Matt McCall writes about his talk last Thursday at Ignite Chicago on the issues of Black Swan and on Ray Kurzweil’s theme of accelerating returns. The Powerpoint of Matt McCall’s speech is here.
Quick points:
— a Black Swan is 1) a rare event, 2) with high impact, 3) that is hard to predict (pattern attributed post event)* examples include 9/11, stock market crashes, discoveries like Penicillin, start-ups (eBay, etc)
— most of mankind’s development has been driven by black swans (unstructured randomness) — black swans key in driving big entrepreneurial successes (payoff inverse to predictability)
Speaking of Ray Kurzweil, a few months ago he was in Chicago for Transvision 07, I had a chance to sit down for a chat with Ray at that time (scroll to the bottom for the podcast), but I’ve had some problems with my WordPress audio software that I fixed over the weekend. My apologies to both Ray and his many fans for the delay.
Listen to the interview: daviddalka.com_Ray_Kurweil_2007
Ray Kurweil talks about some of the following:
hedge funds
reading device for the blind
dietary supplements
his newsletter and web site
by the late 2020’s artificial intelligence eventually matching the ability human brains
becoming non-biological
seeing the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology
the ability to track history and information to create predictive models and time device introductions properly
exponential growth
his passion for ideas
developing his own treatment solution for type II diabetes
health and biology has not become information technology
pocket computing technology to help the blind with OCR readers
Second Life’s potential and indication of things to come and his breakfast with Philip Rosedale
Second Life’s potential to be as real as real life