Daily Inspiration: Skills Development – “Be tomorrow. Today.”

“Be tomorrow. Today.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I’ve got an event today for Enterprise University – it’s a virtual event that has been run by Enterprise Bank and Trust for 20 years. They’ve been doing virtual for longer than there has been virtual! They run quite an extensive series of events for customers and others; you can take a look at the items they are covering in the upcoming season here. You can still sign up for my session that occurs later today via that page!

During my virtual keynote, I will be going online with quite a few AI tools, demonstrating some of the practical ways that it can be used, today. I’ve long been a believer that one of the most effective ways to understand the future is to ‘be‘ the future. The future is all around us already – much of it is in very easy or very preliminary stages. With that being the case, one of the best ways to understand it is to fully immerse yourself in it.

With that in mind, I had just ordered a new Mac Mini M2 computer, which is set to replace the original iMac that I’ve been using in my virtual broadcast studio. One of the key reasons for this is that not only is it demonstrably faster, but it will be able to run quite a few of the emerging AI large-language models. I’ve been trying to implement them on various computers I have here, but none have the horsepower to let me do it properly. This new machine does!

(As an aside, this machine was delivered yesterday. I’ve had to avoid all temptation to take it into the studio and set it up as the main system for today’s broadcast. It should go well, but as we all know, last-minute implementations usually end up in a disaster!)

As always, I digress.

In any event, since I am busy speaking and writing about AI, I long ago decided that I should fully immerse myself in the world. This parallels other actions I’ve taken throughout my career. I predicted the emergence of Internet-of-Things smart home technology in 1996 and began to immediately immerse myself in the world in many of the emerging technologies as soon as they started to appear. Smart thermostats, in-home webcam monitoring systems, and other technologies became a part of our home and chalet long before they came to the market. Linux? When I first began to see it becoming very significant in the last 90’s, I dove right in, even though I had little understanding of how to use it. Remote medical device monitoring technologies that lead to a world of virtual health? The Internet itself? I was online with many of its’ earlier incarnations a good ten years before the rest of the population. For a long time, I;ve using many of the new technologies when they were in their very early, primitive state.

I continue to do so with AI today. Even the images I am generating for this daily post use a variety of the tools I am discovering out there – the best way to understand what is happening is to be a part of the happening. So for today’s image, I used a fascinating new system called Poe – let’s just say it’s an AI that helps you create prompts used in other AIs. To start off, I told it I planned on using the MidJourney text-to-image tool to create a backdrop suitable for today’s post:

Poe obliged with a rather lengthy response, which I fed to MidJourney. You can see the first set of results, with the first set of suggested images.

I kept on playing around and ended up with this result:

….leading me to eventually settle on an image:

I did a little bit of cleanup and formatting, which led to today’s image for today’s Daily Inspiration. There you have it!

To be in the future, BE the future. Immerse yourself, dive right in, get involved, even if you don’t know what is going on. Because its one of the most effective ways to figure out what is actually going on!