reflection
I love leveraging cutting edge tools to build products that empower people to:
- Live more meaningful lives
- Live more connected lives
- Live as the best version of themselves
Going through this project and exploring the space of data and how it connects to AI, it has shown me the speed at which humans innovate. As soon as something is possible with technology, we will find ways to apply it into our lives. For most cases it’s for the better of humanity, but also some cases it might negatively affect humanity.
I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg was not aware of the negative consequences of social media when he first started it. As I continue to live on the edge of technology, I try to remind myself and be mindful of where a certain technology can go in the future and how it can backfire on us. But at the same time, I believe that if you are able to maintain your morals as you continue to innovate, then this would not be a problem. At least, if I were a decision maker. Because I trust that my morals will stop me, but unfortunately I won’t have the ability to stop other people. And this is why I strive to always build things with privacy in mind and with a vision of how it could potentially be exploited in the future and how to avoid that.
This is something that is especially important in the age of generative AI where the US and China are trying to win the AI battle without thinking of how their innovations might backfire. This is explored by an ex-openai employee: https://ai-2027.com (highly recommended read)
The biggest challenge I faced over the past few months is knowing exactly what to focus on and testing out different techniques to see which one works and which one doesn’t. Simulating real-life situations with code and real-life human behavior with code is not an easy task. I’ve even seen startups who try to tackle this but focus on the social media aspect: https://societies.io
I guess I already touched on what surprised me, which is the fact that humans have this natural desire to innovate and will leverage technology in whatever way to improve our quality of life. As soon as new technology and new research is discovered. I find that innate desire to innovate very interesting. In addition to that, because we all desire to innovate, we end up coming up with ideas that are very similar. Something that a lot of young entrepreneurs don’t know is that ideas in some way are very cheap because almost all of them have already been thought of before, and it is extremely rare to discover ideas that are genuinely unique. The young entrepreneurs are oblivious of that. So they think ideas are the thing that makes or breaks a startup.
Piecing everything together and tying it all back to the initial proposal is going to be the biggest challenge for the second half of the course I’ll be looking back at my notes to remain in alignment with what I wanted to achieve