The Context Podcast - David Orban

You may not realize it, but there are important connections linking emails, short vertical videos, and infographics - three of the most popular mediums for online content. Their ability to effectively engage audiences relies on the twin pillars of interoperability and human creativity.

This analysis looks at the unexpected reemergence of email newsletters, despite social media’s early dominance. It explores the surprising rise of short video clips on TikTok, YouTube and other platforms. And it examines why static infographic images continue capturing attention in an increasingly automated world.

By illuminating these relationships, key insights emerge on what drives success for each format now and into the future:
- Email’s resilience owing to its universal protocols
- Cross-platform video sharing, though not without fragmentation challenges
- The ongoing popularity of infographics, fueled by human graphic design skills
- Striking the right balance with AI-generated content moving forward

As technologies progress, grasping these pivotal connections will prove vital. Understanding how these different formats complement one another allows us to better navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.

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Recently, I attended a nine-day Vipassana silent retreat, and I’d like to share my experience with you. Firstly, my perspective is limited. I’ll describe the organization and activities of the retreat I attended, but I can’t compare it to others. My insights stem from a 2,500-year-old tradition, so while they are genuine and fresh, it’s advisable not to rely solely on my experience. That said, if you can set aside nine or ten days from the modern way of life to immerse yourself in such an experience, I highly recommend it.

Vipassana is a meditation technique founded by Gautama Buddha Siddhartha around 2,500 years ago. It was embraced by what later evolved into the Buddhist tradition, and it was passed down orally for many years. The practice remained mainly in regions like Tibet, India, and present-day Bangladesh — where Buddhism was prevalent. About a century ago, it began to gain broader attention, particularly when Tibetan monks, fleeing China’s invasion and accompanying the Dalai Lama, began sharing their practices. By the mid-20th century, teachings were being translated from Sanskrit, the original language of the practice, into English and subsequently other languages. I’ll refrain from using too many Sanskrit terms.

Commitment is crucial. Throughout the silent retreat, participants don’t speak, read, write, use devices or even make eye contact. The aim is mental purification and enhancing concentration by eliminating distractions. Our group consisted of about 70 individuals, predominantly women, with about a dozen men. While we weren’t segregated, women and men were spatially separated during meals and meditation sessions. We were housed in a monastery in Northern Italy, sans monks, and enveloped in silence.

What are the implications of advanced Artificial Intelligence on our understanding of consciousness and self-awareness? We have to strive for self-discovery and introspection, embracing a "luminary" mindset, fully aware and engaged with our experiences and emotions.

As AI continues to advance, it is vital for individuals to distinguish themselves from the mindless, automatic existence of a zombie and actively participate in building a future worth living.

The recent SpaceX Starship test launch has important implications for space exploration. Is the media focusing too much on the negatives, such as the explosion, and overlooking the intricate process and the efforts made by thousands of skilled individuals? How important is it to celebrate our civilization's accomplishments and support the enthusiasm and proficiency of SpaceX and its team?

The iterative, rapid improvement process that SpaceX utilizes is clearly working as shown by remarkable achievements of the Falcon 9 rockets. It is important to acknowledging the hard work behind it, and the competence of professionals.

AI is experiencing jolting change, with advancements such as ChatGPT and GPT4, but there are limits to individual and organizational adaptability.

I was invited to sign an open letter that asks to allow for deeper consideration of AI design, implementation, and regulation.

Concerns include inherent bias, job displacement, pollution of the info-sphere, loss of trust in communication, and potential dangers of Artificial General Intelligence.

The benefits of AI and AGI are immense, but responsible development and planning are crucial for harnessing these benefits and mitigating risks.

I lived alone for three months while my wife was in Seoul, for the first time in 40 years.

In today's world we receive a constant stimulation of inputs, and requests for outputs, in the search for efficiency, and the effort of reaching our goals. Without trying, I unexpectedly discovered how much I enjoy solitude, and the silence. It not only was refreshing, but made me more focused and productive, as well.

When deciding what is worth developing in terms of professional skills, there is an important concept that I would like to talk about: the Half Life of Skills.

