Nowism

You didn't miss my last newsletter, I only send when it's good enough and worth your time. Sometimes that takes two months." I always thought that fully self driving cars would be impossible. How would a car ever know the difference between a paper bag and a rock in the road, or get a sense of when a kid would chase a ball into the road. It turns out with enough data and enough compute, rather like a person, you can (mostly?) solve that problem.

Wow, it’s exhausting out there. Every time a new technology emerges, I get genuinely excited about what’s possible. But then the noise kicks in. These days, it pays to be loud and wrong, bold and clueless, to stir panic rather than understanding. Futurists get paid to be interesting more than helpful, so I’m not one of them. Here’s my latest attempt to bring a little nuance back and be useful.

It all feels a bit overwhelming these days. My attempts to keep up to date with the daily developments in AI have been exhausting, which explains the irregular nature of this newsletter. “Nobody knows anything" was coined by William Goldman, a screenwriter and novelist, as a way to explain how Hollywood “worked”, and it always seems like a perfect description of the current AI world, the more you read, the more you experiment, listen, talk, learn, the more it seems to make less and more sense.

I’ve totally redone this newsletter 8 times now; things keep on changing, or at least it feels that way. It’s all a bit of a blur these days because it’s designed that way: The Trump-induced swirl, the shock and awe, the lack of coherence, and the randomness provide a cover to allow sinister things to hide behind the silly distractions and allow wild lapses in judgment to seem like a cunning strategy. The media has no interest in covering what matters, only what’s likely to get clicked on.

A lot of things hit you visiting Saudi Arabia, one is the huge degree of social change that’s happening at lightning speed, another is the palpable sense of youth (over 60% of the population is under 30) and, most strikingly, the overwhelming sense of ambition. It’s my third visit this year, and this time I emceed (a horrible verb) the main stage of the world’s largest property show for four exhausting but brilliant days.

Get your irregular dose of optimistic insights on tech, business, and innovation with Nowism by Tom Goodwin. Join the conversation on the world's latest and greatest changes today! Over 9,000 subscribers No thanks

Get your irregular dose of optimistic insights on tech, business, and innovation with Nowism by Tom Goodwin. Join the conversation on the world's latest and greatest changes today! Over 9,000 subscribers No thanks

I don’t normally make this a travel journal, but a lot of things hit me on a recent trip to Japan(my 5th trip there), that I felt were interesting and vaguely relevant to share in the spirit of this newsletter and how technology changes the world. Trips to Japan used to feel like visits to the future, a country that invested radically in the great hardware age of the 1960’s to 2000’s.

Get your irregular dose of optimistic insights on tech, business, and innovation with Nowism by Tom Goodwin. Join the conversation on the world's latest and greatest changes today! Over 9,000 subscribers No thanks

Many things are uncertain about Generative AI, but one thing is clear, it’s an exhausting job keeping up. So apologies for the 2 month hiatus, but between writing new keynotes and some hefty consulting, its been busy, I’ll try to get back a more regular cadence from now. We’ve seen some incredible announcements lately, ChatGPT4o was astonishing, Google’s project Astra ( shown here) perhaps even more remarkable, but a couple of questions keep popping up.