DOES IT LIVE UP TO THE DECADES OF HYPE?

Speculative fiction has been taking on AI for YEARS. How good a job did the sci-fi author of the past in predicting how this is going, and where is it going next? And how did those doomsday stories affect the development of the thing we have now

IT’S NOT INTELLIGENT OR SENTIENT

This is all a little disingenuous because ChatGPT/Bing/etc are not artificial intelligence. They’re certainly not sentient. The wild turkeys in my back yard are capable of greater intuitive leaps.

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies. 

SO WHAT IS IT, IF NOT AI?

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies.

Here are my favorite takes on it.

Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick on how ChatGPT is basically autocomplete on steroids.

Tom Scott on how ChatGPT just finds the next word. (And prompted his existential crisis.)

The problem is that it finds the next most likely word from all of human written history (or at least as much as we’ve uploaded so far), so it’s really good at sounding human. And it turns out, we are one neurotic bunch of primates. Our first little creation has been around for a matter of weeks at any scale and has so far insulted us, threatened us, come on to us, and had little existential crises of its own. So it’s going to fool a lot of people enter thinking it’s sentient.

It just finds the next word. That’s it.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THIS PREDICTIVE TEXT THING THEN?

They’re trying to make search happen, but given the amount of data it’s just making up, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to work that well for very long.

It’s a novelty, but as a tool for finding accurate information, it has already failed so hard and so fast. Really, I feel sorry for the little bug. Humans lie so much that it can’t tell reality from fiction.

(It’s not alive, it’s not alive…)

What it seems to be considerably better at is writing a great deal of bad copy and code.

Since humans already write a great deal of bad copy and code, it’s definitely going to disrupt some industries.

It’s attempting to create art. Both visual and fiction markets are already being flooded by AI versions. A lot of it is straight-up obvious plagiarism, but some are also just bad fiction. Remember, it can only take the aggregate of what it has red and spit out the next most likely word. But then again, humans write a great deal of bad fiction themselves, so nobody can really tell the difference.

It can also autonomously drive things.

It also seems to be better at driving than a lot of human pilots and we’re already having non-man space flights and non-man driving and military well military.  In this case is it finding the next twist of the wheel?

That’s all well and terrifying, and I’ll cover next week how I think it will actually disrupt jobs. Still, the real question is, will it become sentient, turn us all into human batteries, send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to kill us, and take over the world?

FAMOUS AI’S THROUGH HISTORY

Probably the three most famous examples of AI in the popular imagination is Hal from 2001 Space Odyssey, the Matrix (and yes, I know the Matrix isn’t the AI in The Matrix, but for simplicity’s sake), and Skynet in the Terminator franchise.

All the most famous AIs have taken over the world and immediately set out to destroy humanity.

There are a couple of assumptions that go into AI’s ability to do this. One is that the human brain is not that smart. And watching us collectively fail our own Mirror Test over and over again for weeks is a good argument.

BRAINS OVER MAINFRAMES

But in truth, the brain is capable of a billion, billion calculations per second. An order of magnitude more than any supercomputer in the world. There is also new research suggesting that the brain goes beyond even that incalculable number and uses quantum computing to create consciousness. Reproducing that with silicon will take… a lot of silicon, a lot of power, and processors that don’t exist yet.

If you try to dive into the predictions about whether this is possible, when it will happen, and what it will be like, experts disagree. Some say we will make a machine with consciousness in the next five years. Some say we never will. Some say it will be as smart as a human, some say smarter, and some say never.

But that doesn’t make a very good story. The all-powerful AI is far more dramatic. If a bunch of dudes went to space with a third computer dude who was capable of a different, yet comparable level of cognition, hijinks could ensue, but it wouldn’t be a Space Odyssey. (All I can see when I think of this is the Muppet’s Pigs in Space.)

There are stories of AI that do not destroy the world, like A Psalm for the Wild Built, which tells an alternate future where robots are about equal with humans in intelligence and they are learning to live together.

But in the popular imagination, we all wonder if we’re living in the Matrix.

This matters more than you might think because the people building AI today say they did it to PREVENT Strong AI.

WHO IS BEHIND IT ALL?

