I have had a couple conversations about AI this week where my perspective was surprising to others, so I wanted to more broadly share my thoughts to seed more possibilities about the future impact of AI. A few articles that prompted these conversations: (Aside: In originally editing this post, I realized the articles below are […]
Category: tech
What problem is your product solving?
I’ve given the same advice to a few different people over the past year, which generally means it’s time for me to write up that advice as a blog post. In this case, what I have been telling entrepreneurs is that they don’t have a business until they are addressing a problem that people will […]
Whistling Vivaldi, by Claude M. Steele
Amazon link Subtitled “How stereotypes affect us and what we can do”, this is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in a while. Diversity issues are everywhere these days, and they seem hopeless to overcome – when looking at a problem like why so few women are in technology, people argue about whether […]
Stewart Brand and Paul Saffo at the Interval
A couple weeks ago, I went to see Stewart Brand and Paul Saffo give a “salon talk” at the Interval (recap and audio of the talk here). It was a packed house – the talk had sold out in less than an hour, but I was lucky enough to be checking email when the tickets […]
Switching Costs
Earlier this week I switched my RSS reader from Bloglines to Google Reader. I’d been meaning to check out Google Reader for months, if not years, but had never gotten around to it, as Bloglines was serving me well enough for what I needed, and I’d gotten used to its quirks. But over the past […]
Living in the future
I live in the future. I don’t mean that in any sort of wacky time-travelling sci-fi sense, but in the sense implied by the William Gibson quip: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” I live in a world that’s a few years ahead of the mainstream. My friends were the geeks with […]
“We are as gods…”
Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, […]
Finishing a product
I used to think that the hard part of creating a product was developing the technology. That’s not a surprising attitude for an MIT graduate, steeped in the lore of plucky inventor heroes who toil in their labs for years before making scientific breakthroughs that bestow great benefits on mankind. I scorned all that “MBA […]
Requirements Management Processes
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in a master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia. As part of that, I’m working on a master’s project, which I’ve decided to do in the realm of requirements and specifications management, mostly because I’ve never seen it done well and would like to understand the field better for my […]
Technology affordances
I bought an iPod Shuffle before Christmas. I had actually planned to buy an iPod Nano, but when I walked into the Apple store, I compared the size of the two, and realized that the Shuffle was about one third the size. I like hearing albums in their entirety, but I decided to give the […]
