This article, by Paul Graham, perfectly describes our state of mind when building Splinder into the largest blogging platform in Italy.

We focused on users, that was our compass, and we focused on usage growth, not on generating revenues, because that would have killed the project. We kept costs down and survived all the business and life odds.

While thinking about the emergence of "new rules" from simple rules and the inadequacy of mathematics to model across levels, I never thought about the implication of this line of reasoning beyond science and technology into the realm of philosophy and religion.

How is development of communication technologies going to affect house prices?

When "real" virtual reality is available, and when it is almost indistinguishable from physical reality (except for touch and smell), it will make it irrelevant to live in cities like New York or San Francisco. Those cities will not command a price premium in housing any more and house prices will go down, that's one view ...

Instead, the author of this article on the New York Times thinks that the price premium will actually increase, because people still want to stick together, and more so now than before.

This is the kind of post I was going to write, if I had time and the writing skills of this guy. In fact I had already started writing it, using a top-down approach, whereas the post I am linking uses a bottom up approach.

I studied Engineering and graduated with honors, but I must admit that I never liked mathematical analysis, and was never too good at it. I found it as being too abstract and hard to visualize; on the other hand, I loved computer science, it was my second nature, I could naturally visualize it without efforts. My thesis work, when I graduated, was about a simulation of an automatic storage system at a car factory, which I simulated using what are now generically called cellular automata.

Yesterday I was invited at a dinner in San Francisco. The host is a very successful entrepreneur, who now spends most of his time finding money (millions) and setting the vision for the democratic party.

We had a great conversation about world politics, US politics, Italian politics (if it ever existed really :-) ), and compared our visions of the future.

This week I attended the AAAI (Artificial Intelligence) conference in Vancouver.

I was a bit disappointed because I did not find much Artificial Intelligence, but rather a lot of Human Intelligence applied to solve specific problems with the aid of computers. I found a lot of mathematics and logic and a top down approach to task solving, but very little talk about bottom up Artificial Intelligence.

I am in Vancouver at a conference on artificial intelligence. Right now I am part of a workshop about Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence.

There is very little agreement on the subject, which in a way confirms the fact that AI has still a long way to go to create a framework for intelligence. Very interesting stuff ...

I know it, yet I keep making the same mistake.

I have my vision of the future; it's obviously a partial one, but I know it is a plausible one. And yet I keep trying to talk to friends who are not technologists and I try to explain to them this vision; it takes a lot of time and effort, but at the end of the day they are not convinced :-(

So why do I do it? Maybe because I need to be reassured that the vision is correct, but I keep looking in the wrong direction, probably.