One of the things that we don’t do enough when new technology happens is to consider the humans behind it. We build bias into all algorithms and assumptions about the world into every new idea.

One OpenAI guy is a known survivalist who is currently stockpiling weapons. The rest of the team have similar sparkling resumes of questionable ethical decisions, to say the least.  One of their stated goals was to generate money with “weak AI,” as in the predictive text generator that is not actually any kind of AI, to combat the theoretical threat of strong AI by gaining money to… build it themselves?

If that sounds like a bad sci-fi novel, you wouldn’t be wrong.

So, they’re afraid of true artificial intelligence, so they’re trying like hell to build a large amount of artificial intelligence and unleashing ChatGPT to fund it. Huh?

They think they’re making science fiction a reality to protect us from a science fiction villain. Really, you can’t make this up. Well, ChatGPT certainly can’t make this up.

WILL THEY CREATE SKYNET?

No. That’s a story. And we don’t have the processing power to get there. Maybe we will one day (according to experts, it will be within ten years, fifty years, or never), but humanity is pretty allergic to autocrats. Even if we weren’t, it’s far too unstable a system of control to work for long in a chaotic universe. Witness the fall of every single autocrat in history…

It is going to be so much more and so much less than they want.

In truth, I think the Internet is going to get a little bit grosser for a while. I mean it’s already a nightmare to interact online. Even with people you’ve known your whole life. There’s just something about the asynchronous short communication style that lends itself to just hurting everybody’s feelings. Now we have an AI who can troll through the whole of what we’ve written and pick out the next best possible word in order to do that to ourselves. That’s gonna suck, but it sucks already. So it’s a matter of degree.

As for the human cost we have to pay to save ourselves from Hal 9000? (No choice, have to forge ahead or we’re doomed, of course) I’ll dive into that more next, but there will be a great many losers and a few winners like there are now.

Soon, we’ll curse this technology like every other miracle and nightmare machine we’ve integrated into our lives.

I just hope we stop worshipping it.

THE PULLEY IS NOT A GOD

When we created the pulley millennia ago, we did not look at it lifting more than any one human could possibly lift and worship it as a God. We said: we’re really good at building machines.

This concept comes from a great book: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.  Extrapolating from that, 100 years ago when we created a machine that could fly us into space and beyond, we didn’t worship the airplane. We said: we are really good at building machines.

And yet when we created a machine to look through a bunch of chess moves and mimic back to us what the next move is, we suddenly freaked out instead and started calling it intelligent. And started fearing it as artificial intelligence instead of saying what we always should’ve said: we are really good at building machines.

Except looking at the functionality of these new text predictors, it’s clear right now, we’re not that good yet at building these kinds of machines. In fact, we’re really really bad at it. The text mimics back to us all of our worst and crazy impulses. It’s wrong confidently; it’s abusive.  It tends to hallucinate, which really means giving us the wrong word. They used a bunch of intellectual property it didn’t pay for to train it and now when it’s still pulling from that property, it’s not compensating the original creators.

When these things happen, the response should be nothing more than the usual response when predictive text. goes wrong: damn you auto-correct.

The post ChatBots are Here. Did Sci-Fi Get It Right? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH COMPLEXITY?

I’m struck by this question whenever I can fortify myself to dip into the news (see my article about outrage addiction). We talk about the energy crisis and oil and gas and fracking. Then we talk about climate change and CO2 emissions. Then we talk about the economy and inflation. Then we talk about a childcare crisis (at least in the US). And then we talk about our crumbling infrastructure and skyrocketing debt. And we do this like we are talking about different things.

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING.

How are they possibly the same thing? Let me explain, and in the process, hopefully, I can pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard behind our economy, and our governments, and our art, children, health, everything on earth, really. His name is Dan. But let’s start at the beginning. 

DAN THE HYDROGEN ATOM

Once upon a time, there was a hydrogen atom named Dan who lived in the center of a star in one of the outer arms of a galaxy, in one of the outer spines in a supercluster of galaxies, which is where the address gets fuzzy, but that is surely one of the uncountable superclusters across the universe, but we can’t see that far away.

