The Age of A.I. is an American 8-part science documentary web series narrated and hosted by American actor Robert Downey Jr. Distributed by YouTube Premium in the United States, it first aired on December 18, 2019 and is an 8-part series
I really enjoyed watching the show as it broadened my knowledge of Artificial Intelligence, the use cases, the opportunities, threats, and issues with the AI Revolution,
I stumbled on knowable while I was listening to the Tim Ferris Show episode with Scott Kelly. Snippets from Scott Kelly: Go For Launch Knowable episode was played during the podcast with Tim, and I really loved the format. After the podcast with Tim was done, I checked out the knowable platform, and I was hooked; I really love learning and becoming a better version of myself.
As Mark Twain once quipped: ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.’ The knowable portal contains 200+ audio courses led by world’s leading experts such as Scott Kelly (NASA astronaut), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder) among others.
Learn life-changing skills with audio courses led by 200+ of the world’s leading experts.
About Knowable
Knowable is a first-of-its-kind audio learning platform and library of original, expert-led audio courses. We create immersive, screen-free learning experiences that help people get inspired, learn new things, and accomplish their personal and professional goals.
Launched: October 2019
Founder: Warren Shaeffer
Warren is CEO of Knowable, a venture-backed audio platform whose mission is to unlock billions of hours of learning time in order to help more people achieve their potential. He started Knowable to solve his own problem: he wanted to learn new skills, but couldn’t find the time for video courses.
Raised: $4M Seed round led by a16z, Upfront Ventures, Alexis Ohanian, and First Round Capital.
I am a super fan of Amazon and Amazon Prime for its speed and convenience. I have been an Amazon Prime subscriber for the past three years, and it is a great service that includes same one or two-day delivery and streaming music and video.
With a reported 150 million subscribers worldwide as of January 2020. Amazon Prime is a paid subscription program from Amazon that gives users access to additional services otherwise unavailable or available at a premium to regular Amazon customers.
More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet.
In his recently released book, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, Jeff shares some great insights about the launch and risk taking involved with the launch of Amazon Prime:
Launching Amazon Prime
An example of how Bezos innovates and operates was the launch of Amazon Prime, which transformed the way Americans think about how quickly and cheaply they can be gratified by ordering online. One of his board members had been suggesting that Amazon create a loyalty program, similar to what the airlines have with their frequent-flyer programs.
Separately, an Amazon engineer suggested that the company offer free shipping to its most loyal customers. Bezos put the two ideas together and asked his finance team to assess the costs and benefits. “The results were horrifying,” Bezos says with his laugh. But Bezos had a rule, which was to use his heart and his intuition as well as empirical data in making a big decision.
“There has to be risk-taking. You have to have instinct. All the good decisions have to be made that way,” he says. “You do it with a group. You do it with great humility.”
One Way Door
He knew that creating Amazon Prime was what he calls a one-way door: it was a decision difficult to reverse. “We’ve made mistakes, doozies like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn’t work out. I won’t list all of our failed experiments, but the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.”
He was aware that it would be scary at first because those who signed up for Prime would be the heaviest users of shipping. “What happens when you offer a free all-you-can-eat buffet, who shows up to the buffet first?” he says. “The heavy eaters. It’s scary. It’s, like, oh, my God, did I really say as many prawns as you can eat?” But eventually Amazon Prime led to the combination of a loyalty program and a convenience for customers as well as a huge source of customer data.”
The 2005 Amazon Prime Launch
In 2005, Amazon announced Amazon Prime is a membership service offering free two-day shipping within the contiguous United States on all eligible purchases for an annual fee of $79 (equivalent to $103 in 2019), and discounted one-day shipping rates.
In his 2005 Letter to Shareholders, Jeff Bezos had this to say about Amazon Prime:
In 2005, we launched Amazon Prime. For $79 per year, Prime members get unlimited express two-day shipping for free and upgrade to one-day delivery for just $3.99.
As another example, in 2000 we invited third parties to compete directly against us on our “prime retail real estate”—our product detail pages. Launching a single detail page for both Amazon retail and third-party items seemed risky. Well-meaning people internally and externally worried it would cannibalize Amazon’s retail business, and—as is often the case with consumer-focused innovations—there was no way to prove in advance that it would work.
Amazon Prime Features
Prime Music is a music streaming service similar to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and others. It allows access to a library of most of its songs to Amazon Prime members.
Price: $7.99 per month for Prime members and $9.99 per month for non-Prime members.
Amazon Prime Video is a subscription video-on-demand over-the-top streaming and rental service of Amazon.com, Inc., offered as a standalone service or as part of Amazon’s Prime subscription.
