The Things That Are Unimaginable
If was 1923 when the Walt Disney brothers founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio.
At the time there were no such thing as TV and 1% of households had radios. The average American went to the theaters 40 times a year to watch a bundle of shows: newsreels, films, and cartoons with gags all of which silent and in black and white.
The advances that would occur in the decades after Disney’s initial incorporation were revolutionary for a person living in that time.
In 1928, Disney released Steamboat Willie, which was a breakthrough in synchronized sound animations. Silent animations became obsolete almost overnight.
In 1932, Disney released Flowers and Trees, one of the first cartoons that used a full three-stripe Technicolor process which produced vivid color animations.
In 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, which redefined the concept of an amusement park, which were seen as chaotic, rowdy, and carnival-like affairs geared for adults.
Along with Disney’s advances, all these revolutions were once unfathomable, but are now taken for granted.
Today’s daily experience rests on the foundation laid by radical breakthroughs and the continual expansion in understanding of what is normal.
And not only is our daily experience already defined—the notion of cartoons having no color nor synchronized sound or going to an amusement park not being a family friendly outing is simply absurd to me—but continually expands.
Most recently, LLMs exploded into ordinary life, which even caught me by surprise, despite experiencing Machine Learning’s growing popularity in 2017 at the University of Toronto (where the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton teaches).
The concept of spending an entire summer to build a website (which I did in 2018) is outdated: that can be done in 1 day now.
Following the patterns of history and present experience, the breakthroughs that will define what is normal cannot be predicted with present understanding.
As much as we like to kid ourselves in the belief of being “ahead of the curve” or “not being like other people”, we simply don’t know what we don’t know.
We may believe LLMs will define future life. After all, it’s in our realm of understanding.
What’s equally if not more likely is something else coming completely out of the blue.
If this pattern is downscoped into an individual’s life, it’s the things that cannot be predicted that will define trajectory.
To expand on Black Swans, our present opportunities are evaluated against our current understanding of the world, which fails to account for the unpredictable black swan events that really move the needle.
Like Disney, which started as a small cartoon shop that sold short black and white cartoons to local theaters, the ideas and pursuits which presently seem so small, dismissible, and silly can snowball into something truly life changing.
I often picture myself looking up and seeing hundreds of threads dangling from the infinite sky, each representing an opportunity to partake.
Since I don’t know what each thread leads to, it’s my responsibility to pick one and pull with all my might.
If it doesn’t pan out and I don’t get wiped out, I’ll go ahead and pull another.
I only need one thread to work out for me and I get luckier the more threads I pull.
Psst… here what I’m consuming this week: