Rule number 11: I skipped rule number 3... TIM BERNERS-LEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Class Presentation

Rule number 10: Cyber security is huge field that did not exist about a decade ago. One of the first-class presentations was about cybercrimes. They covered things such as internet scammers, illegal distribution of child pornography, hackers, and internet stalking extensively. But what they didn’t cover, at least not very thoroughly, is the growing career field for people who combat the people, specifically internet hackers. It is becoming such a large field that there are more jobs available in this field then there are people graduating to take these jobs. So, if you graduate with the right requirements, then you are basically guaranteed a high paying job. Oh, did I not mention they’re high paying? Yeah, a starting salary for this field is within the range of $100,000 to $125,000. To put that in perspective most regular computer scientists will start in the $80,000 to $100,000 range which is already good money. Corporations need people to help defend their important data and will do a lot in order to keep these people. Not to mention the work is really interesting. Your whole job is out hacking hackers, or in some cases hacking big corporations… legally!! This specific job is called white hat hackers. There job is to, with a corporation’s permission, attempt to hack their systems and steal valuable information. They then uniform the company of the vulnerabilities in their system for a reward. I know that a lot of people, like myself, sometimes day dream about hacking into a large corporation and this career path will let you do just that, and make a lot of while doing it.

AI

Rule number 9: AI does not exist… right now. AI is all that anybody talks about, with good reason too. The introduction of true AI technology will potentially have large negative impacts. Some people believe that this technology has already come out. They look at things like Alexa and say, “look it listens to you and can respond to request accurately, Isn’t that scary??” No, because this is not true human intelligence. This is simply a series of complex programs intended to mimic human intelligence. But in reality the programs behind Alexa can be boiled down to simple if else statements. I don’t believe that the AI in Alexa or any other form of AI is actually artificial intelligence. In order to be an artificial intelligence in my opinion, a program has to decide what it wants to do. Right now, no matter how complex the thinking of an AI is, it still has one task that it was told to accomplish by a human. Once a program is run and the AI chooses what it wants to do (not out of a pre-selected group of acceptable actions like move a random number of spaces in a random number direction), them AI will officially be here. Of course, once this does happen it might spell the downfall of humanity because it will be able to learn faster then any of us could control it.   Keep in mind I’m not downplaying the impact of the “AI” on the market. These machines are fantastic accomplishments in the field of technology and I believe that more credit should be given to the programmers who created them, not the “intelligence” held inside them.

Startup.com

Rule number 8: Gov Works was destined to fail. The Documentary “Startup.com” is a perfect representation of the craziness that took place during the dot com bomb. It tells the story of the rise and fall of gov works, a startup company founded by Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, and Tom Herman. The documentary does a great job highlighting how it destined to fail from the beginning, a fact that is blatantly clear to the audience, but not to Kaleil, tom, or anybody else involved in this business.In-fighting and inconsistency plagued this business from the very beginning. The two founders are always butting heads and disagreeing with each other, even during important investor meetings.  I mean seriously, the documentary opens on Kaleil trying to decide what the company’s name is?!?! Like they don’t even know what to call themselves and we’re supposed to believe that they are ready to take accept funding from large investors? Yeah right. Furthermore, there idea has some crucial flaws, such as one brought up by an investor. The flaw in question is that working with the government in order to make a profit is very hard and has the potential to not work out. How exactly do they make a decent profit? What is going to convince government to utilize these features to pay parking tickets, either way they will be getting paid and this will just cost the government. Even if they did want to make this happen, what’s stopping them from investing in making it themselves, that way they wouldn’t have to pay someone else to do it. The idea of having government interactions be done online is a good, but not as a business.

DotBomb.com

Rule Number 7: just because you put it on the internet, it doesn’t mean it will be profitable. The internet is can be used in a variety of ways to help businesses. Therefore, so many creative people started coming out of nowhere to harness the potential of the world-wide web in new ways in the early 90’s. While some of these people went on to create websites that would forever change the way we do business, others not so much. A lot of the ideas that came up during this time were either largely flawed in some way or another, or only implanted the internet as an afterthought, rather than utilizing it as an integral part of their idea. Of course, there always has, and always be bad business ideas out there but what makes this era different is how un-picky investors were being. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous of an idea your business is, if you even mention the internet, people will invest. This reminds me a lot of the recent crypto currency boom. Bitcoin was a revolutionary new form of currency that was not produced by a country like traditional currency. After Bitcoin’s success everyone wanted a piece of the crypto-currency pie. As a result, hundreds of new crypto currencies were created in hopes they would be just as successful as Bitcoin. Some of these crypto-currencies were quite ridiculous, such as “Dogecoin”, a currency based off the meme about a dog from a few years back. Despite how crazy this fad is, it doesn’t stop people from investing in it. There are plenty of forums, and groups that dedicate their time to informing people what crypto-currencies you should and shouldn’t invest in to. There has also been people attempting to scam naïve people with fake get rich quick schemes based on crypto currencies, such as those behind “Bit-Connect.”

What I Learned From Erik Hanberg

Rule number 6: Entrepreneurship and the world wide web are a match made in heaven. I’ve always noticed how the world wide web has allowed for some amazing things to reach me, that wouldn’t have otherwise. Some of my favorite entertainers have carved out a market that wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the internet. YouTube has become as valid of a form of entertainment as traditional Television amongst my generation, and many popular music artists, such as brockhampton, would have never received the amount of success that did if it wasn’t for the large selection of music streaming platforms. However, with both examples comes a great amount of luck. This is because they both need to establish a large audience in order to make a living of these platforms, and even then, they need to have side projects such as selling merch in-order to achieve true success. So, trying to make money on the internets is a huge gamble, right? Not according to Erik Hanberg. Erik represented showed me how to establish a steady income without taking huge risks. Putting something on the internet takes little time and money, so really whatever your goal is can be an afterthought. Erik’s main job was working at a non-profit, but he decided to test out writing a book on the side, and it worked. But if it didn’t there would have been no loss on his part. But if he didn’t have the internet as a tool, then he would have had to have taken thousands of dollars in loans out, and the project would have HAD to be a success.

Technology: It's Always Changing

Rule number 5: There are a lot of cool things happening in technology all the time. There are so many potential subjects I can do my report on it is hard to pick one. Preferably I would like to find an obscure subject that no one has heard about, but a subject like that would be hard to find and equally as hard to study. My answer on the mid-term was robotics, which interests me, and while I will end up looking at it as a potential subject to study, right now I’m strongly thinking about doing a report on quantum computing. There are a few reasons for this. The first being that I have done a little research on it in the past, so I have a basic understanding of the subject. I understand what the theory is and about where the technology is at in its life cycle, so this will make starting on this project a little easier. The second reason is that the technology interests me. They are literally attempting to control atoms as they are from different phases of existence! That sounds like some crazy nonsense a character from a sci-fi movie would say, but it’s true! My third and final reason for choosing quantum computing is because I truly believe that it will be enormously revolutionary invention. This will have as big of an impact as the invention of the traditional computer. If I can teach at least one person in class about this crazy technology, my presentation will be a success.