Fall Syllabus Notes #1
Having a syllabus has been a game-changer in creating structure through a self-paced learning guide, carving time for topics of interest, and identifying patterns in what I'm learning that connect to my observations. I'm quite amazed by how this practice has already helped me in writing an essay on privacy as luxury within my first week.
I have also found my community in the form of #curriculumclub on TikTok, where my algorithm shows me others' curricula for the season and valuable advice in sourcing media, utilizing library archives, and deepening my learning.
One of the tips provided by the many creators on TikTok is to write about what you've learned. Aside from writing essays fueled by my learnings, I'm dabbling in writing biweekly key takeaways to 1) further reinforce what I've learned and 2) share interesting nuggets of wisdom on this blog. Without further ado...
On emerging technology
Amy Webb is the Founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group. She is widely recognized as the global leader in strategic foresight, which is why I'm slowly but surely making my way through her SXSW presentations. I'm a little behind, as her 2025 Emerging Tech Trend Report is available on YouTube.
At the beginning of her presentation, Webb defines trends as "long-term patterns that indicate a direction of change over time." Over the past 5 years, she observed a huge jump in AI, connected ecosystems of things, and biotechnology.
She classified Q3 2023 as a technology supercycle. A supercycle is an extended period of booming demand that elevates prices and assets to unprecedented heights in economic terms. This makes planning cycles significantly shorter because technology is evolving rapidly.
The section on AI is worth watching because she brings up AI's fundamental problem of biases (when prompted to describe a CEO, AI tends to generate images of white men in suits) and unsecured models being compromised by malicious actors (what if someone uses AI to generate a deepfake event?).
One of the trends that I found particularly insightful was the connected ecosystems of things. Our iteration of AI is primarily a language learning model that draws on information from the internet. However, it will eventually run out of things on the internet, hence it will need more types of data, specifically sensory and visual data.
Language learning model predicts what to say next, but language action models predict what to do next.
What does this mean for our future? The growth of smart sensors and connectables, such as our smartwatches, will communicate and exchange data to facilitate and fuel the advancement of AI. We see this in the ways tech conglomerates are pushing eyewear like the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Ray Ban that can trace eye movements, which signal our intentions. Amazon has recently entered the chat with augmented reality glasses for consumers.
As language action models expand, we'll see more AI-focused devices enter the market.
On seeing the humanity in everyone
As the political divide grows wider and our echo chambers become smaller, I fear that we will reach a point where we can no longer see the humanity in individuals. I understand how frustrating and upsetting it can be to interact with someone whose beliefs and values do not align with ours. How do you ask people to care for others in the world when they don't see certain communities as deserving of care?
During the Martyrs and Movements seminar I took at the School of Radical Attention, one of our readings included a few pages of bell hooks' All About Love.
"Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination. Culturally, all spheres of American life – politics, religion, the workplace, domestic households, intimate relations – should and could have as their foundation a love ethic."
This resonated with me deeply during a time of significant violence and conflict around the world. We, as a culture, have lost the capacity for love.
"We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed."
By living with a love ethic, we can deepen our relationship with our communities, navigate the world beyond our own self-interests, and create transformative change to ultimately plant the seeds of a world we want to live in. It made me wonder, how do we begin?
This Psyche article by Scott Shigeoka answers that for me through a practice he calls "deep curiosity", which he defines as a search for understanding that leads to connection and transformation. Through this practice, we can start bringing a sense of understanding and shared humanity into our conversations with the people around us. I know, you may be thinking, why would I want to waste my breath? I genuinely used to think the same; however, after facilitating youth empowerment workshops across Malaysia, I realized that these conversations need to take place for change to happen. Democracy cannot exist when there are no differences in opinion; that's essentially an echo chamber and is not representative of the opinions held by other people.
I'm sure practising deep curiosity will not be an easy journey, but as Shigeoka reminds us, it's a muscle that needs to be exercised. In the article, he lists the four methods to exercise our deep curiosity muscle that I found insightful from a psychological perspective and will be keeping in mind for future use.
On embracing idleness
Kate J. Neville
After writing about rest, I've been thinking a lot about the importance of idleness, daydreaming, and monotasking.
We have been conditioned to embrace multitasking as a form of optimization in our never-ending quest to be productive, a trap that prevents us from asking ourselves the pertinent questions in life. It's the same concept as bedrotting that lies on the opposite end of the spectrum – the act of numbing ourselves through mindless media consumption instead of getting the rest we need to rejuvenate our mind and body.
This article dissects the negative connotations of idleness that date back to the eighth century BC and our relationship with work. An idea introduced in the article by writer Mark Slouka gave me food for thought:
"idle time provides people with the chance to reflect on their values, beliefs, commitments to justice, and strategies for enacting change. Far from an embrace of sin or a dodge of responsibility, idleness is recast as a political project—and an unsettling one for those in power."
Idleness has always been framed as a waste of time, a belief that I've been struggling to unlearn, but this idea allowed me to reframe my perspective completely. Without idle time, we disallow our minds to wander, to ponder, to question, and to examine. Daydreaming has fast become a lost art form where we free our minds up to do what it does best – imagine.
How do we demand a better world when we have lost our capacity to imagine?
"The undirected attention that idleness allows can leave space for other relations, for other politics, for other ways of being."
When we fill our days with other people's thoughts and opinions, we don't leave room for ours to marinate and digest. We become parrots, regurgitating talking points that we saw online. I know I have been guilty of that. Hence why I have started monotasking, in which I focus on one activity at a time. This can take form in washing dishes without listening to a podcast, reading a book without any background noise, or taking a walk alone without headphones.
By doing so, I have been pleasantly surprised to see where my mind goes and what thoughts come up. Allowing my mind to move in free form has helped me in problem-solving, whether it's drafting a professional email or connecting ideas that I wasn't able to before. I would like to reach a point where I'm able to imagine other ways of being. A thought exercise I've been returning to is imagining what a world without capitalism would look and feel like.
"Different from distraction and daydreaming, meditation is a concerted practice; yet, at the same time, its goal is a release from doing, striving, or reaching. It is an act of being, entirely and completely. In letting go of the self, we come to know it better; or perhaps the self is only illusory, and what we come to know is the world. In any case, on everything from speed and slowness and creation to restraint and abandon and grief, I have less to declare and more to consider, and little to impart but lots to question. Uncertainty abounds—as it should."
The goal is to reach this state of mind by letting go of the self to understand the self better.
This post is a lot longer than I anticipated, but I'm happy to see ideas that I've been pondering and reading connect. As I make my way through my fall syllabus one day at a time, I look forward to sharing more notes this season.
