改善弁
It was a strange morning in Shanghai.
Despite its age, the local school had very graciously walked down the street to make room for a new skyscraper complex.
The 7,600-ton building, severed from its roots and mounted on hundreds of mechanical legs, inched 200 ft down the road; without dropping so much as a windowpane.
We don’t always have to destroy the old to make way for the new.
It’s cheaper — and way cooler — to carefully nudge it out the way.
In a couple of hours a nice young doctor is going blind me.
She’ll be very polite about it but there will be a good few minutes — as she scrapes the skin off my eyeball — when my future is entirely in her hands.
Then she’ll zap my eyes with a laser and I’ll be blind for a bit.
Hopefully until Monday. Maybe forever.
That extreme uncertainty, the polarity of futures I’ll face in those short minutes has been straining my ‘third-eye.’ Like a vice locked over my temples, squishing the blood out of my prefrontal cortex.
There’s no way out but to surrender to the unknown and get ready to spend some serious ‘me’ time.
No screens. Nothing to read.
No way to write.
Just me, my thoughts, and a goodie bag of CBD-laced chocolate and Percocet.
Terrifying stuff.
I’ve queued up some of the blogs I’ve written over the last three months that I was too shy to publish earlier.
Thank you for reading my little infinity project.
And if my lucky string continues, I’ll see you on the other side.
Times are changing faster than ever.
Some days I look around at the technology we take for granted and can barely believe I get to see this happen.
Computers used to be a joke. We had a computer with 128kb of RAM when I was a kid. 128 kilobytes!
I’m not even sure you can find an image that small these days.
We can speak to anyone face to face through this tiny computer I can put in my pocket. We have robots that dance and space rockets that land themselves. Self-driving cars and drone-taxis will be standard in ten years.
And we’re still not impressed.
This is the stuff I used to dream about in sci-fi books but I never thought I’d see it happen.
Some days I sit here and look back at those dark, bloody, scary, slow pages of history and think:
They really did all of that for us?
And they really did.
That fills me with such pride for humanity that I want to pass it on.
It’s well-known that humans are terrible at remembering things.
We peer through the blurry lens of time, forgetting the boring or nasty or annoying memories and embellishing the tasty morsels.
It makes us awful at predicting the future too.
We ignore all of the massive, disruptive change we’ve lived through and decide that the future will be pretty much the same as it is now. Nothing will change. We are at the end of the line—the end of history.
But we’re not.
We’re not even close.
Imagine a 20-year-old suggesting that they’d done all the changing they’d ever do and life would be plain sailing for the next decade.
Laughable.
Yet, that’s what we do to ourselves every day.
I aim to change my life every 6 months and the last year has still seen far more change than I ever expected. And I’m betting Life will change again by the end of this year for all of us.
Don’t beat yourself up by imagining the future is the past.
Not finished yet?
More like just getting started.
In case you were ever worried about the robots coming you should know that AI won’t take our jobs.
AI will offer us new, better, more interesting work that we’ll enjoy more.
If you told someone back in 1920 we’d have cat psychiatrists, dog masseurs, and a ten-year-old who made millions from unwrapping presents, they’d probably put you in an asylum.
Yet here we are, psychoanalyzing pets and making synchronized dancing videos for cash instead of squeezing down a mine or milking a cow.
Don’t fear the future.
Imagine whatever wild place you want it to be and start walking.
The rest of us will just have to catch up.
Everybody knows ol’ Jeffers — Head Honcho at Amazon and richest man in the world when it’s not Elon Musk.
If you ever wondered what Bezos was doing with all that cash, it’s Blue Origin (great name) and a space ship that looks like a sex toy.
What I found out recently was that Blue Origin isn’t a way to get richer or save humanity.
This guy really has 300-year goals to ‘build a road into space.’
He said, “I’m going to use my lottery winnings from Amazon to make it easy for some kids in their dorm room to build a giant space company in 100 years.”
It’s his ‘calling’ to empower the human race to take the next step and he doesn’t even expect to see it happen.
That’s one big tree to plant. One massive hairy goal.
And one that — quite frankly — I’m happy to donate to.
Getting toilet roll delivered to my door in 36 hours is like, a bonus.