Can one person change the world?

It is difficult to fathom that in today's world of democratisation of internet and communication where anything secret or plan or thoughts can be dissipated to millions in minutes, with so much interconnectedness with all things and anything can come back and bite you immediately, that one person can overcome all these and get do something unexpected again and again.

With so much interconnectedness and checks and balances and democracies, it should have been almost impossible for someone to change the world's dynamics so fast.
Yet, Donald Trump did it.

Many of the countries of Europe after millenia of fighting against each other and USA came to the mature conclusion of not fighting with each other and rather saving the millions of national resources to better uses like education, lifestyle enhancement, technology and progressed substantially after world war 2 until 2023.

Now, all of a sudden, 1 man is creating havoc almost on a daily basis and causing distrust among things that were built layer on layer for so many decades of trust and effort.

Surely, many would be in disillusionment as was all these years of trust and work just a fake and was it worth it?

The same kind of disillusionment that happens when trust is broken with someone for selfish reasons.

How would humanity look upon this 100 years later? Does this instance change of course of history forever where no country would trust another or just a blip in the overall maturity of having more non-fighting friendly relationships?

Do you have a voice in your head?

Most of us believe that we all have a voice in our head that we listen to.

This "voice in your head" is called "Inner Monologue".

It came as a surprise to me when my friend told me that many people do not have this inner monologue.

More on this research here:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-everyone-has-an-inner-voice-streaming-through-their-head/

Thinking about designs

 How does a design team come up with a good design?
 How does a design team come up with a good commercial design?

There is a vast difference between these 2 above questions.

Any good designer can do new designs. All it needs is creativity and taste.

But a good designer worth his/her salt should be able to make good commercial designs.

What does this entail? 

2 constraints of Reduced cost and a chance to sell it at a high price.

So, there are 3 parameters for a commercial good design.

Look & Features, Price and Cost

A high Look & Features, high Price and low Cost is the success formula.

The long slowdown

 India is witnessing a long winded slow down in retail.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/retail/retail-chains-restaurants-shut-stores-as-consumption-slows/articleshow/119054679.cms?from=mdr

This has been in the news recently after a year or so of the slowdown which the retailers have been experiencing over a year now.

Many retailers across segments, clothing, shoes, belts, vendors across India have clearly been able to witness it firsthand. A few days or weeks have seen sales as low as during those of the covid lockdowns.

The reasons however, were never clear and many attributed it to the following:

1. Hot weather to shop

2. Lack of cash as the general elections were there in 2024

But the real reason is somewhere else.

1. Saurabh Mukherjea suggests stagnant earnings, automation-driven job losses, and an ongoing economic slowdown after the covid revenge shopping.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/income-down-debt-up-saurabh-mukherjea-gives-three-reasons-why-indias-middle-class-is-facing-a-major-crisis/articleshow/119419834.cms?from=mdr

2. Secret back door rate increases profitting the companies at the cost of the people of India.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHtBQHnyryO/?igsh=am4zeWwzcTd0bDBs

Maybe there are more plausible reasons.

Share yours thoughts in the comments

The future of work

About 8 years or so, I have listened on the "Future of work" from Vivek Wadhwa.

At that age and time, his view was "interesting" at most, and his predictions seemed coming true, but his predicted times looked optimistic to me.

Mainly because we all think linearly, the predictions looked optimistic.

He has mentioned the exact last statement in his 2013 interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3LS4PithoM) where he also goes on to also say that when 2 different technologies converge, entire businesses are wiped out.

Technology has changed rapidly and exponentially from 2023 with the advent of Chat GPT.

In today's news, "Researchers just unveiled an AI model called ECgMLP that identifies endometrial cancer with 99.26% accuracy from microscopic tissue images—drastically outperforming human specialists and current automated methods."

With this, the medical "Radiologist" role is almost wiped out.

The same is happening to Lawyers and other professions.

The future looks like this: Govt. paying everyone to live comfortably with no work and few would work on new technologies and earn like crazy. 

My prediction: The middle class is going to diverge into the rich class or the poor class.

I had a very fruitful discussion last week with a close friend of time who is good in technology and we were sharing our views on the future of work. He shared that if the next generation is only going to use the existing generative AI to learn and produce works, thereby being lazy and reducing their thinking, nothing new is going to be made in the next 5-10 years. With nothing noteworthy of contribution, this means that we have already reached about 98% or so of all that AI can ever learn from in the current AI.

The only people who would have work are the creative people who are deep generalists who can inject their creativity into a new converged field and show value. This is something Dan Koe predicts.

The rest would be forced to sit at home with no work. 

FYI, Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari is a book I plan to read where he attempts to paint an image of the future. I am currently listening to his book Sapiens. I would add to this post, on completion of both these books.

Why some people always make money?

I have come across a few entrepreneurs who always make money in each of their ventures. They are serial entrepreneurs and or multi-tasking entrepreneurs. They may have had failures, but it is less.

It took many years to understand the reason - There are a specific set of knowledge and skills required to make money. If we have that, we make money.

As someone I heard put it nicely, give a Rubik's cube to all the people. Only the person knowing how to solve will solve it. The rest of the people irrespective of any amount of time, will not be able to solve it.

Unfortunately, these skills and knowledge are not thought commercially at one place. Very few places teach that in parts.

New age service professions

In Japan, there are many "Rent a boyfriend" services for quite a long time.

Just before covid, "Professional Cuddling" started as a profession. Now, there are many Professional cuddlers around the world.

In today's world, there is coaching for everything. Including many things we don't even know exist. For any sports, there are coaches, for relationship issues, there are relationship coaches.

But what came to a surprise to me is that there are even "polyamory coaches". I am sure some of you would even look up that word.

I wonder how are these people are trained, how much is their knowledge common or varied. 

Is there any course to become any of these?

Understanding the world in different ways

Where do babies come from?

This hilarious conversation between a smart kid and a doctor is no doubt hilarious.

The key thing to notice here is how both are able to give completely different explanations to the same situation/ reality and all attempts to counter the logic fails.

Sometimes, we are in the kids domain and we perceive the world in a way. Maybe, there is an alternate explanation to things.

We need to be on the lookout and not oppose their logics without understanding keenly and questioning our assumptions.

China is the No.1 Technology King

 This month, China has overtaken USA as the No.1 Technology king with 3 announcements in different fields of Technology:

1. Deepseek outperforming OpenAI alternatives

2. Chinese Quantum Computers beats Google benchmarks

https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/china-achieves-quantum-supremacy-claim-with-new-chip-1-quadrillion-times-faster-than-the-most-powerful-supercomputers

3. BYD unveils 5 min EV charging

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/byd-unveils-battery-system-that-charges-evs-in-5-minutes

RIP USA! Our condolences!