AxelS

Entrepreneur – for – Author

As an Entrepreneur, I have this gifted ability to focus. After retiring in 2008, having time to sail, and spending time with startups, I also used to update my blog here and there. That changed in 2020 when I had this epiphany about how our brain composes ideas. I didn’t know what to expect – certainly not a 14-hour workday again. Well – what I do is not really work and has never been in the past. But outsiders would consider it work when you have the idea to build an innovation development system based on the most recent discoveries in neuroscience.

As a result, I stopped blogging on my personal website and did so, still do so, on the BlueCallom.com blog. It’s the “Entrepreneur-for-Author” effect. Sorry, no – it’s not a real effect it is more of an excuse.

The last 4 years rushed away like it was one year. Even though we were looked down and ‘celebrating’ Corona, we were sailing over 1,000 Nautical Miles (almost 2,000km), moved twice, redesigned our foundation, started an AI company, and presented with 4 grandchildren… what a ride. In other words, no room for authoring blog posts. :)

So, what’s next? 

Turning on the afterburner on BlueCallom – ready to launch the first end-to-end or out-of-the-box Agentic AI Solutions.  Ok, many of you may have no clue what I’m talking about. But it is very simple: In the next five years, the developed world will change more than during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The emerging and developing countries will essentially skip a 250-year era and leapfrog into a future that is equally unimaginable as the Industrial Revolution, the first intellectual revolution, or the agricultural revolution.

2030 in a nutshell

The larger part of the working world will use intelligence augmentation through AI that gives us a powerful companion, extending our intelligence no matter how good or bad developed it is or was. Others will do things they always wanted to do and make money that way. Yet others will fight the new world like those who always tried to resist advances in the past 30,000 years.

We will realize that Earth will become inhabitable with exactly 100% certainty. We just don’t know when and act as if it is not during our lifetime. Yet, the human species is so advanced already today, 2024, that at least some people feel it is a good idea to be prepared. We will need every brain cell and every AI structure to find a way to eventually save biological life beyond the lifetime of our planet – period.

Luckily – I’m not only a visionary, but also a grounded entrepreneur with a goal, seeing an opportunity, and wanting to make a difference. As such you will hear from me on the BlueCallom blog because that is my author’s home for the foreseeable future.
No matter what, next year, on

Thanks for your online friendship.

 

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AxelS
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Essence of Entrepreneurship

You have an idea and want to build a startup but don’t know how to make it take off. I guess this is my best summary without telling you step-by-step. Step by step is a good technique to teach workers to do an excellent and repeatable task. A terrible help for entrepreneurs.

 

Entrepreneurship - how to start

image ref: Warner Brothers

Wanting to take over the world – like Pinky and Brain?

Entrepreneurship is a mindset – making something with nothing. It is all about talent – no skills or education needed, seriously.

1) Don’t overestimate the value of your idea. It is exactly zero. And therefore, no need to fear your idea gets copied. Humans create on average 20,000 ideas in their lifetime. 99.999% get never executed. With over 7 Billion people, that are 14 Trillen ideas to copy. Passion? It is for pussy cats. Value is created by obsessive and relentless execution – nothing else. As such, share it with as many people as you can – every single day. You need that feedback more than anything else right now. And to amplify, use your social network. That doesn’t cost you anything.

2) Develop the best possible solution concept and presentation. Dream it in your head, spin it around. Don’t let it distract you from thinking about what it cost, what resources you would need, how much time you would need, and what problems could occur. Always remember: If you can imagine it in your brain – you can build it with what you have and some other people’s help. So this was not that hard either? Right? You don’t need money for that.

3) Find your co-founders. Let brilliant people complement you. Look for people that hate to do what you love doing and love to do what you hate doing. Put all your savings into this new company and request (insist) your co-founders do the same. Again no hard work at all. You don’t need money from others for that – but risk everything you have. If you don’t – why should others.

4) Together with your co-founder(s), validate your concept with 42 people you think would have a huge benefit from your product or service. If you can’t find them, find out if you are skilled enough to look for them or if the market doesn’t exist. Decide if you want to continue and build it up. It’s that easy. You don’t need money for that.

5) Together with your co-founder(s), build your first prototype and show it to everybody and their dog and get feedback. This is where you use the money you invested. Let people pre-order products (crowdfunding), so you get the liquidity and cash flow to build your first production batch. Start a social media campaign and get more feedback. If this was successful, you know you can create demand, whether there is already a market or not. Now you already have customers and revenue before you even talked to any investor. If not successful, it’s either because you did not learn how to crowdfund (Search on google) or there is no interest in your product.

6) Now is the time you may look for investors and funding to grow. As you have already pre-orders and good feedback, you validated your idea, and funding is not a problem. And that was not hard either. When getting capital use, it EXCLUSIVELY to grow your business, don’t waste it for technology upgrades. Keep running with your weak product (and it is weak) for the next few months and grow revenue. Get at least 1,000 feedbacks from your users and improve rapidly. Offer to upgrade for free.

This is more or less how the top startups in the world did it. And so did I. The most important keys:

A) Entrepreneurial mindset to solve a problem that many other people have.
10 most relevant founders traits

B) Never do it alone – always run with a co-founder that is NOT your best friend.
Best founders are co-founders

C) Forget the money part; if you need money to make money – you are an investor but not an entrepreneur.

You may want to consider joining the World Innovations Forum global exchange for innovative minds. A nonprofit organization from entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

Hope that helps.

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AxelS
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Could business be on the precipice of an automation explosion?

Somebody asked me an interesting question on Quora, and I thought I share my answer here:
QUESTION: Could business be on the precipice of an automation explosion?

Precipice? No. Automation is on a “normal” exponential growth.

INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

The degree of Industrial automation (meaning production) in Europe and several Asian countries is at over 80% and still accelerating. When we reach 90%, it will decelerate as 100% industrial automation is not even a goal as we still need to continue innovating. Yet, ironically, innovative solutions need a bit of handholding in the beginning. :)

BUSINESS AUTOMATION

When we look at business automation or office worker automation, that is different. We just see the start of the so-called Hockey Stick. Office automation meaning all the hundreds of millions of office workers who do repeated jobs, call and support centers of any kind, sales and marketing automation, initial health analysis at doctors’ offices, base work in architectural offices, industrial design, and what have you. Here we are currently at about 15%. By the end of this decade, it will significantly change.

EVOLVING TO TRUE HUMANS

The biggest problem here is that we are conditioned to do linear jobs – everything, no matter how difficult, is a step by step process. And these can be done by autonomous machines. Forget AI – please !!! Autonomous machines are human-made machines with human-made code and human-made algorithms that can do amazing things. It can paint and write books (see GDP-3) – BUT – that’s absolutely peanuts compared to what your brain can do. If you want to learn something, learn all about Neuroscience.

HUMANS MOST PRECIOUS ASSET

C R E A T I V I T Y – is no match for even the wildest dreams on the AI front. Our Corpus Callosum, which negotiates thoughts between the left and the right brain halves, connects both with approx. 200 Million axons (Nerve fibers). This is the equivalent of a 200 million parallel processor machine. Today’s AI needs roughly 2,000 to 200,000 images to identify a cat in any surrounding environment. And it may take roughly 10 kW energy to complete it. Any of my four kids needed maybe 10 times to hear what a cat, dog, bird, etc., is. All it took is probably an apple and a glass of water. Every millisecond we recognize our world; we compare it with the millions of previous experiences and create a thought about the difference. All ideas ever created were a composition of billions of past experiences so that it may be the next billion-dollar business. We are just beginning to learn something that opens doors and worlds far beyond the technical capability of any machine. We need to defend life in the universe from the threat of being wiped out by an asteroid. We NEED systems such as AI and mathematicians to build algorithms beyond our today’s imagination. We need to understand quantum mechanics and the entangled phenomenon of those. An AI system can only help when the following conditions are true
1) A purpose is created to make it happen (Human)
2) It can calculate all the possible options (machine)
3) it will be built to do that (human)
4) It will be trained to learn or observe specific things (human)
5) It has enough energy to execute the job (provided by humans)
6) It knows the critical moment when it has a “solution” (defined by humans)
Preserving life in the universe beyond the existence of our planet is our job.

WHAT NEED TO CHANGE

Fingerpointing to our 5,000-year-old or more directly 800-year-old education system makes no sense. It is too complicated to change. WE NEED TO CHANGE.
The knowledge explosion is at a staggering rate of 100% every 24 hours. But we still learn 20,000 hours in our life in schools and universities what our great great great grandparents learned. But 80% of the knowledge that we acquired we don’t. There is not a single hour of education that helps kids understand what success is, how to create happiness for themselves, how our political system works or why it no longer works, how to create wealth, why our banking system is what it is, how modern democracy is now dominated by 80% of under-educated people who do not know what to vote for other than what populists, communicate. We still educate with fear and uncertainty to make young people do what the system says.
WE NEED TO CHANGE and educate our children what the future is bringing, the most amazing opportunities that most adults cannot even comprehend.

HOPING FOR THE AUTOMATION EXPLOSION

100% Unemployment rate is the best thing that can happen to us humans. Then we all become entrepreneurs, do what we love, unfold our creativity – even forced to get creative and live a fulfilling, purposeful life. We cannot all be entrepreneurs?
Take a trip to Shenzhen and visit one of those “Maker Markets.” here everybody is an entrepreneur. Some make others assemble, yet others sell and so forth. You will have a hard time finding unhappy people. “But there must be people who really work,” absolutely not because that is done by robots, AI, and other mechanisms that have not even been developed yet – but are coming from the released creativity. “Not everybody is so creative” – ha ha ha visit any childcare, Kindergarten, or just groups of very small kids on the street. They burst of creativity because nobody told them YET – to sit still, don’t do this or that, go to school, get good grades if you don’t you get no job stay poos can’t have a family….

Have a great time in your life.

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AxelS

A response for Ric S.

Neben unserem Haus ist ein Kindergarten. Da wird geschrien gestürzt, gemalt, dummes Zeig gemacht. Dann geen sie zur Schule da wird ruhing gesessen, manmuss aufpassen und tun was Lehrer sagen. Später im Gymnasium oder wie auch immer es heute heisst muss viel gelernt werden. bis es einem zum Hals rauss hängt. Learn & Repeat ist die Zauberformel. we das gut mach, learn and repaet darf auf die Universität. Da wird wissen vermittelt das ca. 20 – 50 Jahre alt ist. Learn & Repaet bleibt die Zauberformel. Und wenn due Pädagoge werden willst wird das Wissen von vor 800 Jahren vermittelt.. Man hat zwei Menschen typen gebraucht “Worker und Warrior” Warrior werden im Krieg verheizt, brauchen dafür weniger lernen. Worker müssen lernen Häuser zu bauen Brot zu backen, das Feld zu bestellen und Steuern bezahlen. Als die Häuser grösser und kmplizierter wurden wurde Mathematik und Geometrie gelernt. Krankheiten haben dazu beigetragen Medizin zu lernen. Schwierigere Kriege dass wir maschienen bauen. Dann gab und gibt es Privatschulen für die Könige. Heute noch für ein paar Kinder die Glück mit ihren Eltern haben. Die Abgänger werden meistens verachtet weil sie versagen, nicht auf die Universitäten gehen sonder ihr Leben selbst in die Hand nehmen. Ich bin ein Merzschüler, gefeuert, versagt, Aber habe nie aufgehöhrt nur und ausschliesslih für mich zu lernen, Habe 4 Unternehmen gegründet tausende von Mitarbeitern eingestellt und immer diejenigen bevorzugt die ihr Leben schon als jugendliche selbst bestimmt haben – sie waren Teil unseres Erfolges. Sie waren die besten. 2003 haben wir in unsreren Job Anzeigen geschrieben: “Don’t send us a resume – tell us how you will help shape the future.” Was hat das mit Dir zu tun? Wer mit 20 ausbricht ist ein Versager, wer mit 30 ausbricht ist ein Spinner, wer mit 40 ausbricht ist in der Mid-live Crysis. Wer mit 50 ausbricht ist selten wer mit 60 ausbricht ist mutig aber da ist es e’ schon egal. :) Egal wann du ausbrichst du kannst nicht verlieren. Es gibt nur eien Weg ultimative und für immer zu verlieren: Es nie probiert zu haben.

Warum ist das was viele schon lange vor uns wussten, HEUTE SO WICHTG? In der Zukunft werden wir die Workers & Warriors nicht mehr brachen. Sie waren das Fundament auf dem wir heute stehen. Aber der Automatisierungsgrad wächst unveränderlich weiter. Innovation baut auf Innovation und wir werden millinen von “Innovatoren” brauchen um die milliarden von kleinen problem zu lösen ud die probleme die wir noch kreieren wieder zu fixen.

If you have children don’t stay where you are because of your children, break out because of your children. You will feel guilty if you don’t teach them what 20,000 hours of education don’t even touch: How to become successful for yourself, how to develop wealth for yourself and how you keep learning for the rest of your life.

Happy 2021
@AxelS

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AxelS
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Do entrepreneurs really “create wealth”?

This was an interesting Question on Quora: Do entrepreneurs really “create wealth”? The money they earn already exists beforehand and would have gone to other pockets. That’s not “wealth creation” but “wealth changing hands”
Yes, entrepreneurs do create wealth. In fact, entrepreneurs are the group that actually creates wealth in its truest sense. Wealth is created through incremental productivity. It means somebody does something that creates more than that person can consume themselves. Let’s start with food:

All living things consume “food” to live. And all living things “hunt” for food. This starts with microbes, plants, animals, and we, the human animal. That’s all we did for the longest time – simply survive – for approx. 5 Million years.

Approximately 12,000 years ago some smart people recognized that if they collected seeds and planted them, watered them, and took care of the growth, they produced more corn than they could consume themselves. So they could trade the excess corn for other things. That started the first and most significant shift in the life of HOMO. It’s called the agricultural revolution. It was the birthplace of wealth creation. We found out that our unique skill: “ingenuity” allowed us to produce more than we needed. Still, droughts and other natural catastrophes killed a lot of people. But we used that skill of “ingenuity” to improve farming and later hunting. We produced so much that we could afford to have some of us do nothing but build huts or work on and with iron or other metals. We were able to build homes and a few thousand years later we were so productive that only HALF of the population was needed to produce food and the other half was used to build things for our protection and comfort. Today, in developed countries, approximately 3% of the population is producing food, enough for the other 97% to do everything else. Some produce tools to be more productive in producing food and others build tools that allow us to transport the food around the planet. The wealth is created through increased productivity. Everybody who is not contributing to the increase of productivity one way or the other is actually committing theft. Speed traders for instance extract millions per day – contributing zero to productivity and simply extracting wealth for their own, from the rest of the society. Today it is legal to do so.


After the industrial revolution about 200 years ago, the increase in productivity exploded and an unimaginable increase in wealth was created. Over the past 200 years a steady stream of food eradicated hunger, steady stream of health care almost doubled life expectancy, steady stream of physical protection, reduced the risk of war, ongoing increase in productivity cut the time to work almost in half. There is a chance to even eradicate work entirely in the next 50–100 years through machines that completely do all the production for us.

 

The more simple minds fear it because they only see unemployment – and workers have been trained – even conditioned – to see nothing but work. But if you elevate the point of view and realize our most powerful talent over all talents it is ingenuity. This ingenuity will provide us with the capability to create more wealth across the entire planet and so much that we can focus on even bigger projects. And that very ingenuity will help to educate future generations to focus on developing their ingenuity more than they focus on developing more workers that we will need to survive threats that we are already aware of.

The biggest of all projects is the ability to make our species survive the lifetime of our planet. The Universe is big enough to do so, but we will need to get there and that maybe our ultimate purpose. But first we need to create the wealth to afford getting there. And only our entrepreneurial spirit – built on our ingenuity – will be able to make it happen.

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AxelS

Mercedes #EQS

Since long time a car that I really like
Yes, it is a luxury car. Yet, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s an all electric car with a great deal of environmentally friendly materials. If the next generation entrepreneurs like this car as the trophy for building millions of jobs in emerging and developing countries, they more then deserve a bonus like that. Gorden Wagener @WagenerGorden is the man. He and his amazing team made it happen. Now I only hope the the company is bold enough to make a new history with this car. It’s a hybrid – no not hybrid engine, it’s a future luxury design car with a future sustainability architecture in mind.  Give the team a round of applause.

 

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Happy 2019 – It’s going to be interesting

It will become an interesting year in very many ways. I feel there are three challenges worth mentioning for 2019
* Intensifying economic challenges across the world
* Stress factor technological challenges rising
* Socio-Political challenges to deal with the global development

Let me shed some light on those challenges.

Intensifying economic challenges across the world

In 2018 the stock exchanges finished with the worst christmas day in history. The former economic leader, the USA, is in deep trouble. The country is effectively bankrupt but tears itself out of the dilemma, like every year. It does it not by smart finance politics but simply by moving assets around, printing more money and near perfect political communication (also known as propaganda). So markets reakt on the troubling US economy – who’s fault is it? Ahh – the Chinese production data. So the troubling economic situation isn’t about the US but China – really? It’s that simple. But since global financial transaction, mainly commodities are bound to the dollar – nobody wants to change their lead currency in their dealings. However – more and more actually do – but silently. In 2018 Europe became the largest export economy in the world. Export is the factor that defines a nation’s wealth and makes Europe – under the radar – the most powerful economy on the globe. Asia is the fastest growing Economy. But since most economists still look for the US development, the global economic picture is seriously distorted. Even the largest non US banks see a rosy future based on US data influence. Ok data, being the most important raw material for any decision process, come almost exclusively from the US. Europe and Asia has been successfully stimulated to see privacy and data “protection” the most important goal. Well done my friends. 2019 will be interesting as the world’s transparency is still rising, information flying at the speed of light – unfortunately without solid data from the two global power houses Europe and Asia. The result of these challenges -mainly lack of solid information – may be a massive economic crisis in the US and Japan, which can be easily “promoted” to a global economic crisis, leading to massive devaluation of the global stock markets – regardless of their actual local performance. Cash will become king and allow those who keep the cash buy top functional businesses very cheap in the next three years – history will repeat itself on a new even higher level. This may actually by far the best way for the US to rebound from their troubled economy when hundreds of US billionaires acquire top notch European and Asian businesses for change.

