Make Something Wonderful plus...
reconstructing lives through food, AI abundance and creative scarcity.
1. We Can All Make Something Wonderful
Apple users may have noticed the release of a new free e-book ‘Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs In His Own Words’. If you’re not aware of this, I’d recommend you download and enjoy this insight into the genius and brilliant mind of Steve Jobs.
Unlike the great biographies of Jobs, this book features speeches, interviews, and correspondence. It provides insight into Steve’s perspective on childhood, being pushed out of Apple, his Pixar experience, creating NeXT, and on his triumphant return to the company he started.
The introduction by his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, captured his unique brilliance and this one quote stood out for me:
It is hard enough to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. Steve’s gift was greater still: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary: he imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it.”
I add this as a reminder to us humans; we all have agency to imagine what is not, what needs to be, and work to build it.
So before we surrender our humanity to the AI machine algorithmic army, we all have a duty to serve up new ideas and build better worlds.
Suggested Action: Reflect on Steve Jobs' favorite quote from Aristotle"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Explore what you can do to achieve greatness in your sphere of influence, and then consistently practice and cultivate habits that lead to excellence.
2. Reconstructing Lives
Taking of making something wonderful, my guest this week, Chef Simon Boyle’s life journey has been a quest to make something exceptional. From developing excellence in his culinary skills, he soon expanded into helping corporate clients deliver more meaningful products and services, before embarking on a quest to improve the lives of those socially and economically excluded.
Since 2011 in partnership with PwC, Simon’s Brigade Bar + Kitchen in London has delivered fine food and dining experiences built on a foundation of social purpose. Simon’s Beyond Food Foundation provides training opportunities to vulnerable people, those whose lives have unraveled, or fallen on hard times, to enable them to find personal purpose and meaning and begin the process of reconstructing their lives.
Suggested Action: Watch or Listen to Simon and reach out to me if you can help him scale this as I am keen to see this become a global initiative.
3. Creativity In The Age of AI?
In this video Chris Anderson is quoted that 'every abundance creates a new scarcity.
Considering the exponential pace of AI development, we may well soon face an abundance of AI applications. While Open AI’s GPT 4 continues to fill the media streams, other applications such as Anthropic’s, Claude, or the Hugging Face community (and many many more) are rapidly rolling out new innovations, a growing number of experts are deeply concerned that we are on a collision course with AI calamity.
Last week an open letter with 26k signatories from Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari and Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) was published calling on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Without getting into the existential risks, the above video makes one thing clear, we are at the point where there is no turning back. Therefore we must either pause and build in the safety conditions for all developers to adhere to or face potential AI annihilation. Listen to AI Eliezer Yudkowsly expert on superintelligence, on his deep concerns.
Suggested Action: As an optimist and a believer in human creativity I think it incumbent on all of us to imagine new expressions of our human ingenuity, create communities where we collectively shape new futures and do what Steve Jobs would have done ‘identify what is not there, what could be there, what has to be there.’
And if we don’t pause AI development, we face the risk that the machines may have a different idea.