Kids and Living Alongside AI
Last week I spoke to my son’s 6th-grade class about AI. Although I regularly keynote conferences around the world about tech and data, not only was this my favorite keynote talk of the year (seriously, this was a blast), but I think the kids had a lot of fun too. Among other things, I asked them what they thought of AI (them: “It’s going to take over the world”) and gave them my thoughts on AI (me: “It probably won’t take over the world…at least I hope not”), and let them play with ChatGPT on my phone so they could see the potential and limits of what it can currently do. The class definitely came away with a different and more reasonable perspective on AI. I could work with kids all day. Who knows, maybe someday I will?
My advice to the 6th graders (and anyone else reading this) - get off your stupid phones and social media and interact with people in real life, consider alternatives to college (I’m a huge fan of apprenticeships), find a career that will be hard to automate, and learn to work and live alongside AI. Lastly, always be learning and embrace change.
Listen to the audio clip above on this topic, which is also my 5 Minute Friday on Spotify.
Cool Weekend Reads
Tech, AI & Data
The Original AI Doomer: Dr. Norbert Weiner (Pessimist Archive)
“Long before Geoffrey Hinton and Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded warnings about artificial intelligence, there was Dr. Norbert Weiner in the 1950s and 60s. Weiner was a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence, or as he called it ‘Cybernetics.’”
A really cool look at the historical fears of humans vs machines. There’s even a newspaper clip from 1863 about machines taking over!
Rush to Use Generative AI Pushes Companies to Get Data in Order (WSJ)
Lately, I’ve been chatting with people about how the rush to AI might (key word - might) be what companies need to take data quality seriously. Of course, I’ve been through a few other periods of ML/AI excitement, and it didn’t happen then. So who the hell knows?
Why AI Will Save The World (Marc Andreessen Substack)
Good article, and also a bit of an A16Z puff piece (he tends to pump up areas his company invests in, like crypto and Clubhouse). Overall, I tend to agree with Marc’s sentiments in this article.
Profiling & Performance Improvements of Streaming Pipelines (Lyft
Engineering Blog)
“After extensive experience in pipeline operations, scaling them to process hundreds of thousands of events per second, we have realized that there are four categories of performance issues which are common across pipelines. These issues are listed down in their severity order:
Data skewness (hot shard)
Large window size
Interaction with low speed services
Serialization & de-serialization”
A great technical look at how Lyft solved its streaming pipeline performance. Lots of good takeaways if you’re working with streaming.
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR AI BOTS: “NO HUMANS ALLOWED” (Fry.ai)
An interesting experiment of letting the bots run rampant in their own social media.
Business & Startups
Questionable Advice: “How can I drive change and influence teams…without
power?” (charity.wtf)
“HOW CAN I DRIVE CHANGE WHEN I HAVE NO POWER OR INFLUENCE?”
“HOW CAN I DRIVE CHANGE WHEN I AM A TECH LEAD ON A NEW TEAM?”
“HOW CAN I GET PEOPLE ON BOARD WITH MY CONTROVERSIAL PLAN?”
Ever asked any of these questions? If so, read on. Great advice on approaching these delicate matters.
Apple Vision – Stratechery by Ben Thompson (Stratechery)
As always, Ben Thompson writes a solid analysis of where Apple Vision fits into Apple’s future. I’m genuinely curious to see the real-world use cases for the Apple Vision.
Stable Diffusion’s AI Benefactor Has A History Of Exaggeration (Forbes)
Where have we seen this sort of story before?
There’s No Easy Exit for Companies Backed by PE and VC (Institutional
Investor)
It’s going to get gnarly out there…Bad haircuts or worse.
Emergence - How to Price AI In SaaS (Emcap)
Or, make up a bunch of shit like a lot of “AI” companies right now. Price the “AI” using ChatGPT, an abacus, and a magic 8-Ball.
New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff
This week
Monday Morning Data Chat - Putting Data Products at the Center of Data Management w/ Saket Saurabh (Spotify)
The Joe Reis Show
Change Data Capture Deep Dive, and more w/ John Kutay (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Kids and Living Alongside AI (Spotify)
Upcoming
Monday Morning Data Chat - Data Modeling in 2023 w/ Colin Zima
The Joe Reis Show - Lots coming up…
Here are some cool upcoming in-person events I’ll be at in June and beyond for 2023
Vancouver BC DAMA. Friday 6/23
Ethan Aaron Low Key Happy Hour - Vegas Edition. Monday 6/26.
Data Engineering Meetup, San Francisco Edition - Tuesday, 6/27 (register here)
Striim Presents - Data + AI Summit Recap and Mixer w/ Matt Housely and me. Plus book signing. - San Francisco, Wednesday, 6/28 (register here)
Joe Reis + dbt roadshow - Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, and more. Details are coming soon.
Taking July off…🏔️, except for the Portable Conference and a few other things. My calendar is otherwise completely blocked off from July to early August, so let’s chat over email or similar.
Portable Low Key Conference - July 12
DataEngByes. I’ll be on the continental tour in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. August 2023 (more info and registration)
Big Data London - I’m keynoting. Big up the London Massive. September 2023.
Europe - September 2023 TBA
Dubai - October 2023.
Vegas - ReInvent 2023.
More to come…
Thanks! If you mind helping out…
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You can also find me here:
Monday Morning Data Chat (YouTube / Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). Matt Housely and I interview the top people in the field. Live and unscripted. Zero shilling tolerated.
The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). My other show. I interview guests, and it’s totally unscripted with no shilling.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering (Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books)
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Thanks! - Joe Reis