Welcome to my newsletter "What's on Craig's Mind"
March 14
This is the first edition of my newsletter “What’s on Craig’s Mind”. I hope that you enjoy what’s inside and please feel free to share it with friends.
Anything is Possible
AI or Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic these days. The media is full of scare stories about how our lives will be dominated by AI and how AI will control our future. The truth is very different to the sensationalized stories in the media. The Singularity (the point where AI finally equals Human Intelligence) is many years away. The more informed experts in this area, say 2045, others put it even further away.
The question then is how can we judge the relative level of AI v Humans? The Animal AI Olympics is trying to find out. The goal of this contest (I won’t continue to call it Olympics as they will run into copyright issues with that name) is to evaluate various AI’s against known Animal Cognitive abilities. An “Is your AI more intelligent than a Hamster” contest if you will. That name might also have some copyright difficulties however I think you know what I mean.
The contest is being developed as I write and will be released into the wild (tech speak for opening something up for general use) in June 2019 with the results to be announced some time at the end of 2019. Here is their website along with details on the competition’s goals and timeline. http://animalaiolympics.com
Time to get cracking and develop an AI that is smarter than a Hamster.
Photo from askideas.com
The Entrepreneurial Journey
Being an Entrepreneur is tough and there are tons and tons of people with advice. Much of that advice, whilst free, is vague and general. One podcast that I enjoy listening to and get a lot out of is This Week in Startups (twitter link here) by Jason Calicanis. The podcast is available on all the major platforms (Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify etc.).
Jason founded Weblogs which he sold some time ago and he is now an Angel Investor. His twice weekly podcast is great for those interested in startups and Angel investing. His advice is candid and to the point. I have not seen anyone who is able to dissect a business strategy for a startup as well as Jason can. The podcast is published twice a week (about an hour long usually) and conversational. I usually listen whilst walking the dog. The dog needs the exercise and I learn something along the way. Jason and his guests also talk about a wide range of startups that have great products (that is how I found substack.com the platform that I use to send these emails).
Jason also holds the Launch festival each year in Sydney. Free for founders. Apply here, it is a great two days.
From Intention to Innovation
For my most recent birthday my wife made a donation to “DreamSat”, an initiative of Osaka Prefecture University in Osaka, Japan. The idea of DreamSat is that students and young engineers will have the opportunity to develop and build small satellites (“CubeSats”) that can be used for research and other purposes. The goal is to build a new generation of engineers that have skills relevant to the satellite industry.
The teams meet regularly and are guided by special advisors and lecturers. The teams are responsible for the planning, development, manufacturing and funding of each satellite.
The English version of their program can be found here (it is not always easy to read, I think that they used Google translate or something similar. Google translate is good for simple words or phrases but translation bots currently don’t work well on larger pieces of translation and don’t translate meaning well. That said, it is an area of massive research and development and my statement may well be out of date by the time you read this).
From Success to Significance
As the human population ages we are experiencing a rise in diseases that were considered rare only a couple of generations ago. One of these is dementia which most often manifests as Alzheimer’s Disease.
In 2015 researchers at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia published the results of a study in which they successfully reversed the symptoms of dementia in animal models without using any drugs. In 2019 those techniques will move to human trials.
The QBI team uses ultrasound technology to temporarily open up the blood-brain barrier. When applied to the brain this activates mechanisms that break apart and clear the toxic amyloid plaques associated with dementia. This technique has already effectively restored memory function in mice and sheep (I hope they don’t enter these animals in the AI animal Olympics, we might need to institute some sort of performance enhancement testing).
The QBI website has more information on the technique here. I hope they perfect the technique before I eventually need it.
Paying it Forward
If you have a start-up or know of a start-up that has a product ready for market please let me know. I would be happy to have a look and give the start-up a shout out to my readers if it is something that I think they could use. If you have any questions or comments please email me via my website craigcarlyon.com (comments won’t work on this newsletter unless I make it a subscription based newsletter, I would prefer to keep this free).
Till next week.
The Logo on the header is “Thinking by Gregor Cresnar from the Noun Project”