Adopting Early

So I'm here in Milwaukee on a business trip and just read an article in Rolling Stone about Ray Kurzweil. If you don't know Ray Kurzweil, I'll put the link to the article down here. If you don't know Ray Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant inventor, and besides inventing the Kurzweil synthesizer a musical instrument. He is very well known for his work on artificial intelligence, and in particular now, his work on what he calls the singularity. Now, the singularity is the, the point at which human and machine intelligence merge Essentially, if you're a fan of Battlestar Galactica, you know those skin jobs, they're definitely post-singularity creatures. Anyway, I don't want to talk about the singularity too long. What I wanted to do was to, was to talk about my experience of reading Ray Kurzweil's— this article about Ray Kurzweil, and also about you guys. Now, if you're— what, listen to me— if you're watching this video, obviously you're watching this video, uh, you are among the very earliest adopters of technology. Now, it might not seem so, you know, because we're used to— we're used to this technology. We use it as an integral part of our lives, and it's important to us. We communicate with it, we express ourselves with it. We have come to integrate this technology into our day-to-day affairs, and this is what we do. We use technology. So we are early adopters of this technology. Now, when you talk to people who are not early adopters of technologies, the experience is— I can imagine, only get a hint of what it must be like for Ray Kurzweil to talk about his insights into the future and the kinds of reactions that he gets to them. We get a little teeny bit of that when we talk about what we do in a technological context online all the time. Why is that important to me? Well, because when you are an early adopter of a technology Your goal— my goal, I'll speak for myself— my goal is to demonstrate to people how this technology is going to affect us, what difference this technology is going to make in our lives. Now, for those of us who are using the video medium intensely, we already know that we have come to depend on this medium to connect us with people who are important to us. They weren't important to us, uh, at some time in the past. They are important to us now. Yesterday in this business meeting, uh, that I attended, um, I got to talk about meeting people who I'm now business partners with through technology, through video technology, and I could just get a glimpse of the— and, and the people in the meeting are, are, are technologically sophisticated people, maybe not as intense, uh, uh, users of the technology as those of us are who were in this context routinely, but still intense users of the technology. But to talk to them about You know, I mean, I met people who are now business partners of mine through online, particularly online video connections. And someone that I was with talked about actually meeting her husband as a result of her involvement in online video. So, um, that look, that look that you get just a little bit of a of a curiosity, like, you know, maybe you are an outlier. Maybe you guys who are the early adopters are the outliers, and the rest of us who are late, a little later, a little slower— not in this yesterday's meeting, but you know, when you talk to people at a party or even members of your family, uh, that look that you get is what I was, uh, just thinking about and imagining what it must be like for somebody like Ray Kurzweil, who's so far out in front of the rest of us that, you know, he leaves us in the dust. So keep adopting early and keep adopting often. You guys are the future. Take care. See you out there.