Stress factor technological challenges rising

Our technology development is mind boggling. In 2018 more new inventions and discoveries were made than in the previous 10 years which was more than in the past 100 years, which was more than since the existing of mankind. And the pace is still accelerating. But the advances are so many and in so many areas that we hardly notice them.

Will there be any major technological breakthrough?  NO – Not in AI, not in smart material, not with bio material, not with molecular technology, not within blockchain, not in FinTech and any of the other major topics we are talking about in recent months.

We are in a phase of the most massive technological shift of all times. However none of them will see a “breakthrough”. We may actually not see any breakthroughs at all any longer. Because, unlike 50 years ago, we are seeing thousands of revolutionary inventions and discoveries every single day – not every year.

In 2018 we saw the creation of a heart chamber that is entirely build from bio material, creation of concrete stone that is actually made of air – actually CO2 – modified carbon, the advances in enforced deep learning letting AI play, find or construct much faster than any human ever will, creating bacteria that can digest polymers, and hundreds of other “breakthroughs”. They all happened this year – 2018. Next year will be the same and again without any “big bang” but as a “rolling thunder”.

Lack of interest, not knowing where to start, not knowing what to look for and most importantly with not a single hour of education, our children and parents raising children will remain completely unprepared for what is coming in the next 10 years. That stress factor is certainly rising in 2019 and hopefully gaining enough attention for everything and everybody in education to respond.

Socio-Political challenges to deal with the global development

With the two defining drivers in our developed world: economy and technology, seeming to get out of hand, we will see three rather different developments across the planet. Based on our insights working in 27 countries we are seeing three different ways nations will respond to our major challenges:
Doing nothing, waiting what others do
We will see this – actually continuing to see this in countries from eastern and southern Europe, most of Latin America, Africa, and several Asian countries like India, Thailand, Philippines or Indonesia.
Trying to best understand the challenges and respond with actions
We already see this in Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia, Chile, Mexico, Russia and some others.
Due to lack of comprehension and in part inner instability trying to isolate the nation from the rest
Mostly countries with a strong culture, some living big time in nostalgia, or past successes, making their country great again. We see this very prominently happening in the US, Japan, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and other former developed or nearly developed countries.

Even though this third challenge is very much influenced by the first two, it is interesting to note that the world’s order is no longer east / west or developed / emerging countries but reranking itself into advancing countries which can be east and west, and also can be developed, emerging, decaying or least developed countries. One of the least developed countries to watch is Nepal. If the government takes the right actions in the next 5 years it may be a phoenix out of the ash. Already in 2017 we saw that development emerging but in the next two years it will become very apparent.

The biggest challenge in 2019 for everybody: Keeping track of what is going on on a global scale and to do so, developing the skill of “abstraction” – meaning building up the ability to focus on what is most influential and verify the sources of information. Every single human is living in the information age – whether we want it or not.

 

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AxelS

Advanced Entrepreneurship

Advanced Entrepreneurship

OK,  you’ve had an idea, you filled in your business model canvas template, wrote a business plan using other templates, you experimented with all kinds of ideas and ways to run your startup. You probably pivoted many times and did everything you learned at school. Great.

Now trough all this away and start building your real businesses. Create a highly compelling vision that attracts top talents you would never get otherwise, attract customers and partners and also investors. Create a robust and disrupting business model followed by an aggressive go-to-market strategy. Stop pivoting, Drive an insane growth curve at all cost – speed is more important than perfection. Disrupt yourself and everything all the helpful instructors and mentors told you. Welcome to advanced entrepreneurship.

Enjoy this podcast – advanced Entrepreneurship in 20 Minutes.

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AxelS
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Blockchain Transformation | Birth of a butterfly

The recent cryptocurrency development had put a serious dent in the crypto space. The bubble is clearly burst — very clearly. Speculative investors took quite a hit and the money flow from unknown and possibly dubious sources is drying out. What looks like a disaster to some is a very welcome clearance to others.

I’m a Crypto Valley Association Member and an investor and board member in Blockchain Valley Ventures, sitting right in the heart of Crypto Valley. Most recently I received tons of questions — “Where is it going?” “Is blockchain dead” “Is Bitcoin at its end” “Shall we sell?” “Is now a good time to buy?” So let me share my thinking and why I see a more positive future now than a year ago — when everything was just too glossy.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly

Yes — some lost millions of Dollars

Remember what happened when the Internet Bubble burst? It wasn’t the Internet that bust but the greed of many investors who just hoped that the craziness would never end. But the Internet itself was never hurt. Today we have not millions but billions of Internet users. Because the Internet makes total sense.

Fast forward, 18 years later, the crypto bubble burst. It’s not the Blockchain that burst, but the investor craziness in a currency that has never shown any value in itself. In the future we will have millions of Blockchain users, using public and private blockchains. Because the blockchain itself makes total sense.

The Future of Blockchain & Crypto

The Crypto Valley Community is working feverishly on the next big steps, the evolution in blockchain technology and crypto currency. Like the software people in Silicon Valley, the blockchain people in crypto valley have a very clear understanding where things will go — because we are creating that future.

