The Next Frontier

I was at an acquaintance’s flat in Cape Town one day, looking at his bookshelf. This is often one of the first things I do when I walk into a new house. It’s a great way to find something new to read, get a sense of the person you’re visiting. I noticed that he had Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, so I asked him how it was. His response, “I got more out of the Elon Musk biography. I didn’t get more than a few chapters into this one.”

Now I already had misgivings about this book. When it first came out shortly after Steve Jobs’ death, I thought it was a cash grab, an assumption that coloured my view of the book for a number of years. Yet I kept hearing a lot of good things about it notwithstanding the above comment. So when I got home from my holidays, I bought both the Elon Musk biography and this Steve Jobs one.

The Elon Musk biography was excellent, and I got a lot out of it. But I’ll leave that for another time. Unlike my erstwhile host, I got a lot out of this book, the first being that Jobs commissioned the book himself a few years before he passed away.

Whoops! Turns out it takes longer than a month to create a book.

I was never a fan of Steve Jobs, and it’s safe to say I won’t purchase anything from Apple. I still don’t know what the point of an iPad is. Yet the man truly was an inspiration and is someone worth learning from. One thought which kept going through my mind as I read was “What this man has achieved is staggering!”

The truth is, Steve Jobs in creating Apple, has changed so much of our modern world through both direct and indirect means that it is safe to say the world would be different if he never existed.

Everyone knows the contributions he made to society. The introduction of the personal computer. Turning Pixar from a software company into the giant of imagination it is today.

iTunes. iPod. iPad.

I could go on. The list is legion.

Yet that is not what interested me. No, it was the finer details of his life that fascinated me. That drew me in. The why and how of his achievements. His method of creating a company that was imprinted with his essence. How he used his skills and personality to do it.

When it came to that subject, there was a lot of knowledge throughout the book. A nugget on almost every page.

So I want to share with you 3 lessons that I learned from this book, 3 of many:

First, do not be afraid to replace your own product or service. As long as you are the one replacing it, you’ll be fine.

After the stunning success of the iPod and the subsequent revolution in the music industry that it caused, the iPod now accounted for 45 percent of Apple’s revenue. And Steve Jobs realized what it would take to replace it.

At that time, cellphones were becoming more and more technologically capable. They now had cameras and were destroying the digital camera market. Jobs knew that if someone attached a good enough music player to a cellphone, the iPod would become obsolete.

So he did it himself.

Jobs created the iPhone and gained control of a whole new market. Within 4 years, iPhone sales reaped more than half of all cellphone profits around the globe.

Out of Motorala, Nokia, Samsung, LG, and others, Apple gained half of all profits.

All because Jobs wasn’t afraid to replace his own product.

This is a lesson that can apply to much more than business and product development. On the whole, people are afraid of letting go of what they have in order to gain more. People don’t want to spend money on risks in case they lose it. People don’t want to quit jobs and start their own businesses as they are afraid that the jobs will be gone.

This doesn’t just apply to serious pursuits, but to almost all areas of life. I play online chess. When my score and rankings started to increase after all the study and effort I had put into the game, I was unwilling to play more games. What if I lose and then my ranking drops?

 What a silly idea.

Every game played can be a lesson whether it is a win or a loss. Over time, that will compound into better chess skills that in turn lead to a higher ranking. I got over myself and started playing more games. Initially, my ranking took a nosedive, but over time, it improved to past where it was when I started.

The second lesson from Steve Jobs is to create an ecosystem where all the elements support each other.

When Jobs came back from his exile in 1997 he re-ordered the company. There’s the famous story that he had enough money to run Apple for 90 days before it went bankrupt. He went through every project that Apple was working on and removed most of them, leaving Apple with four products to develop.

This helped to create a tighter focus at the company. Most of the employees now supported all four projects with only a few key personnel dedicated to each of them.

Jobs also did away with the semi-independent departments that other companies use as a basis for organization. Now, there was one design department, one engineering department, one marketing department, and so forth. All departments now worked on the various product lines simultaneously.

In addition to that, Jobs reduced the accounting to one balance sheet. This allowed him to direct money to where it was needed across the company, instead of various departments jealously guarding their income statements and revenue.