I'm often asked for advice about skills that are worth developing or learning, and I am always very happy to provide my feedback. These questions come from people of all ages, and this is very appropriate, because those who are not very young anymore, who are not at the beginning of their professional trajectory, can and should invest in themselves in order to maintain and improve their ability to provide value to the businesses that they work together with.

This is especially important in terms of what I call the half life of skills. If we decide to invest our attention, our resources, our time in a given direction, we have to take into account the opportunity costs that arise unavoidably. For example, our professional time is limited even if measured in decades, so we definitely want to maximize the return on the investment that we are making in developing a new skill.

So understanding and analyzing what is the likely life lifecycle of these technical skills enables a person to make very valuable judgments on the investment that a particular direction deserves. I hope that, alongside the other useful parameters of prioritizing certain skills, you may decide to use this concept of the half life of skills as something that you also find valuable.

We often imagine technology in our science fiction scenarios that is very different from what happens when it becomes available. Today, we are starting to talk about Artificial Intelligence that is not exactly like what was depicted in the Sci-Fi books we were reading decades ago.

There has been an explosion of experimentation in the past years, and now there are tools available, at least in preliminary beta versions, for neural networks of very large sizes that can provide paragraphs of text or images from an initial prompt. GPT-3 is an example of the first generating text from a prompt, and it has become the basis for numerous applications. DALL-E-2 and MidJourney are examples of platforms that generate images while being assisted and powered by Artificial Intelligence, where the prompt will produce a particular picture.

Yes, sometimes the robot would end up doing a different thing from what is asked, but this conversation between the robot and the human, it can lead to something bigger, something greater. Right now these neural networks have billions, hundreds of billions and soon, trillions of parameters, but I look forward to when they’ll be trained to handle even more large amounts of data.

What we are doing right now is not the definitive way that we are going to use to interact with AIs, and it’s already something that not everyone has the patience to learn and to follow. Some people will not want to keep experimenting and improving until the result satisfies them; they will want faster and easier ways of going about their business using Artificial Intelligence. But in the meantime, I think this current phase is very precious since it shows how large the space of creativity enabled by AI is.

This new level of creative scenario is going to be possible, but in the meantime, understanding the power of these tools and the unlimited universe of creation is accelerating, and I am so happy that these tools are available to anyone. Anyone can get their hands dirty and understand the power of Artificial Intelligence today, and I invite you to do so. Even if it's just a test with just a handful of images, you will be able to call yourself an artist and learn to interact with the superpower of Artificial Intelligence, which will help you create a better future.

Are you worried about bots, and spam accounts and fake accounts on the various social media platforms? You could decide that this worry should be translated into some kind of eradication of the bots problem, but I want to argue that the opposite is true. We must welcome bots, and learn to live together with them in a peaceful and constructive coexistence.

It is definitely the case that on social media platforms there are a lot of accounts that do not necessarily correspond to a single human. For example, if an Internet of Things sensor uses Twitter in order to communicate the temperature, the humidity or whatever other parameter that it extracts from the environment, and someone else takes advantage of that value incorporating it in an application after it is publicly available on Twitter, is a completely automated non human account, which is certainly not spam or fake. So you can have those accounts that want to defraud, scam or trick people into doing something that at the end will harm them on one hand, and on the other hand there are those accounts that are very useful, even if they are bots.

What should we use? What should we decide? What should we keep the power towards? Can we expect each account to have an ID card to prove their human identity? And can we pretend that each human should only be able to do it once forever? I don't think that it is reasonable to expect that we should do that, and those platforms that will try will find that it is either impossible or undesirable since the value that we will lose by imposing this is too large. On one hand, we must enable anonymous and pseudonymous participation on online platforms for many reasons, but on the other hand, it can be argued that the increase of non-human powered human-like accounts can be valuable, they can play a useful role as well.

I think every platform should ask themselves the same question: “Why are we prohibiting bots? Shouldn't we allow them? And if we do, how should they behave on the platform after explicitly declaring their nature?” Let's see if there will be platforms that understand that this is the future, because I assure you, every year that it passes, the number of bots is going to increase, potentially, and that is definitely going to be the case may be in a decade or two, eclipsing the number of humans and we should rather than feared future, prepare for it, embrace it, and understand how to thrive in it.