Greeting earthlings, What’s up? A short and sweet update for January. (Yes, in vancouver atm. We had snow yesterday!)
Over the last few months, I have researched, interviewed, and explored the past, present, and future of work, personal development, AI Agents, and social impact.
With AI invasion, how will humans retrain and retool? The future will be shaped by Gen Z, so I am looking at how they will do so.
I need to create an overarching thesis with major and minor focal points since those areas are meaningless without context. But, these areas seem to speak loudly rn, and I appreciate you reading and providing feedback on them. Until that thesis arrives, here’s my curated list from my universe to yours:
Augmented Reality Calorie Counter
Apple has acquired a patent for a system to recognize food using audible chewing and cameras. This is the holy grail of automated and autonomous health tracking with minimal human input or intervention.
How would this work? Live your life.
Your AirPods + glasses/wearables/phone automatically capture photo logs, calorie logs, glucose, heartbeat, and eating activities into Apple Health. Automatically send send this data to 3rd party providers such as your doctor, AI fitness coach, personal ghost kitchen chef, etc.
Apple is quietly building the world’s largest health company. Apple wearables, man.
Fast Fashion Update for 2023
Shein has captured a significant portion of Gen Z via TikTok.
- Shein: 50%
- H&M: 16%
- Zara: 13%
- Fashion nova: 11%
- Forever 21: 6%
- ASOS: 4%
How did they manage this? Revisit Shein The TikTok of Ecommerce.
In October, Shein were under siege with unfit factory conditions.
“Garment manufacturers in China are often working up to 18 hours a day, being paid as little as $0.04 usd per item, with no weekends and only one day off”
A number of celebrities and publishers dropped collaborations and advertising programs as a result.
As a category, Fast Fashion is down due to the current economic environment.
Gen Zers spend HOURS a day on YouTube.
Is China the new home of high-tech innovation? They seem to be leading the pack in AI and ML.
Chinese enterprises increased patent filings for artificial intelligence products rapidly in the past couple of years. The companies holding the most active AI and machine learning patent families are now tech giant Tencent and search engine provider Baidu, ahead of U.S. firm IBM, South Korea’s Samsung, Chinese insurance provider Ping An and former AI patent leader Microsoft.
https://www.statista.com/chart/18211/companies-with-the-most-ai-patents/
Interesting Links
A curated list of interesting content from the future, IRL, and across the web:
- The practical guide to using AI to do stuff.
- Over 150 of the current YC batch are building with ChatGPT. Sama is been promoting it internally, with prioritized access to YC companies. Looking to join an AI startup, or write chqs in the space? https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday
- Work has changed dramatically over the past two years, leading to new opportunities and demands from job seeker. This Vertical Labour Marketplace presentation from WeekendFund lists all of the breakout companies by industry/vertical. One of my favourite reads of the month.
- How people discover new music:
- Gen Z - TikTok
- Millenials - Spotify discover weekly
- Gen X - Radio
- The Audience insight: Gen Z wants to be entertained, not sold to. (The owl on TikTok)
- The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them. Twenty-somethings rolling their eyes at the habits of their elders is a longstanding trend, but many employers said there’s a new boldness in the way Gen Z dictates taste.
- Hiring Gen Z? How to Build an Organization That Attracts and Retains the Next Generation of Talent. What Gen Z wants from an employer.
- Working remotely, or manage a remote company that offers FT salary, benefits, stock options, etc..? HR Company Deel, Now Valued At $12 Billion, Nears $300 Million Of Revenue !!!!
- Money makes you happier. According to a new study, well-being increases with income, even above $75,000 per year. These new findings contradict a previous study where “money won’t buy you happiness”.
Report: Time Savings When Working from Home (Jan 2023)
We quantify the commute time savings associated with work from home, drawing on data for 27 countries. The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. We estimate that work from home saved about two hours per week per worker in 2021 and 2022, and that it will save about one hour per week per worker after the pandemic ends. Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities. People living with children allocate more of their time savings to caregiving.
Full report - https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866
A few more shares:
- Kevin, the founder of Instagram is back with a text based Tiktok. - https://artifact.news/.
- Four Key Product Principles from WeChat’s Creator.
- Are You the Same Person You Used to Be? Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what you’re like isn’t who you are.
- Stumbled on severalBBC wildlife documentary shorts using robot spies. This clip is especially interesting because it shows how chimps can easily tell that the robot they are looking at isn’t real.
- Some sage elder wisdom from Steven Pressfield (78yo).
- Sex, Death, Affairs: Everything People Would Rather Talk About Than Money. from the NYT
- Where you see problems, I see opportunities:
- The Social Recession: By the Numbers - “Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.”
- How to Win by Daniel Gross.
- Revisiting this Steve Jobs interview with Playboy from 1985
Read full interview - https://allaboutstevejobs.com/verbatim/interviews/playboy_1985
"Are you still under the illusion that you'll one day reach a point in your life where you no longer have any problems?"
It’s a question most of us could do with asking ourselves.
I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn’t quite the real thing, not just yet – that soon enough, we’ll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we’re living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the “provisional life.”
One antidote is to allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you’d never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, and never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life’s troubles. What if I’ll always feel behind with my email? What if listening attentively to other people will always take the weird amount of effort it seems to take now? What if that annoying thing my partner does annoys me to the end of my days?
It turns out my really big problem was thinking I might one day get rid of all my problems when the truth is that there’s no escaping the mucky, malodorous compost heap of this reality. Which is OK, actually. Compost is the stuff that helps things grow.
What are you working on these days? Subscribe if you feel like it, or eply in the comments if you liked/hated something specific
Thanks for reading.
Kenny