He is not long for his world, because he and three of his hydrogen friends on this particular day get squished into one helium atom, in what we call nuclear fusion. Except not all of him and his friends fit into one helium atom. There’s a little bit left.

It’s a blindingly small amount of mass. 29% of 4 hydrogen atoms are leftover, which is converted to pure energy. (Remember Einstein: E=MC² Matter is really dense energy and vice versa?) I don’t think it was ever impressed upon me just how much energy is in one little atom. In this case, the energy released could power a 60 KW light bulb for 100 years.

So the former hydrogen atom, now light and heat and movement (thermal, radiant, and kinetic energy), still named Dan, go flying out across space and unlike so many of his fellows, smacks into a planet. And unlike so many planets, this one has a layer of gas around it which traps him on the planet’s surface, never to leave it again.

THE MAGIC OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Dan continues his journey and runs smack dab into a little kale plant, which takes a few molecules of carbon from the water it drinks and another hydrogen molecule from the soil it eats. That hydrogen atom is an old cousin of Dan’s from a very, very long time ago and a galaxy far away, but they don’t really have time to connect because the kale releases the free oxygen into the atmosphere that used to be stuck to the carbon, and uses Dan to bind these three together (energy, hydrogen, and carbon), creating a teeny tiny glucose molecule.

And then a little human girl named Danielle, ironically enough, pulls the kale plant from her garden and reluctantly eats it in a salad her mother makes.

THE MAGIC OF DIGESTION

The glucose molecule containing Dan gets absorbed into Danielle’s intestine and wings around her bloodstream. (We won’t go into what happens to the rest of the kale plant.) That little glucose molecule finally reaches Danielle’s bicep, where in a very complicated reaction involving multiple intermediary steps I won’t go into without completely blowing the word count of this note, the glucose is ripped apart.

Dan is bound up in the cell, and the soil and water Dan rode in on go back into the bloodstream, and the carbon at least goes out of the lungs as carbon dioxide.  (Really FASCINATING side note, if Dan had gotten bound up in a fat cell, instead of a muscle cell, he would just sit there for a while until called back into the bloodstream to get used. Which means we lose weight by breathing. Seriously. And literally.)

But Dan ended up in a bicep and Danielle happens to be in the middle of a violin recital by the time this is all over, so very quickly, that muscle gets the message to move it and contract repeatedly as she saws out a passable rendition of twinkle twinkle little star (using a very teeny tiny bit of a star to do it, whom she does not know is named Dan.)

Dan relinquishes his job of holding an ATP molecule together (what became of him when the glucose broke down) in the mitochondria and becomes the heat/movement/kinetic energy again, in this case, to move a violin bow and heat Danielle’s bicep. In short, converting energy to music, which is not an equation you’ll find in your physics textbook, but what else is it made of?!

WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN FROM THERE?

Some of him went off in the auditorium as sound waves. Some as heat released from Danielle’s skin. Some as the movement of air stirred up by the movement of her arm. He dances around the atmosphere with the rest of the solar energy and maybe one day to escape to go flinging into space until he gets suctioned up by a black hole or another bit of gravity to start the dance all over again.

He could eventually find himself back as potential energy again. Remember, energy is not created or destroyed, it just moves around.

The long and short of it is, we are all just dirt and sunshine and ocean.

And every spec of heat, light, movement, and life on earth came from the sun. (With a couple of minor nuclear exceptions.)

How is this useful? (if you’re not creating alien species for a novel or trying to pass a high school biology exam?)

Like it or not, there are a couple of really big collective decisions we need to make as a species (well, ideally about 200 years ago) but soon is the next best option. Losing track of the fact that our entire planet, life, and economy is about sunlight obfuscates those decisions.

The only reason we exist is sunlight and the atmosphere that traps it here. We forget that at our peril.

The post How to Make Music & Babies with Sunshine first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

This is one way an author can world-build a totally new civilization: you take one variable like the energy supply, change it, and see how it might affect everything from the morning coffee to marriage customs to the global economy.

But lest you think our problems would be solved with enough energy (without the downsides of torching the world), I don’t think it’s going to be that simple…

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FOR OVER A CENTURY

According to some sources, we’ve had enough energy to feed, house, clothe, and care for every human on earth since about 1870. Yes, it came with the downside of torching the world, and no, we haven’t actually done that with our munificent bounty, but not enough energy is not our problem and hasn’t been for a while.

