Numbers vs Mission

In Wednesday 7:15BC (Breakfast Club/Bible Class) Steve M. had a quiz about St. Paul with the question about how many members existed in the first European Church in Phillipi and marveled about the number of Christians in the World now.  Naturally, I pointed out the mathematics of my blog of compound annual growth rate of only 1.08% (see Jesus the Mathematician).  Steve M. correctly countered - "But what is the compounded annual growth rate of the human population".   Exactly the proper context to put 1.08% growth rate into perspective!   

Gemini to the rescue!  I loaded my blog analysis into Gemini Pro and presto - the answer with little necessary research:

"Over those two millennia, the global human population grew at a CAGR of just 0.16%. Due to high infant mortality, plagues, and limited agricultural capacity prior to the Industrial Revolution, human population growth was incredibly slow.

So, while a 1.08% growth rate sounds modest by modern financial standards, Christianity actually grew nearly 7 times faster than the human race over that same 2,000-year span."

But as I have found, the proper use of AI is to ask the contrarian view - and deeper analysis into the slippery slope of using numbers and statistics to justify your arguments (similar to my revised post and self fact checking - Confounding Compounding).  Gemini rightly pointed out that using the financial lens of growth rate of a modest 1.08% creates an artificial measure of highly volatile periods of hight growth and statistical missing elements of birth and death rates. 

Bottom line - a more strategic analysis and complete picture is required (stay tuned for an updated blog post on that).  

In my confessional email attempt at humility to my fellow Wed. 7:15BC members, I forwarded Gemini's analysis only to see the real punch line response from Glenn B. with the following story:

Steve, Garen - this is great work, very interesting.  At my wife's aunt's church in Columbus, IN when you drive out of the parking lot of the church from any exit you see the sign: "You Are Now Entering the Mission Field".   Maybe we all should take that sentiment to heart! - Glenn 

Forget the numbers - focus on the mission!

Shells - Collect or Listen

God winks occur all the time - this time with my research on the (or my) future with Gemini Pro and Gemini Notebook leading me to my old presentations at Vistage, Accenture Vision Video  and even my various attempts at 48, 58, and 68 of decade planning.  

I even looked back at my second Christmas letter (2002) with the summary quote in Tolkein's Fellowship of the Rings by Gandalf - "All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us"  .

Gemini Pro caused me to create another Notebook called "Mystery of Time" to research it's statement-  "To slow down life, you have to inject novelty".  

Andy S. story about a business collegue's wisdom about the future in his West Virginia hick accent saying 'Ev...eeer...ray Day" -popped into my mind. 

So the memories flood in and then God winks at you and laughs!   Sunday was the punctuation.

Kyle Ransom's  Crossroads Sermon this Sunday started a new series - RAW.  In his message he played a clip from John Piper's "Boasting Only in the Cross" at Passion OneDay 2000.  More than a wink - that is a kick in the pants!

A great sermon can sometimes be punctuated with just one word - and in this case it is SHELLS. Like the story of the child throwing stranded star fish back into the ocean (if you haven't heard it - just click).  

It's time to stop collecting Shells and listen to God's message inside the Shell.  

Technology Futures Revisited

 I have been working on a "project" for the monthly topic of Vistage Alumni coming up this Thursday - "What Will the World be Like in 10 Years and 20 Years and How Will That Affect You".  Naturally, I am using Gemini Pro and Gemini Notebook (and occasionally Copilot) to help me in this endeavor.  

It's good to still have mid to long term memory as I wanted to access a Andersen Consulting (now called Accenture) Vision video (on VHS) from 1993.   I remember asking my brother D'Lane if he could transfer this to digital as he was working on his own home videos that were on VHS tapes.  

However trying to find that file and/or email exchange would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.  I have two many terabyte external drives and my search skills using Windows Explorer are at best rudamentary.  Hoping AI could come to my aid was the ticket.   Using both Copilot and Gemini on my Outlook and Gmail archives - presto the email exchange with D'Lane put the date of correspondence as 2018.  

Next on to finding the 729MB file on any of my external drives.  Then on to compressing and trying to enhance it with Wondershare software and finally uploading it (which I should have done in 2018) to my Youtube studio.  

For your viewing pleasure - here was Accenture's vision to show how technology will be used in the future:  

Then I started searching for other Corporate Future Visions and found Corning Glass 2011

Equally entertaining.   Now 33 years later (for the Accenture Vision) intelligent agents are just beginning to emerge. Proves how aggressively we can dream but how slowly we adopt.