Self-Driving Cars 👀 🚘 🎰 😊 #21

14 Feb, 2017

Deep Work, Self-Driving Cars, Automation & Great Online Presence

Hi,

Welcome to the 21st edition of this email. Did you know you can read all past editions in our archive?

The subject this time round is Deep Work.

Ready? Let’s focus…

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Deep Work

Hi from Torquay, overlooking the waves rolling in. I’m freshly inspired from listening to Cal Newport’s “Deep Work”. These words are interesting:

“In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.” 

“To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.
If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.”

Cal’s book is fascinating with quickly actionable tips and this is a great list by Ryan Holiday on how he does deep work. Fascinating.

Things getting too heavy?

“Piaggio recently unveiled the company’s first product, a personal cargo robot named Gita. The bot can carry up to 40 pounds autonomously using maps, or by following a human operating the bot’s path… It’s fast enough to keep up with you on a bike (22MPH), and [has] the “human agility” needed to navigate sidewalks.” via Peter Diamandis

Gita and other helpful-to-humans technology excites me! You too?

 

Self-driving cars: coming sooner

Recently in conversations I’ve suggested we’ll use self-driving cars sooner than expected, for a couple of reasons:

  1. With so many other things to do, see, read, watch, catch up on (including sleep), car driving will start to be less of interest compared to other things we could do.
  2. As more images of newly designed car interiors (movie cinema, sleeping pod, working space / shared office) appear the idea of the car being a location to do other things than drive will grow on us… quickly.

Automation and employment

This graph shows job titles and their probability for automation. It’s worth reading the sidebar too. It’s from this month’s Oxford University and Citibank Report (good article to read).
“the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.” Stephen Hawking

I’ve also recently heard the entrancing term the “post-work economy”. Universal Basic Income anyone? What do you think?

Favourite reads & listens:

Great online presence:

 

Happy week!

Sam