If you want to stand out, find a way to be either high fidelity or high convenience in whatever you do. If you're halfway in between on both measures, you're not going to make people feel very excited about you.

From about ninth grade on, I knew I was a writer at heart. I had fantasies of being a great novelist, but I thought that seemed like an iffy way to try to make a living. So I tried journalism while in college, and really liked it. But even in journalism, I've always pursued ways to be somewhat literary, whether writing a column or writing books.

We learn more about how human brains work. And that leads us to ideas about how to make human brains work better.

Our brains are great at knowing what to forget. We actually have to teach computers to do the same.

Now companies tend to mine gigantic databases for insights into what might happen six months from now. That might always be valuable, but there's a different kind of value - and a competitive edge - in processing ongoing streams of data through a software model that can quickly and constantly make predictions about, say, whether a certain customer is going to defect, or an aircraft is going to run into trouble.

Eventually, we need to have computers that work differently from the way they do today and have for the past 60-plus years. We're capturing and generating increasingly massive amounts of data, but we can't make computers that keep up with it. One of the most promising solutions is to make computers that work more the way brains work.

A CD these days is not all that convenient, and it doesn't bring enough fidelity to make you put up with that inconvenience. So, nobody buys CDs anymore.