A Storm

I’ve been thinking about repurposing this site somewhat. I haven’t been in the mood to write about my personal life for a bit because I feel pretty isolated from the world. I used to really enjoy delving into myself and trying to find some personal truth to express, but increasingly I can’t seem to do that knowing that anyone else will read it without feeling my awareness of their perception slowly shifting my words to something to be consumed.

I just need to ramble for a bit…

That’s what so much of these last few months has been about — a quarter life crisis.

It really started while I was at Sun last summer. The recommendation engines predict preferences for people. The algorithms are blind, however. They, and pretty much all modern systems, rely on patterns in large amounts of data. We have no idea why people do the things they do, just that they act consistently over time. If Bob and Alice like the same ten songs, then when Bob likes an eleventh song there’s a good chance Alice will as well.

These types of systems combined with the exponential growth in storage, communications and processing power have the potential to radically reshape the world we live in. The world is awash with possibilities, 99.999% of we never have an option to consider because we simply don’t know about them.

We could be using computer systems to match us against 10,000 jobs and dozens of social events, but the systems just aren’t there yet. I left grad school because I was so frustrated to know that there are so many people who are suffering so pointlessly. It isn’t about some utopian vision where everyone is nice to each other. It’s just about efficiency.

I still love the idea that I could walk into a store and know the entire supply chain story for the products that I want to buy. The data is already in computer systems, but the communications infrastructure isn’t there yet. My real naiveté was thinking that somehow I would change all this on my own.

We’re up to our necks in data and dying for lack of knowledge. I just need to figure out some way to express that.

“There are ten thousand chopping at the branches, for every one digging at the root.”
— H.D. Thoreau