Daily Inspiration: Knowledge & Trends – “Always be prepared to know how little you know!”

“Always be prepared to know how little you know!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

One thing that I have always understood about my ability to interpret the future is that while I know a lot of stuff, there is a lot I do not know. I think that’s a good thing, because that fact is the basis for my relentless curiosity, and I have long believed that curiosity is the key to success for anyone. If you ever lose your creativity, you lose your initiative. Lose your initiative, and you lose your future!

Yesterday, with a bit of downtime between events, I went down a few rabbit holes on my ship of curiosity, the vehicle of my imagination, and my infrastructure for exploration. To me, this is wasted time well spent, because it helps me to understand the gaps in my knowledge, the insight I need to chase, and the skills I need to continue to develop. Yesterday was rather marvelously unproductive and yet, at the same time, massively productive!

Where did I waste time? One of the sites I am trying to spend more time at, simply because it is the home base for so much of what is happening in the world of AI, is HuggingFace.  Consider it to be Ground Zero for our AI future. There, I spent some time playing with the most popular app at this moment, which happens to let you use an AI to draw comics. I mean, why not?

I also simply wasted a lot of time exploring many of the new AI models and tools that are being shared on the site, such as weird new little facial recognition and photo generation tools. This is all a part of my voyage to try to understand what is happening with AI development, and where it might all go in the not-too-distant future – which is today.

My mindset? This is important stuff to understand because as I emphasized in Dallas last week, so much of our future involving AI is being developed in the open, in large-scale collaborative sharing sites such as HuggingFace. Spend time there, and you can watch tomorrow being developed in real-time.

I also spent quite a bit of time creating a file of all of my Daily Inspiration posts (from 2016), and learning how to interact and ask questions of them. I think I’m a little bit restless right now with what I’m doing, and it seems I’m going to launch myself into writing another book. I know what it is going to be about and what it will cover; I just need to figure out how to do it.

I also wasted some time exploring something called Empathic AI; if the demo is still up, you can try it out at demo.hume.ai.

What is it? If you have worked with any AI voice generators, you will know that there are limitations in terms of the mention to be found in the voice. This seems to be an initiative to build a foundation for a voice that is more natural,with a variety of emotions and tonal characteristics.

Spend a little bit of time here, and you get a bit of understanding as to how voice interaction might work in the future.

Come away from that bit of wasted time, and you learn it is not time wasted, but wasted time invested well!

So my day yesterday?

It was all entirely irrelevant to anything important that I should be doing, and yet, had everything to do with what I should be doing, because I know that one thing I just always be doing is continuing my voyage of knowledge exploration!

You? Waste time well – because you should always know how little you know!