. The biggest problem with feeds is that the harder you work, the more exposure you got but everybody else was left with nothing. I got less readership of my posts on Medium than when I hosted it myself. I’m sure it was my lack of active promotion and most probably my stuff wasn’t that interesting anyway, but it bugged me. It felt like my stuff fell into the black hole of social media.

One of the interesting later changes to Medium was the ability to redirect your domain to your Medium host blog. It worked ok and it gave me my own place. I was no longer shackled to the “feed”. But that platform also had major limitations. It was only about articles and posting. There were only very limited ways to customize your blog. That’s fine within the context of Medium, but it wasn’t really for me.

After Medium I moved to Squarespace for a bit. Squarespace is very polished and easy to use. I would recommend to anyone, but it’s also limiting and it was those limits which annoyed me. For instance you cannot experiment on Squarespace. You cannot copy your site or play with other themes, all changes can only happen on your production site. You cannot modify templates except when you pay extra dollars per month. The functionality they offer is powerful and mature, but when they do not offer what you need, you’re stuck.

I like the tinkering and missed it.

So I decided to take the plunge and go back to hosting my own WordPress.

Who still uses RSS newsreaders right?

Trying something new – RSS to email

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There are quite a few blogs I like to follow and I visited them regularly to see if there was an update. But since the update intervals for each of these were very different, regularly visiting wasn’t really working for me. Some of them post once a day, some of them once a week and others only once per month or so.

A while ago I was thinking about this problem. I know there’s RSS but using a RSS reader leads to the same problem with a different interface. I rather be notified then pull since these are low volume blogs with some having a highly irregular posting interval.

Another option is Twitter, but the signal-to-noise of Twitter is in general too low for me to bother with it.

Then I came across this post from Fred Wilson where you can subscribe to his RSS feed via email. I was wondering if there was a generic solution, just enter the URL and your email to get notifications of new posts in your email. Since I won the newsletter battle I’ve a relative well managed inbox and this seems to me the perfect solution to my problem.

I found Blogtrottr which does exactly that. You enter the URL and it automatically finds the feeds (either atom or RSS). You enter your email, confirm your subscription and you’re done.

I’ve been using it for a month now and it’s perfect.  

Mere Potential Can Be More Important Than Achievement

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Zakary Tormala: Mere Potential Can Be More Important Than Achievement

In a series of experiments set in different contexts, we found that high potential can be more appealing than equally high achievement. Our studies uncovered this in situations ranging from basketball player evaluations to hiring decisions, to salary offers, to grad school admissions recommendations. We also saw it in perceptions of artistic talent and in people’s intentions to try a restaurant. In general, potential seems to engender greater interest than achievement.

This is very counter-intuitive on a rational level.

Self-Destructive Behavior of Entrepreneurs

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The article Why do entrepreneurs engage in self-sabotage? tells something about human nature which in general applies to everyone, but gets super-exposed when starting a company.

In his 1985 book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker relates the story of Alfred Einhorn, who invented Novocain, which then became popular with dentists as a local anesthetic. Einhorn held a contempt for dentistry, since it was such a small market. He felt that Novocain should be used by surgeons for all forms of surgery. General surgery was more prestigious than dentistry, and so Einhorn waged a campaign against the use of Novocain by dentists. In the end, his innovation was successful despite him, rather than because of him. According to Drucker, this pattern, where a product is undercut by the entrepreneur who created it, is extremely common.

In his book, Lucky or Smart, Peabody says it is important to be smart enough to know when you are getting lucky. And then, you have to be willing to accept that luck. This takes humility. What’s needed in an entrepreneur is emotional resilience, the kind of strength that allows a person to show grace when their ideas have been proven wrong. One has to adapt to each surprise.

How to write engaging stories

Pixar Story Rules (one version) [2012]

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This is from 2012 and has been written about many times on the internet, but I came across it recently for the first time. As someone who likes to write but has no particular talent in that, I do find it fascinating how writers think and write. Here’s a summary of the rules of story telling by Emma Coats (Story Artist at Pixar at the time, now at Google):

  1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
  2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
  3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
  4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
  5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
  6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
  7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
  8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
  9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
  10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
  11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
  12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
  13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
  14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
  15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
  16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
  17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
  18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
  19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
  20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
  21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
  22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

Why Blockchain Matters

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I came across this talk via Fred Wilson’s blog.

It’s an excellent introductory talk by Muneeb Ali into blockchain and why blockchain matters. He uses very concise arguments, stays away from technology and – more importantly – cryptocurrencies. Even though there’s nothing new (for me) in this talk, I found it very inspiring.

In all fairness, I do not subscribe to the doom & gloom scenario and I would not call the current time “dark ages”, but I guess the lack of nuance is a current sign of the times.

Make you feel safe

The Art of Persuasion

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First Round Review keep putting out excellent articles, but every now and then one of them is a must read. The post Master the Art of Influence — Persuasion as a Skill and Habit is definitely in this category – especially when you’re pitching or selling something. This article gives a great overview with concise and concrete examples on how to persuade people for your ideas, companies, views or products.

“The reality is that visionaries like Steve Jobs haven’t been successful because they thought of something amazing and original out of thin air. Rather, they were gifted at constantly persuading many people to follow them on their journey to something amazing and original.”

“When we look at what visionaries really succeed at, they give us a confident, consistent and coherent plan that makes us feel safe,” says Odean. “We trust them not because their vision is perfect, but because they have it under control. They communicate clearly without giving us all the answers. What most people think of as vision is actually persuasion.”

System I is involuntary; System II is deliberate. System I thinks in black and white; System II sees many shades of gray.

If you speak to System II (i.e. pose something complex enough that it requires reasoning), you’re asking to be doubted. Many of us have had the thought while listening to someone: “I don’t know why you’re wrong, but I still don’t believe you.” That’s System II doing its job.

Values inspires and action follows

Why -> How -> What = How Great Leaders Inspire Action

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The TED talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” is a classic but I came across it quite recently.

You could substitute leaders with organizations or companies. The end result is the same. When there is a clear defined WHY, it’s easier to persuade people on your HOW and WHAT. This applies to defining, building and selling your product through hiring members for your team. If you can’t clearly define WHY, then HOW and WHAT does not really matter. It will never be as convincing.