Optimism

It is easy to be concerned about the nation and the world. So much bad news and misbehavior.

But wow, do I feel optimistic this week. Like so many people I’ve been playing around with Stable Diffusion, and to a lesser extent Midjourney and Dall-E 2. Tons of fun, the open nature of Stable Diffusion makes it easy to play with, I’m reminded of how much fun it was the first time I got a PC. And the rate of innovation around it is incredible – a KerasCV port which seems super fast, alternative web UIs like the Automatic1111, animation aupport, video applications, tools to do incremental training for new objects and styles, prompt generation tools, landscape generation tools, inpainting, outpainting, masking, mosaicing, audio equivalents – it is hard to keep up with everything. Incredibly exciting time, great energy. Lots of issues around copyright and IP protection to be figured out, but still super exciting. I like this phrasing – the creative multiverse is way more exciting than some corporate metaverse. Stable Diffusion and its kin are going to be major accelerants for every creative task.

And I see reasons for great optimism outside software. I am relatively stupid about things biologic, but I get pretty excited when I read articles like Biomanufactured Materials Are Coming. Imagine if we can create Moore’s Law equivalents for biologic materials – ever cheaper, ever higher volume, ever more function biologics – the applications are pretty endless.

And then look at the space industry – Launch volumes are going way up, costs are going way down. And there are a ton of companies working hard to make this happen faster – for instance Stoke Space. Getting the free market to work on this challenge has been brilliant.

I could probably get just as excited about the declining cost of renewable energy and the implications of much cheaper energy.

It seems like we are on the cusp of an explosion of creativity fed by all these advances. A great time to be alive.