Seth Godin writes:
There isn’t a market. There are a million markets. Markets of one, or markets of small groups, or markets of cohorts that communicate. …the idea of monolithic marketing messages to monolithic markets makes no sense. The race is now to be the first mover in the micromarkets where attention matters.
Yes. Wise. I have two riffs to offer on that: one on software, and one on writing.
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A bunch of things lately have really got me thinking about what human qualities can and cannot be digitized. (This is inbetween more mundane tasks like shopping for winter tires. I’ll bet Greek philosophers didn’t have to shop for winter tires right in the middle of theorizing. Geez.)
Here’s a list of things that cannot be digitized:
* Sensation. Many people have been working on this for decades — vision, voice reco, smell, tactile, taste — with slow progress. I do think this will eventually be cracked for many practical applications. But not all?
* Aesthetic appreciation, e.g. of art, music, sunset, poetry, that sound you hear in sea shells
* Emotion
* Creativity
* Dialog. Remember Eliza? I wonder what the state of the art is now. Not much better I’ll bet, because you need…
* Understanding of context. Surely there is a shorter word for this concept? Lack of contextual comprehension is the reason voice recognition is stuck at 95%.
* Consciousness. Although reading wikipedia’s definition, I think humans are losing ground to machines on some aspects of consciousness. [5 minutes pass….] Wow, it’s worth reading that definition and just spending a few minutes clicking the outbound links from it.
So we still have some high ground on the algorithms. But the list is disconcertingly short! And it isn’t normalized; “consciousness” seems like it subsumes so many other things. What have I missed? Help me make a better list, or point me to someone who already has.
Bill really is a remarkable guy. Sean commented it would be great to hear more of his views on the future of books and reading, so I did some more digging:
As humans we long to be part of something larger than ourselves. To be part of a community, a school, a team, a family, a marriage, a project, a city, a country, a race, a religion, a movement. We each yearn to be part of something that is bigger and more important and hopefully more permanent than any of us as individuals ever could be.
This desire is deep-seated in every human. It is about mattering; when all is said and done, we want it to matter that we lived. And when we plug into something bigger than ourselves, when we help design it or build it or make it go, we’ve undeniably done something that matters. We’ve changed the world and people around us, hopefully for the better.
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