The Last Sapien | a hundred miles to Sq

A Hundred Miles to Square One | Roughly a hundred miles that I ran since my last post, a full marathon, twenty miles, a half marathon and the accumulated runs in between. Thinking that if I brave that, I must be employed by the time I reach the finish line, just to discover that some finish lines are way farther than they appear . . . ( a partial quote from the right side mirror).

So I am back at Square One. What did I gain besides age and millage? Have I learned anything from the random interviews, variety of technologies, tens of people I have been talking to, the many webinars and white papers I have attended and read, the applications I downloaded and tried, the Ted Talks, the folks I have connected with, am I a better version of myself from hundred miles back?

It was a short run on the banks of the Charles River, the first after my full marathon, in the old Nonantum village, where I realized that with the largest data lakes ever, yeah they got a marina too, loads of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, we end up confused and clueless about what is right and where to go. We have so many answers but fail time and again asking the right question. We took the simplicity of the Nonantums, converted it for our convenience to an easy to pronounce Newton, how smart, and got everything wrong since.

There are signs that the water are dangerous for people and pets as there is a new toxic algae developed - a result of the water drainage from the roads and the warm temperatures that 'cook' the chemicals to something toxic. After so much effort (and millions of tax dollars) cleaning up the river from decades of industrial pollution, we end up with a toxic river while driving our green cars. What have we learned from this? The brightest people on earth are walking and running the same path I ran, the Harvards, the MITs, the Googles and the Amazons of the world are just here, literally at Harvard and MIT (Google and Amazon at One Kendall Square) and sure enough we learned nothing, we run hundred miles just to realize we are back in Square One.

Where is hope? Is it in mile two hundred, three hundred? How far and epic should we go till we meet wisdom, till we reach our goals, until we cross the ever moving finish line, should we just ask the finish line to stop for a minute or is it about running faster?