15 Mark Jeffery and the tangled web (aka "let's combine the monkey and the computer")

The Innovation Engineer Podcast

Web3? Not needed. Let’s combine the monkey and the computer! Today we have an awesome guest - Mark Jeffrey! We met him on the social platform Polywork and that's actually the best way to describe him, as he does so many things.

Up until last year he worked as a mixture between developer and product manager and as a paramedic on the weekends! And if that's not enough he has a side hustle making wooden globes. And as that's way too many jobs, he quit his work, started a podcast about quitting work and 2 other great podcasts (The Tangled web and The Last Theory) and a seriously cool project called the Open Web Mind! So let's talk about why we should combine the monkey and the computer, how augmented intelligence beats AI, why everything is going to be decentralized (again) and the reason Mark can’t use the coolest VR or AR equipment.

Hosted by two former CTOs who decided to stay hands-on, both veterans of the industry with decades of experience as engineers. You can expect many stories from current and past ventures. Meet Innovation Engineer Tarek Madany Mamlouk and Principal Engineer Sebastian "Waschi" Waschnick.

Key Takeaways

• Open protocols like those used for Mastodon (the Twitter competitor) may be the future of the web and we may see a movement away from centralized services to a more decentralized web, instead of single domains holding all the power.
• Most people either think of doing everything manually with their own decisions or doing everything completely with AI. In reality the future may be augmented intelligence, and not artificial intelligence.
• The only way to beat a chess computer is using a human (the monkey) and augment it with the help of AI. So a human with the help of an AI can beat a chess computer, a pure AI.
• The web was invented as this awesome decentral place and then with social media everything was centralized again. But now the tide is turning and everything is becoming decentralized again!
• In the good old days (around 2005-2008) the term web3 already existed and it meant the semantic web, which never came to be, as it required extra steps and developers are lazy.
• At some point of time, centralizing services simply was the practical thing tod o and that enabled us to grow as a web society
• There are many examples of the huge downsides of the last movement of centralization, like medium.com abusing their monopol and a lot of blogs dying or Mark not being able to use VR/AR from Oculus as it requires a Facebook account and Facebook does not believe that Mark is a real human being.

Show Notes

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:51 Polywork
• 3:58 Way too many jobs
• 6:04 The Open Web Mind
• 13:19 Wikipedia, but decentralized
• 15:17 Blockchain is a really slow database
• 17:16 It’s like WordPress, everybody can run it
• 18:57 How to beat a chess computer
• 20:49 Augmented Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence
• 22:55 What's the difference in AI and machine learning?
• 25:36 Should you start multiple podcast at once?
• 29:46 Your individual Twitter timeline algorithm
• 34:15 The good old decentralized days
• 36:34 The evolution of the web
• 38:39 Not even Facebook knows what they are doing
• 41:06 Web3 aka the semantic web
• 42:29 Wrap up

Stuff we mentioned

We really need to talk more about cool gadgets - I promise we will do this more in future episodes!

• 🧑‍🎨 The social platform Polywork
• 🌐 https://markjeffery.com/
• 🌐 Good Wooden Globes
• 📄 Join the mailing list TheOpenWebMind
• 🎙 Podcast - The Last Theory
• 🎙 Podcast - The Tangled Web
• 🎙 Podcast - The Quit Work Podcast
• 📘 Qualityland

What should we talk about next?

• YouTube: The Innovation Engineer
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