Prime Video additionally offers a content add-on service in the form of channels, called Amazon Channels, or Prime Video Channels, which allow users to subscribe to additional video subscription services from other content providers within Prime Video, such as HBO, StarzPlay, and Shudder.
Beginning in October 2016, Prime members in the U.S. receive access to a rotating set of Kindle e-books through Prime Reading. The service includes unlimited access to a rotating catalog of ebooks and audiobooks, 1 free pre-release ebook every month from editors’ picks, magazines, articles, and comic books also included.
Kindle Owners’ Lending Library
Kindle owners with Amazon Prime memberships can choose from thousands of books to read for free once a month from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL). KOLL is available for readers on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, and Amazon.co.jp. KOLL is different from the Lending for Kindle feature, which allows readers to lend digital books to their friends and family after buying them on the Amazon.com Kindle Store.
The Prime Now service allows members to have products delivered to them within one hour for a fee of $7.99, or within two hours for no additional fee.
Prime Now is a service offered by Amazon and available to Prime members in parts of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and Spain.
Prime Air is a drone delivery service currently in development by Amazon. The service uses delivery drones to autonomously fly individual packages to customers within 30 minutes of ordering.
Amazon Prime or Prime Video subscribers also get Twitch Prime (now Prime Gaming) at no additional cost. Prime Gaming includes a monthly Twitch channel subscription, tons of awesome content in your favorite games, 5+ PC games every month, and more with your Amazon Prime membership.
Fast, free delivery on over 100 million items, unlimited access to Prime movies and TV shows, exclusive deals, and more. Get Free Two-Day Shipping on college essentials including textbooks
On July 15, 2015, in honor of the website’s 20th anniversary, Amazon first held Prime Day. The event features a large number of sales and promotions that are exclusively available to Amazon Prime subscribers, with Amazon promoting that the first edition would feature “more deals than Black Friday.
Prime Day is an annual deal event exclusively for Prime members, delivering two days of special savings on tons of items.
As an Amazon Prime member, you have access to:
Amazon Price
Subscribe to Amazon Prime.
In the past 4 years, I have gifted 4 Amazon Kindle e-readers to loved ones and have used 2 versions myself (Oasis and Paperwhite). If you ask me what my favorite e-reader or gadget is, straight up, my answer would be the Amazon Kindle e-reader. The Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store.
The Kindle eReader has really enhanced my reading speed and urge to read more books. I can now read in the dark before I sleep (one of my favorite things to do); the kindle device also supports dictionary and Wikipedia look-up functions when highlighting a word in an e-book. other cool features of the Kindle includes:
Never doubt that your gesture or your little initiative can make a difference in someone life. Here is a great story about how we can all impact each other. I first stumbled on ” Teddy Stoddard and his teacher Mrs Thompson” story from a public teaching of Dr. Wayne Dyer.
There’s a story from many years ago that tells of an elementary school teacher whose name was Mrs. Thompson. As she stood in front of her fifth-grade class on the first day of school, she told her children a lie. Like most teachers, she looked at her students and told them that she loved them all the same. But that simply was not true, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard.
Mrs. Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he didn’t play well with the other children. His clothes were messy and he constantly needed a bath. Teddy could be unpleasant at times. It got to the point where Mrs. Thompson would take delight in marking his papers with a broad red pen and making bold X’s and finally putting a Big “F” on the top of his papers.
Actor Kal Penn hosts this docuseries from Oscar winner Adam McKay that takes a look at the global economy. Penn, a former White House associate during the Obama administration, takes viewers around the world to meet key players behind some of the more serious and bizarre movements in today’s economy.
Each episode focuses on a central question about the global economy — such as how to launder a bag of dirty cash — as the show looks to discover surprising ways the economy interconnects and impacts the lives of people worldwide. The series features in-depth access to unique specialists, including extreme preparedness experts, and has cameos by such celebrities as Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis, Joel McHale, Ed O’Neill, Rob Riggle and Meghan Trainor.
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software. – Edward Tufte
I have a love-hate relationship with social media because it has some very significant advantages and also some very worrying qualities. I got very interested in the way social media is affecting the world after I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I had a paradigm shift after reading that book, which led me to delete Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin (not deleted but deleted all posts)
I have since read Irresistible by Adam Atler, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicolas Carr, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, and looking forward to reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, among others. The Arguments of the authors are both chilling and thought-provoking; Social Media is great but use with discretion and in moderation.
The Social Dilemma is a 2020 docudrama directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis. Released via Netflix on September 9, 2020, the film explores the rise of social media and the damage it has caused to society, focusing on its exploitation of its users for financial gain through surveillance capitalism and data mining, how its design is meant to nurture an addiction, its use in politics, its impact on mental health (including the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates), and its role in spreading conspiracy theories and aiding groups such as flat-earthers and white supremacists.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke.