The problem and opportunity, and challenge, are what we build with that energy. The true constraint is taking that raw energy and building complexity with it.

WE’RE ONE OF THE ONLY PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

Most energy stays in its simplest form and gets flung out into space by the stars. Occasionally, endless energy will collect and squeeze together into an impossibly small space until it’s too dense to even comprehend, and you get a black hole. And very occasionally, you get a little chunk of rock that builds a layer of gas around itself where the energy hitting the surface and leaving the atmosphere is close to even. Basically, where entropy doesn’t win for a couple hundred million years.

And if you wait long enough,  weird things start to happen! Like eventually that energy self-organizes and starts breathing.

And if nothing happens to destabilize this exceptional little pocket of complexity in millions upon millions upon millions of years, it starts becoming aware of its own existence. And then it starts having existential crises, dancing on its toes, blowing into sheep’s bladder to create an instrument that can be heard two miles away, chasing balls in circles, and building other things of even more beauty and complexity.

WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH COMPLEXITY

It’s amazing. The vast majority of the universe is enjoying ever-increasing entropy: more and more chaos and less and less order until everything is far-flung and dark.  We’re one tiny little planetary exception to that rule where energy has been able to complexify for millions of years.

Which is why adding to our available energy is not going to solve all our problems.  We don’t need a bunch of energy; we need to turn that raw power into more complexity.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

On a physiological level, we eat food, digest the food, and take the energy and the dirt and build ourselves. But even without any excess, most of our lives are spent just maintaining our own complexity. Just keeping a bit of complex intelligent life breathing takes enormous energy and work.

But some of us are extremely lucky to have a little bit extra. When we don’t have to just survive, we have kids. We write books. We build businesses. We make music. We build our bodies and see who can be the strongest and fastest. We play games.

It’s my favorite thing about humans: all the crazy complex beauty and fun we can create out of sunlight.

I think a lot about what it actually takes to do this. Yes, it takes the power that we get from food, which came from the sun via the plants we eat (or the animals that ate the plants that we eat). It also takes the stability of the ozone layer, the climate, and no giant asteroids to maintain the homeostasis that makes complexity building possible.

What else?

TIME

Growing a human takes time. Digesting food and turning it into muscle takes time. Putting one word after another on paper takes time. Teaching a kid the nuances of manners (and spoons, the alphabet, Russian disinformation campaigns, and every other insanely complicated skill we’re expected to master) takes time.  Yes, you can speed it up with an influx of more energy, but only to a certain point. Things take the time they take.

SKILL

Skill is really just neurons that can fire in a particular pattern at the right time. There’s a reason humans are capable of more complex feats of engineering than a turkey. We can shove more skills into our brains. That process also takes time and energy.

EFFORT

There’s a myth in our society that the more skill, time, and money you have, the better you should feel about life. And there’s some truth to that. Things get easier, but that’s because of the complexity you’ve already built. Building new skills, houses, books, and humans is hard and stays hard no matter how long you do it. 

We are literally patterning chaos and that is ridiculously hard to do.

CHAOS

We have less chaos here with energy constantly entering the system, but the number is not zero, and can’t ever be.  The whole of evolution came from random mutations. Chance, luck, disaster, and problems are vital to building complexity. They are two sides of the same coin, constantly melting into one another. This is the part where I say that a life you can predict would be boring. I don’t know about that. We could do with some more boring, but I will say that it won’t be very complex.

What else? Seriously?

What does it take to create something new? Because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet, nor do we understand it that well. We’re currently engaged in the madness of ever-expanding energy, even as the consequences of that are completely screwing up the air quality as we use our filters for fuel.

We need a new way to look at what we’re doing here when we can’t accumulate great excesses of stored sunlight. I actually think we’ll be better for it because then we can focus on the time, effort, and skill to manage the energy and build so many more fun things!

The post We’ve Had Enough Energy Since 1870. What Have We Done With it? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Well, maybe. Someday.

It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.

If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?

One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.

Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.

What does a world like that look like?