Demystifying Blockchain Technology

I feel it’s about time to demystify the blockchain technology. Unlike many people postulate it is NOT this magical architecture running on hundreds of thousands of servers simultaneously and consuming gigawatts of energy just to hide some data in an insanely complex security algorithm. Well you can use it that way — but I actually care less.

Innovative and disruptive smart contracts

The true innovation and in particular disruption to both the software world as we know it and the business process world as we have it, are so called “Smart Contracts”. And this is also why Crypto Valley is so much ahead of the rest of the world. There is a reason why nearly half of the world’s ICOs happened here.

Smart contracts is the actual ‘brain’ of the Blockchain. A Smart Contract does what general software never did: It executes a process autonomously. Very similar to Artificial Intelligence, it is an autonomous vehicle running through the net. And that creates the ultimate power of the blockchain. If an order is entered into a classic ERP system, it requires human action in every single step of the process. Entering the order, processing the order, confirming the delivery, reviewing the payment, observing the shipment and so forth. It makes it extremely slow, error-prone, and costly. The magic of the smart contract that it processes an order completely autonomous based on defined triggers, times, sensors, inputs and no human can intervene or manipulate that process. There is a good reason why IBM, SAP and other big player invested enormously and early on in the blockchain technology. They obviously understood the power of the smart contract technology — which in return requires a blockchain architecture to work in a trusted manner.

The dent in the wallet of a speculating investor will have no effect on the future of the blockchain. And all the current projects here in Crypto Valley show where this technology is already going. We also see why Etherium had such a peak in the meantime: It’s development tools, libraries and APIs had proven to be the most attractive to developers. Also, this will not change.

Shift To New Disruptive Blockchain Applications

As an Investor we obviously are the first to see new companies, new business ideas and possibly new technology shifts. But what we are also seeing right now, is a serious shift in startup quality. A year ago, we have been flooded with whitepapers, which all too often have been a copy of a copy and just yet another crypto currency. That has changed. Today we are very fortunately back to normal. The flood turned into a healthy stream of well thought out and disruptive business ideas. We no longer see the applications that allow a global government be run off of a blockchain but interesting applications in sectors like, supply chain, medical records, pharmaceutical logistics, gamification, business process optimization, IT security, trading, sales and marketing applications and many others where the autonomous processing of smart contracts play a key role for a serious new way of doing business.

Mega shifts on the Crypto side

The clearing air over the cryptocurrency side shows a very interesting development. We will have in the end two types: Security Token and Utility Token. For those not so familiar with the — so far very confusing — crypto side of this world a few words: Cryptocurrency was the “funny money” that transported rewards with the smart contract. If some contractual actions have been completed and confirmed “rewards” or crypto money was paid. That crypto money, very much like the points and other rewards in games or miles, have quickly become so valuable that its value started the craziness that we had until very recently.

In the next evolutionary steps, we are already seeing, we have those two, mentioned above, currency types:

Utility Token

These have a reward characteristic like air miles, points you collect when shopping and so forth. At one point there may be an option to trade it into something or allows you to use it for other features like renewing a software, getting a free flight and so forth. The universal character, the way we can possibly use them across platforms or even trade them makes it a much better vehicle that what we have today. Today’s situation is a convoluted mess of rewards, points and benefits that are so terribly different in their handling that it is actually almost cheating on the consumers to even offer those “benefits”.

Security Token

While they handled inside a blockchain very much like any other token, the purpose of a Security Token in the real world are fundamentally different. These are created to actually have a asset or money equivalent characteristic. Startups can offer shares in their company by using security tokens. The big advantage is that a security token can be traded globally at its designated value and a startup does not need to worry about countless currencies. BUT THAT is highly regulated here in Switzerland and very soon in the US and in the next months or years in other countries. The regulations are by order of magnitude as complex as an IPO but strong enough to prevent money from money laundries enter the ecosystem and will bring the sought after seriousness and investor protection into the game. This major milestone may actually have been the biggest reason for people to pull back their “money” from the crypto world of yesterday and cause the burst.

Looking forward to 2019, the birth of the Butterfly.

@AxelS

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Artificial Intelligence Timeline – next 50+ years

Technological – Business – Societal  – Impact Development Timeline
The era of AMs – Autonomous Machines

2020 – 2025
We will see a rising number of products mainly chat bots, entering our day to day world. At the same time the work on “General AI” will be intensified and we are getting better and better results – yet no real products – despite the rapid development. The business impact will be substantial because access to knowledge will span all industries and will be substantially easier as conventional text search. Search engines will be either UI-less (meaning no keyboard, mouse, looking through lists but you speak to mic anywhere).
The societal impact will begin to bring a dark cloud. The start of significant unemployment in all kinds of call centers, info centers, support center…
Science Fiction movies may become rarer. Our development is faster than a movie maker can write a script, produce the movie and bring it to market. Ex-Machina II may possibly still not come out ;)

2025 – 2030
Technology development towards general AI will be in full swing but not yet really mainstream. Millions of engineers from around the globe will work on AI solutions. That includes Universal AI, multi purpose AI, single purpose AI. AIPU s (artificial intelligent processing units) will become more widely available. New Memory systems may arise. With that I mean silicon embedded intelligence to address memory content. There was a technology developed called “Content Addressed Memory” that may come to new life – now there may be a need for it.
The number of AMs (Autonomous Machines) such as AI Based self driving cars, AI based autonomous robots, AI based autonomous devices, AI based autonomous computers will rise significantly. By then everybody will sell their products with AI-Based XYZ. AI is like Internet in 1998. Widely used but still not fully developed. But everything will include AI one way or the other.
The unemployment rate will rise to very uncomfortable 100+ Million across the globe. Countries will start to TAX AMs in order to finance unemployment aid.
Unemployed will most likely not be able to find a new job. It’s when the wider public understands that AI is different to any other new technology: AI is used to make machines autonomous – rather then needing new skills to use the new technology by humans. AI is not even a technology, software, microprocessors, robots, cars everything existed, but a completely new way to use technology.
As a result, a significant shift in our society will begin. The makers movement will explode, social workers, nature-observers and protectors, artists, musicians, coaches and so forth will rise. We will move from “employed humans” to “autonomous humans”. We will grow more self determined across all levels of education and with a higher value to our society, environment and future evolution of humankind. A major societal inflection point may surface. Those who still need to “work” will push the AI development forward, knowing that if their jobs will be replaced, they can – like all the others – do what they really like to do and receive a UBI (Unconditional base income).