The employees at Apple now work together for the benefit of the company as a whole. This also gave Jobs and Apple increased flexibility in designing new products and bringing them to market quicker than anyone else.

This was observed in the battles with the music companies whilst creating iTunes. These companies were formed from disparate entities that ended up fighting each other almost as much as they fought external competitors. It drastically reduced the collaboration that they could bring to bear when they needed to achieve something.

And here was one of the reasons why no music companies were able to put out a worthy competitor to iTunes, despite knowing how it worked, how popular it is, and even with Jobs telling them in advance exactly what he was going to do.

The third lesson was an observation by Jobs about the nature of companies that first ascend, and then slowly falter. It was a pattern he noticed in established companies, ones that had now achieved a monopoly or very large market share.

Now that their innovative products had become the industry standard, they stopped valuing the designers and engineers who created the products. Instead, they started valuing the salesmen and marketers who could now increase the revenue and bring in more market share. This led to decisions now being made by accountants and salesmen instead of the very people who got the company to their current position.

The modus operandi was now focused more on entrenching themselves and gaining percentage points over their competition. This led to the product designers becoming less important in the direction the company took, and helped blind the companies to what could overthrow them.

As they ceased to innovate, other smaller upstarts did. These upstarts created something revolutionary and overthrew the original companies.

History is littered with examples of this. Uber is currently replacing taxis. Apple and Android replaced Nokia. And Kodak was obliterated by digital cameras. This relates back to the first lesson, be aware of what it will take to replace you and make sure you are the one building it.

All told, this was an amazing book filled with many more lessons than are covered here. It is apparently among the top three most highlighted books on Amazon Kindle, alongside the Bible and The Hunger Games. The last one must be a lot of teenagers seeking wisdom.

What I find interesting is that a lot of people read this book, or they hear about how Jobs was an asshole and they think to themselves that being an asshole is the key to success. That’s not how it works. Jobs was way more driven than most people can ever hope to be. He had incredible strategic foresight and singular focus. He could sum people up and knew exactly how to push them to get the most out of them. The side effect of all that was that he was an asshole.

Jobs managed to build the most valued company in the world despite his leadership flaws. That alone was amazing and apart from everything else is an excellent reason to read the book.

The rapid adoption of technology has changed human society in profound ways, yet no technology has upset things as much as Artificial Intelligence promises to. The predictions for what AI will do range from causing massive unemployment, creating unkillable weapon platforms, and going rogue and enslaving the human race. But I don’t think that some of that is likely. Instead, I see the arrival of AI as an opportunity to make life better for nearly all people, instead of a select few. Let me explain.

It is not human society that has progressed so much as it is technology that has progressed and pulled human society along with it. Despite the constant influx of new methods and the vast leverage that technology provides, people are still stuck in the same old ways of doing things. Technology just allows them to do more with less. So there has been no reason to change, until now.

Previously, technology enhanced people’s abilities, not replaced them. Yes, individual people have been replaced by the adoption of some new piece of technology, but on the whole, humans were still required for the fulfillment of nearly all tasks. And as such, society has kept itself tied to this idea that people need to work to be a part of society. The whole economic machine is predicated on the idea of producers and consumers. Let’s look at how this works and what it has led to.

First off, we live in an incredibly consumeristic society, one that sustains itself through the life blood of the walking dead. Work has become the primary directive for people. Not purpose. Not contribution. Work. Work has expanded to fill most of people’s lives. Some people enjoy it, but most do not. And since these jobs are pointless and meaningless to these people, and people are working longer hours than ever before in history, their minds and souls deaden over time. In order to have some relief from this, they turn to buying stuff for their off hours. Apps, gadgets, appliances and similar. Objects that they are unlikely to buy if they were not worked into this state.

The people working to provide these objects also work long hours in order to meet demand, leading to them also requiring entertainment. And so the whole system turns in on itself, leading everyone to buy from each other and money circulates around. Fast forward this model to today and we have the current situation, people making stuff to sell to each other so that they can have something mindless to do when they aren’t making the stuff they sell to each other.

