Happy New Year 2017

Happy New Year everyone!

We live in interesting times. We are witnessing exponential growth in technologies and social and economic change. I am going to share my personal views on these two topics and then conclude with my plans for 2017 for leading a free and inspired life.

It is difficult for us humans to really understand exponential growth, as we are seeing in artificial intelligence and other technologies like genetic engineering. One personal way to come to grips with exponential growth is to conduct a thought experiment: compare the technological changes in the world between the times you were ten and twenty years old and the changes in technology in the last ten years. Even a few years ago my cellphone did a fairly poor job at understanding my spoken speech and now it understands me almost perfectly and speech input is now the way that many of us interact with our mobile devices. In my field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, deep learning neural networks have revolutionized how we do speech recognition, language modeling, recognize images, and build predictive models. I expect that environmentally safe energy advances like solar, storage of electricity, and likely viable fusion power will profoundly alter the world for the better in the next ten years. Also remember that with very inexpensive power, fresh water becomes less of a problem at least near oceans because of desalination.

The outcome of rapid social and economic change is much less clear. I believe that people should think for themselves when it comes to politics, and in general politics gets too much of our attention. My thoughts on how to live a free and inspired life are influenced by Catherine Austin Fitts who suggests that we pay more attention to our own physical, mental, and spiritual health than externalities like politics and the trappings of materialism that do little to improve our lives. Catherine promotes the idea of concentrating on adding value to our work, businesses, and society at large. I tend to divide events in my environment into "things I can affect" and "things that I can't do anything about." In principle I like to put almost all of my energy and creativity into things that I can affect.

In addition to enjoying the company of my family and friends my plans for 2017 include:

• Spending close to zero time watching the "news" on TV. I believe that 20 or 30 minutes a week reading news on the web, preferably randomly chosen from multiple news agencies in many different countries, is sufficient to understand what I need to know about the world situation. Spending many hours a week in a "mental bubble" watching the same news service on the same TV station in just my own country seems like a colossal waste of time that can be better spent on other activities. In the Data Science sense, I "sample" news sources.
• I hope to spend even more time writing in 2017. I published Haskell Tutorial and Cookbook at the end of last year and my two current writing projects are Introduction to Cognitive Computing and Haskell Cookbook, Volume 2. My wife Carol helps me with editing my books.
• Cooking and the science of food is a core personal interest and I hope to spend a fair amount of time applying AI and machine learning to my recipe site cookingspace.com. Currently I use the USDA Nutrition Database to estimate the amount of core nutrients in recipes and use a machine learning model to predict what additional ingredients would taste good with any recipe. I am rewriting the core analysis code in Ruby (the latest version is in Clojure) and I plan on major web site updates and I plan on also using the RubyMotion development tools to write apps that use the same analysis code for iOS, Android, and macOS.
• Spending even more time hiking, kayaking, and at the gym.