"My Essays"

The Story of Stent

Today is my 17th re-birthday. If you’ve been a longtime reader, you know why I call it my re-birthday. If you are new around here, well, here is a short recap. Just after I turned 41—17 years ago—a life of poor habits and family genetics caught up with me. I had a heart attack and was in the hospital for a few days. The doctors discovered all sorts of problems, and I ended up on the operating table. I came back home with a few new additions to my heart—the stent.

This morning, over my first cup of tea, I started to think about the past few years – things that have gone right – mostly right – since that heart attack. It was a terrible situation, but it changed the trajectory of my life.

After the surgery, the doctors told me

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My Essays, On Technology, TheDailyOm
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Google’s Real Googly. No Not The Anti-Trust! 

Rashid Khan is not a name known to many Americans. But any cricket fan — which includes the heads of Microsoft and Google — knows exactly who he is: a famous Afghan cricket bowler with a devastating version of a pitch known worldwide as a googly. It’s a pitch that every batter thinks they know how to hit. Yet time and again it fools them, and they are out. I wonder if Khan’s bowling comes to Sundar Pichai’s mind as Google grapples with the sudden but all-too-predictable shift to the new “AI” era. Google’s search engine revolutionized the internet. But in the face of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Perplexity, and a slew of other new AI companies, Google search is starting to look old, tired, and less and less useful. 

By now you probably know that a US federal judge declared Google a monopolist this week. Google has been <a

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My Essays, On Technology
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Why (& How) IPL Could Save Test Cricket

Marylebone Cricket Club, one of cricket’s august organizations, recently organized World Cricket Connects, a symposium about the future of a sport that — like so many things — finds itself caught between tradition and tomorrow. Test cricket, the traditional form of the game, is giving way to an onslaught of franchises offering up T20 cricket, a much faster and higher-scoring version. This change is best exemplified by the growth of the Indian Premier League (IPL). 

At this point, everyone who is anyone in cricket has weighed in on the challenges the game is facing. Some have come up with out of the box suggestions to save it. In such a rapidly changing environment, any new proposal is and should be considered a credible suggestion — with the exception, I would argue, of denying the inevitable and blindly clinging to the past. 

While I was not asked to

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My Essays, Obsessions
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The Future of Writing: How AI Will Reshape Our Tools

Earlier this morning while reading The Wall Street Journal, I learned that Bruce Bastian, co-creator of WordPerfect, the word-processing software, had died at 76. His life was consequential, as his obituary so eloquently elaborates. I haven’t thought of WordPerfect for a long time. And probably neither have many others who think of Microsoft Word and Google Docs as “word processing” software. At least a few are thinking about what comes next.

Writing might not have changed, but the tools we use to write and process words have. I learned to write on a wooden slate. I used to (and still do) use paper, pen, and ink to draft, craft, and create. There was a time when typewriters were my word processors. And when computers came along, my tools changed. My focus has been on the work, the words, and why I write— not how I write and where I

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My Essays, On Technology
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This is the future of media with AI

Fable Studio, a San Francisco-based startup that gained fame for demonstrating the ability to create an episode of South Park with a brief prompt, is making headlines again. The company is launching Showrunner, a streaming platform that will enable users to create their own AI-prompted episodes of various shows. 

“The vision is to be the Netflix of AI,” says chief executive Edward Saatchi. “Maybe you finish all of the episodes of a show you’re watching and you click the button to make another episode. You can say what it should be about or you can let the AI make it itself.”

The ability for users to conjure their own scenes, control characters and dialogue, and assemble full episodes from just a few prompts feels like science fiction come to life. In other words, you are essentially choosing your own adventure. Netflix experimented with the “choose your own adventure” concept a few years ago, but it lacked the corporate gumption to continue investing in

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My Essays, On Technology
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