So far, so bad. We now have a society of people existing in order for them to sell pointless crap to each other. But let’s take it a step further. Let’s remove their humanity. Now, these people are faceless cogs in the system. If one breaks (dies, goes insane, needs too many operations for a medical problem), just replace it. Get another cog, slip it in. All carries on as before. The standard of the day is how productive one can be. How much can you get done. This leads to the gig economy with the accompanying celebration of working yourself to death, along with life hacks.

As troublesome as this is, it could still sustain itself. That is until we add in artificial intelligence, robots, and extensive automation. That is going to replace a lot of people and wipe out a lot of jobs. Yes, some new jobs will be created as a result. Jobs that we have no conception of at this moment in time. But most of these jobs are going to be highly skilled positions, given the technology that has arisen to make them possible.

People like to point out that the Industrial Revolution didn’t erase work, it transformed it into something else. When cars started replacing horses, farriers and blacksmiths could be re-tasked as mechanics. Both jobs involved working with their hands. But what are you going to do with a lot of the people that will be replaced in the near future? Teach them to code?

As an example, jobs involving driving make up something like one-tenth to one-fifth of all the jobs on the planet. When self-driving cars and trucks come out and replace most of them, what are they going to do? A lot of them became drivers because they weren’t capable or in the situation to do anything else. And these people aren’t going to go away.

Now there is a whole class of people who are out of jobs, and no longer getting paid. Yet the robots who replaced them will continue to make the goods as before. They might even make more of them. Yet a large part of the consumer market will suddenly not have the money to buy this stuff. So who will?

Half the workforce is out of a job. There are only so many rich people around. If society went along this path, there would be eventual economic and systemic collapse.

Related to this is the issue that we are working more and more into opposition of human nature, to the point where we will be dispensing away with it entirely. Capitalism worked because it was the system that was most in line with human nature. People had the opportunity to put in hard work, effort, and ideas, and the marketplace would test them out and reward them for it. But we are moving from that.

When robots replace people there won’t be much opportunity for people to put in hard work, except in creative fields. Nassim Taleb says that artisans and craftsmen will once again rise to prominence as what they create will be unique and not the same as everything else that was mass produced at the mechanical forge. But again, who is going to buy it? Not as many people as today, that’s for sure.

The solution to this that more and more people are thinking about is to institute a Universal Basic Income. The ideal that has been expressed in science fiction is that once humanity is freed from the shackles of work we will be free to develop our minds and capabilities. We would turn to self-education as a means of improving body, mind, and soul, and contribute to society in that fashion. But there are a few problems with this.

Everyone assumes that people will rise to their higher natures in the case of Universal Basic Income or a similar solution. That’s not likely to happen. It seems that people need a purpose to work towards, whether that be a job, providing for a family, raising children, or even unlocking the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. Take that away, and their lives collapse around this void. Jordan Peterson says that people are draft animals, they have to have something to push and pull against. They’re like huskies, only happy when they are pulling a sleigh. Whatever this purpose is, it infuses their lives with meaning. Take it away and their lives lose all meaning, and eventually, all hope. This is how a lot of people turn to drugs, a way to numb the pain that a lack of purpose brings.

In the absence of work and with the provision of resources, some people will rise to the challenge and work on improving and educating themselves, applying themselves to the pursuit of art or science, but these are the types of people that will find a job for themselves in this new reality anyway. It’s the rest that concern me.

A lot of people today have turned to various forms of escapism in order to escape the meaninglessness that is their lives. As it is, our culture has succumbed to a loss of definite optimism, as defined by Peter Thiel in Zero To One. Definite optimism is the idea that the future will be better than today, and it can be planned for. This leads to people taking chances and innovating, as they can see that it will have benefit to themselves and others. Take that sense away, which we have lost today, and you remove most of the capacity for innovation from society.

Now this is not all doom and gloom. I think that knowing this in advance offers us a real opportunity to change the current nature of work and society into a form that is more aligned with human nature instead of in opposition to it. It only requires a few slight shifts. How this would look I don’t know, but I can offer some suggestions.

