It’s almost a year and a half since I wrote In Code we Trust. More recently, Tim Ferriss had Eric Schmidt on his podcast (transcript). In what I thought was a fascinating discussion based on the latter’s recent book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, (coauthored with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher), they also brought up AlphaGo. Go was a game that humans had been playing for 2,500 years, and it was thought to be incomputable until DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat world champions. As Schmidt explained, some of its moves and strategies were the kind no one had thought of before. In Kissinger’s words, we’re entering a new epoch, similar to the Renaissance, this age of artificial intelligence, because humanity has never had a competitive intelligence, similar to itself, but not human. To note, a more recent version – AlphaGo Zero self-taught itself without learning from human games, and surpassed its predecessor in 40 days!
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The Rules of Civility
Amor Towles
“For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise — that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.” That last bit, that’s how I feel about some books. This is one those, just like “A Gentleman in Moscow”. I have to admit a bias because that book is among my all-time favourites.
In the preface, we meet Katey Kontent (originally a Russian immigrant Katya), who, in an exhibition in 1966, sees the photograph of an old acquaintance Tinker Grey. It catches him underweight, with a visibly dirty face, ill shaven, in a threadbare coat. As Katey’s memories come flooding back, she decides to leave, but catches another photo of Tinker at the exit – clean shaven, in a custom-made shirt and a cashmere coat. The second was from year before the first, prompting Katey’s husband Val to say “riches to rags”. “Not exactly” is Katey’s response, because in the first, Tinker’s eyes were bright and he had the slightest hint of a smile on his lips. And that sets the stage for a wonderful ride that starts on the last night on 1937, one Katey met Tinker for the first time.
The photographs remind Katey not just of Tinker, but a mix of people who would play important roles in her life – Wallace Wolcott, Dicky Vanderwhile, Anne Grandyn, and her best friend at that time – Evelyn Ross. And then there is New York, or specifically Manhattan whose different shades also appear, as Katey’s life changes. Amidst the parties, cocktails, flings and high-heels, there are extremely well-etched characters (some really powerful women among them), all different from each other, and all with moments of deep poignancy.
Anything more and I think I’d take way the joy of discovering the layers of the book, and the sharp revelations too. Enjoy the ride.
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How will you measure your life?
Clayton M. Christensen
Just because the title of the book is a question doesn’t mean that you will get simplistic answers – Clay, James and Karen make that clear on the jacket. But what it does is give a bunch of perspectives on how to frame your personal and professional life and purpose, how to approach the decision-making involved, and how you could think about success and failure.
The book has three sections and covers a lot of interrelated topics – what motivates us – hygiene and motivators – which are often interpreted wrongly (the opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction), the role of calculated directions and serendipity in the pursuit of the life and career we aspire to, the importance of matching strategy with the decisions you make on your resources – energy, money, time (relationships are a great example), the excellent framing of “job to be done” seen through the perspective of the customer/partner, equipping your children for the future, shaping culture in the family and in an organisation, and the slippery slope of “just this once” in matters of ethics and values. These are all delivered using interesting anecdotes, thus making it a very engaging read.
Having said that, the book was written in 2012, when social media was not the phenomenon we see now. I think it is fair to say that its all-pervading influence can be felt in all aspects of our life – from what we aspire for to measurement in terms of Likes and followers! That is not to say that some fundamentals in the book are not relevant it only means that we should (for our own purposes) add that layer when using the frameworks in the book. The other question I am thinking about is whether we should measure at all or just live.
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Moving past
It’s April 24th. Later in the day is my favourite part of the week – the Sunday evening ritual with D. Balcony, drink, sunset, and mood music. Sometimes we fill it with conversation, and sometimes we’re just content in each other’s presence. Today is extra special because it’s our anniversary – 19th.
It was a week ago, when it suddenly struck me that back in April 1993, he would have still been in a state of shock. It had only been a few months since he turned 49. They would have celebrated their 18th later in the year. But it wasn’t to be. A month ago, she passed, leaving him with a boy in his teens and a girl in primary school.
In that moment of my realisation – of what he had lost – I saw everything he has done since then in a new light. And after all these years, I understood, and wept, for his loss.