ADAPT #5 - the one about the happy toes

Yew!

I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week :-)
Stay adaptable and on top of your game!

Let´s go!

Today:

• Awe: can AI become Terminator?

• Deal Flow: a smarter way to diagnose

• Art: feed your brain with novelty

• Personal: my happy toes

• Try: your happy toes

Read time: 3 min 52 sec

AWE

Now that I am slowly warming you on how the brain works (click here to check my previous newsletters), let’s talk a bit about AI.

Intelligent machines need goals.
Goals are not a consequence of intelligence, they don’t appear on their own. Your goal is to replicate your genes, and your brain does a lot of subconscious work to ensure this goal is achieved and your intelligence developed to support this goal…

But as we went on, we were able to wonder and question and overwrite our primitive brain and choose different. Or even make the mistake of terminating ourselves against our goal (climate change).

Yet, the majority of humans stick to the goal and would not do anything against the goal of replication.

The Narrow Intelligence AI that we are building today often has a simple goal: “play chess”, “scan through petabytes of human written text and respond to human request like a human would”, “scan thousands of X-rays and find fractures” etc.

We have to give the artificial intelligence a goal.

Even if we were to eventually reach General Intelligence as opposed to Narrow Intelligence, and have a machine capable of achieving multiple goals, we would still have to provide the goal.

Could we provide a terrible goal? Tell an AI controlled missile to seek and destroy certain targets?
Yes of course - but just so you feel a little safer, intelligence on its own will not develop a goal like Skynet in Terminator… at this stage, a human would have had to provide that goal in the first place.

DEAL FLOW

I am an investor in this business so again, bias warning!

Let me see if I can explain this in super simple terms.
Dean, one of the founders encountered a problem: if you have an epileptic episode, you have to go to hospital, spend 5 days in a room hooked up to sensors and cameras, and hope the event happens again to diagnose it.

A waste of resources, right?
A waste of time for patients too… if it doesn’t happen you have to book again and again…taking up a bed, time and effort.

What Seer Medical did is simple, put all those sensors, cameras and devices in a carry-on suitcase and send you home to go about your day as close to normal as you can and for as long as needed for the episode to occur and the diagnosis to be provided.
Saving this way the bed and resources at a hospital and the patient time and hassle! Brilliant!

Bonus?
Hospitals were not keeping the data correctly so there was no real continuity and ability to improve diagnosis fast.
Today we can aggregate all this information and use AI to notice things humans can’t.

Check them out if you are curious, lots and lots and lots of amazing medical innovation happening right now! www.seermedical.com 

ART

Let’s pick a few of the many artistic endeavours - painting, drawing, music, sculpture.

When was the last time you’ve done any of these activities?

If you play music regularly but haven’t done any painting since kindergarten, you have been challenged.
Get yourself some brushes, paint and a canvas and get to work.

If instead you draw or paint regularly but have not sculpted or played music in a while - go buy that ukelele and learn a simple song with 2 chords - plenty of them online with tutorials to go with it!

REMEMBER: Novelty is the key to an adaptable brain.

PERSONAL

Years ago trying to encourage my kids to be entrepreneurial, I challenged them to find problems worth solving around home_, come up with a solution, pitch it to me and we would negotiate on a price for them to sort it.

You can imagine there were lots of “the car is dirty”, “the grass is long” but there were a couple of them that became little “businesses”.

My daughter was around 12 when we had this conversation:

Loila: “your toes are ugly papá”

Me: “what!? They are like all other toes”

Loila: “no, yours are uglier, I can fix it if you want?”

Me: “how, what is it going to cost me?”

Loila: “I can open a shop and paint your toenails rainbow and charge you $50 bucks”

Me: “that’s expensive”

Loila: “you can sign up and get a membership card and pay only $20 as a member…your toes will be happier this way”

Anyway, brilliant pitch!
Irresistible proposition.. who doesn’t want happy toes?

Since then, my daughter has painted my toenails pretty much every month.
It’s been a few years now and my toes have never been happier!

TRY

Paint your toenails rainbow!

Either ask your kids to do it or go to a saloon and get it done!

Trust me your toes will be as happy and pretty as mine are :-)

My recommendations:

I’m still sharing with you the amazing crew at neu21.com who will help you make work not suck!

So if you need help in your organisation ping me, ping them!

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