JETS JOURNAL - #019
March 5, 2024
Hi All!
Here is your weekly round up of what I’m pondering and exploring. Feel free to forward along to a friend if you think they might enjoy.
Life in 2044
Have you ever wondered what life might be like in 2044? It is only 20 years away and I’m sure it will be here much sooner then we are anticipating. Last week I found a fantastic video covering a strangers predictions for 2044 including topics like AGI, Fusion, Biotech, Quantum.
When I personally watched the video I got really excited for the future ahead of us. As I do believe the traditional 9-5 office job will soon collapse as AI begins to automate many of the boring tasks we hate doing anyway.
Which will then give way to what people are calling the meaning economy which is basically the idea that AI is going to bring so much prosperity and rise the quality of living across the whole planet that people will now have more time to do the things they love like making videos, writing newsletters or doing whatever you like.
If you’re interested can watch the video here if you have a spare 30 minutes.
You are not late
Here’s a fantastic piece written by Kevin Kelly I find inspiring.
Hopefully it inspires you to start your own thing.
Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was ask for the one you wanted. It didn’t even cost anything to claim. This grand opportunity was true for years. In 1994 a Wired writer noticed that mcdonalds.com was still unclaimed, so with our encouragement he registered it, and then tried to give it to McDonalds, but their cluelessness about the internet was so hilarious it became a Wired story. Shortly before that I noticed that abc.com was not claimed so when I gave a consulting presentation to the top-floor ABC executives about the future of digital I told them that they should get their smartest geek down in the basement to register their own domain name. They didn’t.
The internet was a wide open frontier then. It was easy to be the first in category X. Consumers had few expectations, and the barriers were extremely low. Start a search engine! An online store! Serve up amateur videos! Of course, that was then. Looking back now it seems as if waves of settlers have since bulldozed and developed every possible venue, leaving only the most difficult and gnarly specks for today’s newcomers. Thirty years later the internet feels saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years. Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it?
Yet if we consider what we have gained online in the last 30 years, this abundance smells almost miraculous. We got: Instant connection with our friends and family anywhere, a customizable stream of news whenever we want it, zoomable 3D maps of most cities of the world, an encyclopedia we can query with spoken words, movies we can watch on a flat slab in our pocket, a virtual everything store that will deliver next day — to name only six out of thousands that could be mentioned.
But, but…here is the thing. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014. People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.
And they’d be right. Because from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit — the equivalent of the dot com names of 1984.
Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”
So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now. Right now, this minute. This is the time that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh to have been alive and well back then!”
The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things. However the coolest stuff has not been invented yet — although this new greatness will not be more of the same-same that exists today. It will not be merely “better,” it will different, beyond, and other. But you knew that.
What you may not have realized is that today truly is a wide open frontier. It is the best time EVER in human history to begin.
You are not late.
Information Markets as a consumer insight tool
This week I’ve been exploring a website called PolyMarket. In short it’s a place where you can bet on random events like will Bitcoin reach it’s all time high by the end of this month or who’s going to win the oscar for the best animated film. The topics range from politics to tech all the way to the middle east.
While it is very similar to a traditional betting website. The difference here is you can see how other people are putting there money. Since the site is built on the blockchain, everything is transparent — the pool of money for each outcome, how many people have bet on a particular outcome etc.
So if you have that one friend who’s always blurting out the most wild shit about whats going to happen you can tell them to put their money where their mouth is.
I personally don’t use PolyMarket as a gambling tool but as a way to gauge insights into where peoples heads are actually at. It’s very useful for seeing what the market sentiment is when it comes to cryptocurrencies etc.
Backup your life with the blockchain
Yesterday I wrote a short blog post about how you can preserve your momentos and keepsakes using tools like Polyscan to 3D scan your items and mint them to the blockchain so they can exist forever.
If you’re interested you can read the full blog post here.
My favourite boiler room set EVER!
Alright, enough with blockchain talk for today. Last week I stumbled upon a video that I was blown away at. It was a video of a Boiler Room set in Tokyo and the energy was so wild. I’ve been playing the entire set on repeat because I thought the song selection was so good.
If you click this link it will take you to the exact moment the energy in the room is crazy.
This does tie into another thesis I have when it comes to the music scene in general. I believe people are tired of hip hop and the guns, killings, drugs and sad boy music that people just don’t feel good about listening to anymore. Especially when the world is already so fucked up, people are looking for things that make them feel good about themselves. Also, now that we’ve finally gotten past the COVID era, people are more disconnected then ever before and are wanting ways to connect with each other and have a good time.
I’m sure you remember during what I call the Avicii era when electronic music was huge and was the mainstream. However a few years ago Hip Hop began to dominate the charts as rap took the centre stage.
Hope everyone enjoys their week.
Love,
Jet Williams