Identifying individuals who can complete thought-to-deployment cycles in days rather than weeks.
Business Dynamism (measured by summing business creation and destruction rates) and Job Dynamism (measured by summing job creation and destruction rates) as indicators for an economy's willingness to innovate
Back in 1957, companies could expect to remain in the [S&P 500] index for 61 years. In 1980, the average tenure was 36 years. Today, it’s just under 20 years. Enduring businesses are increasingly rare.
The harm of bad laws is often invisible, which makes weighing the trade-offs difficult. (How many good things aren’t happening and how good would they be?) It’s hard to argue against regulation before the potential of a new technology has been realized—the possibilities are, by definition, merely hypothetical.
Even [government] leaders who recognize the internet’s importance and value are stuck in an edifice almost guaranteed to yield a dissonant relationship.
Darwin’s finches sprinted to evolve when food sources changed. For decades, nothing—then sudden transformation. AI follows the same pattern & it’s accelerating.
While people need good advice, what they want is advice that sounds good. The advice that sounds the best in the short run is always the most dangerous in the long run.
Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail.
Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment?
Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works.
Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away.
The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.
Everyone reading this acquired their first language - you didn’t study grammar or memorize vocabulary, you simply absorbed it through exposure.
[...] Language acquisition is an innate capacity that every human being has.
[...] It’s not even within our control to turn it off - with the right setting and exposure, you’ll simply acquire a language.
Organizations are nothing more than idea-transporting vessels and friend-making machines.
Using Google to search for things must feel like using an abacus to do math at the dawn of calculators.
People for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't been able to get through to you yet.
It's not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability.
When software - or idea-ware for that matter - fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea.
It is an Accessibility failure.
When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, [...] Nobody cares.
And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer.
It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.
All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.
Deltas between one’s beliefs and the actual truth are costly in expectation.
Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of “can we,” not “should we.”
And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and use.
I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.