2030–2040
The AMs are substantially advanced. AI development languages and AI operating systems will become a standard in the tech space. Under the development systems the graphical application design tools may dominate as they can be used by pretty much any generally educated business manager. Just pointing and selecting data set sources, algorithms that analyze those data sets, selecting processors (neural networks) to pump it through and so forth. It will be the beginning of broadly available general AI. The number of AI based applications will grow faster and bigger than all conventional software together. The old software world is fading away.
The number of applications and functionalities leveraging IOT, sensor techniques, and robots will enter into all kinds of industries replacing ever more people. It will now be apparent – also for the last human on earth – that industrial work will be completely eradicated. Industrial unemployment will be raising to over a billion people in the next 10 to 15 years. Whether its office workers or manufacturing workers, AMs will take over the jobs. Everybody who is working on repetitive products or services can be replaced by an AM. Artists, will still keep creating Art any creative work that creates a unique ‘thing’ will obviously not be replaced because it would simply make no sense and cost too much. Those AMs work 3 times as long (8 versus 24 hours), no social cost, no vacation. Unemployment aid will at the very latest now become an unconditional base income for everybody, funded by the earlier implemented Value added AM tax. Autonomous Humans will now become the majority.
We also reached another interesting inflection point. Product costs are no longer determined by the amount of labor cost – back to raw material cost based pricing. But the raw material may actually sooner or later come from other planets. Science Fiction? No – this is now becoming reality. Not only because we understand that renewable ENERGY is limited but also recyclable MATERIAL is not infinitely available on earth. A billion cars with Lithium Batteries would require more Lithium after the first few replacement than we have on earth.

2040 – 2050
The AMs will evolve further, write complex algorithms themselves, beyond our own capabilities, create structures and construct products beyond our intellectual capacity. Humans, however, will also evolve further and deeper than we can imagine today, in 2018. Our brain will have more capacity for creativity because we will no longer need to remember when King Ramses built his empire, who his father was and so fort. We have that knowledge in our extended, collective, connected technical brain. Internet connection is omnipresent and guaranteed on every square inch on land or water on earth. Mass products in any way or shape can be constructed, prepared and produced by AMs. Only the decision, what we actually want to create, will still be coming from the human mind. And latest by then we will bring forward real self aware AMs (if not much earlier). There are many people including me working on self conscious AI concepts already. Yet even self aware AMs are far away from the human brain capabilities. The AI research will help us better understand what we are actually capable of. We will learn more about ourselves in these 10 years than in all the 300,000 years before. The human mind’s creativity is so complex that AI is still very far away from coming even close to it. We will have a far deeper understanding of the human mind than just our intelligence. We will understand that intelligence is just one power of our mind, similar to our power to move, the power of our muscles and the power of our orientation – which we have all augmented already some hundreds of years ago. We will understand artificial intelligence is no more than our artificial muscles, which we call tools.

2050 – 2075
Leveraging our added skills, collective knowledge our amazing machines, scientists will be replaced by those machines as well. Testing something new and prove a repetitive behavior to make it a scientifically proven fact, is much better done by an AI system than by a Ph.D. ‘system’. Science will be done by AMs across all factions. At the same time, innovative and creative ideas will explode, AM’s will analyze and verify those ideas in no time. AM owners will compete for those crazy but verified ideas and build it. AMs will help revitalize space exploration in a new and rather meaningful way. We will need other places than earth to harvest raw material and we need other planets for recycling or wast disposal. AMs, powered by solar energy are the best “people” to send to other planets or our moon to extract, produce, recycle, deposit. We don’t even need to terraform Mars for that. But we may safe Mars for exploring Terraforming together with AMs. Autonomous Machines and Autonomous Humans will build the most powerful synergy ever built. We will be depending on AI, more than on any other technology built so far. Most technology can be replaced by something else. But an AI system that can iterate through millions of ideas for any given solution in a few hours is something not only beyond what we built but beyond ourselves.

More details on how and why thousands of different jobs in 300+ industries, from around the world will be replaced in the next 30 years and how we manage the inflection point from the disaster of being “unemployed” to the luxury of becoming an autonomous human will be available on: Eliminating Work . AI

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AxelS
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Imperfection Oxymoron

In my work with artificial intelligence, thinking about the borderline between a perfect algorithm to perform a perfect action and the superiority over the human brain, I reached an area that made me think about the concept of perfection.

Hyper smart applets

In 1996 we were trying to design hyper-smart applets (applets was concept in Jave programming language). The idea was that applets travel through the internet autonomously, find receptors in routers or computers and have dialog systems in connected machines. It was a similar idea like smart contracts in a blockchain, but far more advanced in its autonomy. We were philosophizing: how far could we bring this? Would these applets become one day self aware? Would they be able to execute tasks not only based on our direction but also be influenced by incidents that occur while traveling in the net? For instance could they find their best path virtually on their own? Today’s AI discussion are a real dejavue for me. One thing we discovered at that stage: We have to allow the autonomous applets to make mistakes. We cannot predict every move and every situation. We have to add some sort of error correction mechanism and being aware that mistakes will come from probability of success calculations. This was the first time I realized that failure is not something we humans have because we are dumb – we have the behavior to make mistakes by purpose.

AlphaGO Example

20 years fast forward. The AlphaGo project 2016 showed very well that the AI system that learned to play GO, was incapable predicting every possible move in order to make a perfect moves. The variety of moves are so vast, that all computing power on earth could not perform this task in the next 10,000 years. So what AlphaGo did is taking a shortcut and calculates probabilities to win in percent from several possible and more logical moves. Obviously the way it does it was superior to how we humans can do it – but it is far away from being perfect (perfect as we humans use that term).