First, continue with AI research and implementation, but change the nature of that implementation to enhancement instead of replacement. Right now, we have our brightest minds, a rare and scarce resource, working on how to replace unskilled labour, a vastly abundant resource, with computers. Instead of working on that, why not direct AI research to focus more on enhancement of human capability, the same way all previous technology has worked. Thus AI would fall more to the realm of support and enablement, instead of replacement.

Second, let’s move life back towards its natural rhythms. We have such an amount of technology available that we don’t need to work long hours any more. Shorten working hours, let people get some sunlight and go to bed at a reasonable hour, and find purpose in their lives outside of work. In order to do all this they would require more free time than they currently have available. Some people manage to achieve this today despite the challenges that they currently face, but for them to do that takes effort. It is not the default. I argue that we should move the state of society to a place where this would be the default option instead.

Third, change the nature of education. Currently, the standard education model sets people up to be drones. This worked fine during the Industrial Revolution, but we have moved beyond that. Instead, focus on nurturing creativity and imagination. These more than anything are the linchpins that allow society to progress.

The secret is to do all this in a way that doesn’t go against human nature and doesn’t impact other people’s sovereign ability to make their own judgements. I am not the arbiter of what life should be like, and neither is anybody else. So the best bet is to change the conditions of society in such a way that people have more opportunity to create their version of life for themselves, instead of today’s headlong descent into crushing conformity. If someone really wants to work long hours in order to get ahead, let them. Just don’t make it the standard for everyone. If someone feels that retiring to the woods and writing poetry is the best use of their time, things should be set up in such a way that this is a viable option for them without them being a drain on anyone else.

We have this time of opportunity now before us to change society in such a way that it is better on a deep level for most, instead of better on a surface level for some. We have the technology available, we know about the technology that is coming in to play soon. Instead of letting this unwind as it will, let us rather take a conscious effort to change it to a form that will be better for everyone in the long run.

How does consciousness work? How does it manifest itself in the brain and body and then go on to influence first, the body, and second, the world around us? The second question is a little easier to answer on the macro scale. Consciousness influences the world around us through the primary interface of the body. We think thoughts and then act accordingly. We imagine stuff and then work it in to being. In this way, our combined consciousness’s realise a fully intricate tapestry of action, situation, and place.

But where does this come from?

My thought is that there are two layers to consciousness. The first is the lower layer and that is your mind, unconsciousness and subconsciousness, thoughts, feelings, and dreams. It is the part of you that influences the world. The second part is the true layer, that aspect of you that is eternal. It is the part of you from which you pour your consciousness into your mind. It is a manifestation of pure energy, vibrating and percolating at levels that are unknowable to us at present.

Let’s take a step back. What is the point of the Universe? It is said that it is a place in which the energy of consciousness can express itself in all the infinite varieties of expression, and so doing, know itself. But what does that mean for us?

The Universe comes into being as an infinitely folded in upon itself energy structure. This energy is at once a unified whole but it can also be separated for the purposes of use. The energy coalesces to form the building blocks of matter, with this matter relating to itself through the laws that we express as physics. These laws are structured in such a way that the logical outcome of leaving the Universe to interact with itself is the Universe as we see it today.

By arranging everything and pressing start, the Universe expands, though expands is not the right word for it, balloons maybe, and matter is formed out of the infinite. This matter coalesces into photons, protons and electrons, and all the other subatomic particles we work with. They combine into atoms and molecules, which fall in upon themselves to form the galaxies and stars and planets. The point of this is to create the conditions for consciousness to arise within the Universe as separate points of expression. It is not the goal of evolution to produce humans, it is the goal of evolution to allow life to progress up the ladder of being until a lifeform that is capable of sentience has arisen. On our planet, that would be humans to do it first. But some species of animal are not far behind. If there had been other drives or forces that came into being, porpoises or chimpanzees would be the dominant animals today.

It is believed that our having opposable thumbs is the catalyst that led to our developing sentience. By working with our hands, and then by mimicking what others have done with their hands led to our brains increasing in size and complexity, allowing sentience to express itself through us. But this is not the only form in which consciousness can come about. It is just the way ours did. And it comes with all the baggage and limitations that our innate characteristics as a species can load on it.

This expression as a species is what we would call the first layer of consciousness. The second layer is that which comes from the Universe and expresses itself through the first layer.