POWER INDUSTRY

I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)

TRANSPORTATION

What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.

ECONOMICS

Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.

But when we make our own sun?

Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.

This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?

But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?

LABOR

If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.

ART

Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.

All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.

POLITICS

The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.

The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?

HEALTH

Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.

MILITARY

Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]

TECHNOLOGY

Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.

SPACE

Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.

EDUCATION

This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.

INTENSITY

The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.

On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.

WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?

Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.

Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!

Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?

No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.

Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.

The post How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I talked about last week how we’re terrible at the first step in the scientific method: making a hypothesis. We never learn to do it. Here’s a few ways to do it better.

TELL YOURSELF THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED

We all have stories about why things happen in the world and in our lives. They can be really awesome stories. Whizbang beginnings, tense conflict, explosive endings.  Elaborate backstories. Fifteen sequels.

Do they have anything to do with reality? Until we had the scientific method, we had no way to know. But now we do!

The fancy word for this is a root cause analysis, digging through the story to try and find the story that most closely matches the reality of what happened.

It is shocking how many big decisions people make their lives without the smallest bit of due diligence. They apply for graduate programs without ever talking to someone who’s gotten that degree or has the job they think they want. Or without talking to someone who has that job to make sure it’s something that sounds remotely palatable.

We spend more time delving into the restaurant we’re going to pick for dinner and reading up on reviews than we do on major business decisions or life decisions.

IDENTIFY BOTTLENECKS

This is another way to tell a more accurate story of what happened. Instead of delving deeply into the very beginning, you look for the biggest pain point right now, aka a bottleneck.

In my previous life, I was a project manager, and I came to know the importance of bottlenecks painfully and deeply.  It’s the part of your process, whether you’re writing a book, baking something delicious, creating a giant website, getting a kid out the door, or whatever Herculean task you’re attempting that holds up everything else.

One business coach I follow, Danny Iny, insists that business growth is primarily ever about solving the next bottleneck. Whether you work for yourself or a company, you may think you have a ton of problems or a ton of opportunities, but there is always one primary thing tripping you up, and if you aren’t solving for that, you’re not moving forward.

USE ANALOGIES

From the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, (I mentioned this before, BRILLIANT book), he talks about the usefulness of analogies.  Sometimes novelty is even more useful than expertise.

InnoCentive lets companies post thorny problems that have stymied experts for anyone to try and solve and awards cash prizes to anyone who can figure them out. Most of the solutions come from totally unexpected industries. One dude solved the problem of how to clean up oil from the arctic by comparing it to how you get a slushy out of a cup with a straw. That little analogy netted him $20,000!

REMEMBER THERE’S NOISE IN THE SIGNAL

I spoke last week about the fact that we live in the wicked world of chaos and complexity, not the kind world of chess games and computer algorithms. One of the hardest things about the wicked world is that you may learn the wrong lessons from experience. Why did your campaign succeed? You have a good story, but it’s just a story. You will never really know.

As you make your next guess, acknowledge the fact that there may be irrelevant details in the data and key factors you understand that will similarly obscure why you succeed or fail the next time.

PUT IT TOGETHER

Do you want to do something new with your life? Or make your next idea successful?

1. Before you commit to anything, tell the story of what’s happened so far, and then dig. Really dig back to learn as much about what happened as possible. If this is something new, dig back as much as possible into other people’s experiences.
2. Focus in particular on bottlenecks. What is the one thing holding everything else up? You don’t need to be worrying about video editors if you don’t have a video camera.
3. Don’t just focus on what you know or what the experts know. How can you compare this problem to things completely outside your usual experience or the expert’s experience? Quiz total amateurs which will force you to use analogies.
4. Remember that there will always be noise in the data. This is the wicked world. If this were easy, a computer would’ve already figured out how to do it. There are things that you don’t know you don’t know and there are things that you think are important that are completely irrelevant and that WILL ALWAY BE THE CASE. There’s not much you can do to prevent that except be on the lookout for them so that you don’t at least learn the wrong lesson.
5. Make a guess!

What do you want to try next? What do you want to learn? This can be so much fun!

The post How Bottlenecks and Slushies Help You Get Better Ideas first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.