Permutation

I was reminded that permutation is a strategic concept of nature. We humans see permutation as a “mistake”, because we don’t know much about mistakes. We “instinctively” try to avoid mistakes at almost all cost. On the other hand we are triggered by rewards and any success is rewarded by our brain with “rewards points” also understood as joy.

Perfection

Humans are definitely imperfect. Our imperfection is mainly noticed by the mistakes we make and the joy we have when we succeed. However, the more we think about the reasons why we ‘must make mistakes’ eventually we come to a point where we understand that imperfection is the perfect scheme of development. The fear, that with the rise of AI ‘we are all gonna die’ because we are soooo imperfect, is definitely simply another mistake.

Imperfection Oxymoron

A “perfect system” that still develops makes the ‘perfect’ system being previously ‘imperfect’ or the development is a decay. Development or evolution including permutation can only be considered evolving if it is not perfect. The state of ‘perfection’ is the end of evolution or development.
Imperfection is the only thing that is perfect!

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AxelS

Is AI the last invention humans will do?

I see this question popping up over and over again. At present it may look like Autonomous Machines will carry on the technological development and we sit and watch. Well – here is my thinking:

In 1980 the end of technology was predicted
I remember a day where my boss said “I think with the invention of the 8 bit microprocessor we are at the end of technology development – we will never see a 16 bit microprocessor in commercial use.” I was laughing but he was dead serious. Little did he know that we were not at the end but barely at the beginning of the micro computer revolution.

In 2020 the end of humanity will be seriously predicted
We are very much in the infant stage of AI. If we developed a fully autonomous and self aware AI system we are really at the beginning of a new technology era. Those machines will help us reach frontiers that even SciFi authors don’t see today but will fuel a whole new era of SciFi stories soon.

By 2030 We will see early tangible results
Imagine that we will be able to calculate the least possible effort to develop purified water for all humans on earth – and just do it. Be able to produce food for every single person even at 15 Billion population. We will quickly move away from plastic robots to fully biological material based robots.

By 2050 replacing general ‘work’ with AI Tax based income
By now we may need to / are in the luxurious position to replace 50 – 100 million jobs. By taxing Autonomous Machines we can fuel a pool of UBI (Unconditional Base Income) so those people will be covered and the ones how operate such machines can still do it profitably. Going forward most people in developed countries won’t have to find a job but can do what they are most excited about and evolve to “autonomous humans” in its own right.

By 2075 Smart material development may be in full swing
The very next big thing that already started is smart material and biological material. A Doctor in Germany developed the first artificial aortic ventricle of a heart made fully from biological material. This will keep going for at least 100 years. Smart material is changing its shape and even molecular structure based on electromagnetic impulses. Countless new applications.  The synthesis of smart material constructed and manipulated using – again – AI brings us to all new technological realms.

By 2100 We may reach a state of nearly abundant energy
We know that our sun is boosting unimaginable amount of energy every millisecond. Even our mother planet earth does that in its core. Today we still neither harvest that energy properly – let alone being able to emulate the phenomenon and create Terra Watts generated in a little box behind our homes.

By 2150 Body augmentation may get us to an age of 500 to 1,000 years
Then think about human body augmentation, Artificial yet biological “replacement parts” for virtually everything. Maybe not the brain by then but maybe even that.

By 2200 Terra-Forming
Again all new technologies, powerful energy generators, knowledge about space travel and planet construction. At that stage we actually need technology like AI to do a few billion iterations of possible ways to do what we want to do – a human being would never be able to do that. An AI system on the other side would never “create” the idea and suggesting:  “Hey human what do you think about the idea of making Mars an inhabitable planet”.

Between 2200 and 2500 longer distance space travel
We are not giving up on that one. And we cannot. Earth will be hit by a major asteroid in the next some 100,000 years and our human brain has further developed that we actually care. We will need to find ways to leave our paradise – one day.

Between 2,500 and 3,000 crossing parts of our galaxy
No, forget space ships and forget low speed travel of 100,000 miles per hour. It will be something entirely different – we still need to develop the very foundation of the necessary physics. By that time maybe we are able to develop our own chemical elements and the new Periodic Table is more like a book.

By 5,000 we may…
wonder what next and build a fully biological being, which only needs electric power to survive. We put it into a space ship and send it to Alpha Centaur, where it should start a life on its own – never letting it know where it came from, so we don’t get unexpected visits :) We just watch it develop from a safe distance. We may visit a bit closer – just hoping they don’t discover us and think we are a UFO with extra alpha centaurical live :)

So – NO, AI is not the last innovation it is actually the first of an all new technological, economical and societal era. We won’t hit a point with no more advancement any time soon. And IF, we will advance in a very different way and laugh about our neanderthal like toys including space ships, AI, terra forming and the other primitive gimmick.

Happy innovation

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AxelS

Imperfection as a strategy for quantum computing

Photo by IBM Quantum Computer

I just saw an interesting video on YouTube that helped me understand quantum computing – at least it is now easier to pretend I know :). Talia Gershorn from IBM explained Quantum Computing in a new and very powerful way. This post is actually a comment for Talia but I thought it might be interesting to see what other quantum computing physicists have to say. Failure Tolerance and Imperfection is something I got really caught up with and am fascinated to get opinion from others.

@Talia: You are looking for having fault tolerance. I fully understand because this is how we always looked at computing. The perfect 100% accurate result – any time. And I’m sure one day somebody will find the solution. In the meantime you may want to look at applications where this is not so relevant. Imperfection is a form of quality that we all see in nature and in the universe. It is indeed a quality. Only imperfection allows evolution, mutation, and variation. Without imperfection – funny isn’t it – we would simply NOT EXIST.