Now the big question is why is there something instead of nothing? Where did this energy that drives the Universe and consciousness come from? Or the multiverse for that matter? It is clearly infinite, but even so, how did it get here? How did it come into being? Is it an infinite loop, where our dreams are the creation and destruction of other universes, and thus we too are the dreams of other beings in a universe that encloses ours? Or is it cyclical in nature? Our being here to observe ourselves is what led to our being here. Observation leads to being which in turn observes, and so on ad infinitum, to beyond the end of time. A never ending string of self correcting energy, continually observing and thus driving expression and expansion.

Who knows? I suspect that we might not ever get to know what the higher structures of consciousness are, but I think we can get a good understanding of how it works in this Universe. From there, we may be able to peak behind the curtain of what’s going on.

Science, physics especially, is driven from the exploration of one frontier to the next, with all the intervening space in between being thoroughly mapped out before the next frontier can even be seen. The last major frontier in physics was in 1900, with Max Planck proposing an effect that could not be explained by science up until then, and Albert Einstein thinking about what it would look like to travel at the speed of light.

These two discoveries unfolded into quantum mechanics and special relativity, leading to massive paradigm shifts in how we see and understand our Universe. They also led to our being able to map out our Universe from the smallest scales to the largest, and producing whole new avenues of scientific and technological enquiry.

Now, we are approaching the end of the exploration of this frontier. This isn’t to say that there will be no more discoveries, no more surprises. There will be. We don’t know everything, not even close. And the big paradigm shifting discoveries always come up unforeseen. But at the moment there are not many major discoveries. The biggest results in physics in the last few years was the discovery of the Higgs Boson and measuring gravity waves. Both of these were proving theoretical ideas that were thought up a few decades previously.

We’re in a similar state to the situation in the late 1800’s. There is a lot of work being done at the boundaries of the various disciplines, changing parameters to see what happens, putting a fresh spin on a previously determined law, or creating a new theory to explain some related phenomena. There will probably be some surprises, some effects that turn that field on its head, but nothing that will fundamentally change how we understand our world.

Now that doesn’t mean that we have to wait for the next frontier to magically appear from some unexplained research result. I think it’s already here. And it comes in two parts. I think we will move from exclusively studying the world around us and we will turn inward and look at the nature of consciousness itself and how it imprints upon the Universe. At the same time I think we will start to look outside our Universe entirely and try to see what is going on out there, as I suspect that these two phenomena might be linked.

Here is why. Quantum mechanics could not be explored through the methods and formalism of classical physics. They started out approximating things with classical methods, but the more they discovered, the more they realised it was insufficient. It ultimately required a completely new way of looking at the world, a way driven by uncertainty and probability, not certainty and linearity. We might be able to start approximating consciousness and its effects on the Universe with quantum mechanics, but it will ultimately require a paradigm shift.

So how does this relate to that which lies outside our Universe? First, that which is outside can’t be explained with the physics we use to explain what is inside. There is a boundary where our laws stop working. Interestingly, this also occurs in a few places inside our Universe, such as inside black holes and our own consciousness.

With regards to consciousness, there are three possibilities for how it works. First, it is an emergent phenomena, arising out of the fabric of our Universe through mechanisms as yet unknown. Second, it is an integral building block of our Universe, as much as quantum mechanics and electromagnetism is. Third, it is a property from outside our Universe and in some fashion overlays and imprints itself on our Universe.

The first idea lends itself to the point of view that life is a transitory experience, once it’s done it’s over, for good. The last two fit more in with the various ideas around souls and reincarnation, this is all presuming that consciousness is the representation of the soul in the matter of life.

The first two possibilities only speak to the structure of our Universe, nothing else. Should the third possibility be the one that is found to be true, that will give us an avenue to exploring outside our Universe. It will show that the structure of reality is a lot more interrelated and interconnected than we previously thought. The main consideration from this is that we would no longer be thinking of the outside as a separate entity from our Universe, but instead as another aspect of a larger whole of which our Universe is just a small part. If we can understand how the energies from outside imprint and interact with our Universe, we have a means of understanding the nature of our Universe at a much more fundamental level.

This is exciting stuff to think about.