Here are a couple things I’ve been thinking about recently. Discussions are welcome as always!

1. What will the future interfaces of online social spaces look like?

It seems as though most digital spaces have a default feel and there’s been a lack of new ideas. Take the idea of “feeds” for example. It has become the default way to browse most social apps. You have an infinite feed, a profile page and bunch of other things that are repeated everywhere. The infinite feed promotes distraction. I think social media is cool, but like I’ve often said, I hate how noisy and attention grabbing it can be.

If you try to itemize the fundamental things that make social media great, you might list things like; connection, community, and serendipity. But I’ve found that I get less of these things on social media, instead, it has become a place for virality and for people to aspire towards that. I think that influencer culture ruined so much of the early things we enjoyed about social media. It evolved from a place where you connect with friends and people to a type of digital shopping mall. A place where you’re being sold things, where you look around in wonder and get distracted. If you’re lucky, you run into people that you have fun with, but a huge part of the place is engineered to drive sales and consumption.

If you consider the idea of walled/siloed online spaces like group chats and Discord servers, there is a better feeling of relaxation and good communication within them, that is, there is less performance and more ‘connecting’. This is what social media used to be, but the current way it operates drives influencer culture, templates, virality and distraction. Is this an interface problem and can we engineer interfaces that create online spaces that feel more like community and doesn’t incentivize noise and distraction?

2. What will the schools of tomorrow look like?

The way we learn to parse and process information changes significantly from generation-to-generation. With the advances of language models and how they’ve been embedded into convenient interfaces, I would like to know how education will be structured. I know that educational institutions will still be relevant, but when you have an easily accessible interface that can give you information and answer question in more capacity than some educators you’d encounter, I think this fundamentally changes how we learn. Right now, you can easily design a curriculum, learning plan, collate resources and prepare test questions with the help of language models. There used to be an argument that we need to tailor education towards individual student needs. I think we’ve finally reached a point where we can do this at scale. The business of educational institutions is to prepare people for the future. Will these institutions be able to keep up? Especially now that the average individual has to know so much and be interdisciplinary.

3. How can we democratize things without losing sanity?

There is a sentiment that democratizing things will lead to better access and in turn help lower the barrier for entry or level the playing field. I agree with this sentiment. There is also another sentiment that democratizing things bring about some disorganization or chaos. An example is open-source software projects. While the idea of being able to contribute sounds nice and lovely, it means that even the worst people are able to contribute, which could cause problems down the line. I’ve heard people say that the democratization of science will cause a lot of ‘bad science,’ to happen. I do not necessarily agree, but I think this is an important and interesting question to ask. Is there a way we can democratize things without losing quality and sanity?

4. What would the world look like without nations?

This is more or less a hypothetical question for the purpose of triggering imagination. I have become disillusioned about the idea of a “sovereign” nation. Most nations on earth today were either formed by colonization or business deals. One has to grow up and swear allegiance to the nation they were born into and one is told to be thankful of one’s “heroes past” who died for the nation. The main problem I find is that throughout history a lot of wars and deaths have had to happen just to either create or preserve the idea of most nations. I know that human progress and survival has benefited from the help of some ‘nations’, but it also took a lot of wars and waste to make and preserve these nations. Is there a model where the world would have progressed without the concept of nations? The world map has constantly changed through generations, with borders appearing and disappearing. Are we going to see more change in the way structure the world?

5. Why are we so afraid of difference?

Tribe, ethnicity, political affiliation and religion are things that have always caused conflict. At the center of it is difference in opinion, appearance or beliefs. Some people believe that the world would be a much better place if everyone thought like them, looked like them or believed in the same things as them. One might argue that we have a natural tendency to fear what we don’t understand, but in a world where we’ve become hyper connected and mixed, why do people still try to attack people who don’t represent or look like them? We can’t undo the fact that the world will keep getting inter-cultural and mixed, so what’s the present day importance of tribalism, sexism, homophobia, or racism?

6. What are the ethics of luxury?

More recently, I have been thinking about the ethics of luxury and it’s importance. Why do we need to kill endangered Sturgeons to get caviar? What is the nutritional importance of caviar (it’s ~48% water)? Why do we need to destroy the earth to mine diamonds? Why do we feel the need to own diamonds in the first place?