Here are my favourite takeaways from watching the Social Dilemma Netflix documentary:
A man’s alibi is the child of his own imagination. It is human nature.
A lot of us do not achieve our goals as we have ready-made excuses and reasons why we are not able to achieve success. As the saying goes: In life, we either have reasons or results, excuses or experiences, stories or success. As Mark Twain, once quipped: “There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.” The reasons we give for not living up to our potential are never good enough because no matter how bad you think your situation is, someone has gone through it and they succeeded hence your excuses are really not valid.
In Napoleon Hill’s classic book, Think and Grow Rich he shares the Fifty-Seven Famous Alibis by Old Man If and it is a very excellent list of famous excuses we all use for not achieving our goals and aspiration:
People who do not succeed have one distinguishing trait in common. They know all the reasons for failure, and have what they believe to be air-tight alibis to explain away their own lack of achievement. Some of these alibis are clever, and a few of them are justifiable by the facts. But alibis cannot be used for money. The world wants to know only one thing–HAVE YOU ACHIEVED SUCCESS?
A character analyst compiled a list of the most commonly used alibis. As you read the list, examine yourself carefully, and determine how many of these alibis, if any, are your own property.
IF I didn’t have a wife and family…
IF I had enough “pull”…
IF I had money…
IF I had a good education…
IF I could get a job…
IF I had good health…
IF I only had time…
Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.–Thomas Edison.
One of the most exciting tools I have come across in the past week is the five-minute journal. I got to know about the journal after watching a Tim Ferris Youtube video (Thanks Tim). I love the five-minute journal so much that I ordered 10 for the most important people in my life. I have been trying to journal in the past three months, and it has not been straightforward.
Gratitude is the feeling that embodies the phrase “Thank You”. It is the unexpected reward of a kind deed that is magically produced by your brain. It is the cute, tingly feeling in your body that makes you smile at strangers. A 2003 study by Emmons and McCullough found that keeping a daily gratitude journal leads to better sleep. reductions of physical pain, a greater sense of well-being, and a better ability to handle change.
Gratitude is the experience of counting one’s blessings.
With the gratitude journal, I have a system that makes it easier to journal every day; it has pre-formatted questions on every page with the following questions:
Every page contains the following:
A man’s grammar, like Caesar’s wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.― Edgar Allan Poe
I subscribed for the free version of Grammarly earlier in 2020 as a way to improve my writing. After using the trial version for like two months, I had to upgrade to the premium version as the service has helped with my writing, spelling, and grammar, which are all needed for coherent content, especially online. Grammarly’s core product offering include grammar checking, spell checking, and plagiarism detection services
Don’t obsess over perfect grammar. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story. – Stephen King
Here are some of the reasons you should consider getting Grammarly at least the free version, If you like the service, you can then upgrade to the paid version.
I am a fan of 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) and most of his projects especially for his ABC Legal Drama For Life. The TV series is one of the few Shows I follow religiously week in week out. I really love the show, the show is executive produced by 50 cent. I find the show to be very inspiring and entertaining.
The For Life TV Series is loosely based on the true story of Isaac Wright Jr., who was imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. While incarcerated, he became a paralegal and helped to overturn the wrongful convictions of twenty of his fellow inmates, before finally proving his own innocence.
In his newly released book, Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter, Rapper and Actor 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) shares the story of Isaac Wright Jr.:
One of my favorite examples of someone who was able to combine hard work and focus is a gentleman named Isaac Wright Jr. In the early 1990s, Isaac was wrongly imprisoned on a life sentence in New Jersey for being an alleged drug kingpin. In fact, he was one of the first people convicted under that statute in New Jersey. The one problem with that was he was actually innocent.
Isaac refused to accept his sentence and began looking for ways to get it overturned. Even though he didn’t have any legal training, he set about learning the law in the prison’s library. He became so skilled that he began working as a paralegal on other prisoners’ cases, helping several of them get their sentences overturned.
Promise Yourself
To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.
The Pencil Maker took the pencil aside, just before putting him into the box. There are 5 things you need to know, he told the pencil, before I send you out into the world. Always remember them and never forget, and you will become the best pencil you can be.
One: You will be able to do many great things, but only if you allow yourself to be held in Someone’s hand.
Two: You will experience a painful sharpening from time to time, but you’ll need it to become a better pencil.
Three: You will be able to correct mistakes you will make.
Four: The most important part of you will always be what’s inside.
And Five: On every surface you are used on, you must leave your mark. No matter what the condition, you must continue to write.
A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.
His neighbors said, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.”
The man just said, “We’ll see.”
A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses following. The man and his son corralled all twenty-one horses.
His neighbors said, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!”
The man just said, “We’ll see.”