Here is how it goes: Think about a structure for an airplane wing that is ultra light, still strong enough that it holds the body of a plane, yet flexible enough that it does not break. Your brain comes up with a few ideas, you let it run through a computer, optimize the structure based on let’s say a heat map of issues and then build it. If it’s working safely, you produce it and we are all flying with it – actually for centuries. Guess what – the structure that was picked in the first place is absolutely imperfect, still too heavy but it just works. Let an AI system design it and go through a million iterations, It would come up with a perfect solution (see a video from @Maurice Conti in my recent post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/autonomous-machines-where-we-today-who-may-advance-most-schultze/ . IMPERFECTION however saved us time so we could have airplanes long before we even knew about the existence of AI.

Another example: Your own company (IBM) provided the computer to beat Kasparov in 1997 in chess. The software however was imperfect because it could not go through each and every possible move but used the ones with the highest probability to win. AlphaGO did the same with GO because here the possible moves where simply too many.

IMPERFECTION as a strategy.

How about letting the good old silicon based computers do their job and you focus on apps that doesn’t need that kind of perfection but an overall performance increase unreachable for today’s silicon based machines. Instead of computing a three dimensional image and simulating it to move, using silicon, take a quantum computer and ignore that few pixels that are lost or even whole frames that do not get perfectly represented. As we progress in AI with its more and more complex algorithms and neural networks, we may need to get used to imperfection in an even grander scale. Matching too humans has a great chance of being imperfect. But the meeting everybody from the opposite gender would and keeping the protocol for meeting each other would take approximately 5.5 million years if we allow one day for each person and assuming 25% of half the population is ‘available’.

Just a thought.

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AxelS

Failure – error – is it really that bad?

I was struct the other day when I looked at the ways how AlphaGO, the GO playing AI based computer is actually working. It immediately resonated with a thought that I had years ago about the human imperfection and its results.

Now – GO is a game that is over 1,000 years old not really really complex but its permutation of moves is said to be larger than we have atoms in the observable universe. Well not sure this is really ‘accurate’ but it gives us the idea.

Related image

Image by Google Deepmind

In order to play GO a computer would need until the end of time to calculate every possible move. In order to solve this puzzle, alphaGo went through a series of more obvious moves, then calculated the probability to win for each move and took the one with the highest probability. Far from being perfect but a reasonable way. But this has HUGE implications. It now tells us that some actions of any computer that could not be computed to perfection, are possible but with a certain degree of imperfection.

Imperfection as a result of time

If we let a computer draw a realistic 3D image of the observable Universe we have two options. Making it accurate and have it ready for future generations in a thousand years or so. Or make it pretty realistic and have us look at it in a few months. Obviously the one we can actually look at would not be perfect but pretty OK.

I guess we have to make ourselves familiar with imperfection far beyond seeing it as a failure or error. Humans are imperfect. But that imperfection is actually a quality. It is the quality life itself has defined. Evolution, mutation and variance is a result of imperfection or vice versa. A perfect human would either be alone or has billions of exact copies, no more development. It would make absolutely no sense. So if imperfection is the root cause of evolution or the other way around is interesting because we will end of with an instant existence of a perfect “whatever”. But that is not possible. Imperfection is actually the very basis why we EXIST. We are on a trajectory of an evolution seeking perfection. And now learning that imperfection is not only the starting point but part of our evolution all along.

The best way to learn is making mistakes. ‘Fail and fail fast’ is a saying every entrepreneur knows. A piece of software that works immediately after the first test is the most uncomfortable feeling for the software developer. Imperfection is the hand rail of our forward trajectory. I guess we need to learn way more about imperfection to better comprehend its full implication.

 

 

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AxelS
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Crazy, intriguing, beautiful, challenging future

More and more people understand today, that our future is not accidentally happening but literally created by us and by the forces of our universe.

If a large asteroid is destroying our planet before we found an emergency exit, that future is created by the forces of the universe or whatever we call it and believe in, including by chance if you like. But if we find a way to either destroy such an asteroid before it hits us – or find a way to rescue people and escape to another planet, this is a future we literally create ourselves. Everything we have today, homes, running water, accessible electricity, cars, planes, hospitals, computer, artificial intelligence, robots, machines, cranes…. was created by us. The live we live in today was the future, created by our parents – for us.

With that understanding, we should help all people understand, that every single one is helping create our future. Whether it is building a rocket to the moon where thousands of people, engineers and metal worker created that future – or agreeing that the UK shall no longer be in the EU, was  created by the sum of all of the respective people. The responsibility of every single one is much grander than most realize. Their ever growing influence is way more powerful than most people can comprehend. It is our responsibility to help everybody, understand that we are a collective and we collectively create our future – in what way ever.

For those who fear that influence – I guess we can trust that there are more people with a common sense on earth than those with destructive or criminal energy.

 

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AxelS

End Of Automation

“Please listen carefully to this menu as the menu has changed”. “Your call is important to us but please leave a voice message”. “If you need more information go to www – dot – whatever dot com…”

Sound familiar?

Customer engagement automation is the first impression when engaging with a business. The rest is history.  The intentions were good – yet the results are telling us we made huge mistakes. Automation on the business relationship side didn’t really bring any progress in our business – but alienated our business from our most important asset: our customer base.

I’m not talking about automation on the production side of the world – I’m talking about automation on the business side, the relationship side, the interaction side. Businesses are spending more time, resources and money automating whatever a team is doing then ever before. All done with the intention to be more effective – yet the ‘effect‘ is that we are loosing customers – not winning them.

Billions get invested every year in:

Sales force automation
Low touch sales model
Marketing automation
Automated Phone Systems
Business process automation
Anonymous market surveys
Market research to find what our customers want
… and on and on

In the end much more money is invested in automation than in smart and human customer experience models.

If you stop automating your engagement processes – you force yourself  to create real relationships. And as you “re-invent” relationships it may lead you to new ways to engage, it may lead to better an deeper relationships and it may lead to a level of advocacy that you never experienced before. Automating garbage collection is one way – reducing the volume of garbage is a smarter way.

Automating customer engagement may had been a legitimate experiment in business improvement – but it failed. Focusing on relationships and customer experience shows much more success.

Just give it a shot!

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