If we consider luxury in the industrial and consumption sense of the word, we can define it as combination of factors that contribute to a sense of indulgence, pleasure, and exclusivity. This means most things that are classified as luxury are not necessarily essential to life and wellbeing. I’m not trying to make the argument that the things we own or do should only be essential, but I’ve been thinking about the background aspect of what constitutes luxury and if they’re, in fact, ethical.

Private jets that cause pollution and fly only a few people at a time. Expensive bags, clothes, and shoes that were make by skinning animals for their leather. There used to be a thriving market for elephant tusks that was reserved for wealthy people. There are tons of other examples. Throughout history and even today, there is so much harm we cause to other species and the environment, just for the satisfaction of those who are able to afford it. A lot of people also aspire towards these things.

At a normal scale, I think we can enjoy things the earth has to offer, but the fact that these things have been turned into billion dollar industries, means we need to keep exploiting their sources to keep them running. This worries me and I question the ethics.

7. Are there things we are not supposed to do at scale?

I started thinking about this when someone said something like “there is a flaw in social media in that it tries to get us to scale our friendships and communities.” The main assumption here was that these types of things thrive best as a smaller scale.

Another time I encountered this sentiment, was during a brief conversation with my roommate and his girlfriend. The conversation was about lab-grown meat and if it was a something that was good and we would consider trying. The general thought is that lab grown meat might better for the environment, and ultra-scale farming of animals for their meat, might be very flawed.

This question is somehow connected to my luxury question, but I wonder if there are certain things we weren’t supposed to do at scale, but just have to because of convenience or other immediate benefits they offer?

8. What type of business model might work for rare diseases?

I was walking the streets of San Diego with my academic advisor and another student of his when we ventured into a conversation about Vertex pharmaceuticals and the gene therapy they made for sickle cell. Apparently, Vertex has a drug they priced at $1M to cure sickle cell, and now that they’ve reached most of the patient population (in the US?), they’ve not been able to make a profit to compensate for the large amounts of dollars that went into R&D. My advisor asked sarcastically, “What if the reward is that they cured people?” This got me thinking about the space of other rare diseases and how big pharmaceutical companies might not invest into R&D for their cures if there is no potential for profit. Is there a better model that might work for rare diseases?

9. How did we end up with so many languages?

I’m fascinated by languages and I say that all the time. It surprises me that a collection of people were able to develop a near-complete system of communication. Within some languages there are dialects. There are more than 7,000 languages in the world. How were people able to do this? We know that humans aren’t particularly born with knowledge of any language, but how is it that humans of old were able to invent so many languages with all their complexities and intricacies?

10. What is the next internet?

Several years ago, my friend Busayo asked me this question, and I’ve always thought about it since then. He used a tree trunk metaphor; If you think of the internet as a trunk of a tree and all the technologies that are built on-top of it as branches (email, e-commerce, real-time conferencing etc.). You’d come to find that the internet is a pretty significant invention that has brought about new types of industries and ways of being. What is the next think that can bring about this huge shift and fundamentally change how we do a lot of things? What is the next tree trunk?

11. What would Africa look like if it was never colonized?

A lot of people talk about how the socio-economic climate in Africa is in it’s current state because it was colonized. While I don’t necessarily disagree with them, I often try to think about what most countries in Africa would be like if they were not colonized. Would we have been better off or worse? When I think about ancient African kingdoms of Benin, Dahomey, Kongo, Kush, Aksum etc. and empires in Mali, Ghana, Songhai, Mutapa etc. They had interesting politics, architecture, arts, and crafts. Would they have kept on thriving without interference? What would they have looked like today?

12. What’s beyond digital money?

I often think about the concept of money and how it has evolved through the centuries. This evolution has loosely followed a timeline like this; Trade by batter > Commodity (e.g. cowries, wheat etc.) > Metals (coins) > Representative money ( e.g. Paper currencies) > Centralized digital money > Decentralized digital money (e.g. crypto) > X? What comes next? What’s X?

13. What are the big problems that we do not have the right tools and technology for?

What are important and interesting problems that we can’t even begin to tackle because we do not have the right tools to navigate them? Are there problems that exist and we do not have the technology to start comprehending them?